Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 15, 1994 TAG: 9402180025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ellen Goodman
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
About 21/2 years ago, some 90 women were assaulted at the infamous Tailhook convention. Now the last cases to reach court have been dismissed. Not a single man has been court-martialed or seriously disciplined.
We should be grateful that we know what happened on the third floor of the Las Vegas Hilton. If the men had not assaulted the wrong woman, we might never have heard about the gantlet, the streaking, the leg shaving, the butt biting.
It was a young admiral's aide, Lt. Paula Coughlin, who filed the first complaint. It was Coughlin who had the courage to go public. And last week, it was Coughlin who announced her resignation.
From the beginning, the Navy has worried more about getting over Tailhook than getting to the bottom of it. Their early investigators talked to 1,500 men and turned up two suspects.
After the Pentagon took over the case, 140 fliers were accused of indecent exposure, assault or lying under oath. Seventy of these cases were quickly dismissed and only 50 men were ever fined or moderately disciplined.
Then, last week, the charges against three high-ranking officers were also dismissed. This time, the judge stated that their superior, the Navy's top admiral, Frank B. Kelso II, had manipulated the investigation ``to shield his personal involvement in Tailhook '91.'' Kelso was there, said the judge, he knew, he did nothing.
I will leave it to others to assess Adm. Kelso. Last fall, the secretary of the Navy asked for his removal and Les Aspin saved his job. Now, a military judge has called him a liar.
There are some who see him as one who let the debauchery go on. Kelso swears that he wasn't on the third floor that Saturday night. Witnesses have sworn that he was. Others praise him as a leader in the post-Tailhook Navy, a man who took the problem seriously and made changes. Either way, his
story is only a piece of a larger picture. In this picture, nobody is taking responsibility. Nobody is being held responsible. Since Lawrence Garrett resigned his post as secretary of the Navy at the outset of the scandal, the mutual-protection society has held.
We live at a time when people talk angrily about the lack of individual responsibility. We talk about the Bobbitts, the Menendez brothers, welfare mothers. We talk scornfully about the victim defense.
But nobody describes Tailhook in these terms. We don't talk about the failure of the military men to take responsibility. We don't talk about the 1,500 men questioned and the mere handful who saw evil, heard evil, did evil. The men who stamped themselves and each other ``not responsible.''
Indeed, even those who suspect Adm. Kelso's complicity or at least his lack of leadership often portray him in terms used to defend Bob Packwood: as a victim of changing mores. There is more solidarity among men in the Navy than the Senate. Ask Paula Coughlin.
This is not a search for vengeance. I'd rather the Tailhook scandal produced wholesale change in the military culture than a handful or a hundred punishments. But a very different message is emerging from a failed investigation and a young lieutenant's resignation. It says: Tailhook '91, They Got Away With It.
\ The Boston Globe
by CNB