CAMPAIGN ’88 : A Carter Connection?

The bad old days of the Administration of President Jimmy Carter--particularly 21.5% interest rates and high inflation--have become a campaign theme of Vice President George Bush lately. But Democrats contend that the Republican candidate once vigorously sought to become part of that Administration.

The charge resurfaced this week when Robert S. Strauss, the Democratic Party elder from Texas, told reporters that Bush, when he visited the President-elect to brief him on intelligence matters “instead spent the whole half-hour trying” to retain his job as CIA director. Jody Powell, press secretary in the Carter White House, confirmed the allegation, saying: “I don’t know if he spent the whole time on it, but he asked for the job.”

Adm. Stansfield Turner, who got the CIA directorship in the Carter Administration, made the original disclosure last year, asserting that Bush had asked to continue in the post to which he had been named by former President Gerald R. Ford, even promising to sacrifice future bids for political office if he were retained.

At the time of Turner’s charge, a Bush spokesman at first denied the story and then conceded that “what was expressed was a willingness to stay on if the president-elect found it to be useful.”