Reagan Summons Critical Columnist

The Reagan Administration in recent weeks has conducted high-level conferences with an assortment of top officials over the Nicholas Daniloff affair, but President Reagan on Thursday held a special meeting with a different party to the controversy--conservative columnist George F. Will.

Reagan summoned Will to the White House for a 30-minute talk on the Administration’s posture with the Soviets on the journalist’s detention--a position that Will has criticized sharply as too soft-line and compromising.

Reporters learned of the session when it was accidentally included on the publicly released agenda of the President’s daily appointments, which normally does not note private meetings. Several newsmen staked out the West Wing to ask Will about his audience, but he slipped in through another entrance and later declined to comment on the matter.

“Is the President really that concerned about what Will thinks?” Helen Thomas of United Press International, dean of the White House press corps, asked at the White House’s daily press briefing.

“I don’t know,” replied White House spokesman Larry Speakes. “Never called you in for something you wrote, huh?”