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"Who am I? Why am I here?"

"Who am I? Why am I here?" were the opening remarks by 1992 Reform Party Vice-Presidential candidate Admiral James Stocksdale. In 1999 he was interviewed as follows:

JIM LEHRER: Admiral Stockdale, welcome. You were the Reform Party candidate for vice president in 1992, and you participated in the vice presidential debate. In general terms, how would you characterize that experience for you?

ADMIRAL JAMES STOCKDALE: It was terribly frustrating because I remember I started with, "Who am I? Why am I here?" and I never got back to that because there was never an opportunity for me to explain my life to people. It was so different from Quayle and Gore. The four years in solitary confinement in Vietnam, 7½ years in prisons, drop the first bomb that started the ... American bombing raid in the North Vietnam..

JIM LEHRER: That line, "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" of course, got great publicity. Was that something that you just said spontaneously, or had you thought about it before the thing began?

ADMIRAL JAMES STOCKDALE: I had thought about it a little bit, and I thought it would come to me in a way that I could explain the idea of building a prison civilization. You remember, I really remembered Mark Van Doran's quote. He said, "An intelligent person is one who should a catastrophe strike, say doomsday... he could refound his own civilization."

He went on to explain how the inner qualities of the prisoners coupled with a belief that a ‘cause’ (my word) was worth being tortured for is what helped these men to survive.

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