(Via Milinet)
Did the General Deserve This?
By Richard Cohen
Thursday , July 20, 2000 ; A25
On March 31 the New York Times reported that a man had tried to
kiss a woman.
The woman did not want to be kissed and she eventually reported
the incident.
The man was not the woman's supervisor and could neither reward
nor punish
her. Nevertheless, the paper played the story on Page One. It
was, for some
reason, one of the most important stories of the day.
Some time later, The Washington Post reported a development in
the same
story. The Post also played it on Page One. By then, the man's
career was
essentially ruined, and when his name became public he must have
suffered the
searing pain of Page One ignominy. This month, facing up to the
inevitable,
he put in for retirement.
By now you may have guessed that I am referring to Lt. Gen.
Claudia Kennedy
and Maj. Gen. Larry G. Smith. From what the Army itself
concluded back in
1996, Smith "grabbed her, held her against her will and kissed
her." She made
no official report of the alleged incident until last year, when
Smith was
nominated as the Army's deputy inspector general, a position in
which he
would handle sexual harassment complaints. If Kennedy saw this
as a case of
the fox guarding the henhouse, it was understandable.
This may be the moment to get some things out of the way. First,
I have no
problem with the way Kennedy handled this matter. At no time did
she file an
official sexual harassment complaint, and she was not the one
who leaked the
story to the press. At the same time, Smith allegedly put a
colleague in an
awkward position and possibly made her apprehensive forever
afterward. If the
allegations are true, then Smith was out of line.
But here's what Smith did not do. He did not threaten Kennedy.
He did not
repeat the incident with her nor, it said in news accounts, with
anyone else.
He was in no position to affect her career. He was accused only
of having
made a misguided attempt to seduce an officer of then-equal
rank, a mature
woman with a general's stars on her shoulders. She was no
enlistee in
trembling awe of a general.
Women tell me that sort of thing happens all the time, and while
the
experience may not be pleasant, it's not fatal either. Most of
the women I
queried did not, by any means, find it so outrageous as to
somehow warrant a
public mortification and the end of a career. Here, after all,
was a man who
did three tours in Vietnam, who earned his medals the hard
way--yet all that
mattered in the end was a single, brief incident. No person
should be judged
in this way.
Whatever Smith did, the Army did not deem it so serious as to
warrant a
demotion, a criminal charge or anything other than a reprimand.
And whatever
it was, it was not so awful that this reportedly strong woman
chose to report
it when it happened. The Army elected to believe Kennedy, saying
she could
not benefit from Smith's troubles and therefore had no reason to
lie. I
understand.
But I do not understand how a single purported
incident--distasteful though
it may have been for Kennedy--is sufficient to end a
distinguished military
career, especially when there were no witnesses and the two
parties had
conflicting versions of what happened. I do not blame the Army
alone for
this. It is merely yet another institution so timorous when it
comes to sex,
so fearful of being called sexist or something like that, that
it has
abandoned all common sense, not to mention common decency.
Whatever happened to saying sorry? Whatever happened to
understanding that in
matters of love, sex, romance and that sort of thing, all sorts
of
misunderstandings are possible? Maybe Smith was head over heels
in love.
Maybe he's the sort of guy who misreads the semaphore of sex and
takes a
friendly hello for something more. In this and so many other
similar cases,
it's not the attempted seduction that's penalized, it's the
failure of it.
Making a pass nowadays is like striking at the king: You'd
better succeed.
Kennedy said she was "satisfied with the Army's action in this
case." Fine.
But I'm not. Smith did not attempt to exploit his rank or
persistently make
the workplace a hostile environment. Nonetheless, he was treated
as if he had
done both--a punishment that not only lacked proportion but a
crime itself.
Smith may have done Kennedy wrong--but that's nothing compared
to what was
done to him.
© 2000 The Washington Post Company
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