This Prof Learned the Hard Way

A former P.O. W. runs the Naval War College and teaches too

The lecturer is all Navy: blue uniform, gold braid, seven rows of ribbons, a lined, leathery face and a full mane of white hair. Like a captain on his bridge, he paces back and forth before his students, 45 mature, mid-career military officers taking a year of graduate studies at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

The lecturer, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, 55, is accustomed to speaking before sizable groups of men. As a wing commander aboard an aircraft carrier, he had to brief his pilots before every mission. But now he is talking about moral dilemmas, not military targets. Stockdale is not only president of the 94-year-old Naval War College but also a philosophy teacher who designed his course, "Foundations of Moral Obligation," to combat what he calls "the deadening of moral sensitivities."

Jim Stockdale brings to his classroom a unique set of credentials: a bachelor's degree in engineering from Annapolis (he finished 130th in the class of 1947, behind Jimmy Carter, who was 60th, and CIA Director Stansfield Turner, who was 25th); a master's in international relations from Stanford; and a doctorate in heroism from 7 1/2 years as the senior American P.O.W. at Hoa Lo prison, the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

In 1977 Stockdale was named president of the Naval War College, which sits on a wind swept point overlooking Narragansett Bay. Among his first acts was to draft Joseph Brennan, 68, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, to help him design and teach a course on military morality. "The twists and turns of the fortunes of war have a way of throwing operational skippers and others out into new decision-making territory where all previous bets are off," says Stockdale.

Every Wednesday Stockdale and Brennan team for a two-hour lecture; on Thursdays the class joins the discussion in a 90-min. seminar. "This isn't a leadership course," says Stockdale. "It's a walk through the classics."

For ten weeks, his students contemplate man as moral animal. The reading list is long and demanding: Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Sartre, Emerson, Dostoyevsky, Marx and Lenin. Frequently the class dwells on the unfair ness of fate as illustrated by Job in the Bible, by Camus in The Plague, by Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. And by James Stockdale as a sorely tested P.O.W.

Stockdale came to philosophy as a 38-year-old Navy fighter pilot enrolled in a master's program at Stan ford's Hoover Institution.

Part of his reading was this passage from the Enchiridion, a manual for Roman field soldiers by the philosopher Epictetus: "It is better to die in hunger, exempt from guilt and fear, than to live in affluence and perturbation." It was a lesson Stockdale would draw on repeatedly after parachuting from his crippled A-4 jet and landing in North Viet Nam on Sept. 9,1965.

Before he was finally released on Feb. 12, 1973, Stockdale endured 2,714 days of imprisonment, including three years in solitary confinement and more than a year in total isolation. He was tortured for days on end and, by his own count, was reduced to total submission 15 times. But he also thwarted his captors on quite a few occasions. In 1969, when the North Vietnamese were about to use him in a propaganda film, he battered his face to a puffy pulp with a wooden stool and chopped off his hair with a razor, slashing his scalp in the process. The enemy no longer found him photogenic.

Seven months later, his endurance sapped, Stockdale realized that if his interrogation continued, he would probably give up secrets. He finally employed a lesson he had learned from Thomas Schelling's 1960 The Strategy of Conflict, a work he had come across at Stanford. He stabbed his wrists with broken glass, producing pools of blood that horrified his guards and made them end their interrogations. "I felt the only way I could really deter and stop the flow of questioning was to show a commitment to death," remembers Stockdale. "I don't think that I intended to die, but I intended to make them think that I was ready to die." That act earned him the Medal of Honor.

Stockdale's experiences probably qualify him as much as anyone alive to lead career military officers into the labyrinth of moral questions that have come out of Viet Nam. Ethics is taught in many forms in service academies and postgraduate institutions. But Stockdale wants to create a model specifically designed to help the military "regain our bearings." Says he: "Today's ranks are filled with officers who have been weaned on slogans and fads of the sort preached in the better business schools--that rational managerial concepts will cure all evils. This course is my defense against the buzzword-nomograph-acronym mentality."

Stockdale's record serves as a defense against that sort of mentality among the 345 students at the Newport school. Says Air Force Lieut. Colonel Norman Mc-Daniel, a fellow P.O.W. of Stockdale's and now one of his students: "A lot of training in the military tells you how you should act, but it doesn't give you the why. We're at a stage of moving from responding to what other people tell us to do to having more choice." Not an easy concept for military men, but as Stockdale puts it, "No philosophical survival kits are issued" when man goes to war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.