Embarrassments in the Making
JANUARY 1989
DEFENSE PERSONNEL SECURITY RESEARCH
AND EDUCATION CENTER
MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA
Seventy-eight-year-old Ted Sarbin had spent a lifetime conducting psychological research both as an academic scholar and a government adviser. A professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, his resume was thirty pages long, listing copious honors and prestigious publications. In 1979, at the request of the Naval Post Graduate School, he had developed a long thesis on military deception that became the basis of a book on the subject. After the Walker and Moscow embassy spy scandals, when the Defense Department recognized that it needed to improve its security regulations, the Defense Personnel Security Research and Education Center (PERSEREC) chose Sarbin to serve as its senior civilian adviser, along with PERSEREC’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kenneth Karols, a Navy captain.
For all the intriguing research Sarbin had conducted in his nearly six decades in academe, he still found the question he had been studying for PERSEREC since 1987 uniquely fascinating: Did homosexuals represent security risks? And if so, should they be screened out of positions requiring clearances, including the military?
Sarbin had spent much of his career developing elaborate theories of “social constructionism,” or how societies interpret various phenomena. The phenomenon of homosexuality was a nearly perfect example of social interpretation overriding fact. Homosexuality, Sarbin concluded, was biologically determined, most probably in the human embryo, but certainly within the first years of life. The fact that homosexuality appears in all mammal species also indicated that the trait could not be considered “unnatural,” at least in the strictly biological sense. There was no evidence that gays had a unique psychological predisposition to betray their countries, or were any less able to observe others’ privacy, or to avoid inappropriate sexual advances; it was the social construction of homosexuality, not homosexuals themselves, that was responsible for such fears.
Sarbin began writing his conclusions as an official PERSEREC report. Current military policies succeeded in identifying only an “infinitesimal percentage” of gays who served in the military, he wrote. He also suggested that official fears about disruption in the military’s “good order, discipline and morale” were unfounded: “The order to integrate blacks was first met with stout resistance by traditionalists in the military establishment,” he wrote. “Dire consequences were predicted for maintaining discipline, building group morale, and achieving military organizational goals. None of these predictions of doom has come true. Social science specialists helped develop programs for combating racial discrimination.… It would be wise to consider applying the experience of the past forty years to the integration of homosexuals.”
In their summary, Sarbin and Karols wrote: “Our analysis directs us to regard people with nonconforming sexual orientation as a minority group. Our nation has a long history of successfully dealing with minority groups, particularly ethnic minorities.… The social construction of homosexuals as minority group members is more in tune with current behavioral science theory than the earlier constructions: sin, crime, and sickness.”
Early drafts of the report caused consternation and considerable gossip at the Pentagon for months. In December 1988, the final draft of the report, entitled “Nonconforming Sexual Orientations and Military Suitability,” caused outrage. On January 18, 1989, Craig Alderman, Jr., from the office of the Under Secretary of Defense, fired off an angry memorandum to PERSEREC director Carson Eoyang. Studying suitability criteria for military service, Alderman wrote, “exceeded your authority.” Moreover, the report’s conclusion did not take into account “relevant court decisions” that supported the military’s policies, which “suggest a bias which does justice neither to PERSEREC nor the Department.”
In his response, Eoyang said that the study did fall within the purview of the agency’s mandate and that the agency had forwarded “all information that was relevant to homosexuals and not just that which is supportive of [Defense Department] policy.” PERSEREC stood by the report.
Defense Department officials had reason to be concerned with the study. Its conclusions could undermine Pentagon arguments in continuing litigation over the constitutionality of denying security clearances and military service to gays. Even worse, if the report got into the hands of liberal reporters or congressmen, it could further embarrass the Defense Department. As Alderman wrote in a February memo, “It most probably will cause us in Washington to expend even more time and effort satisfying concerns in this whole issue area both in Congress and the media, and within the Department itself.” The prospect was worrisome.
