Wilson Urges Reagan, Critics to Lower Tone in Arms Pact Debate

Republican Sen. Pete Wilson jumped into the middle of a dispute Friday between President Reagan and some conservatives over the proposed missile treaty that Reagan expects to sign with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev next week.

Wilson, who is up for reelection next year, said in a television show taping in Los Angeles that “both sides (Reagan and the conservatives) would do well to take the time to read the treaty and to analyze and debate it and not engage in this kind of knee-jerk reaction.”

The state’s junior U.S. senator was referring to a dispute that broke out Friday after Reagan said in an interview with network anchormen Thursday night: “I think that some of the people who are objecting the most (to the treaty) . . . basically down in their deepest thoughts have accepted that war is inevitable and that there must come to be a war between the two superpowers.”

Disagrees With President

Wilson said of Reagan’s statement: “I don’t agree with him. I think he went too far. There are a lot of people who have very realistic reservations (about the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty) who are not all for the inevitability of war. . . .”

Interviewed on the KNBC program “News Conference,” which will air at 10 a.m. Sunday, Wilson was asked if he planned to vote to ratify the INF treaty.

The senator replied, “I think there is much to recommend it but I haven’t read it. It is hundreds of pages long and if we have learned nothing else from the bitter experience we had with the ABM treaty 15 years ago, it is that the Senate did not do its job then. Nobody in the Senate looked at the negotiating record.”

On other matters, Wilson said he expected Federal Judge Anthony M. Kennedy of Sacramento to be confirmed for the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming months and noted that he had long ago recommended Kennedy to Reagan.

Still Supports Pardons

Asked about his statement some months ago that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and former National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter should be pardoned for acts they committed in the Iran-Contra scandal, Wilson stuck to his guns Friday. Unless North and Poindexter were convicted of actual crimes rather than “bad judgment,” he said, he thought a pardon should be considered for them.

“If we’re going to convict people for bad judgment,” Wilson said, “then we would have to lock up half of Congress.”

Asked if he favored the $23-billion tax increase that is included in the budget reduction package drawn up by the Administration and the Congress, Wilson said he did not like the tax increase, and if it were up to him he would make more domestic cuts in such programs as farm support. But he did not say how he would vote on the budget deficit reduction.