The Kelly Flinn case - 30 May 1997

Two momentous movements of American policy, which could affect the lives of all of us, were underway this week.

The president’s move to expand the North American Alliance by taking in the old potential enemies of Eastern Europe, a move which, he believes, like another unforgotten Western leader, could guarantee peace in our time. On the other hand, the American diplomat who for 50 years has been the country’s leading Russian scholar has declared the NATO expansion to be an “unparalleled disaster” in American policy.

At the same time, a very serious debate is brewing in the Congress, which will decide whether the prospect of massive trade with China outweighs the American people’s real concern over the stifling of dissent and the persecution of Christians.

And yet this week, once these two mighty issues had been covered in the first dispatches and the follow-up commentaries, it’s fair to say that the country stayed absorbed by the case of First Lieutenant Kelly Flinn versus the United States Air Force, and then the case of Paula Jones versus the President of the United States.

Both these cases can be broadly labelled as “sexual scandals”, but they’re far from being the usual tabloid distractions. They’ve fascinated the most serious, as well as the most frivolous people in the country, and both of them touch on issues – one affecting military law, the other the Constitution of the United States no less – that will not go away.

The case of Lieutenant Kelly Flinn has been settled, but it has not settled the question of the severity of the military code about sexual behaviour and the fairness or unfairness of its application to women.

Lieutenant Kelly Flinn is 26. She was the first woman to become a B-52 bomber pilot, a distinction that in the first place heightened the public interest in her case.

She was charged with what the air force says are three very serious offences, especially for an officer. She fraternised (that’s to say she had a short sexual relationship) with a junior in her command, not an officer. A few months later, she began an affair, which she says was a love match on both sides, with a married civilian. He was the soccer coach at her base. This relationship came to the notice of her superiors and she was questioned about it. She swore in a written statement that it was platonic. She was, however, living with the man at the time, and she was commanded to stop seeing him for good. Being very much in love, she understandably didn’t obey.

So there were the three charges: fraternising, lying, disobeying an order. She admitted all of them.

When she came to face punishment – if found guilty by a court martial, she could face as much as nine years in prison – she requested an honourable discharge; in any other case, a very unlikely outcome. But she seems to have been so sure of widespread public sympathy for her that she simply put up to the brass a single alternative: they would give her an honourable discharge or she would go straight to a court martial.

This made nobody happy. The air force knew as well as Kelly Flinn that a prison sentence for an attractive, lovesick, young woman, a brave pilot, would provoke a storm of outrage from the public. Moreover, the Secretary of the Air Force is a woman, Dr Sheila Widnall, and for the next week or two she went through her own form of mental torture, weighing the usual and the extraordinary possibilities with a flock of Pentagon officers and legal staff.

The case for the prosecution was put tersely by an air force general. “This is not about adultery. This is an issue about an officer entrusted to fly nuclear weapons who disobeyed an order, who lied.”

Lieutenant Flinn pleaded simply, without overmuch drama, that she was a woman very much in love, had been cruelly let down by the man. She’d made bad mistakes, expected some punishment – a reprimand, a reduction of rank, say – but wanted to serve her country and remain a flyer.

Her family took a site on the internet and invited the public to contribute to a legal defence fund, and to email their congressman or congresswoman.

Although the Congress usually keeps its collective lips buttoned when matters of military law are in question, this time (and after hearing about the gushes of mail that came over the website) even United States senators threw protocol to the winds and came out confidently on Lieutenant Flinn’s side. The Senate majority leader, Senator Dole’s successor Mr Trent Lott, appeared incensed in public. “She has been badly abused,” he said. “I mean get real, you’re still dealing with human beings.”

These words from such a spokesman must have been honey to the Flinn family who sat around in a motel room near Kelly Flinn’s base, arguing the case over with her.

Three thousand miles away throughout one night, Secretary of the Air Force Dr Widnall was agonising too. The Pentagon had riffled through all its records to find another case (man or woman) who, charged with these offences, had ever been granted an honourable discharge. There was none.

