CHAPTER 13

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

It was all over but the sniping.

In November 1992, Bill Clinton went on to win the White House—illegitimately, many groused. Clinton had garnered only 43 percent of the total ballots cast (3 percent fewer than had Mike Dukakis during his loss four years before). But the math cut both ways. Third-party spoiler Ross Perot, it turned out, had siphoned more votes from Bush than he had from Clinton, helping to open the door for the Democrats.

“The old order passeth, a new generation riseth,” Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan would observe in a New York Times column two days after Clinton’s win. It was simply time, she said, for the coming of the Boomers, a designation that applied to many members of the press as well: “They want a new story, a new headline, new news. They love their country; they want change; they’re sick unto death of Republicans. (Note to the Clinton staff: your new friends have built you up for a steep fall.)”

Clinton, more to the point, had appealed to voters as a new-wave leader, one who, in marketing vernacular, “reflected the electorate.” The down-home working-class southern boy with a Rhodes Scholarship appealed to the proles and the progressives, the centrists and the lefties, the LGBT voters and the minority voters, the single moms and the soccer moms and the single soccer moms and dads.¹ “We all live with contradictions,” observes legal scholar Joan Williams, the founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law, at UC Hastings in San Francisco. “In my view, Bill Clinton is still a hard-living, working-class guy. He was bringing that with him [to the general election], including the sleeping around. And then, on top of that, and partially integrated—he’s what I call a class migrant. [As] a class migrant, you present as ‘upper-middle-class, professional-managerial.’ [But] there’s actually nothing ‘middle’ about them.” Once Clinton and Hillary Rodham became a couple, as Williams sees it, she helped to further integrate Bill’s transition into this social stratum.

“He was able to embody these two parts,” she says. “That’s why he won. He was a feminist, but it didn’t erase his hard-living, good ol’ boy origins. Johnson was a good ol’ boy. Carter was a good ol’ boy. By the time that Clinton came along, he was not only a good ol’ boy—and therefore countered the Republican southern strategy—but he was also a good ol’ working-class boy.”

Good or bad, ol’ or new: he was the people’s choice. And the cultural and social shifts commenced the very week he became president. “We have heard the trumpets,” said the sax-player president upon taking the oath of office. “We have changed the guard.”

Clinton went to work, pen in hand. On his third day as president—the twentieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade—he reversed the moratorium on the use of fetal tissue samples in experiments that many believed would eventually help treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s. He struck down a directive that had prohibited government money from going to overseas health groups known to propose abortion as an option when advising women about fertility and family.2 He threw out “the Bush ‘gag’ rule” that, as Clinton would later describe it, “[barred] abortion counseling at family planning clinics that receive federal funds,” a rule that effectively forbade “clinics from telling pregnant women—often frightened, young, and alone—about an option the Supreme Court had declared a constitutional right.”

This was Clinton in full battle array, taking command of the culture war.

He diligently and deliberately set the social clock ahead, establishing a parity agenda that, as it turned out, would grant women greater latitude in their health decisions and would begin to create a semblance of equity between the sexes and among various sectors and classes of society. With every passing month, his administration would push plans that curbed everything from sex discrimination to sexual harassment in the workplace to gender equality in schools. Clinton put his own spin on “family values”: expanding education reform, slashing the price tag of college loans, opening up “empowerment zones” in low-income communities, granting workers more flexibility to care for loved ones during times of need (the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act), and attempting to set up a comprehensive health care program (a failed effort spearheaded by Hillary Clinton). The president’s influential labor secretary Robert Reich would head up a three-year Glass Ceiling Commission to examine obstacles to advancement faced by female and minority workers. (In the early 1990s, by some accounts, all but 5 to 10 percent of senior management slots in corporate America were held by Caucasian men.)

In perhaps his strongest rebuke of the Christian right, Clinton twice vetoed a law that came to his desk that would have outlawed so-called partial-birth abortion.3 He also encouraged the FDA to reconsider the U.S. embargo of the French “abortion pill” RU-486, and the agency, on his watch, would end up approving the drug’s use.

