When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz

The idea that there were abandoned Americans still alive in Southeast Asia synthesized the pro-war and anti-war imagination: paranoia and distrust of government born of revelations about the intelligence agencies, Watergate, and the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia mingled with the sense that the country was stabbed in the back by cowardly and deceitful bureaucrats and liberal elites. The myth gave hope to the families of the 2,500 men still “unaccounted for”—a category that included those believed by the military to be dead—that their fathers and sons might still be alive. And it gave hope to the nation that its honor could be restored through the rescue—or the resurrection, really—of the lost men. What began as a public relations blitz had transformed into a veritable national cult. Perot positioned himself as a messianic figure in this nationalist cult of the undead. Here was a man who could overcome the traitors who had left America’s warriors behind, rescue the captives, and redeem the nation’s sense of loss and humiliation.