Pat Schroeder Caught In Middle Of `Nasty, Gross' Storm -- Lawmaker Leads Attack On Military Sexual Harassment

WASHINGTON - "Have you seen the fax? Do you want to see it?" Rep. Pat Schroeder cheerfully asks as she walks across her office to retrieve from her desk a missive that arrived last week.

Faxed from Camp Lejeune, the Marine training base in North Carolina, it consists of two lurid photographs of women in extremely compromising positions. It also suggests an act that Schroeder could perform for the sender if she were so inclined.

So it has gone lately for the most visible and controversial woman in Congress. Since the issue of sexual harassment in the military exploded with the allegation that Navy officers assaulted at least 26 women at their annual Tailhook convention last year in Las Vegas, Schroeder, D-Colo., has become the principal congressional conduit for all manner of communication on the issue.

A senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and Congress' leading advocate for servicewomen's rights, Schroeder in the past few weeks has received about 20 requests for help from servicewomen claiming to have been sexually harassed or worse by male colleagues.

She also has gotten dozens of impassioned letters from people on both sides of the issue, some commending her for her work on behalf of military women, but more excoriating her for it.

Schroeder said this wasn't the first time in her nearly 20 years in Congress that she had found herself at the center of a storm. But this storm, she said "is probably the most nasty and gross" that she has had to weather.

In addition to the pornographic fax, a group of Navy officers, indignant that she had taken a strong interest in the Tailhook scandal, unfurled a banner at a party this month at the Miramar Naval Air Station, Calif., bearing an obscene reference to Schroeder. Five officers have been held responsible and relieved of their duties.

Wallace Stevens of Oceanside, Calif., a retired veteran of 30 years in the Marine Corps, contacted Schroeder's office in late June on behalf of his daughter, Rose Renneisen, an Air Force fighter mechanic based in Germany. "She was told that in order to receive a performance rating equal to her past ratings, she would have to perform a specific sexual act," Stevens' letter said.

Lynda Clark of Corvallis, Ore., a Marine Corps veteran, told Schroeder she had been threatened with rape several times by other Marines and that when she had complained to her commanding officer, "she just laughed and told me not to worry about it."

Schroeder said there was little she could do to compel the Pentagon to investigate such charges. But she said she would encourage the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to pursue them.

The House committee scheduled two days of hearings on the sexual-harassment issue, beginning today.

Gene Jacoby of Ramona, Calif., wrote to Schroeder on July 6 to inform her, "It is the instilled arrogance that makes the American fighting man the best in the world. Your thoughts of women in any kind of combat scares the living hell out of me. . . . Why not try going back to Colorado and doing something constructive, knitting, sewing or cooking?"

Perhaps the most poignant letter of all came from Rena Coughlin of Virginia Beach, Va., the mother of Navy Lt. Paula Coughlin, who has publicly charged that her fellow officers sexually molested her at the Tailhook party.

"As a parent of one of the naval officers assaulted at the 1991 Tailhook convention, I would like to thank you for your most visible support of the cause of women in the military," she wrote on July 6. "I do hope you can bring to justice the Navy aviators who inflicted this wrong on my daughter and 25 others."