A month later, Colonel Ted Borek, director of Pentagon legislation and legal policy division, proposed identifying the report as a “draft,” rather than as a final official document. In that case, the Defense Department could deny that the report even existed, because it was only a draft and not a report.
“In our view, the draft study … has significant analytical and factual shortcomings and does not contain new or useful information that has not been considered over time in the formulation of the present DoD policy that homosexuality is incompatible with military service,” Borek wrote. “We have no interest in expending further resources either to complete the draft study or to conduct additional research in this area at this time.” The study, he wrote, “represents only the personal opinion of the authors.”
Although the Pentagon hoped that knowledge of the report would never become public, rumors soon reached attorneys at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, as well as Congressman Gerry Studds, the openly gay congressman who had taken an interest in the issue of gays in uniform after hearing of the Parris Island excesses. When Lambda lawyers filed a motion to release the report under a court order for documents relevant to its legal challenge to the Pentagon’s homosexual policy, the Defense Department denied it existed. Studds requested the report, too. Again, the Pentagon said it had no such report.
There was a new truism in Washington in those days, that the Xerox machine had become the most powerful device working against government deception in the history of America. Just to maintain security on the document, PERSEREC had prepared only three copies of the report for Washington. However, it was during those months that someone at the Defense Department photocopied one of these copies, and one photocopy bred another, and gradually the study began circulating through the vast gay network at the Pentagon.
Studds’s own involvement added a new dimension to the military issue. The harsh reality on Capitol Hill is that an issue is not really an issue until a congressman takes a personal interest—and is willing to devote staff time to it. Studds’s emerging role gave gays in the military a champion of incalculable importance.
The courts would not reform the military’s policies on homosexuals; neither would the new Republican presidential administration. What would accelerate the ultimate termination of these policies, however, were a series of extraordinarily embarrassing episodes relative to gay policy-making at the Pentagon during 1989 and 1990; these, more than anything, laid the groundwork for the policies’ ultimate abolition. The PERSEREC report was one such embarrassment; gay students participating in the ROTC program would soon become another.
ABOARD THE USS HYMAN G. RICKOVER
ATLANTIC OCEAN
Around the time the first memoranda about the PERSEREC report were flying between Washington and Monterey, Robb Bettiker, a twenty-one-year-old midshipman in the Naval ROTC program, was participating in an ROTC cruise in preparation for acceptance into the Navy’s prestigious nuclear propulsion program. The cruise had conjured up deep fears in the young college student, who had recently admitted to himself that he was gay.
Robb had been a straight-A student, a member of the National Honor Society, class valedictorian, and Most Likely to Succeed when he graduated from high school in Ohio. He had a talent for science. The one asset he lacked was a wealthy family, so Robb took a Naval ROTC scholarship to pay for his tuition at MIT, with the full expectation of repaying the scholarship through his required four years of Navy service.
Bettiker had never had much interest in dating girls, and now he understood why. He had a massive infatuation with his new roommate and he was terrified. Like most young gay people of his generation, he knew about homosexuality mainly as being associated with the killer disease AIDS. And in spite of all the things that had changed in the world over the past twenty years, young men still feared that they were less than men if they were gay.
All through the fall semester, the conflict grew between Bettiker’s knowledge of what he was and his expectations of what he should be. When the campus newspaper reported a series of suicides among MIT students, he secretly thought that at least their conflicts were over.
Robb’s membership in the Naval ROTC program was another problem, he knew, but over the next month, as he began to accept his new knowledge of himself, he fantasized that he could prove the service and its policies were wrong, and be a great Naval officer. The test would be the required cruise on the Rickover during his semester break from ROTC in December 1988 and January 1989.
Early in the cruise Robb heard about HOMOVAC, and experienced a new sense of foreboding. He would have to be constantly on guard in the Navy, he realized, would have to watch every word and gesture. He was just beginning to free himself from twenty years of absolute repression; the prospect of still more self-denial in the years ahead was disheartening. Still, Bettiker noted that the fear did not seem so overwhelming to another ROTC midshipman, David Carney, a Harvard student who, like all Harvard ROTC students, trained with the MIT unit of ROTC. Carney had been audacious in saying that he thought the Navy’s policies against homosexuals were archaic, and in writing to that effect in a letter to the Harvard Crimson. Robb suspected Carney must be gay, too.
