Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 26, 1994 TAG: 9410260049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Former Attorney General Elliot Richardson and former CIA Director William Colby joined U.S. Sen. Charles Robb at a news conference to brand Republican challenger Oliver North as being treacherous like ex-President Nixon.
"The question is not politics; the question is principle," Colby said.
Richardson said both Watergate and Iran-Contra were constitutional crises in which members of the executive branch sought to evade the "accountability" built into the American political system.
Richardson - whom Nixon fired in October 1973 for refusing to replace the independent Watergate prosecutor - called Iran-Contra "more evil and more flagrant" than Watergate because Iran-Contra was a deliberate attempt to evade the will of Congress.
He accused North of creating a secret "slush fund" to pay for a foreign policy that was outside the oversight of congressional committees.
As a White House aide, North diverted profits from arms sales to Iran and used the money to arm Contra rebels fighting the elected government in Nicaragua, an attempt to circumvent a congressional prohibition on providing U.S. tax dollars to the Contras. North has admitted diverting the funds without the permission of his superiors, including President Reagan.
Asked how North could be locked in a dead heat with a sitting senator if Iran-Contra was such a scandal, Richardson said, "If I were as engaging on camera as he is, I would have been elected to the Senate in 1974."
North, campaigning in Richmond, dismissed the Richardson-Colby comments as "another desperate ploy by the foundering Robb campaign to bring Washington insiders to bear for them."
The day before, North had called a press conference with former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams and former Attorney General Edwin Meese of the Reagan White House to refute press reports that North tolerated drug-running on the part of pilots supplying Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
On Tuesday, North insisted that Robb was trying to divert the campaign away from issues. "He knows he doesn't want to talk about the issues, because his stands are so very bad," North told a partisan crowd at state Republican Party headquarters. Robb "would rather hurl mud and sleaze and distortions in the hopes his record in the Senate would be obscured or, better yet, never come up."
North returned to the overriding theme of his campaign - that Robb is a clone of President Clinton - and extended his criticism to Jesse Jackson, who has been in Virginia for two days stumping for Democrats.
"Jesse Jackson, Chuck Robb - two peas in a pod. ... Here's two liberal extremists trying to advance that liberal agenda," North said.
Despite the struggle to keep the debate focused on issues, the campaign day was capped by the release of "Oliver North's Pack of Lies" - a deck of playing cards containing 52 misstatements attributed to North - by Clean Up Congress, a nonprofit group seeking to derail his candidacy.
Some of North's false statements featured in the deck include:
His claim at a Sept. 9 debate that the "unionized" Norfolk school system was so bad that the city has more students in parochial schools than in private schools.
His claim that his statements in support of a group seeking to fly the Confederate flag over a public museum in Danville did not mean he supported the public display of the Civil War symbol.
A North campaign brochure that describes his felony convictions in the Iran-Contra scandal this way: "A jury of his peers looked at the evidence and the evidence exonerated him."
Staff writer Alec Klein contributed to this report.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB