James Stockdale, 81; POW at Hanoi Hilton, Won Medal of Honor, Ran With Perot

Retired Navy Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale, whose bravery and defiance during 7 1/2 years of brutality as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam gave hope to his fellow prisoners and earned him the Medal of Honor, died Tuesday at his home in Coronado.

Stockdale, 81, had battled Alzheimer’s disease for several years, the Navy said in announcing his death.

Nineteen years after returning home from Vietnam, Stockdale was chosen by third-party candidate H. Ross Perot as his running mate in the 1992 presidential election. Stockdale is probably best remembered during that campaign for a rhetorical question he posed during a nationally televised debate: “Who am I? Why am I here?” He also appeared unprepared for the rigors of the campaign.

But his brief and lackluster career as a politician in no way tarnished his image as a genuine war hero.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was also a downed aviator who became a POW, said Stockdale “was one of the bravest men I’ve ever known. His leadership inspired us to do better than we ever thought we could.”

Tortured repeatedly, forced to wear vise-like leg irons for two years and put in solitary confinement for four years, Stockdale refused his captors’ demands to make anti-American statements. He also devised a clandestine way for the Americans to communicate with each other, in defiance of prison rules.

Released in 1973, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest medal for bravery, in 1976.

The citation noted that because of Stockdale’s stoicism, his jailers stopped their tactics of harassment and torture of POWs, feeling such brutality useless.

In 1992, Perot, a longtime friend, persuaded Stockdale, a Republican, to join him as his running mate in the billionaire’s independent campaign for the presidency.

Stockdale was an unlikely politician, as he admitted later. He was candid, had a self-deprecating sense of humor and was uncomfortable with the simplistic sloganeering of politics.

“There are certain things I’m good at,” he told The Times in 1994. “Fighter pilot, I’m good at. I was damn good at leading a prisoner underground.”

But politics? “It was like I was a college football player that somebody decided ought to go into boxing and a week later I was in the ring with Joe Louis,” he said.

After the losing campaign, Stockdale returned to the Republican Party but said he had no regrets about having joined Perot. He had admired Perot for his efforts to improve conditions for American prisoners in Vietnam.

Unlike some veterans who display their medals and relish telling war stories, Stockdale was modest. He kept his Medal of Honor in a box in a drawer. To do otherwise, he said, would be bragging.

Retired from the Navy in 1979, Stockdale served as president of The Citadel, a private military academy, from 1979 to 1980 and then as a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace from 1981 to 1996. His time at the think tank was not without controversy; at one point, the faculty protested his credentials to teach.

Stockdale was born in Abingdon, Ill., on Dec. 23, 1923, the only child of a schoolteacher and an executive at a china factory. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1947 and served in the fleet for three years before becoming a jet pilot and a test pilot.

He rose quickly through the ranks and spent 1961-62 studying philosophy at Stanford, the kind of mid-career move the Navy encourages for officers of great promise.

In 1964 he led the first American airstrike into North Vietnam, and on Sept. 9, 1965, after 201 missions, he was shot down while piloting his A-4 Skyhawk on a low-level mission to destroy a bridge near the North Vietnamese city of Thanh Hoa.

After safely ejecting, he was found by villagers and beaten. He was taken to the infamous prison called the Hanoi Hilton and kept in isolation for six months.

At the time his plane was shot down, Stockdale was commanding officer of Carrier Air Group 16 flying off the carrier Oriskany. He was to become the senior Naval aviator taken prisoner during the Vietnam War.

When he found that some U.S. officers had not shown sufficient leadership as POWs, he decided to become an example that other prisoners could emulate. He told other prisoners to defy their captors at every turn and never act like helpless captives.

“I told them that we must take control over our own destinies,” he said. He beat his head with a wooden stool and slashed his wrist to show his guards that he was not afraid of pain or even death.

Adm. Vern Clark, chief of Naval Operations, said Tuesday that Stockdale, “challenged the human limits of moral courage, physical endurance and intellectual bravery, emerging victorious as a legendary beacon for all to follow.”

Like many Vietnam War veterans, Stockdale faulted the nation’s civilian leadership, particularly President Lyndon B. Johnson, for not using greater military power to force the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese into submission.

After his retirement, he bluntly disputed the official line of the Johnson administration that the first strikes against North Vietnam were in retaliation for Vietnamese attacks against two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

“Nothing happened,” he said. “I literally led the initial strike of a war I knew was under false pretenses.”

Stockdale held 26 combat awards, including two Distinguished Flying Crosses, two Purple Hearts and four Silver Star medals. He was a member of the Navy’s Carrier Hall of Fame and the National Aviation Hall of Fame and the recipient of 11 honorary doctoral degrees.

His war injuries left him with a limp but he often quoted the philosopher Epictetus: “Lameness is an impediment to the leg but not to the will.”

His years as a pilot left him with impaired hearing. In his final years, his ruddy complexion, shock of white hair and frail appearance belied the young aviator known as one of the most daring of attack pilots.

He and his wife, Sybil, wrote a book in 1984, “In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam War.” It was made into a movie by NBC.

In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, he explained what allowed him and other prisoners to survive: “It comes down to comradeship, and it comes down to pride, dignity, an enduring sense of self-worth and to that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism called personal honor.”

Besides his wife, Stockdale is survived by their sons, James of Beaver, Pa.; Sidney of Albuquerque; Stanford of Denver; and Taylor of Claremont, Calif.; and eight grandchildren.

He will be honored July 16 aboard the carrier Ronald Reagan at North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado. Burial will be at the Naval Academy on July 23.