THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Carolyn H. Becraft

“I never really had a plan. Doors opened and I walked through them.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, November 2024

CB:  I’m Carolyn Becraft. I was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1944.

JW:  Well, welcome. Tell us a little about your life as a child.

CB:  I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. That’s where my family is from. I would say very normal childhood. I went K through 12 schools here. Then I went on to the University of North Dakota for my college experience. In my senior year I enlisted in the army, because they had a student program for medical professionals and I was going for a degree in dietetics, nutrition. So, upon graduation, I was commissioned in the army as a second lieutenant.

JW:  Wow, this is after college?

CB:  Yes.

JW:  So, what year would that be?

CB:  That was 1966. That was before women could be in ROTC or any of that. My dad found the program. Dietetics requires an internship after graduation and we had a friend who was a dietitian in the Navy. He asked her what would be a good dietetic internship program and she said the Army had the best program. So, that’s how I found it, through my dad. And then I enlisted and they paid for my senior year in college, essentially.

JW:  Did you have siblings or were you an only child?

CB:  I have a sister that’s a year younger than I, and a brother that’s five years younger than I.

JW:  Okay, so you, like me, are the first born.

CB:  I am the first born. Yes, and all the traits that go with it.

JW:  We’re talking about the ’60s, so when did you actually get interested in women’s issues?

CB:  I got interested in women’s issues by what happened to me. I got hit on the head a lot of times. Like, Oh, my God. I went into the Army and did my internship. About two and a half years later, I was transferred to Fort Devens, Massachusetts; I had been in Denver and then in Tacoma, Washington, then I was transferred to Fort Devens, Massachusetts. That’s where I met my husband, and we got married, and he moved into my apartment.

Things were different then. When I filed my name change, they took away my quarters allowance, which was a third of my pay, because the policy was that married women could not draw in the army. It was a policy, it wasn’t a law, but they couldn’t draw quarters allowance if they were married. I’m in this combat arms place, one of the only women in the whole place. I really tried to fight it, but I didn’t know how. I mean, I should have gone to the Jag, to the lawyer, but I was really naive and young.

At Fort Devons, I was 24, and I was the head dietitian of a 200-bed hospital. So, I had about 30 people working for me. We were transferred to Fort Knox, Kentucky, both on orders. I outranked my husband, not by much but it was enough, so, I had data-rank on him. When we arrived at Fort Knox, my data-rank would have gotten us better housing than his data-rank. I was doing well. I was a dietitian. I started out as head of diet therapy. Very shortly after that, I was made the head dietitian of Ireland Army Hospital. That was a thousand-bed hospital. I had 120 people, military and civilian, working for me. I mean, I’m 26 years old.

JW:  Amazing.

CB:  But I found out in this process that I was good at managing lots of stuff. The scientific part wasn’t really that interesting to me. You were thrown into it and, Do you like it or don’t you? I did well in the diet therapy part because I had good interpersonal skills. I was the head dietitian, and we were there for about two years and I became pregnant with our first child. At that time, the laws were changing.

Teachers and flight attendants were bringing lawsuits against having to leave their jobs if they became pregnant. They had an investment in me. I was a captain. I was the youngest person to have a job like that. We had just maxed the I. G. Inspection. We had just maxed the joint hospital inspection. They han interest in keeping me, so they made me an offer. I could stay in the military if I gave up total custody of my child to my husband who was on orders to Vietnam, or to my parents. You can’t make this stuff up.

JW:  What year was this?

CB:  This was like 1971.

JW:  ’71. Oh, my gosh.

CB:  Yes. So obviously, they made me an offer that I would not take. So, I left the military and I became a military spouse.

JW:  Excuse me. Let me interrupt you. Before you left the military, I’m wondering, you had an amazing job for a woman. Was there a backlash? Were you harassed? People say things behind your back about being a woman? I’m just curious.

CB:  No, I was always in a hospital setting, and hospital settings are used to women, nurses. It was a very professional setting. I had buddies, and I had a coffee pot. I was very naive. The term networking was really foreign to me. I couldn’t have known what it was, but it turned out I was networking. The boys would come in, and we’d have coffee. I had total separation from the nurses. A lot of it was because we were young and the young ones got the evening and night shifts.

I was in a totally different administrative role. I went to the staff meetings of the chief of staff of the hospital. So, I was not savvy about what a good position I had. I was just young and doing my job. Anyway, I left the military and became a military spouse. My husband stayed in the military. I had no idea how far I had fallen. I had status in the institution, then I had no status in the institution.

My husband was on orders in Vietnam, so I went back to Fargo, North Dakota, and that’s where our son, Peter, was born. When my husband came back, we went back to Fort Knox, he was reassigned there. In our first 11 years of marriage, we lived 10 places. I did get some consulting dietetic jobs, but every time I got a job, he got orders.

I sold real estate, I established a learning resource center, et cetera. We were reassigned to Germany in, must have been ’77. He was assigned to Baumholder Germany. I then had our second child, Jeremy, who was, I think, seven months oldwhen we moved to Germany. I thought, “Okay, I’ve got the GI Bill. I’m going to get a master’s degree.”

I really wanted to get a master’s degree in business, but I didn’t have one of the prerequisites. The other opportunity was a program from the University of Southern California, a Masters of Education. I did the Masters of Education with a specialization in adult education. When it came time for me to write my thesis; this was 1978, I could have done a fat boy study. I’m a dietitian.

But, I probably at that time, unbeknownst to me and not thinking it through, made a decision that I would probably leave the dietetic field. First of all, I’d been out of the field for almost 10 years. I would have had to start all over again, and the kinds of jobs I had in the army weren’t available in the civilian sector. I mean, I’d been a head dietitian. But it was an unconscious decision, really.

I went to my thesis advisor, Alice Bunker, she was wonderful. And I said, “I have this idea. This is 1978. I’m living in a 1950s world. I think maybe I want to measure the effects of the women’s movement on wives and military officers.” “Because,” I said, “This is crazy.” She just leapt right on that and said, “Perfect.” There was no data on wives of military officers or families.

