{"id":56530,"date":"2014-11-18T12:07:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-18T17:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=56530"},"modified":"2014-11-18T12:07:41","modified_gmt":"2014-11-18T17:07:41","slug":"john-t-downey-pow-for-20-years-passes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=56530","title":{"rendered":"John T. Downey, POW for 20+ years, passes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.courant.com\/politics\/hc-judge-downey-flag-half-staff-20141117-story.html\">Hartford Currant<\/a>, John T. Downey, the longest held American POW has passed at the age of 84. Downey joined the CIA after college in 1951, and he was in an aircraft that was shot down by the Chinese in November 1952;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He was sentenced to life and spent the next 20 years in Chinese prisons. When President Richard Nixon re-established relations with China in 1971, Downey&#8217;s sentence was commuted. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated Downey&#8217;s release on March 9, 1973, and Downey was reunited with his sick mother, Mary Downey. Three years after his release, Downey graduated from Harvard Law School at the age of 45.<\/p>\n<p>His son, Jack Downey, recalled his father Monday as a patient and humble man who might have been a little &#8220;rabid&#8221; about Yale football, but who never dwelled on his years of captivity.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;For a lot of people, especially of a certain generation, he was this enormous, larger than life person,&#8221; Jack Downey said. &#8220;But he never made it a big thing. There was very little fanfare. He would just tell me a story about it like he was talking about baseball.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to the Hartford Currant, John T. Downey, the longest held American POW has passed at &hellip; <a title=\"John T. Downey, POW for 20+ years, passes\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=56530\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">John T. Downey, POW for 20+ years, passes<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blue-skies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}