Back at school for spring semester 1989, Bettiker continued to go through the arduous process of “coming out” as a gay person. He learned that two other fraternity brothers were gay. They talked until late at night about the path toward self-acceptance. By the end of the school year, Robb had a boyfriend, a student from Dartmouth, and he was beginning to think he might tell the Navy he was gay before he entered the service. He believed his ROTC commander might just tell him to keep it quiet and everything would be fine.
He even brought the matter up to a psychiatrist who had once practiced in the Air Force. What would happen if someone told the ROTC he was gay? he asked. The psychiatrist thought the student would probably be disenrolled and the military could seek to recoup tuition money they had paid for the student, although the psychiatrist believed the latter was unlikely. Robb hoped so. His tuition amounted to nearly $40,000. Besides, he was willing to serve. The issue was whether the Navy would let him.
Robb did not know that on campuses across the country, a number of other ROTC students were picking their way through the same quandary and coming to the same conclusion. Dave Carney from Harvard University was one. Carney had been pondering his Naval future ever since 1986, when during an orientation for the Naval ROTC, a new cadet had come to formation with a pierced ear. The ROTC instructor had ordered the student to stand at attention in front of the assembled cadets and shout, “I am a faggot! I am a faggot!” Carney, struggling with his own sexuality, was sickened at the display.
Another student deciding his future in the military was Jim Holobaugh at Washington University in St. Louis. Articulate and strikingly handsome, Jim Holobaugh was the ideal ROTC candidate; in fact, the Army ROTC had featured him in magazine advertisements promoting the program. Holobaugh’s conflict over his homosexuality culminated after one of his fraternity brothers was discovered to be gay and Jim sat through a long debate over whether he should be kicked out of the fraternity. Some brothers took the young man’s side; the majority were outspoken against him. Through it all, Holobaugh, who knew himself to be gay, was silent, and the brother was formally ejected from the fraternity. His own hypocrisy had hung heavily on Holobaugh since then, and by early 1989 he knew that if he was present for another debate over gay rights, he would not be silent again.
FEBRUARY 26,1988
CAMP LEJEUNE
JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA
The administrative hearing on charges against thirty-six-year-old Captain Judy Meade, who had served twelve years in the Marine Corps, was the last stemming from the Parris Island investigations.
The charges centered on the events of the night of February 25, 1988, a year earlier, when Staff Sergeant Bonnie Ferguson and her friend Jill Harris had appeared at Paula Berry’s home in Beaufort and asked Meade about lesbians in the Marine Corps. In his testimony at the hearing, Parris Island prosecutor David Beck revealed that Harris had been flown to South Carolina to help gather information on lesbians. From the start, Meade had been a victim of a well-planned setup. But the scheme had not succeeded in developing any evidence that Meade was a lesbian, only that she knew lesbians. Therefore, the Marine Corps charged that Meade had committed “conduct unbecoming an officer” because she had gay friends.
Both Meade and Berry testified that Meade had retreated to the bedroom to get away from Harris’s questions, and had fallen asleep watching television. Berry had not wanted to wake her and Meade therefore slept in Paula Berry’s bed that night, though there was no evidence that carnal activity took place. Sleeping in the proximity of a gay person, however, was another offense against the Marine Corps.
A third charge was that Meade had patronized the Leatherneck Tavern in Jacksonville, long a hangout for Marines. A local sheriff’s deputy testified that the Leatherneck was a gay bar, which it was not. The bar’s owners testified that it was not a gay bar, and that they did not allow gays. In the hearing, however, the Marine Corps’ assertion was accepted as fact.