There was beginning to be corporate spouse data. The Air Force had a little bit. Anyway, I had access to the Officers Wives Club. It was one of the things I always did. I always joined the Officers Wives Club. That was a political thing to do. So, I had access to the list of two Officers Wives Clubs. They were my sample base. I developed a survey. I mailed it out to them with stamped envelopes to mail back to me, and I got a 70% return. If you’ve done that, you know that that is amazing. I found out that they were dissatisfied with their status also. So, I found out it wasn’t crazy. The response rates were at the level 0.02 or 0.01 level of significance.

JW:  I don’t know what that means.

CB:  Well, they were statistically very valid.

JW:  I see. Okay.

CB:  Anyway, that was my thesis. We then moved to Germany, and I applied for a job, and I got a job as a director of a learning resource center. Now, I will say every time I applied for a job in Germany, my resume went into the spouse pile, not the vet pile. I’m a vet, okay? Which meant that they didn’t want spouses to be able to get into the regular civil service. Then they’d have agency. It also meant that they didn’t have to evaluate the job at the level it might be. But anyway, I was a GS7, very low. But I had developed this learning resource center for the base, and it became a model for the general of the 8th Infantry Division. All of Europe loved it. I got some speaking experience at conferences. I had a good job, and I did a good job.

Right before I left, there was a position open for an education counselor, a GS9. I had called the personnel office on the fact that I was a vet, and they weren’t treating me as a vet. I applied for it. The commander of the civil part of the base; he came to me right before my husband was about ready to be transferred back, and he said, “Well, Carol, you got your application in there, but you’re  going to be leaving.”

I knew because I was a vet that they were going to have to hire me. “I have the right to be accepted based on my criteria. If you offer me the job, I have the right to either accept or reject, but I’m not going to pull the application.” I just wanted to make a point. They did offer me the job, and I did turn it down. Now, that gave them a little headache because they had to go out and re-advertise, but that was their problem, not mine.

When we moved back to the United States in 1980, the Officers Wives Club at Fort Meyer outside of Washington, DC, was putting together a symposium on the family. I believe it was because of the generals’ wives. There were some that were just fabulous, and they realized that there was a lot of unhappiness among the spouses and they wanted to be able to evaluate family programs and what would make it better.

Well, I heard about it when I arrived. I called the organizer. I didn’t really have the money to go, but I talked up my thesis, and she said, “Oh, you’ve been a facilitator, haven’t you?” I said, “Yes.” And she said, “Okay, you can be a facilitator. That’ll be perfect.” So, I put the phone down, I looked up the word in the dictionary, and I said, “I can do that.” This conference had the support of the Chief of Staff of the Army. So that meant his wife was on board. So, we made some recommendations after this.

JW:  Before you go on, sorry. Tell me what you did as a facilitator.

CB:  I facilitated small group discussions among the wives on what would make the community better. What would they like to see. It was very rudimentary. Then, of course, these smart retired generals’ wives saw a sucker who was so excited, they made me the chair of the after-action committee. They were advisors. They were fabulous. They helped me strategize. I was so apolitical. I’ve always been apolitical, I guess. There are a lot of politics in everything. I’m not talking Republican, Democrat. I’m talking institutional politics. But they were very good at helping strategize.

There was also a woman who had been at a high level and was a military spouse, married to a general. She was very instrumental in the policy realm and keeping her focus. We made six policy recommendations. They were pretty innocuous. I mean, one of them was that a service member’s assignment would not be affected by whether or not their wife worked. This was specifically an officer thing but that was happening. People were being denied. Men were being denied opportunities if their spouse was employed and wouldn’t be able to be there all the time.

JW:  This was like 1980, you said?

CB:  I mean, that was probably the most forward leaning. The other was to have a newsletter of programs available in communities. I can’t even remember all the six, but that’s the one that is jaw-dropping. Then, with another colleague, wonderful woman, Emily, we co-chaired the After-Action Committee and we briefed the Chief of Staff of the Army.

Now, my husband was a captain, and I’m up there briefing the Chief of Staff of the Army. He accepted all the recommendations. Then we bird-dogged the organization to make sure they followed through. Another significant recommendation was that they establish an Office of Family Policy to oversee funding for family policy, which was not there, and that it have a significant enough civil service ranking to make the difference.

So as a volunteer, in the process, I met a lot of people. I went to the State Department. They already had a family liaison office. We had another conference, and a woman that I knew was getting a master’s degree at GW in Women’s Policy. She called me and she said, “I just saw this job announcement, and you need to apply for it.” The Women’s Equity Action League had just gotten a grant from the Ford Foundation for a Woman in the Military project. Now, I had really no network in Washington, DC, other than beyond the spouse stuff. But I remember her reading the application to me, and I said at the end, “My God, I wouldn’t even have to lie.” So, I applied, and I got the job.

JW:  What was it?

CB:  It was the director of a Woman in the Military project and it was funded by the Ford Foundation. So, that gave me a job, it gave me a mission, it gave me status, and it gave me money. My initial contacts were family contacts but I also was a military member, I’m a veteran. So, I had to start out and I had to figure out what direction I wanted to go. First of all, I had to be able to gain the trust of military women, because they became my sources. Military women were very leery of women’s rights groups. My toughest thing were the women’s rights groups. NOW, that was really tough.

There is an advisory committee called the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. So, I started attending their meetings, and then I thought, “We’re all talking past each other.” So, I developed these fact sheets using DOD data. Until I went to the Defense Department, I didn’t realize that there were only two laws in the US Civil Code that specifically discriminated against women, and they were the so-called combat exclusion laws.

The first law pertained to the Navy, said that women could not serve on Navy ships expecting to be in a combat mission with the exception of hospital ships. Because you couldn’t have a hospital ship without nurses, right? The Air Force law said, that women could not fly planes expecting to be in a combat mission as defined by the service. So initially, all planes were combat planes. But the Army did not have a law. There’s never been a law that said women couldn’t be in the infantry. They just used the policies of the other services to justify their exclusion. Well, that was like a light bulb moment.

I had never even heard of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. Ruth Bader Ginsberg is my hero. She was taking on these things. I was just a person out there in a combat arms range, trying to just figure out how to survive. But anyway, once I realized that, I thought, Well, the laws have to go. How do we go about doing that? 

I developed fact sheets because I needed to educate people and I used DOD data. That was the data I used. First of all, I took, What is a combat job? What is a combat support job? What is a combat service support job? and explained those. And then I went through each service and said, This is what women can do in this service, and this is what they can’t.

