Shooting down Cunningham's legend

During his days as a Navy pilot, Randy "Duke" Cunningham headed a squadron whose members poked fun at each other by writing humorous entries in a journal dubbed the "hit log." Officers who served with Randy "Duke" Cunningham said the qualities that made him a good pilot – cockiness, a sense of entitlement – led to his undoing in Washington. Cunningham would make entries in the book from time to time, singling out his subordinates for good-natured ribbing. But his writing was so riddled with misspellings and tortured punctuation that a junior officer took to diagramming the sentences, describing Cunningham's grammatical mistakes as "Dukelexsia." Miffed at the insult, Cunningham got rid of the logbook, said a former member of the squadron, Bob Clement.

"Everybody knew he was a nice guy and an above-average pilot," said Clement, 56, now a FedEx pilot who lives near Memphis, Tenn. "But as for leading a squadron, he didn't have those skills."

Back then, before he retired from the Navy and ran for Congress, Cunningham was known to the general public as a war hero. He was the gutsy fighter pilot who shot down five enemy aircraft during the Vietnam War, thereby becoming the only Vietnam-era naval aviator to earn the coveted title of ace.

But among his fellow officers and pilots, Cunningham – who pleaded guilty last month to taking $2.4 million in bribes as a congressman – had a somewhat different reputation. He was considered a bit buffoonish, a solid pilot but a less-than-stellar officer, a guy with a knack for self-promotion but not much talent for military leadership.

Few of his fellow officers considered Cunningham a shining intellect, and they had varying degrees of patience for his long-winded stories and occasional acts of insubordination. Despite his Vietnam medals, he had difficulty advancing in his 20-year Navy career, several officers who served with him said.

Today, the former Rancho Santa Fe congressman faces up to 10 years in prison after he admitted taking bribes from defense contractors in one of the most brazen episodes of corruption in the history of Congress.

Many of the aviators who served with him in the Navy say they're stunned at the scope of Cunningham's admitted misdeeds, though not necessarily surprised that he got himself into trouble in Washington, D.C. He was undone, they say, by the same qualities that made him an effective pilot: a cocky attitude, a sense of entitlement, a mind undistracted by complicated thoughts.

In the Navy there was always someone to keep Cunningham in line and save him from the excesses of his personality, a challenging task in the years after he shot down three enemy planes in a single day.

"It was almost like he was frozen in time right there," said Jack Ensch, 68, a fellow Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam and spent seven months as a prisoner of war. "He hasn't grown up as a person from that day on."

In interviews with The San Diego Union-Tribune in recent weeks, some former officers said they are angry at Cunningham – angry that he would embarrass the Navy, angry that he would sell out his office after trading on his military exploits to launch his political career.

"I don't understand why he decided to bring disgrace on naval aviation," said one of Cunningham's former supervisors, Jack Ready, who served as commanding officer of the elite Top Gun fighter-pilot academy. "I just don't understand it."

Others feel sorry for the 64-year-old disgraced former congressman, who declined through his lawyer to comment for this story. They liked him as a politician and see his downfall as an allegory for the dangers of succumbing to temptation.

"It broke my heart to hear it," said Carl Wynn, 75, who was a commanding officer of Cunningham's squadron in Vietnam and now owns several rental-car dealerships in Louisiana.

Wynn called Cunningham "a good man" who showed tremendous courage in combat, never losing his nerve even under a barrage of anti-aircraft fire.

"A career like his – to have something like this happen, it just makes you sick to your stomach," Wynn said.

Even Cunningham's harshest critics will concede this much: During his prime, the former Illinois high school swimming coach was a very good fighter pilot.

Over the years, several news outlets have reported that Cunningham was the model for Tom Cruise's brash fighter pilot in the 1986 hit movie "Top Gun." That isn't true.

Cruise's character wasn't based on any one real-life aviator, said Jack Epps Jr., who co-wrote the screenplay and teaches at the University of Southern California's film school. Epps said neither he nor his co-writer even spoke to Cunningham during their research

Still, as a pilot, Cunningham had some of the same qualities as Cruise's Maverick. He was aggressive, impulsive and fearless – "a pretty good stick-and-throttle guy," as Ensch put it.

