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The Social History of the U.S. Navy, 1945–Present
A Historiographical Essay

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I: Introduction

The special circumstances of the early Cold War significantly influenced the social evolution of the U.S. Navy. As the greatest political, economic, and military power on earth after World War II, the United States assumed the responsibility with the support of key allies for ensuring global peace and prosperity. This mission suggested the need to integrate into the Navy America’s most intellectually and physically capable men and women, regardless of their race, gender, religion, or ethnic identity. The advent of nuclear weapons and nuclear-driven warships; sonars, radars, communications, and other electronic equipment; jet-powered aircraft; and ballistic and shorter-range missiles required the enlistment of America’s most skilled workers and its brightest minds. Forward-thinkers argued that the Navy’s global deployment could not be sustained by the limited number of mostly white, Anglo-Saxon males who constituted the pre–World War II Navy.  So, the needs of the service called for the reduction of existing social and cultural barriers that had prevented the full exploitation of America’s human resources.  

Another factor influencing the change in the Navy’s post–World War II demographic composition was the growing desire of many Americans for the equal treatment of all citizens. The positive contribution in World War II by women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and other members of minority communities had opened the eyes of some—certainly not all—of their fellow citizens to the patriotism of those groups and to their often ill treatment by the military services. The exploits of Cook Third Class Doris Miller, the Tuskeegee Airmen, and other black Americans who fought and died for their country but who suffered discrimination piqued the conscience of many. So too did  the valiant service in Europe of the Army’s Japanese-American 442nd  Infantry Regiment, one of the most highly decorated units in U.S. military history, which was juxtaposed with the incarceration of Japanese-Americans at internment camps throughout the West. The courage of Ira Hayes, one of the flag-raisers on Iwo Jima, and Captain Ernest Evans, whose leadership and self-sacrifice helped win the Battle of Leyte Gulf, highlighted the contribution of America’s first inhabitants. The fact that “Rosie the

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Riveter” and hundreds of thousands of other women replaced men in the production of airplanes, ships, weapons, and ammunition or transported combat aircraft overseas enlightened many of their compatriots about female skills in the workplace and in the military and potential for future employment in the armed services.

A fully integrated Navy devoid of sexism, racism, discrimination, and associated ills, however, was far from realized in the years following World War II. The naval service took positive measures to improve the lot of minority sailors during the latter half of the 20th century, but grudgingly and often as the result of pressure from the executive branch, Congress, progressive interest groups, and the female, black, Hispanic, and other communities. Too many Navy leaders doubted that members of the minority communities had the education, skills, or aptitude to serve alongside white male sailors in the fleet. Over time, minority men and women moved into the service’s mainstream but progress was excruciatingly slow and sometimes painful for those sailors denied equal treatment by their Navy. Indeed, black sailors rebelled against what they considered discriminatory treatment during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout their service but especially during the 1990s, many Navy females  had to endure sexual discrimination and harassment while carrying out their duties. For years, Congress’ combat exclusion law hindered the ability of women to operate with men on an even plane. Despite all the obstacles to their advancement, however, minority leaders and sailors took advantage of opportunities and ultimately established themselves as full-fledged members of the Navy family.   

As will be elaborated on in this paper, historical coverage of social change in the modern U.S. Navy has been spotty, narrowly focused, and until the last 25 years mostly confined to specialized studies. Much of that work has reflected first-rate scholarship but it has not been incorporated into the major histories of the naval service. To remedy that deficiency and to prevent similar problems with future work, this author recommends two major historical endeavors:

1) A Social History of the United States Navy, 1945-Present

There is great need for a comprehensive social history of the U.S. Navy from World War II to the present. This era was one of the most dynamic in the struggle of American women, blacks, Asians, gays, and other minority sailors in the quest for dignity and equal opportunity in the naval service. No single work exists that encompasses the integration struggles and the

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Navy’s actions to deal with institutional sexism, racism, discrimination, harassment, and associated ills. There are discernable periods of modern naval history that would support a chronological approach to the overall topic. For instance, the late 1940s saw passage of hopeful legislation on the integration of women and blacks followed by two decades of social retrenchment or at best modest achievement. Paralleling developments in American society, the 1970s witnessed social turmoil in the Navy and a renewed focus on improving the opportunities and service of naval personnel. The continued advances of women and African-Americans during the 1980s were offset, at least for women, by the Tailhook scandal and related gender issues of the early 1990s.

The standard texts on the modern history of the U.S. Navy treat the service’s social history briefly or not at all. Kenneth J. Hagan’s 400-page This People’s Navy (1991)1 apparently refers to white male people since no blacks or females (other than Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani) are indexed in the work. The same applies to George Baer’s 450-page One Hundred Years of Sea Power (1994).2 Other historians incorporate a few short paragraphs on key events. Paolo E. Coletta’s 600-page The American Naval Heritage (1987)3 has a few brief paragraphs on women and blacks. The only mention of social issues in Nathan Miller’s 300-page The U.S. Navy (1997)4 are two short paragraphs on the shipboard disturbances of 1972 and Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.’s Z-Grams. Michael T. Isenberg’s Shield of the Republic (1993)5 includes four full pages on social issues, but they are hardly balanced against the 800 other pages in his massive tome. The histories mentioned above end at the latest in the early 1990s, so there is great opportunity for a new work that carries the story forward.  

Ample sources exist to support greater coverage of social issues, including records in the National Archives, Navy Operational Archives, and the collections maintained by the Naval War College, U.S. Naval Academy Library, and many other repositories.  Only a handful of the U.S. Naval Institute’s (USNI) more than 225 oral history volumes were accomplished with women, mostly related to their service in the World War II. A great many of the interviews with male naval leaders, however, contain rich and often frank discussions of social issues with which they dealt. The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) holds hundreds of interviews conducted with veterans of the Cold War and post-Cold War Navy. The command’s Navy Reserve Combat Documentation Detachment 206 gathered hundreds more interviews with naval personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Naval Historical Foundation holds 196

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interviews, including those with Rear Admiral Mack C. Gaston, the first black commander of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.6 The Military Women’s Memorial Library holds additional interviews with Navy women.7

2) A History of the U.S. Navy in the 21st Century

With legislation now in place to combat sexism, racism, and other forms of outright discrimination and harassment, and with naval personnel the most diverse group in the Navy’s history, there is need for a major historical overview. Unlike the general tomes identified above, this proposed work should include not only the leaders, strategies, combat operations, tactics, weapons, and technologies employed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the fight against terrorism, but also how naval officers and enlisted personnel of all ranks have performed in these conflicts and how they have been influenced by them. We need to learn the stories of individual members of this diverse Navy who acted heroically and those who might not have earned distinction but served. Another important factor to be investigated is the much more robust role played by members of the Navy Reserve in this century’s conflicts as compared to previous eras. Thousands of citizen sailors have participated as individual augmentees or in units during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. David Winkler’s Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always (2015)8 on the Navy Reserve has covered some of this experience but much more needs to be done.

An important topic within this overall study would discuss how female sailors, as routinely exposed to the dangers of combat as male sailors, have fared in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and against terrorists. How have women handled Islamic cultural and religious taboos? Have women benefited from their gender in situations where males could not operate? Has sexual discrimination or harassment seriously compromised their service in the combat theater? What female leaders and sailors have earned distinction in combat? A number of works have been published on the exploits of Navy women in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Navy Nurse Cheryl Ruff’s Ruff’s War (2005)9 and Heidi Kraft’s Rule Number Two (2007).10 Gail Harris in A Woman’s War (2010) describes her experiences as a Navy intelligence analyst focusing on Saddam Hussein’s activities in Iraq from 1991 to 2003.11 Still, we need more work on the Navy story in this new century.

II: Historiography of Social Change in the Modern U.S. Navy

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The late 1940s witnessed a major push by key naval leaders and female officers, many of the latter having served in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) during World War II, for a more permanent status in the Navy. A key source on the WAVES in the war is Regina T. Akers, Doing Their Part: The WAVES in World War II (2000).12 She argues that these Navy women made a significant contribution to the war effort that has not been widely recognized. In April 1947, Congress passed the Army-Navy Nurses Act that established the Navy Nurse Corps as a permanent staff corps. The WAVES also achieved permanent status in the Navy but it took an almost three-year effort by determined female leaders and supporters in Congress to bring it about. Hence, on 12 June 1948, Congress passed the Women’s Armed Service Integration Act (Public Law 625) and President Harry S. Truman signed it into law on July 30. The measure provided for the permanent service of officer and enlisted personnel in the regular and reserve components of the armed forces. Few Americans, however, were prepared for an across-the-board integration of women into all the roles and missions of the military services, especially combat.

Despite the passage of Public Law 625 and measures taken by the Navy during the next two decades to integrate women into the service, not until the 1970s did significant published works begin to appear on the subject. The U.S. Naval Institute released Lady in the Navy (1972)13 by Joy Bright Hancock, who had served as an enlisted Yeoman (F) in World War I and as a high-ranking WAVES officer with the Bureau of Aeronautics in World War II. As one would expect, much of Hancock’s memoir covers that early service. Hancock, however, was also a primary figure in the passage of Public Law 625 and she discusses at length the behind-the-scenes actions to get it passed. While Captain Hancock and her subordinates did most of the work preparing for the Congressional hearings, male officers made the case to Congress. Hancock considered it entirely appropriate that male officers take the lead since women “were not in a position of sufficient authority.”14 It also helped that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and other distinguished leaders spoke in favor of the legislation. Regina Akers in her positive portrayal, “Joy Bright Hancock: Pioneering Spirit” (2013), concludes that Hancock “opened many doors for women in the naval service” and “did so with a strong sense of professionalism, innovative thinking, diplomatic skill, and open-mindedness.”15

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Senator Margaret Chase Smith (D-ME), another key figure with regard to Public Law 625, published her own biography, Declaration of Conscience (1972),16 which reinforces many of Hancock’s observations. At one point, to support the employment of Navy women overseas, Smith observed “the Navy either needs these women or they do not.”17 Elizabeth Allen in her Navy WAVES (1988)18 discusses the critical involvement of Smith and Hancock in the legislative process and provides a useful summary and chronology through 1988 of key dates relating to Navy women.

Other sources of information and insight can be found in the numerous oral history interviews conducted by the U.S. Naval Institute’s John “Jack” Mason and Etta Belle Kitchen, the latter a member of the World War II WAVES. Included in the collection are the remembrances of Hancock (1969–70), Louise K. Wilde (1969), and Winifred Quick Collins (1969), of whom the latter two worked to overcome bureaucratic and institutional lethargy during the 1950s and served as Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for Women (ACNP [W]) during the era.19 Additional interviews with female officers and enlisted personnel include those with Robin Quigley (1976), Mildred McAfee Horton (1969), Jean Palmer (1969), Elizabeth Crandall (1970), Frances Rich (1960), Eleanor Rigby (1970), and Tova Peterson Wiley (1969).20 As with other oral histories and personal memoirs, these should be used with caution because they can be self-serving and colored by sometimes flawed remembrances. Nonetheless, the U.S. Naval Institute oral histories frequently provide insight into the actions taken by the Navy with regard to women and how these female leaders coped with the many challenges they faced. Quigley, for instance, related that long before she proposed dropping the term WAVES, Joy Bright Hancock had suggested the same thing. According to Quigley, Hancock had written a memorandum, the purpose of which was to “say she wished they would stop using the term . . . ‘Wave Officer’ because after all, the women were naval officers, not Wave officers.”21

The most in-depth studies of women in the Navy can be found in Crossed Currents (1999)22 by Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall and Serving Proudly (2001) by Susan H. Godson.23 Ebbert and Hall, both of whom had long connections to the service and married Navy captains, contend that “ours is not a particular feminist stance . . . [but our] sensibilities have been challenged by feminist thought.”  Hence, “while we have tried to show the genuine professional concerns that lie beneath some of the Navy’s cautious attitudes and decisions about women, we have also described inequities the service has imposed on women.”24 Ebbert and Hall conclude,

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with justification, that Navy women have been “all but neglected by historians and biographers.”25 They make the especially apt observation that before the 1980s, accurate and useful information on women in the Navy could only be found in small archival collections, newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, obscure memoirs, and interviews. To correct that deficiency, Crossed Currents incorporated extensive documentation from national and naval archives, libraries, special collections, wide-ranging secondary sources and memoirs, magazines and journals articles, oral histories, and personal interviews with hundreds of Navy men and women.

A key object of Crossed Currents was to “serve as a general text that will acquaint a wide audience with this nearly unknown aspect of 20th-century American history [and] a starting point for further research into naval, feminist, and social history.”26 It was the authors’ intent to produce a balanced work that described the Navy’s acceptance of its need for women and pride in their accomplishments but also its reluctance to accommodate them. For the most part, they have achieved their goals. They successfully followed a chronological approach to the topic but also put emphasis on women at sea and in combat, pregnancy, child care, fraternization, sexual discrimination and harassment, lesbianism, female leadership, and other key issues.

Susan H. Godson’s Serving Proudly complements Crossed Currents in that both works thoroughly detail the history of women in the Navy in the 20th century. Ebbert and Hall focus solely on Navy women other than nurses, the latter of whom they conclude were deserving of separate treatment. In contrast, at the request of the Naval Historical Center (now Naval History and Heritage Command), which sponsored her work, Godson treats the two groups of Navy women in parallel. She acknowledges that while the nurses, who generally performed long-accepted roles in the military, did not face the same resistance from males as non-nurse women, the story of their service has many similarities. That argument has merit.27

Godson is a Ph.D historian and author of Viking of Assault: Admiral John Leslie Hall Jr. and Amphibious Warfare (1982)28 and other works. She admits that interviewing numerous women in preparation of the book was a learning experience since she had not served in the Navy. But her scholarship is first-rate and is supported by extensive research in the relevant collections of the National Archives, Navy archives, and other repositories and the secondary literature. Godson tracks the integration of women in chronological fashion. Close to half of the book deals with the World War II and previous eras but individual chapters cover developments in the late 1940s, the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, and the Tailhook scandal. While

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Godson’s Serving Proudly does not impart the same passion and insider feel as does Ebbert and Hall’s Crossed Currents, it does not avoid contentious issues. Indeed, individual segments expand on pregnancy and motherhood, sexual harassment, and sexual discrimination. In short both Serving Proudly and Crossed Currents provide solid foundations of information and analysis on the history of women in the Navy through the 20th  century.

A work that had a significant influence on the books by Godson and Ebbert and Hall is Women in the Military (1982; revised edition 1992)29 by retired Air Force Major General Jeanne Holm. The author made the salient point that women were critical to the post-Vietnam, all-volunteer armed forces and that “so integrated are they [women] into the services, and on such a scale, that the United States could not go to war without them.”30 Holm’s book includes a sizeable chapter entitled “Taking to the Air and the Sea” that discusses in detail the issues related to the integration of Navy women into the aviation and naval surface warfare communities. She relates that the experimental assignment of women to hospital ship Sanctuary (AH-17) in the mid-1970s was bound to fail since the Navy allowed a double standard to exist on the ship that fueled male resentment: “women stood no watches [and] were given the best assignments. . . . Single women were allowed to live in off-base housing, while the men lived in the barracks or onboard the tugs.”31 Holm’s 1992 revised edition included the service of military women in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf War.

A complementary work is Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider’s Sound Off (1988),32 which presents excerpts from interviews with 300 women from all the services. The topically arranged book looks at the issues of women in combat, feminism, pregnancy and childbirth, and the impact of military service on family life. The authors observe that, despite occasionally experiencing sexual discrimination and harassment, “most of our interviewees believe in an expanding future for women in the military.”33

There is need for a study, similar to Sharon Disher’s First Class: Women Join the Ranks at the Naval Academy (1998),34 on the first female sailors who went to sea in the 1970s and 1980s.  There are ample oral history interviews, journal and magazine articles, and archival sources to support a work on the legislative and bureaucratic processes that enabled women such as Deborah Gernes and Catherine Leahey to join the crews of non-combatant and then combatant ships; the plusses and minuses of their reception by male officers and enlisted sailors; and the adjustments made by the Navy and the women to make that transition successful.

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A New Era for African-American Sailors

In World War II, many citizens came to recognize the similarity between the harsh treatment of religious and ethnic minorities meted out by German Nazis and Japanese militarists and America’s historic racism and abuse of blacks. A. Philip Randolph and other key black leaders enlisted the support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to improve the status of blacks in the military. Hence, the Navy allowed the commissioning into the Naval Reserve of a small number of black officers (including one warrant officer), the subject of Paul Stillwell’s in-depth study The Golden Thirteen (1993).35 While Stillwell’s well-written and evocative book focuses on World War II, one chapter provides a concise summary of developments with regard to blacks through the late 20th  century and statistical information on black personnel in the Navy in 1992. Stillwell characterizes one of the Golden Thirteen, Dennis D. Nelson II, as “a ‘tree shaker’ who did much on behalf of black naval personnel in the years following World War II.”36 Nelson, although not a historian, authored a short overview entitled The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 1776–1947 (1948)37 published by the Navy Department.

Towering figures in the history of African-American integration into the U.S. military during much of the 20th  century, Morris J. MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty produced the 13-volume Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Documents (1977).38 The work presents what they considered to be the most significant documents on the U.S. government’s interaction with African-Americans in the military service from colonial times to the close of the Vietnam War. Their research led the authors to conclude: 1) “when in need of manpower, the armed forces . . . turned to the Negro;” 2) “influential individuals, acting on principle but usually arguing in terms of increased military efficiency, prodded the armed forces toward acceptance of blacks and whites as equals”; and 3) “the black community, gathering strength and self-awareness, succeeded in exerting strong if sometimes indirect pressure upon personnel policies within the armed forces.”39 The publisher condensed that work in one volume entitled Blacks in the Military: Essential Documents (1981).40 MacGregor then authored the incisive Defense Studies: Integration of the Armed Forces: 1940–1965 (1981)41 for the Army’s Center of Military History. That well-researched and authoritative analysis describes the successful effort to eliminate the “legal, administrative, and social barriers to the black American’s full participation

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in the military service of his country.”42 Given the racial difficulties experienced by the military services in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that conclusion appears overly optimistic.

In Strength for the Fight (1986),43 Nalty, a long-time federal historian, observes that “racism deprived generations of blacks of . . . basic rights, in the process imposing artificial limits on their opportunities within the military.” With others, he makes the salient point that “the recurring need for manpower prevented the armed forces from continuing to indulge in the wastefulness of racism.”44 Half of Nalty’s Strength for the Fight deals with the post–World War II era, which he covers in detail, especially the 1948 integration act and its consequences, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and the services’ successful handling of its racial problems in the 1980s. Another useful source on the topic is James T. Controvich, African Americans in Defense of the Nation: A Bibliography,45 which identifies relevant books, Ph.D dissertations, and journal/magazine articles on blacks in the Navy. Significant information on the black experience in the military available nowhere else can be can be found in Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP; black newspapers such as the Norfolk Journal and Guide and the Pittsburgh Courier; and the NAACP papers maintained by the Library of Congress.

Improving the Navy’s efficiency in the Cold War became a driving force behind the integration of blacks but it had far to go to achieve that goal. In 1948, black sailors in the Navy’s enlisted force numbered only 4.3 percent of the total. Between 1946 and 1948, only 16 African-Americans completed Officer Candidate School and only 14 blacks were commissioned through the Naval Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC) program. The one memorable event, long overdue, was the Naval Academy’s graduation and commissioning of Wesley A. Brown, the first African-American to graduate from the institution that had been established more than 100 years before. The seminal work on Brown and his experiences in Annapolis is Robert J. Schneller’s Breaking the Color Barrier (2005).46 Schneller, a professional historian, argues that Brown succeeded where other African-American midshipmen had failed because of a “convergence of forces that leveled the playing field.” This success resulted from a “push from the black community, national political imperatives, a shift in racial attitudes among the American people, direct intervention by leaders, and the strengths and abilities of individuals in the trenches.” One key asset was Wesley Brown himself, who possessed the “requisite talent.”47

President Harry S. Truman breathed life into the integration effort, for the most part to win political favor with voters but he also opposed discrimination against African-Americans.

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On 26 July 1948, the commander in chief issued Executive Order 9981, which mandated a policy of “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”48 The order established a committee to advise the President on specific measures to improve the lot of minorities in the armed services. And in 1950, Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews issued a policy statement prohibiting “discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in enlistment, appointment, promotion, or assignment” of Navy personnel.49

Starved of budgetary support in the late 1940s, the Navy found itself in great need of sailors at the outbreak the Korean War in June 1950. Enabled by Truman’s integration order, the Navy increased the number of blacks in the half-million-man service from almost 15,000 men in 1950 to 24,000 by the end of the conflict in 1953. No longer assigned to segregated units, black sailors served on board the Navy’s battleships, aircraft carriers, and other combatants. Ensign Jesse L. Brown was one of the first African-Americans to earn naval aviator wings. He died when his attack plane went down in the mountains of North Korea while supporting the 1st  Marine Division in its epic December 1950 battle and withdrawal from Chosin Reservoir. Theodore Taylor in his popular work, The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown (1998),50 details the officer’s early life and education, training as a naval aviator, service on board aircraft carrier Philippine Sea (CV-47), and interaction with his wingman and Medal of Honor recipient, Thomas Hudner. Taylor relates the circumstance of Brown’s crash landing and death.

Lenwood G. Davis and George Hill’s Blacks in the American Armed Forces (1985)51 provides a useful guide to magazine and journal articles on black sailors in the Korean War. An important short summary of the African-American naval experience is Bernard Nalty’s contribution entitled Long Passage to Korea in The U.S. Navy and the Korean War (2007) series.52 Supported by Nalty’s deep understanding of the topic and knowledge of relevant sources, the illustrated monograph traces the history of blacks in the Navy from the American Revolution on but with an emphasis on the Korean War. Nalty is candid about the challenges faced by the Navy and its African-American sailors.

One problem that outlasted the Korean War was the racial composition of the Steward Branch, whose black sailors served white officers. Naval Academy history professor Frederick Harrod, in a scholarly USNI Proceedings article (1979),53 relates that Lester Granger, director of the National Urban League during the war, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), and

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others pressured the Navy to desegregate the branch and open up more general Navy billets to blacks. At one point, Powell argued that “intelligent, ambitious Negroes are boycotting the United States Navy because they are not interested in making the world safe for democracy by shining shoes, nor are they interested in fighting communism with frying pans.”54 While only covering the 1930s and early 1940s, Richard E. Miller’s The Messman Chronicles (2004) analyses the challenges faced by African-American sailors serving in the segregated Steward Branch.55 The Navy redoubled its efforts to integrate Caucasian and Asian-Americans into the predominantly black branch, although that effort proceeded slowly during the 1950s.

