Welcome to the not-old-better show. I'm Paul Vogel-Sang and this is episode number 371.

As part of our Smithsonian Associates, Her Story, Author, interview series, we are joined

today by author, historian, museum curator, Keith Hartage Lee.

Heath Hartich Lee will be appearing at the Smithsonian Associates Program July 15th, 2019, and the title of her presentation is

Wives, Mothers, and Rescuers how unlikely activists brought their POW husbands home.

He Tardage Lee comes from a museum education and curatorial background and she has worked at history museums across the country.

Drawing from archival sources, personal letters, diaries, and oral histories in her new book,

The League of Wives, The Untold Story of the Women, who took on the

U.S. government to bring their husbands home, Heath Hartichly reveals how these unlikely activists

went to extraordinary lengths to facilitate their

husband's freedom and to account for missing military men.

Heath Hartage Lee answers our questions about how these women achieved their success

by relentlessly lobbying government leaders, conducting a series of savvy media campaigns and

covert meetings with anti-war activists attempting to

negotiate on their own with the North Vietnamese and most astonishingly helping to code secret letters to their imprisoned husbands.

And the plans for this insurgency that all began on the California Island of Coronado

where death and havoc were unseen but felt deeply by all the islands inhabitants.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt surveyed the flat sandy fields of North Island on the Coronado Peninsula with an

acquisitive eye.

FDR, a former assistant secretary of the order clearing Coronado of its longtime army presence and claiming the entire area for a new naval base.

With war in the Pacific raging, the island would become a recognized cog in the military success during World War II.

Naval Amphibia Space Coronado was constructed on this barren spot in 1944 and Coronado was now the Navy's

...