Public Eye Seeing Stars Over Kelso

By MARGARET CARLSON

The press of other business was about to draw the curtain over the part Admiral Frank Kelso played in the disgrace known as Tailhook. There would be no prosecutions. It was a done deal in the Senate to whisk Kelso off to a four-star retirement at full pay as if nothing untoward had happened on his watch. Then an astonishing thing occurred. Two of the most venerable forces in Washington -- the Pentagon and the Senate Armed Services Committee -- were confronted by one of the newest: seven women Senators. And for a moment the militarists were forced to regroup. Kelso's supporters had to launch a sudden offensive to squeeze out a 54-43 victory. By saying, "Not so fast," and impeding the old-boy network, the women, and the 36 men who joined them, rallied around that rarely observed principle: accountability. Still, they lost.

Tailhook is one more sorry example of the practice of conceding that mistakes were made without punishing those who made them. A Navy judge found that Kelso was on the third floor of the Las Vegas Hilton when women -- not just Top Gun groupies but also 15 female officers -- were assaulted. The judge accused Kelso of lying about his presence there and of trying to manipulate the investigation to shield himself. A Pentagon inspector-general report found otherwise, but Kelso decided against a further inquiry to sort out the discrepancies in favor of stepping down two months early. He bargained for a statement of praise from the Secretary of the Navy, who earlier had urged him to resign for a "failure of leadership." The Senate would then vote him a four-star retirement rather than two stars, and full pension, $84,340 a year, vs. $67,467.

A lopsided Senate vote in Kelso's favor would have been the expected end of it. Instead, a bipartisan group of women forced a daylong debate. Those who tried to defend the admiral were reduced to praise for a solid 38-year career -- minus Tailhook and logic. Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Arkansas asked his female colleagues to "remember that ((Kelso is)) a father of two young women who are very sensitive of their father's role in this matter" -- whatever that meant. John Warner of Virginia worried about the hardship Kelso's wife would bear if he were to get $17,000 a year less. Sam Nunn got tangled up in sailing analogies -- Kelso's opponents were putting him in a rowboat and tying an anchor to his leg and saying he "should have been down on the bottom of the ship" -- and concluded that the Senate should not take two stars away from Kelso because it "would set a different standard." But that was exactly what Kelso's opponents were hoping for.

Just the contemplation of punishment for Kelso was sufficient for his supporters to insist that he had suffered enough. One reason for the surprising lack of sympathy in the U.S. for the American student Michael Fay after he was sentenced to be caned in Singapore is the increasing recognition that Americans have too much compassion and too little accountability. Our usual way would be to understand the root causes for Fay's vandalism spree -- his attention-deficit disorder and the breakup of his parents' marriage -- and send him on his way. From top to bottom, American society is soaked with the sense that with enough explaining, a good lawyer and the pressing of the right buttons of guilt and victimology, there is a way out of most things. The most heinous acts get a round of applause on the talk-show circuit, as if confession were a substitute for contrition. Forgiveness has its place, but so does retribution. There's a way well short of lashing an American abroad to restore the notion that acts have consequences, and it could have started in the Senate with two fewer stars for Admiral Kelso.