Women in the Korean War

Officer and enlisted women also answered the call to serve in the Korean War. The demands of the service increased the number of women in the Nurse Corps from 1,921 in 1950 to 3,405 at the peak of the conflict. The nurses did not serve ashore in Korea but on board ships of the Military Sea Transportation Service and at more than 150 medical stations in the United States and abroad. Nurses also served on board hospital ships Consolation (AH-15), Repose (AH-16), and Haven (AH-12) off Korea. Navy nurses died serving their country throughout the war, for instance when hospital ship Benevolence (AH-13) en route to Korea collided with a merchant ship in San Francisco Bay in August 1950. The following month, 11 Navy nurses were killed when the plane carrying them to the naval hospital at Yokosuka went down in the Marshall Islands. Altogether, the war claimed the lives of 29 nurses.56

As recommended by the Defense Advisory Committee on Woman in the Service (DACOWITS), President Truman launched a nationwide campaign in late 1951 to encourage female enlistment. Even though the Navy fell short of its goal of 11,000 women on active duty, 9,000 did wear Navy blue by war’s end. Overall, the number of women in the Navy tripled between 1950 and 1953.57 While focusing for the most part on non-Navy women, William B. Breuer in his War and American Women (1997)58 provides a useful discussion of the activities of DACOWITS from its establishment through 1997 and the political issues connected with women in the military and in combat.

The standard texts on the Navy’s involvement in the Korean War, including Malcolm W. Cagle and Frank A. Manson’s The Sea War in Korea (1957), James A. Field’s History of United States Naval Operations: Korea (1962), and this author’s The U.S. Navy in the Korean War

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(2007), mention Navy nurses cursorily or not all.59 More focused works include Jan Herman’s Frozen in Memory (2006),60 which covers in detail not only the activities and reminiscences of nurses but also those of doctors, dentists, corpsmen, and other medical organizations and personnel. The challenges faced by Navy nurses in Korea are also focused on in the Women in Military Service for America Foundation work A Defense Weapon Known to be of Value (2005).61 The Navy Nurse Corps records maintained by the Navy’s Operational Archives provide a wealth of information on the Korean War experience of individual nurses as do the cruise books for the hospital ships that served there, which are held in the Navy Department Library.

Into the Doldrums

Despite the passage of key legislation and the positive experience of the Korean War, neither the nation nor the Navy aggressively pursued better treatment for women and non-white males and their full inclusion in the service during the next two decades. Indeed, the period witnessed the continued relegation of women to second-class status. Nation-wide, African- Americans, Hispanics, Asians and other minorities suffered injustices and mistreatment at the hands of racists north and south. The national fight over the civil rights and educational opportunities of African-Americans was divisive, extended, and often violent.

The Navy’s handling of the integration issue in some ways mirrored that of society at large, with improvement to the lot of its minority sailors slow in coming. No women could serve in combat aircraft or on board battleships, carriers, and other combatants. The custom of naval personnel referring to females in the service as “WAVES” well into the 1970s, long after the official end of that designation, only hardened the perception that the women were separate from the mainstream Navy. One ray of hope occurred in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Public Law 585-84, which enabled the promotion of a small number of female lieutenant commanders and commanders. In some ways, things got worse for enlisted women. The Navy concentrated women in specific functional areas to avoid having to make special arrangements with regard to their housing, discipline, and administration. Hence, 90 percent of Navy women served in clerical or medical jobs.62

Coauthors Ebbert and Hall conclude, however, that in the 1950s and early 1960s, when “women in the Navy might have disappeared altogether . . . they survived.” The excellence of their work in the administrative, medical, and intelligence areas to which they were confined,

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and their determination to take advantage of opportunities, eventually convinced Navy men that they “could no longer view their female counterparts as a novelty; a momentary aberration.” An equally relevant observation was that the women “posed no threat to Navy men. The fields in which they excelled were seen as peripheral to the Navy’s chief reason for being, which was readiness for war at sea.”63

A poignant and descriptive work on the experience of Navy women serving in the Vietnam War is former Lieutenant Commander Roberta “Bobbi” Hovis’ Station Hospital Saigon (1991).64 Her reminiscence certainly helped refute the age-old perception held by many Americans that women could not handle the fears of a combat zone. Assigned to the Navy hospital in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon in 1963, she found herself in the middle of a coup attempt against the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Gunfire from aircraft, artillery, tanks, and infantry weapons splattered her bachelor officer’s quarters (BOQ) and on a number of occasions narrowly missed hitting her. Jan Herman, former Historian of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, in his Navy Medicine in Vietnam 2010), Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald in their From Military Assistance to Combat (1986), and Thomas J. Cutler in his article “Purple for Christmas” (2015), discuss to a greater or lesser degree the service of Navy nurses in Vietnam.65 The three works document the Navy’s award of Purple Heart medals to Nurse Corps Lieutenants Barbara Wooster, Ruth A. Mason, and Frances L. Crumpton, and Lieutenant (j.g.) Ann Darby Reynolds, for wounds they suffered during the Viet Cong terrorist bombing of the Brink Bachelor Officers Quarters on Christmas Eve 1964. They were the first female members of the U.S. Armed Forces to receive the award in the Vietnam conflict.

Herman’s illustrated monograph describes the work of the approximately 450 female and male nurses who served in Saigon and at the 600-bed Station Hospital Danang. Other nurses operated from hospital ships Repose (AH-16) and Sanctuary. Herman’s treatment of women as part of a team and in the overall context of Navy medicine in general is entirely appropriate. Navy nurses worked closely with general physicians, surgeons, psychiatrists, and other specialists, medical equipment technicians, hospital corpsmen, and of course the badly wounded soldiers and Marines coming in from the field. Naval Reserve Rear Admiral Maryanne Gallagher Ibach has posted a detailed and moving account of nursing in Vietnam as remembered by a number of women who served there.66 Ibach observes that “my sense of our work, day to day, was that our success in saving lives was phenomenal.”67 Lieutenant Commander Marie Joan

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Brouillette recalled that she “had never seen such teamwork before or since my tour in Vietnam.”68 The Repose and Sanctuary cruise books and operational reports maintained by the Navy Department Library and the Navy archives provide information on the Nurse Corps’ wartime experience found nowhere else.

Integration of the corps during the 1960s involved not only women but also men. Once more, the needs of the service necessitated change. A drastic shortage of nurses throughout the nation and the naval service in 1964 prompted the Navy, in Godson’s words, to do “the unthinkable: it allowed male nurses to enter the Nurse Corps.”69 In many ways, the experience of the first men who sought to join the exclusively female Navy corps suffered from the same prejudice and mistreatment suffered by women in the Navy at large. It was common for female nurses to resent the intrusion of males into what had traditionally been a female preserve. Since males are now fully integrated into the corps it would be instructive to learn how this process was managed. This topic deserves serious historical study.

Despite the example of the Navy women who risked death and injury and served with distinction in Vietnam and offshore, naval leaders, as Ebbert and Hall and Godson relate, believed that women, other than nurses, should not serve in the fleet. The primary champion of that view was the Navy’s top female, Captain Rita Lenihan, the ACNP (W). She didn’t think “women belong onboard ship. . . . Their place is on shore and I don’t think the day will come when women will be seagoing as the men.” The captain added that “I don’t think we’ll ever be hearing of service women at Cape Kennedy ready to blast off into outer space.”70 Lenihan elaborates on her philosophy in oral histories and interviews conducted by the U.S. Naval Institute and Jean Ebbert. Hence, only nine female line officers served in South Vietnam. Despite the increasing need for military personnel during the war, the Navy also failed to exploit the readiness of American women to serve in the Navy itself. In 1960 and nine years later in 1969 there were still only about 6,000 women in the Navy of 600,000 to 700,000.71

Perhaps no other woman in the Navy’s history has achieved as much renown as Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. One of the most comprehensive works on her life and Navy career is Kathleen Broome Williams’ Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (2004).72 Williams’ biography is an insightful analysis not only of Hopper’s professional accomplishments and technical genius but also of her exemplary personal traits of perseverance, pedagogical excellence, and dedication to Navy service. Hopper also figures prominently in Williams’

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Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II (2001),73 in which the author focuses on the scientific and technological accomplishments of four women, including Hopper, whose work significantly aided the Navy’s war effort. Williams highlights Hopper’s need to “be at the forefront of her profession, never satisfied with the status quo.” Williams adds, “it was her ability to sustain this eager probing with undiminished energy.”74

Other works on Hopper include Charlene W. Billings’ Grace Hopper (1989),75 a popular treatise that sings that admiral’s praises while eschewing deep analysis. Carmen Lois Mitchell’s “The Contribution of Grace Murray Hopper to Computer Science and Computer Education” (1994), a Ph.D dissertation for the University of North Texas, discusses in detail Hopper’s “philosophy of teaching and learning, and her pedagogical legacy for today’s teachers and scholars of computer science and computer science education.”76 Hopper’s Navy experience, however, is incidental to the piece. Kurt W. Beyer in his “Grace Murray Hopper: Technical Innovator” (2013) praises the admiral’s “confidence in her abilities, leadership skills, sense of honor, and aggressive nature [that] allowed her to win over even the toughest critics” and serve as a “role model for generations of women in the computing industry and the Navy.”77

This author, in his chapter “Cold War to Violent Peace: 1945–1991” (2000) in The Navy, and a booklet entitled Women in the United States Navy produced by the Navy Diversity Directorate (N134) and the Naval History and Heritage Command (2011), presents short, useful analyses of Hopper’s contributions.78 One of Hopper’s great strengths was her ability to make computer science understandable to the layman and in that regard she teamed up with Steve Mandell to write Understanding Computers (1984).79 Articles on Hopper abound in Navy, computer science, electronic engineering, and other journals, identified in the Navy Department Library link http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/bibliographies/hopper-grace-admiral-select-bibliography.html 80

When Hopper retired from the service in 1966, Navy leaders concluded that they could not lose her special skills and brought her back on active duty. In the following years, she continued to champion the applicability of computers for information management in American business and industry. Nonetheless, Grace Hopper considered her highest award to have been “the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy.”81

Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman included Rear Admiral Hopper in his book On Seas of Glory: Heroic MEN [capitals added for emphasis], Great Ships, and Epic Battles of

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the American Navy (2001).82 Despite his general ambivalence about women serving in the Navy, he gives her high praise for her tireless efforts to convince the service that computers were essential to future success in battle. Indeed, he observes that “more than any other person she kept the culture of the Navy focused on exploiting the digital revolution [and this] ever-widening lead in technology over the Soviets that came from this focus hastened the end of the Cold War.”83

African-American Sailors in an Era of Turmoil

As with Navy women, constraints on the service of African-Americans limited their full or equitable integration into the Navy during the 1950s and 1960s. Naval leaders were not convinced that black sailors would improve the service’s efficiency. Moreover, the Navy became complacent in the 1950s concluding that the previous and modest ongoing measures to improve the status of blacks in the service were sufficient. Even before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the concept of “separate but equal” in Brown vs. Board of Education, the Navy enacted the Defense Department order prohibiting segregation in military schools, a plus for the Navy.84

Despite Wesley Brown’s accomplishment, by 1968 only three dozen black men or women had graduated from the Naval Academy. Robert J. Schneller, author of Blue & Gold and Black (2008), the definitive work on racial integration at the Naval Academy, observes that “black midshipmen were not yet fully integrated, professionally or socially.”85 These factors soured many in the black community on the Navy’s primary institution for commissioning officers for the fleet. Schneller adds that black families also considered the Navy as “the epitome of snobbery” because the service still assigned many blacks to the Steward Branch [now termed Culinary Specialists]—to serve white officers.86

The Civil Rights Commission, established in the late 1950s, suggested that “all but a few aspects of racial discrimination” had been eliminated from the military, but singled out the Navy which the commission felt had “shown little or no improvement” since Truman’s integration order.87 Inspired by the efforts of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil rights movement, in 1967 the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel mounted a major, albeit largely unsuccessful, recruiting effort to double the number of black officers in the Navy within two years. Schneller relates that the percentage of African-American officers in the Navy rose only

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from 0.3 in 1965 to 0.7 in 1970. By that latter date, there were only three black captains in the service.