For instance, women in the Navy couldn’t be on a combat ship, but it said nothing about planes. Women have been flying for a very long time; they just couldn’t land on an aircraft carrier. Also, the Navy draws their support ships. They get their Navy ships, and they come from the Military Sealift Command. Same ships, it just depends what’s ready to go when your mission goes out. Well, the Military Sealift Command at that time was under the Department of Transportation, and they had to abide by Title VII. So, there were women on those ships. They wouldn’t even let a woman in the military detachment on those ships. Those are the supply ships and oilers.

Things began to loosen, mainly, I believe, when they were forced to open the academies to women. That was in 1976. The boys had to figure out, Jeez, what are we going to do with women? They can’t all be finance officers, as well as the push from the outside. Because of Title IX and because of Title VII, they were being given opportunities that they hadn’t before, and services weren’t keeping up with that.

So, there was pressure from the outside, and you could use that. Now, this was like an eight or nine-year project. First of all, you have to define the terms of the debate. If you can define the terms of the debate, you can win the debate. So, I developed my fact sheets. The press would contact me, and once your name appears in the Washington Post or the New York Times, they all find you.

I got so tired of explaining combat 101. For  new reporters, I wouldn’t talk to them until they read my fact sheet, but I developed really good press contacts. Then within the Defense Advisory Committee, the members of that committee, I gave them my fact sheets, I helped them formulate the questions that they should ask. I became trusted to them, and it didn’t matter party or whatever.

The Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service draws, at that time, on civilians from the private sector, those that have status. It’s a nomination. Now, it’s got mostly retired military. I think it was very helpful to have, not the retired military, it was very helpful to have the outside, because they really challenged the military in the briefings that they had. These were women that owned their own business. And they weren’t all women, they were men and women.

So gradually, you chip away at their arguments, and gradually, things started to open up. I did a lot of work with, or I tried to do a lot of work with the women’s groups. With NOW, with the military veterans, or military female veterans. I would send my stuff to the people in the Pentagon, and I sent my fact sheets to the Hill. So, all the aids that worked military issues, I sent them all the fact sheets.

There was a group from Germany that went to the Pentagon and they were looking at how the Army or the military was going to integrate women. Then the Pentagon sent them over to talk to me. I had my fact sheets and I had packets for them, and I gave them my fact sheets, and they said, “Oh, we already got those from the Pentagon.” The Pentagon was using my fact sheet to describe the differences between the services they didn’t understand themselves. So, if you can control the terms of the debate, you can win the debate. I wanted everybody singing off the same song sheet.

JW:  Oh, wow. Yes.

CB:  You have to understand, I was flying by the seat of my pants.

JW:  Well, I get that. You didn’t have any advisors advising, although you did say you worked with women’s groups. I’m a little curious about those.

CB:  When I was doing the family stuff, I had two women, generals’ wives, that were wonderful advisors to me. Then when I went to WEAL with the military project, I had a wonderful mentor, Major General Jeanne Holm. Jeanne Holm wrote the first book on women in the military and described all the policies in the past. She was a major general, the first woman in the Air Force to make major general.

The thing about her was that she had so much staff time in Washington. She was very political, and she was very connected to other groups. When I first got there, I found that the Navy woman understood the potential of this, and I just had to pass their test so they could trust me. But because they were so restricted, couldn’t go to sea on ships, et cetera, et cetera, those that made it through had a lot of high-level staff time, and they knew how things worked, the politics of institutions. They tolerate strong personalities. It’s just their ethos.

Women did sue the Navy in the mid ’80s for the right to serve on some ships, and they won the suit. They hadn’t really integrated that much, but they had won the suit, so they had status. Then the group that sued put together and developed a professional organization, the Women and Officers Professional Association. That was legitimate. Then they could invite the CNO to come and talk to them, and they could get funding for their conferences because it was legitimate. They were very political. The other group that was political were the pilots in the mid ’80s. Gradually, things opened up and women were able to fly, but not fighter jets. But they had mentors that were the WASPs.

JW:  Can you explain the WASPs, what that is?

CB:  Women’s Airforce Service Pilots. The WASPs ferried airplanes to the coast of the United States so that then they could be flown over to Europe or to Asia during World War II. These women, the women who fly, love to fly. They had an organization and they reached out to the aviators. These women had mentors, and they formed their own Women Military Aviators. Then, these aviators knew women from across services. Air Force, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, and they mentored each other.

It’s very unusual for service people to really know people across service. It just doesn’t happen. It’s a silo. Until they get to some high-level command or school or something. But these women had women military aviators, and they started just going to the WASP conventions, and then they originally formed their own organization. The politics, especially the Navy women, were very political, and they were very supportive, and they were wonderful sources.

So, you just began chipping away. Ok, General, this service does this, but you don’t allow them to do this. Why is that? Isn’t that the same thing? You just pit one against the other, try to get the press involved whenever you could. Then if there was a scandal, there always is a scandal; I was very busy during Tailhook, I’ll tell you.

JW:  Oh, my God. I can imagine.

CB:  I spoke to press from around the world.

JW:  Okay. You’ve got to explain for our audience, in case they don’t know, what is Tailhook?

CB:  Tailhook is a Navy Association of combat pilots. The tailhook refers to the hook when they land on the Air Force carrier ship. They had a tradition. They originally started meeting in Mexico. They would have a conference every year, and they moved them from Mexico to Las Vegas. They would have these raunchy suites; every command had a suite, and it just got raunchier and raunchier. And then all these women would come in, and they would grab them going down the hall and all this stuff. It was a raunchy, raunchy, yearly event.

I’m a little ahead of myself, but once the combat exclusion laws were deleted by the Congress, overturned, the women started to go to the Tailhook thing, and the men were not happy. One of the women, a helicopter pilot, was an aid to an admiral, and she was groped in the hall. She told her boss, and other women were groped, and it became a big scandal. I call it Fly boys behaving badly. It was a huge scandal. The aviation community defended their conference. The political leadership of the department said, This has got to stop and it was a big brouhaha. And then the Navy eventually said they couldn’t have this conference anymore. They disassociated themselves with Tailhook.

JW:  This was like the ’80s?

