Reagan Hints Door Is Open to Mild Sanctions : Slight Policy Shift Makes Clear That Punitive Measures Passed by Congress Would Face Veto

President Reagan, declaring that “we haven’t closed any doors,” indicated Thursday that he may not oppose limited sanctions against South Africa after all, but White House officials said he is determined to veto any punitive or sweeping sanctions passed by Congress.

The President will exercise the veto, one senior official said, even though he does not now have enough votes to sustain one and Republican Senate leaders have served notice that they will defy him and press for enactment of tough economic sanctions.

Comments by Reagan and his aides implying that he might acquiesce if Congress passes mild sanctions reflect an apparent slight shift in policy. The President was widely criticized by Republicans and Democrats after strongly opposing sanctions in a major speech Tuesday on policy toward the white-led Pretoria regime.

Reagan’s vehement stand against harsh sanctions stems from a deep loyalty to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a conviction that they would be counterproductive and cost him any chance to influence events in South Africa, said the senior official, interviewed on condition that he not be identified.

Standing With Thatcher

“Ronald Reagan wanted to stand behind Maggie Thatcher--he didn’t want her to stand alone,” the official said. “She stood behind him on Libya. And he didn’t want to lose his influence in South Africa. Ronald Reagan has more clout today in South Africa than anybody in the world. They’ll listen to him. And, if he approved sanctions, they would ignore him.”

Britain was the only Western ally to support the American bombing of terrorist strongholds in Libya on April 15. Thatcher and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl have been the only Western leaders besides Reagan to oppose sanctions.

Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker said Thursday that he plans to go to London next week for consultations with the British government.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, first raised the possibility Wednesday that Reagan might reconsider his adamant stand against any sanctions. Shultz held out the possibility that the Administration might join Western allies in imposing some sanctions in two months if South Africa had not moved by then to eliminate its apartheid system of racial segregation.

Reporters covering a Reagan campaign appearance for Republican candidates in South Carolina on Thursday asked the President whether the United States might consider imposing sanctions in concert with its allies.

“We haven’t closed any doors,” he replied.

Although Reagan declined to elaborate, White House spokesman Larry Speakes drew a distinction between “punitive economic sanctions” and other, less harsh sanctions.

Denial of Landing Rights

Such lesser steps, Speakes said, might include denial of landing rights in the United States for South African planes and “things like that.”

Another White House official suggested that, by denouncing “sweeping” and “punitive” sanctions in his address Tuesday, the President “left some running room for Congress to pass something mild.” In the speech, Reagan said he agreed with Thatcher that punitive sanctions would be “immoral” and “utterly repugnant.”

White House aides wrangled over Tuesday’s controversial address for 10 days before Reagan approved a final version, sources said. Most of Reagan’s White House aides advised him not to deliver it and at one point a decision was made to scrap the speech. However, three hours later, sources said, Reagan himself declared: “We’re going ahead.”

State Department and National Security Council officials favored the President’s speech. But, except for Patrick J. Buchanan, Reagan’s outspoken communications director, few of the President’s top White House advisers supported it.

Urged TV Coverage

Buchanan felt so strongly about the subject that he urged all three major commercial networks to carry the President’s speech live. All of them declined, according to Buchanan, although one of them, which he refused to identify, offered to carry it if the speech included an endorsement of sanctions.

Buchanan, who calls the mushrooming movement for sanctions “a great moral stampede,” is said to believe that if the Administration can delay Senate consideration of sanctions--allowing passions to cool and people to consider the full import of Reagan’s speech--they will be less disposed to support punitive sanctions.

At the moment, however, emotions are running so high and support for sanctions is so strong on Capitol Hill that White House officials realize that Congress would override a presidential veto of punitive sanctions.

At a recent White House meeting, a Reagan aide said: “One of the most conservative members of Congress came up to me and said, ‘You don’t have 40 who will vote to sustain a veto, and I’m not sure I could vote to sustain.’ ”

Prestige on Line

The Administration had “zero support before the President’s speech,” the aide said, “but we’re getting some from the Hill, now that the President put his prestige on the line. Now some of those who were rushing to support sanctions have to step back and say if the President is serious enough to take a strong stand and take all this heat, I’d better take another look.

“What we need is some of the leaders to stand up and say: ‘Damn it, the President is right.’ You know some of the conservatives are looking at (Senate Majority Leader Bob) Dole as a possible candidate in the presidential race. If he stands up now with the Gipper on sanctions, it could put a lot of money in the bank for him.”

By all accounts, the President took an extraordinary personal interest in the address. At one point, while many drafts were exchanging hands about a week before he delivered the speech, Reagan sent copies of a lengthy article on South Africa written by Paul Johnson, a British journalist and historian, to White House, National Security Council and State Department officials, along with a note saying: “Please read this.”

Article in Commentary

In the article, published in the September, 1985, issue of the journal Commentary, Johnson argued that sanctions would be counterproductive, that blacks would suffer the most from sanctions and that South Africa would face a future of continuing and increasing violence “in which a refortified and emotionally strengthened regime of apartheid will almost certainly stay on top, using whatever force is necessary.”

In his speech, Reagan, who echoed several of Johnson’s points, quoted a section of the article that declared: “Only in South Africa have the real incomes of blacks risen very substantially. . . . In mining, black wages have tripled in real terms in the last decade. . . . South Africa is the . . . only African country to produce a large black middle class.”

Also circulating among Reagan advisers was an article by South African author Alan Paton denouncing sanctions. In his speech, the President described Paton as “for years the conscience of his country” and quoted him as writing: “Those who will pay most grievously for disinvestment will be the black workers of South Africa.”