POW/MIA hysteria and the 1992 presidential campaign

John Ganz’s fascinating 2024 book When the Clock Broke is a cultural/political history of America focused primarily on the years 1989-1992. Reading it reminded me that a major issue during the 1992 presidential campaign was the question of whether the Vietnamese and/or Laotian governments were holding American prisoners of war as slave laborers, with the knowledge and complicity of the US government.

I was already aware, via Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, of how cynically the Nixon administration had ginned up and exploited the supposed POW/MIA issue, at the time when the actual American POWs were being released per the terms of the Paris peace accords. Even though in 1992 was 32 years old and paying some attention to politics, I had mostly forgotten that, nearly 20 years after the withdrawal of the US military from Southeast Asia, this paranoid and indeed frankly insane conspiracy theory about dozens or hundreds of American service members still being held captive was something that all three major presidential candidates had to treat respectfully. Indeed Ross Perot himself was obsessed with the issue, and had had extensive financial dealings with minor presidential candidate and former Green Beret Bo Gritz, who had made at least a couple of trips to Southeast Asia, to find and liberate these non-existent prisoners.

The hysteria around this was sufficiently intense that per a WSJ poll at the time, 70% of Americans professed to believe that POWs were still being held by the Vietnamese, and that the US government was covering this up. It seems likely that this belief was due in no small part to Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films and their various knockoffs. Another manifestation of the hysteria was the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA affairs, which existed from August 1991 until January 1993, despite the fact that all of its members (it was chaired by John Kerry) were well aware that the whole thing was a cruel farce:

Running the committee was seen as politically risky for Kerry, and one that his advisors recommended he not do. Indeed, as Bob Kerrey later said, “Nobody wanted to be on that damn committee. It was an absolute loser. Everyone knew that the POW stories were fabrications, but no one wanted to offend the vet community.

I noticed a few days ago that a POW/MIA flag is still flying next to the Stars & Stripes at my local post office, no doubt because of some ongoing executive and/or congressional order, which can’t be rescinded because of a combination of Nixon-style cynicism, and the same political cowardice that will at all costs avoid “offending the vet community.”

I’ll have more to say about Ganz’s book, which is full of telling vignettes like this one.