Navy Secretary Resigns Over Tailhook Incident

Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III, hoping to defuse a crisis over sexual harassment in the Navy, resigned Friday, accepting responsibility for “a leadership failure” that led to the alleged sexual assaults by Navy and Marine Corps pilots of 26 women at a 1991 convention of the service’s Tailhook Assn.

Garrett, the Navy’s top civilian, tendered his resignation in a letter to President Bush, who accepted it without the customary references to regret at the loss of a high-ranking official.

Instead, in a sternly worded statement issued Friday, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said the President “seeks a full, thorough and expedited investigation that will result in actions to ensure the highest standards of equality and conduct among all members of the Navy.”

Garrett, who has come under withering fire for failing to act more decisively in the case, also accepted responsibility “for the post-Tailhook management” of his department.

Last week, after a public outcry over the inadequacy of Navy investigations into the incident, Garrett had asked the Defense Department’s inspector general--an investigative unit separate from the Navy--to conduct its own probe.

Garrett, a former naval aviator, went on to denounce as “egregious conduct” the behavior of the Navy and Marine pilots accused of forming a gantlet in a hotel hallway during the Las Vegas convention and pushing women--many of them also naval officers--through it while sexually assaulting them.

One alleged victim, Lt. Paula Coughlin, who only this week made her charges public, said in interviews that she had been “terrified” and feared at one point she would be gang raped. Participants in the gantlet grabbed her breasts and tried to rip off her panties, said Coughlin, whose complaints first prompted the Navy’s investigations.

Garrett has maintained that he was on an outdoor patio during the gantlet incident, although the uncorroborated testimony of a Marine officer placed him closer to the scene. On Friday he repeated his assertion that “contrary to what has been so maliciously suggested in the media,” he neither saw nor engaged in offensive conduct during the convention.

While expressing confidence that the Navy ultimately will eradicate sexual harassment from its ranks, Garrett acknowledged in his letter that “our progress to date has disappointed me.”

Navy officials Friday said Garrett hopes his resignation will stem calls from lawmakers for more dramatic action. They said Garrett’s gesture is in keeping with a time-honored Navy tradition of an officer’s accountability for mishaps that take place on his or her watch.

But while lawmakers applauded his move, they warned that the Navy will have to do much more to prove its commitment to eradicating widespread sexual harassment from its ships and shore bases. A 1991 Navy study indicated that 75% of Navy women and 50% of Navy men believed that sexual harassment was occurring within their units.

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee who had called for Garrett’s resignation, said Garrett “can’t take the rap for everyone else” involved in the case. “I hope the service realizes that this is a new day. If we are going to deal with sexual harassment, then the federal government has to be in the forefront and not the rear.”

Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham (R-San Diego), another member of the House Armed Services Committee and a retired naval aviator, said Garrett had “done the honorable thing.”

“In no way does this mean that the Pentagon’s investigation of sexual harassment at ‘Tailhook ‘91’ is over,” Cunningham said. “These are the ‘90s. Men and women work together. The signal must be made clear that the kind of misbehavior that occurred last September in Las Vegas does not belong in our Navy. Period.”

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney released a statement on Friday saying: “I admire (Garrett’s) courage and loyalty to the U.S. Navy.” In his first public statement on the Tailhook case, Cheney stated he is “committed to ensuring a thorough and independent investigation and to whatever corrective action is necessary.”

In another development in the case, the Defense Department’s inspector general told lawmakers on Friday he has asked the Navy to suspend its criminal investigation into the Tailhook incidents because some of the investigating officers might themselves be subjects of a separate Pentagon probe into the affair.

Pentagon officials said that it appears that some Navy investigators might have been involved in evasions or obstructions of the inquiry.

A memorandum sent by Garrett to lawmakers in early June had identified two officers alleged to have hindered the Navy’s investigation of the case. But the Navy’s assistant secretary for manpower, Barbara Pope, acknowledged before a congressional committee it was “kind of mind-boggling that after 1,500 interviews you had (only) a handful of people who saw anything.”

Coughlin, who described the assault on her in an interview with the Washington Post, earlier this week said she has become frustrated with the Navy’s inability to bring her attackers to justice.

Navy officials have acknowledged that only one case stemming from the incidents at the Tailhook convention has resulted in disciplinary action. Earlier this month, a naval aviator “received counseling” but suffered no punitive personnel action after the aviator was reported to have encouraged the alleged assaults by shouting, “Gantlet, gantlet!”

Some Navy officers have expressed regret that the first disciplinary action in the case has yielded the mildest form of punishment that can be meted out in such cases. Other Navy officers, including many naval aviators, feel they have been subjected to a “witch hunt” that has caused a political clamor for heads to roll.

Steve Millikin, a retired Navy captain in San Diego who acts as spokesman for the Tailhook Assn., reflected that sentiment Friday. Noting that Garrett’s announcement “caught us completely by surprise,” Millikin said the gantlet incident had “been blown way out of proportion.”

While Millikin acknowledged “the allegations were very serious,” he said that “the Navy has dealt with those.”

But he noted that Garrett’s decision to step down is “part of the Navy way,” which calls for a skipper to hold himself accountable for actions taken under his command.

Millikin said about 5,000 people attended the convention, “and these incidents we keep hearing about were perpetrated by a handful of people.”

“Most people in the association are very confused and upset that their whole reputation has been tarnished by the actions of a few,” he said.

In a recent interview, the Navy’s most senior military officer, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Frank B. Kelso, declared that he was “certainly accountable for what happened” at the Tailhook convention. But he said that rather than step down, “my accountability and responsibility at this point is to go try to fix it.”

But as political pressure mounted for the Navy to take more dramatic action, the official said, “the clamor for accountability was diverting attention from efforts to change Navy culture and from the normal course of business.”

Times staff writers James Bornemeier in Washington and Michael Granberry in San Diego contributed to this story.