Presswatch: Flinn-Flam
Corry, John
P RESSWATCH by John Corry Flinn-Flam W hat happened was this: Flaxen-haired, Dutch-boy bobbed Lt. Kelly Flinn had a couple of quickies with an enlisted man, and then an affair with a creepy...
...instead there was a series...
...Flinn accepted a general discharge rather than face a court-martial...
...Maloney represents a Manhattan congressional district where everyone reads the New York Times...
...Ronald Fogelman, the Air Force chief of staff, lost his temper at a Senate hearing...
...She believed the man she loved...
...Well, yes, many people did doubt it, correctly so, (Continued on page 81) The American Spectator • July 1997 45 Presswatch (Continued from page 45) and even the airy assumption about Flinn being a star pilot was wrong...
...Obviously the Times liked that...
...It assigned an able reporter to write about Flinn, and her stories were fine, but Times commentary was beyond parody...
...Nonetheless Flinn had faced no more than an administrative hearing—an Article 15—on that or on the messy adultery charge...
...I was 25 years old at the time, and very confused," Flinn had told a sympathetic Morley Safer, while explaining the adultery charge, and tearing up while she did...
...They believed that male officers were allowed to be randy while female officers were held to a more rigorous standard...
...The early coverage—long profiles in the Washington Post and New York Times, and an interview on "6o Minutes"—upheld the view she had been victimized...
...Frank Rich wrote that he had attended a performance ofA Doll's House, which he called an "urtext for the drama of Kelly Flinn," and that the "only sound as the curtain fell was of audience members —women and men, but especially women — crying...
...Women from both parties hailed Flinn as a "trailblazer," and suggested that chauvinists had singled her out for punishment...
...Grounding Flinn would be difficult," the Boston Globe said, "but what else do high-ranking white guys have to do when Cold Wars give way to baby-sitting missions...
...Those with the highest grades in the all-purpose training get first choice, and those with the next highest grades get second choice, and so on...
...Surely that resonated with the women who spoke out on Flinn's behalf...
...There was no one moment when things began to right themselves...
...In fact, what upset the Air Force about Flinn's fraternizing was that she did it on the lawn outside her house, and the Air Force in its outdated way had thought that detriPress and pots saw Lt...
...The next day it was over...
...Indeed she had to be a star and not just an also-ran...
...She also disobeyed an order to stay away from him, and she flaunted her disobedience when she did...
...You cannot roll or loop a B-52...
...The same editorial that praised Lott also said the Air Force should have offered Flinn "warnings, counseling sessions, and, if necessary, a transfer...
...If an equally accomplished male pilot had made the same mistakes," she asked, "how many high-ranking Air Force members would have looked the other way...
...All the evening news broadcasts that night led with the story, while on PBS later Democrat Carolyn Maloney was interviewed by Charlie Rose...
...Members of her family were pretty good, too...
...had a singularly female weakness...
...The Air Force was being routed...
...Simultaneously the Army does some of its own ungendering...
...The sisterhood was sharing Flinn's pain...
...If she were not at the top before being victimized by the loutish male culture, it was really not much of a story...
...Then the Washington Post recalled the two generals the Air Force had sacked for adultery, while the Washington Times reported that court-martial figures showed the Air Force and Army had brought a proportionately much larger number of adultery cases against men than against women...
...They also hired a publicist, and they set up a home page on the Internet to solicit contributions for Flinn's legal defense fund and to ask readers to e-mail Congress...
...One was the near unanimity, at least at first, in which press and politicians supported her and not the Air Force...
...I just don't understand all this...
...She took the creepy guy with her when she visited her family in Georgia, and when the visit was over she moved him into her rented house outside the Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota...
...She left out "if necessary," but the thinking was consistent...
...On the other hand, the New York Times knew a good thing when it saw it...
...By Air Force standards, she was an ordinary pilot, and the repeated references to her in the press as a star pilot, hot pilot, or top pilot had no real basis...
...They had encountered rats in their lives, too, and bad experiences still rankled...
...Trent Lott even heard from his missus...
...but then she lied and disobeyed orders...
...Enough is enough, the Air Force said, and decided on a court-martial...
...Ibsen's Nora, it seems, was standing in for the Air Force's Flinn...
...Another was that while reporters eventually found some perspective, few politicians ever did...
...This is an issue about an officer entrusted to fly nuclear weapons who disobeyed an order and lied...
...44 Ju / y 1997 • The American Spectator mental to good order and discipline...
...He also said he did not know why Flinn was "being singled out and punished the way she is," and that "at the minimum"—whatever that meant—"she ought to get an honorable discharge...
...Even so, the Kelly Flinn incident had distinctions all its own...
...Then Gen...
