The Incredible Stoicism of James Stockdale: Prisoner At War

“On September 9, 1965, Admiral James Stockdale’s A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot down in Vietnam. He was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese and spent the next seven years being tortured and subjected to unimaginable loneliness and terror. Fortunately, three years earlier, he was recommended a book. That book, he says, saved his life.” Find out how Stoicism helped James Stockdale face unimaginable adversity, on today’s podcast. Today’s episode is brought to you by Thuma. Thuma has spent thousands of hours making the perfect platform bed frame, called The Bed. The Bed by Thuma is super supportive of your mattress, breathes well, and is built to naturally minimize noise. Thuma ships your bed frame right to your door, and it takes five minutes to assemble, no tools required. Visit Thuma.co/stoic to get free shipping on your order of The Bed today. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect. We prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Here we are. And I wanted to talk today about someone who I got to mention briefly in the new book, Lives of the Stoics. But we decided in that book to sort of cut off at Marcus Aurelius. First off, there's the perfectness of starting with Zeno, ending with Marcus Aurelius. You got Z to A, so to speak. But just decided to profile the ancient Stoics in that book. Were there Stoics after Marcus Aurelius? Absolutely.

• 1:29Ryan Holiday?

  Are there even modern, recent-day Stoics? Yes. The most impressive and awe-inspiring is probably Admiral James Stockdale. I've been lucky enough to speak at the Stockdale Center at the U.S. Naval Academy a few times. I'm actually a fellow there at the Stockdale Center. But I didn't get to profile Stockdale the way I wanted to in the book. I mentioned him briefly in the Epictetus chapter and a few other places. But what I wanted to do today was give you a glimpse into the life and philosophy of the great James Stockdale, what we could learn from him. I call him, in today's episode, "not a prisoner of war," although he famously was a POW in the Vietnam War.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  But a prisoner at war. He was at war against fate, at war against adversity, at war against his own limitations, at war against doubt and fear, at war against pain and despair. And he was largely victorious in those battles. And I think that makes him a particularly awe inspiring figure. And so here we are today, looking at the incredible Stoicism of the great James Stockdale. On September 9, 1965, James Stockdale's A4 Skyhawk was shot down over Vietnam. He was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese and spent the next seven years being tortured

• 2:52Ryan Holiday?

  and subjected to unimaginable loneliness and terror. But fortunately, three years earlier, he was recommended a book. That book, he says, saved his life. After 20 years in the Navy, Stockdale had decided to go back to school. He enrolled in a two-year graduate program at Stanford, where he studied philosophy under the World War II naval commander Philip Reinlander. After the final class, knowing that Stockdale was graduating and returning to the cockpit, Reinlander gave him a copy of Epictetus's In Corydian, a handbook for the busy man,

• 3:32Ryan Holiday?

  he had called it. Over the next three years, Stockdale boarded aircraft carriers all over the Western Pacific. He launched three seven-month cruises to the waters off Vietnam. He led the first ever American bombing raid against North Vietnam. He commanded the USS Oriskany with a mighty "O" as it was nicknamed. "But on my bedside table," Stockdale said, "no matter what carrier I was aboard, were Epictetus's books." Then exactly three years after leaving Stanford, Stockdale was shot down and captured.

• 4:07Ryan Holiday?

  “After the ejection, Stockdale later wrote, “I whispered to myself, five years down there at least, “I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. Those three years with Epictetus had taught him the importance of autonomy and the freedom of his own mind, that it was something that could never be taken from him. In prison, the words of Epictetus kept coming back to him. “Do you not know that life is a soldier’s service? If you neglect your responsibilities when some severe order is laid upon you, do you not understand to what a pitiful state you bring the army? And each day Stockdale lived what Epictetus taught him, that a podium and a prison is

• 4:52Ryan Holiday?

  each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained, if you so wish. Stockdale learned in that prison camp, in what they had come to call the Hanoi Hilton, he learned to live without fear or hope, as the Stoics teach, believing that fear and hope were flip sides of the same coin, pointless concern for future events.” “Most of his fellow POWs, Stockdale noticed, tormented themselves with hope, a hope of an early release, a hope they would be rescued next week, next month, next year. They were the ones, Stockdale said, who died of a broken heart and didn’t make it out alive. But Stockdale’s Stoic practice helped him confront the grim reality of his situation

• 5:36Ryan Holiday?

  without giving in to despair or depression. He realized that only the ruthless acceptance of the presence would sustain him over the long haul. So casting aside all thoughts of future fears or hopes, he believed instead only that the harm could be done to him would be done by himself. “I learned what Stoic harm meant, he said, a shoulder broken, a bone in my back broken, a leg broken twice were peanuts by comparison. Epictetus had said, “Look not for any greater harm than this, destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting, well-behaved man within you.” With those words on a kind of internal loop, Stockdale said he never doubted... That I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  into the defining event of my life. Maintaining that balance of radical acceptance of the present realities with the optimism in maintaining the freedom of his own choices was the paradoxical key to his survival. Jim Collins, the bestselling author, would dub it "the Stockdale paradox" in his classic "Good to Great." "You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end regardless of the difficulties," Collins explains, "and, at the same time, you must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." With that powerful blend of radical realism and relentless optimism, Stockdale made it out alive.

