Carter papers leaked

Press, 30 June 1983, Page 10

Carter papers leaked

NZPA Washington The case of the purloined briefing papers is blowing into a scandal which could see senior aides to President Reagan out on their ear and may even cost the President a second term. White House officials admit that a “mole” on the then President Jimmy Carter’s team passed them position papers during the run-up to the election in 1979, but their memory is vague and Mr Reagan, at a news conference yesterday, dodged when faced with a barrage of direct questions on the facts and on the morality of using stolen information from an oppon-

ent’s team. The United States is still shocked by Watergate, when Republicans broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington to wire it for sound during the 1972 Presidential campaign, an action for which the principals went to jail and the then President, Richard Nixon, resigned two years later rather than face impeachment.

The after-shocks of Watergate resulted in a strict demand — in many cases codified in laws — for a high standard of morality from politicians. In that swing Mr Carter

was elected President, but he disappointed his supporters and Americans generally saw him as too idealistic and not pragmatic enough.

The pendulum swung back with the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, seen during the campaign — and in a television debate with Mr Carter — as a genial man but one who knew his own mind and had strong positions on such subjects as international Communism and the need for Americans to go back to pulling themselves up by their own bootrstraps with minimal interference from Washington.