Taps For The Navy? The Tailhook Scandals

ON OCTOBER 15, 1993, Rear Admiral Riley Mixson, Chief of the Navy’s Air Warfare Division, received a letter of censure from new Secretary of the Navy John Dalton. Dalton hit Mixson for being responsible for the arrangements of the 1991 Tailhook convention, the military’s worst sex scandal in history.

The rebuke was fired like a showy missile attack, staged for the benefit of CNN. But Mixson defended himself with a letter that convincingly refuted Dalton’s charges. He wrote that during most of the time plans were being made for the infamous convention in Las Vegas, he was half a world away directing combat operations during Desert Storm. “I can assure you,” Mixson wrote, “my thoughts in the Red Sea were not on Tailhook ’91.”

ED

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Elaine Donnelly

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ON OCTOBER 15, 1993, Rear Admiral Riley Mixson, Chief of the Navy’s Air Warfare Division, received a letter of censure from new Secretary of the Navy John Dalton. Dalton hit Mixson for being responsible for the arrangements of the 1991 Tailhook convention, the military’s worst sex scandal in history.

The rebuke was fired like a showy missile attack, staged for the benefit of CNN. But Mixson defended himself with a letter that convincingly refuted Dalton’s charges. He wrote that during most of the time plans were being made for the infamous convention in Las Vegas, he was half a world away directing combat operations during Desert Storm. “I can assure you,” Mixson wrote, “my thoughts in the Red Sea were not on Tailhook ’91.”