Meade had asked for a court-martial, so that witnesses against her would have to face her and undergo cross-examination, but the Marine Corps assembled a board of inquiry instead, which merely read the statements of witnesses, most of which were written by NIS agents. Some witnesses, such as Barbara Baum, did not appear because they did not want to help the Marine Corps case. (Though Baum’s statement about Meade was used as evidence against the captain, Baum had never even met her.) Other witnesses, like Ferguson and Harris, could no longer be located. By now, Harris had made six statements to the NIS, all different and conflicting, so the Marine Corps only presented the two that incriminated Meade. Meade’s attorney, Vaughan Taylor, asked that the Marines furnish the NIS agents, particularly Renea King, as witnesses, but they refused.
Without witnesses to cross-examine, Taylor asked attorney Charles Macloskie on the stand to testify about the unscrupulous NIS tactics in other Parris Island cases. NIS agent King, he said, “is every reason rolled into one person why agents of the government cannot be trusted.” The prosecution countered by putting prosecutor David Beck on the stand. Beck, recently promoted to lieutenant colonel after his fifteen successful prosecutions at Parris Island, declared that the NIS and Agent King had behaved in a thoroughly professional manner.
Perhaps the most ominous twist to the Meade investigation was that the NIS had obtained payment records from Paula Berry’s home telephone—Berry was a civilian with no attachment to the military beyond having friends in the Marine Corps—and had submitted them as evidence that Berry and Meade had talked frequently after charges were pressed against Meade, thus conspiring to obstruct justice and squelch the investigation.
Evidence that might exonerate Meade was manipulated to incriminate her. As one of Meade’s attorneys noted in his successful appeal of her case, subsequent to Ferguson’s initial accusations against Meade, she asserted that Meade had never been involved in homosexual activity—and a lie detector test showed Ferguson was telling the truth. So an NIS agent changed the assertion: Meade was gay, according to Ferguson, he wrote.
In her favor, Meade had an assortment of character witnesses, including a colonel who had supervised her before his retirement and who described her as a “superb” officer with “moral courage and integrity in all her duties.” Paula Berry, an engineer in an aerospace plant, testified for five hours during which time the prosecutor aggressively asked her to name other lesbians she knew in the Marine Corps. In a personal statement that made Meade’s gay friends wince, Meade herself vehemently denied being a lesbian and said it was “totally against my morals and my upbringing.” Homosexuality, she said, was “disgusting.”
Throughout the four-day hearing, it appeared to some that the case had already been decided. One particularly outspoken board member, a female colonel, could not restrain herself from frequent bursts of “Jesus,” and “Oh, my God,” at some of Meade’s alleged indiscretions. When Meade claimed she did not know that Berry was a lesbian when they became friends, a board member asked how that was possible. Berry played women’s softball, the board member said, and everyone knew that the only women who went out for softball were lesbians.
In his closing arguments, though he could present no evidence that Meade was gay, prosecuting attorney Captain Chris E. Dougherty suggested she must be to know so many lesbians. “Is it just a coincidence all her friends and acquaintances in her life are lesbians?” he asked. “I submit that in fact, Captain Meade is part of The Family.” As for Paula Berry, Dougherty said she was an obvious lesbian; everyone in the courtroom could tell by looking at her and Meade should have been able to do so, too. In associating with a lesbian, Dougherty said, Meade “has disgraced all the commissioned officers of the United States Marine Corps by her conduct.”
The board of inquiry deliberated for six hours before ruling that no one with a gay friend may serve as an officer in the United States Marine Corps. Specifically, the board found Meade guilty of “engaging in a public association and long-term personal friendship with a known lesbian,” “being in the presence or occupying the same dwelling with enlisted Marines whom Captain Meade suspected to be lesbians,” “associating with lesbians, thereby giving the perception that she herself was a lesbian, which brought discredit to herself,” and “habitually frequenting the Leatherneck Tavern, a bar known by her to have a questionable reputation.” For this unbecoming conduct, the board recommended that Meade be discharged from the Marine Corps under other than honorable conditions.
