Irvine : Former Aide Defends Quayle Against Attacks

In the wake of reports that Vice President Dan Quayle’s own staff was critical of him during the 1988 election campaign, his chief speech writer during that time defended Quayle in a speech in Irvine on Wednesday.

Kenneth L. Khachigian, 44, a San Clemente attorney, accused the authors of a new book of “selectively choosing comments, quotations and observations to confirm a pre-selected view” of the vice president.

The book, “Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988” by political journalists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, quotes former aides to President Bush and Quayle as making disparaging remarks about Quayle’s intelligence and political acumen.

At an Orange County meeting of the Town Hall of California, Khachigian said that in many policy areas Quayle’s “knowledge and depth of understanding were not only broad, but they were sophisticated, technical and perceptive.”

The book quotes Stuart Spencer, who was Quayle’s campaign manager, as saying he let Quayle scrap a prepared speech in Chicago and deliver his own rambling version so that the candidate would foul up publicly “and then we’ll own him again.”