Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 303

Chicago Tribune, Friday, April 19, 1991 Section 1 27 Firing over A-12 fiasco didn't hurt captain's career WASHINGTON Capt. Lawrence Elberfeld ran I -aground the Navy's biggest weapons program, yet Mow he's in One for promotion to rear admiral. He was the program manager for the Navy A-12 attack jet, a new plane being developed under a $4 billion contract to replace the venerable A-6 attack jet and carry naval aviation into the 21st Century. The future of the carrier navy was riding on that project It was that important. Elberfeld was fired last Nov.

29 by Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett after an investigation documented that the project was hemorrhaging money a $1 billion overrun and $3 billion spent that yielded little more than drawings, design studies and aircrafUparts. Civil rights: From movement to minutiae Viewers who saw "Separate But Equal," the televised version of Brown v. Board of Education, with Sidney Poitier as the young Thurgood Marshall and Burt Lancaster as the distinguished defender of a brittle old order, may have wondered about something: Whatever happened to civil rights? Once upon a time, civil rights meant something clear and sharp like justice. The cause sent people into the streets, the courtroom, the voting booth black and white together marching against something that was so clearly wrong it could not stand.

Slowly it dawned: It was not the agitation over civil rights that had divided the American people but the cause of that agitation racial segregation. It had set race against race, North against South, those who believed ''W'" David Evans Paul Greenberg Throwing off the joblessness stigma microwaved, streamlined, vacuum-packed and brought just a whole lot closer together. It just forgot to take us with it There are thousands of us feeling and experiencing the very same things. That's very important to understand. This change we are going through is not our fault, and is by no means a reflection of our worth as human beings.

We all have an important part to play in the scheme of things, and we must rise above the guilt feelings brought on by unemployment. There is no magic answer. I wish there were. But I do know that everyone is affected: Ph.D.'s, M.B.A.'s, B.A.'s and right on down the line. No one is escaping; it's in almost every field of work.

Realizing this, I advise you to sit down and analyze what it is you really want to do. I mean, really love to do, not just a "job." Part of our problem is that we have been stuck in jobs we really can't stand, but we Faced with stark evidence that the program had been unraveling for months, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney terminated the A-12 on Jan. 7. Ever since Garrett's action, there have been questions about whether justice was served. They're coming from Congress.

They're coming from naval officers. Garrett fired the two admirals over Elberfeld at the same time he relieved the captain. The admirals were heaved over the side for the misfeasance on the part of their program manager yet Elberfeld's going to be promoted. This logical and ethical disconnect caused one retired admiral to grouse, "The foundation of the issue is doing the job right at the program level." Nonetheless, in a recent letter to Rep. Andy Ireland Garrett defended his decision to allow.

Elberfeld to be promoted on the basis of timing. He claimed there was no evidence that the A- 12 program was coming unghied when the promotion board convened in November 1989. Everything about the A-12 program officially was as the recommendation for Elberfeld's promotion left the Pentagon and went, by way of presidential endorsement, from the White House to the Senate for confirmation. The Senate approved his promotion on Oct 27, 1990. About a month later, Garrett fired Elberfeld and issued a stinging letter of censure that would normally terminate a naval officer's career.

However, according to Garrett's reasoning, even though Elberfeld mismanaged the program and produced rosy progress reports that "materially contributed" to misleading his bosses, and thereby caused "significant damage to the credibility" of the Navy, these heinous sins didn't come to light until hispromotion was, as they say, "a done deal." The evidence suggests otherwise. A month before the promotion board convened, Tom Hafer, a mid-level cost analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, recommended cutting funding for the A-12 because his assessment showed the program was two years behind schedule and $500 million over budget. As one officer said, Elberfeld would have been thrown out of the Naval Academy in terms of the basic code of conduct' The world as we knew it yesterday does not exist today. It has been condensed, freeze-dried, shrink-wrapped, rrutiiaturized, laser-beamed, microwaved, strearnlined, vacuum-packed and brought just a whole lot closer together. It just forgot to take us with it By Jim Pratt As I sat staring out the window, not really seeing anything, just staring depressed, alone, scared, demoralized and just plain "whipped" I wondered if I was the only one who couldn't land a job.

