[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 72 (Tuesday, May 21, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H5361-H5363]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     TRIBUTE TO ADMIRAL MIKE BOORDA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bateman] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BATEMAN. Mr. Speaker, earlier today we said a sad farewell to one 
of the best our Nation has to offer. I know Mike Boorda was a friend, a 
very special friend. Last Thursday our colleague from Mississippi, 
General Montgomery, spoke of him as a brother. I too regarded Mike 
Boorda as a brother. No one outside my immediate family has touched my 
life more than he.
  When I first met Mike Boorda, he was newly assigned as chief of naval 
personnel, and I was the ranking member of the military personnel 
subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. I came to know 
firsthand the depth of his commitment to the Navy and his abiding 
devotion to the people who make our Navy the greatest Navy in the 
world.
  Much has been and will be written about Mike Boorda and the tragedy 
his death represents. I cannot begin to understand the totality of what 
was involved in producing this tragedy. There are some things I do 
know, however, because it was my privilege to know Mike Boorda. As a 
frank, honest, straightforward witness and as an advocate for a better 
life for the people who make up our armed forces, the most respected 
segment of our society, he was superb.
  From personal experience I know him to care enough to find time in an 
incredibly busy schedule to focus on individual personnel problems. He 
did so to insure that fairness was done to a member of the Navy family 
whom he believed had not been dealt with justly.
  Much has been said about the V insignia he wore for a time in his 
decorations he pinned on his chest. I claim no expertise on the subject 
of military decorations and insignia. The only decoration I am sure I 
received after my service in the Air Force during the Korean conflict 
was a Good Conduct Medal. What I do know is that Mike Boorda would 
never, never seek to dissemble or pose as that which he was not. I not 
only do not know, I am not interested in pursuing, the arcane

[[Page H5362]]

question of was he or was he not technically entitled to wear a V on 
his ribbons under the terms of military regulations in effect at some 
point in time.
  Also I am not interested in whether a former chief of naval 
operations was officially empowered to authorize the wearing of a V for 
all Navy personnel involved in combat operations during the Vietnam 
war.
  What I do know, because I knew Mike Boorda, is that he would not have 
knowingly put on his chest anything to which he was not entitled to put 
there. The Mike Boorda I knew did not dissemble. He was truthful, so 
respectful of doing what was right, that the idea that he could falsely 
proclaim himself a hero is unthinkable.
  Last Thursday, one of the most miserable days of my life, I could not 
come to the floor of the House and talk about the tragic end of Mike 
Boorda. At that time, and based on the information available, I just 
could not accept that my friend Mike Boorda, so full of energy and 
confidence, so sensitive to making life better for the sailors of the 
United States Navy, could have taken his life.
  Dear Mike, a great poet spoke of one who loved greatly but not 
wisely. You were so wise, so devoted, so consumed with duty, honoring 
country, that in your sense of duty and propriety you took extreme 
measures that were not wise or even reasonable, but it was all out of 
your love for the Navy.
  From those of us that knew you and knew your passion for protecting 
the interest of the people who make up our armed services, you would 
never have had to fear that we would not have defended your honor. My 
confidence in you and trust in your dedication to duty, honoring 
country, make it so difficult to either accept or understand the 
tragedy that took you from us.

  God bless you, Mike Boorda, and your loving family.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like now to read the brief remarks of Jim 
Kincaid, news anchor of WVEC-TV in Hampton, VA, concerning Mike Boorda 
and the tragedy of his death. His words have great meaning, and I quote 
them now.

       ``When a person of great value leaves our midst, 
     particularly voluntarily . . . we usually search for reasons 
     . . . and we hardly ever find any that are really 
     satisfactory.
       ``Admiral, Mike Boorda didn't need to take his own life . . 
     . according to what we know of him.
       ``Those of us who did know about him, and his career, would 
     not have thought any the less of him if questions had been 
     raised about one or two of his military decorations. 
     Particularly those of us who know the difference.
       ``Whether he was entitled, technically, to wear a 
     decoration for valor, his record plainly shows that he was a 
     valorous man, as brave as any of us, and far braver than 
     most.
       ``But, in a world where we seem to feel that our heroes 
     must be flawless, and where a certain sort among us hunts for 
     flaws like a bounty hunter after a bank robber, some flaws 
     will surface, even among the best of us. And Mike Boorda was 
     one of the best of us.
       ``He was, through and through, a military man, a follower 
     of the military code of duty, honor, country.
       ``Such men have, down through the ages, chosen to fall on 
     their swords rather than dishonor their comrades. Today, the 
     technology may have changed, but the passion remains.
       ``We don't know what brought him to yesterday's terrible 
     decision.
       ``We can be sure that it was generated, at least in part, 
     by our society's appetite for gossip, and scandal.
       ``And, like any appetite that is indulged to excess, it can 
     have very unhealthy results, and very costly ones.
       ``The death of this fine sailor is just such a case.''

