Presswatch/The Death of Kara Hultgreen
Corry, John
The Death of Kara Hultgreen by John Corry j ournalistically, the case seemed clear. An injustice had been done, but now it would be rectified. As Peter Jennings said on the ABC "Evening News,"...
...Mistakes are punishable by death, and of all that is required of naval aviators, carrier landings are probably the most demanding...
...Subscribers who access the Military City Online text library may read it in its entirety...
...Indeed, as the anonymous author of the fax had insisted—and almost certainly he was a naval aviator, just as he had claimed—something was wrong in the Navy, and "we owe it to Kara Hultgreen" to fix it...
...As Peter Jennings said on the ABC "Evening News," there had been "a vicious campaign against allowing women to serve in combat...
...I can only conclude that the Navy allowed an inexperienced and unqualified pilot to be assigned to a fighter squadron because of political pressure to place females in combat billets as soon as possible...
...Without it, morale plummets, discipline suffers, and warriors lose faith in their superiors...
...The 1992 finding by the Presidential Commission on Women in the Armed Forces that women should be kept out of air and ground combat was met with general disdain...
...Two weeks after the Navy had released its public report on Lieutenant Hultgreen, it completed its own Mishap Investigation Report, or MIR...
...Two months after that the Navy issued a report on the crash...
...A tkinson almost certainly was right...
...This was deceit of a high order, and Caldwell's story ought to have been picked up by ABC, say, or the Times, but obviously that could not happen...
...Political expedience, however, made it unwise to say so...
...Nonetheless, naval records show that Lieutenant Hultgreen failed the carrier-landing phase of her training in April 1994...
...Many news organizations quoted statements by Lieutenant Hultgreen's mother, Mrs...
...As proof, the Navy asserted that eight of nine pilots crashed when they faced "similar circumstances" in a flight simulator...
...One former naval aviator, Gerald L. Atkinson, though, had raised the salient issue...
...Subsequently, whoever leaked the MIR to the news organizations took another extraordinary step...
...privately it was "sharply critical of Lieutenant Hultgreen...
...The only place they had received any more 40 The American Spectator June 1995 than cursory mention was in San Diego, the home port of the Abraham Lincoln...
...The finding was enthusiastically received...
...Naval historians may one day note that just after she failed her carrier-landing training, Admiral Boordaannounced that he wanted to open combat positions to women, and that he wanted to do it quickly...
...The media culture was locked in place...
...So it was the engine after all...
...And to suggest that she had, as Jennings said, was "vicious," or, as his ABC colleague Jackie Judd said, "a smear...
...But her total grade was slightly above average...
...Not the pilot," the columnist Ellen Goodman triumphantly proclaimed...
...And for the most part, the media had cheered, considering this no more than just retribution...
...Lieutenant Hultgreen died when she stalled one of the engines on her F-14A Tomcat fighter while she was trying to land on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and flew the plane into a spin...
...But now the Navy had concluded that the plane had crashed because of engine failure...
...S o give Caldwell the last word now to explain to his media colleagues what they clearly do not understand: "Integrity, and the moral authority it conveys, is the very heart of any leadership, including that in the military...
...Shortly afterwards she was assigned to the Abraham Lincoln...
...The Navy had ordered the simulator pilots not to use the emergency procedures they might have been expected to use if they had been in the same situation as Lieutenant Hultgreen...
...Jeremy Boorda, the new chief of naval operations, to put women on submarines met with its approval...
...it also gave the networks four seconds of video—taken by the camera mounted on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln—that showed the F-14A on its fatal approach to the carrier...
...The Hultgreen story, he said, is "also a story about us, in the media...
...Actually, Koppel was right about that, although not in the way he intended, and almost everything that had been reported on the Hultgreen case was untrue...
...Apparently, anonymous critics had charged that the Navy had lowered its standards so that Lieutenant Hultgreen could become a combat pilot...
...Lieut...
...MIRs are never released to the press...
...many other careers had been ruined, and thousands of Navy and Marine promotions had been put on hold...
...There is, of course, a background here...
...The report said the crash "was precipitated by a malfunction of the left engine...
...They knew, too, that if they said this openly they would jeopardize their careers: hence, their anonymous calls and faxes...