Was I doing something wrong? What were they looking for? Was it my lack of a degree? Did I dress OK? (Maybe I should have worn the blue pinstripe.) Was it my resume? I had spent a loi of money on it Did Cod really hate me that much? What is wrong with me7 The fact is, my friends, there is nothing wrong with us! We have the inherent and learned trait of self-inflicting a serious and deadly wound when faced with being relegated, in any way, to the demoralizing stigma of the "unemployed." Think about it: Do you really want anyone to know you have lost your job? Of course not. Instead, we hide in a vast cavern of emptiness and darkness, groping desperately to find the way out before we are discovered. But we must find ways to throw off these old shackles if we arc to survive in today's world. We have all been so accustomed to having our self-worth dictated by a paycheck that, when we arc not receiving one, we feel rejected, worthless, outcasts. In conjunction with that, we arc living in a time of tumultuous socioeconomic change, brought about by warped time travel through our industrial age and into this transitional era.

We couldn't have stopped it if we had tried. During our childhood, our fathers usually worked for one company, teaching us loyalty and trust for employers. The company took care of them, and they, in turn, worked hard to please their employer, knowing that they were secure, then and into the future. We grew up learning what they had taught, and we thought our lives would pretty much be the same. Boy, did we get a rude awakening! No one, not even our teachers, warned us about what we would encounter as the world turned ever faster.

We knew the computer age was coming, but we had no way of knowing how it would affect our lives. Now, I'm not blaming the computer for the problems we face in today's work force. Actually, there is no blame to be placed on any one thing; it is a myriad of small changes in such a short period of time. The world as we knew it yesterday does not exist today. It has been condensed, freczc-dried, shrink-wrapped, miniaturized, "micronized," laser-beamed, in the Constitution and the rule of law against those who still clung to a racial standard.

A new national consensus formed in law and, more important, in the American mind: Jim Crow had to go. It was unjust It was irrational. Most of all, it was un-American. The unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court in 1954, politically astute and constitutionally necessary as it was, didn't so much inspire such feelings as confirm them. And the rest, however unsettling, was history.

How could it have been otherwise? Well, it could have been. Suppose Brown had not been argued as a matter of justice, of constitutional Krinciplc and undeniable common sense, but instead ad been fought over technical issues. Its moral grandeur would have been reduced to another quarrelsome little contest between high-paid lawyers. Suppose, in other words, that the issues had been those now raised by the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1991: Do employment tests have a disparate impact on different races or ethnic groups or the sexes and, if so, docs that mean the tests ore sufficient proof of unlawful discrimination? Should the burden of proof fall on plaintiff or defendant? Should damages be only compensatory or punitive? And if punitive, should they be limited to Should legal fees remain urilirnited? Should claims be settled by private arbitration or federal commissions? What is the difference between a quota and a numerical goal? Might a bill that formally outlaws quotas informally encourage employers to adopt them rather than risk being judged guilty of invidious discrimination? What is the proper proportion of racial and ethnic groups in a company's labor force should it be determined by the complexion of the community in general, the skilled labor pool, the national population or all of the above? Should an employer have to prove that his tests and other "employment practices" bear a "significant relationship to successful performance" in order to escape damages? And so eternally, pettifoggingly on. Can you imagine basing great law or a great cause on the outcome of such a debate? Think of trying to fit all these points into the sweeping appeal of a Martin Luther King Jr.

at the Lincoln Memorial, let alone on a picket sign. Arc these reasons for young people to march and old folks to undergo a crisis of conscience? These arc not issues that rally a great people; they're the stuff of special-interest politics and legal maneuvers. This is not the core of a great movement; it is the detritus of a moral cause that has become one more lobby. Now civil rights can be found somewhere on the national agenda between airline deregulation and form subsidies. Whether Americans come down on one side or the other of a civil-rights bill is no longer a moral test; it is more of a legaland economic preference.

There is no longer a national consensus on civil rights because there is nothing great, decisive and historic here to have a consensus on. Civil rights has become dare I say it? a bore. It has become a contest between ethnic groups and economic interests, not over the rights of the individual. And when that happens, it isn't very interesting or very American. To quote Cornel West of the African-American Studies Program at Princeton: "The power of the civil-rights movement under Martin Luther King was its univcrsalism.

Now, instead of the civil-rights movement being viewed as a moral crusade for freedom, it's become an expression for a particular interest group. Once you lose that high moral ground, all you have is a power struggle, and that has never been a persuasive means for the weaker to deal with the stronger." The stultified leadership of what's left of the civil rights movement insists on replaying the themes of the 1960s in the 1990s. But that old battle was fought and won; the times they have changed. Words that were once stirring and relevant arc now reduced to empty ritual. Meanwhile, dangers that cut across racial lines go neglected: the deterioration of the family, the absence of community, unequal education, the emphasis on group entitlements rather than civil rights even as the annual posturing over civil rights begins.

1691. IM AnoBtwTVnei Synmcato do it anyway because we "need the money." What a fife! A resource I have found extremely uplifting is group discussions. A local community group the church, community centers allows us to get together with other people, and we don't feel so completely alone. These groups are a wonderful resource for pooling information about jobs. Someone who interviewed for a job and was found to be underqualified could pass that information on to someone who is qualified, or vice-versa.

You don't have to go it alone. But you should be creative! Start a neighborhood group, ask some professional resource people to help out, brainstorm ideas and get feelings out on the table. In this world of change, we must go back to the basics and become a closer, more understanding, feeling, loving community, and be willing to help our neighbors. Maybe in our changing world of technology, we forgot to bring along the most important thing: love for one another. 0 199f.

Provfcjonos Jouno' Jim Pratt lives in Woodstock, Conn. The Navy produced a mountain of optimistic briefings to beat back his challenge. However, since March of 1988, Debbie D'Angelo, an analyst in the Navy's aviation bureaucracy, had offered repeated warnings that the A-12 effort would exceed the cost ceiling Indeed, the Navy's own internal investigation into the matter shows that D'Angelo's cost estimates, which were "inputs" to the Navy counterattack on Hafer, were consistently downplayed by Elberfeld, who substituted her findings with more optimistic cost figures that now cannot be documented. Although D'Angelo provided Elberfeld with a range of estimates based on increasingly unfavorable contractor cost and schedule data, almost without exception he would choose a number to send up the chain of command that was even lower than her lowest (most optimistic) estimate. As one officer familiar with these ploys said pointedly, "He would have been thrown out of the Naval Academy in terms of the basic code of conduct" What has happened to these people? According to congressional investigators, Hafer and D'Angelo received downgraded performance ratings for warning ir of the rocks and shoals in the A-12 program.

Hafer was taken off aircraft programs and now analyzes missile projects. D'Angelo recently left the Pentagon for the Public Health Service. Unless President Bush removes Elberfeld's name from the promotion list, he'll sew on his admiral's stripes sometime in August, when the next position is expected to open. Parenthetically, Congress has told the Navy it must cut eight of its 258 admirals by Oct. 1.

So far, Navy Secretary Garrett stands behind promoting the man he fired, asserting that, except for cost and performance (what left?) he did a tine job on the A-12 effort. Altogether, the fates of Elberfeld, 'Hafer and D'Angelo suggest a new form of Pentagon accountability: The reward of the guilty and the punishment of the innocent. Anthony D'AdairoNewidty No-frills citizenship process loses something in the translation Quotables "I don't know how we ever got into a situation of telling parents where they have to send their kids to school. In China, I con sec, but not here." Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, on why he supports "choice" programs in education. "It was like the Grateful Dead going to work for IBM." A former writer for Jim Henson Productions, on the clash in corporate cultures when Waft Disney tried to buy the company behind the Muppets.

