Jensen-Stevenson,M. Stevenson,W. Kiss the Boys Goodbye. 1990

Jensen-Stevenson, Monika and Stevenson, William. Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam. New York: Dutton (Penguin Books), 1990. 493 pages.

Monika Jensen-Stevenson was a producer for CBS's "60 Minutes" in 1985, and her husband Bill was a former fighter pilot, war correspondent, and the author of military histories such as "A Man Called Intrepid" and "Ninety Minutes at Entebbe." This book begins with a segment she produced on Bobby Garwood, a Marine POW who was released by Vietnam in 1979. Efforts were made to discredit Garwood, because his testimony that other prisoners were still held captive was inconvenient for high government officials. Her segment aired despite attempts to stop it by gray men with shadowy connections. This only whetted her appetite, so she quit CBS and convinced Bill to help her write a book. They were confronted with missing files, snatched purses and briefcases, harassment designed to intimidate, threats from officials, and stories from scared insiders. Ross Perot, the Christic Institute, Bo Gritz, Scott Barnes, and others figure in this disturbing drama, and the reader is left with the spooky certainty that there's something going on here. The Stevensons are a conservative, well-connected Georgetown couple who socialized with Eric Severeid and Supreme Court justice William Brennan, and they had numerous intelligence contacts. If in the end they write of "zealots who fund murky foreign wars with deniable assets and disposable soldiers," and refer to the secret state as a "hidden monster," who among us can feel comfortable?
ISBN 0-525-24934-6