NATO Chief ‘Out of Line’ on Arms Deal, Shultz Says : Gen. Rogers Criticized for Charging Administration Was Trying to Use Pact to Salvage Its Foreign Policy

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, in an angry retort Saturday to the retiring NATO military commander, defended proposals to ban medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe as a good deal for the West--not just a way to salvage the Reagan Administration’s tattered foreign policy.

Shultz said that Gen. Bernard W. Rogers was “way out of line” for accusing the Administration of blackjacking European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into accepting a doubtful arms control pact just to restore the Administration’s political reputation for leadership.

“Gen. Rogers may not like what has happened--apparently he doesn’t,” Shultz said. “But to say that it has been done in a rush for a reason. . . .”

He did not finish the sentence. Instead, he resumed, “As a general that has been in Europe for eight years, commenting on the political scene that hasn’t been his area of specialty--I think he is way out of line.”

Shultz spoke to reporters during a flight from Singapore to Sydney for talks with Australian officials today and Monday. The flight pushed his marathon June tour of the world past the 15,000-mile mark--stretching from the Venice economic summit through a NATO meeting in Iceland, consultations with Philippine officials in Manila, an Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Singapore and on to Sydney. He is scheduled to stop in Western Samoa on his way home.

Important for Diplomacy

Although Shultz said his talks in Manila, Singapore, Sydney and Western Samoa were as important to U.S. diplomacy as regular watering and weeding is to gardening, his only major accomplishment came in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he obtained NATO’s support for the “double zero” plan to ban short- and medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe. So he was doubly angered by Rogers’ criticism, in an interview with the Washington Post, that the prize of his trip resulted from stampeding European members of the alliance into abandoning their apprehensions about removing missiles from Europe.

Rogers, a former Army chief of staff, is due to step down at the end of this month from his post as commander of U.S. forces in Europe and NATO’s supreme allied commander after the Reagan Administration refused to grant his request to remain in the job.

“In the first place, his (Rogers’) statement that things have happened in a big rush is obviously ridiculous,” Shultz said. “These positions go back to the 1979 double-track decision” in which NATO agreed to deploy medium-range missiles in Europe while trying to negotiate an arms control agreement with Moscow.

“If this is news to him, where has he been?” Shultz said.

‘Good Proposal’ for U.S.

“The criticism of the nay-sayers of President Reagan’s original proposal (to eliminate both U.S. and Soviet missiles in Europe) was not that it was a bad proposal on its merits for the United States,” Shultz said. “The criticism was that it was too good a proposal on its merits from the standpoint of the United States and so good on its merits that the Russians would never agree to it.”

“Gen. Rogers can put that in his pipe and smoke it,” Shultz said.

By the time Shultz gets back to Washington on Thursday, he will have been away from the Capital for almost three weeks. He conceded that he did not achieve any dramatic breakthroughs for his efforts, but he insisted there is more to diplomacy than that.

“You shouldn’t restrict yourself to going somewhere only on occasions when world-shaking events can take place,” he said. “The world doesn’t live on world-shaking developments.”

Shultz is scheduled to play golf with Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke today before holding formal meetings with Hawke and Foreign Minister Bill Hayden.

On Monday, Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger will meet with Hayden and Australian Defense Minister Kim Beazley in a formal meeting of the alliance which was known as ANZUS before New Zealand--the NZ in the acronym--was read out of the club for refusing to allow U.S. nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed warships to call at its ports.

Shultz said he anticipates no difficulties in the talks.

“Fortunately, the relationship between the United States and Australia--pretty much across the board--is a strong one,” Shultz said. “One reason for our annual visitation is to keep it that way.”