...A rough hierarchy is established...
...After the editorial appeared, Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat, said the Air Force "should have offered Kelly Flinn counseling, warnings and a transfer...
...My wife has a good question," Lott said...
...Ike had never been punished for their affair, and that showed that men always got off easy...
...Lott had said it was "not in touch with reality on this so-called question of fraternization," and that it had to "get real...
...A fog hung over Capitol Hill until the end...
...Where's the guy who's involved in this deal...
...Democrat Carolyn Maloney, in a much-quoted remark, was more specific...
...The campaign to feminize the military seems to go on unimpeded...
...Those with the highest grades, the star pilots, usually choose the fast fighters, the F-15s or F-16s...
...The Air Force, she said, "has thrown the book" at Flinn, "treating her like a criminal," presumably because she was a woman...
...But the press is not knowledgeable about military skills, and describing Flinn as a kind of top gun made for a better story, anyway...
...Alert as always in our sensitive JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...The wages of sin in America are not the same as in nineteenth-century Norway...
...A B52 pilot has a perfectly respectable and often demanding job, but he, or she, is just not a star pilot...
...The cool-hand bomber pilot was a fool for love, and a man had made her do it...
...but as the sage Dick Morris told the Washington Times about Flinn: "I think she may become a very significant feminist figure and spokesperson...
...Then the Secretary of the Army hires a consultant who wants an "ungendered" military...
...They turned up on the morning news shows, and on CNN and C-Span...
...Meanwhile, Eleanor Clift, Geraldine Ferraro, and various congresspersons brought up Dwight Eisenhower and Kay Summersby on television...
...After that, the preference would be for a transport plane, a Galaxy or Globemaster, and only after that, more or less in a three-way tie for least desirable of all, the B-52, lumped in with the turbo-props and helicopters...
...those with the next highest grades want the air tankers (a tanker pilot has a better chance at an airline job after he leaves the Air Force), or a B1 or a B-2 if one or the other is available...
...14...
...Poor Nora, of course...
...Worse, he betrayed her by telling the Air Force their most intimate secrets...
...Anna44 Frank Rich called A Doll's House an 'ur-text for the drama of Kelly Flinn.' Quindlen was not even missed...
...Senate majority leader Lott should have understood, and he had no business sounding that dopey...
...A B-52 pilot is not supposed to act that way...
...it is flown in a boring straight line, and it is certainly not, as a Washington Post columnist described it, the Air Force's "most prestigious plane...
...Fraternization" and "adultery" were mentioned, but only as abstractions, or, as a thoroughly modem Eleanor Holmes Norton called them, "outdated, nonfunctional rules from another period...
...She appeared unaware that Flinn had lied and disobeyed orders, and Charlie had to remind her, although she did not seem to think it at all important...
...The media did not approve of a court-martial, however, and neither did members of Congress...
...The argument over Lieutenant Flinn sounded like the old battle of the sexes...
...Flinn was good on television...
...It develops a device called the Freshette Complete System so female warriors can urinate standing up and not squatting...
...It does not know much about the military, either, and it sincerely believes that the armed services are, shall we say, too mannish...
...I am concerned about the appearances of randomness with which the military chooses to enforce its policies surrounding sexual behavior," said Republican Nancy Johnson...
...N onetheless, the New York Times has a constituency...
...In the end," he said, "this is not an issue of adultery...
...age, they said Lieutenant Flinn was being picked on because she was a woman...
...Kelly Flinn had a couple of quickies with an enlisted man, and then an affair with a creepy married civilian, and while the Air Force might have overlooked her bad taste and rotten judgment, it had to do something when she lied about her affair with the civilian...
...The Times had asked, "Does anyone doubt that it would have done a better job of career salvage for a z6-year-old man with Lieutenant Flinn's record as an Air Force Academy graduate and star pilot...
...Meanwhile the Clinton administration makes clear it would like to open all combat posts to women...
...Kelly Flinn as a damsel in distress...
...That was to be expected, of course...
...Scores of innocent naval aviators find their careers destroyed because of Tailhook...
...Air Force Academy graduates undergo seven months of all-purpose pilot training, and then are allowed to choose the planes they eventually will fly...
...A Wall Street Journal editorial demolished the accusation by Republican Slade Gorton, among others, that the military was tougher on women than on men...
...Both had loved not wisely but too well, and moralistic officials had overreacted...
...Civilian leadership of the military was crashing and burning...
...A Times editorial —"Trent Lott's Military Mind"—applauded the one-time Ole Miss cheerleader for his "sound civilian advice" to the Pentagon...
...Maloney did not say what Flinn's mistakes were, and none of the other congresspersons who spoke out did, either...
Vol. 30 • July 1997 • No. 7