While other defendants had avoided press attention, Meade had given interviews and her case received extensive local publicity. After the hearing, the Defense Department and the Marine Corps defended their policies. “We’re not out there breaking doors down looking for homosexuals,” said Major Ron Stokes, a Marine Corps spokesman in Washington. “But do we aggressively pursue these allegations which are made? We do.… I think we’re in step with the general public. We have an obligation to those mothers and fathers who provide their daughters and sons to us to provide them with a healthy environment.” Pentagon spokesman Major David Super added, “When homosexuals are found, they must be removed. Is that a witch-hunt? I guess it depends on who’s looking at it.”
Attorney Vaughan Taylor, who had represented seven of the Parris Island women, had come to his military law practice the same way as most specialists in his field, through military service as an Army judge. Uncertain of his own feelings toward the gay policy, the forty-one-year-old lawyer had begun asking friends in the military what they thought of the regulations. Some thought lesbians offered advantages as soldiers, because they did not get pregnant. One two-star general said he worried about combat romances between male soldiers. If one soldier was shot, he reasoned, it would affect two fighters instead of one; 25 percent casualties might mean 50 percent ineffectiveness.
Taylor also sympathized with the lack-of-privacy argument: Heterosexual men would not feel comfortable showering with other men who might be looking at them as sex objects. The military was not like other jobs, the argument went, because in the armed forces, you showered and slept where you worked.
Taylor continued to feel ambivalent about the policy, and finally decided that the regulation was appropriate, at least as long as most of society continued to feel uncomfortable with gays.
Taylor’s wife and paralegal, Christine Sharron Taylor, however, found the hearings extraordinarily disconcerting. She had gay friends, and she tried to imagine what it would be like to be put on trial for her acquaintances; it seemed surreal. She was also struck by the fact that the military’s persecution seemed reserved for lesbians. She had to believe it was a connivance to rid the Marine Corps of a gender they never wanted much anyway. After her husband had spent all of 1988 and the first two months of 1989 almost exclusively on Parris Island cases—Mary Kile’s, Laura Hinckley’s, Judy Meade’s, and others—Christine asked her husband not to take anymore, at least for a while. They had left her feeling terribly depressed.
ABOARD THE USS IOWA
ATLANTIC OCEAN
Only at the last minute did Gunner’s Mate Second Class Clayton Hartwig hear that he would be the gunner’s captain that morning for the Iowa’s Turret Number Two.
It was an important day for the Iowa. A two-star admiral was aboard, and the gunner in Turret Two would be trying a different arrangement of explosives geared to improve the gun’s accuracy. The presence of an admiral meant pressure on the crew, particularly the gun crews, who were to be the day’s star attractions. And pressure was one thing this crew did not need. Along with being understaffed, the gun crew was very inexperienced. This was why Gunner’s Mate Richard Lawrence, originally on the roster as supervisor for the day, had been replaced by the more seasoned Hartwig. Only a handful had the certification that, under Navy regulations, was required of a gunnery crew member.
Like a number of the Iowa’s sailors, Hartwig had forebodings about the ship, and especially about his job given the age of the gunpowder the crew was using; the explosives that morning dated back to the Korean War.
Recently, someone had posted the lyrics to a song by the popular group Metallica in Turret Two. The song, entitled “Disposable Heroes,” was about soldiers being sent away and killed for the convenience of the government. To keep the half-century-old ship floating, with guns and technology so antiquated that even Navy officials conceded they could never be replaced if damaged, made them all disposable heroes in the opinion of some.
But being a gun captain was what Hartwig had always wanted to be, just like his dad, who had been a gunner’s mate in World War II. It was his job, and he probably did not think much of the abrupt assignment as he climbed the six-story hardened-steel cylinder that housed the huge gun, along with fifty-eight other sailors who would man it that morning.
Hartwig’s friend, Gunner’s Mate Third Class Kendall Truitt, was in the bathroom when general quarters was sounded to man the guns, so he was late to his station on the bottom floor of Turret Two; he was among the last to enter. The friendship between Truitt and Hartwig had changed in recent months. Truitt had married, and Hartwig did not like his wife. The pair had not spoken for a period, but lately they were warming up toward each other again.