His agenda dovetailed with decisions in the courts and statutes from the Congress. During Clinton’s tenure, key legal rulings would run the gamut from penalizing universities that discriminated against female athletes to helping establish codes that would give workers and employers a system for identifying unwarranted sexual advances or incidents of harassment. Lawmakers would pass legislation, supported by the president, to aid victims of sexual and domestic violence (the Violence Against Women Act, proposed by Senator Joe Biden). Clinton signed the so-called Oprah Bill—the National Child Protection Act of 1993—with Ms. Winfrey (herself abused as a child) leaning over his shoulder. The act would set up a nationwide database listing perpetrators of violent acts and sex crimes. Initiatives during Clinton’s tenure ranged from the Gender Equity in Education Act to National Pay Inequity Awareness Day, from garnishing the wages of deadbeat dads, to extending benefits for family leave, to overhauling the adoption and foster-care systems. Clinton signed into law an act that provided safety at entrances to family planning centers and championed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act to make it easier to prosecute violent acts against LGBT people. And all the while, the president made it a priority to place women, minorities, and gay men and women in visible leadership posts.

The shifts were neither subtle nor cosmetic. They were sweeping and for the most part irradicable. Bill Clinton—who during his campaign had promised to set up a government that “looks like America”—was doing just that. He was addressing imbalances in the nation’s social, familial, and gender power schemes in ways that were striking and new—and a threat to the defenders of “traditional values.” And as the decade played out, virtually every cultural calamity that the conservatives had forewarned would come to pass.

The changes began almost from the moment Clinton settled into the West Wing. But that very first week, he was hit with a culture-war broadside. The confrontation became known by its sound bite: “gays in the military.”

Absolutely no one in the administration had sought to make such a hot-button issue a priority, especially during week one. If Clinton—considered history’s first gay-rights-prone president—wanted to make points on this score, surely he might have focused instead on marriage equality. Or violence against members of the LGBT community.4 Or increased funding for battling AIDS. But circumstance, not logic, often dictates the West Wing calendar. The previous November a federal judge had decreed that the military’s rules banning LGBT service members violated the Constitution. The ruling, as described by Senator Barney Frank in his memoir, Frank, had forced Clinton’s hand, ensuring that during his first weeks as president “[his] administration would be required either to appeal the decision, that is, defend the ban, or abolish it by executive order.”

At the same time, the fight over homosexuals fighting in the armed forces was part of a synchronous drift that had riled social conservatives and spread through the courts. In the previous year, more and more members of the military were proudly and publicly coming out—and then being sacked because of it. A handful of highly visible cases revolved around lesbian and gay individuals in the uniformed services who had sued after being outed and then dismissed. An antigay propaganda film was passed around like samizdat among key lawmakers, clergy, and military leaders. According to scholar Nathaniel Frank, in the definitive book on the subject, Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, dubious antigay research papers were being commissioned, providing statistical fodder for both the Pentagon brass and religious advocates of a gay service ban. Some studies described “typical” homosexuals as antiauthority, sybaritic, and disposed to disease.

To amp things up, there was an effort by right-wing religious leaders “to mobilize social conservatives against gay service,” writes Frank. “Even before Clinton’s inauguration… [the Reverend Jerry] Falwell began a ‘dial-a-lobby’ operation, using his Old-Time Gospel Hour program to generate 24,000 signatures on a petition against gay service in a matter of hours. As a result, a week after the inauguration, Congress was besieged with 434,000 phone calls in a single day, overwhelmingly against letting gays serve.”

The issue, to be sure, was in the air. In the earliest days of the presidential race, Clinton had declared that he disagreed with the policy that barred homosexuals from joining up or that required a soldier’s dismissal if he or she later came out or was revealed to be gay or lesbian. “If they want to serve their country,” the candidate had said, “they ought to be able to do it openly.”5

Clinton’s stance was political kryptonite. Most of the Pentagon’s commanders—not to mention the rank and file—forcefully disapproved. Many congressional leaders, some of them combat vets, did too.

In Clinton’s corner, however, were several notables. One was the independent-minded Barry Goldwater, the former Republican senator from Arizona—and the GOP’s 1964 presidential nominee—who had helped found the modern conservative movement. “Gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar,” he asserted in the Washington Post. “You don’t need to be ‘straight’ to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.” Other Clinton allies included the incoming senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, as well as Senator John Kerry, the decorated Vietnam veteran who would later run for president and serve as Obama’s secretary of state.

If Clinton’s culture-clash foes saw a battle they could win, hands down, it was this one. The president, for all the leverage he held on other fronts, had yet to earn a whit of respect on military matters. He was perceived (inaccurately) as being unschooled in foreign affairs. He had strenuously objected to the Vietnam War, a conflict in which many commanding officers had fought with distinction. He had gone to great lengths to avoid the service as a young man—behavior that didn’t sit well with troops in an all-volunteer military. And he was the first commander in chief in half a century with no tangible connection to World War II.

