Reagan Now Says Bork Replacement Will Be ‘as Qualified’

President Reagan on Thursday backed away from his vow to make opponents of Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert H. Bork “object . . . just as much” to Bork’s replacement, saying he meant only that, if the Senate rejects Bork, he “will try to find somebody that is as qualified” to replace him.

The Senate plans to vote on Bork at 11 a.m. PDT today. Fifty-five Senators have announced that they will vote against the nominee. Forty-two have said they will support him, and three have not yet taken positions.

Bork supporters, who have delivered a lengthy series of speeches supporting the nominee and attacking his opponents, announced Thursday that they would end their efforts at Bork’s request. The controversial federal appeals court judge met Thursday afternoon with a leading supporter, Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), and asked that the Senate not “protract or prolong” debate, Simpson said. “He wanted to express that he hoped you could conclude.”

Decries ‘Political Contest’

Reagan, in his press conference, repeated his criticism of the “politicization” of the nomination process, saying “we must all make sure that never again does this process . . . turn into a political contest, as if people were voting on it.”

But, reflecting a White House strategy of trying to prevent confrontations that might damage the prospects of the next nominee, Reagan avoided the harsh criticism of Bork’s Senate opponents that he had used last week, along with the vow he made early last week to find a new nominee “they will object to just as much” as Bork.

Simpson’s unexpected announcement of an end to the Bork debate came immediately after Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), one of the few senators who had not announced his position before the debate began, became the 55th to say he would vote against confirmation.

“America simply cannot afford to refight the civil rights battles of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s,” Nunn said, adding that he could not be sure whether, if Bork were on the court, he would follow the views he expressed in his confirmation hearings or whether he would return to positions he espoused in the past, which included opposition to several major civil rights advances.

Sens. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), John C. Stennis (D-Miss.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.) have not yet announced their positions, although Proxmire said during debate Thursday that “there are elements in his (Bork’s) background that trouble me.”

Simpson said Bork had asked him to relay to the Senate that he “deplores” advertisements by his supporters targeted against senators who had opposed his nomination.

Bork, who had refused to seek withdrawal of his nomination because he wanted the issues to be debated with “lower voices,” said the negative ads were “ ‘not the kind of debate I wanted,’ ” Simpson said. “ ‘I’m appalled by it.’ ”

Simpson said that Bork deplores those ads “just as he deplores the negative ads directed against him.”

“There has been zealotry across the entire spectrum,” Simpson said.

During the second day of debate Thursday, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) warned that Bork’s expected rejection will lead Reagan to nominate a less “brilliant” candidate who has written less and is not on the cutting edge of legal thought.

Gramm contended that the controversies Bork’s positions have generated could also induce “our best minds not to enter into debate about the most important issues” facing the nation.

Such results, Gramm said during the second day of Senate debate on Bork’s nomination, would be “a tragedy,” making all Americans “losers in the end.”

Acknowledges ‘Distortion’

Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) acknowledged that both sides in the Bork fight have engaged in “distortion and exaggeration.” But he contended that the “raw politics” now being waged do not compare with what took place during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s last year in office, when 19 GOP senators--including then-Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, now the White House chief of staff--pledged to oppose any Supreme Court nominee Johnson chose.

The sharply different assessments of the confirmation process came as Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N. H.) departed from the Senate’s practice of avoiding personal attacks on members and lambasted Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), one of Bork’s most outspoken critics.

Humphrey quoted one of Kennedy’s anti-Bork speeches and labeled it a “demagogic, irresponsible, unfounded and unfair statement” that played “a pivotal part in the smear of Judge Bork.”

Humphrey, decrying the “lynch-mob tactics employed by many of the Bork opponents,” accused “many of the leaders of black organizations in the country” of having “intimidated their membership into opposing Judge Bork” by creating “an atmosphere of fear, of hysteria” over Bork’s past opposition to civil rights legislation.

Humphrey’s statements drew sharp retorts from Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), a leading Bork opponent, and Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is an insult to the memory” of thousands of blacks who were lynched in the United States to make such “cavalier use of this sort of language,” King said in a statement that Metzenbaum quoted.

Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) joined in the escalating debate by defending actor Gregory Peck against charges by several pro-Bork senators that Peck “lied” in an anti-Bork television advertisement.

Noting that Peck had received the nation’s highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom, Cranston said the actor “is a patriotic American whose integrity has never been questioned.” Cranston said that he spoke with Peck on Wednesday about the television spot he had narrated for People for the American Way, a liberal group leading the fight against Bork’s Senate confirmation.

“He asked that I make it clear to the Senate that he had personally read the material documenting the charges before he made the TV spot, and that he made the spot only because he was convinced that it was a fair statement of Judge Bork’s record and positions,” Cranston said.