  Mr. Speaker, I now ask leave to have printed in the Record an 
editorial from the Wall Street Journal of today and an op-ed piece 
written by former Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, respecting our 
dear and departed friend Mike Boorda.
  The articles referred to are as follows:

         [From the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, May 21, 1996]

                           The Navy's Enemies

                            (By John Lehman)

       In 1981 Capt. Jeremy ``Mike'' Boorda was my acting 
     assistant secretary for manpower. He was so effective and 
     such an advocate for sailors and their families that I 
     pressed him to stay permanently on my staff. But the fleet 
     was his life, and he pressed for orders back to sea. One of 
     his many creative solutions in that period was a program of 
     special bonuses for aviators, who had been leaving the Navy 
     in droves during the Carter years of naval decline. Mike was 
     their advocate, we adopted his idea, and it worked. He was 
     first a sailor; he only came ashore to champion the sailors 
     against the bureaucrats. He had ``come up through the hawse 
     pipe,'' the first enlisted sailor ever to become chief of 
     naval operations. How such a great human being could be 
     brought to the point of ending his life is a question of 
     national magnitude.


                         the tailhook firestorm

       No one gives credence to the trivial issue of ribbons, 
     which his Vietnam superior, Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, says he earned 
     in any case. They may have been the final straw, but they 
     were not the cause. With eerie parallels to the death of 
     former Navy Secretary James Forrestal 47 years ago, Adm. 
     Boorda was driven to his death by a relentless lynch mob that 
     has hounded the U.S. Navy, especially for the past five 
     years.
       The triggering event was of course the Tailhook convention 
     of 1991. The reported sexual harassment was a shameful 
     aberration by some, perhaps dozens of individuals. But even 
     the usual excesses of an annual party which began at a time 
     when hundreds of Tailhook members a year were being killed in 
     Vietnam, had become incompatible with a peacetime Navy 
     struggling to include women aviators. What should have been 
     at most a week's story instead ignited a firestorm that has 
     been consuming the Navy ever since.
       The Navy employs more than a million people, who perform 
     their jobs all over the world around the clock. Naturally, 
     this group reflects some of the failings of the population at 
     large. There will always be a few bad actors and a lot of 
     mistakes. Yet the rates of crime, cheating, drug abuse and 
     other misconduct are far lower in the Navy than in civilian 
     institutions, as one has a right to expect. And the endless 
     media exposes have revealed nothing that has not happened in 
     the other services in other times.
       Why then has the Navy continued to be the center of the 
     investigative media? Because it is payback time. The Navy, 
     its carriers and its aviators did indeed have a very high 
     profile in the Reagan years, and as the movie ``Top Gun'' 
     illustrated, naval aviators are not known for great humility. 
     Many outsiders resented their bonuses, their glamour and 
     their publicity and were glad to see Tailhook cut them down a 
     few pegs. When the story broke in the middle of a 
     presidential campaign in which the gender gap was already an 
     issue, it was sure to ignite.
       It was sure also to have faded after the election but for 
     the fact that the new president, who in his younger days said 
     proudly that he ``loathed'' the military, brought in an 
     administration staffed by former war protesters who largely 
     shared the prejudices of those in the anti-Navy lynch mob. 
     Thus instead of dying out, the firestorm grew, fanned and 
     encouraged at the highest level. The White House commissars 
     of political correctness began enforcing standards for 
     military promotion. Attendance at Tailhook, regardless of 
     behavior, became sufficient to deny promotion. The Senate 
     Armed Services Committee and especially its staff, full of 
     Navy grudges and personal scores to settle, joined in the 
     persecution. Add to these factions the more extreme wings of 
     the feminist and gay movements. They piled on because the 
     Navy has epitomized to them what they see as the homophobic, 
     macho culture of the military, and they see a great 
     opportunity to bring it down.
       Henry Kissinger used to say that even paranoids have some 
     real enemies. This adage aptly describes the Navy. There are 
     important interest groups that wish to pull the Navy down. 
     Take the organization that was sifting through Adm. Boorda's 
     records, the National Security News Service, part of the 
     left-wing archipelago of tax-exempt think tanks. The talking 
     heads from these antidefense lobbies who are now attacking 
     the character of Navy leaders were the very same talking 
     heads who spent the 1980s extolling the Soviet economy, 
     blaming America for the Cold War, and attacking the Reagan 
     naval buildup.
       Throughout those years Newsweek, the journal pursuing the 
     recent story on Adm. Boorda, was ever a willing conduit for 
     their bogus studies and mean-spirited attacks. It is not 
     coincidental that the magazine published one phony expose 
     after another--alleging that Tomahawk missiles wouldn't work, 
     that Aegis cruisers would tip over, that aircraft carriers 
     couldn't survive; anything and everything that would 
     discredit the U.S. Navy. Newsweek's entire editorial crusade 
     of the 1980s has been discredited by events. All those Navy 
     programs did work, the Cold War was won, and Iraq was kicked 
     out of Kuwait. Now Newsweek's editors seem bent on impugning 
     the character of the Navy's leaders. They are sore losers 
     indeed.
       Add to the Navy begrudgers certain entrenched bureaucrats 
     in the Defense Department. Their anti-Navy bias has permeated 
     the Pentagon since before the Reagan era. They have been a 
     steady source of tips to witch-hunting journalists. They have 
     also used this period of Navy weakness to cancel most of the 
     modernization programs for naval aviation: the A-12, the A6F, 
     new engines for the F-14, and many others. Little wonder the 
     aircraft accident rate has sharply increased.
       As a result of this onslaught, 14 admirals have now been 
     cashiered and more than 300 naval aviators have had their 
     careers ended, all without even a semblance of due process. 
     Thousands more are leaving the service in disgust. Fifty-
     three percent of postcommand aviator commanders resigned last 
     year. These are the best of the best and won't be replaceable 
     for a generation, yet the inquisition continues. Yes, 
     terrible things happened

