Aspin Decides Adm. Kelso Will Stay On

Defense Secretary Les Aspin, rejecting the recommendation of his own Navy secretary, has decided to retain Adm. Frank B. Kelso as the nation’s top naval officer rather than remove him as punishment for the Navy’s Tailhook scandal, Pentagon officials said Monday.

Aspin’s decision came after three days of soul-searching by the Clinton Administration, which found itself in a politically difficult situation after new Navy Secretary John H. Dalton recommended Kelso’s ouster for a failure of leadership in the Tailhook incident.

Dalton, a former businessman and a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, argued that, according to naval tradition, Kelso’s presence at the 1991 Tailhook Assn. convention in Las Vegas, where scores of women were sexually harassed or assaulted, made him accountable for the misconduct, whether or not he was aware of it.

Dalton’s recommendation was made public Friday, prompting a flurry of consultations among Aspin, Kelso, Dalton and President Clinton. Officials said that Aspin decided to keep Kelso largely because of steps the 60-year-old admiral took after the scandal to confront the issue of sexual harassment in the service.

Kelso did not witness the acts of drunken groping and indecent exposure that took place at the Tailhook convention. And in response to initial questions about whether he would resign, he said that he believed he should stay on as chief of naval operations to resolve the problems in the service that were uncovered by the scandal.

In a statement released Monday at the Pentagon, Aspin said that Dalton’s report on Kelso, received Friday, “does not suggest to me that (Kelso) should be asked to retire.”

But while Aspin made clear that he will not seek Kelso’s resignation, his decision contained no explicit expressions of confidence in the admiral, who is expected to retire in July after 37 years in the service.

“Aspin said it was his judgment that the time for applying (a strict standard of accountability) to Kelso’s behavior had passed,” the Pentagon explained in a statement. It noted that Kelso had offered his resignation last year, when then-Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III resigned because of Tailhook. “It was not accepted. Now, the secretary said, Kelso should be judged as are others with similar records regarding Tailhook.”

Aspin asked Dalton for further clarification of his recommendation that disciplinary action be taken against several other Navy admirals and Marine Corps generals who attended the Tailhook convention. That request leaves open the possibility that Aspin still may adopt some of Dalton’s proposals to punish senior officers for “failures of leadership.”

Indeed, a senior Pentagon official said that Aspin has not ruled out some lesser form of rebuke for Kelso, following further consideration of Dalton’s recommendations.

Aspin’s decision leaves Dalton in a precarious position as the Navy’s civilian chief. His recommendation is certain to have alienated many of the Navy’s senior military leaders, as well as many of the civilian defense officials with whom he would work to defend Navy budgets and priorities. The goodwill of both military and civilian officials is critical to a service secretary’s effectiveness, experts said.

Leaving the Pentagon Monday, Kelso expressed satisfaction at Aspin’s decision.