
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 11, 1992                   TAG: 9203110222
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

NIXON CHIDES BUSH AND FOES ON WEAK BACKING FOR RUSSIA

Former President Nixon says George Bush and his presidential challengers have been far too weak in supporting forces for democratic change in Russia. "The stakes are high, and we are playing as if it were a penny-ante game," Nixon says.

Nixon, writing in a four-page essay that his office said had been intended only for friends, said the Bush administration's responses have been "pathetically inadequate." The West, he said, risks "snatching defeat in the Cold War from the jaws of victory."

Bush brushed the criticism aside. "I don't think President Nixon and I have a difference on this," he said, calling the ex-president's dissertation "a very constructive paper."

Excerpts of the essay, titled "How to Lose the Cold War," surfaced in several publications Tuesday, on the eve of a two-day Nixon Library conference on "America's Role in the Emerging World."

Nixon urged the United States "to put some chips in the pot."

The former president said that Bush is only half correct in his assertion that "the Cold War is over and we won."

"The communists have lost the Cold War, but the West has not yet won it," Nixon wrote. "Communism collapsed because its ideas failed."

Nixon expressed strong support for Russian president Boris Yeltsin and said that if he fails, "prospects for the next 50 years will turn grim. "The Russian people will not turn back to communism," Nixon writes.

"But a new, more dangerous despotism based on extremist Russian nationalism will take power."

Whatever Yeltsin's flaws, Nixon said, the alternative would be worse.

"What has the United States and the West done so far to help Russia's first democratic, free-market oriented, non-expansionist government?" Nixon asks.

The answer, he says, are "a photo-opportunity" international conference, long on rhetoric but short on action, and food and medicine left from the Persian Gulf War.

Bush, opening a meeting with Republican congressional leaders, said they would discuss ways the United States can be as supportive as possible of Yeltsin.

by CNB