The next time you are browsing in the philosophy section of the bookstore, pick up a tome on stoicism, flip to the index, and look under the letter “S.” Don’t be surprised if you spot an entry for “Stockdale, James.”
In many respects, Navy Vice Adm. James Stockdale (1923-2005) was the personification of the all-American hero. A native of Abingdon, Ill., Stockdale never lost his distinctive Midwestern twang. A summary of his life reads like a series of checked boxes: He graduated from the Naval Academy, became first a test pilot and then a fighter pilot, married Sybil — the only wife he would ever have — and fathered four sons.
But an exotic thread entered the fabric of Stockdale’s life during his service in the Vietnam War. In 1965, he piloted a plane felled by the North Vietnamese. Immediately upon being captured and confined, the new prisoner of war, who was introduced to philosophy while pursuing a master’s degree at Stanford University, turned to the teachings of a long-dead Greek guy. As he recounted in a 1995 speech at King’s College, Stockdale whispered the following to himself just before he was hauled off: “Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”
Epictetus’ creed was stoicism. As Stockdale put it in the same speech, stoics were to silo “those things that are ‘up to him’ and … those things that are ‘not up to him,’” mastering the former and tolerating the latter. Harnessing this philosophy, Stockdale navigated his 7-year stint in the Hanoi Hilton. Upon his return to civilization, he received the Medal of Honor and a pair of Purple Hearts.
Today, owing both to his devotion to the philosophy and the unique circumstances under which he field-tested it, Stockdale is something akin to the public face of stoicism, cited in books, articles, videos, and across the internet.
Such was not always the case. In fact, although his experience as a prisoner of war was recounted in a popular 1984 book he co-authored with his wife called In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Years, Stockdale first came to the attention of the general public when he served as Ross Perot’s running mate during the 1992 presidential contest. “Who am I? Why am I here?” Those words, Stockdale’s introductory salvo in the vice presidential debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle, still ring out. The ex-prisoner of war’s performance was judged harshly. The New York Times was condescending, writing, “There was some charm in this 68-year-old who uttered simplicities amid the bombast,” while “Saturday Night Live” was willfully ignorant, with Phil Hartman portraying a man of immense learning as a shouting fool. The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle conceded Stockdale’s philosophical bent, but he still concluded, “Last night, officially riding shotgun, he had trouble, it must be said, speaking for himself.”
Then, at some point in the mid-’90s, came a startling reversal: Stockdale, who seemed destined in some quarters to be remembered as a name on lists of “memorable VP debate moments,” began to be cited as a philosophical lodestar. Early on, his defenders came from unlikely corners. Comedian Dennis Miller, for example, went on an impassioned pro-Stockdale tribute during a 1994 stand-up routine. “He’s a brilliant, sensitive, courageous individual,” Miller said. “But he committed the unpardonable sin in our culture: He was bad on television.” In an interview conducted after serving a sentence for vehicular manslaughter, “Pulp Fiction” co-screenwriter Roger Avary described Stockdale, whom he had met while working on a planned HBO series about Medal of Honor recipients, as a kind of guiding light. “I cannot stress to you how strong and noble this man was,” Avary said.
Did Miller or Avary know anything of Stockdale before that notorious VP debate? Perhaps they did, but City College of New York philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci openly admits he did not. “He seemed foolish, but little did I know that Stockdale would become one of my role models, several decades after that night and about ten years after his death,” Pigliucci writes in his 2017 book, How To Be a Stoic, in which Stockdale is discussed alongside such figures as Cato the Younger.
Why were people as diverse as a comedian, a filmmaker, and a professor drawn to Stockdale? For starters, Stockdale’s public sliming was sure to invite independent thinkers to take a second look. What they found, however, was not a garden-variety hero, but a man who framed a wretched experience in unapologetically intellectual terms. Not every soldier imprisoned by the enemy uses the occasion to try out a school of philosophy. Note how, in reeling off adjectives about Stockdale, Miller lists “brilliant” and “sensitive” ahead of “courageous.”
What’s more, Stockdale was serious. Stoicism to him was not a metaphor. His admirers say he meant it. “For Epictetus, emotions were acts of will,” he said at King’s College. “Fear was not something that came out of the shadows of the night and enveloped you; he charged you with the total responsibility of starting it, stopping it, controlling it.”
Taking this to heart, Stockdale steeled himself against physical pain to dole out minimal information to his torturers; personal pride at holding out on some things, if not all things, buoyed Stockdale and the “expatriate colony” of imprisoned officers he led. At such moments, Stockdale said in a documentary, he did not wish to be elsewhere: “When comradeship ran so high, and there was such an affection for each other among us guys who were victims of this thing, I thought to myself, ‘You know, I wouldn’t be anywhere else. I’m right where I should be.’”
Stockdale’s story, then, was not of one man’s exceptional bravery, but of a philosophy of use to anyone with the goal of regulating his own inner life. Indeed, his message could find relevancy even in the world of business, as proven in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, in which the term “Stockdale paradox” was introduced. The paradox, which has gained traction in business literature, was this: Terrible turns of events cannot be swept under the rug, but they also must not be glumly accepted. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality,” Stockdale told Collins.
Stockdale probably never guessed he would be mentioned in the pages of Forbes and Fast Company. On the other hand, it is a sign of progress in American culture that Stockdale went from getting mocked by those who should know better to getting celebrated by those we wouldn’t necessarily expect to appreciate him.
Maybe his outlook is popular because it offers both toughness and optimism. Maybe those drawn to him reckon that, while they may not have been prisoners of war, they have their own heap of problems, and that those problems ought to be tackled with character and guts rather than handouts from the government or help from Mom and Dad.
Near the end of his speech at King’s College, Stockdale spoke of a message he received from fellow war prisoner Dave Hatcher. Stockdale was recuperating from having slit his own wrists — an act done in preference to going through torture that, due to a note his captors had found, might cause him to implicate those in his “colony” — when he read lines not from Epictetus but from William Ernest Henley. They ended like this: “I am the master of my fate/ I am the captain of my soul.” As his admirers know, these words weren’t an aspiration for James Stockdale. They were a job description.
Peter Tonguette has written about the arts for the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and the New Criterion. He is the editor of the book Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews.
