Last week Defense Secretary William Cohen tried to put a stop to this malevolent game of telephone. The time has come, Cohen said, to “draw a line” against the “frenzy” of sexual allegations. He insisted that air force Gen. Joseph Ralston should not be disqualified as a leading candidate to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just because of an adulterous affair 18 years ago with a woman who was not in the military. Cohen’s words were brave, and he was quietly applauded by the top brass and a few senators for trying to take a stand. Unfortunately, he appears to have picked the wrong case to defend.
And the wrong time to do it. Just two weeks ago, the brass effectively drummed out First Lt. Kelly Flinn, the air force’s first female B-52 pilot, for sleeping with a civilian who claimed to be legally separated from his wife. Congressmen and women’s groups immediately accused Cohen of applying a double standard. “If you are a friend of the secretary of defense and you’ve had an affair, you’re in,” scoffed Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York. “If you’re a successful woman who’d had an affair, you’re out.” In an exclusive article for NEWSWEEK, Flinn herself argues that “what matters in these cases is not what really happened but your gender, your rank and who you know.”
The contretemps is another messy chapter in the struggle to integrate women in the ranks and enforce the military’s rules against adultery in an evenhanded way.
While sexual harassment and rape-the crimes of Tailhook and Aberdeen- continue to be serious problems for the military, adultery and consensual sex pose more subtle and pervasive dilemmas for the top brass. Last Saturday Cohen announced the creation of a set of task forces to bring some clarity and consistency to the rules on consensual sex in the military. The regulations are not likely to be significantly relaxed. Sex in the ranks Can be disruptive and dangerous-left to fester, jealousy and resentment among comrades in arms can cost lives in combat. Yet soldiers and sailors are often stationed far from home, and affairs are not uncommon. The old solution-to look the other way, except in the most egregious cases-won’t suffice as more and more women serve and live alongside menin barracks and below decks. A NEWSWEEK Poll shows that 41 percent Of all Americans and nearly half the.women polled- 47 percent-think there’s a double standard: that males are treated less harshly for sexual misconduct than women.
The inevitable comparison to Kelly Flinn–who left active duty two weeks ago-makes Ralston a most unlucky man. His affair with a female intelligence analyst from the CIA, begun while Ralston, then separated from his wife, was studying at the National War College in 1983, must be measured against his 82 years of service. Ralston, who flew combat missions over North Vietnam and Laos, is so highly regarded that the Joint Chiefs would like to make him their next chairman. Even Ralston’s ex-wife, Linda, said that there was no one more qualified for the job. Traveling in Asia last week, Ralston thanked Cohen for his confidence “in my ability to further serve this nation.”
But Ralston’s ambition to become the military’s top soldier is almost surely doomed. It is up to the president to choose the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, on the recommendation of the secretary of defense. For Clinton, Ralston is a no-win proposition. Appointing the adulterous air force general would infuriate the women’s groups and editorial writers who are crying “double standard.” Rejecting Ralston, on the other hand, would alienate the top brass at the Pentagon. It would also would be awkward for Clinton to confront the issue of Ralston’s adultery, given his own tacit admission in the past and his current woes over Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit. No wonder that White House aides, in background conversations with reporters, were strongly signaling their desire to make ,the Ralston case go away. As a practical matter, it is doubful that Ralston could be confirmed by the Senate. For Cohen, faced with his.first public test of leadership, the whole episode has been a disaster. He failed to save Ralston’s career and may have damaged his own standing by dragging,the president into a controversy he needs about as much as a testimonial from Gennifer Flowers.
To be sure, some of the furor over Cohen’s remaks was off the mark. Kelly Flinn’s case is actually quite different from Ralston’s. Flinn directly disobeyed an order from her commanding officer, a serious offense in the military, where duty and obedience are paramount. Flinn’s lover was married to an enlisted woman, and the affair was the source of considerable gossip on base. Ralston, the Pentagon insists, was more discreet; his affair did not undermine the discipline or morale. offs troops. Still, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon had to struggle to distinguish Ralston from two other general officers whose careers had been ended because of similar adulterous affairs.
Their cases illustrate the murkiness of.trying to regulate consensual sex in the military. The current rules leave considerable room for interpretation. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery is prohibited if it undermines “good order and discipline” or brings “discredit upon the armed forces” or reflects “conduct unbecoming an officer.” The standard was strict enough to force Maj. Gen. John Long-houser to step down last week as the commander or,he army’s training base at Aberdeen, Md. Recently, a tipster called the army’s hot line and reported that Longhouser had had an affair with a civilian in his office five years ago when he was separated from his wife and expecting a divorce. (They were later reconciled.) Aberdeen is,the site of the army’s most notorious scandal, the ring of drill sergeants who allegedly extorted sex from recruits. Although Longhouser couldn’t really be blamed-he took over the base after most of the alleged rapes occurred-no less an authority than Secretary Cohen insisted that military officers had to beheld accountable. “I’m not the secretary of morality, but the military has very high standards,” Cohen declared.
