Word: coasting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...last year, he strode to the podium of the Old Wardroom dining hall at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, to inspire the 118 cadets of Bravo Company and their guests with tales of Coast Guard glory. Aiming to start on a light note, Blanchard promised to "dispense with the political correctness" and opened with several risque jokes as guests finished their strawberry-covered cheesecake. Blanchard said he had seen a cadet's fiance wearing a brooch featuring maritime signal flags. Blanchard's joke: "She said the flags meant, 'I love you.' They really said, 'Permission granted...
...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...
...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 pain and shame that Captain Blanchard felt he had brought upon himself and the Coast Guard led him to choose suicide as a solution...
...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...