Presswatch: Going Over Boorda
Corry, John
"Presswatch: Going Over Boorda" by John Corry Going Over Boorda Admiral Jeremy Boorda's suicide left the press baffled, and even embarrassed. It could not believe Boorda had taken his life because he had worn two...
...Nonetheless, he also seemed to know it was wrong at the time...
...Network news programs ignored it...
...He did leave the note to "the sailors," but apparently the Navy does not want it released...
...Only the most spectacular cases, however, get reported in the press, and they are often accompanied by a suggestion that the punishment is appropriate for the crime...
...They had been circulating for a while, but they had never been raised in so public and dramatic a fashion...
...The Washington Tithes and the Baltimore Sun covered the speech...
...That was evident as soon as he became chief of naval operations...
...his suicide was an act of atonement...
...The story recalled "the alcohol-soaked hallway" in which "scores of women were assaulted by drunken sailors...
...forces in the Pacific," Perry said...
...Civilians may not understand—even a Wall Street Journal editorial began, "We say 'nuts' to the medals teapot" — but among warriors the decorations mean something...
...Few naval officers would admit it to the press, but there were those of them, particularly among the aviators, who thought Boorda took the honorable way out...
...Webb ended with this peroration: If the Navy is to regain its soul and its respect, the answer lies in the right kind of leaders...
...Feminist orthodoxy was still upheld...
...Tailhook took place almost five years ago, but it still consumes Times editors as much as it does Pat Schroeder...
...He had not said, or necessarily thought, anything like that, of course, but no matter...
...A month after Mackie was dismissed, Admiral Ralph Tindall, the deputy commander of NATO forces in Spain and Portugal, was forced into early retirement after confessing to an adulterous relationship with a female subordinate...
...The American Spectator • July r 9 9 6 53...
...What was on Boorda's mind during all this...
...Webb called them "the cream, the very future of the Navy, officers who had performed for two decades in a manner that marked them as future admirals...
...In death he was eulogized as a "sailors' sailor"—the columnist Richard Grenier says Perry plucked the phrase from a news story —but but he was not popular among the midlevel ranks, and aviators, in particular, seemed to despise him...
...When a whole generation of officers is asked to accept...the destruction of the careers of some of the finest aviators in the Navy based on hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations, in some cases after a full repudiation of anonymous charges...what admiral has had the courage to risk his own career by putting his stars on the table, and defending the integrity of the process and of its people...
...Certainly Stan Arthur is paying a penalty, and the country is paying a penally," he said in an interview then...
...Exactly why the lapse in judgment rendered Mackie unfit for command was not clear, but Pat Schroeder had called it "the biggest outrage I've seen in a while," and presumably that was enough...
...But if Boorda knew it was wrong, why did he do it...
...Webb spoke at the Naval Academy before the brigade of midshipmen, various admirals, and Pentagon officials...
...A better question was how Boorda felt about himself...
...The Times reported that "the Navy has deluged sailors and officers with44 The New York Times did not report the astonishing speech by James Webb, the former secretary of the Navy, in which he castigated Boorda only weeks before his suicide...
...The midshipmen cheered...
...Who fought this...
...The Times refused to mention it even when it reflected on his death...
...As Webb pointed out in his speech, last year 53 percent of the post-command commanders in naval aviation — officers awaiting promotion to captain— retired or otherwise left the service...
...Then a final prurient touch: A "drunken teen-aged girl had her clothes torn off...and was left half naked and semiconscious in a corner...
...Boorda later called this the biggest mistake he ever made as chief of naval operations...
...Nothing is allowed to minimize the enormity of its crime...
...He was a man who went along...
...Webb did not mention Boorda by name, but in what later became the most widely cited part of the speech, he accused him, as chief of naval operations, of placing politics over principle...
...The paper has been feminized to a remarkable degree, and it JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...So terrible were Tailhook's sins that the Times felt compelled to reprise them...
...Leaders who are imbued with a solemn duty to preserve sacrosanct ideals and pass them on to succeeding generations...It is time to give the Navy back to such leaders...
...In Admiral Stan Arthur's case, Republican Sen...
...7, books and seminars to help them prevent sexual harassment...but the Tindall case is a disheartening sign that even at the highest levels, the message has not got through...
...Who condemned it...
...The suicide of the chief of naval operations raised issues the Times was unable to ponder...
...Tailhook was much on his mind...
...As the cause of suicide, that would not do, even though Boorda had killed himself just before he was to meet with two Newsweek reporters who were persuaded of his deception...
...A murmur went through the Navy...
...It is not hard to imagine him brooding, though, about the combat decorations he did not seem to have earned...
...The admirals and Pentagon officials were angry...
...What had not got through to the Times, though, was an entirely different message: The bipartisan fear of feminist displeasure has led to a long series of incidents that have crippled naval morale...
...That question, though, was beyond media imagination...
...Did he think he had lost his honor...
...Boorda, the story suggested, was haunted by these scenes of depravity...
...He said he wanted women to fly fighter planes...
...Tailhook, it declared, was "a vicious bacchanal," and it had left a "climate of scandal and shame...
...The heroism, however, was only vaguely defined, and it was obvious the Times was uncomfortable...
...As the New York Times eventually said in a brief editorial, Boorda was a "hero...
...it said he had died because of Tailhook...
...David Durenberger had demanded to know why Arthur had approved the request to ground the female pilot...
...Generally speaking, their orthodoxy matches that of the New York Times...
...As Webb pointed out, Boorda had responded by withdrawing Arthur's nomination to the Pacific command, and forcing him into early retirement...
...often seems to be edited now by, and for, Smith College juniors...
...The Times reported that Congresswoman Schroeder had criticized Mackie for thinking that "Boys will be boys —the view that women are just commodities...
...Thus the story on Monday, the day Boorda was buried...
...The Times did not report the astonishing speech by James Webb, the former secretary of the Navy, in which he castigated Boorda only weeks before he killed himself...
...The dismissal of Admiral Richard Mackie as Pacific commander, for example, was widely approved...
...No op-ed pieces or letters to the editor about Boorda were published, either...
...Admiral Arthur was only one of hundreds of officers whose careers have been sacrificed to appease angry feminists...
...The number had never reached as high as 25 percent in any other year...
...It could not believe Boorda had taken his life because he had worn two tiny V's on his chest, and now was being threatened with exposure because he had not been entitled to wear them...
...If he had any reservations about putting women in combat roles, he kept them to himself...
...Then the Times described "the now-infamous gauntlet" — "drunken naval aviators...lifting women, including women sailors, into the air and molesting them as they were passed from man to man...
...The press focused on the narrow question of whether protocol had allowed Boorda to wear the V's or not, but in fact that missed the point...
...He's not sewing in a job where he would have been superb...
...The Washington Post caught up to it with an op-ed piece...
...Webb said: When one of the finest candidates for Commander in Chief of the Pacific in recent times, a man who flew more than 50o combat missions in Vietnam, and then in the Gulf War commanded the largest naval armada since World War II, is ordered into early retirement by the Chief of Naval Operations because one senator asked on behalf of a constituent why Stan Arthur as Vice Chief of Naval Operations had simply approved a report upholding a decision to wash out a female officer from flight school, who expressed their outrage...
...She had claimed sexual harassment...
...PR ESSWATCH by John Corry Going Over Boorda Admiral Jeremy Boorda's suicide left the press baffled, and even embarrassed...
...Within hours after the remark was reported, he was sacked by the sensitive Secretary of Defense William Perry...
...The secretary of defense, the secretary of the Navy ("I feel good about the decisions we've made," the feckless secretary, John Dalton, recently told George Will), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee were also ready to sack Admiral Arthur...
...Boorda had killed himself on a Thursday, but the editorial did not appear until Tuesday...
...The dirty secret of naval life is that women have no real place there, but Boorda did his best to ignore it...
...Boorda was a very political admiral...
...The charges were not new...
...He also said he wanted to put women on all ships in the Navy, even submarines...
...He also had left behind him a note to "the Sailors" in which he alluded to his disgrace...
...Leaders who understand that the seemingly arcane concepts of tradition, loyalty, discipline and moral courage have carried the Navy through cyclical turbuWhy was everyone so quick to dismiss the part lost honor played in Admiral Boorda's tragic death...
...Whatever his reservations, it would have been out of character for Boorda to disagree...
...After three marines abducted and raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl, Mackie said, carelessly, if not incorrectly, "For the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl...
...Obviously we will never know...
...In Fall From Glory, a lip-smacking account of the Navy's supposed war against women, Newsweek reporter Gregory Vistica writes that when Boorda was in charge of the Bureau of Personnel, he "was viewed within the Navy as a political chameleon who could cut a political deal without leaving any fingerprints...
...52 Ju y 1996 • The American Spectator lence in peace and war...
...Times columnists had also been silent...
...We decided that his lapse of judgment was so serious that he would be unable to perform effectively his duties as Commander in Chief of U.S...
...For the sailors, the assaults are "nothing but an alcohol-stained blur," but for the women "who were molested or otherwise assaulted, the memories are as clear as the warm desert air over Las Vegas...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
