Answers Unasked, Wrong Questions : Reagan’s Responses Questionable?

President Reagan, wearing two hearing aids that his spokesman said allowed him to hear perfectly, offered answers to some questions he wasn’t asked at his news conference Wednesday night and confessed he was baffled by another.

“I must have goofed some place,” Reagan lamented at one point, trying to understand a query about a speech he made this week.

As the cameras whirred and clicked in the cavernous East Room during the televised session, Reagan called on a reporter who in a booming voice asked about that day’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision upholding a woman’s right to an abortion.

Reagan, with a quizzical look on his face, apparently did not understand the reporter’s question.

“Now wait a minute, hit me again here,” Reagan said, adding he was still contemplating a prior question.

The reporter repeated his question, asking if Reagan intended to take another case to the Supreme Court to further test the abortion law.

Reagan launched into a defense of his Administration’s adoption of the so-called Baby Doe regulations for handicapped infants, which had been struck down by the court 5 to 3 earlier in the week.

At another point in the session, Reagan spoke about strategic weapons negotiations in Geneva when he was asked about an offer made Wednesday by the Warsaw Pact to NATO for large cuts in European conventional troops.

But Reagan’s questioner added to the confusion. He had asked the President whether the United States ought to take the Soviet-allied Warsaw Pact up on the offer, in light of the lack of progress in Geneva.

Reagan, keying in on the word “Geneva,” went on to argue that there had been no progress at the Geneva talks because the United States and the Soviets count each other’s weapons arsenals differently.

At another point, Reagan was asked why, in a recent speech, he had compared Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Libya’s Moammar Kadafi and PLO leader Yassar Arafat. Reagan said if he had done so, he hadn’t meant to.

White House spokesman Larry Speakes denied today that the President had had any trouble hearing the questions.

Speakes said Reagan misunderstood the two questions on the Supreme Court abortion issue because he was concentrating on a list of reporters he wanted to take questions from.