JS: Yes, and that was done in the summer of '76. I just...

JS: '67, '67, and that was a...

JS: Yeah. Yes, that film was made in the summer of '67. I had a lot to do with, not the film, but those were very tough days in prison and I the senior officer in Hanoi and we had... that film company also made films of guys that tortured to give... put on film my rules. I had a million rules out there, surreptitiously tap through walls, that was really para... well, we were pretty well had it, they were about to give up on their propaganand so I know when it happened and many of the people that were filmed... I've seen it, I've got a copy of it. I of course wasn't in it, but I knew...

JS: Yeah, various kinds. We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film.

JS: Well, well, it didn't come as a surprise. We'd... On the eighteenth of December 1973, when we were...

JS: '72, OK. Well, it didn't come as a surprise. On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes. Everybody was yelling, pack, we're going home. There was... We knew we would never leave until the B52s came to town and the week... eleven days or whatever it was, that really turned 'em round. So we knew we were going home and it took a month to get back to Paris and get all this. But, again, Communists are kind of legalistic and Henry Kissinger had put into the document that all captive Americans would receive a copy of the agreement. Well, the copy of the agreement was like the Washington phone book, so they would come to the cell and by this time, we were living in groups sometimes, here'd be about five guards and there'd be twenty guys in there and there'd be twenty phone books all saying the same thing! But we... Oh, I talked to Sybil, called her from... Well, we marched out on the fourteenth of February, I think, my group. I was the first group... I was the twenty sixth man to be shot down and we were let out in reverse order of shoot-down and we were taken out to Gialong Airport and finally put on American transports. What were they? C130s I'd guess, I'd never seen one before. I'd been there, as I said, for nearly eight years and we went to the Philippines and went to the hospital and then we were encouraged... you know, the phone was free and called Sybil. We have a recording of that, it's kind of nice, that somebody... and one of the kids, I guess, put a tape machine... and I was coming home pretty soon and we thought there was some business about important physicals, but they were just trying to figure out if we were nuts or not and once they were convinced that we weren't, they put us on the airplanes and...

JS: Well, we were very... in general, Nixon got standing ovations from us in Hanoi, because we had confidence that he had the courage to put the B52s in and to take the heat and I was invited back to Washington to have a visit with him, it was early in April 1973, and it was kind of late in the afternoon. Sybil had... of course had formed the League of Families and had had several sessions with him, one on one, before I... and she was sitting out in the outer office and he wanted to personal tales and he talked about lots of things. He said, you know, they always said that the military... he kept saying that we don't want to be hamstrung, we want to do our thing and he said, when I decided to take the B52s to Hanoi,... I said, we want all B52s over here and boy you should have heard the outcry, these generals... these air... He said, why, we've got to cover targets and you know, so forth. He said, they really screamed (unintelligible) they didn't want to get their airplanes beat up you know, and it was kind of a laugh, you know. He had a sense of humor about it. But inside stuff like that, what life was like for him, oh he said, Tom Moore, that damned Tom Moore is one hell of a guy. He was chairman of the Joint Chiefs and he was a great friend of mine and he said there times here when he was the only man in Washington would speak to me. And so he told about what it was like to be there. Then he said, about the time I left, he said, you know, the North Vietnamese - this is April, early April - the North Vietnamese are not abiding by the agreement, Henry and I rather thought they would not, and we have some alternative plans we might execute, I might put those B52s back in there, would you support me if I did? I said, yes sir and that's when I came out. Sybil said, what'd he say? I said, that last thing was the one, but John Dean went to the prosecutors on the next day or the day after that Watergate was on us and that program went down the tubes. That's way I mean, that's the way I see it, but poor guy, I really liked him. We went to his funeral and... yeah, he was...

JS: Beg your pardon?

JS: Oh, I think, yeah, I think it would have done. I think we would probably never had lost South Vietnam, if we ever owned it, but...

(END OF INTERVIEW WITH ADMIRAL JAMES STOCKDALE)