NATION : Atwater Faints While Speaking During Fund-Raising Breakfast

Lee Atwater, chairman of the Republican National Committee, fainted while speaking at a fund-raising breakfast today and was rushed to a local hospital, a spokeswoman said.

Atwater, 39, recovered immediately after he collapsed at the podium, said Leslie Goodman, RNC communications director.

Atwater, just back from the West Coast where he accompanied President Bush to several GOP fund-raisers, recently has been on a special liquid diet. One aide said Atwater had been using a diet food sold in powder form in grocery and drug stores and designed to be mixed with milk. Goodman said, however, that Atwater is not now on a diet and that she does not believe it was a factor in his collapse.

Goodman said Atwater was not a strict adherent of any diet. She said, however, that he had encouraged “everyone who wanted to” at the RNC to go on a voluntary diet. “It was Lee’s suggestion that we be lean and mean for the 1990s and that the only thing we were going to lose this year was weight.”