Follow the money, the all-knowing Watergate source nicknamed “Deep Throat” told Woodward and Bernstein.
Focus on the admirals, a Navy leader counseled Greg Vistica nearly 20 years later.
The latter advice is worth recalling in the aftermath of the suicide of Navy Chief of Operations Adm. Jeremy “Mike” Boorda. It may help answer a question even more germane amid his passing: What’s wrong with the Navy?
Vistica, 41, national security reporter for Newsweek, is a good person to ask. As a San Diego newspaper reporter, he broke the prize-winning stories of the Las Vegas debauchery that was the Tailhook sex harassment scandal. Recently, he published a much-praised account of the scandal, and other Navy woes, in “Fall From Glory–The Men Who Sunk the Navy” (Simon & Schuster).
Boorda’s death came amid a Newsweek investigation of the decorations he wore and shortly before he was to answer questions from two Newsweek reporters. Vistica had nothing to do with the original reporting and only a brief, peripheral role in confirming his colleagues’ suspicions of Boorda’s apparent untruth.
Much of the media coverage of the death has troubled Vistica in that it has downplayed a key point.
“It’s not focusing on the brass, the admirals. You have an institution of honorable men doing the dishonorable–compromising their principles for the good of the Navy as opposed to the good of the nation. They run a protection society, a protection racket.”
For sure, the litany of troubles pervading the Navy has verged on the prodigious: Tailhook, a budget-busting expansion during the 1980s Reagan arms buildup, cheating at the Naval Academy, continual crashes of the F-14 fighter jet, the explosion on the battleship Iowa blamed wrongly on a gay sailor, the cruiser Vincennes erroneously shooting down an Iranian airliner, questions about the competence of female pilots, and high-ranking personnel decisions tied more to political fashion than merit.
The Army, Vistica notes, endured a difficult self-examination after the Vietnam War and arguably came away improved. The Navy wasn’t given to the same introspection, he says, a fact which accentuated a possible Achilles’ heel: a double standard where ethics are involved.
There’s one set for the top brass, another for the rank-and-file. As Vistica puts it, “If you have stars on your shoulder, you usually get off; if you have stripes, you usually get hammered. When things hit the fan, the brass blames everything on junior officers. They become the `bad guys’ in the public’s perception.”
He can cite example after example of admirals being coddled, vividly so in Tailhook, leading him to conclude that morale within the Navy, notably through the ranks of enlisted men and women, “has never been worse.”
“We in the public and press don’t really comprehend that, though the rank and file does. There is instance after instance: a captain, for example, promoted to rear admiral though involved in a manslaughter in Australia. He was promoted without questions. There are other cases of admirals doing crazy things and getting promoted. But the kids get hammered.”
Over the last 15 years, no branch comes close to the Navy in scandals. And if there is a common denominator, he finds, it’s a mismanagement of each mess by a publicity-conscious service. The tendency is to cover up, to protect an upper echelon given at times to more blatant forms of situational ethics.
“They try to spin everything” but wind up booting themselves in the derriere. “On the Iowa, they blame it on the kid they said was gay. In the case of the Vincennes, they shoot down that airliner and give everybody medals. In the case of the Iowa, Vincennes, Tailhook, the Naval Academy cheating, they continually get into trouble misleading the public.”
Ironically, Boorda represented the “core values” that are the Navy’s road map for honor and integrity. “He kept going around and saying, `We have to tell the truth,’ ” said Vistica, who knew and liked him.
But, it’s possible, Boorda was hiding his own deceit, involving questionable decorations. For the military’s warrior class, especially, such a misstep is grievous.
“What does it say to the kid down the chain of command, watching this guy (Boorda) who’s the Navy’s last great hope to pull it out of the muck and morass, and slowly doing it, but preaching core values and apparently wearing medals he’s not supposed to wear?”
Of course, I told Vistica, you could note that at least the military does have codes of honor. This is, after all, a society where cheating rarely is equated with failing; where plagiarists and other fibbers get chance after chance, perhaps even a book or movie deal to glorify their fraud. The Navy does, warts and all, stand for something.
He hadn’t thought about it quite that way. Even so, his response seemed on point. “The Navy, by its own words, has held itself up to a higher standard,” especially its executive class of high-profile admirals.
Playing the greens
As Illinois GOP Senate candidate Al Salvi will soon learn, fat cat Republicans on a golf course don’t yell “Fore!” on a golf course. They proclaim, “Four!”
A friendly lobbyist passes on an invitation from the GOP Senate Committee for the surely prestigious Warner-Nickles Golf and Tennis Classic, June 7-9, in Williamsburg, Va.
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The gist of a letter to lobbyists and other fat cats from the GOP Senate Committee is to take out the old checkbook and make one out for $4,000 to the event.
Named for Sens. John Warner of Virginia and Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the outing will line the campaign pockets of incumbent GOP senators seeking re-election, as well as hopefuls such as Salvi, the upset winner in the primary.
There’s golf, tennis, receptions, “southern cooking at its best,” and a trek to Busch Gardens Amusement Park for the kids, who presumably could be capital insiders one day.
Your personal check (“corporate checks are prohibited by law”) for $4,000 may be made out to the “WW/N 1966 Committee or to the campaign committee of the individual candidate. It doesn’t cover your room, which will be $248 at the Williamsburg Inn, or $139 or $195 if you slum at the Williamsburg Lodge.
So get out the moolah since, Warner and Nickles warn, there’s room for just 64 tennis players and 125 golfers. So much sucking up to do, so few slots to do it.
Cokie watch
“In 1996 you have one chance to experience history in the making,” declares another invitation, this one to an event blending journalism and commerce on Lake Michigan.
You can experience history in the making on June 6 by merely ambling over to Chicago’s Navy Pier and boarding the Odyssey Cruise Ship for a “lively panel discussion and luncheon cruise.”
CNN, Time and LEXIS-NEXIS are joining forces as sponsors for this lakeside gabbing on “Shaping the Presidential Image,” which the invitation modestly tags a “history-making event.”
Lou Dobbs, moderator of CNN’s big nightly business show, “Moneyline,” will be there, as will Time columnist Margaret Carlson, CNN “Crossfire” co-hosts Geraldine Ferraro and John Sununu, Jesse Jackson and LEXIS-NEXIS chief executive officer Ira Siegel.
A Time spokesman said this grew out of a joint effort between CNN and LEXIS-NEXIS, with Time joining in as it is become chummier with CNN as a result of the pending merger of Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting.
Dobbs, a CNN executive vice president, couldn’t be reached to learn if he’s doing this merely out of deep corporate loyalty. A Time spokesman said it will compensate Carlson for her effort, as it now routinely does for its folks.