Retiring Marine Chief Doesn’t Deliver Attack on Congress : Gen. Kelley’s Last Volley Stifled by Heat

Gen. P. X. Kelley was ready to take his parting shots Monday as Marine Corps commandant by putting heat on Congress for being cheap with defense and on the news media for having a “lynch mob mentality.”

But, instead, Kelley took pity on the troops wobbling in the muggy heat at retirement ceremonies for him and Gen. John A. Wickham, the Army chief of staff, and made a simple farewell.

‘Driving a Wedge’

“My first concern is with a growing attitude in the Congress which places more credence in the views of staff members on matters dealing with national security than in the views of the service chiefs,” Kelley said in the text of a speech he did not read. “This attitude is driving a wedge between the members of Congress and the nation’s principal military advisers.”

Kelley and Wickham, both of whom step down at the end of this month after 37 years in uniform, received full military honors that included a 19-gun salute, music from Army and Marine Corps bands and honor guards from all branches of the military.

As the temperature climbed toward 90, the soldiers lined up in dress uniforms on the parade grounds at Ft. Myer, an Army post adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery, began to be affected by the heat.

Several were taken out of line before they passed out, and one nearly collapsed directly in front of the reviewing stand, where Vice President George Bush, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and the military brass were seated.

“I had a long speech, but the troops have been out in the sun for about an hour,” Kelley said as he discarded his 800-word text.

Budgetary ‘Meat Ax’

Kelley had been ready to express his concern “with a feeling among some members of our Congress that you can buy the defense of our country ‘on the cheap.’ . . . The requirements for the defense of the republic are dictated by external threats, and the satisfaction of these requirements should not be emasculated by some arbitrary and capricious budgetary ‘meat ax.’ ”

Kelley became Marine commandant in 1983, a few months before a Marine barracks in Beirut was demolished in a truck-bombing that killed 241 American servicemen.

More recently, the Marines have been faced with allegations that guards at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were involved in a sex-and-spy scandal and are reminded almost daily that Oliver L. North, the former White House aide at the center of the Iran- contra affair, is a Marine lieutenant colonel.

In his undelivered speech, Kelley complained about the news media, attacking the “unbalanced treatment of our armed forces by many, not all, but many members of our ‘fourth estate.’ ”

“For one who has spent the past 37 years in building an institution, it is particularly difficult for me to understand a ‘lynch mob’ mentality--one which appears devoted to destroying the public image of our most precious institutions,” Kelley’s text said.