Atwater Termed ‘Amoral’ at U.S. Mayors’ Conference

Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater came under intense attack at the U.S. Conference of Mayors on Tuesday, with New York’s Democratic mayor denouncing him as “amoral” and a “pathological” liar.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Ron Brown said his GOP counterpart has “taken politics to the lowest level of my lifetime.”

New York Mayor Edward I. Koch said: “(Atwater) may be the best hired gun in the world, but he carries with him all of the things that America hates, which is low-level, disgusting tactics . . . vile things.”

The Democrats took aim at Atwater one day after the Republican chairman startled some mayors with a sharply partisan speech in which he said he wanted to recruit black mayoral candidates and that the GOP would try to establish a “political beachhead” in the cities by defeating Koch this year.

Some members of Atwater’s party expressed regret at his remarks. Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut, a Republican, said: “I was embarrassed and disappointed.”

The mayors usually play down overt partisanship at their annual conference, but it overshadowed other activities here in the fourth day of the five-day meeting, which is to adjourn today.

An aide to Atwater who attended the meeting, Marcy O’Boyle, said that Atwater had no comment on the criticism.

Koch, who arrived Tuesday, said that “there’s nothing wrong” with the Republicans’ trying to unseat him, but he noted that GOP mayors had told him they were embarrassed that Atwater had used the conference for such a speech.

Koch then referred to the recent Republican National Committee memo that was seen by many to contain homosexual innuendo about House Speaker Thomas S. Foley. An Atwater aide resigned over the incident, and Atwater denied that he had known about the memo.

“When Lee Atwater, according to the President, comes into the President’s office and looks him in the eye and says, ‘I didn’t do it,’ when you have a person of the background and record of Lee Atwater, you know that they are pathological,” Koch said.

“And someone who is capable of doing what he has done can lie with a lie detector, because they are amoral. That’s the only word to describe it,” Koch added.

Brown, the Democratic chairman, addressed the gathering of more than 200 mayors. He made a partisan strike at Atwater in lamenting the decline of federal spending on social problems during the Ronald Reagan Administration.