Leo Thorsness, RIP

[Valin]

Power Line

 

Scott Johnson

May 3 2017

 

I am sad to report that Leo Thorsness has died at the age of 85. Meeting him was perhaps the most awesome experience I owe to writing for Power Line. I had the great good fortune of meeting Colonel Thorsness in the summer of 2008 through the offices of McCain campaign midwest spokesman Tom Steward (now with Center of the American Experiment).

 

(Snip)

 

His Medal of Honor was kept a secret so that the North Vietnamese would not use the citation against him and aggravate the conditions of his captivity. As it was, he was tortured unmercifully for the first three years.

Upon his capture, he was tortured in interrogation for 19 days and 18 nights, without sleep. “It took them 18 days to break me,” he told me when I first met him in the summer of 2008. Eighteen days! As I sat listening to him, I thought someone has to write up this story.

 

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Leo told me that he appreciated the introduction I contributed to the paperback edition of his book. I responded with an expression of my gratitude for the opportunity, adding that I was not proud of the interests I had pursued as a high school and college student while he was “tied up” for the six years of his captivity. “Oh, you’re like Peter,” he said gently, referring to Peter Collier, the radical antiwar colleague of David Horowitz whose “second thoughts” led him to Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement in the 1980’s.

With the comparison to Peter, Leo was granting me absolution. Peter contributed the individual profiles of the living Medal of Honor recipients whose stories are told in Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Above and Beyond the Call of Duty. (The book was a project of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation, with which Leo was active.)

“You were exercising your rights,” Leo told me, which is not the way I would put it. As I said, he was a magnanimous man.

 

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[Valin]