Shot Down Once, Battleship Plan Returns

Turning a battleship around is never easy -- especially in the politically roiled waters of the San Francisco Bay.

Last July, San Francisco’s county supervisors voted 8 to 3 against bringing the vintage World War II battleship Iowa to San Francisco as a permanent tourist attraction. Some opponents said they were taking a stand against both the war in Iraq and a military that boots out gays and lesbians, a powerful faction in local politics.

But now, advocates of the move are trying to woo the supervisors with a promise to create a privately funded dockside museum that will tell the story of minorities in the military, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender troops.

“Our feeling was that this would make it a better fit for San Francisco,” said Jim Maloney, director of the Military Education Initiative, a group that supports the lifting of restrictions on gays in the military. “Adding in the component of LGBT service would be obviously quite unique,” he said.

The new plan also calls for an annual peace symposium on the Iowa, which has a storied record of combat in the South Pacific and off the Korean coast.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite battleship, the Iowa carried him to Casablanca, Morocco, in 1943, en route to a conference of Allied leaders in Tehran.

In 1989, 47 crew members were killed in a shipboard explosion that officials blamed on a sailor who they said was involved in a failed gay relationship. The Navy later backed away from that explanation, ruling that the explosion was an accident and apologizing to the family of the dead sailor.

“That’s a story that deserves to be told,” Maloney said.

Since 2001, the Iowa has been mothballed in Suisun Bay, about 35 miles east of San Francisco.

According to Maloney, one of the eight supervisors who opposed the local docking of the Iowa now favors it because of the tweaks to the plan. He said he was hopeful that two more supervisors would join the campaign and form a pro-Iowa majority when a revamped resolution comes before the 11-member board, possibly this month.

Of course, choosing a berth for the Iowa will be up to the Navy, not San Francisco. But without the support of local officials, the consolidated city-county would have little chance of success. Landing the Iowa has become something of a civic crusade in Stockton, San Francisco’s only competitor so far.

The Port of Stockton has donated a 1,000-foot dock to berth the Iowa, which, at 889 feet, stretches about the length of two-and-a-half football fields. The port also has volunteered a 90,000-square-foot building and 15 acres for parking.

U.S. Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy), who represents the Stockton area, has been so eager for the acquisition that he has tried a number of legislative maneuvers to secure the Iowa for Stockton without the customary bidding between cities. Earlier this month, he and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), an ex-mayor of San Francisco who was outraged by the supervisors’ snub of the Iowa, agreed that the Navy should take bids on the ship, though only from California.

The competition doesn’t worry retired Navy Capt. Jim Dodge, one of the Stockton campaign’s chief boosters. Dodge, the last commanding officer of the Alameda Naval Air Station, helped rescue the aircraft carrier Hornet, which was going to be turned into scrap before it was saved and transformed into a museum at the former East Bay base.

“I think it’s virtually a slam-dunk,” he said, contending that Navy officials still resent the bitter protest of the mid-1980s, when San Franciscans rallied against basing the aging battleship Missouri there.

As for San Francisco’s museum proposal, Dodge had no doubt the plan would be deep-sixed: “I think it will absolutely turn the Navy off.”

That mirrored the consensus on an Iowa veterans’ Internet forum, where one former sailor predicted that the ship’s reputation would be permanently battered.

“All it would take is a band of Gay Rights folks parading in Speedos and carrying their rainbow-colored banners on the pier in front of our beloved Iowa ... and a news joker from CNN getting a single picture,” he wrote. “Would it happen elsewhere? Not likely. Would it happen in S.F.? Bet on it.”

Such comments do not deter Merylin Wong, a former banker who heads the San Francisco-based group Historic Ship Memorial at Pacific Square, which has lobbied for the Iowa since 1997.

While San Francisco has not set aside a pier for the Iowa, the city-county can draw the tens of thousands of tourists needed to keep the ship financially secure and Stockton can’t, she said, contending that “after a year, they’d be in big trouble.”

In addition, she said, the museum idea has increased pressure on San Francisco officials to fight for the Iowa.

“I can tell you that no other population segment within San Francisco is working as hard as the LGBT community to convince the supervisors -- particularly the ones who are gay -- to support this,” Wong said.

After bids from Stockton, San Francisco and other candidates are submitted, the Navy is expected to make a decision later this year.