It was more than a sore point, then, when he received a request right as he came into office. The Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) wanted to air their views on this very matter.6 It was a showdown Clinton had tried to avoid. Since the November election there had been many prep sessions between the incoming Clinton team and members of Congress and the military to try and reach some form of consensus on the subject. Options had been presented and hashed over. But the state of play remained strained and inconclusive. Time reported that the head of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, had signaled he might bolt if his new boss lifted the ban unilaterally; Newsweek reported that all of the chiefs might step down.

Clinton’s Machiavellian radar detected a setup. Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican, was then the Senate minority leader.⁷ In a sign that there would be no Clinton honeymoon, Dole threatened to tack a gays-in-the-military ban onto whatever bill the White House first sent to the Congress. The president had the authority, by the powers of his office, to lift the ban. But such a maneuver by Dole would effectively pluck an executive prerogative from the president’s grasp. The senator went on Meet the Press and issued a shot across Clinton’s bow, invoking the separation of powers. Dole cautioned the president against forcing the Senate to override him: “There are other things you can do by executive order that wouldn’t blow the lid off the Capitol.”

Clinton, when looking back on the first cultural incursion of his presidency, said he believed that Dole “clearly wanted this to be the defining issue of my first weeks in office.… By raising the issue early, and repeatedly, he guaranteed it so much publicity that it appeared I was working on little else.” In that, Dole succeeded. And as the president filled in his postinaugural datebook, legislators worked the phones and took to the airwaves. “Congressional resistance,” wrote the New York Times, had broken into “open revolt.”

On January 25—day six of Clinton’s first week in office—he called an afternoon meeting with the Joint Chiefs. They were led by General Colin Powell and Clinton’s incoming defense secretary, Les Aspin, a supporter of lifting the ban. At precisely 4:30 p.m. the generals took their places in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Clinton, however, didn’t show until around 6:30, according to one of those in attendance, Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill “Tony” McPeak. “We were all on time and got to cool our heels for two hours,” McPeak would remember in an interview for A Complicated Man, Michael Takiff’s oral history of the life and times of Bill Clinton. “It was maddening. I had things to do.”

Clinton asked his generals for their frank opinions. And one after the other, the men in uniform spelled out the reasons for their opposition. Privacy concerns were “paramount,” according to a report by Eric Schmitt two days later in the New York Times. “Unlike civilians who go home after their work is done, many service personnel live together in barracks, ships or in tents.” There were worries about everything from unit cohesion, to the deterioration of command structure, to an infusion, as the Times put it, of “an element of sexual tension and anxiety [that might] undermine the teamwork necessary for efficient military operations.”

Among the most adamant voices in the room was that of Carl Mundy, the commandant of the Marine Corps. As Clinton recounted, “He was concerned about more than appearances and practicalities. He believed that homosexuality was immoral, and that if gays were permitted to serve openly, the military would be condoning immoral behavior.” (Servicemen sounded a similar theme, the Times noted after the meeting. Writing in that month’s edition of the Marine Corps Gazette, Sergeant Major S. H. Mellinger went so far as to state, “The Bible has a very clear and specific message towards homosexuals: ‘Those that practice such things are worthy of death.’” If the ban were to be lifted, some Marines suggested, it might be better to dissolve the corps altogether than to appear to endorse such dishonor.)

Colin Powell, who had been the JCS chairman during the allies’ overwhelming victory in the ’91 Gulf War, argued that it would be a grave error to shake things up. A policy reversal, he said, might be “prejudicial to good order and discipline.” But then he switched tack and suggested a middle ground, and a plan began to emerge. “[Powell] raised an alternative that he’d been discussing with Aspin,” George Stephanopoulos would recall in his memoir. “‘Stop asking and stop pursuing,’ he called it.”

McPeak would remember proposing a notion along the same lines: “I even used the words, ‘Let’s have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.’ We said we were willing to do that, we recommended it. We could make his political day easy. At the time, to enter the armed forces, there was a form you had to sign at the recruiting station, and one question was, ‘Are you a homosexual?’ We said, ‘We’ll stop asking the question.’”8

The president seemed genuinely pleased and open to the proposal. This new formula let some air out of the balloon and, in true Clintonian fashion, it accommodated diametrically opposed viewpoints. He assured the Joint Chiefs, however, that he wasn’t waffling. One way or another, he said, he was going to open the path for gays and lesbians to have a secure place within the armed forces. They had been fighting and dying for their nation since the War of Independence. They were owed the honor of serving. “I want to work with you on this,” he said, signaling the inevitable. Powell and the brass agreed to meet him halfway.

