David Evans’s Dishonorable Discharge
Sixteen months ago Evans wrote that “the feeling among many current and former naval officers” is that the chief of naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso, should resign. “Kelso was the man at the helm when the Navy’s credibility ran aground spectacularly at the 1991 Tailhook convention,” Evans explained–as a retired marine officer he’s equally comfortable with military values and military metaphors. A few weeks ago, the secretary of the Navy agreed. He recommended that Kelso be dismissed.
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“Finally,” Squires wrote, “I hired a bright marine retiree [Evans] from the office of the secretary of defense to cover military affairs. If [Stanton] Cook wanted military expertise, he could have it. The problem was, the marine colonel turned out to be one tough reporter, who often knew and reported what the Pentagon was not telling as well as what it wanted everybody to know. Almost from his first column, he became the source of a two-year running dispute between myself and the publisher [Cook] over his credentials as a journalist. Cook seemed to think he ‘just isn’t catching on,’ while I thought he was magnificent. I never had orders to fire him, but the suggestion was planted in my office at least once a month, for no other reason than the constant battering Cook was taking from Pentagon public affairs officers and their friends in the defense contracting business.”
To which Evans replies, “There’s not a single one of those C-17 stories that was wrong. I’m sure they’re popping champagne at McDonnell Douglas, but I felt the Tribune was solidly behind me as long as my facts were right. And they were.”
It is almost unheard-of for the Tribune to fire anyone who has not been accused of some act of professional turpitude such as plagiarism. No one suggests Evans did any such thing. The Tribune’s public position is that the post of military affairs writer was dropped in favor of national security writer–which Evans apparently was deemed unqualified to be. Tyner would not discuss Evans directly, but he told us this:
“No. It’s simply a question of me having to take a hard look at how we deploy our forces.”
Unfortunately for Evans, the column that became his passion was supposed to be only a small part of his job. As a beat reporter chasing breaking defense stories he was considered inadequate–too clumsy a writer, too tendentious, in need of too much guidance from Chicago. Exasperation flowed both ways. “Clearly there can be differences in opinion on what constitutes a major story, and I did not regard my judgment as infallible,” says Evans, recalling stories that were spiked, buried, and rewritten. “But I felt I had a nose for stories that would be of interest. And that feeling was reinforced by seeing the same stories I had suggested given greater play in other publications” –as much as a year or two later. “I wanted to excel. I was frustrated.”
