Fast and Loose with Facts

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

In the second presidential debate, accuracy was no object "This may have been the most factually mucked-up debate ever held between two presidential candidates--and no one cares. It's over. Done."

Thus does one of Ronald Reagan's advisers sum up the second and final TV confrontation between the President and Democratic Challenger Walter Mondale at the start of last week. Reagan indeed is treating the debate as a settled issue; his aides think he put to rest doubts about his age and competence with a wisecrack about Mondale's "youth and inexperience," and with that removed the last real barrier to his reelection. But Mondale nonetheless is hammering away at the theme that Reagan "cannot make a statement about a major issue without making a major mistake."

Still, the response he has been getting is tepid enough to indicate that there is some regrettable truth to the remarks made by Peter Teeley, press secretary to Vice President George Bush, after his man debated Mondale Running Mate Geraldine Ferraro. Said Teeley: "You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it." If the press then points out an error, Teeley continued, "so what? Maybe 200 people read it, or 2,000 or 20,000." (Teeley hastened to add that Bush has not "purposely used misleading or incorrect figures.")

But the exaggerations, oversimplifications and outright misstatements on both sides deserve greater attention. Some of the errors might make a concerned voter shudder, since they involve the gravest issues of national policy. A partial list, beginning with the President, whose mistakes were the more numerous:

Chided repeatedly by Mondale for having allegedly said that missiles fired by submarines or bombers could be recalled, Reagan protested that he "never ever conceived of such a thing." Referring to statements at a May 13, 1982, press conference that indicated otherwise, the President asserted that he had meant to say that bombers and submarines, not their missiles, could be called back. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt, it was a misleading statement. Bombers indeed could be recalled after taking off, but missile-firing submarines are continuously deployed in undersea locations from which they could launch nuclear warheads at the Soviet Union. In a crisis they would stay put awaiting instructions on whether to fire their missiles; their commanders certainly would not be told to head back to port.

Reagan also misstated his own proposal on reducing strategic nuclear weapons, made to the Soviets at talks in Geneva that have since been suspended. He said during the debate that he had proposed initial reductions in land-based nuclear missiles, with cuts in nuclear weapons aboard submarines and bombers to be negotiated "in a second phase." Actually, the proposal unveiled by the President personally in a speech in May 1982 would have reduced the numbers of submarine-launched as well as land-based missiles at the start, though warheads on bombers would indeed have been saved for a later phase. The deepest reductions would have been in land-based missiles.

Worse, Reagan professed to be nonplussed because Moscow vehemently rejected this idea as being unbalanced. In his words, "the Soviet Union, to our surprise . . . placed, they thought, a greater reliance on the land-based missiles." That was no surprise at all to other members of his Administration, who knew that the land-based missiles make up a far greater proportion of the Soviet than of the U.S. nuclear-strike forces. Alexander Haig, who was Secretary of State at the time, has written that the U.S. proposals "would require such drastic reductions in the Soviet inventory as to suggest that they were unnegotiable." If Reagan really was taken aback by the Soviet response, that would raise questions about his understanding of basic nuclear facts.

Reagan also was mistaken about a CIA manual giving advice to contra guerrillas battling the Sandinista government of Nicaragua on how to assassinate Sandinista officials, hire "criminals" to kill contras who would then be presented as martyrs, and stir up mob violence. The President said the manual had been written by a CIA contract employee "in Nicaragua" (he hastily corrected himself to say "in that area," meaning Central America) and censored in Washington, but "some way or other" about a dozen copies with the offending passages got out to the contras. He wrongly remembered what briefers had told him just before the debate: a dozen copies had been submitted to Washington for censorship. At least 2,000 were circulated to the contras, and even after censorship they still contained advice on "neutralizing" Sandinista officials, a euphemism for assassination.

Some other dubious assertions by the President:

The Carter Administration had practiced "unilateral disarmament." Toward the end of his term Jimmy Carter set a policy of raising military expenditures faster than the rate of inflation, though earlier he had canceled the B-l bomber and backed off the neutron bomb.

The U.S. is supporting the authoritarian government of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines because "the alternative . . . is a large Communist movement to take over." In fact, Marcos' strongest opposition comes from many nonCommunists, including Jaime Cardinal Sin, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Manila. Reagan's assertion that the Marcos government has done "things . . . that do not look good to us from the standpoint, right now, of democratic rights," was, to put it charitably, an understatement. A few days after the debate, the majority of a Philippine inquiry commission charged that some of Marcos' military commanders, including his close friend and top general, Fabian Ver, had been behind the murder of Opposition Leader Benigno Aquino when he returned to the islands last year. Even the State Department felt compelled to soften Reagan's remarks. Said Spokesman John Hughes: "I think there is certainly recognition on everybody's part that there are other forces working for democratic change in the Philippines."