Samuel L. Gravely Jr., who became the first black admiral in 1971, deserves a full-length biography. A veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, Gravely was the first African-American to command a combatant ship, to be promoted to flag rank, and to command a naval fleet. Gravely's life and naval career, spanning the years from 1944 to 1982, paralleled the ups and downs of black integration into the Navy. Oral histories and archival materials on Admiral Gravely are ample. A solid starting point for a work on Gravely is Paul Stillwell’s “Samuel L. Gravely Jr.: Setting the Precedent” in Joseph J. Thomas’ Leadership Embodied (2013).88 Stillwell observes that “one hallmark of a successful leader is the ability to go where no one has gone before, to light the way, and to serve as a role model and mentor so that others may follow. Samuel L. Gravely Jr. was such an individual.”89

Zumwalt

No individual has been more associated with the history of social change in the modern U.S. Navy than Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., the Chief of Naval Operations from 1970 to 1974. Published books, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and oral histories abound on this dynamo of a leader who served with distinction in command of naval forces in Vietnam and at the young age of 49 took the helm of the Navy over the heads of 33 more senior admirals. The starting point for any understanding of Zumwalt is his memoir, On Watch (1976).90 The admiral was keenly sensitive to the inequities that he knew African-American, female, and other minority sailors suffered on a daily basis in the Navy. The admiral also understood that unless he took action to reverse the drastic attrition of naval personnel in the wake of the Vietnam War and America’s anti-military fervor at the time, the Navy would be in serious trouble. Hence, as in previous eras, the needs of the service loomed large.

Zumwalt was also a man of great ambition. As an indication that he had more in mind than reforming the fleet’s personnel policies, much of his 511-page On Watch focuses on Vietnam, aircraft carriers, a nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union, and his contentious relationships with Admiral Hyman Rickover, Henry Kissinger, and the Nixon administration. The admiral was supremely confident in his own abilities and the correctness of his views. As

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with most memoirs, On Watch is self-serving, selective in its use of information, and must be weighed carefully against other sources.

Not much help in that regard is Larry Berman’s tome, Zumwalt (2012).91 The author, a journalist and author of several books on the Vietnam War, raises hagiography to new heights. Much of the work relies on Zumwalt’s memoir; a complimentary oral history the admiral recorded with the U.S. Naval Institute; other USNI interviews with admiring former subordinates Alex Kerr (1984),92 Howard Kerr, W. Lewis Glenn, and Worth Bagley (the latter three in 1989);93 Zumwalt family papers; and materials housed in Texas Tech’s Vietnam Archive. Restrictions with regard to still-classified information prevented Berman’s access to the official Zumwalt papers and other documentary records held in the Navy archives. Still, Berman did not avail himself of unclassified Zumwalt-related command histories, operational reports, interviews, and other sources available at NHHC or in other relevant collections nationwide. Berman’s treatment of his subject is superficial and one-sided and many of his interpretations argumentative.

One of the more balanced appraisals of Zumwalt’s tenure as CNO and his activist programs is Thomas J. Cutler’s chapter “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Hero or Heretic” in James C. Bradford’s Quarterdeck and Bridge (1997).94 Cutler concludes that Zumwalt’s “methods were unquestionably radical and provocative, but they also achieved what had not been done before. Zumwalt’s contention that traditional methods were prone to failure when revolutionary changes were needed makes sense, as viewed historically.”95 In “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Innovation” (2013), Cutler makes similar observations, characterizing the admiral as “one of the most controversial naval leaders of all time” who “both literally and figuratively . . . changed the U.S. Navy.”96 Norman Friedman in Robert Love’s The Chiefs of Naval Operations (1980) relates that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of the Navy John Chafee wanted Zumwalt for the job “because his views on the roles of blacks and women in the navy were more liberal than those of other senior admirals. He did not think that the navy had ever really tried to integrate blacks into the service and saw the general policy towards both blacks and women as tokenism.”97 Friedman’s assessment is that Zumwalt offered the Navy “revolutionary solutions to its gravest problems, rather than the evolutionary changes with which most of the naval community felt comfortable. . . . Zumwalt was flamboyant: his style resembled the charismatic, vigorous military leader of the past, rather than the colorless, bureaucratic manager of modern

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armed forces.”98 Edgar F. Puryear Jr.’s American Admiralship (2005)99 speaks about Zumwalt and his personnel reforms, but for the most part through the mouths of others, including Zumwalt himself and the historians who have written about the admiral. The book presents page after page of needlessly lengthy block quotes. Despite eschewing much editorial comment, Puryear does conclude that Zumwalt “was a champion of change who dared to sail into the political mine fields . . . and was ever willing to ‘rock the boat’ in an attempt to correct what he perceived as the serious ills of the U.S. Navy during the early 1970s.”100

An especially balanced, thoroughly researched, and insightful work on the racial aspects of Zumwalt’s tenure is John Darrell Sherwood’s Black Sailor, White Navy (2007).101 Sherwood discusses the impact of Zumwalt’s so-called “Z-Gram” communications to the fleet, each of which can be seen at the NHHC link http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/z/z-grams-list-policy-directives-issued-admiral-zumwalt/list-z-grams.html.102 Z-Gram 66 (Equal Opportunity in the Navy), for instance, expressed Zumwalt’s belief that “ours must be a Navy family that recognizes no artificial barriers of race, color, or religion.” Sherwood covers the racial unrest that exploded on aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk (CVA-63), fleet oiler Hassayampa (AO-145), aircraft carrier Constellation (CVA-64), and many other Navy ships and shore stations in 1972 and 1973. Lenwood G. Davis and George Hill, eds., Blacks in the American Armed Forces (1985)103 is a useful compendium that identifies magazine and journal articles on blacks in the racial disturbances and other aspects of the Vietnam War.

To many observers, African-Americans opposed the war in Vietnam, railed against the discrimination and harassment they experienced in the Navy, and ultimately rioted on board ships connected to Vietnam service. This is only one side of the story, however. Information and resources abound about black sailors who willingly served, shared the dangers and hardships of their white shipmates, often performed heroically, and valued their experience in the Navy. There is the need for a balanced history of the topic. Sherwood also describes the Navy’s response to this turmoil and the success or failure of its efforts in the short and long term. Thoroughly vetted by subject-matter experts, Sherwood’s work is based on interviews with many relevant naval personnel and research in the Chief of Naval Operations or “double zero” records, the information-rich official Zumwalt Papers, the Vietnam Command Files, and other primary source materials maintained in the Navy archives.

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Sherwood probes the question of whether or not there was institutional racism in the Navy before 1972. He also explores the reasons why Zumwalt had become “a crusader for equal opportunity and affirmative action in the Navy.”104 Later chapters analyze the causes of the racial disturbances and the House Armed Services Committee’s findings on them. Some senators from the South, retired flag officers, and other sympathetic commentators suggested that the disturbances resulted from black activism and the lax discipline and permissiveness of the Vietnam-era Navy.

Indeed, the list is long of those flag officers who railed not only against Zumwalt’s handling of race issues but also other aspects of his personnel reform programs, especially Z-Gram 57 that sought to eliminate “Mickey Mouse” rules and regulations. Sailors could now grow beards and sideburns and communicate their concerns directly to the CNO in Washington. Oral histories recorded by the U.S. Naval Institute with Admirals Thomas H. Moorer, Kent L. Lee (1990), Robert L. J. Long (1995), Raymond E. Peet (1984), and other retired flag officers reflect widespread dissatisfaction with what they considered Zumwalt’s hasty and ill-thought-out social changes that he pressed on the Navy.105 Thomas B. Hayward (2009), CNO from 1978 to 1982, recalled that “the Z-grams were always a big problem with me and with most of us. . . . Later, when I was CNO, I reversed a lot of them.”106 James D. “Jig Dog” Ramage (1993), a former fleet commander, contended that the Z-Grams had “generated an air of permissiveness, led to the deterioration of smartness, and the denigration of the CNO’s authority.”107 Gerald E. “Jerry” Miller (1984), one-time colleague of Zumwalt on the Navy staff and former fleet commander, contended that “the chain of command was being destroyed. Bud [Zumwalt] was a great builder and a great destroyer.” He added, “what a tragedy—for him and the Navy.”108 Historian Thomas C. Hone in his Power and Change (1989)109 has observed that to some Navy officers Zumwalt had weakened “naval command authority—the chain of command [and] in the process he undermined the tradition of seniority.”110

Admiral James L. Holloway III, who served as Zumwalt’s Vice Chief of Naval Operations from 1973 to 1974, related in his interviews with this author (2012) that all the living CNO’s concluded that “we’ve got to get rid of Zumwalt . . . . He’s just tearing the Navy apart. ” Admiral George W. Anderson met with President Nixon to express the admirals’ views and according to Holloway, “Zumwalt would have been fired if Watergate hadn’t come along.”111

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Holloway later observed that “Admiral Zumwalt does not qualify as a great leader because his command philosophy was not to lead but to accede to the wishes of the subordinate levels of the Navy. Unfortunately, he often did this without consideration of whether this permissiveness would be helpful to the overall mission of the Navy or hurt it. Admiral Zumwalt was a dashing figure, articulate and immensely popular with the junior officers and younger sailors who constitute the majority of the Navy. But we must not confuse popularity with leadership” [Holloway’s italics].112

Holloway also had decidedly mixed feelings about Zumwalt’s approach to the problem of race relations in the Navy. Holloway believed the Navy profited from Zumwalt’s actions to improve the lot of African-American sailors because “it highlighted a problem that nobody else would agree” about, but “my disagreement was the way it was done.” Holloway felt that the racial awareness program was amateurish and not “professionally run.”113

Both Zumwalt and Holloway, however, acknowledged that racism was endemic to the Navy and worked to end it. A problem was the failure of blacks and whites to understand one another. As Sherwood has observed, “black sailors represented a changed civilian world, while the white chain of command represented a Navy culture stuck in the social and cultural world of the 1950s.”114 Sherwood is spot on when he concludes that by improving the image of the Navy in the black community, both Zumwalt and Holloway helped transform the service “into one of the best employers in the nation for minorities—a workplace often cited later as a model of racial harmony.”115

Sherwood correctly credits Holloway for carrying forward many of Zumwalt’s programs and Holloway’s institution of the Navy Affirmative Action Plan (NAAP). As documented in a University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School study entitled Black and Other Minority Participation in the All-Volunteer Navy and Marine Corps (1979),116 both services had high aims for their affirmative action programs, including the elimination of racial bias, the distribution of “minorities proportionately across paygrade and rank categories,” and an increase in the “total number of minorities in service, especially in the officer corps.” The study found that because of competition with private industry, both services “have had difficulty in finding minorities for their officer and higher skilled positions.”117 Nonetheless, the racial climate in the Navy had improved markedly by the late 1970s.

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Zumwalt also took action to improve the lot of women in the Navy. He was keenly aware of the strength of the American feminist movement during the late 1960s, whose adherents called for greater equity and non-discrimination in the armed forces. Even though it was never ratified, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution reflected the support for a change to the status of women, as did the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1971.118 Zumwalt was also aware, with the abolition of the draft in 1973, of the Navy’s pressing need to enlist and retain qualified women for the “all-volunteer force.”

