Quayle Works on Talk to Guard Veterans as He Prepares for Solo Campaign Swing

Embattled Republican vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle prepared for his first solo campaign swing today which he hopes will demonstrate that he has weathered the worst of the controversy about his military service.

The 41-year-old Indiana senator Tuesday closeted himself in his suburban Washington home, where he worked with a speech writer and his research chief roughing out the standard stump speech he plans to unveil on the three-state hop through the Midwest.

On the schedule is an address tonight in St. Louis to a meeting of National Guard veterans, an audience virtually sure to be sympathetic to Quayle’s side of a controversy swirling around his 1969 entry into the Indiana National Guard during the height of the Vietnam War.

Influential Family

Quayle, a military hard-liner plucked from relative obscurity only last week to be the running mate of Vice President George Bush, has been plagued ever since by reports that he may have used the clout of the influential Pulliam publishing family that he comes from to gain a slot in the Guard and considerably reduce his risk of being sent into combat.

During the Vietnam era, Guard units were rarely activated into the regular military and sent overseas. Quayle enlisted in his state’s Guard in May of 1969, just before he would be graduated from DePauw University and automatically lose his student draft deferment.

Quayle has acknowledged that he sought help in gaining entry into the Guard from Wendell Phillippi, a former high-ranking Guard official who at the time was managing editor of an Indianapolis newspaper owned by Quayle’s family. But Quayle, a leading Senate hawk on defense matters, has also insisted that no strings were pulled or undue pressure used on his behalf.

Guard Understrength

His version of events got a boost Tuesday as officials in Indiana denied a published report that a special slot was created to accommodate Quayle because the state Guard was overstaffed in mid-1969 and enlistments frozen. On the contrary, Guard officials told reporters in Indiana, the Indiana Guard was slightly under its authorized strength at the time Quayle joined up.

Although state archives indicated that the Indiana Guard as a whole was above its authorized strength in mid-1969, the records also indicated that staffing levels varied widely from month-to-month in certain Guard units--including the one that Quayle joined.

Capt. Cathi Kiger, a Guard spokesman, told the Associated Press that Quayle’s unit had only 132 men in it during the month he enlisted--six understrength.

“I can find no evidence that he was given special consideration and there was no need,” Kiger said. “Units that were not up to 100% strength could continue to recruit.”

Tells of Request

Another Guard official, Maj. Gen. Alfred Ahner, told reporters that he fielded a recommendation on Quayle’s behalf from a Pulliam family employee and then contacted the Guard’s personnel office.

“They said they had a couple of spaces,” Ahner was quoted as saying. “I said, ‘Hold one of them, there’s a good guy coming over.’ . . . I couldn’t have done a thing . . . if there hadn’t been a vacancy.”

In a hastily arranged appearance Monday night, Quayle emphatically declared before a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Chicago that his entry into the Guard was on the up-and-up and he did not benefit from any special treatment. Dave Prosperi, a Quayle spokesman, said the enthusiastic response that the senator received from the veterans’ group proved that “we’ve more than turned the corner” on the Guard controversy.

Copies of Records

Responding to press queries, Quayle promised last Saturday to release copies of his military records once they could be retrieved from Guard files. On Tuesday, Quayle’s Senate office distributed 47 pages of those records, virtually all of which were illegible and unreadable. Brose McVey, a special assistant to the senator, said the copies were made from microfiched records which were themselves hard to decipher.

Also on Tuesday, Playboy magazine said Paula Parkinson, a former lobbyist at the center of a seamy Washington sex scandal who had posed nude for the magazine, has accused Quayle of making a pass at her during a 1980 Florida golf outing.

In 1981, the FBI investigated the relationship between Parkinson and three congressmen--including Quayle--who shared a cottage with the woman for a weekend and later voted to oppose a crop insurance bill that Parkinson had lobbied against.

All Exonerated

All three were eventually exonerated of any wrongdoing by investigators, although Reps. Tom Evans (R-Del.) and Tom Railsback (R-Ill.) were subsequently defeated for reelection. At the time, Parkinson had claimed to have had an affair with Evans, but she had never publicly implicated Quayle--who has been married since 1972--of any sexual wrongdoing.

“He wanted to, but I was there as Tom Evans’ date,” the magazine said Parkinson would be quoted as saying in its upcoming November issue. “We flirted a lot and danced extremely close and suggestively. He said he wanted to make love.”

Responding to a similar newspaper report Tuesday, in which former attorneys for Parkinson said she had told FBI investigators in 1981 that Quayle had propositioned her on the Florida trip, Quayle said:

“That is just an absolute, flat-out falsehood. 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.

‘Totally Untrue’

“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,” he said.

Jerris Leonard, a Washington attorney who represented Parkinson on business matters during the early 1980s, said both she and her former husband, Hank, had discussed with him in great detail all the men with whom she had relationships.

“I am confident that, if she had any relationship with Quayle, even if he had once made a pass at her, that would have been mentioned,” said Leonard, once an assistant attorney general in the Richard M. Nixon Administration. “But there was never even a mention of Quayle in this respect.”