...She wouldn't have been doing what she was doing unless she was very qualified...
...Koppel's real objection was the same as that of his colleagues: that the charge had even been raised...
...Her radar intercept officer was ejected safely from the rear seat, but as the plane rolled over she was ejected into the sea...
...Was it possible Lieutenant Hultgreen had received insufficient training, or been placed aboard a carrier too soon...
...When Vice Adm...
...The four-second video of her crash that the Navy distributed to the networks was part of a 12-second video that it kept to itself...
...It also said that while "a moreexperienced pilot might have been able to save the plane . . . that reality is gender neutral...
...Consequently, many junior officers knew their superiors were not being candid in their public comments about Lieutenant Hultgreen...
...This may be counter to everything in the book of John Corry, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...Nightline" reported that Roger Hedgecock, a San Diego talk-show host, had gotten an "anonymous seven-page fax, allegedly from a naval aviator," which said Lieutenant Hultgreen's grades were below average in flight school...
...The New York Times, for example, called the commission's report "a hash" and "unhelpful...
...In other words, it was rigged...
...Naval aviation is an exacting profession...
...In fact, the charge had never spread, and the media had never given it any credence...
...Koppel said the charge had spread, and that now "we are left to wonder how the story got as much credence as it did in the first place...
...Lieutenant Hultgreen was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in November after her body was recovered in some 3,600 feet of water, still strapped into the ejector seat...
...He had gotten a call, too, from someone who said Lieutenant Hultgreen had received special treatment because she was a woman...
...confronted with the same circumstances she had faced, only one of the nine pilots would have survived...
...The major news organizations, however, barely noticed...
...Moreover, while the Navy was saying publicly that Hultgreen was blameless, privately it had reached a different conclusion: Pilot error, not engine failure, was the principal cause of the crash...
...Even the batty proposal by Adm...
...At least seven seconds—a lifetime in naval aviation—passed by between the first wave-off call and the time her plane spun out of control, but she had made no apparent effort to "fly out of it...
...Then Lieutenant Hultgreen took the training again, and passed...
...Kara Hultgreen was killed in a crash while trying to land her plane on a carrier last October, "a lot of men took that as an opportunity to say that women were not up to the job...
...Sally Spears, about her daughter's abilities: "She had some really good days and some really bad days...
...When Ted Koppel expanded on this on "Nightline," he added a provocative point...
...Shortly after Lieutenant Hultgreen died, the New York Times had alluded to "spurious accusations about her flight record .. . apparently from disgruntled male aviators...
...The press, of course, has dismissed the idea that politics were at work here: but it is not realistic to think that Admiral Boorda's whimsies, or more importantly, those of Patricia Schroeder and her congressional allies, did not have some effect...
...There had not been a vicious campaign against allowing women to serve in combat, and it was unlikely a lot of men had used Hultgreen's death to say "women were not up to the job...
...Given the parameters of the media culture, Caldwell seems to have the topic to himself...
...They are kept confidential so that participants in an investigation will be protected from outside pressure...
...We owe it to Kara Hultgreen...
...He said some people had even insisted that the Navy had lifted its ban on women combat pilots because it was embarrassed by the Tailhook scandal (which, of course, was just what the Navy had done) but after Lieutenant Hultgreen died "it got worse than that...
...In the twenty years that F-14As have been in operation, no pilot had ever stalled an engine this way before...
...The landing signal officer on the Abraham Lincoln had tried repeatedly to wave Lieutenant Hultgreen off as she approached the fantail of the carrier...
...Carrier pilots are supposed to react instinctively in emergencies, their hands and feet moving automatically without conscious messages from the brain...
...Nonetheless, the MIR on Lieutenant Hultgreen's death was leaked to major news organizations, presumably by one or more junior officers distressed by the whole affair...
...Publicly, he wrote, the Navy attributed the crash of the F-14A mostly to engine failure...
...An unknowing press reported that a stalled left engine on the F-14A had led to the crash, but without noting that it stalled because Lieutenant Hultgreen mistakenly had jammed on the rudder...
...Kara Hultgreen was not yet ready to fly the F-14A aboard ship as a combat fighter pilot...
...Presumably disappointed that it had attracted so little attention in the press, he placed it on the computer network America Online...
