Army secretary led force during difficult transitions

Togo West Jr., who as secretary of the Army in the 1990s oversaw its wrenching post-Gulf War conversion to a truncated peacetime fighting force that granted women more combat roles and vowed to shield them from sexual abuse, died Thursday on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. He was 75.

The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Hilary Carter West said.

Mr. West was the second black Army secretary and the second African-American to hold the cabinet-level position of secretary of Veterans Affairs, appointed to both posts by President Bill Clinton.

After the Army department was flooded with thousands of complaints of sexual harassment in the mid1990s and three male instructors at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland were accused of rape in 1996, Mr. West responded by greatly tightening penalties for sexual transgressions and ordering an internal investigation.

It found that “sexual harassment exists throughout the Army, crossing gender, rank and racial lines.”

“Sexual abuse is not endemic throughout our Army,” Mr. West said at the time. “Sexual harassment, however, continues to be a problem.”

He told the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” “I say to the parents of America, you can trust your sons and daughters to us.”

Later, as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he fought the White House behind the scenes, with only modest success, to expand spending on medical care and other benefits for former members of the military. After two years, he left the agency, whose inspector general described some of its divisions as mired in “total chaos.”

Mr. West earlier served as an associate deputy attorney general under President Gerald Ford; as general counsel of the Navy under President Jimmy Carter; and, under President Ronald Reagan, on a panel that found complicity by the Salvadoran authorities in covering up the murder of four Roman Catholic churchwomen from the U. S.

President George W. Bush appointed Mr. West to two review panels. One criticized the care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the other urged the Army to improve its ability to identify and treat highrisk soldiers after the fatal shootings of 13 people by a military psychiatrist at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.

“His entire life was a model of citizen service,” Bill and Hillary Clinton said in a statement Sunday.

Togo Dennis West Jr. was born on June 21, 1942, in Winston-Salem, N.C. He was named after his father, who had been named for Adm. Togo Heihachiro, a hero of the Russo-Japanese War.

The younger Mr. West earned a bachelor of science degree in engineering from Howard University in Washington, where he also received a law degree and met Gail Berry, whom he married in 1966 and who survives him. She was later named deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force.

After clerking for Federal District Judge Harold R. Tyler Jr. in New York, Mr. West was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Field Artillery Corps and attained the rank of captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, where he served until 1973.

After working in the Carter administration, he became managing partner at the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler and a senior vice president of the Northrop Corp., now Northrop Grumman, a major defense contractor, before joining the Clinton administration.

Mr. West was named Army secretary in 1993. The first African-American to hold the post was Clifford L. Alexander, appointed by President Carter.

As secretary in the years after the Gulf War, Mr. West managed base closings and troop reductions that constituted the largest military demobilization since World War II. He also administered the Clinton administration’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, intended to accommodate gay soldiers.

Mr. West clashed with Army brass who objected to his plan to expand the role of women in combat. He eventually compromised on a plan that allowed them to be assigned to about 2 in 3 Army jobs but barred them from others, including operation of advanced air defense field artillery weapons, helicopters that fly cover for tanks and special operations forces.

He served until 1998, when he was appointed to the Veterans Affairs post, succeeding the first black to hold that post, Jesse Brown, and serving until July 2000.