Jun 20, 2008  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

He would rather not talk about it.

But at the request of a reporter, Ralph White Jr. this week recounted how in August 1982 then-U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) called him into his office and told him he would have to resign from his job as Nunn’s legislative assistant because White is gay. Nunn’s name has been back in the news as a potential running mate for Barack Obama.

“This is something that happened 26 years ago,” White, who still lives in Washington, said. “It’s a horrible thing for anybody to go through, and I would really prefer not to talk about it. It’s so of the past.”

White did talk about it 16 years ago, in November 1992, less than a month after Bill Clinton won election as president. At the time, Clinton was said to be considering naming Nunn to his cabinet as Secretary of Defense.

White and Greg Baldwin, another gay man who said Nunn fired him as a Senate committee staffer in 1981, agreed to tell their stories to the Blade. In interviews in November 1992, the two said they wanted to inform the gay community and then-President-elect Clinton that Nunn’s record appeared to be at odds with Clinton’s support for gay civil rights.

The New York Times and the Washington Post, along with other mainline news outlets, quickly picked up the story about White and Baldwin’s firing.

In a news conference a short time later, Nunn confirmed that he forced the two men to resign, saying he did so because he believed their being gay could jeopardize their ability to deal with classified information and national security issues that would come before the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which Nunn was a member.

White said this week that a number of prominent gay leaders who worked on Clinton’s presidential election campaign told him they cited his and Baldwin’s forced resignations by Nunn as strong reasons why Clinton should drop Nunn from consideration for the Secretary of Defense post.
“They apparently leaned on Clinton not to pick Nunn for anything,” White said.

White, meanwhile, said that the painful experience of his dismissal by Nunn ironically led to a successful and rewarding career over the past 26 years.

At the time of his dismissal, at age 26, he was attending law school at Catholic University at night while working as Nunn’s legislative assistant for national defense.

White speculates that Nunn found out about his sexual orientation through someone at the law school. On the day Nunn asked him to resign, Nunn showed him a letter he received from a man claiming to be the head of an Atlanta-based group called Campaign for Morality. The man, Malcolm Stewart, stated in the letter that White openly discussed his sexual orientation with fellow students at Catholic University and that these “indiscretions” could embarrass Nunn.

In his 1992 interview with the Blade, White told of how he responded when Nunn asked him if Stewart’s claim that he is gay was true.

“I told him I made a promise to myself that I would never lie about this,” White said. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’”

This week, White said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) hired him as a researcher a short time after Nunn forced him to resign and that Levin helped him gain valuable experience as part of a Levin investigation into government procurement and contracting irregularities. White said Levin knew White was gay when he hired him and told him he did not believe being gay should be grounds for discrimination.

After receiving his law degree, White went to work for the General Accounting Office, an arm of Congress that monitors federal government agencies. Recently renamed the Government Accountability Office, White has remained with the office for the past 19 years. He serves as assistant general counsel for the office’s Procurement Law Division, a post that is similar to that of an administrative law judge.

“So some wonderful things have come out of this,” he said of his firing by Nunn. “It led me to a great career. That doesn’t excuse what happened, but lots of wonderful things happened afterwards.”
Nunn could not be reached for comment for this story.
 
The Obama campaign has declined to comment on who Obama is considering for his running mate.