"Rick is one of my best friends on the team. I hope he comes back and wins 22 games." Cubs pitcher Mike Bielecki, after being sent to the bullpen to make room for Rick Sutchlfc in the starting rotation. "We went through this in '87 or '88 and at the 1 1th hour, they called it off. It's a sure thing: The sun rises, the Cubs aren't going to moke the pennant, and the trains are going to run." Chicago North Western commuter Steven Kasper of Wheeling, who says he never worried that a rail strike would interrupt train service. "I'm sick of it Every time I get on a train, there's somebody right there my face holding a cup or trying to force me to buy a copy of Street News.

After a hard day at work sometimes all you want is a quiet subway ride home. Is that too much to ask?" New York subway rider Josephine Walker, on the city's new crackdown on panhandling in the subways. 1 T. By Herbert London The Immigration Act of 1990 may indeed be "the most comprehensive reform of immigration laws in 66 years," as President Bush has noted. Overall immigration will increase by 160,000 people from 1991 to 1992, resulting finally in a 40 percent rise.

From my point of view this decision will have a profound and salutary effect on the nation. But it has one notable deficiency that deserves mention. The citizenship process is now so streamlined in the new law that the often stirring courthouse ceremony in which foreigners take their U.S. vows has become optional, Ifthc new citizen chooses, the final step of citizenship can be conducted through the mail. Daniel Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said, "This removes the majesty of the naturalization process.

For two hundred years the country has impressed on i immigrants the aura of the process. Now they can do it mail order. Through "administrative naturalization" an immigrant, after satisfying Immigration and Naturalization Service requirements, including an oral exam on U.S. government and civics, can obtain citizenship without requesting it from a federal judge in a ceremony well known to millions of recent Americans. The justification for this decision is partly financial and partly because citizenship petitions won't compete for judicial attention on court calendars clogged with criminal cases and civil lawsuits.

There is a logic to this argument But it can also be argued that turning citizenship into a mail-order business is yet another example of a diminished civic sense in America. Some people may regard this effect as trivial compared to the extraordinary increase in immigration, but I do not This ritual is important because it is suggestive of a civic commitment It represents a landmark moment in one's life with the citizenship ceremony as notable as a wedding, graduation, confirmation or bar mitzvah. Through this ceremony people from all around the world engage in bonding to the American idea. In the past recent immigrants were woven together by freedom and all it implies, even if filiafpicty remains in their background. As I remember seeing it, the ceremony is simple and brief.

Rarely is it conducted with a dry eye in the assembled audience. When the judge administers the oath of allegiance and the pledge is said, ties to the American tradition are established. With the passage of t. this rite, something essential in our civic lives will be gone forever. At a time when ceremony of all kinds has lost its luster, it seems to me important that the psychological and moral commitment attached to citizenship should be reasserted.

Surely the oath itself may not bind one to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the land, but it is a sacred trust, at least as important as marriage, carrying both privilege and responsibility. For the president to inter on institution of such lasting value is probably a reflexive action. Yet this decision is certainly not worthy of his estimable office. The thousands of young men and women in Desert Storm were from all over the globe bound by a military mission and by a sense of national purpose. Either they or their forebears reached these shores because they wanted to share in the mystery and majesty of the American idea.

It is to that idea that they give their allegiance and it is that idea which serves as the focus of the citizenship ceremony. Citizenship is more than a driver's license sent in the moil; it is a bond of fealty, an honor. To dismiss its importance is to diminish national allegiance and to militate against the very loyalty we should be encouraging. The Immigration Act of 1990 is a superb piece oflcgislation; I only wish its authors understood why this act is so important. -ST7 Hubert London is dean of the Gallatin Division of New York University and a senior reflow at the 'Hudson Institute.

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