• 7:01Ryan Holiday?

  He was released and returned home during Operation Homecoming on February 12, 1973. He was awarded the Medal of Honor a few weeks later. He could barely walk, let alone stand upright, following the debilitating treatment in captivity, which included being forced to wear heavy leg irons for over two years. Otherwise, he would have returned, had he had the choice, straight to the cockpit. Instead, he was promoted Vice Admiral of the U.S. Navy and eventually retired in 1979 after a 32-year career. In all, Stockdale was awarded 27 Combat Awards, the Medal of Honor, two distinguished flying crosses, four Silver Stars, and two Purple Hearts, among others.

• 7:45Ryan Holiday?

  But the Stoic is not only a soldier. Stockdale's civilian life was equally productive and decorated. He was named a Fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and spent more than a decade there teaching the Stoic philosophy that saved his life. He was asked to serve as a Chair of the White House Fellows under the Reagan administration. He and his wife Sybil co-authored "In Love and War: The Story of a Family's Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam War," which was later made into a movie starring James Woods and James Alexander. He was, to his own surprise, announced as the billionaire business tycoon and independent presidential candidate Ross Perot's vice presidential running mate.

• 8:26Ryan Holiday?

  And a few months later, Stockdale found himself on national television debating against Al Gore and Dan Quayle. "Who am I? Why am I here?" Stockdale famously responded when asked for an opening statement. These were questions meant to poke fun at the fact that he was not a politician like his counterparts. But the haughty ignorance of the media and uninformed public led not only to the missed opportunity of bringing wisdom to the political conversation, but the mocking of a hero. There was even a Saturday Night Live recreation later that week with Phil Hartman as Stockdale. His reputation tragically was damaged and never fully recovered, at least not in his lifetime. "It was terribly frustrating," Stockdale

• 9:08Ryan Holiday?

  later explained. "I began my remarks with the two questions that are perennially debated by every thinking human being. I chose them for their broader relevance to my life. I am a philosopher," he said. Dennis Miller, the comedian, said it best in his 1994 HBO comedy special, "Look at the record, folks," he said. "The guy was the first guy in and the last guy out of Vietnam, a war that many Americans, including our current president, did not want to dirty their hands with. He's a brilliant, sensitive, courageous man, and yet he committed the one unpardonable sin in our culture: he was bad on television." Stockdale died in 2005 at the age of 81. His legacy outlives him. The Navy has the

• 9:53Ryan Holiday?

  Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Award for Inspirational Leadership. There's a guided missile destroyer christened the USS Stockdale. The main gate and building at the Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado, California are named in his honor. There are buildings and halls named after him, as well as a statue of him at the U.S. Naval Academy, and even the Stockdale Center for Leadership in Annapolis. The jet he flew early in his career was restored and put on display at Air Base Arizona. But the truth is, Stockdale's legacy is with us all every single day. "We are in a Stockdale moment," as Jim Collins said in a recent message to fans and students. "The world is in a Stockdale moment," he said. "Our

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  countries are in a Stockdale moment. Our companies and organizations are in a Stockdale Moment, and we ourselves are in a Stockdale moment. Stockdale learned to lead and fulfill his duties in unimaginable circumstances. Let it inspire us to do the same, to remain unbroken, to seize our freedom, to prepare ourselves for the difficulties of life, and to know in the end that we will prevail no matter what happens. The Stoics were not just thinkers and writers. Even 2,000 years ago, they talked about penning philosophers. They meant that derisively. They wanted philosophers who were doers, right? And that's the point of Stoicism. It's to help make you better in the real world.

• 11:21Ryan Holiday?

  And so the new book, Lives of the Stoics, is going to look at how did these actual human beings live the ideas in the philosophy they espoused? In all my other books, I've been talking about the ideas, the teachings of Stoicism, but this is the first time the lives of the Stoics have been documented all in one place, literally ever in history. It's how did these men and women apply the ideas of Stoicism to the challenges of their lives and of their times? From the Stoics, we can learn so much about resilience, about perseverance, about happiness, about virtue. So I'm so excited about the new book, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius. Please check it out, and thank you very much.

• 12:03Ryan Holiday?

  Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, available anywhere books are sold.

• 12:16Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference, and of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out the crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.