Tailhook Scandal

In 1993, scandal involving naval and marine officers. The Tailhook Association is a private organization that sponsors the Tailhook symposium, a reunion of former [Page 705]marine and navy flyers that began in 1956. Members of Tailhook also include defense contractors, and the U.S. Navy and contractors provide significant support to the meetings. By 1992, the Tailhook Association boasted 10 corporations and 15,000 individual members.

In 1993, Navy lieutenant Paula Coughlin claimed on ABC News that the Tailhook convention that she attended had included a gauntlet of officers who groped her and made questionable comments as she attempted to get through. Her revelations brought forth other women, who indicated that similar indignities had happened to them at Tailhook conventions.

Admiral John W. Snyder, for whom Coughlin was an aide, acknowledged her report, noting that such behavior was the natural consequence of getting naval aviators drunk. Coughlin filed charges and, when her case moved slowly, she went public with her allegations. A seven-month investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and Inspector General uncovered 140 cases of misconduct against 80 to 90 female victims.

As a result of the investigation, the secretary of the navy, H. Lawrence Garrett III, ordered the services to take disciplinary action against 70 individuals. Fifty were participants in the gauntlet, and 6 had obstructed the investigation. When witnesses placed Garrett and his chief of naval operations (CNO), Frank Kelso, near the gauntlet, the secretary resigned and the CNO retired early.

As the Tailhook story spread, senior officers retired or had their careers ruined. Defenders of the Tailhook Association attacked Coughlin's credibility, but she and other victims maintained that allegations were true. She and six other victims sued the association, which settled out of court. Coughlin resigned her commission in 1995.

Kelso and Garrett had previously worked to better women's status and opportunities in the navy, but the Tailhook scandal ended both their careers. In 1994 the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first combat ship to accommodate women. That happened shortly after the 1994 Tailhook convention.

Other careers were affected by the scandal. Admiral Snyder was relieved of duty, and three other admirals were censured. Thirty more admirals got letters of caution. More than three dozen lower-grade officers received letters of caution or fines. Of the 117 officers implicated in the scandal, only 10 were junior grade.

The Tailhook scandal brought sexual harassment and sexual crimes in the military from out of the shadows. In the aftermath, military women began speaking out about the abuses that had occurred since the active recruitment of women with the end of the draft in 1973. The increasing presence of women in greater numbers in the new unisex military placed great stress on the old-line traditional military. To many, the Tailhook events were the logical outcome of such stresses breaking through under the weakening influence of excess alcohol.

As a result of Tailhook, the other armed services became more aware of the problems of sexual harassment and more aggressive in dealing with it, but not particularly more successfully. The army weathered a number of scandals in the 1990s, and as of 2004, the Air Force Academy had not yet overcome the stigma of periodic flare-ups of sexual harassment and sexual crimes against women.

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