Bush Raises Issue of Foe’s Patriotism : Politics: President questions Clinton’s Moscow trip as a student, anti-war activities. Aide to Democrat accuses Bush of ‘McCarthyite tactics.’

President Bush on Wednesday night called attention to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s conduct while a graduate student in England to question more directly than ever before the youthful patriotism of the man who is now his Democratic rival.

Joining in a chorus encouraged by his campaign, Bush said in a live interview with CNN’s Larry King that Clinton should “level” with Americans about the circumstances of a trip he made to Moscow while at Oxford University and about his role in leading anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in London.

“I cannot for the life of me understand mobilizing demonstrations and demonstrating against your own country, no matter how strongly you feel, in a foreign land,” Bush said.

Bush told King he found it peculiar that Clinton could not remember whom he spoke with during a trip to Moscow “one year after Russia crushed Czechoslovakia.” The reference was to the Soviet Union’s suppression of budding democracy.

The President was following the lead of Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), Bush’s California co-chairman, who has been charging for weeks that there was something sinister about Clinton’s Moscow trip. However, Dornan has admitted he has no proof, and Bush admitted the same thing Wednesday night, saying: “Larry, I don’t want to tell you what I really think, because I don’t have the facts.”

Clinton has said that he paid for the trip himself and found it interesting. He has also admitted participating in anti-war demonstrations, but denied being a top leader.

After the attack, a top Clinton aide accused Bush of resorting to “McCarthyite tactics” in a desperate act to salvage his troubled campaign. “It kind of turns your stomach,” said communications director George Stephanopoulos, “but it makes you believe your poll numbers.”

Stephanopoulos called Bush’s reference to the Moscow trip a “sad and pathetic ploy by a desperate politician. If he worried as much about what most Americans are going through in 1992 as he does about what Bill Clinton did in 1969, we’d all be in much better shape. He sees the writing on the wall.”

Bush made the charges in response to a question from talk-show host King about Clinton and Moscow. But the President was clearly prepared for the query, and at a time when he and aides have struggled to find an issue that might give him a much-needed boost, he showed no hesitation in opening the latest in what has been a series of wild-swinging attacks.

Sitting alongside this city’s famous Riverwalk, Bush said that he saw a “pattern” in Clinton’s trip to Moscow and his anti-war activities.

“What concerns me, and I really feel viscerally about this, is demonstrating about your country in a foreign land,” Bush said. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but to go to a foreign country and demonstrate when your sons and daughters are dying halfway around the world. . . . I think it is wrong.”

Bush raised the issue during an extraordinary interview in which he became the first President in 15 years to respond to questions from a call-in audience. In a session that King said was designed to humanize the presidency, the host even persuaded Bush to show off his Texas driver’s license and American Express card.

In focusing on Clinton’s travels and anti-war activities, Bush followed the path laid by Dornan, who has labeled Clinton’s visit to Moscow particularly suspicious in that it took place at the height of the Vietnam War. He has suggested that Clinton could have met with the KGB.

After first all but ignoring Dornan, the Bush campaign earlier Wednesday took up some of his charges in a written statement issued from its headquarters in Washington. “It is absolutely germane to the voting public to know precisely why Bill Clinton traveled to the heart of enemy territory at the height of war,” deputy campaign manager Mary Matalin said.

Clinton has readily acknowledged spending a week in Moscow over New Year’s Eve in 1969 as part of a 40-day tour of Europe that he made during a break from studies during his second year as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.

The Arkansas governor has also acknowledged that he opposed the Vietnam War and that he participated in anti-war demonstrations, including one held in late 1969 at the U.S. Embassy in London. A book published by the Rev. Richard McSorley, an anti-war activist, has described Clinton as one of the leaders of the demonstration.

But Clinton, asked about the issue on the “Donahue” show Tuesday, insisted that he was “not a big organizer of anti-war activities.”

The statement issued by the Bush campaign listed six questions it said 10 Republican congressmen had posed Wednesday in a letter to Clinton. The queries included who had sponsored and paid for the trip, and whether Clinton spoke with members of the Communist Party or Soviet government before or during the journey.

Bush’s attempt to draw implications from the visit appears to rest on the assumption that few Americans visited the Soviet Union in those days and that the cost would have been prohibitive for a student.

But travel guides of the time show that the barriers to traveling to Moscow were easing dramatically. Travel author Frank W. Rounds Jr. said in a magazine interview at the time that the Russian government was “putting on the most massive tourist drive imaginable.”

Rounds wrote that more than 40,000 Americans visited the Soviet Union in 1969, about double the number of the year before, and said the Soviet tourist agency Intourist was offering moderately priced packages in 1969 for $18.90 a day, including a hotel room and one meal.

The director of the largest U.S.-Soviet student exchange organization at the time said visits like Clinton’s were not unusual.

“It was difficult to go and stay for a long period, but it was quite ordinary to go in for a visit,” said Allen Kassof, former director of IREX, the International Relations Exchanges organization. “There were thousands who did that.”

Television viewers from Tokyo to Tampa, Fla., called into the King show to ask Bush pointed questions about government trade negotiators who become lobbyists for overseas firms, a point Ross Perot made in his 30-minute commercial on Tuesday night; Bush’s own avoidance of paying taxes in Maine; his stewardship of the economy; his opposition to homosexuals in the military and his truthfulness about the Iran-Contra affair.

“I think you are out of touch, I am not happy with you,” a caller from Tampa told the President on live television. “I’ll put you down as doubtful, fella,” Bush replied.

After the program, Bush expressed dismay to the audience about “the ugliness” of this political year.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this story.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in Kansas City, Mo.

President Bush campaigns in New Orleans and Houston.

Ross Perot has no public events scheduled.

TELEVISION

Clinton is on ABC’s “Good Morning America” at 7:30 a.m. PDT.