Gore’s Right: Don’t Ask, Don’t Expel

In the 1950s, a young Navy lieutenant named Tom Dooley became an international hero for his efforts to save refugees fleeing communism after the French lost their phase of the Vietnam War. Working as a Navy doctor in makeshift jungle facilities, Dooley dispensed lifesaving aid and comfort to thousands of Vietnamese. He was called the American Albert Schweitzer and was celebrated in cover stories in Life magazine as “Dr. America,” which is how he was referred to in South Vietnam, where he received that nation’s highest award.

Born and raised by a prominent St. Louis Catholic family, Dooley was handsome, smart, patriotic and, in every discernible way, a credit to his generation of servicemen. Indeed, in 1960, shortly before his premature death from cancer, he received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Notre Dame, where he was praised by fellow honorees, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Giovanni Cardinal Montini, who became Pope Paul VI.

But at the same time, Dooley was the object of a smear campaign by some in naval intelligence who were determined to prove that this hero, in his private life, had gay relationships. Navy snoops followed him everywhere, planting electronic bugs in his hotel rooms and finally recording a conversation between Dooley and a male lover.

His military career was then over, but without public scandal, because this hero was still useful to U.S. policymakers eager to build support for an increased U.S. role in Vietnam. The CIA continued to support Dooley’s medical clinic as a front for its clandestine military operations in Laos and Vietnam, and Dooley went along with the deception, seriously risking his own health at jungle medical outposts.

What a victory for sanity it would have been if Dooley had been allowed to publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation and stay in the service. If that had happened, we would have been spared the pathetic fumbling with this issue in the current presidential campaign.

Al Gore, for example, would not have had to apologize for a perfectly logical position, since abandoned, that as president he would want to know in advance that his appointee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff agrees with him that the duplicitous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy doesn’t work and that the right thing to do is to admit into the military openly gay people. Gore’s original position was the correct one.

As the Dooley case illustrates, this shift in policy would be nothing more than a matter of honesty. Gays have been in the military as long as there has been one. And they have managed, as much as their heterosexual counterparts, to serve with honor, at times heroically, without permitting their social lives to intrude on duty. Indeed, most if not all of the sexual harassment and abuse of authority claims in the military involve heterosexuals.

But instead of honesty, Republican candidates, notably George Bush Jr. and John McCain, want to perpetuate the Clinton administration’s failed policy of asking those whom we entrust with the national security to lie about a basic fact of their make-up.

Even more deplorable among the GOP presidential candidates is Steve Forbes, who owes everything he is and has to his father’s good name and wealth, stating that openly gay people should not be permitted in the military. Of his own father’s homosexuality, Forbes has said only that “my father had his life. We respected it. What he meant to us and to others I think speaks for itself.”

What a stand for common decency it would have been for Forbes to acknowledge that his own father, a gay man, was a military hero in World War II, wounded as a machine gunner in combat and the recipient of the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, who was returned to this country in a body cast.

Dooley and the elder Forbes--and there are undoubtedly many others--demonstrate that gays are fully capable of observing military discipline and performing with valor and honor. It is denigrating to their memories to deny that one can be both gay and a military hero. It is also to deny the truth: Homosexuals distinguish themselves in every aspect of American life, and it’s time they be allowed to enjoy the full measure of their citizenship in this society.

Discrimination against gays in the military is in no way morally more palatable or institutionally justified than earlier bans on blacks and women. The president would not want to appoint leaders of the military who are racist or sexist, nor should it be acceptable that they be homophobic. Instead of condemning Gore, the other candidates should have embraced his call to do the right thing.