He was also an obsessive student, devouring information about tactics and aviation history. In the book "The Scream of Eagles: The Dramatic Account of the U.S. Navy's Top Gun Pilots and How They Took Back the Skies Over Vietnam," author Robert Wilcox wrote that Cunningham "got the reputation of a man on a mission."

Wilcox, who interviewed Cunningham for the book, said the young pilot took to wearing a black, custom-made flight suit. "I wanted the enemy to know I was flying a death truck," Cunningham told the author.

Cunningham often wrote tips and lessons on the blackboard in his squadron's ready room, to the occasional annoyance of his fellow pilots.

"A lot of people, they're prepared for the mission but they don't want to think about fighting airplanes 24 hours a day," said one of his military flight instructors, Jim Ruliffson, 66, who is now retired in Virginia. "He did."

If Cunningham had ambition, he also had a temper. During one infamous episode aboard the aircraft carrier America, he got into a fight with a member of his squadron and chased the man through the ship with a golf club, said Stephen Queen, a fighter pilot who was on the carrier at the time. Queen, 61, is now an executive with Cubic Corp., a San Diego-based defense and transportation contractor.

In 1972, Cunningham's hard work paid off. He also happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Some Navy fighter pilots never crossed paths with a single enemy plane during the entire Vietnam War. But Cunningham and William Driscoll, his back-seat radar intercept officer, shot down five enemy MiGs in five months, three of them in one day.

Their final kill – the one that earned Cunningham the title of ace – came during a now-famous dogfight that lasted several minutes, with the two planes making several spiraling passes.

"These guys were both so good that they kept coming back at each other," the author said in a recent interview. "Towards the end, each one knew that the one who tried to get away would lose. So you're up there fighting, knowing that if you make the wrong move and you're the one getting shot, you're dead."

As Cunningham and Driscoll headed back to the carrier Constellation after the battle, their F-4 Phantom was shot down. They ejected into the South China Sea, where they were rescued by helicopter.

All of a sudden, Cunningham was a war hero. Before his Vietnam heroics, he had been passed over at least once in his quest to become a regular naval officer instead of a reservist, said two members of his squadron.

Now he was the Navy's showpiece. The Navy brass promptly gave him a regular commission along with a job as a Top Gun instructor back at Miramar.

. "I think he got a little bit of an ego," Ruliffson said. When the Navy decided to award Cunningham and Driscoll the Navy Cross instead of the more prestigious Medal of Honor, the aviators threatened to boycott the awards ceremony, said Ronald McKeown, the Top Gun commanding officer at the time.

McKeown, 66, who now lives in Mission Valley and works for a software company, said the two men changed their minds after he pulled them aside and told them what would happen if they followed through with their threat.

"I told them, 'I will personally rip your tits off, and I guarantee you'll die at your present rank,' " McKeown recalled.

Soon afterward, Cunningham had another run-in with a superior, an incident chronicled in the book "Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy," by former Union-Tribune reporter Gregory Vistica.

According to Vistica's account, Cunningham sneaked into the office of his commanding officer and rifled through the fitness reports of his fellow Top Gun instructors.

Upset that many of them scored higher than he did, Cunningham complained to the commanding officer, Jack Ready. When Ready asked how Cunningham could possess such classified information, he replied, "Because I came in here and went though your files and compared them," according to the book.

In a recent interview with the Union-Tribune, Ready said he doesn't remember Cunningham admitting to rifling through his desk. Still, he said, Cunningham couldn't have obtained the information any other way.

"The only way he could get that information was to go into the files," said Ready, 66, a retired Lockheed Martin Corp. executive who lives in Michigan.

In subsequent years, Cunningham's naval career didn't follow the arc that might be expected of the Navy's only Vietnam-era ace.

He was never placed in command of a deployable fighter squadron, one that would see combat during a war. Instead, he was given a less-prestigious job: executive officer of VF-126, an adversary squadron that played the role of the enemy in training exercises.

He wrote his autobiography, titled "Fox Two," the military code for a heat-seeking-missile launch. At some point he changed his call sign – a Navy pilot's unique nickname – from "Yank" to "Duke," an homage to John Wayne. The vanity license plate on his car read "MIG ACE."

He fell into the habit of telling stories that seemed exaggerated or embellished. One fellow Vietnam pilot, Matt Connelly, said he read Cunningham's autobiography and wound up writing notations such as "ridiculous" and "never happened" in the margins.

