Speakes Will Quit, Join Firm on Wall Street

Presidential spokesman Larry Speakes announced today he is resigning his White House post after 5 1/2 years to join the giant Wall Street investment firm of Merrill Lynch & Co.

Speakes, who has spent more time in the job than anyone since James Hagerty in the Eisenhower Administration, told reporters that if he could write his epitaph, he would want it to say: “He told the truth. Always.”

Speakes, the principal White House spokesman since Press Secretary James S. Brady was critically wounded in the assassination attempt against President Reagan in 1981, said he will remain in his job until Feb. 1.

The spokesman, 47, joins Merrill Lynch in New York as a senior vice president for communications. Sources have said Speakes will earn about $250,000 a year in salary and benefits.

Asked about his leaving in the midst of the Iran- contra scandal, Speakes said he had considered it but decided that staying on for two months would be “enough time to serve the President in the current situation.”

He added that he had been discussing the position with the brokerage firm since early October, before the current crisis arose.

Administration sources have said Interior Under Secretary Ann Dore McLaughlin is Speakes’ most likely successor. Marlin Fitzwater, Vice President George Bush’s press secretary, also has been mentioned.

Speakes’ sometimes-combative posture during more than 2,000 news briefings often rankled the White House press corps. Reporters were especially upset by his handling of reports on the removal of a small skin cancer from Reagan’s nose last summer.

Speakes initially issued a statement indicating that Reagan had been treated for “a minor skin irritation.” However, sources said Speakes was required to handle the matter the way he did because of Nancy Reagan’s sensitivity to the release of information about her husband’s health.

On another occasion, Speakes told a reporter who asked about indications that the United States was on the verge of invading Grenada that an invasion was “preposterous.”

U.S. troops landed on the tiny Caribbean island the next morning.

But in that case, Speakes was relying on guidance from Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, who resigned last week as Reagan’s national security adviser because of the Iran affair.