Zumwalt took concrete action with regard to women. In Z-Gram 116 of August 1972 the main purpose was to “eliminate any disadvantages to women resulting from either legal or attitudinal restrictions.”119 The communication gave enlisted women greater access to billets; assigned women to the (non-nurse) crew of hospital ship Sanctuary; and stated the intention to promote women to flag rank, and to command of shore-based units. Loanne Johnson, in Making WAVES, relates her personal experiences, not always positive, as an enlisted sailor in “this man’s Navy” during the post-Zumwalt years.120

In this context, one woman who deserves biographic treatment is Captain Robin Quigley, the highest-ranking woman in the Navy from 1971 to 1973. She took bold steps to eliminate the perception that women were somehow a “special” or separate category in the Navy; she strongly urged everyone to stop using the acronym WAVES, since that had no official standing after 1948. She abolished the billet of ACNP (W)—her own job—as anachronistic. She also recommended abolition of each Navy command’s special advisor for women’s concerns contending that commanding officers should directly handle all such issues. The captain, however, was much more conservative on other issues. In his memoir, Zumwalt suggests that Quigley lost favor with the administration because she upset Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird over the elimination of the ACNP (W) billet.121 Quigley later exclaimed, “that is an unbelievably preposterous misrepresentation of the facts. . . . The Secretary of Defense [had] not the foggiest thing to do with anything [regarding Navy women] until 1972, after I had told the Chief of Naval Operations I could not and would not endorse his program.”122

Zumwalt does not reveal that he lost confidence in her because of her more traditional outlook. According to Quigley, however, the CNO was “most unhappy with my philosophy” and she alludes to the “hypocrisy of Admiral Zumwalt’s purported interest in women.”123 She opposed women serving on naval vessels, taking flight training, or attending the U.S. Naval

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Academy. It was clear to Quigley that she was persona non grata with the CNO and that “they had to find out what to do with the squirrely lady. . . . Her next assignment needed to be something with a certain degree of high visibility, so that it would not look as though I had been fired or quit.”124 Recognizing her ability to work in Washington was nil, Quigley agreed to accept command of the naval schools in San Diego, and despite her differences with the CNO, thus became the first woman to lead a major Navy command. Some naval leaders, both male and female, considered a number of measures instituted by Zumwalt and Quigley too radical and destabilizing and worked to reverse course. As one example, in 1979 the Navy established the billet of Special Assistant for Women’s Policy (OP-01[W]), in essence bringing back Quigley’s old job.

In general, the 1970s witnessed significant advances with regard to Navy women. In 1970, 6,633 women (.95 percent of all naval personnel) served on active duty but by 1979 that figure had risen to 24,644 (4.7 percent of those in service).125 By 1979, out of 102 enlisted ratings, 91 (including 15 combat-related billets) were open to women. In April 1972, Zumwalt selected Alene B. Duerk, head of the Navy Nurse Corps, to be the first female flag officer.

The nurses made great strides integrating males into the corps. In 1970, only 156 men served alongside 2,273 female officers in the Nurse Corps but by 1979, 648 men represented 25 percent of the 2,551-person organization. In 1972, the first females entered naval aviation training and by the end of the decade many of them piloted helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. In 1978, Lieutenant Barbara Allen became the first woman to qualify in jet aircraft. The practice of separating from the service pregnant women or women with dependents under 18, long the norm, was ended by 1975. Holloway opened the U.S. Naval Academy to women in 1976 and in 1978 authorized females to serve on board naval vessels other than hospital ships and transports.126

Many Americans and most historians, including this author, credit Zumwalt, despite a number of programmatic missteps, with changing for good how the service accommodated the quest for dignity, equality, and opportunity by its men and women. In his eulogy of Zumwalt in 2000, President Bill Clinton observed that the admiral “worked in the face of wilting criticism and a highly resistant institutional culture to make the Navy do the right thing and make the Navy one of the most colorblind institutions in our entire nation.” He added that Zumwalt “had

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the vision to see a great future for the Navy” and that “the changes he brought about . . . will continue to shape the character and culture of our Navy for a long time in the 21st century.”127

There is need for a balanced study of the personnel, disciplinary, social, and other changes that impacted on the Navy in the early 1970s. A work is called for that does not focus on any one aspect, for instance the actions taken to improve the lot of women, but looks at the influence of American society at large, steps taken (or not taken) by the Navy before Zumwalt’s time as CNO, and the lasting effects of those measures (good and bad) on the service. There are many more sources available to support this study.

The Promise and Problems of the 20th Century’s Last Decades

In the 1980s and 1990s, African-Americans registered great gains in the Navy. As documented by historian Robert J. Schneller, at the naval academy “the 1,511 African-Americans admitted into the classes of 1980–99 represented a quantum leap over the 476 black midshipmen who entered into the classes of 1969–79.” He added that “by and large, black midshipmen, male and female, from the classes of 1980–99 looked back with pride at the Naval Academy as an unparalleled opportunity to obtain a first-class education, a gateway to the naval profession, and a ticket to a lucrative civilian career.”128

Bernard C. Nalty wrote of the 1980s that “the eradication of the last vestiges of racial discrimination from the armed services yielded during this period of quiet to such objectives as improving relationships within military families and rehabilitating drug users and alcoholics.” In short, “years of progress in race relations had removed the worst manifestations of racism.” He ascribed this development to the improvement of race relations in society at large and the recruitment of a higher caliber of black and white sailors.129

In 1994, Secretary of the Navy John Dalton raised the goal of African-American officers in the Navy to 12 percent, representative of the black population of the United States.130 In 1996, Paul Reason became the first African-American promoted to four-star flag rank when he took command of the Atlantic Fleet and accepted responsibility for 122,000 service men and women, 200 naval vessels, and 1,400 aircraft.131

Navy women also registered successes during the last decades of the 20th century.

During the 1980s, the number of non-nurse Navy women rose from 30,000 to almost 58,000, the latter figure representing 9.5 percent of the men and women in uniform. Female officers began

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rising to the Navy’s flag ranks. Pauline Hartington, Grace Hopper, Frances Shea, Mary Nielubowicz, Mary Hall, and Roberta Hazard put on admiral’s stars during the 1980s.132 Regina Akers’ oral history interview with Roberta L. Hazard (1994)133 highlights how the admiral distinguished herself in a 32-year career during which she had a significant impact on improving the quality of service and training of Navy personnel. Every year during the 1980s approximately 100 women entered the Naval Academy and many of them excelled as officers in the brigade of midshipmen, students, and athletes. In 1981, the first four Hispanic women and the first Native-American woman graduated from the Naval Academy.134

But resistance within the Navy toward the service of women in non-traditional roles remained strong. In 1986, outgoing Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James D. Watkins called for a limit to the number of women in the Navy and his successor, Admiral Carlisle A. H. Trost, planned to implement that action. Only Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s intercession prevented that restriction from becoming a reality.

Chase Untermeyer, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs from 1984 to 1988, kept a diary of his daily interactions with Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and his successor James Webb. While Untermeyer’s work is self-serving and routinely reflects a one-sided view of matters, his Inside Reagan’s Navy (2015)135 opens a window into the decision-making of the Reagan-era secretariat. Untermeyer relates that both secretaries were unsympathetic to a proposal to assign women to non-combatant ships in the Mobile Logistics Support Force. Lehman reportedly worried that Navy wives would be up in arms about fraternization and compel their husbands to leave the service.136

Webb, a highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran, was remembered by many even before he became Secretary of the Navy as the author of a November 1979 article in Washingtonian magazine entitled “Women Can’t Fight” that made the case that females were inherently unsuited for combat.137 Once in office, Webb was so sensitive to the perception that he was anti-woman that he fired his Chief of Naval Personnel, supposedly unsympathetic to the plight of female sailors, but other factors apparently prompted the action. He announced in a meeting with the Women Officer’s Professional Association that he was reviewing policies regarding billet assignments, sexual harassment, and fraternization. But according to Untermeyer, Webb was “truly against women in the military and detests those who keep pushing the matter.”138 Webb changed the title of the Mobile Logistics Support Force to the Combat

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Logistics Support Force to emphasize the legal prohibition against women being assigned to ships that might be involved in combat. When the new Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, supported consideration of assigning women to oilers, ammunition, and stores ships in the logistics force, Webb intimated to Untermeyer that the Secretary of Defense “is going to have to get Ronald Reagan to tell me to do it.”139 Despite his personal objections, in December 1987 Webb approved the assignment of women to 26 of the 37 ships in the force. Retired Master Chief Petty Officer James L. Leuci’s “Navy Women in Ships,” provides detailed information on individual women and the ships to which they were assigned and is an especially valuable resource.140

Webb took action to preempt the release of a report by DACOWITS resulting from a tour of naval bases in August 1987 that found many females complaining about sexual harassment, poor communication between female sailors and their superiors, and discrimination on the job. At Secretary Webb’s direction, Admiral Trost ordered an investigation that produced the Navy Study Group’s Report on Progress of Women in the Navy.141 The 28-member study group, half of whom were women and included 20 officers, four master chief petty officers, and a “steering committee” of four flag officers, looked at 1) the progress of women in the service during the first years of the all-volunteer force; 2) the Navy’s use and execution of relevant policies; 3) sexual harassment and fraternization; and 4) the quality of life for female sailors. The report emphasized that “Navy women officers and enlisted personnel have experienced significant growth in both numbers and in career opportunities during the last 15 years.”142 The study group recommended assigning women to ships of the Combat Logistics Support Force and shore-based fleet air reconnaissance squadrons, an improvement in career opportunities, establishment of a permanent captain billet (OP-01W) for the oversight on women’s programs, and promulgation of a policy on fraternization. One troubling finding of the study group was that “over half of the 1,400 women interviewed . . . indicated they had been victims of some form of sexual harassment in the Navy; nearly all those interviewed reported observing some form of sexual harassment.”143 In that regard, the study group recommended greater Navy efforts to improve male attitudes toward their female shipmates. That report and a 1990 Update Report on the Progress of Women in the Navy,144 both led by Rear Admiral Roberta L. Hazard, found that continued combat restrictions and the prevailing male-dominated Navy culture made it especially difficult for women to prosper in the service. The latter report bemoaned the “lack of acceptance,

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underutilization, and lack of equal treatment” of women in the service, one of the prime factors being the “highly emotional issues of pregnancy, single parenthood, and sexual harassment.”145 In short, there remained problems aplenty with regard to the service of Navy women.

Real or suspected instances of sexual harassment in the Navy could quickly become national news, as was the case when pre-Army-Navy Game revelry in 1989 at the Naval Academy resulted in Gwen M. Dreyer being handcuffed to a urinal and photographed by male midshipmen. As related to this author in an interview with Joseph W. Prueher (2016)146, the Commandant of Midshipmen at the time, he considered the incident an issue for the academy to handle. He spoke with both Dreyer and her father and punished the individuals involved but did not expel them from the academy. The incident, however, soon became a major news item across the country with many commenters characterizing Prueher’s actions as insensitive and inadequate. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun newspaper, the officer later admitted that he was surprised by the media’s attention and that he “would have handled the Dreyer case differently today. Ms. Dreyer deserved more sympathy . . . and those responsible for the incident possibly deserved harsher punishment.”147 Convinced that Prueher had learned hard lessons from the experience and was an especially promising naval leader, Maryland Senator and woman’s advocate Barbara Mikulski helped keep the officer’s career on track. Joseph Prueher went on to serve as the Vice Chief of Naval Operations; Commander in Chief, Pacific; and the U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. The episode is recounted in a balanced, well-researched chapter in John Hattendorf and Bruce Elleman’s Nineteen Gun Salute entitled “The Right Skill Sets—Joseph Wilson Prueher (1941- )” (2010) by Bruce Elleman.148 More over-heated and inaccurate coverage can be found in Greg L. Vistica’s screed, Fall From Glory.149

By 1990, 331 officers and 7,803 enlisted women were serving afloat on board more than 100 naval vessels. Not unexpectedly, the new assignments could put women in danger, as occurred in 1987 when Iraqi air-launched missiles hit guided missile frigate Stark (FFG-31), operating in the Persian Gulf along with destroyer tender Acadia (AD-42) and her integrated crew. In this era of “firsts,” female officers became the first commanding officers and executive officers of training, recruiting, Military Sealift Command, and other commands. In 1987, Lieutenant Commander Deborah Gernes became the first executive officer of destroyer tender Cape Cod (AD-43) and later qualified for command at sea.150

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Other Navy women took to the skies and shared with their male counterparts the risks of flying military aircraft. Lieutenant Commander Barbara Allen Rainey, the first female to become a naval aviator and qualify in jets, was killed in a training accident in 1982. Other women became naval aviators and naval flight officers, test pilots, helicopter pilots, and training instructors, or served in aviation-related navigation, intelligence, and communications billets. In 1988, Commander Rosemary Mariner became the first executive officer of a naval aviation squadron and later the first commanding officer of that unit. By 1990, 4,892 enlisted women served in aviation squadrons. Belying the observation of Captain Lenihan in the late 1960s, in 1984 Naval Reserve Commander Kathryn D. Sullivan, serving with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, became the first woman to walk in space.151

Homosexuality

Homosexuality and the Navy’s response to it is a subject that demands more comprehensive historical coverage. Homosexuality has gone down to the sea in ships from the dawn of time, but the issue gained nationwide attention in the late 1980s. Following an explosion that tore apart gun turret Number Two of battleship Iowa (BB-61) in April 1989, a Navy investigation concluded that sailor Clayton Hartwig had purposely triggered the blast with an electric or chemical detonator that killed him and 46 other sailors. The national media picked up rumors that Hartwig was a homosexual and had had a falling out with another homosexual sailor, an assertion never substantiated. Indeed, subsequent government-sponsored investigations contradicted the Navy’s findings and blamed the explosion on a mechanical malfunction unrelated to human error.

The standard works on the U.S. Navy discuss homosexuality sparingly, if at all. Godson relates in several short paragraphs that until 1994 when President Clinton implemented the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” lesbians and gays were routinely discharged from the service as a threat to good order, discipline, and national security.152 Ebbert and Hall provide a forthright, albeit short analysis of lesbianism in the Navy and how the service dealt with it during the late 20th century. They relate two instances, which received media attention, where a number of female crew members on board tenders Norton Sound (AVM-1) and Yellowstone (AD-41) were investigated for homosexual activity and some discharged from the service. The authors contrast the Navy’s handling of those cases with its routinely secretive discharge of gay male sailors.

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Ebbert and Hall add that during the 1980s, “of all the services, the Navy had the highest overall rate of discharge for homosexuality for both men and women.”153

Randy Shilts’ Conduct Unbecoming (1993)154 and Joseph Steffan’s Honor Bound (1992)155 clearly support allowing homosexuals to serve in the military while Ronald D. Ray in his Military Necessity & Homosexuality (1993)156 opposes that measure. E. Lawrence Gibson’s Get Off My Ship (1978),157 the Rand Corporation’s Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy (1993),158 and Gays and Lesbians in the Military (1994) edited by Wilbur J. Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley, provide useful information on government policies and relevant literature. Nonetheless, despite these most recent studies, much more needs to be done to gain a full understanding of homosexuality’s impact on Navy since the end of World War II.

The Ups and Downs of the Integrated Navy

Tens of thousands of Navy women took justified pride in their accomplishments during the 1990s. The standard texts on the Navy’s involvement in the Persian Gulf War focus for the most part on political-military issues, strategy and tactics, and combat operations, but document some contributions of Navy women. Seventy-five thousand American naval personnel, including 3,700 women, deployed to the combat theater. This author and Robert J. Schneller, in their work Shield and Sword (2001),159 relate the experience of Lieutenant Commander Diane Cangelosi in dangerous flight operations near Kuwait and how another military woman, Army aviator Rhonda Cornum, endured torture, including sexual abuse at the hands of her captors. Shield and Sword also makes the point that other military women suffered death and injury when a Scud missile launched from Iraq killed or wounded 56 men and women of an Army Reserve unit at a support facility in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.160 Nonetheless, as with many histories of the Navy since World War II, Shield and Sword, Marvin Pokrant’s two-volumes on the war at sea (1999),161 and Norman Friedman’s Desert Victory (1991)162 do not provide in-depth coverage of female activities in the conflict. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that by 1990–91many women were carrying out their duties in much the same way as their male counterparts.

For Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall, “the Gulf War . . . was a turning point for women in the Navy.”163 The courageous and professional performance of Navy and other military women in the Persian Gulf War invigorated Americans who wanted to redefine, if not rescind altogether the 1948 law that barred women from combat. Hence, in November 1993, Congress

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enacted a legislative measure that enabled women to serve on combatant ships, with the exception of submarines and mine warfare vessels.

The 1990s produced a flood of books on women in the Navy. One of the most insightful is More Than a Uniform (1997)164 by Winifred Quick Collins, who had served in World War II and the early Cold War and held the billet of Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for Women from 1957 to 1962. Captain Collins made the point that “although the ‘woman’s revolution’ is often said to have begun in the early 1960s, we should recognize that at that time women in the Navy were already [original italics] performing important jobs which were unavailable to their civilian counterparts. The changes for women in the navy had become profound before the women’s revolution got under way.”165

Doris M. Sterner’s In and Out of Harm’s Way (1996)166 is a chronological compendium of people, events, and other information relevant to the Navy Nurse Corps from its establishment in 1908 to the last years of the 20th century. John P. and Marie C. Dever’s Women and the Military (1995)167 is a font of information on the females in the services as is Vicki L. Friedl’s Women in the United States Military (1996).168 The latter work provides a research guide and an annotated bibliography on the topic. The work specifically identifies archives and other repositories holding material on Navy women; congressional reports; relevant books, articles, and studies; and the best sources on such issues as family and pregnancy, sexual harassment, and women in combat. Margaret C. Devilbiss in her Women and Military Service (1990)169 uses a social science methodology to study the seminal policies relating to military women and analyzes ten “key issue areas” to determine their underlying causes. A more specialized study is Deborah G. Douglas’ United States Women in Aviation ((1990)170 that looks at military and civilian women who made a mark in aviation. Individual chapters for the postwar period include the “Impact of the Women’s Rights Movement” of the 1960s and “Women with the ‘Right Stuff’” of the 1970s. Other useful sources include Lory Manning’s Women in the Military (2008) and Laurie Weinstein and Christie C. White’s Wives and Warriors (1997).171

Sexual Harassment and Turbulence in the Navy

Navy women would remember the 1990s not only for their participation in combat operations and professional accomplishment but highly publicized and sensational episodes related to sexual harassment. The Tailhook scandal of 1991–92 rocked the Navy as no other

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gender-related issue of modern times. The annual meeting in September 1991 of the Tailhook Association, a group that looked at issues related to the Navy’s aviation community, degenerated into raucous parties and lewd behavior fueled by alcohol in certain areas of the hosting Las Vegas hotel. Female officers reported that inebriated male aviators had groped and verbally abused them as they made their way through the hotel. Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, a helicopter pilot and an admiral’s aide, reported the egregious behavior to her superiors. Dissatisfied with the Navy’s investigation of the matter, she went public and the activities at the Tailhook convention soon became heated national news.

The passion generated by Tailhook is clearly reflected in the works that cover the episode. On one side are books like Gregory Vistica’s Fall From Glory that heap calumny on the Navy for all manner of transgressions, real or imagined, and its “bag of dirty tricks.”172 His sensational approach and obvious antagonism to the naval leaders who worked to deal with Tailhook severely limits the book’s usefulness. Journalist William H. McMichael’s The Mother of All Hooks (1997)173 is written in much the same vein. He regarded Tailhook as “a failure of leadership, deceptiveness, institutional entrenchment, loyalty over truth, abuse of power, [and] outright incompetence.”174

A more even-handed treatment of Tailhook can be found in Jean Zimmerman’s Tailspin (1995).175 She documents the entire episode with a focus on Lieutenant Coughlin’s role in it and the gross misbehavior that took place at the Las Vegas Hilton. For Zimmerman, a key issue was the combat exclusion law that prejudiced male aviators against their female shipmates and set them up for disrespectful treatment. Zimmerman, however, credits Admiral Frank B. Kelso, the Chief of Naval Operations—the villain in the piece for many antagonists—as the man who “effectively ushered the Navy into a new era of including women in combat duty”176 Admiral Stanley R. Arthur, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations under Kelso, in his interview with this author, provides significant insight into the leadership’s actions during Tailhook and especially those of Admiral Kelso.177 Both Godson in Serving Proudly and Ebbert and Hall in Crossed Currents provide short balanced summaries of Tailhook.

Another angle on the Tailhook episode is provided in William B. Breuer’s War and American Women (1997).178 The author of numerous popular military histories, Breuer praises the accomplishments of women throughout U.S. history but questions the wisdom of putting females in combat positions. He does not dispute the fact that sexual transgressions occurred in

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Las Vegas but rails against feminists and their supporters in Congress and the media who sullied the reputations of male officers who attended the convention but took no part in its misbehavior. He bemoans the damage done to the Navy in the scandal’s aftermath.

Malcolm Steinberg’s Admiral Boorda’s Navy (2011) is a misnomer in that the author has little or nothing to say about the Navy of 1994­96, instead focusing on the suicide of Admiral Jeremy Boorda, the Chief of Naval Operations following Kelso.179 Steinberg argues that the pressures of gender issues helped influence Boorda to take his own life. Many of the events associated with Tailhook and related issues are discussed in the pages of the U.S. Naval Institute’s compilation of articles entitled Women in the Navy (2015) by Thomas J. Cutler.180 The work provides an especially useful collection of articles that appeared in Proceedings from 1978 to 2014 and touched on women on ships, in naval aircraft, the combat exclusion legislation, and pregnancy.

Tailhook was not the only gender-related problem that commanded the Navy’s attention and received analysis in the sources identified above. In 1994, Admiral Arthur, who had commanded U.S. naval forces during the Gulf War and flown more than 500 combat missions in Vietnam, was compelled to withdraw his nomination to be Commander in Chief, Pacific. The principal reason was that he had endorsed an aviation command’s finding that Lieutenant Rebecca Hansen was unqualified for flight duty. Hansen charged that sexual harassment by a flight instructor, later disproven, had caused her failure.181 That same year, Lieutenant Kara S. Hultgreen became the first woman to qualify in the Navy’s top fighter, the F-14 Tomcat. Like many of her male counterparts over the years, Lieutenant Hultgreen was killed while recovering on board an aircraft carrier, an inherently dangerous maneuver. Some critics charged that to satisfy feminists the Navy put an unqualified woman in the pilot’s seat. Others said that a woman should not have been exposed to such risk in the first place. In the end, the Navy determined that it mattered not in the least whether the pilot of that F-14 was male or female. Most of the sources treating Tailhook also include passages on Hultgreen’s Navy experience and death on duty. An especially compelling work was written by her mother, Sally Spears, who “conscious of that [familial connection] tried very hard not to paint her as a saint or a prude or always in the right, a plastic perfect heroine.”182 Spears’ book works especially well in that regard.

The Focus on Diversity

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The major efforts after the 1990s to improve the status of women and blacks and to end discrimination also inspired the Navy to pay much closer attention to its Hispanic, Asian-Pacific, and other minority sailors and their contribution to the service. An earlier work on a minority member of the Navy was the autobiography Carrier Admiral (1967)183 by Vice Admiral Joseph J. “Jocko” Clark, of Oklahoma Cherokee ancestry. Noted historian Clark Reynolds helped the admiral prepare the work on the latter’s service in World War II. A much more polished and interpretive work on the admiral is Reynold’s On the Warpath in the Pacific (2005).184 Reynolds describes Clark’s early life and naval service, leadership in the carrier battles of World War II, and command of the U.S. Seventh Fleet during the Korean War. While Clark and Reynolds seem comfortable with allusions to Indian stereotypes, as depicted in the latter volume’s text and illustrations, readers may find the treatment less than sensitive to contemporary tastes.

