im to come forward told her that the abuse was what she should have expected in such a setting. The Navy stonewalled and took over a year to produce a report on the incident. In the report the allegations concerning the behavior at the convention were judged to have "been blown out of proportion." In the investigations that followed the facts that emerged demonstrated that "sexism is deeply imbedded as the most difficult problem in today's Navy." But the Navy faces other problems as well. The combination of a cheating scandal at the Naval Academy, problems with minority officers, accusations of Navy harm to the environment (in and out of war situations), and Navy insensitivity to local communities would have made the Navy vulnerable to public opinion in themselves. But in most cases the handling of the problems has increased the impact of these problems far beyond what they would have been if they had been handled properly. To increase the service's worries, the man who appeared best able to handle the seemingly endless stream of failures in command, Admiral Jeremy Boorda, committed suicide in the face of a minor scandal involving his wearing medals to which he was not entitled. Boorda had said, in regard to all the Navy's other problems, that "every single person in the navy should have one leader they can look to and say, 'That person is responsible and accountable for me.'"
Yet in a setting where the leadership is expected to assume this attitude toward command, the refusal to integrate the s
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