Only via in his service jacket, unless the convening Flag officers have their own records, and release them. (I have copies of all official corresponds I signed, including evaluations, Fitness Reports, and MAST proceedings. Some officers keep nothing, as was the apparent case of Bush's National Guard C.O.. I honestly never met anyone of the sort of character as the Barnett guy who obviously forged documents in an attempt to impune Bush's record and integrity.)
This information is priviledged, and the officers (regardless of their political pursuasion) will do their duty and keep it that way, unless Kerry signs the Form 180.
Would this be something done by executive order?
Yes. The board was apparently convened by Executive Order. The President's order would probably dictate the terms of the Board, i.e. if Carter's general amnesty did not cover Kerry, he most certainly would have written rules for the Board to follow that would have favored Kerry's case. Much as the JAG guys (i.e. lawyers) say "Don't ask a question if you do not already know the answer", President Carter would not have ordered the board convened unless he was certain of the result.
By the way, speaking as a ex-Senior Navy Officer, a board covened by Executive order is simply unheard of. The Secretary of the Navy might order boards for numerious reasons (i.e. to correct errors, right "wrongs" to a POW's record during captivity, etc.). The President gets directly involved, over the head of his appointed cabinet head, when there's a matter of urgent national security, or political patronage involved.
Figure it out.
SFS
bump
Thanks for the input.
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".......allowing Jimmy Carter a free pass on the issue of presidential pardons, as was done in a recent piece by his former chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, on this page, ignores both the evidence of history and the trauma that President Carter visited on this country during his earliest days in office ("The First Grifters," Feb. 20). Indeed, it could be said that the seeds of Bill Clinton's political arrogance were sown by Jimmy Carter's own hand.
While the Carter presidency may have handled cases of individual presidential pardons with great care, Mr. Carter's first official act as president was to pardon, en masse, all those who had been or could be charged with draft evasion during the Vietnam era. Motivated by the ever-present desire of American politicians to "heal the wounds" of the Vietnam War, and beyond doubt manipulated by the army of antiwar McGovernites who had seized control of the Democratic Party, Mr. Carter's gesture had the symbolic effect of elevating everyone who had opposed the Vietnam War to the level of moral purist, and by implication insulting those who often had struggled just as deeply with the moral dimensions of the war and had decided, often at great sacrifice, to honor the laws of their country and serve.
Nor did President Carter's abuse of power end with the pardoning of draft evaders. Some had criticized this blanket amnesty as having made class distinctions between college boys who were "enlightened" enough to oppose the draft and blue-collar boys who had gone into the military and then either seen the light regarding the war or suffered the supposed abuses of the military system. Liberal groups and antiwar politicians assailed the "inequities" of military justice and the "randomness" of its characterization of service when one left the military, despite the fact that 97% of those who served during Vietnam had been discharged under honorable circumstances. Within weeks of pardoning all the draft evaders, Mr. Carter invoked his powers as commander in chief and ordered that the "bad paper" military discharges of hundreds of thousands of deserters, malcontents and nonperformers be mandatorily upgraded, so long as they met one of six easily attained criteria.
Again President Carter had upset a delicately balanced apple cart among the Vietnam generation. By wiping the slate clean for those who had dodged the draft or created problems while in the military, he signaled to those who had served honorably during a horribly emotional period that their self-discipline, loyalty, wounds and even deaths did not matter. The Congress, and particularly the Committees on Veterans Affairs, where I then served as a House counsel, spent the next six months in emotional argument and negotiation. The House and Senate at times engaged in heated floor debates and recriminations before some measure of historical standards were mandated to accompany any veterans benefits awarded to recipients of Mr. Carter's falsely upgraded discharges."
If this is the case, then there is a copy of the Executive order in the Carter Library and, I believe, in the Federal Register.
So9