[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.
____________________