Promotions of 2 Admirals Expected to Be Withdrawn : Navy: One was slated to command San Diego’s Carrier Group One. A link to sex-harassmant scandals is denied.

The Navy is expected next week to withdraw the proposed promotion of two admirals, one of whom was to have assumed command of Carrier Group One in San Diego, Navy officials said Friday.

Naval officials said the changes are a result of long-range plans to reorganize the service’s top-heavy bureaucracy in light of the end of the Cold War.

They acknowledged, however, that the promotions of both men, Rear Adm. Joseph W. Prueher and Vice Adm. Jerry O. Tuttle, could have become controversial because of their links to two separate, high-profile cases involving allegations of sexual harassment.

Attention to the issue of sexual harassment in the service has been heightened since allegations stemming from the September, 1991, Las Vegas convention of the Tailhook Assn., a booster club for naval aviators.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has declined to approve promotions for several thousand officers until the Navy provides assurances that those officer were not invovled in Tailhook. Although neither man has been implicated in that case, it was possible, Navy officials said, that their promotions could have been complicated by the incidents.

Prueher, who had been nominated for promotion to a three-star grade, was to assume command of Carrier Group One.

He was commandant of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1989 when a female midshipman, Gwen Dwyer, was handcuffed to a urinal by a group of male colleagues.

But Navy officials insisted that the withdrawal of his name from the promotion list was prompted by the reorganization plans, not concern over the case.

The command of Carrier Group One will remain unchanged for now, naval officials said, and Prueher will remain in his current post.

The nomination of Tuttle also is expected to be withdrawn for organizational reasons, the Navy said.

However, like Prueher, Tuttle was cited by naval officials for bad judgment--in his case, for publishing jokes that offended some female officers in a monthly newsletter he writes for the Navy’s Space and Electronic Warfare Command, which he also heads.

One joke was: “Beer is better than women because beer never has a headache.”

Tuttle was to have become assistant chief of naval operations for air warfare, the top position in the service’s troubled aviation arm. He would have replaced Vice Adm. Richard Dunleavy, who retired last month.

It is expected that the post will be consolidated with at least one other flag officer’s position in the coming reorganization.

“None of it has anything to do with Tailhook, and that’s not why their nominations were pulled,” insisted one senior naval officer.

Several officials said the reorganization has been in the works for almost a year and is part of an effort to recast the Navy in a post-Cold War world and to winnow its headquarters staffs of senior admirals.

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