THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Saturday, July 13, 1996               TAG: 9607130179
SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A3   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   53 lines

STUMPF DECIDES TO RETIRE, GIVING UP PROMOTION BATTLE AVIATOR SAYS HE FELT NAVY WAS NO LONGER SUPPORTING HIS BID TO BECOME A CAPTAIN.

Navy Cmdr. Robert E. Stumpf, whose two-year public battle to win a promotion to captain split the U.S. Senate and bedeviled Navy leaders, gave up the fight Friday.

The Virginia Beach-based aviator, one of the service's most decorated pilots, said he will retire Oct. 1 to pursue unspecified opportunities.

``It's been a tough three years,'' Stumpf said in a brief interview Friday night. ``We're all kind of worn out.''

Though noting that he had been cleared repeatedly of any wrongdoing at the 1991 Tailhook Association convention of naval aviators, Stumpf said in a statement that ``the conduct of the latest of nine investigations convinced me that the promotion was no longer going to be supported'' by the Navy.

Stumpf and his attorney, Charles W. Gittins, walked out of an under-oath interview last month with a senior Navy lawyer assigned to investigate his case. Gittins complained that the inquiry by Joseph G. Lynch, the service's assistant general counsel, had become prosecutorial.

Navy promotion boards recommended Stumpf's advancement in 1994 and again this year. But the Senate Armed Services Committee, after a rare public display of disagreement over a military promotion, voted at least twice to oppose his advancement.

The committee initially approved Stumpf's promotion in 1994 but reversed itself after learning of his attendance at Tailhook, where dozens of Navy and civilian women were groped and sexually assaulted by drunken aviators.

Despite a Navy board's official finding that Stumpf had done nothing illegal, he apparently ran afoul of senators who thought that he should have acted to head off a bawdy party in his squadron's hotel suite.

Stumpf was present in the suite during a striptease act but had left by the time the stripper performed oral sex on another aviator. Because he was the squadron commander, critics suggested he bore some responsibility for misconduct by his subordinates.

In May, Navy Secretary John H. Dalton ordered Lynch to take what service officials called ``a fresh look'' at Stumpf's case and to compile a comprehensive record.

Navy sources suggested that Dalton, who had urged the committee repeatedly to support Stumpf, was hoping to find some new information or a new way of presenting old information that would win over enough senators to give Stumpf a majority.

A Navy spokesman on Friday praised Stumpf's ``dedicated service to the Navy and the nation'' and stressed that the service ``kept the door open'' for him to participate in the Lynch inquiry despite last month's walkout. ILLUSTRATION: Stumpf

KEYWORDS: TAILHOOK by CNB