CB:  This was in late ’80s. But let me back up and say, over that period of years, things loosened up. Then, the precipitating event that really changed things was the first Iraq war. First of all, the military lost control of their narrative, because they had to build support from the country for this war to be able to go over to Kuwait. You saw on television that women were deploying, and they dealt with the, Mommy goes to war. 

But you’d see them on the Today show. Hi, Mom, I’m over here. And you saw Susie and you saw Johnny. And then to further do that, they mobilized the Garden Reserve. So, it became a state story. You followed your National Guard unit, and you knew that Johnny and Susie were in that unit and that they had deployed. So, it was really education of the public about the composition of the military and what it really looks like.

Thankfully, the war as it was, was over quickly. it ended in February and it went into the authorization cycle in the House. The business of Congress starts in March with the authorization and appropriation bills in the markups. Among the things that this did is, it exposed; I’m not going to call it lies, it exposed the talking points of the military that turned out to be false. They were this: there was a static front line and the women were behind, and they’ll never get hurt.

Well, the infantry doesn’t walk to war. They get taken in the back of trucks, driven by women, or men. Their supplies come in trucks; you name it. The American public would not tolerate women being POWs. There were two POWs, Rhonda Cornum and a young enlisted woman. And then the American public would not tolerate women being killed in battle. Well, women were killed in that. And here’s the kicker, the men would not fight because they’d be so busy protecting the women.

JW:  I didn’t think of that.

CB:  Anyway, it rolled into the authorization cycle and in the House Armed Services Committee Personnel Subcommittee, Pat Schroeder put in an amendment to repeal the Air Force’s law because they had on the record from the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, that the only reason women couldn’t fly combat aircraft was because of the law. Not to be outdone, Beverly Byron, who was chair of the subcommittee, put in a law to get rid of the Navy’s law, 6015. It passed overwhelmingly. You had the fervor of, Yay, yay, yay and so, 100%, it passed.

I got called by the lead staffer on the House Armed Services Committee, and she said, “Carolyn, you’ll never guess what’s happened.” I immediately called the President of the Women Military Aviators; her name is Rosemary Mariner. Wonderful woman. She, at that time, was the first woman to command an aircraft squadron, and she was in command.

I said, “Rosemary, your organization has to be, in for a penny and in for a pound. You can’t just have a 50-something dietitian out there fighting for you. If you don’t win, what have you lost?” But I said, “You have the right as citizens to write your congressman” and I faxed her the members of the Armed Services Committees. “You have a right, and your members have a right to do that.”

So, it went over to the Senate. Of course, the Pentagon was caught flat-footed. They didn’t see it coming. They mobilized their forces. The Senate Armed Services Committee set up a hearing, and of course, they had an E3 Marine Corps woman, and they would send her just to say, You don’t want to go to war, do you? Oh, no, I don’t want to go to war. Well, nobody wants to go to war. But Anyway, we had to mobilize all of the groups that we could think of.

So, in that four-month period, a little bit before the war started, I convened a group of women’s groups, National Women’s Law Center, NOW, other women’s groups, and then I brought in Navy women. On-duty Navy women. And a lawyer explained why women know that if they have children, they have to go to war if they’re called up as part of their unit. These are the fact sheets. 

The National Women’s Law Center did the legal analysis, so we had a packet with my fact sheets and theirs. So, these are our talking points. At one point, they wanted to do the gay and lesbian issue. I said, “No, stick to the issue. If you win one, you’re going to get the other. Don’t confuse it.” How did I know that? I mean, I just knew you don’t want to give a distraction over there. “You got to stick with what we’re dealing with right now, and this is what we’re dealing with.”

JW:  Step by step. Step by step. That’s how we do it in this country.

CB:  Yes. So, there were hearings, and by this time, the press is all on this of course, and we’re feeding them. I said, “Okay, Rosemary, you guys have to fly in. You can go on leave, but fly in.” And they did, God bless them, and all services. We set up committees to lobby. The conservative groups took the conservative members of the Senate, the liberal groups took the liberal, and kind of divided them up. There was a military woman pilot in each of those groups. They were not there to lobby; they were there to educate. Just to explain that, Well, because of this, I would qualify, but I can’t, because of whatever.

JW:  Right.

CB:  And these women were gorgeous.

JW:  On top of everything else.

CB:  On top of everything else. They came in uniform, not in their duty uniform. They were on leave, but they could still wear a uniform. They were of all services. And we went through the Senate building, I mean, people were hanging out the doors. Who are these people? We got great press. One of them, Trish Beckman, was a test pilot. She’s a test pilot of the airplanes that she can’t fly. That was a great press story. Top of the fold, Washington Post. They just had great stories.

The Women veterans were a part of this group. It was very eclectic. The one at NOW that did women’s military issues also did gay and lesbian issues. She had her card, Women in the Military and Gay and Lesbian. I said, “You can’t use that card. You could just have Women in the Military. We’re not going to confuse this.” I said, “I’m going to be able to get you into staffers that you have never been able to get into. But you cannot do that.” I don’t usually tell that part of the story.

JW:  Interesting. So okay, did it work?

CB:  Oh, yes. It had already passed the House. It went over to the Senate. The person that took the reins on that was Ted Kennedy. His staff was very good on this. Another one was Senator Roth. He had put in a bill to repeal the combat exclusion laws. He was from Delaware. Nobody knew who he was. Actually, as we were lobbying, my friend Rosemarie that was President of Women Military Aviators, the Navy liaison office that was at the Pentagon, took her in the office and said, “Tell these women to go home.” Roth called the CNO and said, “Get your boys off her.”

JW:  Wow.

CB:  I mean, that’s an untold story.

JW:  I love that story.

CB:  Yes. We were up in the gallery when they were going to do the final vote. It was so fun. I was sitting right up above Ted Kennedy, and I looked down, and he was reading off of my fact sheets.

JW:  Oh, my gosh.

CB:  I loved it. I had, What are women doing in other services? and all this stuff. Well, it passed 69 to 30. That’s veto proof. We made a kind of a condition. We gave a little and said, It can pass, but then they can just study how to implement. So, there was a study there. It’s a bureaucratic delay, but we got a lot for what we gave. It passed, and then they established a study group, and of course, they packed it with all right wingers. They studied it for a year, and they made a recommendation that women shouldn’t fly, but they could be on ships. That was their recommendation. It made no sense.