More recent publishing efforts have included works on other minority Navy leaders, for instance Sarandis Papadopoulos’ chapter on Admiral Horatio Rivero Jr. in Bruce Elleman’s Nineteen-Gun Salute (2010).185 Papadopoulos argues convincingly that the intellectual and diplomatic skills of this Puerto-Rican-born officer served the Navy especially well. Rivero earned combat decorations in World War II and the Korean War, distinguished himself in leadership positions throughout the Cold War, and became the Navy’s first Hispanic four-star admiral as the Vice Chief of Naval Operations during the critical early years of the Vietnam War. He then served as Commander in Chief, Allied Forces Southern Europe, and U.S. Ambassador to Spain. The NHHC’s archive holds his papers and the U.S. Naval Institute has conducted an oral history with him. Rivero’s contributions to the Navy and the nation cry out for more comprehensive biographical treatment.

Naval historians have also devoted attention to the contributions of minority sailors in the fight against global terrorism. Thomas J. Cutler’s A Sailor’s History of the U.S. Navy (2005)186 recounts the bravery and professional skill of petty officers Tayinika “Baby Doc” Campbell, an African-American, and Ernesto Garcia, an Hispanic-American, in the successful effort to save guided missile destroyer Cole (DDG-67) after her attack by Al Qaeda terrorists in October 2000.

The Naval History and Heritage Command, as tasked by the Navy Diversity Directorate (N134), has made a concerted effort to document the contribution of minority sailors who have served the Navy and the nation. Individual booklets published in 2010 and 2011 focus on Women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian Pacific-Americans, Native Americans, and

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religious diversity. We learn that 41,500 Native Americans, more than 90 percent of them volunteers, served in the Navy and the other military services during the Vietnam War.187 Indicative of the advances Asian-Americans have made in the Navy, Harry B. Harris Jr., born in Yokosuka, Japan, to an American chief petty officer and a Japanese woman, in 2014 became the Navy’s first officer of Asian ancestry to put on the four stars of a full admiral when he took the helm at the Pacific Command.188 In 2007, Adam M. Robinson Jr. became first black Surgeon General of the Navy and Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.189 Rear Admiral Nora Tyson became the first woman to command a carrier strike group, which operated from aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush (CVN-77).190 Hispanic-American Jacqueline DiRosa became the first woman to serve as both a Force and Fleet Master Chief, billets at the top of the Navy’s enlisted ranks. While these booklets serve the purpose of highlighting the contribution of minority communities and individual leaders, and should be continually updated, they are no substitute for in-depth, thoroughly researched and analyzed histories and biographies that should be encouraged.

One individual who has distinguished herself in service to her country and warrants a full biographical study is Michelle J. Howard. She was the first African-American female to achieve four-star rank in the Navy when she became the Vice Chief of Naval Operations in 2014. Subsequent tours included command of U.S. Naval Forces, Europe, and Allied Joint Force Command, Naples. Earlier in her career, Howard led Expeditionary Strike Group 2 in anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and served as Chief of Staff to the Director of Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff. Oral histories and other supporting materials are available in the Navy archives and other repositories.

Conclusion

Historical coverage and analyses concerning the integration of women, African-Americans, and other minority sailors in the U.S. Navy of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras reflects the status of those groups at the time. During the 1950s and 1960s, when minority officers and enlisted sailors constituted a very small percentage of the personnel in the Navy and many of those minority members did not serve in the operating fleet, few works appeared in print to document their contribution. All that changed in the 1970s and early 1980s when the nationwide civil rights, feminist, and anti-establishment movements and opposition to the

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Vietnam War shined a spotlight on the status of African-Americans and women in the Navy. Complementing the path-breaking works on African-Americans by Morris MacGregor and Bernard Nalty were Frederick Harrod’s salient analysis, Herbert Northrup’s and Greenwood Press’ documentary works, and especially Admiral Zumwalt’s memoir On Watch. Scholars have also benefitted from the insider views of Joy Bright Hancock and Margaret Chase Smith through their autobiographies and the U.S. Naval Institute’s recorded interviews with key female and male leaders of the previous eras. The floodgates opened wide in the 1990s with regard to publications on Navy women and gender issues. The Tailhook scandal generated a number of works, including solid analyses by Jean Zimmerman, Susan Godson, and Ebbert and Hall, and heated works by Gregory Vistica, William McMichael, Malcolm Steinberg, and William Breuer. John and Maria Dever, Doris Sterner, Winifred Quick Collins, Vicki Friedl, Sally Spears, Margaret Devilbiss, Lory Manning, Sharon Disher, and Deborah Douglas produced creditable works on various aspects of women in the Navy of the time. The issue of homosexuality in the military came to the fore with publications by Randy Shilts, Joseph Steffan, and Ronald Ray. The three most useful overviews of Navy women in the last half of the 20th century are Crossed Currents by Jean Ebbert and Mary Beth Hall, Serving Proudly by Susan Godson, and Women in the Military by Jeanne Holm. Supported by in-depth research in primary and secondary sources, and oral history interviews, these authoritative works present a wealth of information and sharp analysis on gender issues.

The 21st  century has witnessed the publication of several first-rate, scholarly books focused on key aspects of the social history of the modern Navy. Robert Schneller’s Breaking the Color Barrier and Blue & Gold and Black thoroughly document the integration of black Americans at the U.S. Naval Academy while John Darrell Sherwood’s Black Sailor, White Navy provides a cogent interpretation of the Navy’s racial troubles in the Zumwalt era. Finally, the Naval Institute’s oral history interviews with admirals Stanley R. Arthur, Joseph A. Prueher, and other key leaders shed significant light on the social issues that shook the modern U.S. Navy.

In short, a solid body of information and interpretive works exist relating to the experience of minority sailors in the momentous decades since the end of World War II. Study of that subject and that era of the Navy’s history, however, is far from done. The American people and the naval service deserve a full-length, thoroughly researched and analyzed work on the social history of the late 20th  century; and another that combines the strategic, operational,

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institutional, technological—and social aspects—of the Navy’s momentous 21st  century  history. 

 

I would like to thank the Naval History and Heritage Command for sponsoring this historiographical project, and my friends and colleagues Drs. Michael Crawford, John Darrell Sherwood, and Regina Akers for their positive advice on the subject and careful reading of several drafts.

_____________

Endnotes

1 Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: The Free Press, 1991).

2 George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 18901990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

3 Paolo E. Coletta, The American Naval Heritage (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987).

4 Nathan Miller, The U.S. Navy: A History (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press [hereafter USNIP], 1997).

5 Michael T. Isenberg, Shield of the Republic: The United States Navy in an Era of Cold War and Violent Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

6 http://www.navyhistory.org/oral-history-index/.

7 http://www.womensmemorial.org/H&C/Oral_History/oralhistory.html .

8David F. Winkler, Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always: More Than a Century of Service by Citizen Sailors (Washington, DC: Navy Reserve Commemoration Committee, 2015).

9 Cheryl Lynn Ruff, Ruff’s War: A Navy Nurse on the Frontline in Iraq (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2005).

10 Heidi Squier Kraft, Rule Number Two: Lessons I learned in a Combat Hospital (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2007).

11 Gail Harris, A Woman’s War: The Professional and Personal Journey of the Navy’s First African-American Female Intelligence Officer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010).

12 Regina T. Akers, “Doing Their Part: The WAVES in World War II,” Ph.D dissertation, Howard University, 2000.

13 Joy Bright Hancock, Lady in the Navy: A Personal Reminiscence (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1972).

14 Ibid., 223.

15 Regina T. Akers, “Joy Bright Hancock: Pioneering Spirit,” in Joseph J. Thomas, Leadership Embodied: The Secrets to the Success of the Most Effective Navy and Marine Corps Leaders (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2013), 129.

16 Margaret Chase Smith, Declaration of Conscience, with William C. Lewis Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1972).

17 Ibid., 85–86.

18 Elizabeth Allen Butler, Navy WAVES (Charlottesville, VA: Wayside Press, 1988).

19 Margaret Chase Smith interview with U.S. Naval Institute (USNI), 1969; Joy Bright Hancock interview with USNI, 1969–1971; Louise K. Wilde interview with USNI, 1969; Winifred Quick Collins interview with USNI, 1969.

20 Interviews with USNI: Robin Quigley, 1976; Mildred McAfee Horton, 1969; Jean Palmer, 1969; Elizabeth Crandall, 1970; Frances Rich, 1960; Eleanor Rigby, 1970; Tova Peterson Wiley, 1969.

21 Quoted in Robin Quigley interview with USNI, 1976, 239.

22 Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall, Crossed Currents: Navy Women in a Century of Change (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 3rd ed., 1999).

23 Susan H. Godson, Serving Proudly: A History of Women in the Navy (Annapolis, MD: USNIP and Naval Historical Center, 2001).

24 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, xvi.

25 Ibid., xv.

26 Ibid., xv–xvi.

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27 The author of this historiographical study reviewed the manuscript while in preparation at the Naval Historical Center.

28 Susan H. Godson, Viking of Assault: Admiral John Leslie Hall Jr. and Amphibious Warfare (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982).

29 Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982) and revised edition 1992.

30 Ibid., xiv.

31 Ibid., 330.

32 Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, Sound Off: American Military Women Speak Out (New York: Dutton, 1988).

33 Ibid., 245.

34 Sharon H. Disher, First Class: Women Join the Ranks at the Naval Academy (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1998).

35 Paul Stillwell, The Golden Thirteen: Recollections of the First Black Naval Officers (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1993).

36 Ibid., 267.

37 Dennis D. Nelson, The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 17761947, with a Brief Historical Introduction (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1948).

38 Morris J. MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Documents (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1977).

39 Ibid., introduction.

40 Morris MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty, eds., Blacks in the Military: Essential Documents (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1981).

41 Morris J. MacGregor Jr., Defense Studies: Integration of the Armed Forces, 19401965 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1981).

42 Ibid., ix.

43 Bernard Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military (New York: The Free Press, 1986).

44 Ibid., 2.

45 James T. Controvich, African Americans in Defense of the Nation: A Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011).

46 Robert J. Schneller, Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy’s First Black Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

47 Ibid., x, 257.

48 Quoted in Bernard C. Nalty, Long Passage to Korea: Black Sailors and the Integration of the U.S. Navy in Edward J. Marolda, ed., in The U.S. Navy and the Korean War (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 2003), 28.

49 Quoted in Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 264–-65.

50 Theodore Taylor, The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown (New York: Avon Books, 1998).

51 Lenwood G. Davis and George Hill, Blacks in the American Armed Forces, 17761983 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 125–30.

52 Nalty, Long Passage to Korea.

53 Frederick S. Harrod, “Integration of the Navy (1941–1978),” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings105 (Oct 1979): 40–47.

54 Ibid., 45.

55 Richard E. Miller, The Messman Chronicles: African Americans in the U.S. Navy, 19321943 (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2004).

56 Godson, Serving Proudly, 183–87.

57 Nalty, Long Passage to Korea, 143; Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 144–45.

58 William B. Breuer, War and American Women: Heroism, Deeds, and Controversy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).

59 James A. Field Jr., History of United States Naval Operations: Korea (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1962); Malcolm W. Cagle and Frank A. Manson, The Sea War in Korea (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1957); Edward J. Marolda, ed., The U.S. Navy in the Korean War (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2007).

60 Jan K. Herman, Frozen in Memory: U.S. Navy Medicine in the Korean War (Self-published, 2006).

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61 Linda Witt, Judith Bellafaire, Britta Granrud, and Mary Jo Binker, eds., A Defense Weapon Known to be of Value: Servicewomen of the Korean War Era (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Military Women’s Press of the Women in Military Service for America Foundation, 2005).

62 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 161–64, 167.

