Political Scandals Brew--Is This Bush’s Watergate? : Politics: If these accusations of wide-ranging political skulduggery are true, the choice of Quayle begins to look like impeachment insurance.

Question: After what recent war did the Republicans in the White House, ready for a triumphant overhaul of U.S. politics and domestic policy, find themselves enmeshed in widening accusations of grand-scale political espionage and nervous defense of an embarrassing vice president?

Answer: After Vietnam, in early 1973. But perhaps also now, after the Gulf War. Therein lies one of the most fascinating “ifs” taking shape in the murk--and sleaze--of U.S. politics. The Gulf War, Vice President Dan Quayle and 1980 Iran “Hostagegate” situations throb with individual political importance but also the chance of a convergence could be the 1991-92 election season’s bombshell.

For now, contentions that senior officials of the 1980 Reagan-Bush presidential campaign conspired that summer and autumn with Iran to keep the 52 American hostages imprisoned until after November--thereby dooming Democrat Jimmy Carter’s reelection--don’t hold an evidentiary candle to Watergate. However, should proof start developing, the 1980 conspiracy accusations could threaten a major political and constitutional crisis--and besmirch not only Republican honor but also the GOP’s image of foreign-policy prowess and its political benefits from the Persian Gulf.

Quayle, of course, is no Spiro T. Agnew, who was forced to resign for corruption. But Quayle is not as popular as Richard M. Nixon’s vice president was back in 1970-71, and the current incumbent also faces a unique problem. Polls reveal that a huge majority of Americans are uncomfortable with Quayle becoming President, a majority believes he lacks the basic qualifications and a narrow majority wants him replaced.

That spells trouble for George Bush, who picked him, because no 20th-Century President has ever faced this steady second-guessing. Agnew’s scandal raised a different problem, as did Franklin D. Roosevelt’s need to replace Vice President Henry A. Wallace in 1944. Rank-and-file voters didn’t care much about Wallace, but Washington power brokers knew he was too much of a dewy-eyed liberal to be left in the presidential succession with the aging Roosevelt likely to die within a few years--as he did.

Bush, by contrast, is the first President to face what lopsided polls may make a test of prerogative. Is the vice presidency his to put in second-rate hands on a personal and electoral whim--or is it a national trust for the abuse of which he ought to be politically liable?

Historically, the answer is not clear. From roughly the 1820s through the 1940s, the vice presidency--dismissed by one occupant as “not worth a pitcher of warm spit”--routinely went to hacks, ticket-balancers or both. Background on William R. King, Charles W. Fairbanks and Hannibal Hamlin comes hard even to political historians.

If there had been polls before 1935, few samplers would have bothered to ask “Do you think Vice President Hamlin is qualified to be President?” But over the last 40 years, because the importance of the vice presidency has mushroomed, such questions are asked. Quayle is the first vice president to be conspicuously failing, and Bush may be the first President to face the consequent challenge: If this office is so important, why did you pick him?

Bush’s first line of defense is already evident: rebutting the premise by asserting Quayle is a stand-out choice under unfair attack. A secondary defense is that, in picking Quayle, Bush was sincerely gesturing to the next generation.

A minor problem comes if Bush chose Quayle in part because he wanted a nobody--to avoid someone with independent stature. And the biggest problem comes if Bush, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was influenced by the thought that if some revelation about the Iran-Contra scandal, a Noriega drug-money link or some other possibly impeachable secret dealing ever came to light, Congress would shrink from any action to install J. Danforth Quayle--familiar to both houses as a lightweight Indiana congressman and a not-quite-average senator--as President.

This has been an off-and-on wisecrack since 1988--dismissed because no one can ever know what Bush thought. But several U.S. senators privately cited the not-making-Quayle-President angle in 1989, after backing off from hard-ball pursuit of Bush on Iran-Contra while grilling his former national-security adviser, Donald P. Gregg in nomination hearings for U.S. ambassador to South Korea. Moreover, an ex-CIA director--and Bush is the first to be President--can be presumed to have internalized some deviousness everyone else just reads about in spy thrillers.

What’s pumped new life into an old cynicism are the recent resurfacing of charges that the 1980 Reagan-Bush presidential campaign--specifically future CIA Director William J. Casey--conspired with the radical Iranian government, promising them future arms for keeping the U.S. hostages through the November election rather than releasing them and possibly ensuring Carter’s re-election. Bush has angrily denied charges he was personally involved. However, those alleging the conspiracy--from ex-Carter White House aide Gary G. Sick to former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr--counter that Bush still refuses to deny any conspiracy took place.

The proof is mostly circumstantial. But so was the Watergate affair 18 years ago, before a special prosecutor and congressional hearings geared up. An optimistic minority of Democrats now see potential, at very least, for a major embarrassment to the GOP and, at most, for a second Watergate. But pessimistic Democrats may be correct to worry they’re biting off more than they can chew.

First, Democrats probably won’t be able to find out what happened back in 1980--and possibly in 1985-86, if the Iran-Contra mess is tied in--without a major congressional investigation, for which they may not have the political nerve. Eighteen years ago, the Democratic Party was only beginning its decline into current-day spinelessness. Turning Watergate into impeachment was an institutional counterattack by people who still knew how to use a bayonet. Today’s Democratic congressional leadership, by contrast, practices the political equivalent of crocheting.

Second, back in Watergate days, the Nixon Administration and the CIA were mutually suspicious, despite both having fingerprints on Watergate. From White House Chief of Staff H.R. Halderman to Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, senior Republicans even suspected the CIA was involved in setting them up. This time, with Democrats investigating possible 1980 conniving by a former CIA director (Bush) and a future CIA director (Casey), the agency would almost certainly line up with its close ally in the White House.

The final, eerie parallel is that just as Watergate was, in a sense, a fight over whether Republicans or Democrats would pay politically for Vietnam, resolution of the 1980 “Hostagegate” possibility could be a key to the continuing political evolution of the Persian Gulf War. Back in March, buoyant Republicans said the bombs that crippled Saddam Hussein’s armies also smashed the “Vietnam Syndrome.” But Democrats could yet turn the Gulf War into a political cancer for the GOP by displacing the glory of high-tech military success with a decade of secret, sleazy GOP dealings with Iran and Iraq.

Indeed, “Hostagegate” could build on what’s already a long and powerful tradition of revisionist political reinterpretation of U.S. wars. Four times before, the party in the White House when a war started paid a political price when public opinion later soured. The Democrats lost the White House in 1920, after World War I. They lost Congress in 1946, after World War II; they lost the presidency in 1952, while the Korean War was bogged down, and finally lost the White House again in 1968, partly because of voter anger over the quagmire in Vietnam.

Even the military victories of the two world wars were no protection against “losing the peace” in ensuing diplomatic and political decisions, and some of this has recurred following Bush’s failure to unseat Hussein or save the Kurds. In early March, one poll showed a 55%-38% majority of Americans called the Gulf result a U.S. victory despite Hussein staying in power. But by mid-April, a 55% majority said, with Hussein still in power, it was not a victory.

If that taints U.S. victory--imagine the public’s reaction if the 1980-90 period turns out to be a seamless web of GOP secret Middle East dealings, first with the government of Iran in 1980 to delay U.S. hostage release, then in the Iran-Contra situation and more recently--as the Financial Times and ABC News are reporting--over secret, late-’80s funding that helped Baghdad build its illegal arms network.

It may be a long shot, but backstage events in the Middle East--and what Bush knew about them--could dramatically rewrite the ’92 political campaign.