serving with distinction in the 1.8 million–member military, but they maintained that letting them serve openly would be, in General Powell’s words, “prejudicial to good order and discipline.” The rest of the Joint Chiefs were with the chairman. When I raised the fact that it apparently had cost the military $500 million to kick 17,000 homosexuals out of the service in the previous decade, despite a government report saying there was no reason to believe they could not serve effectively, the chiefs replied that it was worth it to preserve unit cohesion and morale.
The chief of naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso, said the navy had the greatest practical problems, given the close and isolated living arrangements on ships. The army chief, General Gordon Sullivan, and U.S. Air Force General Merrill McPeak were opposed, too. But the most adamant opponent was the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Carl Mundy. He was concerned about more than appearances and practicalities. He believed that homosexuality was immoral, and that if gays were permitted to serve openly, the military would be condoning immoral behavior and could no longer attract the finest young Americans. I disagreed with Mundy, but I liked him. In fact, I liked and respected them all. They had given me their honest opinions, yet had made it clear that if I ordered them to take action they’d do the best job they could, although if called to testify before Congress they would have to state their views frankly.
A couple of days later, I had another night meeting on the issue, with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including Senators Sam Nunn, James Exon, Carl Levin, Robert Byrd, Edward Kennedy, Bob Graham, Jeff Bingaman, John Glenn, Richard Shelby, Joe Lieberman, and Chuck Robb. Nunn, while opposed to my position, had agreed to the six-month delay. Some of my staffers were upset with him for his early and forceful opposition, but I wasn’t; after all, he was personally conservative, and as chairman of the committee, he honored the military culture and saw it as his duty to protect it. He was not alone. Charlie Moskos, the Northwestern University sociologist who had worked with Nunn and me on the DLC national-service proposal and who said he had known a gay officer during the Korean War, was also against lifting the ban, saying that it preserved the “expectation of privacy” to which soldiers living in close quarters were entitled. Moskos said we should stick with what the great majority of military people wanted, because the main thing we needed in the military was the ability and willingness to fight. The problem I saw with his argument, and Sam Nunn’s, is that they could have been used with equal force against Truman’s order on integration or against current efforts to open more positions to women in the military.
Senator Byrd took a harder line than Nunn, echoing what I had heard from General Mundy. He believed homosexuality was a sin; said he would never let his grandson, whom he adored, join a military that admitted gays; and asserted that one reason the Roman Empire fell was the acceptance of pervasive homosexual conduct in the Roman legions from Julius Caesar on down. In contrast to Byrd and Nunn, Chuck Robb, who was conservative on many issues and had survived heated combat in Vietnam, supported my position, based on his wartime contact with men who were both gay and brave. He wasn’t the only Vietnam combat veteran in Congress who felt that way.
The cultural divide was partly, but not completely, partisan and generational. Some younger Democrats opposed lifting the ban, while some older Republicans were for lifting it, including Lawrence Korb and Barry Goldwater. Korb, who had enforced the ban as an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, said it was not necessary for maintaining the quality and strength of our forces. Goldwater, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a veteran, and the founder of the Arizona National Guard, was an old-fashioned conservative with libertarian instincts. In a statement published in the
While all this was going on, I saw a poll showing that by 48 to 45 percent the public disagreed with my position. The numbers didn’t look too bad for such a controversial issue, but they were, and they showed why Congress thought it was a dead-bang loser for them. Only 16 percent of the electorate strongly approved of lifting the ban, while 33 percent very strongly disapproved. Those were the people whose votes could be influenced by a congressman’s position. It’s hard to get politicians in swing districts to take a 17 percent deficit on any issue into an election. Interestingly, the biggest divisions were these: self-identified born-again Christians opposed my position 70 to 22 percent, while people who said they knew homosexuals personally approved of it 66 to 33 percent.
With congressional defeat inevitable, Les Aspin worked with Colin Powell and the Joint Chiefs on a compromise. Almost exactly six months later, on July 19, I went to the National Defense University at Fort McNair to announce it to the officers in attendance. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” basically said that if you say you’re gay, it’s presumed that you intend to violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and you can be removed, unless you can convince your commander you’re celibate and therefore not in violation of the code. But if you don’t say you’re gay, the following things will not lead to your removal: marching in a gay-rights parade in civilian clothes; hanging out in gay bars or with known homosexuals; being on homosexual mailing lists; and living with a person of the same sex who is the beneficiary of your life insurance policy. On paper, the military had moved a long way, to “live and let live,” while holding on to the idea that it couldn’t acknowledge gays without approving of homosexuality and compromising morale and cohesion. In practice it often didn’t work out that way. Many anti-gay officers simply ignored the new policy and worked even harder to root out homosexuals, costing the military millions of dollars that would have been far better spent making America more secure. In the short run, I got the worst of both worlds—I lost the fight, and the gay community was highly critical of me for the compromise, simply refusing to acknowledge the consequences of having so little support in Congress, and giving me little credit for lifting another ban on gays, the ban against serving in critical national security positions, or for the substantial number of gays and lesbians who were working throughout the administration. By contrast, Senator Dole won big. By raising the issue early, and repeatedly, he guaranteed it so much publicity that it appeared I was working on little else, which caused a lot of Americans who had elected me to fix the economy to wonder what on earth I was doing and whether they’d made a mistake.
I was finding it a challenge to keep another campaign commitment: cutting the White House staff by 25 percent. It was a nightmare for Mack McLarty, especially since we had a more ambitious agenda than the previous administration’s and were getting more than twice as much mail. On February 9, just a week before I was slated to announce my economic program, I proposed the 25 percent reduction, cutting the staff by 350 people, down to 1,044 employees. Everybody took a hit; even Hillary’s office would be smaller than Barbara Bush’s, though she would take on greater responsibilities. The reduction I regretted most was the elimination of twenty career positions in the correspondence section. I would have preferred to reduce their numbers by attrition, but Mack said there was no other way to meet the goal. Besides, we had to have some money to modernize the White House. The staff couldn’t even send and receive e-mail, and the phone system hadn’t been changed since the Carter years. We couldn’t do conference calls, but anyone could press one of the big lighted extension buttons and listen in on someone else’s conversation, including mine. Soon we had a better system installed. We also beefed up one part of the White House staff: the casework operation that was designed to help individual citizens who had personal problems with the federal government, often involving an effort to obtain disability, veterans, or other benefits. Usually citizens call on their U.S. senators or representatives for help in such matters, but because I had run a highly personalized campaign, many Americans felt they could call on me. I got an especially memorable request on February 20, when Peter Jennings, the ABC news anchor, moderated a televised “Children’s Town Meeting” in the White House, in which young people between the ages of eight and fifteen asked me questions. The kids asked if I helped Chelsea with her homework, why no women had been elected President, what I would do to help Los Angeles after the riots, how health care would be paid for, and whether I could do anything to stop violence in schools. A lot of them were interested in the environment. But one of the children wanted help. Anastasia Somoza was a beautiful girl from New York City who was confined to a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy. She explained that she had a twin sister, Alba, who also had cerebral palsy but who, unlike her, couldn’t speak. “So because she can’t speak, they put her in a special education class. But she uses computers to speak. And I would like her to be in a regular education class just like me.” Anastasia said she and her parents were convinced that Alba could do regular schoolwork if given a chance. Federal law required children with disabilities to be educated in the “least
