Former VA chief Togo D. West Jr.
Togo D. West Jr., a government lawyer and high-ranking Clinton administration official who oversaw Army investigations into sexual harassment, served two rocky years as secretary of veterans affairs, and later directed investigations into the mistreatment of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the roots of the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, died March 8 on a Silversea cruise ship traveling between Barbados and Puerto Rico. He was 75.
The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Hilary Carter West.
The son of North Carolina schoolteachers, West served as an Army lawyer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and worked as the top lawyer in the Department of the Navy and Defense Department under President Jimmy Carter.
He became the second African American to serve as Army secretary when President Bill Clinton nominated him to the post in September 1993 after the acting secretary, John Shannon, was charged with shoplifting a $30 blouse and skirt from the base store at Fort Myer in Virginia.
The incident marked the beginning of an unusually eventful tenure for West, who was tasked with shepherding a Cold War Army into peacetime and implementing the Clinton administration’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gay troops.
“He assumed office at a particularly sensitive time,” Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina, wrote in an email. “He seemed undercut in accomplishing a great deal by the gays controversy, an Army leadership focused on dealing with [Defense Secretary Les Aspin’s] ‘bottom-up review,’ budget cuts, controversies over interventions abroad, and changes in threat planning resulting from the end of the Cold War.”
As the Army’s senior civilian official, West oversaw a drawdown that reduced the branch from 18 to 10 active divisions, reorganized its reserve wings and battled criticism that the Clinton administration was using political patronage to determine who would be honored with burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
West also orchestrated a rise in the number of opportunities for women in the military, said Joe Reeder, former undersecretary of the Army. “We opened I think more posts for women than had ever been done before, and any time you have changes like that it’s a big challenge,” Reeder said.
In perhaps his most prominent action as Army secretary, West ordered an investigation into senior officers’ responsibility for sexual abuse at Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland, where in 1996 three male instructors were charged with rape and other sex crimes against female recruits. More than 50 recruits eventually came forward with allegations of sexual abuse at the base.
He went on to launch an investigation into each Army base that trains female soldiers, and appointed a nine-member civilian-military panel that proposed changes in Army training and sexual harassment policies.
Although While West’s handling of the sexual assault investigations drew praise from many on Capitol Hill, his tenure at the Veterans Affairs Department was marked by accusations of mismanagement, as well as long-standing complaints that the department was doing too little to ensure proper health care for veterans.
Appointed department chief in January 1998 after Clinton’s initial choice for the position, Hershel Gober, withdrew his nomination amid accusations of sexual harassment, West inherited a sprawling system of 172 hospitals, 132 nursing homes and more than 650 clinics.
Behind the scenes, he soon began battling a White House spending plan that would have decreased VA funding when accounting for inflation.
In a memo, West wrote that the proposal for the 2001 fiscal year would have limited veterans’ access to emergency care, turning them into “second-class citizens,” and “would raise significant doubts about the administration’s commitment to veterans.”
An additional $3 billion was eventually added to the bill, but West received scant credit. He was by then mired in separate controversies over his travel practices - he sometimes used rented limousines and chartered military airplanes, a violation of government rules - and over what an inspector general’s report described as an atmosphere of “total chaos” at the VA’s Office of Congressional Affairs. He resigned in 2000. “Under his leadership,” Clinton said at the time, “the VA has begun to confront some long-neglected problems head on, reaching out to more than 400,000 veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange, pressing for answers to the Gulf War syndrome and proper care for those who suffer from it, beginning the process of building five new national cemeteries ... and making a special effort to bring homeless veterans back into the society they did so much to defend.”