Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
X-Rated, April 20, 2003
"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
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An honest no-holds-barred account of power abuse, September 27, 1998
By A Customer
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.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Complete and Balanced, January 13, 2001
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.
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