As the meeting broke, McPeak would recount to oral historian Michael Takiff, the president “came around the table and grabbed me by the shoulders. He said, ‘Tony, you should have been a lawyer’—I guess thinking that was a compliment, which it isn’t. But I came out of there feeling ten feet tall, like you always do with Clinton. The guy’s so charming, you fall in love. It isn’t until the next morning you realize you had too much chocolate.”

The Joint Chiefs had expressed not only reservations but firm disfavor. Yet they were duty-bound to follow the dictates of their president. Some of those in the room even believed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” might actually prove to be workable. As McPeak would later put it, “We left on great terms. Every guy on our side of the table came out of there thinking, ‘This is a great guy. Good ol’ boy from Arkansas. Hell yes, he understands. He’s our kind of guy.’”9

But the spirit of compromise was gone in a flash. The next morning, according to Takiff, National Public Radio would report, “White House aides say they’re… angry over what they call insubordination by the Joint Chiefs of Staff”—even though their commander had asked for their points of view, unfiltered. The JCS, said McPeak, felt blindsided.

The stress level rose as the week wore on. Clinton next held a cabinet room session with Democrats who served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, a formidable group responsible for military oversight. Their perspectives—and backing—would be critical. Clinton canvassed each senator in succession over the course of two hours.

Sam Nunn, the committee chairman, was dead set against Clinton’s stand and made the point that lifting the ban too quickly might incite acts of antigay rage within the ranks: “If you did it overnight, I’d fear for the lives of people in the military.” In contrast, Senators Edward Kennedy (the brother of a president) and Chuck Robb (the son-in-law of a president) supported lifting the ban. But the man who left the most indelible impression that day was West Virginia’s Robert Byrd. A Democratic warhorse and the unofficial historian of the Senate (as well as a repentant ex-member of the KKK), Byrd would engage with eleven presidents during his career, going on to serve longer than any senator in American history. His opinion held gravitas. He was the last to address the group. And instead of remaining seated, as his colleagues had, he rose and scanned his audience.

“The fingertips of his left hand rested lightly on the table,” as George Stephanopoulos would describe the scene in his autobiography, “his right hand clutched the buttons of his jacket—a classic orator’s pose. Rome was where he began.” Ted Kennedy, in his memoir True Compass, would relate how Byrd had opened with a discussion of homosexual conduct in antiquity: “He informed us, with many ornate flourishes, that there had been a terrible problem in ancient Rome with young military boys being turned into sex slaves. I don’t remember the exact details, but I think the story involved Tiberius Julius Caesar being captured and abused.… And then years later he sought vengeance and killed his captors.”

In another account of the meeting, by historian Taylor Branch10 (reconstructed from audiotapes he had made with Clinton during his presidency), Byrd, according to Clinton, had insisted that “homosexuality was a sin. It was unnatural. God didn’t like it. The Army shouldn’t want it, and Byrd could never accept such a bargain with the devil. Clinton [recalled that] this classical foray rocked everyone back in their seats.… Some senators noted that the Roman emperors won brutal wars for centuries while indulging in every imaginable vice. (Augustus Caesar ravaged both sexes, wrote the gossipy Suetonius, and softened the hair on his legs with red-hot walnut shells.) Byrd invoked Bible passages.… There were sharp stabs of tension, leavened with astonishment at such a debate between senators and a brand-new president. ‘I couldn’t tell,’ said Clinton, ‘whether Teddy Kennedy was going to start giggling or jump out the window.’”

Byrd’s point was not that the ancient Romans had allowed homosexuality. He was arguing that their empire had fallen because their decadent behavior had corrupted the state from within, leading to the civilization’s collapse. “Rome fell,” said Byrd, “when discipline gave way to luxury and ease.”

After a long silence, Clinton rose from his seat. “His response,” according to Kennedy’s account, was commanding and brusque. “‘Well,’ [the president] said, ‘Moses went up to the mountain, and he came back with the tablets and there were ten commandments on those tablets. I’ve read those commandments. I know what they say, just like I know you do. And nowhere in those ten commandments will you find anything about homosexuality. Thank y’all for coming.’ He ended the meeting and walked out of the room.”

