GREAT PRETENDERS
Out on a Limb
Douglas Stringfellow, an infantryman in the U.S. Army Air Forces who enlisted in 1942, took shrapnel to the spine during his first two weeks of overseas deployment in December 1945 and, in January, was on his way home to Utah—an abbreviated battlefield career that gave the private a Purple Heart medal and a cane to help him walk. But by 1952, when Stringfellow announced his candidacy for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, he had recast his fortnight of mine-clearing detail in France to include an impressive list of battlefield heroics, including the top-secret capture of a fabled Nazi nuclear physicist from behind enemy lines and his subsequent escape from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the torture he endured left him a paraplegic. Utah voters were so enamored of Stringfellow’s story—he sometimes gave his stem-winding campaign speeches from a wheelchair—that he was elected to Congress in a landslide. He was exposed by the following election cycle, however, and
