Leave Me Off, Rights Panelist Asks Reagan

John H. Bunzel has asked President Reagan to withdraw his name from consideration for another three-year term with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which he called a “little Beirut on the Potomac.”

In a scathing announcement from Stanford University, Bunzel, a Democrat who was named to the commission in 1983, also said the agency has “lost its credibility.”

Stanford spokesman Bob Beyers said Bunzel made his request and comments in a letter sent to Reagan last week. The letter was made public Sunday, he said.

“I believe the best days of the commission are over,” Bunzel said. “Gone are the moral strength and purpose it once enjoyed when times were simpler and its vision (was) clearer.

“Today it is an agency in serious trouble, scarred from rhetorical battles over old quarrels, with a budget cut almost in half and a depleted staff with worse than low morale,” he said.

“It is finally time for Congress to give serious attention to whether it believes the commission still has significant work to do,” Bunzel said.

Bunzel, former president of San Jose State University and now a senior research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, called for the resignation of controversial commission Chairman Clarence Pendleton last spring because of his “inflammatory rhetoric.”