Then there was the case of Lt. Gen. Thomas Grffith, who had been stripped of his command of the 12th Air Force after he admitted to an adulterous affair with a civilian he’d met at a conference. Griffith’s punishment had been meted out in 1995 by non, other than General Ralston. Pentagon spokesman Bacon tried to argue that Griffith’s adultery was more serious than Ralston’s because Griffith was living with his wife, not separated, and actively commanding troops, not taking courses at a war college, at the time of the affair. True enough, but the differences didn’t seem great enough to justify such different outcomes.
AND AS THE FACTS SLOWLY emerged last week, it appeared that Ralston’s affair was more prolonged than Cohen had at first let on. The story begin when The New York Time and The Washington Post were tipped off, reportedly by another student at the National War College that Ralston had had an affair there in the early ’80s. Cohen initially told reporters that Ralston had assured him that the affair ended after “approximately a year,” before he went back to his wife, who later divorce him. In divorce papers filed in Florida however, Ralston’s wife claimed that Ralston never ended the liaison, and that her husband’s failure to stop seeing the CIA analyst (who was herself married) was the reason she finally asked for a divorce. The brief reconciliation, she said, had been a sham. Ralston had come back only because he believed a divorce would hurt his chances to get a good command. Late last week Pentagon officials were scrambling to reconcile the two versions of events. Aides to Cohen uncomfortably explained that the defense secretary had been poorly briefed. Under questioning from Pentagon lawyers, Ralston had flatly denied his wife’s charge that the affair continued during their reconciliation. But he acknowledged that after the couple had split for a second and final time and he had been posted back to Washington, he resumed the affair, ending it for good only in 1988. In the scramble of events, Cohen’s aides say, those details never got to Cohen. So he inadvertently misled the reporters.
What made Cohen, normally a cautious and politically sensitive politician, take on such a shaky cause, and then botch it? Twice married himself, a published poet and novelist, Cohen may have felt some particular empathy for Ralston. But Cohen was also responding to power politics inside the Pentagon. Cohen, a former senator who served for years on the armed-ervices committee but never in uniform, is eager to win over the point Chiefs, who nominally re-ort to him yet can be unruly arons. As a Republican, he is Lore inclined to forge ties on the E-Ring of the Pentagon than. at the Clinton White House. The chiefs have been firmly united behind Ralston as the best successor to Gen. John Sha-likashvili, the current JCS chairman who arill step down in September. Ralston is an able manager and technocrat, a somewhat bland and predictable figure. More important, he is not John Sheehan, the marine general who, if made chairman of the JCS, might turn the Pentagon upside down. Sheehan is a brilliant iconoclast who believes that the Pentagon is, as usual, preparing to fight the last war. He is not shy about his opinions–he sometimes tells commanders of forces he seems to be obsolete, like most armored divisions, that “you are useless to me.” Sheehan’s rivals in the Pentagon fear that Clinton, who is known to admire Sheehan, will pick him to be chairman if Cohen sends his name up to the White House.
There is no obvious consensus candidate. Many of the best and brightest have left the military, in part because of the end of the cold war, and the inevitable cutbacks have removed the challenge and the opportunity for advancement. Those who remain have to wonder who in their past could do them in. Often away from their wives, senior officers were long accustomed to relieving stress in typical male fashion. Drinks are cheap at the officers’ club, and women were drawn to warriors in their dress uniforms. As the gender wall came down in the services (the military is now about 15 percent female) those women were also in uniform. Though the rules prohibit “fraternization”-sex between soldiers of different ranks-indiscretions were often overlooked or dealt with quietly.
That was before the Tailhook scandal disgraced the navy. Because the navy was slow to punish the drunken and randy aviators who groped and pawed at the Tailhook convention in 1991–and because their superiors, including several admirals and the secretary of the navy, were later forced to resign, the military cracked down. When the allegations of rape first arose at Aberdeen last fall, the army set up its sexual-abuse hot line. Thousands of calls have poured in. While many of the complaints are legitimate, some callers have revenge on their minds. Every night scores of senior officers lie awake wondering if their turn is next. Will it be that pretty ensign who seemed to laugh at the leering jokes and welcome the furtive kiss? That old rival from officers’ candidate school who was passed over for promotion and now wants to get even?
