Bush Says Reported Probe by Perot Is Not ‘American’ : Politics: President goes on the attack in a “20/20” interview. He says the public will reject the alleged tactic of delving into his children’s lives.

President Bush, continuing an escalating attack on Ross Perot, said Monday that Perot’s reported investigations of him in 1987 and 1988 were “not very pleasant” and not “particularly American.”

Responding to a report in the Washington Post, the President said: “It’s fine to investigate on one’s own the vice president.” But if the reports were true that Perot had investigated his children, “I feel a little tense about it.”

“I don’t think that’s particularly American,” he said at a late afternoon appearance. “I don’t like what I see.”

In a taping for the ABC-TV news show “20/20,” Bush said that if Perot “was having my children investigated, that is beyond the pale. Leave my kids alone, I say. They’re good, honest boys . . . and a good, honest girl.

“I am sick about it, if it is true, and I think the American people will reject that kind of tactic,” Bush said for the broadcast, which will be aired Friday.

The Post reported in its Sunday editions that Perot, apparently seeking to embarrass Bush, had approached the newspaper when Bush was vice president with information from a series of inquiries into Bush’s financial dealings.

In one of the investigations, in 1987, Perot and his campaign chairman, lawyer Tom Luce, paid a Washington law firm $10,000 to investigate a $48-million federal tax break obtained by Pennzoil. The oil company’s chairman, J. Hugh Liedtke, was a Bush business partner in the 1950s, and the newspaper quoted Perot as saying he believed the investigation might disclose a “mini-Teapot Dome” scandal.

The newspaper also reported that Perot had once warned Bush that a private eye had told him that two of his four sons might be engaged in improper activity.

Perot had told Bush that a Florida investigator had told him that one Bush son had visited a known gun smuggler, the newspaper said. Bush responded with a note: “They are all straight arrows, uninvolved in intrigue.”

The Post said that in its own checking, it could never find any evidence that Bush had been guilty of anything improper.

In the “20/20” broadcast, the President also denied that Perot had told him in 1986, as Perot has reportedly claimed, “This world is full of lions and tigers and rabbits. And you’re a rabbit.” The Post said Perot had told several people of this alleged exchange.

James Squires, Perot’s press secretary, said Monday that the inquiries were initiated when Bob Woodward, an editor at the Washington Post, had called Perot in 1988 in the course of his investigation of Bush’s personal finances. “It was Woodward’s investigation, not Perot’s,” Squires said.

Separately, presidential Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said Monday that Perot had told him in 1987 that he would “get” ABC-TV newsman Sam Donaldson unless Fitzwater could persuade Donaldson to retract a story about how the White House had snubbed Perot.

Donaldson’s Feb. 11, 1987, story had said the White House had declined Perot’s request to name him special U.S. emissary to Vietnam on the issue of American GIs still missing in action.

Perot “called me from his airplane, just out of the blue,” Fitzwater told reporters at the daily White House briefing. “It scared me to death.”

Fitzwater said he had interpreted the call as “threatening,” but had told Perot: “I don’t control the network news.”

Bush, a former CIA chief, had special responsibility on the MIA issue during the Ronald Reagan Administration, and had repeatedly clashed with Perot on the subject.

Perot was given special White House clearance in the mid-1980s to review secret documents on the MIA issue, in hopes he would be able to uncover evidence that some soldiers remained alive. But Perot had been frustrated with a lack of progress, and had quarreled with some POW/MIA advocates and Reagan Administration officials on the subject.

In an interview, Donaldson said his story reported that Perot had visited Donald T. Regan, then White House chief of staff, but had been rebuffed in his request to be named special emissary. Amid Perot’s battles with others involved in the issue, the White House decided: “If you want to go to Hanoi, we’re not going to stop you--but we’re not going to make you a special emissary,” Donaldson recalled.

He said that far from threatening him, Perot had called him to complain about “what a bunch of bums the White House guys were.”

Times staff writer John M. Broder in Dallas contributed to this story.