Clinton Confronts Issue of Avoiding Service : Military: He tells Legion he is patriotic and votes should not be based on the fact that he didn’t serve in Vietnam.

Seeking again to quell repercussions from his conduct during the divisive Vietnam War, Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton on Tuesday urged the nation’s veterans to cast their votes for the future and not let fester the issues of the past.

Clinton confronted the potential political fallout of his efforts to avoid military service before a group that had a vested interest--the American Legion--and portrayed himself as a patriotic public servant worthy of their support despite his actions as a college student in the late 1960s.

“You know that I never served in the military,” he said. “You know that I opposed the war in Vietnam.”

But, he added, “I . . . hope that you will not base your vote on the fact that I didn’t serve in Vietnam 23 years ago. This campaign must be decided on the future, on the issues.”

Clinton also asserted that his lack of military service should not disqualify him from becoming commander-in-chief, noting that such past presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan sent U.S. forces into battle without having served themselves.

“Every President in the last half-century has had to confront the fateful decision to send Americans into combat,” Clinton said. “I do not relish this prospect, but neither do I shrink from it.”

Clinton’s comments to the Legion, meeting here for its annual convention, came shortly after President Bush’s campaign launched a press release broadside aimed squarely at the Democrat’s much-publicized effort to keep himself out of the draft.

Bush, addressing the delegates before Clinton arrived, did not target the Arkansas governor by name. But he did invoke, in a silent comparison, his own service in World War II. Bush joined the Navy after his high school graduation, becoming at one point the youngest pilot in the service in that war.

The Bush campaign’s press release took a much sharper tone, resurrecting news articles published earlier this year when questions about Clinton’s draft record initially arose. The articles suggested contradictions in Clinton’s accounts of how he avoided going to Vietnam.

Clinton’s campaign staff said his speech to the conventioneers was meant to allow him to deal with Republican charges that, because of his actions, he is not fit to serve as commander-in-chief.

Clinton himself compared his appearance to then-candidate John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Assn., a much-publicized moment in that year’s presidential campaign where Kennedy told the group it should not oppose him because he was a Roman Catholic. Clinton also said he came to deliver “one final statement to set the record straight” on his conduct.

But he delivered no new information to clear up questions about his actions. And despite a promise last April to release his draft records, Clinton did not do so on Tuesday.

Nonetheless, he was greeted with repeated rounds of applause from the veterans, many of whom said Clinton’s lack of service would have no bearing on their vote.

“It was wise of him to talk about it here because it made him feel better,” said John Kirchen of Hancock, Wis., an undecided voter. “I wasn’t concerned about that issue before and I’m not concerned about it now.”

Much of the applause came as Clinton promised to provide veterans with health care, better funding for veterans’ hospitals, a full accounting of soldiers missing in the Vietnam conflict and job retraining for military personnel mustered out because of cutbacks in Defense Department spending.

But he returned, time and again, to the subject of his actions during the Vietnam War.

“I was never against the heroic men who served in that war,” said Clinton. “I honored your service then, and I honor it still.”

Clinton first dealt with the issue of his actions during the Vietnam era in February, after Arkansas officials suggested that he might have manipulated the Selective Service system to avoid the draft.

He became eligible for the draft on Aug. 19, 1964, when he turned 18, but was protected for nearly four years by the then-common undergraduate student deferment. He became eligible once again in the spring of 1968, when he graduated from Georgetown University, but he was not called into the service even though others younger than him were drafted.

In the summer of 1969, Clinton said, he came home from his first year of study at Oxford University in England and was prepared to be drafted “at any time.” In response to that threat, he agreed to join the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and was protected from several subsequent draft calls.

In the first draft lottery, conducted on Dec. 1, 1969, Clinton’s birth date was the 311th of the 366 dates pulled from a large bowl. Ultimately, no one with that high a draft number was called. Clinton declared in February that it was “simply a fluke” that he was not drafted.

That version of events held until April, when The Times published an account indicating that Clinton had, in fact, received a draft notice before he entered the ROTC program. The head of the ROTC program said Clinton had never told ROTC officials that he had received the draft notice--and that he would not have been accepted into the program had the truth been known.

Clinton then acknowledged for the first time that he received a draft notice. He said it came to him in the spring of 1969, while he was studying in England. Local draft board officials told him to ignore it because the date on which he was to report had already passed, he said.

A Clinton campaign official said later that the candidate was not sure, after all, whether the notice he received was an induction notice.

It was the discrepancies in Clinton’s remarks that drew the most attention in the Bush campaign press release.

The statement demanded that the Arkansas governor make clear once and for all whether he had received the notice from his draft board before seeking a deferment by joining the ROTC.

Fulwood reported from Chicago and Decker from Los Angeles. Also contributing to this story was Times staff writer Douglas Jehl.