The potential for scandal is limitless as long as the military is determined to crack down on sex in the ranks. The top enlisted man in the army–Sgt. Maj. Gene McKinney–faces sexual-misconduct charges from four women. He has asked to quietly retire. But the Pentagon may have to stage a show trial to prove that it means business and to avoid further charges of a double standard. Meanwhile, aboard the aircraft carrier Nimitz, sailors have been disciplined for holding hands. Yet among the 5,500 menand fewer than 100 women aboard ship, sex has been a problem. One couple was recently discovered fornicating inside the huge air-intake duets of an F-14’s engine.
Clearly, the military needs to do a better job spelling out what behavior is forbidden and why. Sexual harassment is one thing–the rules should be as strict against groping or lewd comments in the military as they are for civilians, if not stricter. Consensual sex, however, is a different question. It seems almost quaint to ban adultery, at least between soldiers and civilians. One approach would be to simply ban sex between soldiers of different ranks who are also in the same chain of command. It is an obvious threat to discipline and morale if a soldier in a foxhole thinks his buddy is sleeping with the sergeant. In a world where obedience to authority is all, it’s sometimes hard to say whether sex is consensual between soldiers of different ranks. New recruits are particularly vulnerable to the advances of their drill sergeants,
Just because sex is hard to stop doesn’t mean that commanders won’t try. The officer ethos in much of the military is vaguely Southern and muscular Christian. They believe morals should be taught and enforced. Adultery inevitably involves deceit, saysGen. Charles Krulak, the commandant of the Marine Corps. There is no place for lying in the Marine Corps. Hence, there is no place for adultery. If the flesh is weak, then the answer is more and better discipline.
Of course, if every officer who ever strayed from his wife had been prosecuted in World War II, the troops landing at D-Day might have been driven back into the sea. Even the commander of alliedforces, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, had a romantic relationship with his driver, Capt. Kay Summersby. Summersby waited 51 years to tell all about their affair, in a memoir she wrote as she was dying of cancer in 1974. Nowadays, old girlfriends and boyfriends don’t always wait so long before telling on their old lovers–particularly if they have a score to settle.
Defense Secretary Cohen’s decision to support Ralston as a candidate for chairman of the Joint Chiefs despite the general’s adulterous affair prompted this question: is the Pentagon, which bans adultery and sexual harassment, applying a double standard in which high-ranking male officers are treated easier than others? A survey of recent cases:
NAME AND POSITION: Sgt. Delmar Simpson Drill sergeant CHARGE: Raped six women trainees at Aberdeen Proving Ground numerous times. Simpson said the sex was consensual. OUTCOME: Was convicted of the rapes and sentenced to a maximum of 25 years in prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. NAME AND POSITION: Lt. Kelly Flinn: The air force’s first and only female B-52 pilot CHARGE: Had an affair with a married man, lied about it in an investigation and disobeyed orders to end it OUTCOME: Avoided a court-martial and a dishonorable discharge. She received a general discharge in May. NAME AND POSITION: First Lt. Crista Davis Air force officer CHARGE: Had an affair with her training-academy English professor, by whom she has a 5-month-old son OUTCOME: She says the case is trumped up and plans to fight if court-martialed; she faces a possible sentence of up to 10 years NAME AND POSITION: Lt. Col. Karen Tew: Air force bomber pilot CHARGE: Had an affair with an enlisted man while estranged from her husband. She pleaded guilty to fraternization. OUTCOME: Committed suicide in March 1996–five days after being dismissed and just one year short of retirement NAME AND POSITION: Drill. Gen. Stephen Xenakis; Commander of Dwight D. Eisenhower Medical Center CHARGE: Allegedly had an “improper relationship” with a civilian nurse who had been caring for his ill wife OUTCOME: Relieved of his duties as commander of Eisenhower in late May and temporarily suspended pending further investigation NAME AND POSITION: Maj. Gen. John Longhouser Commander of the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground CHARGE: Had an affair with a civilian woman years ago while separated from his wife and beginning divorce proceedings OUTCOME: After overseeing the Aberdeen sex scandals and convening five courts-martial, he announced his early retirement June 4. NAME AND POSITION: Rear Adm. R. M. Mitchell; Commander of Navy Supply Systems Corps CHARGE: Allegedly made repeated and unwanted advances to a female subordinate, creating a “hostile working environment” OUTCOME: Was given a letter of reprimand, fined and removed from his position. The two-star admiral will leave with one star. NAME AND POSITION: Lt. Gen. Thomas Griffith; Commander of the 12th Air Force CHARGE: Had an extended extramarital affair with a civilian woman while commanding Arizona’s Davis-Monthan base OUTCOME: Relieved of his command in June 1995, stripped of one of his stars and retired with an honorable discharge