Lieutenant Flinn was offered a general discharge. Her professional record would remain intact, but she would sacrifice veterans benefits. She could not even fly in the Air Force Reserve.

Dr Widnall searched every crevice of the code to find an escape clause that would save the lieutenant from cruel punishment and yet maintain the air force’s code, which, as in all armies, is stricter than civilian law.

It was Kelly Flinn who yielded. She didn’t want the public confessional of a court martial and the squalor of the competing testimony. Her lover’s wife swore the lieutenant was a “heartless home-breaker”. She accepted a general discharge.

Her name will fade from the headlines except as we hear about the price of a book advance and which of a flock of commercial offers she has accepted.

But there is a book about to be published, which reveals the huge, gross difference between the very stern treatment of women and the treatment (or non-treatment) of men for sexual activity in or out of camp.

It’s by a woman who has done her own exhaustive, not to say nauseating research, into the actual customs, morays, the ritual practices of soldiers, airmen, marines that have to do with what she calls “the culture wars of sex”. If only half true, it is a nightmare revelation of the sexual bullying, intimidation and routine mockery to which many women are exposed in every branch of the service. The book in the wake of Lieutenant Flinn’s discharge will open a barrel of worms.

For the moment, a fair-minded reader may marvel why any women would enlist in the armed services and wonder, average human nature being what it is, if a male/female integrated army can ever guarantee the equal dignity of both sexes.

While we await the deluge of horror stories, I wonder (as I often do with investigative pieces that deride or challenge one or other American institution), I wonder why don’t we hear about the situation in the other armed services – I mean other countries? Is everything proper, decent, beautifully regulated in the French forces, the British, the German, the Swedish? Or is it just Americans who are, as they used to say during the second war, “oversexed and over here”?

In the present state of communications in our global village, I’m sure that I don’t need to give more than the sketchiest outline of the case of Paula Jones versus the President of the United States.

However, recalling that when Charlie Chaplin first returned to England and a quarter of a million people carried him from Waterloo Station to his hotel in the Strand, at the same time who should be in London but Mahatma Gandhi. “Who,” asked Mr Gandhi, “is Charlie Chaplin?”

So for anyone who’s been living underground or wrapped in a shroud, I will say briefly that Paula Jones is a young woman who says she was sexually harassed by Mr Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas in 1991, in a suite at a hotel where a state conference was going on. She was at the time a state employee and she claims that the governor made gross sexual advances to her, which she instantly repulsed.

She filed suit three years later because not until then did a magazine piece appear which elaborated on the whole incident, identified her by name and implied that she had yielded to Mr Clinton’s advances.

Once the piece was published, various presidential spokesmen publicly called her a liar. Subsequently the now President Clinton said he’d never met the woman.

A month after Miss Jones filed suit, the president countered by claiming that he cannot be subject to a civil case while in office, and six months later a federal court upheld him.

But early last year, a federal appeals panel said not so; the president has no constitutional right to delay the trial.

This spring, the president’s lawyers urged the United States Supreme Court to hear the case as soon as possible, which it did. Last Tuesday, it ruled that the president in this (as in any other civil matter) is not above the law and may come to trial while he’s still in office.

The Supreme Court has nine justices. Most rulings during recent years have been decided by a vote of five to four, which leaves us (some people think) in the powerless and undemocratic position of having all the greatest issues of American life determined not by nine persons but by one; not always the same one.

This time, no such complaint will be raised against the court. For the first time since most of us can remember, the court was unanimous – nine to nothing.

It’s now up to the president to track through the serpentine maze of legal procedures, which in the American system must precede any attempt to reach a settlement with what the court has called “all deliberate speed.”

If the past is anything to go on, Mr Clinton won’t find his way through that maze, achieve deliberate speed and confront Miss Jones before possibly January 2001 when he leaves the presidency anyway.

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