FALL FROM GLORY : The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy

Rating:
Summary: Who is this Guy?
Review: "Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy," by Gregory L. Vistica is a powerful journalistic examination of the political manipulation of American taxpayer dollars and the disgraceful treatment of women who had answered the nation's call to service. However, be warned...it is also filled with excessive and graphic X-Rated pornagraphic narratives.

The author does a worthy service in documenting how Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a President Ronald Reagan appointee in 1981 orchestrated the largest peacetime naval buildup in the nation's history. Vistica explains how the rallying cry for building the fleet had been the Soviet bogeyman. Moreover, he documents how the Navy had known all along that the Soviet Fleet was defensive in nature and not a threat to the United States. Consequently, the American taxpayer paid the bill for an excessive expansion that included a "six hundred ship Navy" that was not needed and mothballed at great expense.

This book also focuses on the role of women in the Navy and gives a step by step account of the hidden dirty laundry at the prestigious U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Vistica also displays intimate details of the infamous Navy and Marine aviators Tailhook Association annual gatherings in Las Vegas. Vistica is a first class researcher and an enormously talented writer who must be credited for being meticulous in detail. Nevertheless, he displays an amazing lack of maturity for lowering himself into the gutter and reporting news not fit to print.

Bert Ruiz

Rating:
Summary: An honest no-holds-barred account of power abuse
Review:
Vistica's FALL FROM GLORY (1996) chronicles power abusesurrounding the US Navy from the Reagan era to the Clinton presidencyin a swift moving narrative fashion. What had begun as an attempt to gain the largest share of pie in the vicious defense bureaucratic infighting under the secretaryship of shrewd naval aviator-wannabe, John Francis Lehman Jr., prompted the coverup of corruption, the corrosive intra- and inter-service rivalry, the defective weapon systems as result of flawed procurement, repeated leadership failures, the sexual abuse perpetrated by the sailors and the promotion of political agendas pursued by the lawmakers. In the end, the "house built on deck of cards" fell apart like a sputtering engine.

Though the Navy had its share of tough, honest and capable leaders, they ultimately alone could not restore the former glory that it had once enjoyed. These leaders were often swept under the current of endemic political correctness, and the rotten system controlled by the fraternity of "untouchable" admirals who were contemptuous of the regulations. The Navy, unable to support the enormous financial burden of the "Six Hundred Ship Navy", found itself on its ass. Still, the Navy hobbled along on its crutches for quite some time, finding excuses to defend its hollow structure, thanks to the agendas promoted by the Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex.

Perhaps the everlasting impact under the leadership of the Airdale-wannabe Lehman was the conditioning of the flag officers into silence, for agreeing to the personal agenda of the Secretary and the lawmakers was understood to be the ultimate display of loyalty and the key leading to "bigger things". The admirals hunkered down in their plush Pentagon E-ring offices and flagships to escape the merciless indiscriminate hatchet of the lawmakers as they witnessed their beloved fleet sinking. More often than not, they shifted blames on their men by creating scapegoats when things blew up on their screen.

The slow painful death of the once-mighty and glorious fleet began with the disgraceful suicide of its leader, and a searing indictment of the Navy's failure by a former Secretary of the Navy, James Webb in his famous 1996 speech at the Naval Academy.

In this swift, moving, no-holds-barred narrative account of power abuse and corruption, Gregory Vistica exposes to the reader the lies perpatuated by the public servants to justify the raison d'etre of their "sacred pork," and its corrosive impact on the service branch they sought to glorify. Worth noting in this book is the superb quality of its writing style: absorbing, moving, and mesmerizing. A class of its own.

Rating:
Summary: Not going the MBA route (yet)
Review: Book is a treasure trove of little-known operations and events during the '80s defense buildup. From secret wargames held 6 miles off the Russian Coast, to budget battles in the Pentagon, the book is an a keyhole to how the navy functioned in the Reagan Administration. Names of the key players that led the massive naval buildup parade across the book. Vistica's coverage of the 600-ship buildup was not complete but otherwise impressive.

Rating:
Summary: Who is this Guy?
Review: Having served in the operations field of the Navy from the Vietnam era to after Desert storm I can with some reliability say that this book is nothing more than pure liberal hogwash from a typically liberal biased journalist who's sensationalism of the Reagan years is designed to bring him a fat paycheck at the expense of gullible readers who could have no concept of what might be the truth. In Pontious Pilate's words "what is truth?"
Truth one; The Soviet Union had built a huge military whose mission was power projection as witnessed by their buildup of an amphibious navy and their proliferation of long range strategic (not tactical) nuclear weapons. These are not weapons of defense.
Truth two; Anybody living in the Czech Republic, East Germany and Poland can adequately bear witness to the Soviet Unions desire for global domination via their defensive (sarcasm) takeover of those countries and their defensive (more sarcasm) attempt at taking over Afghanistan. None of these countries were a threat to the Soviet Union.
Truth Three; The soviet union is 'no more' and part of the reason for that is Reagan's buildup of our Navy along with his hardline diplomacy towards the Soviet Union. Lehmen was right and that buildup worked.
Truth Four; We are currently in a war in the middle east that has drained our military resources to the limit because of the drawdown perpetrated by the Reagan/Bush1 successor. Our reservists/national guard are spending more time doing their part time military job than they are in their civilian full time job. Not even a small war in Iraq can be sustained without a military approaching the size of the Reagan years. We should be more concerned about how small our current Navy is instead of how large it was during Reagan's tenure.
Truth Five; If these documents that the author has said he is using are classified then the author needs to be in jail for accessing them. Classified means having a clearence AND a need to know in order to have access. None of which this journalist has.
There are many out there whose viewpoints are only looking for validation and my review of this book is certainly not going to change your mind. For those of you who have not made up your minds take this book with a huge grain of salt. If you want dirt about the military, and it's ridiculous spending, the Reagan years are not it. You would be best served by reading about the Kennedy years and secretary Mcnamara.

Rating:
Summary: Complete and Balanced
Review: I've read numerous articles by Gregory L. Vistica in the newspaper and in Newsweek Magazine, and am always impressed by the quality of his research and reporting. His writings on military matters are free from political bias and personal agenda.

I read "Fall From Glory" particularly for its coverage of conditions in the gender-integrated Navy. Vistica presents a very balanced view of the Tailhook Scandal, beginning with the circumstances which led up to it. The Navy had overlooked gross sexual misconduct for many years -- from Subic Bay's "hostitutes" for servicemen to "Tomcat Follies" and convention "TailHookers" for male aviators. It was inevitable that such a permissive atmosphere culminated in the drunken debauchery and assaults at Tailhook 91. Perhaps the real tragedy of Tailhook was that careers were destroyed over conduct which had been condoned and even encouraged in the past. (Nor does Vistica place the entire blame on male officers and command. Many female Naval attendees participated in the revelry with equal licentiousness.) Ironically, the Navy's attempted coverup in the aftermath of Tailhook provided the impetus for the long overdue promotion of female aviators to the Fleet. Vistica relates the struggle of those aviators to overcome military sexism and media sensationalism over the fatal crash of a pioneer F-14 aviatrix. While acknowledging deficiencies in the accelerated training of that pilot, Vistica reveals a Navy policy of keeping "an inordinate number of mediocre and poor male pilots, many of whom are less qualified than [she] was... The Navy never released the details of accidents in which inferior male pilots killed themselves and others while flying... They were allowed to keep flying despite serious deficiencies because of the 'good old boy network' that is still so prevalent in naval aviation."

But "Fall From Glory" contains much more than just information relevent to women in the Navy. The book details the abuses of power of the Navy's top Admirals and Secretary Lehman during the Reagan Administrations. How they manipulated the President and misled Congress into appropriating billions of dollars -- for an unecessary fleet buildup to counter a greatly-exaggerated threat from the Soviet navy -- is the real eye-opener. From Lehman's scheming and Reagan's astonishing gullibility, to Clinton's wishy-washy compromises on gays in the Navy, Vistica's thorough documentation leaves no sacred ox ungored. This will not endear his book to liberal or right-wing readers seeking validation of their political agendae. But it is a book which should be read by everyone who really cares about the US Navy and is concerned about its fall from its former glory.

Rating:
Summary: AWESOME!!!
Review: If it were possible, I would give this book a negative 5 stars. It's only value is in demonstrating to the public just how biased and anti-military an author can be while, at the same time, holding credentials as a serious "journalist."

Gregory Vistica claims, in his Author's Notes, that the book was originally intended to deal with the Tailhook scandal he promoted when he broke the story in 1991. He claims that his editor advised him to make it a borader historical text on the Navy. That was the book's downfall because Mr. Vistica does not know the military, its planes or its weapons. Throughout the book, there are numerous errors. Worse than that, however, is his claim that the book's narrative is based on "classified and sensitive documents." He would not have access to "classified" documents. In addition, he claims that "careful readings of the manuscript were also done by several senior naval intelligence officers, who must remain anonymous." He doesn't like a single rank and he doesn't even give a specific number for the people in question. As a former intelligence analyst myself, I find the book is filled with numerous errors about ships, planes, their deployments and operations, and how they were used in Operation DESERT STORM, for one. Gregory Vistica was not competent to write such a book and was far out of his league. I would challenge him to name one of those "several senior naval intelligence officers," at least one of whom should have departed the service by now and should be willing to speak, and have them step forward to vouch for this claim made when the book was published in 1995. Anybody who claims that they were a senior intelligence analyst, who made even one cursory examination of this book, and failed to find the huge number of errors contained within, either was misidentified as a qualified intelligence officer or never should have been one in the first place. These items are in the first seven pages of the book, it goes downhill, drastically, from that point on. Contrary to what one other reviewer of this book wrote, this book is an extreme example of anti-military bias and a prime example of why the media is so distrusted by some in the military and despised by many others.

Rating:
Summary: For the book burners: Someone had to write this book!
Review: Someone had to tell this story. I searched the WEB for information on the Tailhook Scandal and the only book I could find having anything to say about how the Navy got into that situation is "Fall from Glory." All books have factual errors but I'm very glad this book was written. I was a naval aviator, attack pilot, in the 1960 and 1970s. 500 carrier landings A1 and A4. I've witnessed the scene at the Cubi Point Officers club. I can separate truth from fiction. What disgusts me most about these events is the lying, the cover ups, the protection of men who deserve to be courts martialed, and the sexual escapades.

I have some of the same reservations that many military men have about women in the service. I think they have an important roll. I have a problem with their being on aircraft carriers flying fighter planes but space is limited so I'll leave out the numerous reasons why I have these reservations. But young men who harass women at the Naval Academy far beyond the norms of hazing, people who ostracize others who tell the truth, are, in my opinion, cowards and scum. And men who think it's funny grabbing at women in a "gauntlet" are not the men I want leading our Navy. I notice that some of the reviewers speak of the Reagan Administration, Secretary Lehman, etc. as if they are the chief offenders or the cause. Bull! Every individual from admiral on down is responsible for his/her actions. Too many naval officers did nothing!