THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, September 7, 1996 TAG: 9609070177
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 243 lines
On a pier in Newport News this morning, the Navy's and much of the nation's top military brass will convene for a celebration of American sea power.
Christening the Harry S Truman, the nation's newest aircraft carrier, they'll admire the workmanship of its builders and the courage of those who'll one day man its decks and fly its planes.
Even without President Clinton, who canceled his scheduled appearance to avoid being seen as drawing the military into his re-election campaign, this should be a proud day - a day to remember - for the Navy. But whatever it brings, at least some of the naval officers and dignitaries on hand will have no trouble recalling Saturday, Sept. 7, for years to come.
Because five years ago today, in a desert hotel hundreds of miles from the nearest port or ship, a decidedly less dignified gathering of naval officers started a tidal wave of change that continues to rock America's fleet.
Tailhook, the social and professional organization that brought those officers together, now names an era in U.S. naval history. The tidal wave begun in the desert has pitched women into the cockpits of carrier-based jets and the torpedo rooms of cruisers.
When the Norfolk-based destroyer Laboon launched missiles into Iraq this week, a female officer supervised the firing; before the Truman is retired, there's a reasonable chance a woman will have been in command.
Such a role for the ``weaker'' sex in the male-dominated Navy was almost unthinkable five years ago; certainly, no one expected that so much would change so quickly.
``I think it truly was a watershed event,'' says John H. Dalton, secretary of the Navy for the past three years. ``I think the Navy has changed remarkably and very much for the better. . . . We are such a better, stronger Navy than we were then, in so many ways.''
The Tailhook era began with a symposium of 4,000-plus Navy fliers at the Las Vegas Hilton, an annual event known for its after-hours parties and the unique forum it provided junior and senior officers for frank discussion of the issues facing naval aviation.
The Tailhook Association - the name refers to the hook that drops from the rear of each Navy fighter to snag cables strung across the carrier deck and halt the plane safely - was marking its 35th birthday in 1991 with its biggest gathering ever.
Though not an official part of the Navy, the association enjoyed a close relationship with the service. It claimed more than 16,000 active duty, reserve and retired fliers as members and was the envy of similar associations of submariners and surface ship operators.
Guests for Tailhook '91 included 170 representatives of defense contractors, who came to show off elaborate new guidance, weapons and communications systems they hoped the Navy would buy. Among the featured speakers were Adm. Frank Kelso II, the chief of naval operations, and H. Lawrence Garrett III, the secretary of the Navy.
At the symposium's ``flag panel,'' a question-and-answer session on Saturday afternoon, then Vice Adm. Dick Dunleavy, the Navy's senior aviator, wore a bull's-eye on his shirt. ``For you fighter pilots, that's a target,'' he said.
With the audience dressed in civilian clothes, ``the juniorest ensign could get up and ask a question of a three- or four-star admiral,'' said retired Capt. Lonny McClung, the Tailhook Association's current president. Secretary Garrett noted the openness and candor of the exchanges with approval, wishing out loud that other segments of the Navy provided a similar opportunity for their officers.
One of the questions that Saturday, and much of the buzz in the hotel lobbies and suites, concerned the possibility that women might be assigned to combat jets. For the overwhelmingly male association, it was an uncomfortable prospect.
``Hoo boy,'' a nervous-looking Dunleavy exhaled when one female aviator brought up the subject. ``If Congress directs SecNav to allow qualified women to fly combat aircraft, we will comply.''
Hours later, after the official program had ended, came the events for which Tailhook '91 is remembered. Junior officers and squadron commanders gathered in the Hilton's third-floor hospitality suites for a long night of drinking and debauchery. Dozens of Navy and civilian women were sexually molested or groped as they tried to make their way down the hallway. In some suites, stag films were shown; in others, groups of fliers passed the hat so their squadron mates could have sex with prostitutes, then watched and cheered as their money was put to work.
The revelers were overwhelmingly male, but at least a few Navy women joined, stripping off their tops as male colleagues cheered, visiting a special suite to have their legs shaved in public, or conducting ``equipment checks,'' in which they grasped the groin of clothed male aviators.
There had been wild parties at past Tailhook conventions, though apparently none to match those of '91. In the aftermath, an embarrassed Capt. Frederick Ludwig, then Tailhook's president, sent a letter to squadron commanders decrying the third-floor ``gantlet'' and asking for help to head off such antics in 1992.
