President Selects Acting Head as Navy Secretary

WASHINGTON — President Bush will nominate Acting Navy Secretary Sean O’Keefe to become Navy secretary, replacing H. Lawrence Garrett, who resigned over the Tailhook sex harassment scandal, the White House announced Friday.

Bush will send O’Keefe’s nomination to the Senate for approval.

O’Keefe, 36, was named acting secretary in July after Garrett resigned. The former secretary took responsibility for the Navy’s failure to fully investigate charges of sexual assaults against women by Navy pilots at a convention in Las Vegas last year.

O’Keefe previously served as Defense Department comptroller. Since his appointment, he has launched a drive to change male attitudes toward women in the Navy, warning that those men who do not learn will be driven from the service.

The Navy recently dismissed two admirals after the Defense Department’s chief investigator accused the service of whitewashing senior officers in the September, 1991, Tailhook Assn. convention scandal.

The Pentagon said naval investigators did not pursue the issue of whether senior officials were accountable for the behavior of pilots involved in alleged sexual assaults on at least 24 women at the meeting of the private association of naval fliers.