Clinton Denies Lobbying Effort to Delay Induction : Draft: Angry candidate says uncle didn’t organize drive. ‘There’s no facts, no evidence,’ he adds.

After spending most of his day trying to focus on other issues, Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton Wednesday night angrily denied that his uncle had mounted an organized effort to keep him from being drafted during the Vietnam War.

Breaking a daylong silence about the story published in Wednesday’s editions of the Los Angeles Times, Clinton told reporters that the lobbying effort “never happened.” He blamed the story on Arkansas Republicans and denounced reporters for asking him questions on the subject.

“There’s no facts, no evidence, no nothing” to support the report of the lobbying effort, the Arkansas governor said. “All of the principals are not living. And none of them--the people who are living say that no inappropriate influence was ever exercised. . . . There is no evidence of anything here, and yet you keep asking me this and it’s amazing to me.”

Clinton made the comments as he left a late-night gathering here of Latino leaders. As he moved away from reporters, the governor heatedly demanded that an aide try to bring an end to questions on the subject.

“Our story was based on interviews with several persons who have knowledge of Clinton’s draft situation during 1968, including one who described his own participation in the lobbying effort and one who was a member of Clinton’s draft board,” said Norman C. Miller, national editor of The Times.

Throughout most of Wednesday, Clinton had been refusing to comment on The Times’ story, which was based on the recollections of four people familiar with Clinton’s draft status in 1968-’69 and Selective Service documents from that period.

Clinton, who was a student at Oxford University in England during the period in question, has long maintained that he never received, nor sought, any unusual or favorable treatment from Arkansas draft officials.

But The Times’ story reported there is evidence the candidate benefited from a concerted lobbying campaign orchestrated by an uncle, Raymond Clinton, to delay his nephew’s military induction through the draft. The late uncle was a car dealer in Hot Springs, Ark.

According to Henry M. Britt, the uncle’s attorney who said he assisted in the lobbying effort, it included arranging the offer of a Navy reserve assignment, created especially for Bill Clinton at a time when there were no openings in the local reserve unit. Clinton ultimately did not accept the Navy offer. He joined--and then quit--a Reserve Officer Training Corps program, then received a draft lottery number high enough to keep him out of the war.

The lobbying for the Navy reserve slot was part of a larger effort that appeared to have enabled Clinton to complete his first year at Oxford despite lacking the protection of a formal draft deferment, The Times reported.

According to Selective Service records, Clinton’s pre-induction physical was put off for 10 1/2 months after he was classified 1-A, or available for the draft. His physical was delayed more than twice as long as anyone else registered with his local draft board and more than five times as long as most, according to the records.

None of the actions taken on Clinton’s behalf were illegal; indeed, many in his generation undertook efforts to avoid service in the unpopular war. But questions about Clinton’s case have plagued him in the current campaign because the candidate’s chronology of the events involving his draft status has differed from the recollections of others and from government records.

Aides to Clinton indicated that in their view, the new controversy would blow over if he withheld comment. One aide dismissed Britt--the attorney for Clinton’s uncle--as a “Republican hack.” Britt ran unsuccessfully for governor of Arkansas in 1960 as a Republican.

President Bush’s campaign attempted to fan the controversy Wednesday, releasing a written statement from Dominic DiFrancesco, past national commander of the American Legion. “Regardless of one’s views about the war or the draft, don’t the American people deserve the truth on these important issues?” the statement asked.

And Vice President Dan Quayle, campaigning in Kansas City, said Clinton “has a credibility problem. He is going to have to come clean with the American people and answer the questions.”

Referring to questions that four years ago surrounded his actions during the Vietnam era, Quayle said: “I chose to serve in the Indiana National Guard. I answered all the questions the media put to me in 1988. . . . Bill Clinton is going to have to answer those questions, too.”

Clinton’s late-night denial came after a day in which the candidate tried to ignore the renewed controversy and, in the parlance of politics, stay on his message. To that end, he repeatedly bashed Bush on the issue of education.

Before several hundred fans at a junior college in suburban Washington, D.C., Clinton excoriated the President for his education policies and promised the nation’s schools would receive an infusion of cash if he reaches the White House.

Much as he had on Tuesday, when Clinton scolded Bush for what he said were plans to balance the federal budget partially through cuts in Medicare payments to elderly recipients, Clinton sought to depict the President as a threat to everyday Americans.

“Do we want to stay with trickle-down economics for four more years, or do we believe that there is nothing wrong with the American Dream--it hasn’t failed--but these policies have and we’ve got to change them?” Clinton asked as he stood surrounded by students at Montgomery College.

He added: “I very much want this election to be about the education of our children and our adults. I wake up every day thinking about things that I don’t think cross this Administration’s mind, except at election time.”

Clinton received repeated rounds of applause from his audience, the biggest of which greeted his vow to initiate a student loan program that would allow any student to borrow money for college from the government. The loan would be paid back either through deductions of future income or by performing one to two years of community service at a reduced salary.

“We can change the whole face of America with the brightest Americans giving two years of their lives to building this country,” said Clinton, who has been touting the plan since his announcement for the presidency.

Going after Bush with vigor, Clinton accused the President of being insensitive to the financial straits in which college students and their families find themselves.

“After a decade in which tuition costs are the only basic in the family’s marketbasket of economic needs that went up faster than health care, this President has tried to cut back on grants and loans that helped millions of young people from poor and middle-class families,” he said.

He also blasted Bush for trying “to change the law so that if you make $10,000 a year, you’re too rich for a college grant from the federal government.”

The Bush Administration actually has called for an increase in funding for student loans accompanied by a cutback in grants. But Bush’s proposals have been blocked in Congress.

And responding to Clinton, the Bush campaign issued a statement by Education Secretary Lamar Alexander that accused the Democrat of playing “fast and loose with the facts.”

Clinton again dwelled on the education theme in a speech Wednesday evening before the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a nonpartisan public policy group. He also pledged that as President, he would achieve greater ethnic diversity among federal judges. He said he would appoint a federal bench that “will look more like America” than is presently the case.