[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 77 (Friday, June 17, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 17, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
          A MATTER OF MORALS, WHAT IS RIGHT AND WHAT IS WRONG

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Byrne). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Walker] is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. WALKER. Madam Speaker, earlier today my colleague, the gentleman 
from Indiana [Mr. Burton] expressed legitimate concern about a 
situation that has been reported out of the White House where evidently 
members of the White House staff and/or persons from the media left the 
George Washington during D-day activities with a number of items of 
linen from the ship, amounting in total to over $560 worth of 
materials.
  This is a matter of some concern, I think, because it goes to the 
question of what is right and what is wrong. Remembering that this 
incident took place only a couple of days after the major reports about 
the helicopter incident where a Marine helicopter was used to take 
White House staffers on a golf outing, one would have thought that 
White House staff would be particularly sensitive to the need to 
maintain any semblance of propriety in what they did. And yet it sounds 
as though the staff and/or the media involved left the ship with 
bathrobes, with towels, and with all sorts of other things that at 
least someone has reported they took as memorabilia. I think that that 
is a matter of real concern.
  I have been on Navy ships where we have had an opportunity to be 
there, and when you spend some time with the crew, you do like to go 
away with a little remembrance of the occasion. In most instances, you 
are given the opportunity to purchase those kinds of things in the 
ship's store. That could have certainly been done here. Evidently it 
was not.
  If you go to a hotel room and there is a bathrobe hanging in the 
closet, I do not assume and I do not believe most middle-class 
Americans assume that that is there to take out of the room and keep. 
Nor do most middle-class Americans assume when they find towels with 
monograms in the room that those are theirs to keep.
  There is a sense of common decency, a sense of right and wrong that 
has to govern the affairs of people. It appears as though for some 
people who are part of the White House contingent that was aboard the 
U.S.S. George Washington, that that was not the case and that they did 
leave with some of this linen.
  I guess what finally concerns me in all of this is the kind of 
standard that this sets for men and women who serve in the military. 
Men and women who serve in the military, if caught with that kind of 
act, which is stealing, it is pilfering, would be at least brought up 
on charges before their commanding officers and in some cases if it was 
serious enough they would be court-martialed. It seems to me that that 
is the standard that ought to be kept in the White House. If the staff 
was responsible for any of this, they need to be disciplined. And in 
the case of people who were engaged in serious violations here, they 
should do what would be done in the military, they should have the 
equivalent of a court martial, and that is they should be fired.

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