The article says he apologized:

"Golightly stepped down Thursday as Boeing’s senior vice president of communications following an employee complaint about the 1987 article, which he called “embarrassingly wrong and offensive.”"

A former Naval Officer and C-Level aplogizing when he gets caught 30 years later is not honorable. The time to do it was decades ago. It’s a wonder who vetted him.

He’s not some kid on the internet.

The guy is in his 60s. Asking people to remember everything they have ever written over their entire life, and then publicly retract it as soon as they change their minds about any given portion, is not reasonable. Heck, I had an article published in a student newspaper twelve years ago (in 2008), and even now I barely remember what it says.