[[Page H5363]]

     in Tailhook, and certainly those kinds of abuses have to be 
     rooted out. But it is despicable to abandon due process, the 
     chain of command and any sensible approach to fairness, 
     ruining so many careers in the process.
       The Stan Arthur case is a classic example, repealed 
     hundreds of times at lesser and less visible grades. He flew 
     more than 300 combat missions in Vietnam and led the Navy 
     forces in Desert Storm. An impeccable career. A leader who 
     really inspired young kids in the service. He was asked as 
     vice chief to review a decision denying a female helicopter 
     pilot her designation. He came to the conclusion that she 
     could not meet the qualifications. For that he was cashiered, 
     because everybody was afraid--afraid of Pat Schroeder and her 
     McCarthyite slurs, afraid of the White House commissars, 
     afraid of the media.


                          a dangerous calling

       The Navy is not just another bureaucracy in the government. 
     Naval service is a dangerous calling that requires the 
     highest professional standards to defend the U.S. and its 
     interests. What an outrage that we are cashiering and 
     promoting people based on reasons that have nothing to do 
     with their readiness to fight the conflicts of this country.
       Fifteen years ago and after, I came in for my share of 
     abuse. But as a presidential appointee I was supposed to be 
     politically accountable. Generally my successors and I give 
     as good as we get: I for instance can afford libel lawyers. 
     The new and ugly phase of recent years, however, has brought 
     career officers into the line of fire for the first time--and 
     a viciously personal fire it is. Career professionals are not 
     prepared or trained for it, they lack the means to defend 
     against it, and they don't deserve it. We can only hope that 
     Mike Boorda's tragic death will awaken some basic decency in 
     our leadership and the crusade will end before it does 
     irreparable damage to our nation's defense.
                                                                    ____


         [From the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, May 21, 1996]

                            Mike Boorda, RIP

       We say ``nuts'' to the medals teapot; we're going to 
     remember Admiral Boorda for what he did to the Serbs' jets.
       Before he was called back to the Navy's CNO, Admiral Boorda 
     was the commander of NATO forces in southern Europe, which is 
     to say the top U.S. commander involved in the conflict in 
     Bosnia. One day he found himself in authority, perhaps 
     through some oversight at the U.N., just as Serbian jets were 
     flouting the U.N.'s ban on their flights. So he ordered them 
     shot down, just as they were starting bombing runs on 
     population centers.
       Similarly, when Cuban MiGs shot down American-owned planes 
     over international waters, his first reaction, according to a 
     good source, was: where are my Tomahawk shooters. In the end, 
     of course, the U.S. did not launch Tomahawk cruise missiles 
     at Cuban airfields, nor did the Boorda airstrike end the war 
     in Bosnia. But shooting down four Serbian jets was the most 
     vigorous action anyone at NATO or the U.N. took against a 
     particularly disgusting aggressor.
       Mike Boorda, in short, had more than the usual ration of 
     political courage, which makes his suicide all the more 
     perplexing and mysterious. By the weekend, the media had 
     pretty much exhausted the tempest over the medals and got 
     around to the main issue: Tailhook, and the pressures still 
     radiating through the Navy under Commander in Chief Bill 
     Clinton.
       Good military officers don't shift blame for breakdowns on 
     their watch, and Admiral Boorda bore the brunt for what the 
     political furies of Tailhook did to the careers of Admiral 
     Stanley Arthur, Commander Robert Stumpf and many others less 
     prominent. The legendary Admiral Arthur's promotion to the 
     Pacific Command fell through on Admiral Boorda's watch. In an 
     interview after he had agreed to pull the plug on the 
     promotion, the CNO said: ``Certainly Stan Arthur is paying a 
     penalty. And the country's paying a penalty. He's not serving 
     in a job where he would have been superb.''
       That incident is being revisited in the suicide's 
     aftermath. The Navy command withdrew the nomination after 
     Senator Dave Durenberger, of all people, made Admiral Arthur 
     the target of feminists for supporting an instructor's 
     decision that a female pilot was below standard and should 
     not fly. In fact, the decision to wreck Admiral Arthur's 
     career was assented to by the Secretary of Defense, the 
     Secretary of the Navy, the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs and 
     the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
       This is the same Armed Services Committee, under Sam Nunn, 
     that held a secret session to waive through the nomination 
     of John Dalton to be Secretary of Navy amid questions 
     raised about Mr. Dalton's dealings during the 1980s in the 
     Texas S&L industry. Mr. Dalton, who later worked for 
     Stephens Inc. of Arkansas, vehemently denies any 
     wrongdoing, and the solons of the Senate get red-faced at 
     the suggestion that they gave Mr. Dalton special 
     treatment. And indeed it's not a widely known story. But 
     ask the next Naval officer you meet if he knows about it.
       This year, with Tailhook's eternal bonfire still burning, 
     Secretary Dalton withdrew the promotion of Commander Robert 
     Stumpf, even after his own investigation had cleared the 
     commander of any Tailhook taint. Admiral Boorda was on the 
     bridge for that one, too. Earlier in the process, Admiral 
     Boorda tried to help Commander Stumpf, but he couldn't. 
     Instead he was directed to withdraw Commander Stumpf's 
     nomination. When asked this Sunday morning about his 
     department's handling of these personnel matters, Navy 
     Secretary Dalton said, ``I feel good about the decisions 
     we've made.
       The attitude within the Navy is no doubt captured by former 
     Navy Secretary John Lehman in his article nearby. James Webb, 
     another former Secretary, delivered a searing speech at the 
     Naval Academy last month, speaking of ``the destruction of 
     the careers of some of the finest aviators in the Navy based 
     on hearsay and unsubstantiated allegations.'' He wondered 
     ``what admiral has had the courage to risk his own career by 
     putting his stars on the table, and defending the integrity 
     of the process and of his people?''
       For some reason, this country does not have a tradition of 
     honorable resignation on principle, as exists elsewhere. 
     America's government is a huge and hugely powerful force, and 
     its high officials, even as they disagree bitterly, tend to 
     let it sweep them forward. It might be healthier for all if 
     on occasion they said what they truthfully felt, and quit.
       Admiral Boorda left behind a single-page note addressed to 
     ``the sailors.'' The Pentagon's story is that releasing this 
     note is a decision for the family, and sympathy for their 
     tragedy is appropriate. The fact remains that the Navy as an 
     institution has been rocked to its foundations, and if Mike 
     Boorda had something to say about that, everyone serving in 
     the Navy should be entitled to read it.
       Today there will be a memorial service for Admiral Boorda, 
     and President Bill Clinton will deliver the eulogy over his 
     career and life.

                          ____________________