Women Sought for High Armed Services Posts

The White House, determined to break new ground in filling senior political jobs with women, is combing its resume files for female executives who could be appointed to some of the Pentagon’s most visible posts, as secretaries of the three military services.

Clinton Administration officials say that among the candidates for Air Force, Army and Navy secretaries, respectively, were Sheila Widnall, an aeronautical engineer and associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Antonia Handler Chayes, a Washington attorney and former Air Force undersecretary; and former Rep. Beverly Byron of Maryland, an expert on military personnel matters.

Long a bastion both of maleness and machismo, the Pentagon is seen as a crucial new testing ground for Clinton’s commitment to make his Administration “look like America.”

No woman has ever become the civilian head of a military service or filled any of the Pentagon’s top four uniformed slots as a joint chief of staff, and Defense Department officials have complained that the pool of experienced women with backgrounds in management and military affairs is scant.

The job of a service secretary is both managerial and ceremonial, and has shrunk in importance in recent years, when power has been increasingly centralized in the office of the defense secretary and the office of the joint chiefs.

It is clear that with men already slated for virtually all of Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s top policy-making positions, women are unlikely to penetrate deep into the Pentagon’s inner-circles during the current Administration.

It also is unlikely that all three service secretary posts would go to women, Clinton Administration officials said. Washington attorney John Holum, a Clinton confidant who drafted options for lifting the prohibition against homosexuals in the military, has emerged as a leading candidate to be secretary of the Navy.

But the choice of even one woman to lead a military department would be a significant symbolic gesture to the military services as they struggle with a host of social problems ranging from sexual harassment to the introduction of openly homosexual service members to declining personnel rolls.

Women also are in the running for two other key posts in the Defense Department, including director of defense, research and engineering and assistant secretary for environmental restoration.

Anita Jones, a University of Virginia computer scientist, is said to be a front-runner for the director’s job, a post overseeing the Defense Department’s massive acquisitions bureaucracy.

Sources said that Barbara Seiders, a theoretical chemist who is chief of research at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s science adviser’s office, is under consideration as assistant secretary for economics and the environment.

The White House has stepped up pressure on the Pentagon and its own personnel-screening groups to find “diversity candidates” to fill jobs in the national security sphere. One knowledgeable source said that Clinton angrily rejected an early roster of candidates for senior national security jobs because it included virtually no women, and the subject is said to have attracted the interest of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But some Pentagon officials have said their choices are hampered by a shortage of women who have served as executives in government national security positions. Others reject the argument as a stalling tactic.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Adrianne Goins, chairwoman of the Coalition for Women’s Appointments defense task force. “We have seen hundreds of resumes of qualified women in the defense field. They are former government officials; they come from service in the armed forces, from the academic and arms control communities and from private industry, including the defense industry.”

Goins conceded that women’s groups “have traditionally seen the Pentagon as a hard place to crack.” That, however, may soon change, she added.

“It takes a President like Clinton who is committed to diversity to get beyond that,” Goins said.