In Memorium

Admiral James Stockdale passed away Tuesday at his home in Colorodo. He was 81.

Admiral Stockdale became a public figure when he ran as Ross Perot's vice-presidential candidate in 1992. He was ridiculed by the LameStream Media for his performance in a debate. It was a great injustice to a great man. As Dennis Miller said shortly after the debates, in one of his first famous HBO rants, "He's a brilliant, sensitive, courageous man. And yet he committed the one unpardonable sin in our culture: he was bad on television."

His greatness is recorded in other places though. An interview. His Wikipedia bio. His Hoover Institution Website.

A summary, from the A.P., is in order:

During the Vietnam War, Stockdale was a Navy fighter pilot based on the USS Oriskany and flew 201 missions before he was shot down on Sept. 9, 1965. He became the highest-ranking naval officer captured during the war, the Navy said.

Stockdale was taken to Hoa Lo Prison, known as the "Hanoi Hilton." His shoulders were wrenched from their sockets, his leg had been shattered by angry villagers and a torturer, and his back was broken. But he refused to capitulate.

Rather than allow himself to be used in a propaganda film, Stockdale smashed his face into a pulp with a mahogany stool.

"My only hope was to disfigure myself," Stockdale wrote in his 1984 autobiography "In Love and War." The ploy worked, but he spent the next two years in leg irons.

After Ho Chi Minh's death, he broke a glass pane in an interrogation room and slashed his wrists until he passed out in his own blood. After that, captors relented in their harsh treatment of him and his fellow prisoners.

Stockdale spent four years in solitary confinement before his release in 1973.

He received 26 combat decorations, including the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest medal for valor, in 1976. The citation reads, "By his heroic action at great peril to himself, he earned the everlasting gratitude of his fellow prisoners and of his country."

He retired from the military in 1979, one of the most highly decorated officers in U.S. Navy, and became president of the Citadel, a military college in South Carolina. He left in 1981 to become a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.