And then there was an election and Clinton became President and he appointed Les Aspen to be the Secretary of Defense. Les Aspen had been the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Before he rose to that position, he was chair of the Military Personnel Subcommittee. He was the first person I’d ever testified before and he was very well aware of the issue. And of course, when that happens, they bring all their people in with them.

So, he brought all his staffers in with him, and they were all setting it up, and I called one of his staffers, Debbie Lee; this is so presumptuous. Before that, I was on a committee, knowing there would be a transition, and we were working to try to get women into policy positions in the State Department and the Defense Department, and also to get more women to be on talking heads on shows. It was all male at the time. We’d been connecting resumes, and it was bipartisan. Who would we like to see regardless of who was in there? I’ve been working on that.

After the administration came in, I called Debbie Lee and I said, “This is the position I would like.” At that time, it was a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Personnel Support and Family Policy. My fingerprints were all over everything in that portfolio. I got the requisite recommendations. I submitted to the transition team. Now, it happened that the guy that was going to be the head of military personnel was a person that I’d worked with before.

He had a Ford Foundation grant for Blacks in the Military Project, and I had the Women in the Military Project. Mine was funded at $100,000 a year, his was funded at a million dollars a year. Anyway, he then went to Brookings, and I was at the time, working for the International Center on Women, next door. I saw him in the cafeteria line at Brookings, and he said that he was being considered for that position. I said, “Well, Ed, I’d like this position.” You know me. We both had the same funders.

Anyway, I put in my application. I was never really interviewed, they just sent me the paperwork. I had to go through all the paperwork and the background check and all of that. The reason Trump isn’t putting his people through background checks is they wouldn’t pass. Think about it. If you’ve ever had an FBI background check, they go back to your first-grade teacher, and they’re very thorough. Anyway, I went into the position. I went in in 1993, as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, for Personnel Support Families and Education.

That portfolio was huge. It had everything in a military community with the exception of housing. I had direct responsibility for the commissary system, for the Department of Defense, K-12 school system around the world, I had policy oversight of everything from child care, family advocacy, I’ll call it Parks and Recreation, MWR. It was huge.

I was known by the people in my directorate because of my work on women’s issues and family issues, and they were excited to have me there, I think. I think I was able to make a difference because I understood the portfolio. If you bring somebody in from, I don’t know, the person before me came in from the Red Cross, but she didn’t understand the military community and the lives of the people.

I had things I wanted to fix. I had an agenda, but I didn’t know how the bureaucracy worked, but they did. We laid out a vision of what we wanted to accomplish. These people were so good. They knew how to implement it. They knew what I had to do. I didn’t know. One of the things in the first year I had learned in the staff meetings, was that there was a budget meeting.

I went back to the people and said, “Okay, who goes to the budget meetings from here?” We’ve got to go.” They said, “Oh, Mrs. Becraft, we aren’t invited to the budget meetings.” I said, “What do you mean? It’s our budget.” We crashed the meeting. And they said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “You’re talking about my budget.” They brought up stuff, and we contradicted them. I thought, “Okay, this is about money.”  

I reorganized and set up a budget shop. We had policy oversight over the services, so our job was to see that they funded the portfolios according to the law. And that oversight had not been there before. We had this policy oversight board and they were so good. It took a while to reorganize as a brand-new person, What are you doing? et cetera. But it was a, Follow the money. In the time I was there, the Secretary of Defense at the time, William Perry, his goal was quality-of-life. Of course, it’s all how you define it. The Marines would say quality-of-life is bringing them home alive. I had quality-of-life programs, but that gave me extra push. That was the Secretary’s agenda. Gradually, by the time I left, the funding had increased 30% for quality-of-life programs, childcare, you name it.

The other thing that I did was, in the military repeal effort, I had met with Senator Stevens from Alaska. It turns out that Steven’s military guy went into the Office of Management and Budget, OMB. We looked at the President’s agenda, the Secretary’s agenda, and we looked at my portfolio. Because I knew him, I made an appointment, went over with one of my people, and I said, “Okay, this is Clinton’s agenda, this is Perry’s agenda, and look what I have in my portfolio. Your guidance to defense would be very helpful if you would say, fund these things,” Because OMB sends guidance to the various departments.

The other thing that I did when I first got there and the Clintons were going to go overseas, and they were going to go to a military base; I’m a military spouse and I let my fingers do the walking. I called her office and I said, “I’m Carolyn Becraft. Here’s my title, but I’m also a military spouse. There are a lot of landmines in a military community that they might not recognize, so I would like to just brief a staffer that’s setting up her trip.” Well, they called back and they set up an appointment. Then I had to go to my boss and say, “I’ve just been asked to go over to the OEOB to meet with the staffer for Mrs. Clinton.”

I went over and they put me in a room, closed the door. Five minutes later, in walks Hillary Clinton. My 15-minute appointment lasted an hour and a half. She did know a lot about me. She wanted to know about military women. She wanted to know about the generals that were currently female in the services, et cetera, et cetera. We hardly got around to the military community. But basically, I said to her, “The only thing you really need to know is play to the generals’ wives, and it’ll all flow downhill from there.” So, that started my time with Hillary.

Hillary set up a White House Inter-Agency Council on Women. And this White House Inter-Agency Council on Women, I was the defense representative to that. It was chaired first by Donna Shalala and then by Madeleine Albright. So that gave me additional ways that I could go over the heads of people. She brought me over a number of times just to talk about military stuff and what did I think, et cetera. It was very interesting.

Then when she was going to take a trip to Bosnia, her office called and said, “They’re setting up this trip. Do you have a recommendation of a base that they could go to in Europe before they go?” I said, “Well, let me think about it.” I called a guy that I knew in the community I used to live. It turns out they had a sister relationship with Tuzla, Bosnia. The school kids did, it was a pen pal kind of thing. And out of that, they developed a play. It was very moving. It was both of them. Just kids, talking to kids. The trauma of war in which they had loved ones that were going to be involved. It was very moving. So, I suggested that.

They went to Baumholder but at the time, I said, “Well, I really probably ought to go along, don’t you think?” We fly to Germany. We get on the plane in the evening. First of all, if you think these planes adhere to Fasten your seat belt, don’t get up until you see the lights or whatever, forget it. Suitcases are in the aisle, people walking all over the place. Anyway. It was at night and I was in this place where there was a two-seat, two-seat and a table in the middle.

