Harassment Most Ugly : Secretary of the Navy resigns as Tailhook uproar continues

The resignation of Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III Friday in the wake of the Tailhook scandal serves as a reminder of how much progress has been made against sexual harassment and at the same time how much remains to be done.

Garrett said he accepted “full responsibility” for the Navy’s management of the investigation into sexual abuse at a 1991 naval aviators convention in Las Vegas and “for the leadership failure which allowed the egregious conduct at Tailhook to occur in the first instance.” His resignation is an admission of the severity of the Tailhook misbehavior and of the Navy’s initial failure to confront ongoing problems of harassment within the service.

Twenty-six women, half of them naval officers, said they were sexually harassed by “an all-male gauntlet” of Navy and Marine Corps pilots, many of them drunk, at the annual convention of the Tailhook Assn., an organization of present and former Navy pilots. Garrett had come under fire in the wake of the Navy’s own investigation, which said in April that senior Navy officials had known for years of the outrageous behavior at these conventions but had done nothing to prevent it. He claims not to have seen any untoward conduct while attending the Tailhook gathering.

Garrett’s action Friday followed a graphic report on the Tailhook incident televised the previous evening on ABC’s “PrimeTime Live.”

The affair underscores growing intolerance for sexual harassment in the armed services. But the real lesson of Tailhook is that the problem is more pervasive and intractable in society than most people recognized.

Prof. Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment by now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last September riveted the nation and sparked a long-overdue dialogue between men and women about the nature of harassment and ways to eliminate it. That sometimes painful dialogue must continue, both inside and outside the Navy, and the sexist attitudes that caused the intolerable behavior at the Tailhook convention must change.