almost everyone knows about the latest sex “harassment” scandal brewing in the Army, involving seven officers at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. The officers are accused of sexual abuses against females under their command, which include charges of rape, sodomy and assault.

But until the NAACP stepped into the case a week ago, few people were aware that all seven officers are black, while most of their alleged female victims are white. It also appears that the facts of the case are not so simple as first thought. Five women “victims” now say that military investigators, eager to show that the Army knows how to deal with sexual harassers, intimidated them into transforming consensual sex (which would have brought punishments on their heads) to the serious criminal charges that have been filed against the black officers.

Both the sex scandal and the racial coverup are products of political correctness, which many thought was yesterday’s news, but still runs so strong as to threaten the efficacy of the one institution that previously appeared impervious to such assaults.

The Aberdeen case exactly parallels the infamous 1991 Tailhook affair involving the U.S. Navy. The government was never able to get a single conviction of the Tailhook defendants because the women “victims,” under cross-examination, admitted to having consensual sex. They, too, told stories of military investigators threatening them and putting words in their mouths so that top military brass could be shown to be on the side of the angels. These facts are not well known, because the white males caught up in Tailhook did not have an NAACP to intervene in their behalf. Without the race card to trump the gender card, they were hung out to dry.

The national hysteria over Tailhook, whipped up by the feminist left, resulted in one of the most extensive witch hunts in American history. It ended the careers of hundreds of seasoned officers, admirals of flag rank and war heroes, many of whom were not even at the Tailhook convention or who did not participate in its celebrated events. The pressure to destroy the “male culture” of the military led to more lost careers than were destroyed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The resulting crisis in military morale has decimated the ranks of seasoned officers.

These politically inspired assaults have been mounted under the banner of “desexegrating” the military (the term was coined by former Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., who has led the crusade). The idea is to put women in combat and combat-support roles once reserved for men, as though the problems associated with such a profound shift were trivial and the rationale for preserving male prominence in combat were the same as the Jim Crow reasoning employed by white supremacists to preserve their domination in the segregationist South. As a result, at least one female navy pilot, Kara Hultgreen, is dead.

Hultgreen was a Navy pilot who would have been grounded before her death had she been a man and held to normal Navy standards of competence. But feminist politicians in Washington, led by Schroeder, then ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, were so determined that the Navy qualify females to fly advanced combat planes, that normal standards were thrown overboard.
Despite her documented inadequacies,
Hultgreen’s training, which clearly pushed her beyond her ability, continued — until in 1994 she crashed her $40 million F-14 into the sea while trying to land on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Nobody, either in the Congress or the media, has looked into the possibility that Schroeder’s “desexegration” agenda may have been to blame.

Schroeder is a left-wing Democrat whose entire career could be viewed as an assault on America’s defense establishment. Entering Congress in 1974, she pledged to cut off all military aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam. The aid was cut, the anti-Communist regimes fell, and 2 million Indochinese were slaughtered in the blood baths that followed. Untroubled, Schroeder went on to oppose every subsequent use of American military power over the next 20 years, right up to the Gulf War. Fortunately, Republican presidents, with the assist of a battalion of “boll-weevil” Democrats, were able to maintain America’s military posture adequately and to sustain the standards that have kept America’s fighting force the best in the world.

During the Bush administration, a Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces specifically recommended that women not be assigned to combat for reasons that lie at the heart of the above-mentioned incidents. Four years ago, however, the American people elected Bill Clinton as their commander-in-chief. Encouraged, the Schroederites resumed their agenda, disregarding the recommendations of the presidential commission. The death of Kara Hultgreen is one result; the sexual fiasco at Aberdeen is another.

Unbowed, a Schroeder-sponsored group called WANDAS (Women Active in our Nation’s Defense and their Advocates and Supporters) is busy keeping the faith alive. When the San Diego Union and the Washington Times published reported charges by Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness that the military was preparing to qualify a second inadequate female flyer (known as “Pilot B”), WANDAS sued both papers and Donnelly on behalf of “Pilot B” on the grounds that they had defamed her flying skills!

Pilot B., incidentally, is no longer flying any planes. Last year she became pregnant and is now the mother of a baby daughter.

tom hayden and I were once comrades-in-arms in a movement to overthrow America’s democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image and help America’s enemies defeat her sons on the field of battle. Now he is running for mayor of Los Angeles and many people are asking me, “Does this past matter?” I think it does.

Hayden and I were deadly serious about our revolutionary agendas. During the Vietnam War, Tom traveled many times to North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia and Paris to meet communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders. He came back from Hanoi proclaiming he had seen “rice roots democracy at work.” According to people who were present at the time, including Sol Stern, later an aide to Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein, Hayden offered tips on conducting psychological warfare against the U.S. He arranged trips to Hanoi for Americans perceived as friendly to the Communists and blocked entry to those seen as unfriendly, like the sociologist Christopher Jencks. He attacked as “propaganda” stories of torture and labeled American POWs returning home with such stories as “liars.” Even after America withdrew its troops from Indochina, Hayden lobbied Congress to end all aid to the anti-Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. When the cutoff came, the regimes fell and the Communists conquered South Vietnam and Cambodia and slaughtered 2.5 million people. When anti-war activist Joan Baez protested the human rights violations of the North Vietnamese victors, Hayden called her a tool of the CIA.

fifty years ago this spring, Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in
baseball. The events that followed provide a lesson for Black History Month
– which ends this week — that
many civil rights leaders seem to have forgotten. Following Robinson’s historic
breakthrough, as everybody knows, other black athletes followed his example and
professional basketball and football also became multiracial sports. Over the
years, however, there were many doubters that these gains were possible or that
the revolution would continue. The doubters said whites would never accept more
than a few black players. There would always be quotas to limit the number of
blacks. Whites, they said, would never allow blacks to become managers or
quarterbacks or the owners of clubs. They said that if blacks became the
majority of the players in professional basketball, for example, whites
wouldn’t
go to see the games.

everybody from Newt Gingrich to Bill Clinton agrees that the crisis in
our schools demands national action. Many proposals — raised standards, smaller
classrooms — are already part of a bipartisan agenda. But no one
seems to have the political spine to name the parties responsible for this
crisis. As a result, none of these solutions will work.

Let’s stop beating around the bush: The source of our national educational
crisis is a massive failure of teachers to teach.
Any educational reform program that does not include reductions in pay or wholesale firings for our failing teachers and school administrators — as well as raises and bonuses for those who succeed — will not work.

at a time when its latest heroes are a fascist (Eva Peron) and a
misogynist (Larry Flynt), it is perhaps not surprising that Hollywood is
experiencing a crisis of conscience in finding a place in its heart for a
patriot like Elia Kazan. Last month, the Hollywood establishment, in the form of the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, denied Kazan a lifetime achievement award, thereby continuing to shun one of its most accomplished artists. Even the subsequent defenses of the filmmaker that appeared in Variety, the New York Times,
the Los Angeles Times and other periodicals lacked conviction. Not one of them has managed a forthright
defense of Kazan as what he is: the longest-standing victim of Hollywood’s McCarthy-era
blacklists.
Elia Kazan is probably Hollywood’s greatest living legend. And yet the director
of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront,” the man who launched the
careers of James Dean and Marlon Brando, the first artistic choice of Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller, cannot
get an award from his own creative community because of the unforgivable sin he
allegedly committed in appearing as a friendly witness before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities more than 40 years ago.
I use the plural in speaking of blacklists advisedly. For as Kazan
himself wrote, defending his decision to testify, the communists in Hollywood
were the first to blacklist artists in any organization and on any project they
happened to control. One of the
questions Kazan asked himself was, “Why should I defend people like this?”
Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the recent spate of articles and
editorials about the Kazan affair is the amount of print the “defenders” of
Kazan have expended in attempting to justify the extension of “forgiveness” to
him after all these years. Why does a man have to be forgiven for defending his
country? This question does not even seem to have occurred to his public
champions. Perhaps most flagrant in this regard was a piece by the
theologian Martin Marty, which appeared in the Opinion section of the L.A.
Times. Marty noted that a usual prerequisite for forgiveness was repentance, and
that Kazan had not repented. He nonetheless called for a “creative forgetting”
to allow the 87-year-old artist to be readmitted into decent society.
To many, no doubt, the gesture appeared gracious. But to others this call
for repentance had a peculiar ring. What about all those communists in Hollywood
and elsewhere who betrayed their country, its democratic ideals and human
decency itself in order to support a mass murderer like Joseph Stalin and to
lend a helping hand to an empire that destroyed the lives of millions of human
beings? Did anybody demand that the Hollywood Reds repent their sins in order
that they be forgiven? Were they required to put on sackcloth and ashes before
the entertainment industry made them heroes of the First Amendment in films like
“The Front,” “The Way We Were” or “Guilty by Suspicion”? In fact, no such humility was
required. As Marty observed, the code of E.M. Forster prevails: It is better to
betray your country than your friends.
But even if one were to accept the debased ethic of an alienated writer
like Forster, who said the people Kazan named were his friends? In his
autobiography “A Life,” Kazan makes very clear that the communists whom he named
had not only betrayed his country, in his eyes, but betrayed him, as an artist
and man, as well. Why, he said to himself, should I sacrifice my career for
people like this?
It is not necessary for us to rehearse every detail of what went on 40
years ago or to take sides in personal matters, however, to draw certain
conclusions. The release of the Venona transcripts and other Soviet documents in recent years
makes clear beyond any doubt that American communists were part of a conspiracy
to betray this country and were in fact engaged in acts, orchestrated from the
Kremlin, to undermine the security of this democracy and to render it
defenseless in the face of its totalitarian adversary. Propaganda, which was
what Hollywood excelled in, was no small national asset. If Hollywood’s
communists need make no apologies for their role in trying to deliver this asset to
America’s enemies, then why should Kazan apologize for defending America against
them? If the opponents of the blacklist argue that it is such an evil in itself,
why then is it acceptable to blacklist Kazan?
Unless one insists on a double standard — one rule for communists,
another for patriots — then only one conclusion is possible: The time has come
to lift Hollywood’s longest standing blacklist and honor Elia Kazan — not only
as one of its greatest living artists, but as a man who stood up for what he
believed, and who braved years of persecution to defend his ideals.