Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1996 by Scott Shuger

When it comes to the military, American publishing has an interesting blind spot The battlefield, from Crane to Wouk, through Caputo and O'Brien, has long produced interesting, salable novels, as well as a fair helping of fine non-fiction. And if you're interested in hardware, there are the story-lined weapons manuals of Tom Clancy and his ilk. But there's another dimension of our military machine: the bureaucracy. Despite such contributions as Bob Woodward's The Commanders and Cohn Powell's autobiography, the organizational behavior and thing of the contemporary U.S. military remain sadly underreported.

The main reason for this is that the smarties of Manhattan deem organizational behavior to be "dull," even when the organization has the expanse and power to change or end all of our lives. Woodward and Powefl got aromd this by being Woodward and Powefl, and by having a hot war as their news hook. But ordinarily, anyone ft*g to pitch a book about, say, how the peacetime U.S. Navy ffim and works would end up kneeaff in rejection slips. (I know. I tlied. And I was.)

Thank God for Tailhook. By using the 1991 scandal as his touchstone, Gregory Vistica was able to sell and write just such a book. Vistica, now with the Washington bureau of Newsweek, broke the story of the Las Vegas assaults--and the Navy's apathetic reaction to them--while 16 was a reporter for the San Diego Umon.

This bureaucratic study opens at the 1986 Tailhook Convention at the Las Vegas Hilton, with Reagan's first Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, lying on his back with a naked woman gyrating over him. C. Northcote Parkinson was never able to come up with a lead like thing.

I found Fall From Glory a fascinating read--not just because I don't find bureaucracy dull but also because I was m the Navy for part of the period it covers. (I was on active duty from 1978 to 1983; Where goes from the Reagan buildup to the present) I even knew some of the officers who figure m the tale, most notably Jack Snyder, the rear admiration for whom Tadhook whistleblower Paula Couffik worked. After the media identified Couffik she said she had computer to Snyder the very next morning about being sexually assaulted and that he had brushed her off This scenario was the basis for one of the Navy's very few disciplinary actions in the case: Dozens of diary avail went unpunished, but Snyder was fired.

At the time, I remember thinking did Snyder's alleged insensitivity didn't sound like the man I had known. Indeed, Vistica provides evidence that Coughlin didn't make Snyder fully aware of what happened to her. (It's undisputed that once she did, he started contacting superiors on her behalf. The bureauratic point of this is that in the Navy, lines of imputed liability for events occurring beyond headquarters tend to fall arbitrarilly on the rank of rear admiral and below. After all if there were grounds for censuring Snyder, the case against Chief of Naval Operations Frank Kelso--who personally witnessed the debauchery at the Hilton and did nothing--was far stronger. But Kelso successfully held out for retirement on schedule, with a full four-star admiral's pension.

If you think this approach to naval accountability has changed, consider this: Just a few weeks ago, a man named James Barry wrote a piece in The Washington Post based on his years as an instructor at the Naval Academy. He related his experience of that institution's "culture of hypocrisy, one that tolerates sexual harassment, favoritism and the covering up of problems." Despite a recent major drug scandal at the Academy, its four-star superintendent remains in place.

I never served in Washington, where Fall from Glory is primarily set. I was deployed overseas on carriers with an aircraft squadron. Out on the carriers, trivial as well as catastrophic screw-ups were a near-daily occurrence. But ultimately those of us in the Fleet believed both that the leadership would watch out for our best interests and that the dangers we were regularly exposed to were neccessitated by a ready awesome threat--the Soviet Navy. Vistica's point, in a nutshell, is: Boy, were we wrong!

Through extensive reporting and documentary research which included fighting for and while access to the 22 boxes of John Lehman's private files in Navy custody), Vistica shows how Lehman and his cronies concocted a picture of the Soviet Navy as an aggressive and well-equipped blue-water outfit ready, willing, and able to take on U.S. slips anywhere in the world--even though there was ample evidence to the contrary inside the naval intelligence community. The reason? To bulk up the Navy's share of the defense budget. Vistica details how Izhman's drive to the Six-Hundred-Ship Navy rolled roughshod over reams of naval attaches' personal observations about materiel and personnel problems in the Soviet Navy, as wen as U.S. Navy and CIA findings that the Soviets didn't aggressively deploy their naval forces and didn't intend to. Lehman could keep all this information under wraps by labeling it "Top Secret."