Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale, USN, retired, served on active duty in the regular Navy for 37 years, most of those years at sea as a fighter pilot aboard aircraft carriers. Shot down on his third combat tour over North Vietnam, he was the senior naval service prisoner of war in Hanoi for 7-1/2 years - tortured 15 times, in solitary confinement for four years, leg irons for two.

During his navy career, his shore duty consisted of three years as a test pilot and test pilot school instructor at Patuxent River, Maryland; two years as a graduate student at Stanford University; one year in the Pentagon; and, finally, two years as The President of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

Upon his retirement from the Navy in 1979, the Secretary of the Navy established the Vice Admiral James Stockdale Award for Inspirational Leadership which is presented annually to two commanding officers, one in the Atlantic Fleet and one in the Pacific. In 1989, Monmouth College in his native State of Illinois, from which he entered the Naval Academy, named its student union "Stockdale Center." The following year he was made a 1990 Laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Academy of Illinois in ceremonies at the University of Chicago. He is an Honorary Fellow in the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. In 1993 he was inducted into the Carrier Aviation Hall of Fame, and in 1995 was enshrined in the U.S. Naval Aviation Hall of Honor at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida.