Ex-Blue Angel leader gets Tailhook-delayed promotion

©Associated Press
August 1, 2002

Stumpf

PENSACOLA -- Six years after being forced to retire, a former Blue Angels leader has received a promotion that was denied because of the Tailhook sex scandal.

Although the Navy cleared Robert Stumpf of wrongdoing at the 1991 Tailhook Association convention in Las Vegas, it blocked his promotion from commander to captain in 1995.

Stumpf, now a Federal Express pilot, lives in Pensacola. He was in El Paso, Texas, Tuesday when he learned that Assistant Navy Secretary William Navas had approved the belated promotion.

It will increase his retirement benefits and might help remove the Tailhook stigma. Navas wrote that it was an injustice to deny Stumpf's promotion and praised the Persian Gulf War veteran for heroism in combat.

"I have mixed emotions," Stumpf said. "On one hand, I'm elated; but on the other, I think about how it could have been had this not happened."

Stumpf was suspended as commanding officer of the Navy's precision flying team, based at Pensacola Naval Air Station, in 1993 during a Tailhook investigation.

He later was restored as the team's leader after the Navy cleared him of an allegation that he did nothing to stop a junior officer from having consensual sex with a stripper.

Female officers complained they were groped by aviators during the three-day conference, and the Defense Department's inspector general implicated 117 officers in various offenses, including sexual assault and indecent exposure.

Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett resigned, and Adm. Frank B. Kelso retired early as chief of naval operations after the scandal.

Stumpf was at the convention to receive an award from the association of retired and active duty naval aviators, which is named for the hook used to stop planes when landing on aircraft carriers.

The Senate approved Stumpf's promotion in 1994, and he was slated to take command of an air wing aboard the USS Enterprise the next year.

The Navy denied his upgrade after senators later complained that they were unaware of his Tailhook link when they voted to promote him.

Stumpf retired in 1996.

"I was no longer proud to wear the uniform," he said.

He blamed politics, and contended that Navy prosecutors and Senate staffers had overblown the scandal. He plans to write a book about it.

"When you summarily ruin the careers of a great many dedicated, patriotic, professional Navy officers for political reasons, you need to be held accountable," Stumpf said.

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