A good man, kept down: why is John Warner playing games with James Roche?

WHEN President Bush tapped Air Force secretary James Roche for a transfer to the Army as its civilian chief in May, he did not appreciate Sen. John Warner's willingness to put blame-shifting and grandstanding over the needs of the Army. Warner, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is holding up Roche's nomination over the sexual-abuse scandal at the Air Force Academy. The scandal predates Roche's tenure as secretary by at least a decade, while coinciding neatly with Warner's own stint as the top Republican on the committee responsible for oversight of the Academy.

Last February, allegations surfaced that officials at the Academy had fostered an atmosphere that discouraged cadets from reporting sexual assaults. Politicians howled, investigations were launched, and heads rolled. Two Air Force teams and a Defense Department group were deployed to look into the scores of assaults and rapes reported by female cadets since 1993. Roche initially defended the school's leadership, but as the full scope of the scandal became clear, he replaced the Academy's top four officers in March.

Congress ordered its own investigation. The result was a report to Warner's committee by an independent panel in September. At that hearing, Senator Warner seemed more concerned with pinning the blame for the scandal on Secretary Roche than with hearing about the scope of the scandal or examining the two dozen recommendations for reform. Throughout the hearing, the independent panel's chairman, former congressman Tillie Fowler, was pressed to accuse Secretary Roche of complicity in the scandal. While Warner praised the work of the "unbiased, unaffiliated group of our citizens" on the panel, he rejected their repeated insistence that they were "impressed with the leadership of Secretary Roche."

The panel found that there had been 142 allegations of sexual assault at the Academy since 1993. Fowler explained that the atmosphere that put female cadets at such risk had "plagued the Academy for at least a decade and, quite possibly, for as long as women have attended the institution." Secretary Roche had been on the job for about a year and a half when the scandal became public. John Warner has been on the Senate Armed Services Committee for 24 years. Evidence of problems at the Academy first surfaced 20 years ago, but was largely ignored. In 1995, the Senate did hold a hearing on sexual harassment in the Air Force, but there was little follow-up. According to Tillie Fowler, "Secretary Roche moved very quickly once he had the information." Warner, it seems, has moved just as quickly to echo criticisms of Roche made by Democrats on his committee, including Sens. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton.

Female cadets arrived at the Academy in 1976. In 1978, John Warner, then married to Elizabeth Taylor, lost a nomination fight to Richard Obenshain, who died in a plane crash soon after. Virginia Republicans reluctantly selected Warner to replace him. Warner won the seat by fewer than 5,000 votes. During his first term, he danced to the tune of those who had brought him to the Senate: Virginia conservatives recall that Warner would ask them, "What would Obenshain do?" before important votes. The answer to that question put Warner in the "No" camp on the creation of the Department of Education in 1979. Since his first re-election in 1984, however, Warner has been more likely to be influenced by Democratic colleagues than by his state's conservative voters. Warner ran for re-election without a Democratic opponent last year.

The senator's predilection for siding with the other team is well established. A former GOP Senate aide recalls that, in the late 1980s, Republican members of the Armed Services Committee caucused in secret to figure out how to prevent Warner from going along with then-chairman Sam Nunn, a Democrat, on most defense issues. "It wasn't clear if Warner was a problem because he didn't understand the issues well enough to defend Reagan's positions, or because he was intimidated by the popularity of Sam Nunn," the aide explains.

At a committee hearing this September, a clearly frustrated Sen. Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, delivered a rare public rebuke of Warner for allowing Sen. Robert Byrd to run well over his allotted time for questioning. Warner had not been able to bring himself to cut off the lengthy harangue of Defense Department officials by one of the administration's harshest critics. He explained defensively that Byrd was shown deference because he had a key role in appropriating the $87 billion request for Iraq reconstruction, and that "his support will be needed." Within a few weeks, Byrd, who has spent the past months hysterically accusing President Bush of lying the country into war, predictably opposed Bush's request.

Thus the Roche business is only the most recent example of Warner's willingness to oppose his own party and its president--during wartime, no less--at key moments and on key issues. Noting that it is inconceivable that a Democratic committee chairman would so frustrate a president of his own party over such an important appointment, a former Republican senator strongly criticizes Warner's hold on Roche's nomination: "It's hard to imagine walking off from a president at a time like this."

Other Republicans are also sharply critical of Senator Warner's scapegoating of Secretary Roche. Republican congressman Joel Hefley, whose district includes the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, complains that the Senate session on the Fowler panel's report was "a confirmation hearing without the nominee." Hefley believes that Roche "took the issue very seriously and dove into it" in the interest of restoring the Academy's reputation.

In contrast to the Senate, a September 24 House hearing on the Fowler panel's findings revealed the uncomfortable truth about where blame more properly lies for ignoring problems at the Academy: with Congress itself. Democratic representative Vic Snyder of Arkansas pointed out that Congress had been on notice since at least 1994, owing to General Accounting Office reports, that there appeared to be a problem with sexual harassment and assaults at the Air Force Academy. Snyder told the panel members that they had treated Congress too gently in their report. "[I]t's not like we've been adjourned for the last decade. I mean, we've been here," he said. Members of the Fowler panel agree that there has been a clear dereliction of duty on the part of certain members of Congress.

The president, the vice president, and congressional leaders appoint both congressmen and private citizens to the Academy's 15-member Board of Visitors, which is charged with visiting the Academy annually and reporting to the president on its findings, including the state of morale and discipline. An investigation by the Denver Post revealed that the board first heard reports about discipline problems and sexual assaults in 1983 and that misconduct problems surfaced repeatedly in the years that followed. There is widespread agreement that the Board of Visitors failed to take its oversight responsibilities seriously. Over the past nine years, less than half the board members attended the yearly meetings. Only two of seven congressional members were at October's meeting.

The board's new chairman, former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, promises to insist on a change: "In the future we'll be looking for an attendance commitment and a leadership commitment from Congress." Currently, there is one vacancy on the Board of Visitors--the one that Sen. John Warner, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, has yet to fill.