Football Game Kept Him in Dark--Bush : Says He Missed Learning Weinberger, Shultz Opposed Arms Sales

Vice President George Bush, in an interview published today, said an Army-Navy football game kept him from hearing two Cabinet officers strongly object to the Iran arms sales and thus he cannot be faulted by other presidential candidates for not offering his own objections.

Bush, the unannounced front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, told the Washington Post that the Iran- contra hearings prove his integrity is beyond question in the scandal and said his judgment in the affair cannot be questioned because he was “denied information” about the operation.

“I’ve said all along I didn’t know about the diversion of funds, and I think people may now understand I was telling the truth,” Bush said in his first interview since the public hearings into the scandal ended Monday.

Bush said he was completely unaware that Shultz and Weinberger had waged a “raging fight” with National Security Council officials about the arms sales.

“I didn’t attend the meeting where that was brought up, apparently with great vehemence,” Bush said. “I was off at the Army-Navy football game” on Dec. 7, 1985, “and none of them ever came to me” to discuss their objections at other times, he added.

“If I’d . . . sat there and heard (Secretary of State) George Shultz and Cap (Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger) express it (opposition to the operations) strongly, maybe I would have had a stronger view,” Bush said.

“But when you don’t know something, it’s hard to react. . . . We were not in the loop.”

The vice president blamed the very congressional hearings that he praises for vindicating him for creating what he called the public’s “distorted view” that he “was lying.”

“They just kept pounding away that everything was wrong, everything was evil. . . , that the President must have known about the diversion of funds,” from his sale of U.S. arms to Iran to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, Bush said.