Connelly, 62, now a retired commercial airline pilot who lives outside San Francisco, called some of the assertions in Cunningham's book "fantasy."

Cunningham also became a fierce guardian of his own legend. During an interview with the "Scream of Eagles" author, Cunningham lost his temper at the suggestion that an enemy plane might have played a role in shooting down his F-4. Cunningham insisted he had been downed by a surface-to-air missile.

For a fighter pilot, the difference between the two scenarios can be extremely significant. Getting shot down by an enemy plane means defeat at the hands of another man.

Connelly, who was flying a quarter-mile away when Cunningham's plane went down, said he never saw a surface-to-air missile in the area and thinks Cunningham was shot down by a MiG. He also disputes Cunningham's contention – contained in his autobiography – that he had to flee four pursuing MiGs while trying to fly back to the ship.

Connelly said he saw only one MiG, which was right on Cunningham's tail. Driscoll, Cunningham's radar intercept officer, didn't return a phone call seeking comment for this story.

If Cunningham loved being a pilot, he was less enthusiastic about being an administrator, said Nick Criss, who served as commanding officer of the VF-126 adversary squadron from 1983 to 1985, with Cunningham as his second-in-command.

That certainly wasn't unusual, Criss said. Plenty of good pilots aren't enthusiastic about filling out paperwork, writing evaluations and doing the other mundane chores associated with an administrative post.

But Cunningham's work habits didn't inspire much confidence in the ranks. And some of the junior officers in the 300-member squadron lost a bit of respect for the Navy ace after he began challenging them to aerial competitions – and losing.

"The guys I had in the squadron were very good pilots and went up and embarrassed him on a few occasions," Criss said. "They kind of lined up to get a piece of the ace."

Normally, a squadron's executive officer serves 18 months in the post and is automatically promoted to commanding officer. But when the time came for Cunningham's promotion, several of the squadron's department heads complained to Criss that Cunningham "wasn't suitable to take over the command," said Clement, who was one of the department heads.

Criss said he, too, was "uncomfortable" with Cunningham's abilities and expressed those concerns to his superiors. Nonetheless, Cunningham received the standard promotion to commanding officer in 1985.

"He was not the perfect guy for the job, but the Navy has survived worse," said Criss, 60, who now lives in Rancho Peñasquitos and works as a commercial real estate broker.

In his new post, Cunningham still wasn't much interested in administrative duties. His office became known as "a giant black hole," Clement said. Eventually, his executive officer assumed many of the day-to-day responsibilities.

"He'd say, 'Duke, you go play with the airplanes; I'll take care of all the paperwork,' " said Thomas Davis, 53, a member of the squadron who is now a FedEx pilot in Tennessee.

If there was one thing that did interest Cunningham, it was hawking copies of his autobiography. He would keep boxes of the books in his car, selling them at air shows and speaking engagements. On one occasion, Cunningham brought along Clement, one of his junior officers, to help him sell copies at an aviation conference in Long Beach, where Cunningham was scheduled to give a speech.

Hundreds of people bought the book that day, and afterward the two men loaded several bags filled with a few thousand dollars in cash into the car, Clement recalled in a recent interview.

Clement said they didn't get back to San Diego until after midnight. When he arrived for work at the base a few hours later, he found Cunningham waiting for him.

"I'm 50 bucks short," Cunningham said. Clement said Cunningham then ordered him to go back to his house and check his uniform to see if the missing money was in his pockets.

Clement concluded that Cunningham must have spent the wee hours of the morning counting every bill in every bag.

"Here's a guy who controlled my career, and I'm thinking, 'What am I supposed to do, write him a check for $50?' " Clement recalled.

Cunningham retired from the Navy in 1987 and won a seat in Congress in 1990, beating a Democratic incumbent whom Cunningham referred to during the campaign as "just another MiG."

Some of his Navy comrades kept in touch with the pilot-turned-congressman over the years. Even those who were put off by his personality liked his reliable conservatism and were glad to have someone in Congress with his level of military expertise.

Ruliffson, one of Cunningham's former flight instructors, said he would have lunch with the naval ace every couple of years in the members' dining room of the House of Representatives. Cunningham's chief of staff would "encourage me to come by because I didn't want anything," Ruliffson said.

"Certain things are burned into our memories like it was yesterday," Ruliffson said.

