Monday, May 26, 1997

Turbulence for Secretary of Air Force

By Ellen Goodman

BOSTON - As the saga of the Air Force and adultery came to its public conclusion, as the sex life of the poster pilot and the con man, Kelly Flinn and Marc Zigo, became a national spectacle, I thought about the other woman.

I don't mean Gayla Zigo. That battered and betrayed ex-wife managed to turn her rage on the other victim of Marc's attentions. I leave her and her self-deception to Ann Landers.

I mean Sheila Widnall, the secretary of the Air Force. It was her unhappy fate to decide the unhappy fate of a young pilot who was wiser in the air than in love.

On Thursday, Sheila Widnall was the one who brokered a general discharge instead of a court-martial. She was the one who had to disappoint those who wanted to see Flinn behind bars and those who wanted to see her back in the cockpit.

On paper these two women, whose lives collided, look like a mother-daughter act of "firsts."

In 1960, Widnall was one of only 21 women among 900 men in her graduating class at M.I.T. She was the only woman to go directly to graduate school, the first to head the M.I.T. faculty. She was on the visiting committee at the Air Force Academy long before Kelly Flinn was admitted. She was the first woman to become secretary of the Air Force.

This aeronautical engineer and a self-proclaimed feminist worked her way up to the narrow point of the pyramid while holding out a helping hand to the young women behind her.

If life doled out happy endings, such a story would have concluded the day the First Female Secretary of the Air Force was flown by the First Female B-52 pilot. What a photo for a feminist album.

But in this sad postscript, the first woman in charge had to pass judgment on the first B-52 woman pilot. One woman had to decide how much to enforce rules and how much to remake them.

The clash of cultures around this 26-year-old pilot's love affair with a married man, the lurid questions she was asked and the lies she told, are familiar by now. To many civilians, this was a case of the Air Force going after a fine officer whose crimes deserved a traffic ticket. To many in the Air Force, like the chief of staff, Gen. Ronald Fogleman, this was "an issue about an officer entrusted to fly nuclear weapons who lied."

But the buck stopped on the desk of the civilian leader of the military branch, the female head of this male order, the former outsider who was very much inside. It was up to her to say she was making a deal to uphold "the values of officership," "the importance of integrity" and "order."

The secretary of the Air Force sits on a hot seat shared by many successful women. It's shared by certified change agents who become CEOs and find themselves in charge of the bottom line. It's shared by women reporters, who lobby for family hours and then become editors in charge of the newsroom schedule. It's shared by women politicians who start to work within the system and wonder if they've gotten wise or gotten co-opted.

Those who identify their movement up with the women's movement face greater expectations and disappointments. From others and themselves.

In this highly publicized and well-spun case about either a "woman in love with the wrong man" or "integrity and obedience to orders," the secretary was in what one lawyer on women's military matters called "a no-win situation." It's a familiar location for women renting rooms at the top.

Did Widnall ever wince at how a Flinn - younger than her own daughter - was treated by this man and military? Did she understand why this isolated "showgirl" pilot fell for a guy who said he would follow her anywhere?

Perhaps that's why Widnall said, "I don't look at this in terms of a victory." But in the end she cut the best deal she could.

The secretary denied a double standard in Flinn's case. "I have to say from a personal point of view, it is extremely important to me that we hold men and women to the same standards of officership." It's impossible, though, to deny that in dealing with sexual conduct, the single standard is arbitrary and archaic.

I hope to find Kelly Flinn in the cockpit of a 757 if not a B-52. But it's up to military now to rewrite the rules on sexual conduct.

As an aeronautical scientist, Widnall once specialized in turbulence. That's not bad experience for logging the next flight pattern.

The Boston Globe Newspaper Company