Quayle Calls New Charges ‘Outrageous Outright Lies’

Republican vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle today denounced as “outrageous” new allegations about his entry into the National Guard and his involvement with a woman lobbyist.

Quayle, preparing for his first solo campaign trip, said voters “want to know about the issues. They are not interested in a bunch of rumor and gossip and half-truths and, a matter of fact, what we just said today, outright lies.”

“This is just getting a little bit outrageous and I’m getting a little bit indignant about just one bum rap after another,” Quayle told reporters outside his home in McLean, Va.

Quayle denied using his family’s influence to get into the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War.

‘No Influence Used’

“There was no influence used,” Quayle said. “I didn’t have to use any influence because before I applied there were openings, when I applied there were openings and after I applied there were openings. Those are the facts.”

But a retired Indiana guard official acknowledged today that he asked the Guard personnel office to hold open a space for Quayle after receiving a call from a Quayle family employee in 1969.

Retired Maj. Gen. Alfred Ahner, former military support officer for Indiana and later head of the state’s National Guard, said he was contacted by an old friend, Wendell Phillippi, a retired Guard commander who then worked for a newspaper owned by Quayle’s family.

‘Had a Good Man’

“Wendell Phillippi had called and said he had a good man, and said he thought he’d make a good guardsman,” Ahner said in a telephone interview from Indiana. “That’s when I went over to personnel. . . . I asked if they had any spaces for a good man.

“They said they had a couple spaces. I said hold one of them, there’s a good guy coming over.”

Quayle’s campaign aides distributed an Aug. 19 statement from the Indiana National Guard that said Quayle’s unit “had vacancies the month before, the month of and the month after the senator’s enlistment.” Guard records, however, said the Indiana National Guard had an “over-strength of 52” people on June 30, 1969--a month after Quayle joined.

Proposition Story

Quayle today also denounced as “an absolute, flat-out falsehood” a report by two attorneys for former lobbyist Paula Parkinson that he propositioned her during a 1980 Florida golfing vacation, but that she rebuffed him.

“I had nothing to do with her down there. I had nothing to do with her before, and I had nothing to do with her afterwards. I think y’all are going to have to be a little bit careful about this, because it’s totally untrue. I’ve got a wife and three small children, and I hope there’s some respect and dignity for things I did not do before we go rushing off with all these so-called rumors.”

The Daily News of Los Angeles quoted the lawyers as saying that Parkinson told the FBI that Quayle propositioned her when Quayle--then a congressman--and two other legislators shared a cottage during the trip.