They served us dinner, and then in comes Hillary. The person on the other side had negotiated the Bosnia Accords with Holbrook. So most of the discussion was about that, but it was fascinating, just fascinating. Of course, she was so smart and she was asking such great questions. Then I gave her the lay of the land in Baumholder and what they would be seeing. We got there, and then we finished that. It went really well. Then we went back to Ramstein Air Force Base and went to Bosnia.

She had brought Sinbad and Sheryl Crow along to go and entertain the troops. And then, by the way, she brought Chelsea also. I think she only traveled when she was on vacation, but she brought Chelsea along and Hillary was meeting with women’s groups in Bosnia. Anyway, so we get there, and I’m on one helicopter with Sheryl Crow, somebody else is with Sinbad, and we’re flying around all Bosnia entertaining troops.

Well, I’m not entertaining, she gets out and she plays a song and whatever. It was fascinating. You could see the damage. You could see where people were still living in the woods. You could see areas that weren’t touched at all just because I was in this Blackbird helicopter, which I love these helicopters, by the way. Anyway, about six months later, my son comes home from school. He’s in high school, and he calls me up and he said, “Mom, I just saw you on MTV.” I was cool with that.

JW:  The best thing you could have ever done in your life.

CB:  I know. I was cool with that kid. Sheryl Crow had brought, I don’t know, maybe it was a boyfriend at the time and he was shooting all these videos. Well, it turns out, there I was.

JW:  That is so great.

CB: Well, I’ll tell you another thing that I didn’t realize about the portfolio I had. Probably the most powerful thing I had in my portfolio and I was too stupid to know it, was that I controlled the policy for all the military golf courses around the world. I mean, that’s power. In the process, I changed the name of the organization from Personnel Support Families and Education to Military Community and Family Policy.

I did that because the sexiest part about the portfolio to many people was the commissary and exchanges. I had policy oversight of all the exchanges, but direct oversight of the commissary and that’s the sexy part. People were always trying to pull it away. So, I figured if I had military community in there, that it would be more specific. Personnel Support, Families, and Education sounds girly. I wanted to sound important, and that’s what it’s still known as today. I have a lot of stories on that.

I was then nominated to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. I’m Senate confirmed, that was in 1998. When I called my sister and told her what I was going to be doing she said, “What are they going to call you?” I said, “The Honorable.” She said, “That’s disgusting.” I had that position for two and a half years. I had money at OSD, and I had a lot more maneuvering room, but I was still on the Interagency Council on Women, so I was able to bounce around on that. The M&RA job is looking at the funding of course, but it’s also a lot of personnel policy, reviewing personnel decisions, et cetera. That was my experience of always being the only woman in the room. It was less so at OSD just because of the policy portfolio I had, but I was the only woman in the room.

I had an aide that I hired and I let him go because he was trying to be the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. I went to the bureau and I said, “I want a list of candidates to be my executive assistant,” and “I want to make sure that you have them on your list that are about to make admiral.” I said, “I know you have those lists.” So, I got another slate, and in comes this guy. He’s a SEAL, and he was just about to give up command of SEAL Team Six.

I had a nice interview with him, and I said, “Would you have a problem working for a woman?” Because I said, “If you did, it would be your problem, not mine.” He said, “No,” he wouldn’t. He was wonderful. Bert Calland. He went on to become head of the SEALs, and then Deputy Director of the CIA. I promoted him to admiral. Oh, I love the man. He just passed away about a year and a half ago. With Bert, you have to imagine the stories he must have told, because he had not been around; except for maybe a school or two, any women. He was just so wonderful, and he was very good. He gave me great information. He was very supportive.

I also had a Marine Corps aid because the Marine Corps is a part of the Navy. They each had an aid. They’re all spying and going back to their service and saying what’s happening. That’s part of their role. But anyway, right after I hired Bert, he was a Naval Academy graduate, of course, as was my Marine Corps aid, the secretary called me down and he said, “I want you to go to Tailhook and see if we can put them back in the fold. I said, “Okay.”

I go back to Bert and I say, “Bert, you and I are going to Tailhook. We have to determine if it’s ready for them to come back into the fold.” He said, “Oh, my God, there goes my career.” You see, also part of what they did at Tailhook before, is that they would have admirals up there asking questions, but there would be kegs all over the place. It was just a drunken thing.

Anyway, we went to Tailhook, and of course, we were about as welcome as you can imagine. It was very interesting. We were wrong, they didn’t have beer kegs all over the place. Went to their meetings and briefings, went through their squadron rooms and all that stuff. Of course, all the commercial defense contractors are there. Boeing had a simulator, and they had a contest who could do it the best.

They finally had to shut it down at 2:30 in the morning because nobody could beat the woman pilot that was ahead. If she weighed 100 pounds dripping wet, anyway. But the women pilots didn’t want to talk to me. They don’t want to be singled out. The more senior ones, the ones I knew from WMA, that was not a problem. They were very good mentors on what to do. But just some young woman who’s in a squadron someplace that gets to go to Tailhook, they’re just trying to fit in.

JW:  I can see that.

CB:  Anyway, we went back and the Tailhook came in; we did see a keg of beer one place, went in the secretary’s office, and they said, “What do you report back, Carolyn?” I said, “Well, I think you need to bring Tailhook back into the fold.” I said, “There was one keg of beer we saw,” and the Tailhook guy said, “No, there wasn’t.” And bless Bert, my aid, he said, “Yes, there was.” So, Bert backed me up on these things.

But anyway, I said, “Look, the Senate has called all those with the most egregious behavior from before. I said, It hurts the men, it hurts the women. It’s time to get over it. They have a history, as long as they play by the rules, it is my recommendation.” Interestingly, I was at Bert’s Celebration of Life this summer, and a man came up to me and shook my hand and said, “I was in the room when you said, we should reinstate our relationship with Tailhook, and I want to thank you.” I mean, I almost cried. Anyway, I had that job for two and a half years until the administrations changed.

JW:  I can’t help but ask you about the incoming administration where I’ve heard members, potential members, say women are not going into combat, period. I just really had to ask you what you thought. I know what you think of the idea of that, but do you think that’s really possible for them to bar women?