Davis, a member of Cunningham's VF-126 squadron, said he ran into the congressman at an airport a few years back. At the time, Cunningham, a prostate cancer survivor, was in the news for saying that undergoing a rectal exam is "not natural, unless maybe you're Barney Frank," a reference to the gay Massachusetts congressman.

"Duke, every time I read about you, you're getting in trouble," Davis recalled telling Cunningham at the time.

In the weeks after Cunningham pleaded guilty to bribery charges in December, his travails became a hot topic of discussion among his former Navy comrades, many of whom still meet for breakfast every month at a diner in Mission Beach.

A few of them say Cunningham deserves more sympathy than he has been getting lately.

"As bad as what he did was, I feel there's a lot of undeserved piling-on going on," said Keith Crenshaw, 59, who served with Cunningham in Vietnam and now lives in Ventura County.

Many also feel that Cunningham fell victim to his own weaknesses. Ensch, the former Vietnam POW who is now the Padres' director of military marketing, calls Cunningham's downfall "a Shakespearean tragedy."

There's an old Navy expression for keeping a fellow pilot out of trouble, Ensch said recently. The expression is "covering your six," which means keeping watch over a fellow pilot's 6 o'clock position – the pilot's rear, the blind spot.

"As long as he was with the Navy," Ensch said of Cunningham, "there was always someone there to cover his six."

"I told them, 'I will personally rip your tits off, and I guarantee you'll die at your present rank,' " McKeown recalled.

Now THAT is a demonstration of a talent for military leadership.

Admiral Cunningham has done things that I believe he is even sorry about. I'm not Navy I'm U.S. Air Force and I consider him and Willie Driscoll BROTHERS. I'm sticking by them and even though I am not there to guard his six. The F-18 E/F model is in service today because Adm. Cunningham fought for it. Don't come back to me and start telling me how he got money for what he did. I don't care because the weight of the electronics went down and the fuel load went back up and a lot of Navy and Marine pilots have enough fuel to go around now and try to trap again. The Admiral is not a saint though take a look around how many do you see. Look at some of the good things he did. Yes, we all know that you can do a hundred good things and when you do one single bad thing the hundred good things don't count anymore. Remember he is a fighter pilot. Being an U.S. Air Force jet engine mechanic I've seen them in real life and the aircraft they flew. If they didn't have the attitudes they have more of them would have never come HOME.

He was undone, they say, by the same qualities that made him an effective pilot: a cocky attitude, a sense of entitlement, a mind undistracted by complicated thoughts.

A sense of entitlement and an absence of ethics is a disastrous combination. The other two qualities would never have gotten him into serious trouble, by themselves.

I seem to remember CDR (Ret) Randy Cunningham campaigning on the main drag in Coronado, just outside NAS North Island in 1990.

I dunno about this Admirable bidnezz. :o)

Be careful about what you say about Naval Aviators. I, in my experience of 20 years enlisted in the US Navy(8 years as an ABH and 12 years as an IS(3 of that being in an F-14 Squadron, VF-111)) have found most(not all) Naval Aviators to be VERY shallow, thin skinned and full of themselves. Why do you think that the Navy Tac Air community let Tailhook '91 happen. TH '91 KILLED most of the A-6 and F-14 Navy community and left the door open for the sub-standard A-7(now "F/A-18 "where is the tanker") to take over a kill Navy Tac Air(in my opinion). OK Flame me away!!!

Now I KNOW you don't have a clue. If you can use my handle and not recognize it, then I know what you are all about. Thats fine, a lot of people claim to know Duke who really don't. You aint the first. If I were you, I would not keep diggin. Let me help you. Go read the original thread on this at the link I posted above. You might learn something.

I don't give a flip about how great a fighter pilot Cunningham WAS or all the heroics and good deeds he is credited with.

I do care that he became a crooked politician who did more than betray his constituents. He is far worse than Tom DeLay ever thought about being. The perks that come with being a U.S. Representative weren't enough for his greediness. Cunningham's lust for enriching himself have forever tainted him as a crooked politician.

It's too bad that he alone ruined his once stellar reputation because he so dearly wanted a multimillion dollar house and a rolls royce, etc. But it's worse that Cunningham not only left the high ground, but has damaged the GOP and his political band of brothers. How much damage he's done is yet to be determined.

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