And Lt. Paula Coughlin, an admiral's aide, made a formal complaint that she had been manhandled as she tried to get through the gantlet. Her charge set off a string of investigations in the military and on Capitol Hill and initiated sweeping change in the way the Navy treats - and thinks about - women.
The inquiries and the resulting prosecutions ultimately proved perhaps even more embarrassing to the Navy. Witnesses covered for their ship and squadron mates; some suffered convenient losses of memory when asked about what they saw or who else was present.
A written statement from one witness placing Secretary Garrett in a particularly rowdy suite was omitted from the Naval Investigative Service's report on Tailhook. And there were claims by others that Kelso had been on a swimming pool patio where he would have had a clear view of leg shaving.
Though Garrett and Kelso denied seeing anything untoward, each was forced from office by the scandal. A Navy judge concluded that Kelso had lied about his knowledge of improprieties at the symposium and had tried to manipulate the service's investigative processes to protect himself.
The whirlwind of investigations ended without a single conviction but ruined dozens of careers. Pushed into early retirement, Kelso almost lost his fourth star in a Senate vote. A string of admirals involved in the probes were forced out of the Navy; the Senate Armed Services Committee held up hundreds of promotions for junior officers until the Navy certified that they were clear of any involvement in Tailhook's excesses.
``You can't calculate'' the damage the convention and all that followed did to the Navy, says U.S. Sen. John W. Warner, a former secretary of the Navy who now is among the service's most prominent guardians on Capitol Hill. ``It was a tragic episode . . . but it is behind us now.''
The real struggle for the Navy, and ultimately for all the military branches, has come in what the late Adm. Mike Boorda, Kelso's successor, called ``learning the lessons of Tailhook.''
Whatever he saw, or didn't see, at the Hilton, Kelso grasped those lessons almost immediately after he learned of Paula Coughlin's trip through the gantlet.
``We will not tolerate sexual harassment and we will not tolerate any action that demeans the dignity of another,'' he told commanding officers throughout the fleet in a message transmitted seven weeks after the convention.
At Kelso's direction, the Navy began a massive educational campaign on its ``zero tolerance'' policy toward harassment. And in the spring of 1992, Kelso endorsed an ambitious plan to put women in combat jets and on combat ships. Congressional agreement with that proposal left submarines, which Navy leaders assert lack the privacy needed for gender-integrated operations, as essentially the only all-male enclave in the Navy.
Particularly among aviators, the changes have not always been smooth. In 1994, Adm. Stanley Arthur, the Navy's vice chief of operations, essentially was forced into retirement after a senator complained - despite considerable evidence to the contrary - that he had failed to protect a female lieutenant from retaliation after she filed a harassment complaint. The incident embittered Arthur's fellow aviators, and Boorda later called his failure to fight for Arthur the worst mistake of his tenure.
Later that year, after Lt. Kara Hultgreen was killed when her F-14 Tomcat crashed in the Pacific, some male aviators complained that she was unqualified but had been allowed to fly because of her gender.
And when an investigation report released to the public attributed Hultgreen's crash to an engine failure, some reporters were given a confidential report that also faulted her flying.
``I know there's a perception that at one point there may have been a double standard,'' said McClung, Tailhook's current president.
Arthur agreed. But while there are at least some in the Navy who will try to advance their careers by too aggressively promoting women, he said, there have always been others who would apply a double standard to protect and advance underqualified men who are particularly hard-working or popular.
Events this year also have demonstrated that at least some male naval aviators believe their part of the Navy is still being punished for the excesses of Tailhook '91.
Through much of 1995 and this year, Navy leaders have been embroiled in a bitter public fight over the career of Cmdr. Robert Stumpf, a former commanding officer of the Blue Angels. Stumpf's promotion to captain was derailed by the Senate Armed Services Committee after the Navy acknowledged he had been present in a Tailhook '91 suite during a striptease show.
Official Navy investigations cleared Stumpf of any crimes, and after personally reviewing the case Dalton and Boorda endorsed his promotion. Still, the secretary's refusal to advance Stumpf over the Senate's objection, an option Dalton might have exercised because of a quirk in the way the case was handled, provoked an outcry from conservative activists and Navy retirees.
