Like many such episodes in Washington, however, the public drama didn’t begin to tell the real story. The behind-the-scenes machinations that led to Lister’s resignation two weeks ago had to do more with festering resentment over women in the ranks than it did with the honor of the marines. Lister was brought down by a carefully orchestrated campaign of conservative activists who know to manipulate the Beltway media machine.
Lister’s comments about the marines, while impolitic, were not particularly exceptional. She was basically elaborating on the thesis of a new book by The Wall Street Journal’s respected Pentagon reporter, Tom Ricks, called ““Making the Corps.’’ ““Theirs is a culture apart,’’ writes Ricks–and most marines (““the proud, the few’’) glory in the difference. Lister’s true crime, in the eyes of her many foes in the Pentagon, is her persistent effort to get women into military units, like engineers and artillery, that are close to frontline combat. Lister also pressed to broaden the investigation of sexual harassment at the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground to other training bases. Not surprisingly, her activism on both fronts was roundly scorned by many of the army’s top brass. But never publicly. In the current climate of political correctness, for a uniformed army officer to openly criticize a female civilian superior would be career suicide. For another woman to attack Lister, however, is an entirely different matter–and the key to Lister’s demise.
Lister’s remarks barely caused a stir when she made them at an academic conference in Baltimore on Oct. 26. Attending the same conference, however, was Kate O’Beirne, Washington editor of National Review. O’Beirne rushed to tell her friend Elaine Donnelly, the head of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative think tank based in Michigan. A shrewd polemicist, Donnelly has been perhaps the most outspoken and effective critic of women in the military. She has strong ties to the top brass: last year the Association of the United States Army, an influential nonprofit group whose 150,000 members include both retired and active army officers, gave Donnelly’s center a $20,000 donation. After talking to O’Beirne, Donnelly played up Lister’s remarks in a newsletter, then accused the army’s assistant secretary of ““terrorizing people in uniform for years.’’ Tipped off by Donnelly, The Washington Times publicly broke the story on Nov. 13. Talk-radio hosts Oliver North (a former marine) and G. Gordon Liddy immediately picked up the beat. Dozens of tapes of Lister’s remarks were circulated through the offices of Republican lawmakers, who passed a resolution calling for her resignation. Lister apologized and resigned the next day. ““It was a pretty nasty way to go out,’’ she told NEWSWEEK. ““There were lots of tears.''
Worn out by the gender wars in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, Lister said that she was ready to resign anyway. But before the ““extremists’’ brouhaha, congressional leaders were afraid she might one day return to the Pentagon as secretary of the army. ““I was unwilling to take that chance,’’ said Stephen Buyer, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel, who helped choreograph the congressional demands for her ouster. Hill Republicans believe that with Army Secretary Togo West, who is black, moving on to run the Veterans Administration and Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall retiring, the Clinton administration would want a woman or a minority as a service chief. Lister would have been the obvious choice.
Buyer and other GOP leaders on the Hill are unabashed about how they dispatched Lister after she gave them an opening. Now they want to roll back the movement to get women into combat; Buyer will hold hearings early next year to toughen up military training, which he believes has been softened to accommodate women. To NEWSWEEK, Buyer called Lister a ““stealth feminist.’’ So stealthy, in fact, that she had to be ambushed.