The Shah of Iran "had done our bidding" in the Middle East. Only the Ayatullah Khomeini would go quite that far. Also, Reagan questioned whether the Shah "was that far out of line with his people." The Shah, despite his reputation for megalomania, had no such doubts. After the Khomeini-led revolution had driven him into exile, the Shah confessed to President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, "When I woke up, I had lost my people."

Oddly, though, one passage from the debate that was widely regarded as a Reagan blooper was not. The President, listing areas of vital concern to the U.S., mentioned the Middle East, the Pacific Basin and "our neighbors here in America." Many eyebrows went up because he did not include Western Europe. But he was only answering the question as phrased by Marvin Kalb, NBC diplomatic correspondent, who asked him to define U.S. interests "aside from what is obvious, such as NATO."

Though Mondale had better command of the facts than Reagan did, he made some questionable assertions too. One that the Administration jumped on was a charge that Reagan had sent Marines to Lebanon and kept them in barracks near the Beirut airport where 241 U.S. servicemen were killed in a terrorist bombing, despite the anguished pleas of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Mondale put it in the debate: "First, the Joint Chiefs of Staff went to the President and said don't put those troops there . . . And then, five days before the troops were killed, they went back through the Secretary of Defense and said please, Mr. President, take those troops out of there because we can't defend them." White House Chief of Staff James Baker termed these contentions "Absolutely false." At best they are unprovable. Mondale was paraphrasing accusations made in an article in the Nation, a leftist weekly; the writer, Patrick J. Sloyan, who regularly covers Europe and the Middle East for the Long Island paper Newsday, has declined to disclose his sources.

Mondale also made a series of misstatements about the President's Star Wars idea to develop a system that could intercept and destroy incoming enemy missiles. "I assume" the Star Wars weapons would be based in space, said the Democrat; actually, they might be ground-based lasers. Addressing Reagan directly, Mondale asserted, "You haven't just accepted research, Mr. President. You're beginning to test . . . you're asking for a budget of some $30 billion for this purpose." Administration officials once estimated that Star Wars spending might total $25 billion over five years, but most of that would merely continue existing research programs. Actual outlays now are only $1.3 billion a year, entirely for research; no systems are anywhere near ready for testing. The only tests scheduled are for an antisatellite weapon, not an antimissile weapon.

Mondale twice expressed alarm that if a Star Wars defense were ever actually deployed, "for the first time we would delegate to computers the decision as to whether to start a war." Defense experts contend that a Star Wars defense would rely no more heavily on computers to give warning of an impending missile attack than present deterrent strategy does. The greatest danger of nuclear devastation because of computer error would arise if false signals tempted a President to order not the use of defensive weapons but a retaliatory nuclear strike.

Mondale also misrepresented the provisions of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill, which is designed to curb illegal immigration into the U.S. in part by imposing fines on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. The Democratic nominee objected that the bill "requires employers to determine the citizenship of an employee before they're hired . . . I don't think we should have a citizenship card." The bill says nothing about a citizenship card. It would require job applicants to produce documents--Social Security cards, drivers licenses, temporary work permits--indicating that they are legal residents of the U.S., not necessarily citizens. Moreover, employers would have no obligation to verify the documents; they would be penalized only if they hired aliens who had no documentation at all.

Both candidates also made some less serious, and more obvious, slips. Reagan in his summation absentmindedly referred to "the policies of weakness of the last four years," as if he had traveled in a time machine back to 1980. Mondale taxed the President with not knowing that submarine-launched missiles are "recallable"; he meant the exact opposite. Reagan got a big laugh by deriding a TV ad showing Mondale on the deck of an aircraft carrier, which the President identified as the Nimitz; if Mondale's policies had been followed, said Reagan, "he'd be deep in the water" because the Nimitz would never have been built. Actually, Mondale would have been high and dry; the carrier was the Midway, which was commissioned in 1945. He could hardly have voted against it, since he was 17 at its launching.

It says a great deal about the debates that each candidate let almost all questionable statements made by his opponent go by without challenge. Indeed, it seemed at several key points that one candidate could not even have been listening to what the other said. The principal reason for this, say their aides, is that both had rehearsed what amounted to short speeches, which they insisted on giving no matter what. Reagan, says one assistant, feared that answering Mondale's charges point by point would make him look defensive, as he did in their first confrontation on domestic policy. Mondale, says Foreign Policy Adviser David Aaron, "didn't want to spend the evening bickering with the President. He had his own message that used up a lot of time." The candidates also are inhibited, understandably, by the pressure of the occasion: a television audience of some 90 million and a horde of fact-checking reporters do not encourage freewheeling improvisations.

Some insiders whisper another reason for the lack of real rebuttal: neither candidate is much good at it, at least by the standards a coach of formal debates would apply. The rules for judging a TV political debate are of course different. Says one candid presidential aide: "Reagan delivered a couple of good one-liners, stayed close to the podium, looked alert and had a better camera angle. The conclusion is that Reagan won the debate." The adviser's own verdict is somewhat different: "The most interesting thing is how little these debates tell us about which candidate would be the best President."

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Douglas Brew/Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew