Obama addresses academy grads

May 25, 2013 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama condemned sexual misconduct in the military and told Naval Academy graduates to try to restore Americans’ faith in institutions in a commencement speech that hinted at the scandals swirling around the president.

“As we’ve seen again in recent days, it only takes the misconduct of a few to further erode the people’s trust in their government,” Obama said Friday in a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. “And that’s unacceptable to me, and I know it’s unacceptable to you.”

Obama’s remarks didn’t explicitly reference the controversy over Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups, one of three controversies that consumed the news in recent weeks. But the president seemed to have the shortcomings of government bureaucrats on his mind. He said that every day “civil servants do their jobs with professionalism,” but he added that “institutions do not fail in a vacuum.”

“Institutions are made up of people, individuals. And we’ve seen how the actions of a few can undermine the integrity of those institutions,” he told the group in the rainy ceremony.

The president was more direct in discussing sexual assault in the military, an issue that shot to prominence after a string of new reports of misconduct and the release of a Pentagon survey that found a large number of unreported incidents among the ranks.

The Pentagon data estimated that 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted in unreported incidents last year, a 35 percent increase from 2010.

Obama has said he will work with military leaders to put an end to the crimes.

On Friday, he called on the graduates to follow their “inner compass” in choosing between right and wrong. And he tried to underscore the seriousness of the matter by comparing sexual-misconduct cases to battlefield photos that show “troops falling short on their standards” and “endanger our forces and undermine our efforts to achieve security and peace.”

“Likewise, those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that makes our military strong,” he said. “That’s why we have to be determined to stop these crimes because they’ve got no place in the greatest military on Earth.”