Rights Panelist Bows Out With a Swipe at Pendleton

John H. Bunzel, a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, declined reappointment to another term on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on Monday, saying the agency “has lost its credibility” and is “no longer an important voice in behalf of national goals and ideals.”

Bunzel, a Democrat who was named to the commission by President Reagan in 1983, likened the agency to “a little Beirut on the Potomac.”

In a letter sent to Reagan on Nov. 24 and made public Monday, Bunzel suggested that Congress re-evaluate the commission’s mandate so that it can better address problems of crime, unemployment and teen-age pregnancy among minorities.

Bunzel, 62, a former president of San Jose State University, also told the President that Clarence M. Pendleton of San Diego should be fired as commission chairman because of his “inflammatory rhetoric” and for “clouding a national debate with an inappropriate bitterness.”

‘In Serious Trouble’

Bunzel wrote: “I believe the best days of the commission are over. Gone are the moral strength and purpose it once enjoyed when times were simpler and its vision 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. It is finally time for Congress to give serious attention to whether it believes the commission still has significant work to do.

”. . . I am now persuaded . . . that the commission--for 30 years sometimes wise and often mistaken, usually judicious but often hyperbolic, occasionally important and frequently marginal--is no longer an important voice in behalf of national goals and ideals.”

Congress cut the commission’s budget from $11.8 million in the last fiscal year to $7.5 million in the current fiscal year after expressing concern over audits indicating mismanagement.

The eight-member commission has been engulfed in controversy ever since Reagan appointed Pendleton as chairman and replaced three members with Bunzel and two other nominees more attuned to his philosophy.

Commissioners serve three-year terms.

Traditional Role

Pendleton is a conservative black, and civil rights groups have charged that he oversaw the commission’s abandonment of its traditional role as a protector of the rights of black people.