Four years ago, in the late winter and early spring of 1968, the "Arnheiter Affair" was much in the news. I wrote three columns and a magazine piece on the case; and looking back at the copy today, I
am no more ashamed than I usually am about the rest of my copy. A working reporter never knows enough, never has enough time; his stuff almost always falls short of his aspirations.
Now Neil Sheehan of The New York Times has published a book, The Arnheiter Affair" (Random House, $7.95), and those of us who supported Lieutenant Commander Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter in 1968 are compelled to a reexamination of the position we took then. In part, but only in part, I retract.
This was a famous case. Sheehan's brilliant book probably will make the best-seller lists. Already the author has been interviewed on the CBS morning show; Arnheiter has sued him for $5 million in libel. And the book is indeed brilliant. It is brilliant in the fashion of Randolph's mackerel in the moonlight: It both shines and stinks.
Poor Arnheiter! Poor, doomed Arnheiter! He was the young naval officer, a graduate of Annapolis, who, took over his first seagoing command at Pearl Harbor just before Christmas of 1965. He was made skipper of an aging destroyer-picket, the Vance, assigned to patrol off Vietnam. Precisely 99 days later, in a virtually unprecedented action, Arnheiter was summarily removed from his command. In disgrace, he was exiled to a dreary desk post in San Francisco. In time, he was ridden out of the Navy altogether.
Two years after his abrupt dismissal from command, when the story broke into the national news, many a Washington correspondent (including Sheehan, at the time) was trapped in the deadline net that is woven about us. We had Arnheiter's own account; the Navy would not talk; and there never was time to run down the adverse witnesses a reporter would like to question. It was Sheehan's useful feat subsequently to take three months off and to do all the careful digging the case deserved. This book is his report. He has destroyed all that remained of Marc Arnheiter.
The story at the time, was that Arnheiter had taken command of a warship that had been loafing its indolent way through a Vietnam assignment. A spit-and-polish Dutchman, over-eager, over-zealous, he had undertaken necessarily drastic measures to bring the ship to a fighting pitch; his efforts had been undermined by junior officers who ridiculed his determination and conspired maliciously against him
Sheehan explodes this account --- over-explodes it. As Sheehan tells it@, Arnheiter emerges as a liar (he knowingly ordered that false position reports be sent); as a coward (he cravenly ducked for cover when his overheated imagination conceived that the ship was under fire); an
egomaniac (he dictated a letter recommending that he be decorated, and ordered his subordinates to sign it). By this account, Arnheiter was selfish, inconsiderate, querulous, domieering, and absurd. He was a garrulous bore, a tyrant, a vainglorious windbag. He knew nothing of machinery; he was reckless with firearms;, he endangered his own crew to serve his own vanity. He did, nothing right or well.
Sheehan's, investigation tends to support much of this indictment. His evidence is especially, telling on the matter of Arnbeiter's. firing upon imagined targets on. shore. Sheehan, has produced new grievances that did not figure in the 1968 hearings: Arnheiter demanded a white . toilet seat,
for example; and Arnheiter infuriated the crew by taking Incessant showers when water was under ration.
Yet it is hard to square this grotesque painting of a real life Captain queeg with Arnheiter's excellent record immediately prior to his command of the Vance. Sheehan skates too easily around the Navy's gross violation of Arnheiter's rights at the time of hIs removal. The book, engrossing as it is, wholly misses the pathos--the poignant human tragedy - of Arnheiter's fevered ambition: He wanted to be a Horatio Hornblower; and it seems he didn't know how.
Article presented by Bob Howey |