...Hedgecock read part of the fax: "And something is terribly wrong with the United States Navy today, and it ought to be fixed before it's too late...
...That is why questions surrounding the Navy's response to the death of one aviator last October off the coast of San Diego have grown so important...
...Our major news organizations think it appropriate, even desirable, for women to take part in combat...
...And even though the pilots were told that the engine was going to fail, he said, eight of the pilots still crashed...
...Boozy leg-shaving and groping in Las Vegas, after all, had led to the resignations of a secretary of the Navy and a chief of naval operations...
...Therefore, Lieutenant Hultgreen was blameless, and it was reprehensible to suggest anything else...
...The Navy is serious about this, and the cover page of an MIR always warns that anyone who leaks or discloses its content is subject to criminal prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice...
...Many of them, it seems, were appalled by what they saw...
...life—not to mention all its chapters on military history—but feminist politics take precedence in the media culture...
...Recently, however, Caldwell uncovered three sources, "all reporting independently," who charged that the simulator test "was configured to produce an almost automatic crash...
...It is unlikely, though, that many reporters or correspondents will bother to do this...
...t was probably inevitable, then, that the Hultgreen story would be covered so poorly...
...Meanwhile, Ted Koppel played media ethicist...
...A month later the Navy succeeded in recovering the wreckage of the F-14A, and began to examine its two engines...
...Revelations like this spread quickly in the clannish world of naval aviation...
...Then the columnist Georgie Anne Geyer wrote in the Washington Times that some pilots from "the old school sent anonymous faxes around impugning her qualifications...
...Robert Spane, the commander of Pacific Fleet Naval Forces, appeared on "Nightline," he asserted that nine pilots had replicated Lieutenant Hultgreen's mishap on a flight simulator...
...The Navy is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies, especially military bureaucracies, are run by osmosis...
...But only the most demanding training can bring this about, and Lieutenant Hultgreen showed few signs of having received it...
...The Navy keeps meticulous records on such matters...
...After Lt...
...Nightline" also said that Hedgecock had received a call from someone who claimed that Lieutenant Hultgreen's flight instructors had been ordered to pass her, "whatever her grades...
...She received a second chance in July, and passed...
...Putnam's Sons...
...Nightline" replayed part of the call: 'We have taken that minimum and changed it so that we can allow various people in there for social programs, including me...
...If they had used the story, it might have been construed as an argument against putting women in combat...
...B ut back now to Lieutenant Hultgreen, by all accounts a brave and indomitable woman, and just possibly a pilot who had been pushed too far and too fast as well...
...He finished by saying: "It is my professional judgment that Lieut...
...Nonetheless, copies of the longer video were passed around among present and former naval aviators...
...When the Navy moved to put more women on ships the next year—the Clinton White House was then signing off on admirals' appointments—the Times applauded the Navy for "in effect junking the commission's work...
...Only the San Diego Union-Tribune did anything useful...
...Thus, while her total grade may have indeed been slightly above average, her ability to land on the pitching deck of a carrier was somewhat below average...
...B ut none of this seemed vicious, and surely Lieutenant Hultgreen was not being smeared...
...Robert J. Caldwell, a conscientious reporter, closely compared the Navy's public and private pronouncements, and The American Spectator June 1995 41 Up From Subsidy by David Frum noted the great difference...
...Of the thousands of field practice and carrier landings I have observed," he wrote, "Lieutenant Hultgreen's pass was the worst I have ever seen...
...Otherwise, few had paid attention to the accusations, and those who did had dismissed them...
...Spane meant this as a defense of Lieutenant Hultgreen and her training...
...The Los Angeles Times and Newsweek published stories that said the MIR contradicted the Navy's earlier statements on Lieutenant Hultgreen, but without presenting much detail...
...Then Atkinson, who also has a doctorate in nuclear engineering, offered a technical analysis of what had gone wrong...
...The attitude at the top seeps down, and the attitude implanted there by Tailhook was that Navy personnel would suffer if they appeared to mistreat women...
...Kara Hultgreen did not die on the altar of political correctness or reverse discrimination...
...And the real media story, as opposed to the one Koppel imagined, was that so few reporters wanted to know...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
