Word: blanchards
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...Blanchard also feared the loss of a pension that a court-martial might mean. He offered to resign if the Coast Guard would halt its probe, but on March 10, he was turned down. Three days later, Blanchard met with Vice Admiral Arthur Henn, the Coast Guard's No. 2 officer, to ask for time off. "His face was drawn and a little pale," Henn said. "He was mortified that he had caused such potential embarrassment to the Coast Guard and his family...
...under pressure from a dozen Coast Guard women, most of them at the academy, the Coast Guard brass launched a criminal probe into the jokes, according to a recently concluded review of the case obtained by TIME. This was not Blanchard's first such cultural clash. In 1990, as skipper of the Legare, a sleek, new 270-ft. cutter, a female petty officer charged him with sexual harassment, saying he and another commander had treated her unfairly and called her a "Jewish-American princess." (For good measure, she wasn't Jewish.) While Blanchard was never punished, the Coast Guard concluded...
...Blanchard, the father of two teenagers, the probe threatened to end the career to which he had devoted 30 of his 46 years. "Newspapers are going to have a field day," Blanchard fretted. "My children are going to be humiliated." He abandoned his exercise regime and stared blankly out his office window instead. His unease mounted as his colleagues avoided him. "As chief of public affairs, his phones rang all the time," his widow Connie, an elementary school teacher, told TIME. "It was very noticeable when all that stopped...
...next afternoon, Blanchard went into his suburban Virginia backyard, put the muzzle of his grandfather's Smith & Wesson revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun had misfired. He could have taken that as a sign he was meant to live. But Blanchard pulled the trigger a second time. The gun went off. He left no suicide note. A Navy psychological autopsy concluded that "his style seemed consistent with someone whose duty it was to shoulder the burden and assume responsibility," even as that style clouded his ability to keep his situation in perspective. "The emotional...
Coast Guard officials see the case as a freak tragedy with no larger lessons. Still, some in the Coast Guard are asking whether the institution should have let the potentially career-ending charges hang over Blanchard for so long. By comparison, when a top Navy admiral suggested during a breakfast with the press last year that U.S. servicemen charged in the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl would have been smarter to hire a prostitute instead, he was out of his job by dinnertime. "The stress level went up as it dragged on and on," Connie Blanchard says...