In the spring, Stumpf tried to force the issue by suing Dalton; a judge dismissed the case. The secretary then ordered a ``fresh look'' at the matter and aides said he wanted to send a new and complete file on Stumpf to the committee in hopes it might reconsider. That effort collapsed when Stumpf refused to answer questions under oath and decided to retire.
Rear Adm. Kendell Pease, who as the Navy's chief spokesman has led efforts to repair the service's image, suggested the Stumpf case helped keep journalists focused on Tailhook long after the story might otherwise have run its course.
``Because of Tailhook, it seemed if anything happened with the Navy, the media picked up on it,'' agreed Georgia Sadler, a retired Army officer who is director of a project on military women for the Women's Research and Education Institute. While other services' harassment problems generated stories in military-oriented publications, those involving the Navy seemed always to show up in The Washington Post or The New York Times, she said.
Garrett, alternately bitter and good-humored about his demise, argues that reporters and the public ``have to move away from indicting the institution for the acts of a few people.''
Working today for a defense contractor in an office barely a mile from the Pentagon, Garrett also worries that Tailhook's ultimate legacy may be a loss of control by Navy leaders over who should fill what jobs in the service.
``I don't think in the end the services will have much to say about who goes where and is assigned to what,'' Garrett said in an interview. Congress has made those decisions by lowering gender barriers in federal law and the courts will enforce the new rules, he asserted.
``I don't question the valor or the desire or the courage'' of Navy women or their counterparts in the other services, Garrett said. ``But answers have yet to come forward'' on their fitness for at least some combat jobs to which they're now being assigned.
Dalton has no such hesitancy.
``It's a readiness issue as far as I'm concerned,'' he said. ``If we're serious about saying we want to maintain the highest quality people we can have . . . we're kidding ourselves if we don't recognize that more than 50 percent of the population is women. And if you're going to eliminate half the market, you're not going to have the highest quality.''
Beyond that, said one senior naval officer who asked to remain anonymous, the Navy's leaders have concluded that as women assert themselves politically and in the world of business, the Navy can't afford to be seen as hostile to them.
``In 20 years, if we don't look like society, we will be in deep trouble,'' the officer suggested. ``Because we won't have the support of Congress, we won't have the support of the American public. What we have to do, without lowering our standards - which we never will do - we have to develop that force that will be able to interact with the whole society . . .
``It's the right thing to do for everybody. That's the key.''
Shortly before his death in May, Boorda told several reporters that his greatest frustration in two years at the Navy's helm was his inability to ``get Tailhook behind us.''
For the most part, he asserted, things were going well in the service. Through all its embarrassments, the Navy had answered quickly and professionally every time it was called on to fight or to flex American muscle abroad.
Real progress, Boorda said, was being made in reshaping the attitudes of even veteran sailors toward women in the ranks. When he went out to visit the fleet, questions invariably centered on pay and benefit issues, the quality of housing, the length of deployments, Boorda said; the grumbling about women in the ranks and double standards had all but disappeared.
The weeks after Boorda's death brought support for that assertion in the form of a survey of some 90,000 military people. The Navy scored highest among the services on virtually every question dealing with programs for preventing sexual harassment and punishing harassers.
``It's becoming standard for people to think of all their shipmates with dignity and respect,'' Dalton said. ``It doesn't matter what gender, what race, what background. . . . We are all part of the same service and we need everybody pulling on the same oar to get the job done.''
These days, that sentiment gets some support even from within the Tailhook Association, which is meeting again this weekend - in Reno rather than Las Vegas.
Lucy Young, a newly selected captain in the Navy Reserve and a member of the association's board of directors, said most Tailhookers now believe ``the Navy will emerge stronger'' from the current era and ``if women are part of the team, more power to 'em.''
``Any kind of change is going to generate controversy,'' Young said, so it's not surprising that the Navy has struggled with the changes sparked by Tailhook '91. Male pilots now ``know the women had to work very hard to get there,'' she added. ``It's only fair to give everyone a chance to excel, everyone a chance to fly with the best.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
John H. Dalton, Secretary of the Navy
KEYWORDS: TAILHOOK U.S. NAVY HISTORY CHRONOLOGY by CNB