63 Ibid., 170.

64 Roberta Hovis, Station Hospital Saigon: A Navy Nurse in Vietnam, 19631964 (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1991).

65 Jan K. Herman, Navy Medicine in Vietnam: Passage to Freedom to the Fall of Saigon in series The U.S. Navy and the Vietnam War, Edward J. Marolda and Sandra J. Doyle, eds. (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2010), 6, 7; Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, From Military Assistance to Combat, 19591965 in series The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1986), 362, 482–83; Thomas J. Cutler, “Purple for Christmas” in Cutler, The U.S. Naval Institute on Women in the Navy: The Challenges (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2015), 170.

66 http://www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org/pdf/magallagher.pdf (2016)

67 Gallagher, “Memories of Navy Nursing: The Vietnam Era,” http://www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org/pdf/magallagher.pdf.

68 Quoted in Herman, Navy Medicine in Vietnam, 27.

69 Godson, Serving Proudly, 210.

70 Quoted in Godson, Serving Proudly, 206.

71 Godson, Serving Proudly, 204; Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 173.

72 Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2004).

73 Kathleen Broome Williams, Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2001).

74 Williams, Improbable Warriors, 153.

75 Charlene W. Bilings, Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (Hillside, NJ: Enslow, 1989).

76 Carmen L. Mitchell, The Contributions of Grace Murray Hopper to Computer Science and Computer Education (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1995).

77 Kurt W. Beyer, “Grace Murray Hopper: Technical Innovator” in Thomas, Leadership Embodied, 163.

78 Edward J. Marolda, “Cold War to Violent Peace: 1945–1991,” in The Navy (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Foundation, 2000), 182; Navy Diversity Directorate (N134) (Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and Heritage Command, Women in the United States Navy, 2011), 3.

79 Grace Hopper and Steve Mandell, Understanding Computers (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1984).

80 See this Navy Department Library link: http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/bibliographies/hopper-grace-admiral-select-bibliography.html.

81 Quoted in Marolda, “Cold War to Violent Peace: 1945–1991,” 182.

82 John Lehman, On Seas of Glory: Heroic Men, Great Ships, and Epic Battles of the American Navy (New York: The Free Press, 2001).

83 Ibid., 324.

84 Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 270–86.

85 Robert J. Schneller Jr., Blue & Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 369–70.

86 Quoted in Schneller, Blue & Gold and Black, 117.

87 Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 287–302.

88 Paul Stillwell, “Samuel L. Gravely Jr.: Setting the Precedent” in Joseph J. Thomas, ed., Leadership Embodied:The Secrets to Success of Most Navy and Marine Corps Leaders (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2nd edition, 2013).

89 Ibid., 175.

90 Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., On Watch (New York: Quadrangle, 1976).

91 Larry Berman, Zumwalt: The Life and Times of Admiral Elmo Russell “Bud” Zumwalt Jr. (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).

92 Alex A. Kerr interview with USNI, 1984.

93 Howard J. Kerr, W. Lewis Glenn, Worth H. Bagley interviews with USNI, 1989.

94 Thomas J. Cutler, “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Hero or Heretic?” in James C. Bradford, ed., Quarterdeck and Bridge: Two Centuries of American Naval Leaders (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1997), 415–32.

95 Ibid., 430.

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96 Thomas J. Cutler, “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Innovation” in Thomas, Leadership Embodied, 182.

97 Norman Friedman, “Elmo Russell Zumwalt Jr.,” in Robert W. Love, The Chiefs of Naval Operations (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1980), 376.

98 Ibid., 365.

99 Edgar F. Puryear Jr., American Admiralship: The Moral Imperatives of Naval Command (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2005).

100 Puryear, American Admiralship, 480.

101 John Darrell Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet during the Vietnam War Era (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

102 http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/z/z-grams-list-policy-directives-issued-admiral-zumwalt/list-z-grams.html.

103 Davis and Hill, Blacks in the American Armed Forces, 131–50.

104 Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy, xiv.

105 Thomas H. Moorer, Kent L. Lee (1990), Robert L. J. Long(1995), Raymond E. Peet (1984), interviews with USNI; Moorer, Thomas H. Interviews with Edgar Puryear (2002; 2003), in Edgar F. Puryear Jr., American Admiralship: The Moral Imperatives of Naval Command (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2005).

106 Thomas B. Hayward interview with USNI, 2009, 247.

107 James D. Ramage interview with USNI, 1999, 343.

108 Gerald E. Miller interview with USNI, Vol. II, 1984, 735.

109 Thomas C. Hone, Power and Change: The Administrative History of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 19461986 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1989).

110 Ibid., 97.

111 James L. Holloway III, interviews with E. J. Marolda, for Naval Historical Foundation, Part II, December 2012, 58–59. Holloway repeated that story in his 2001 interviews with Edgar F. Puryear in American Admiralship, 448. For elaboration on Holloway’s evaluation of Zumwalt’s leadership and activist programs, see also 454–78.

112 Holloway interview with Edgar F. Puryear in American Admiralship, 453.

113 Holloway interview with E. J. Marolda, Part II, December 2012, 54–55.

114 Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy, 265.

115 Ibid., xvii.

116 Herbert R. Northrup, John A. Brinker, Steven M. DiAntonio, and Dale F. Daniel, Black and Other Minority Participation in the All-Volunteer Navy and Marine Corps (Philadelphia, PA: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1979).

117 Ibid., 185.

118 Women in the United States Navy, 2011, 4.

119 Naval History and Heritage Command: http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/z/z-grams-list-policy-directives-issued-admiral-zumwalt/z-gram-116.html.

120 Loanne Johnson, Making WAVES: A Woman in This Man’s Navy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986).

121 Zumwalt, On Watch, 262–64.

122 Quigley interview with USNI.

123 Ibid., 236, 274, 308.

124 Ibid., 296, 305.

125 Godson, Serving Proudly, 227.

126 Ibid., 240.

127 William J. Clinton, “Remarks at Funeral Services for Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., in Annapolis, MD, Maryland,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=58232.

128 Schneller, Blue and Gold and Black, 282, photo collection following pp. 238 and 368.

129 Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 354–55.

130 Navy Diversity Directorate (N134), African-Americans in the United States Navy (Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and Heritage Command, 2011), 6.

131 African-Americans in the United States Navy, 3.

132 Godson, Serving Proudly, 251, 253, 256.

133 Regina Akers interview with Roberta Hazard, NHHC, 1994.

134 Diversity Directorate (N134), Native Americans in the United States Navy, (Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and Heritage Command, 2011), 10.

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135 Chase Untermeyer, Inside Reagan’s Navy: The Pentagon Journals (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2015). See especially 91, 142, 189, 210–11, 228, 244–45, 260, 265–72, 277–80, 302–303.

136 Untermeyer, Inside Reagan’s Navy, 91.

137 James Webb, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian magazine (November 1979).

138 Untermeyer, Inside Reagan’s Navy, 266.

139 Ibid., 278.

140 Leuci, Women in Ships, http://www.navyhistory.org/navy-women-on-ships-a-deployment-to-equality/.

141 Navy Study Group’s Report on Progress of Women in the Navy (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1987).

142 Ibid., ES-1.

143 Ibid., ES-15.

144 An Update Report on the Progress of Women in the Navy (Washington, DC: Navy Department, 1990).

145 Ibid., ES-38.

146 Joseph W. Prueher interview with Edward J. Marolda, USNI, 2015–2016.

147 “Promotion restores shine to tarnished Navy career,” Baltimore Sun (9 April 1995).

148 Bruce A. Elleman, “The Right Skill Sets—Joseph Wilson Prueher (1941– ),” in John B. Hattendorf and Bruce A. Elleman, eds., Nineteen Gun Salute: Case Studies of Operational, Strategic, and Diplomatic Naval Leadership during the 20th and Early 21st Centuries (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2010). See also Joseph W. Prueher interview with Edward J. Marolda, USNI, 2015–16.

149 Gregory L. Vistica, Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 292–97.

150 Godson, Serving Proudly, 256–71.

151 Ibid., 262, 272.

152 Ibid., 122–23, 221, 246, 275, 289–90.

153 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 258. See also 208–11, 259.

154 Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military: Vietnam to the Persian Gulf (New York: St. Martins Press, 1993).

155 Joseph Steffan, Honor Bound: A Gay American Fights for the Right to Serve his Country (New York: Villard Books, 1992).

156 Ronald D. Ray, Military Necessity & Homosexuality (Louisville, KY: First Principles, 1993).

157 E. Lawrence Gibson, Get Off My Ship: Ensign Berg vs. the U.S. Navy (New York: Avon, 1978).

158 Wilbur J. Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley, eds., Gays and Lesbians in the Military: Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1994).

159 Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller, Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War (Annapolis, MD and Washington, DC: USNIP and Naval Historical Center, 2001)

160 Ibid., 108, 147, 312.

161 Marvin Pokrant, Desert Shield at Sea: What the Navy Really Did (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Pokrant, Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).

162 Norman Friedman, Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1991).

163 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 289.

164 Winifred Quick Collins with Herbert M. Levine, More Than a Uniform: A Navy Woman in a Navy Man’s World (Denton, TX: University of North Texas, 1997).

165 Ibid., xviii.

166 Doris M. Sterner, In and Out of Harm’s Way: A History of the Navy Nurse Corps (Seattle, WA: Peanut Butter Pub., 1996).

167 John P. and Maria C. Dever, Women and the Military (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1995).

168 Vicki L. Friedl, Women in the United States Military, 19011995: A Research Guide and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).

169 Margaret C. Devilbiss, Women and Military Service: A History, Analysis, and Overview (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1990).

170 Deborah G. Douglas, United States Women in Aviation, 19401985 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1990).

171 Lory Manning, Women in the Military (Arlington, VA: Women’s Research & Education Institute, 2008); Laurie Weinstein and Christie C. White, eds., Wives and Warriors: Women and the Military in the United States and Canada (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997).

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172 Vistica, Fall From Glory, 389.

173 William McMichael, The Mother of All Hooks: The Story of the U.S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal (Livingston, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997).

174 Ibid., 325.

175 Jean Zimmerman, Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook (New York: Doubleday, 1995).

176 Ibid., 286.

177 Stanley R. Arthur interview with Marolda, USNI, 597–98.

178 William B. Breuer, War and American Women: Heroism, Deeds, and Controversy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).

179 Malcolm Steinberg, Admiral Boorda’s Navy (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2011).

180 Thomas J. Cutler, ed., Women in the Navy: The Challenges (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2015).

181 Arthur interview with Edward J. Marolda, USNI, Jan 2016.

182 Sally Spears, Call Sign Revlon: The Life and Death of Navy Fighter Pilot Kara Hultgreen (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 1998), x.

183 J. J. Clark with Clark G. Reynolds, Carrier Admiral (New York: McKay, 1967).

184 Clark G. Reynolds, On the Warpath in the Pacific: Admiral Jocko Clark and the Fast Carriers (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2005).

185 See Sarandis Papadopoulos, “Partnership—Horacio Rivero Jr. (1910–2000),” in John B. Hattendorf and Bruce A. Elleman, eds., Nineteen Gun Salute: Case Studies of Operational, Strategic, and Diplomatic Naval Leadership during the 20th and Early 21st Centuries (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2010), 145–55.

186 Thomas J. Cutler, A Sailor’s History of the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, MD: USNIP, 2005).

187 Native Americans in the United States Navy, 2–12.

188 Navy Diversity Directorate (N134) Asian Pacific Americans in the United States Navy (Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and Heritage Command, 2011), 9–13; Edward J. Marolda, Ready Seapower: A History of the U.S. Seventh Fleet (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command), 151.

189 African Americans in the United States Navy, 5, 9.

190 Women in the United States Navy, 5–12.

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Published: Mon Dec 05 07:23:53 EST 2016