Jane Fonda picked an old scab when she apologized for the infamous 1972 photo of her atop an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi. “I made one unforgivable mistake when I was in North Vietnam, and I will go to my grave with this,” she told Oprah this month.
We won’t argue with that. But if America is looking for a woman whose conviction made a difference during the Vietnam War, we have a suggestion: Sybil Stockdale, widow of a hero — Admiral James B. Stockdale — as well as one in her own right.
While Ms. Fonda was posing with North Vietnamese soldiers, Mrs. Stockdale’s husband was leading resistance against them in the Hanoi Hilton. For his leadership, he would later receive the Medal of Honor.
In this resistance to the enemy, and in their marriage, Mrs. Stockdale was the admiral’s full partner. Not only did she found the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, she worked with naval intelligence to communicate secretly with her husband using invisible ink. He replied with names of imprisoned Americans that Washington did not have — and descriptions of torture.
In their splendid book “In Love and War,” the Stockdales recount these events and describe the war from each side: he, as a POW in Hanoi; she, as a wife and mother on the home front. In her advocacy, she walked a tightrope. While she aimed to pressure Washington to do more for POWs, she would do nothing to dishonor her husband’s uniform.
For her actions, the US Navy awarded Sybil Stockdale its Distinguished Public Service Award, the only wife of an active-duty officer ever to be so honored. In a month that includes the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, America would do well to put Ms. Fonda behind us — and look instead to an American woman whose example reminds us of the service and sacrifices made by the families of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.