On Being an Officer--and a Gentleman : The ugly Tailhook scandal should leave Navy more, not less, prepared and sensitive

Allegation: The Navy may be conducting a witch hunt by overreacting to charges of sexual harassment in its ranks. Not so.

To hear Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R-San Diego) tell it, mere overreaction may be the reason the Navy relieved from duty five officers at Miramar Naval Air Station who allowed pilots under their charge to perform two lewd skits at the base officers’ club in June. In the annual “Tomcat Follies,” a show honoring the Navy’s pilots who fly the F-14 Tomcat fighter jet, officers in one skit held up a vulgar sign that associated Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) with oral sex. The other skit included a line about Schroeder and a sex-change operation.

Schroeder had been a vocal critic of the Navy’s handling of the scandal that resulted from last year’s Tailhook Assn. convention in Las Vegas. More than two dozen women, half of them Navy officers, charged that they were groped and assaulted by male officers in a hallway at the aviators convention.

Now, new revelations provide more disturbing details. Three male aviators who attended the Tailhook convention have come forward to say that a workshop that took place just hours before the assault helped foster an attitude that might condone such an attack. During the workshop, an audience of mostly men raucously hooted at the idea of women as combat pilots and jeered women officers who asked about their futures in naval aviation.

According to a videotape of the workshop, top Navy brass who observed all of this did not call for order or rebuke the male aviators.

In addition, it was disclosed this week that Pentagon investigators have been given several rolls of film that contain pictures of an intoxicated 17-year-old girl being manhandled and undressed by dozens of rowdy naval aviators on the same night that the other women said they were abused in the same hotel hallway.

“This obviously underage, short female staggered out of one of the suites and was immediately swept up by the crowd,” said a witness who asked to remain anonymous.

Rep. Cunningham says Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney has promised to review the “Tomcat Follies” disciplinary actions to make sure the Navy is not overreacting because of the earlier Tailhook scandal. Fair enough. But given what continues to emerge about the attitudes toward women and their treatment, it’s clear that the Navy must move more aggressively, not less, to investigate and condemn sexual harassment.