Navy Says No Mo To Bremerton It Appears Likely Battleship Missouri Will Move To Hawaii

Secretary of the Navy John Dalton has dashed Bremerton’s hopes of keeping the retired battleship USS Missouri as a historical museum on its downtown waterfront.

It now appears inevitable that the 58,000-ton battleship, a major tourist attraction in Bremerton for more than three decades, next year will be towed to a permanent moorage on “battleship row” in Pearl Harbor, said Earl Smith, chairman of the Bremerton-based Save the Missouri Committee.

“We don’t have a legal leg to stand on,” Smith said when asked if his committee might consider a lawsuit to halt the Navy. “They can donate it to anyone they want to.”

Dalton declined a request by Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., to reopen the selection process for a permanent berthing site for the famed World War II battleship, the site for the formal surrender of Japan to the western allies on Sept. 2, 1945.

Dicks had requested an investigation by the congressional General Accounting Office into the Navy’s decision last Aug. 21 to give the decommissioned ship to the USS Missouri Memorial Association in Hawaii.

Smith and other local critics of that decision charged that the Navy altered its selection criteria at the last moment to tilt the results to the Hawaii group.

Mothballed in Puget Sound Naval Shipyard during 1954-83, the Missouri drew an average of 180,000 visitors a year, at no cost to the city.

After five years of active service from 1986 to 1991 including combat in Operation Desert Storm, the Missouri was stricken from the naval warship registry, prompting local civic officials to plan a new $6 million waterfront site for a permanent memorial.

Groups from Pearl Harbor, Long Beach and San Francisco competed with Bremerton to receive the ship as a donation for a naval museum. Under the Navy process, each application was assigned a numerical score based on criteria such as adequate funding, a suitable moorage site, environmental considerations and continuous maintenance and security plans.

The Navy last summer added two additional criteria for the competition - “public affairs value” and “historical significance” of each site, but did not inform the four contending groups that those two new criteria constituted 75 percent of the final grade for the decision, Dicks said in a June 3 letter to Dalton.

Bonnie McDade, a member of the Save the Missouri Committee, said Bremerton had the leading score for the Missouri before the last-minute change. But when the final scores were tabulated, Pearl Harbor edged Bremerton by 8.8 to 8.7 on a scale of 10.

Dicks said this and other “serious flaws” justified reopening the contest and assigning the final disposal decision to an independent panel.

Dalton responded to Dicks Tuesday, saying he concluded the GAO review “contains nothing that would warrant reopening the process.”

“I remain confident that my selection of Pearl Harbor was in the best interest of the Navy and our nation, based on the impartial review of the relative merits of the four acceptable applications,” Dalton wrote.

After conferring with congressional leaders Tuesday about the possibility of a legislative reversal of Dalton’s decision, Dicks threw in the towel.

“I have been informed by the chairman of the House National Security Committee that there is not sufficient support in Congress for overturning this decision, and at this point it appears that no further action on the matter is possible,” Dicks said.