Army Chief Didn’t Know Appointee Faced Charges

Army Secretary Togo West Jr. said Tuesday that he could not explain how the service’s top enlisted man had been appointed to a panel investigating sexual harassment, without knowing that the man had himself recently faced a harassment charge.

Gene C. McKinney, the sergeant major of the Army, was the target of a complaint brought last June by Sgt. Maj. Brenda L. Hoster, a 22-year veteran, Army officials acknowledged.

But while Hoster’s immediate superior had reported the allegation, West said that neither he nor his advisors had known of the charge when McKinney was added in the fall to a panel to investigate sexual harassment in the Army.

At a Senate hearing, West said that he did not have “any information” on the involvement of Hoster’s superior officer, Col. Robert Gaylord.

“What I do know is that those of us who put together the panel, who advised me, became aware of those allegations just yesterday.”

McKinney, a much-decorated 28-year veteran, has denied the complaint, which came to light Monday. But the latest twist suggests that the charges could badly damage the Army’s efforts to get on top of a sex-harassment scandal that has so far given rise to 292 separate investigations. Army officials have insisted at every public opportunity that they have “zero tolerance” for harassment.

Hoster, 39, who worked as a public relations aide to McKinney for more than a year, has alleged that he made advances to her on several occasions. Among them was an occasion during a trip last April to Hawaii, when McKinney sexually harassed her in a hotel room while his wife was down the hall, Hoster said.

She has also alleged that her superior, Col. Gaylord, deputy chief of the Army’s public affairs operation, sought to cover up the incident, which she says led her to retire in August 1996.

The news of the complaint brought pointed questioning at a hearing on Capitol Hill. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), asked West whether McKinney should have been appointed to the panel.

West said that he knew nothing of Gaylord’s report. “What I do know is that those of us who put together the panel, who advised me, became aware of the allegation just yesterday,” West said.

McKinney stepped down from the panel Monday lest his presence impede its work. But he continues work at his regular job at the Pentagon, which is advising West on a full range of policy matters pertaining to the service’s 410,000 enlisted men and women.

Hoster went public with her complaints by approaching the New York Times after she became angered at the news that McKinney had been named to the commission. But that was after she had tried unsuccessfully to use the sexual harassment hotline that the Army has set up to allow women a less intimidating means of coming forward with their complaints.

Susan Barnes, an attorney for Hoster in Denver, said that Hoster called in her complaint to the hotline but got “scared” and decided she didn’t want to give her name. “She thought they were hostile to the idea of taking the name of somebody at this level,” Barnes said.

Her difficulties with the hotline may suggest problems with the telephone service, which has become one of the principal elements in the Army’s effort to combat sexual harassment.

Barnes said that Hoster had become deeply distressed about McKinney’s advances and his harsh criticism of her work. She approached Gaylord last June to report her grievance, hoping that it would lead to a reassignment.

Instead, according to the attorney, Gaylord raised only the options of confronting McKinney and settling the issue herself, or resigning from the Army, Barnes said. He did not point out that the Army has a formal channel of complaint that she could have used to report the incidents, she said. “She knew by the time she walked out of the office that he wouldn’t do anything,” Barnes said.

Pentagon officials said Tuesday that in their view Hoster’s allegation should be given no more credibility than any uncorroborated complaint that came across the hotline. They declined to discuss details of the alleged incidents or to make available the principals in the incident.

“Right now we have allegations,” said Ken Bacon, the chief Pentagon spokesman. “I think we have to approach them with a sense of fairness and let the investigators determine what conclusions are correct.”

But late in the day, the Army released a statement acknowledging that Gaylord had heard the complaint last June. The statement appeared to suggest that Gaylord did not keep the allegation to himself, as Hoster suggested.

Former Army officers said that McKinney was known around the Pentagon as a no-nonsense boss who often yelled to make his points. But some said that he was also known as a leader who had pushed hard to advance the careers of women and sometimes had sought to bring them to prestigious positions most often filled by men.