'Don't ask, don't tell' fades away Tuesday

By Mackenzie Weinger

More than 17 years after a tortured political compromise that left no one happy, “don’t ask, don’t tell” is done.

On Tuesday, President Bill Clinton’s 1993 directive that allowed gays and lesbians to serve in the military without discrimination as long as they stayed in the closet will be formally repealed. The measure had mandated that applicants weren’t to be asked about their sexuality, and it barred military brass from investigating a service member’s sexual orientation without credible evidence.

The repeal of DADT — which stirred anger among conservatives and liberals alike, touching off a nearly two-decades-long debate — was approved by Congress last year, signed by President Barack Obama, who had made it a campaign pledge in 2008, and given final authorization by military leaders this summer.

“As of Sept. 20, service members will no longer be forced to hide who they are in order to serve our country,” Obama said in a statement in July.

The day will be marked by an afternoon news conference at the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, celebrations around the country by those who had worked nearly a generation to abolish DADT and disappointment from critics who had pressed right up until the last moment for the repeal to be delayed or turned back altogether.

With the death of DADT at hand, POLITICO asked some key Clinton-era players on the Hill, in the trenches at the Defense Department, and at advocacy groups on both sides of the issue to reflect on then and now.

Ron Dellums, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee at the time, recalled how he was surprised to hear Clinton on the other end of the phone in 1993, seeking advice about how to handle his campaign promise to lift the long-standing ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military. “Mr. President, keep your promise,” Dellums told Clinton.

“You lift the ban,” the 75-year-old California Democrat remembers telling the president. “There’s going be a fight, but let us handle the fight in the Congress. I’m more than willing to be part of that fight. You’ve got other issues to deal with. Lift the ban, and we’ll take it from there.”

But Clinton ignored Dellums’s advice, instead signing a controversial order that didn’t eliminate the strict ban on homosexuals serving but modified it a way that soon came to be known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Clinton’s hair-splitting move touched off years of court battles, streams of reports and studies, and, far from ending the public debate, ratcheted up the volume.

Earlier, when Clinton had moved unilaterally to repeal the absolute ban by executive order after he took office, Congress, backed by support from the military and the public, fought back and included language preserving it in a defense spending bill passed in November 1993. As a compromise, Clinton issued a Defense Department directive on Dec. 21, 1993, mandating that gays and lesbians could serve, but not openly.

More than 14,000 service members had been discharged from the military under the Clinton policy. DADT’s days were numbered after the House approved a repeal bill, 250-175, on Dec. 15, 2010, and the Senate quickly followed on Dec. 18, voting 65-31 in favor of the legislation. Obama signed the measure on Dec. 22, 2010, setting off the certification review required before official repeal. Obama, Panetta and Mullen gave the final word on July 22, 2011, that the military would be ready for repeal in 60 days.

In Congress, veterans of the 17-year battle said Tuesday was a long time coming.

Rep. Barney Frank, the openly gay Massachusetts Democrat who has been leading the fight against the ban since 1993, told POLITICO the “important thing about this date [Tuesday] is two or three years from now when none of the negative predictions come true” about the impact of gays and lesbians serving openly in the military.

Only with time, Frank predicted, will supporters of DADT see how the policy was based on prejudice and “unfounded” claims.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, one of only a handful of senators to vote against enforcing the existing ban in 1993, said in a statement, “All these years later, it is a relief to see the end of a bad law that has been with us for far too long.”

Along with the lawmakers at DADT’s front lines, several senior aides working at the Pentagon in the 1990s said Tuesday’s repeal will bring their own battle full circle.

When attorney Jamie Gorelick was tapped to be Pentagon general counsel in 1993, she quickly found herself in an unexpected role — she became one of the chief architects of implementing “don’t ask.” “It fell to me and others to try to put it in a form that was usable by the military, which meant translating what was a two-page outline to thousands of pages of regulations,” Gorelick told POLITICO.

From figuring out the nitty-gritty of how DADT would work in recruitment to digging into questions of what constituted homosexual actions — for example, one fiercely debated point was whether a soldier placing a picture of another man beside his bunk constituted “telling” — Gorelick helped painstakingly develop the military’s plan for putting Clinton’s directive into effect.

“At the time, many of us did see it as a way station” to gays and lesbians eventually being able to serve openly, she recalled.

Years later, Gorelick ended up on the other side of the issue at the liberal Center for American Progress, where she worked to undo DADT, along with another ex-DoD staffer, Rudy DeLeon.

DeLeon, who was serving as the senior assistant to Secretary of Defense Les Aspin in 1993, had been part of the working group looking at how to allow gays to serve in the military “consistent with what at the time was referred to as ‘good order and discipline.’”

He, like many others in the Clinton administration, saw DADT is a temporary policy at the time it was enacted.

“It was interesting in ways that in 1993, the military services were ready to open up more billets to women members of the armed forces, but they had really never had a discussion on gays and lesbians serving,” DeLeon told POLITICO.

“So just in terms of the reference points they used, this became a big issue with the press very much in watching the back and forth between a president who wanted to allow everyone to serve and a Congress that had a restricted view on who could serve. I think the debate in 1993 was nowhere near to the sophistication of the debate in 2009 and 2010,” he added.

Last year, Gorelick and DeLeon were among those successfully attempting to persuade Congress to repeal DADT by advocating the legislative language that gave wavering members a final push to vote yes: “Don’t ask” would be gone only after the military formally certified its end.

Today, advocacy groups on both sides are more concerned about what comes next.

Andrea Lafferty, president of the Traditional Values Coalition, which opposed the repeal of DADT, said the Obama administration must address concerns raised by some in Congress that the military still isn’t prepared for the impact of ending “don’t ask.”

“What the average person doesn’t understand is that the president has attacked an institution that cannot defend itself,” she said, referring to political correctness inhibiting a frank discussion about homosexuals in the armed services. “We have these wonderful men and women serving this country … and these people have to keep their mouths shut and they can’t defend themselves from gays in the military.”

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, which also opposes repeal, said, “The military is in peril — there is a lot of disruption that they really don’t deserve. A burden has been placed on the military because of a promise the president made to LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] activist groups.”

Meanwhile, Servicemembers Legal Defense Network Executive Director Aubrey Sarvis called the end of DADT a “remarkable achievement.”

The group, formed in 1993 to offer legal assistance to those impacted by the policy, will be hosting “Freedom to Serve” events around the country on Tuesday to celebrate the end of “don’t ask.” Then, Sarvis said, the work turns to helping reinstate service members discharged under the policy and advocating for equal benefits for gay and lesbian married couples who are serving in the military.

“It’s not the end,” Sarvis said.