CB:  No. And before I go into that, I had something that I wanted to add back to the time of the repeal of the combat exclusion laws in that process. The first Gulf War ended in February, and it went into the authorization cycle of the House. So, we had the momentum and we took it. If that conflict had ended in August, we wouldn’t have gotten there. We would have had to wait a half a year or more just to get into the authorization cycle. The Pentagon would have wrapped up. So, it was taking advantage also of the timing, and the public was educated to the fact that there were women over in Iraq and so forth. We were able to tell a story and push it through and negate their arguments. We would have lost years had it ended.

JW:  Interesting.

CB:  The repeal happened 30 years ago. The military career path is additive. You have certain schools at a certain time. Certain assignments you’re supposed to have, et cetera, et cetera. If you miss one of those; so, all these women that had a lot of experience but they didn’t have the second lieutenant experience that you have to have to be promoted, and you don’t go back. So, it’s taken over 30 years, but now, you’ve got the Chief of Naval Operations, the CNO, she’s a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Commandant of the Naval Academy,  a woman, just gave up transport command, command of all the transportation around the world. You’ve got four-star generals, and admirals, and they have played the same game, but they were able to take advantage of opportunities because when the law was appealed, then those justifications went away. But it took the younger women to get those advancements of the time to those combat positions. There were some women that did get to one or two-star, very bright women in different fields, but not in the mainline fields.

JW:  I see. It sounds like in order to bar women from combat, there need to be new laws.

CB:  Well, they can’t. They can’t really do that. I mean, first of all, women make up 20% of the force. The Air Force has the most women, the Marine Corps has the fewest. The reason the Marine Corps has the fewest is that they drive their support services from the Navy. So, they are essentially a combat force. But still, almost 20% of the military are women, and they have the command.

It would be very hard. Plus, they have a hard time recruiting men. Partly, these women, they’re augmenting the force. I think during Afghanistan and Iraq, that was a real education for the senior leadership of the military because they had women on their staffs and they hadn’t before. They gained the respect of the senior leadership. So, by the time of the end of even Iraq, they knew they couldn’t do it without the women.

Even back when I was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the top 20 graduates of the Naval Academy – and these people usually get their choice of where they want to go – ten of them were women. And so, the aviation community came in and I said, “Well, you’ve got your share of top graduates because you eliminated half the pool. What do you think of that?” They make up about 20% of the service academies, too. Maybe even more.

They continually graduate at the top. It’s very much like colleges. They’re good students, they’re young; I’m a mother of sons, they mature at a later date, let’s just say that. When they’re in college, they’ve had to fight hard to get there, but they are very good students and you see that in universities all over the United States. Really, a lot of the top talent in the military is female.

JW:  Interesting. So, there’s no way they’re going to just be at, “Oh, women can’t be in combat. End of story.”

CB:  Oh, they can’t do that because their units couldn’t function because they’re so integrated. But what I do worry about, like a Hegseth, who, if the leader at the top says, “Women don’t belong,” it provides license. The military has a problem with sexual harassment, sexual assault. It’s primarily a male institution. You have somebody at the top that gives license that you don’t belong there.

I have a professor friend. He teaches at Bucknell, and we were talking about this just a couple of weeks ago and he said the sexism on the Bucknell campus against the women is really horrific. I don’t think that it’s just Bucknell. It’s in the air. I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. I think we have to deal with it. We still don’t understand the effects that COVID had on that generation.

JW:  Well, let’s get back to where we left off, which was around 2000 when you left the Clinton administration and the Clinton administration ended. Were there activities after that that involved you working for women?

CB:  Well, I have stayed involved with the Women Military Aviators. They made me an honorary member. I’ve done a lot of forums and things for them. When I left, I did some executive coaching, mostly of people leaving the military and how to adjust to civilian life. Culture-wise, it’s very different. I’m still involved tangentially with women military aviators because without them, it wouldn’t have happened. Also, the other Navy women, I just have to emphasize that they were strong and outspoken, and they weren’t afraid to be outspoken, which I think, just goes to the culture of the Navy.

JW:  Oh, interesting. So that helps a lot.

CB:  Yes. I am right now in Fargo. I just gave up chair of the Prairie Public Board. Prairie Public is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NPR. But here in North Dakota, it covers the whole state of North Dakota, the western section of Minnesota, and it goes up to Winnipeg. It’s TV and radio. I mean, it’s really interesting. I’m also on the Fargo Human Rights Commission.

JW:  You had mentioned WEAL briefly, and I don’t think we explored your involvement with WEAL

CB:  I was involved with a number of women’s rights organizations. I was first hired by the Women’s Equity Action Lead, which is WEAL, and it is no longer in existence. I was jumping around, really bucking up my salary. I went to work for a for-profit firm, Decision Resources Corporation. It is no longer around either, but working on getting contracts. Then I worked for the International Center for Research on Women, and that’s still around, ICRW.

JW:  I don’t know them. Tell us about that.

CB:  It’s a women’s group funded by Ford, among others. If their offices are still where they were, they are next door to the Brookings Institution, and they focus on research of women in foreign countries. They do a lot of work on women’s contributions. One of the things I learned from that is that the best use of foreign aid in the United States is the education of women in these small communities. Because if they’re educated, they can count, they will ensure education of their children, they can earn money.

They have these little businesses, whether it’s chickens or whatever, but it was focused on research on women to improve women’s status internationally in these countries. Then I went back to the Women’s Research and Education Institute. I don’t know if you remember that. That used to be the arm of the Congressional Women’s Caucus and they spun it into a nonprofit. I went back to Betty and I said, “Let’s get this grant back from Ford, and we’ll continue.” And so, the work on the repeal and stuff I did while I was at WREI, the Women’s Research and Education Institute.

JW:  WREI, yes, I remember.

CB:  I bounced around a lot in the ’80s.

JW:  But all women’s groups, it sounds like.

CB:  Yes. At that point, except for the research organization, and that was looking at surveys of the military in general, it was military-related. I guess there was so much happening during the ’80s on the women’s rights front, and I had this niche and I was passionate about it, you could say. My husband at one point said to me, “I don’t know where this is going, Carolyn.” But I just found a passion for it and I was able to find a way to keep myself employed.

JW:  And make changes for a lot of women, really.

