Word: coded
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What is happening at West Point this spring seems to confirm the findings of a study of the honor code released last October by the Federal Government's General Accounting Office, which acts as an investigating agency for Congress. The G.A.O. study said "the toleration clause" is one of the biggest problems for the members of the corps, and the longer a cadet stays at West Point, the more tolerant he tends to become of wrongdoing. Some cadets felt that maintaining a friendship is more important than reporting a fellow student and that the penalty of banishment from West...
...magnitude of the problem becomes more apparent, high Pentagon officials are quietly deciding that perhaps the time has come for West Point to modify the code. When he heard what was going on, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld impatiently asked aides who was administering the system at the Point and whether there was any room for discretion in the system...
Well aware that the honor code and its system of justice were causing problems, West Point's Berry set up a special committee in 1974 to see how the two "could be strengthened and improved." Composed of 14 officers and 16 cadets, the committee produced a two-volume report ten months before the present scandal broke. The academy is already instituting recommended procedural reforms aimed at removing the secrecy of the hearings and improving the individual's right to due process. For example, cadets appearing before an honor committee are now allowed to be present while witnesses...
...their elders, despite the difficulties. "An officer who sees a fellow officer commit an atrocity has an obligation to report him, even if he's a friend," says Ulmer. "If you won't do that, you have no business at West Point." Over the decades, the code has helped to make West Point what George Patton Jr. called a "holy place," an institution that Maxwell Taylor describes as "something like the church; it is not for everyone, only for those with a true vocation." Agrees Berry: "The code's a statement of ideals that I think...
...could quarrel with Berry's contention that West Point has to prepare young men to perform honorably and reliably on the battlefield. The problem that he and the U.S. Army confront is how to revise the code, and the system of justice that goes with it, to foster a sense of honor in the cadets-a system that they can uphold with honor themselves