Tailhook Witch-Hunt

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/1993%20October%20Vol%202,%20No.pdf TAILHOOK WITCH-HUNT According to Navy Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, a helicopter pilot and aide to Rear Admiral John W. Snyder, she had no idea that she would be walking into sexual hell around midnight on September 6, 1991, when she went up to the third floor of the Las Vegas Hilton to visit the hospitality suites at the Tailhook Association's annual convention. But as she entered the hallway of the hotel, she immediately found herself in a sea of leery male faces swollen with sexual energy. A taunting chant arose, "Admiral's aide! Admiral's aide!" A man bumped her from behind, grabbing both of her buttocks and lifting her up off the ground. Then, as she spun to confront this attacker, someone else grabbed her from behind. She felt hands going down the front of her blouse. Paula Coughlin was not the only victim of this bacchanal. Ensign Elizabeth Warnick said that she entered a hotel room after an invitation and was immediately jumped by three naval aviators who grabbed and blindfolded her, threw her on the bed and began ripping her clothes off. With heroic effort she managed to kick at the men, get herself free and escape from the room. The scandal known as "Tailhook" which erupted two years ago, after Paula Coughlin told her story about what happened that night in Las Vegas would eventually shake the American military and the culture that supports it more than any event since the trial of Lieutenant Calley for the My Lai massacre two decades ago. Just as Calley's trial became a symbolic event for a military haunted by losing the war in Vietnam, so the Tailhook scandal was a symbolic moment for a profession still trying to accommodate to the requirements of a gender-integrated force. These requirements had already created a revolution inside the military, yet critics claimed that women still were "second class" participants, restricted from combat and thus from the careers that conferred the highest rank and esteem. When Tailhook, the annual bash of the Navy's and Marine Corps' elite "top guns," seemed to have turned into an orgy of wholesale sexual harassment and assault it also appeared to have proven everything the critics said, presenting a picture of the male military culture which was not only resistant to change, but morally degenerate and out of control. When Navy brass instituted a "cover-up" in the wake of the revelations of Coughlin and other victims of Tailhook, it was taken as proof by politicians and the public at large of the existence of an Old Boy Network that would stop at nothing to protect its own. Critics of the military like Representative Patricia Schroeder said that heads would roll, and roll they did. Two years and many military careers later, these images of sexual barbarism and cover-up are still firmly fixed in the American mind. Perhaps they always will be. But as the Tailhook investigations have been completed and the trials and court-martials of alleged criminals have begun, a very different picture of what took place that fall weekend is beginning to emerge. That the late evening hours of Friday and Saturday nights on the third floor of the Las Vegas Hilton constituted a mob scene which to some extent was out of control is beyond dispute. That some $23,000 worth of damage was done (albeit most of it the result of stains on carpets) cannot be doubted. That there was in fact public lewdness and sexuality, some drunken brawling, and a general groping of females by intoxicated military personnel has been proven. Some civilian women who strayed into the third floor party unsuspectingly were indeed verbally and physically abused and there were perhaps one or two cases of real sexual assault. All this notwithstanding, however, the Pentagon investigation, conducted by civilian federal agents and involving several thousand interviews with witnesses and detailed reports on the night's activities in every single one of the 26 hospitality suites, shows something else as well: that many victims who were identified as victims in the press and even who are identified as victims in the Pentagon report, do not consider themselves victims; that many who do consider themselves victims, including the chief accuser, Paula Coughlin, were willing collaborators in the sexual frivolities that spilled over into the abuse of innocents; that when the party was over, and Coughlin and her cohorts appeared to advance a cause, it was not the cause of duty, honor, country, but a gender cause that sees the military as an enemy to be defeated by a war of social attrition. From the beginning the Tailhook scandal had the air of a public burning rather than a dispassionate inquiry into the facts of the case. Before a single participant in Tailhook was given his day in court, the Secretary of the Navy and six admirals, including the commander in charge of the Navy's own investigation, had been sacked and had their careers terminated, 4,000 Navy and Marine Corps promotions were held up, and the entire male enlisted corps was required to attend a million hours of sensitivity training. The tangled chronology of investigation began with Paula Coughlin. She did not report her assault to the Hilton security staff or to the police the night it allegedly occurred, but the next morning she did file a complaint with Admiral Snyder. After reading it, Snyder did not regard the complaint as warranting any action (a judgment that would cost him his career). After several weeks without a response to her complaint, Coughlin wrote to Vice Admiral Richard M. Dunleavy and Dunleavy notified his superior, Admiral Jerome Johnson, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations. On October 11, 1991, the head of the Tailhook Association sent a letter to squadron officers who had attended the bacchanal rebuking them for the excesses at the Hilton. "Let me relate just a few specifics to show how far across the line of responsible behavior we went," his letter said "....We narrowly avoided a disaster when a 'pressed ham' [naked buttocks] pushed out an eighth floor window...Finally, and definitely the most serious, was 'the Gauntlet' on the third floor. I have five separate reports of young ladies, several of whom had nothing to do with Tailhook, who were verbally abused, had drinks thrown on them, were physically abused and were sexually molested." This letter was leaked to the San Diego Union on October 29, triggering a full-scale inquiry by the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) and producing the national scandal that has determined the dynamics and shaped the meaning of the case ever since. Two thousand one hundred witnesses were summoned for questioning about Tailhook by agents of the NIS — 100 more in fact than the number of those actually registered for the convention. Many were subjected to mandatory lie detector tests and other star chamber methods of interrogation that would not have been allowed under a civil investigation. And when this exhaustive dragnet identified only 26 assault victims, the small number was taken as a sign of the Navy's willingness to "whitewash" the problem. A clamor went up from gender radicals demanding a larger body count. If 4,000 men attended Tailhook, the reasoning went, there had to be more culprits. Summoning the Joint Chiefs before the House Armed Services Committee, longtime foe of the military Patricia Schroeder interrogated them in a voice dripping with sarcasm: "Is the bottom line [that] most of you think you could do without women?" As a result of the pressure, the head of the Naval Investigative Service, Rear Admiral Duval Williams, was removed from his command. According to the subsequent Pentagon report, one of the admiral's sins was to comment, according to his female special assistant Marybel Batjer, "That, in his opinion, men simply do not want women in the military." His other two sins, according to the report, were his reluctance to interview admirals who had attended Tailhook and "his repeatedly expressed desire to terminate the investigation." A key testimony to this allegation was a female agent's claim that "Admiral Williams said that NIS did not have 'a fart's chance in a whirlwind' of solving this investigation." Two days after the submission of the initial Navy Investigative Services Report, the Secretary of the Navy, whom the Navy report had failed to place at Tailhook even though he had been present on the third floor, was summarily cashiered. Embarrassed by the Tailhook publicity and feeling itself vulnerable to increased budget cuts and the downsizing policy of the Bush Administration, the Pentagon brass simply capitulated to the pressure of powerful legislators, like Schroeder, who controlled its purse strings. On June 24, 1992, a second investigation was ordered, this time by the Pentagon. Federal agents normally accustomed to tracking white collar crimes were dispatched by the Inspector General's office of the Defense Department to investigate not only the Tailhook convention but the naval investigation itself. Their bottom-line assignment was clear: to produce a more satisfactory result. In this second effort, 22,000 man-hours were allotted to the investigation of the first investigation alone. Instead of being criticized, the star chamber methods of the failed Navy investigation were intensified. Eight hundred more witnesses were interrogated. Immunity was given freely in exchange for incriminating testimony. At least one senior Marine officer was put on notice by investigators that if he did not cooperate he would be audited by the IRS (and subsequently was).

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