CB:  And make changes. And you know what? Once you start, if you start small, once you get a win, then you get more credibility, you get another win, you get other people that are willing to help you because you’ve got a track record. They figure that you won’t betray them. That’s why the military never went after me. In fact, when I was going for the Deputy Assistant Secretary position, two of the people that sent recommendations were two former Chiefs of Staff of the Army.

JW:  Wow.

CB:  So, I used their data. I didn’t do the, They’re all baby killers kind of stuff. Well, you know, think back on it. I’ve had a lot of inside sources, not just women. They may just say, Oh, Carolyn, you might want to think about this saying it this way. A lot of it wasn’t direct. It was indirect. Some of it was direct, some of it was just providing access and because I was a military spouse, I had access to the building. I had an ID card.

JW:  Not because you were a veteran yourself?

CB:   No.

JW:  Interesting.

CB:  Yes. Having access to the building was really important. It’s hard now. It’s almost impossible to get through now, but it was easy as long as I had an ID card and I could show it.

JW:  In your current work now with the Human Rights Commission, are there women’s issues that come up?

CB:  Believe it or not, Fargo was a real destination for immigration. We had a very active Lutheran Social Services that helped place people. When I grew up, it was all Norwegian and Swedish. Now we’ve had Bosnians, Indians, Vietnamese, Somali, Sudanese, a whole range. So housing is a big issue. Access to housing, how some of these immigrant communities are treated. Sometimes they don’t know how to access a system. That’s a huge issue. Some women’s issues are issues, but it’s more in the housing and access, and health. And poverty and the results of poverty.

I think the police department here is pretty good, but it’s also very White, and it doesn’t necessarily match the community. For many, it’s really the classic immigration story. A family comes over, the parents don’t really speak English. They’re very educated, but they can’t get a job in their field because they don’t know the language. The kids learn the language fast and then they assimilate. But the second generation has to help their parents through all the legal issues and so forth if they don’t know the language.

For a lot of people, it’s also the credentialing. You may be an engineer, but if you can’t get the credentialing, or a doctor, whatever, there’s a lot of that. That’s an issue. Children’s issues. We have some areas in the city that are very low income, have a lot of crime, and how does a school help these children? So, we are appointed to advise the city on human rights issues. That’s our role. We’re all volunteers, but issues come up and we make recommendations to the city commission, whether they accept them or not. For instance, around the Gaza and Israel issue. We have both sides coming in, expressing their points.

So, the issues that are in the United States are here in Fargo, too. Fargo, actually, just for your information, the Fargo-Moorhead area is about 230,000 people. It’s got three universities, huge health infrastructure, huge transportation infrastructure, the second largest Microsoft campus in the world. As far as North Dakota goes, it’s reasonably liberal. You might not recognize that so much, but it has a very educated population.

JW:  Well, this has been wonderful. I wonder if you might talk about how your involvement in those women’s issues affected your whole life, your family life, your friend life.

CB:  It’s interesting. I’ve had this conversation a lot with friends who have had a career of their own also. I always worked hard to maintain contacts back here because it was the only thing that was real to me. The military is a political world. I lived in DC. I lived in Berk, Virginia, which was a zip code, not a town. So, all the organizing structure around a town, we never took advantage of because we were never in a town.

I have a lot of friends here. They haven’t had the experience. It’s kind of an experience you get when you’ve been in the work world your whole life as opposed to people that haven’t. I know you can relate to that, too. I have a few really close friends that we talk about that, but I can’t talk about that with the others. In some ways, people are afraid of me. I don’t know why.

JW:  You speak your mind, I bet.

CB:  I speak my mind, but I’m not out there causing trouble. I’m pretty much of an introvert.

JW:  I find that hard to believe. Really?

CB:  No, I am. I learned to be more extroverted. I’ve never been the great extrovert at all. Sometimes going into gatherings and stuff was hard for me. Making small talk.

JW:  You want to talk about the issues.

CB:  Well, I don’t know. As I said before, I never really had a plan. Doors opened and I walked through them. That’s the best I can describe it. It didn’t always work out, but you learn something. When I look back on it, my life has been one case study in public administration, yet I had no background in that at all. I was Chair of the Alumni Association at UND, University of North Dakota, and I was on the College of Business and Public Administration Board. Our College of Business also has public administration in it. I was involved with the public administration part. That’s what got me on the board, not the business part. My husband and I worked with them in DC also. That was interesting.

My husband retired from the military. When we got back to DC in 1980, I wanted stability for my children, and really in retrospect, for myself. But it was also a situation where I didn’t move again. So, he took a command in New Jersey, I stayed back, and we were separated. And that was a good move for me because had I left, all the cache I had built up would have been gone. I really needed stability. When I got the first political appointment, my husband retired from the army. He’d been in 26 years. Then he went on to INS, and he ended up being the Deputy and Commissioner, and then he went to the private sector. So, he did well.

JW:  Do you have some closing thoughts?

CB:  Well, one of the things that I always say is “Where you start is not necessarily where you’re going to end up.” If a door opens, walk through it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, you’ve learned something. You don’t have to stay in something you’re miserable in. It’s not worth it. Take a risk. That’s pretty much for young people. Now, women today have a path. They can say, Gee, I want to do this. When I went to college; and I’m not really proud of this, but I became a dietitian because I didn’t want to be a teacher or nurse. I always knew I was going to go to College. I always knew I was going to graduate from College. That was not an issue. But doors weren’t open.

JW:  I became an elementary school teacher.

CB:  So, you understand.

JW:  I went to law school a little later.

CB:  There you go. But that wasn’t possible at the time, or maybe one woman in the class or something like that. Young women and young men today, they can see a path, and a route for where they want to go. Fields are open to them that weren’t open when I was going to college. Many law schools wouldn’t let women in. This is all pre-Title IX. I think it’s delaying childbearing. At some point, you have to get a sense of self of who you are, and a sense of self-confidence.

Then the other thing I’ve noticed, and I’ve talked about with friends, about trying to understand some men that are struggling. Lost their jobs or whatever, then the woman goes out and gets a job. If a woman has never worked before and gets a job and brings money into the marriage, they gain leverage. Tables turn. That’s a lot of what has happened. The breakup of unions, the less bargaining power. You can just go back to all of that. That took away a middle-class life for a whole group of people. There have been a lot of shifts and a lot of changes. I just think it’s important to acknowledge that contributions to a marriage include money.

JW:  I agree.