Soldiers… Romans… Countrymen… The so-called gays-in-the-military ban consumed Washington for weeks. And after much back-and-forth, the Congress, the military high command, and the president agreed on a Clintonian compromise: they would suspend the decision. The president agreed to delay any plan’s implementation for half a year in order to canvass stakeholders’ positions and move cautiously toward a final presidential directive.

As Nathaniel Frank would recount the onslaught in Unfriendly Fire, the National Association of Evangelicals and a phalanx of military chaplains worked overtime to block any policy shift: “Brigadier General Richard Abel, head of the Campus Crusade of Christ’s military ministry… equated homosexuality with selfishness.” The Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, according to Frank, drafted a directive to the president decreeing that “homosexuals are notoriously promiscuous… perverted… pedophiles” and wondering about blood-spattered battlefields in the age of AIDS. And on it went.

Alarmist, dire, and ragingly homophobic, these Klaxons rang on deaf ears. Six months to the day after he took office, Clinton began to implement what came to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The new arrangement allowed closeted homosexual or bisexual members of the U.S. military to continue to serve. It purported to penalize those who might harass or discriminate against servicemen and -women because of their sexual orientation. And it forbade openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual men and women from serving in or joining the armed forces (or from engaging in homosexual acts, as service members, on or off duty and on or off base), since, according to the statutory language, “the presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.”

It was convoluted. It was tortured. It was a disaster. It would codify a two-tiered setup that unfairly disadvantaged gays and lesbians, according to a subsequent legal review commissioned by the Center for Sexual Minorities in the Military.11 The policy, so the study argued, would deny victims of discrimination or abuse from having a legitimate procedure for redress—in effect tabling their constitutional right to equal protection. And it would set in motion, in the words of the center’s director, Aaron Belkin, “a system that gives a wink and a nod to anti-gay harassment.”

Clinton took flak from virtually all sides, most notably from LGBT activists and opinion-makers. Indeed, in 2014—two decades after the adoption of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—the New York Times’ assessment was that the program was “widely viewed as among the most significant setbacks the gay rights movement has encountered.”

“If you look at the history of the gay movement,” arts arbiter Ingrid Sischy would tell me, apropos of the policy, “what is at stake when one has to hide and lie? The fact that Clinton’s first act when he became president was to put people back in the position of lying? I speak not just for the gay audience but… for the audience in general: this idea was a terrible disappointment, and I think [it signaled] the beginning of a loss of faith in politics. I really believe it. It was also a manifestation of a return to lying—and hiding—about sex… It kind of institutionalized lying about sex.”

Clinton, for all the grief he received through the years, had nevertheless managed to take a position. He had been committed to forcing the issue. He had managed to tease out the consensus-building and decision-making process over the course of many months. And to do so he had moved bureaucratic mountains: persuading two recalcitrant, historically hetero, indeed macho, institutions to seriously (if obliquely) address the social ramifications of sexual orientation. He got no credit for these efforts, least of all from leaders of the LGBT community, many of whom came to regard their supposed advocate as a sellout. Clinton’s edict, in the eyes of leading gay and lesbian advocates, was as discriminatory, shameful, and shaming (if not more so) than the framework it was meant to replace.

In ’90s America, the bridge to such acceptance and tolerance had been a bridge too far. And it would take a decade or more before two larger truths became evident, at least as far as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was concerned. First, when hidebound sectors of society conscientiously object to changes imposed upon them by a transformation in the wider culture, it sometimes takes byzantine means to justify ineluctable ends. Second, discrimination is discrimination. Writer Nathaniel Frank would identify a telling comment by Senator Howard Metzenbaum, the Ohio Democrat. When presented with poll numbers suggesting that as many as one-half to three-quarters of American troops did not believe that their openly gay peers should serve among them, the senator had responded, “So what?” Metzenbaum’s point was simple: no opinion polls were needed when the Pentagon was deciding to freely admit blacks or women. The generals back then had simply decided to do the right thing.

Over the subsequent two decades, new attitudes and new laws regarding sexual orientation would evolve as the culture, the nation’s leaders, and the military evolved. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama would make the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” a campaign pledge. By then, a majority of Americans supported his call to rescind a system that, all told, had required the dismissal of fourteen thousand servicemen and -women. The cost to the Pentagon (and the American taxpayer) by one estimate: upwards of $364 million—not to mention all the reputations upended, loyalties betrayed, and careers shortchanged.

The policy would be abandoned in 2011. Four years later, the Pentagon would begin to have its first serious discussions about permitting transgender Americans to serve their country.