Bush’s Diary Reveals Iran-Contra Concerns : White House: Excerpts from President’s tapes express fears about his political future.

President Bush feared late in 1986 that his future bid to be President would be “damaged” by the Iran-Contra scandal, according to excerpts of a “political diary” that he taped then and partially released Friday.

The 45-page transcript of diary excerpts, while largely supporting Bush’s earlier statements that he was “out of the loop” on the Iran-Contra affair, gives an extraordinarily revealing glimpse of his thoughts and fears for his own political future as the enormity of the scandal became apparent.

At one point in the diary, which the then-vice president began keeping as he prepared to run for President, Bush expressed frustration that “the vice president has no power, and yet I am the one damaged.”

Bush failed to give Iran-Contra prosecutors the diary excerpts for more than five years because he was not aware of their request for all material he had that was relevant to the case, an attorney for the President said in a report that was released along with the excerpts.

At the same time, said the lawyer, former Atty. Gen. Griffin B. Bell, White House officials who had been aware of the request that Bush turn over materials related to Iran-Contra were not aware that he had kept the diary, which consisted of notes he dictated as vice president under Ronald Reagan.

The notes were discovered at the White House in September, Bell said, but were not disclosed to independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh until Dec. 11 because of the pressures of the presidential election campaign and because Walsh’s office had recently agreed to a similar delay on other material.

Bell’s comments are in a report to the President, written at Bush’s request and released by the White House. They offer the first public explanation for the President’s failure to comply with a request that Walsh made in 1987 for material relevant to the affair.

Mary Belcher, a spokeswoman for Walsh, criticized the diary release as “selective.”

The White House on Friday also released the transcript of a five-hour videotaped deposition taped on Jan. 11, 1988, which was long before many of the key facts of the Iran-Contra scandal were uncovered by Walsh’s investigators.

In it, Bush added little to what he had said publicly about his knowledge of the arms sales.

He contended that when he discovered that profits from the sales had been diverted to the Nicaraguan contras, “I felt like I had been hit in the gut.” The Iran-Contra affair involved the secret sale of U.S. arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages held by pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon.

Proceeds from the sales were diverted to the anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.

Bush has long contended that he was aware of the sale of arms and of efforts to secure release of the hostages, but said he was unaware the two initiatives were linked.

Walsh first disclosed the existence of Bush’s diary last Dec. 24, after Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra defendants. He contended Bush’s failure to submit the material in response to 1987 document requests constituted misconduct and vowed “appropriate action.”

“We have reviewed the report generated by the President’s lawyers and the selective release of his diaries,” Belcher said Friday. “Because our investigation is ongoing, we are not free to comment on the accuracy or the completeness of the report.”

Bell, in his report, said “there is no evidence that any intentional gaps existed” in the dictated tapes or transcripts. Walsh had complained in interviews last month that there were “gaps” in the diary and at least one of them matched a period of particularly “interesting” activity by prosecutors.

But Bell said Bush “did not dictate every day. . . .”

The report, prepared by Bell and five lawyers from his Atlanta law firm, said Bush began in early November, 1986, to regularly dictating his personal thoughts on running for the presidency in 1988. Intending the dictation to be “private, confidential and political in nature,” Bush arranged for the tapes to be transcribed by a “trusted employee” in his Houston office, and the transcripts were prepared by June 15, 1987, the report said.

On April 8, 1987, C. Boyden Gray, then chief counsel to the vice president, sent Bush’s staff a memo on producing documents for Walsh’s requests. The report said Bush has no recollection of ever reviewing the memo or any written document requests, and that no one recalls ever discussing the scope of Walsh’s request with him.

Although Bush “apparently was not aware of the request for diaries, even had he been aware . . . his present view is that he would not have believed that his dictation constituted a diary responsive to an Iran-Contra document request,” the report said.

The transcribed tapes went undiscovered until last Sept. 24 when a career White House employee, at Bush’s request, did an inventory of the contents of a safe in the White House residential quarters, reviewed the tapes and found discussions of Iran-Contra matters.

After highlighting relevant passages, she told Bush of them, but he said he did not believe they had any relevance to the Iran-Contra probe. The President then asked Gray to review them for relevance, according to the report.

Gray determined that the transcripts contained relevant information. But knowing that a June 30, 1992, document request had been postponed until after the election, “combined with the crush of the campaign and the need to interview individuals who might” know why the transcripts had not been found earlier, Gray “decided unilaterally not to raise the issue until after the election.”

On Dec. 1, nearly a month after the election, Gray raised the existence of the material with White House officials and they agreed to notify Walsh’s office as soon as the transcripts were reviewed.

Often in fractured syntax, the transcripts indicated that the diary had become a sort of therapy for Bush during the tense days as the full scope of Iran-Contra became clear.

Bush began the tape-recorded journal on Nov. 4, 1986, primarily, he said, as a means of recording his thoughts about his upcoming run for the White House. Ironically, that was the same month that the scandal burst into the news.

The following day, in his first direct reference to the unfolding controversy, Bush described himself confidently as “one of the few people that know fully the details,” and dismissed the early, sketchy details as “a lot of flack and misinformation out there.”

But by his final entry, a Christmas Eve rumination, he complained: “I am not in the decision process. . . . The facts are that the vice president is not in the decision-making loop.”

Bush’s entries indicate that his first direct warning the scandal was larger than he expected and could reflect upon him came in a conversation with former Secretary of State George Shultz on Nov. 9, 1986. Shultz complained that he himself “had felt cut out. . . . He feels that I’m in jeopardy myself. He thought he had heard me say something that later proved to be a lie, and his advice to me as a person interested in my future, ‘Don’t get involved in all this.’ ” Bush did not specify what that lie was.

On Nov. 24 of that year, the day he was informed by former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III that money from the Iranian arms sales had been diverted to the Contras, Bush worried: “It may get so bad--this, or the economy, or something--that I will cease to be a credible candidate.”

Throughout, Bush seemed haunted, even obsessed, by his memories of the Watergate scandal, during which he had been Republican Party chairman.

“I remember the way things oozed out,” he said. “It is important to level, to be honest, to be direct. We are not to say anything. The dam gates are open. . . . It really is hemorrhaging.”

On Dec. 1, during what he described as “a madhouse day at the office,” Bush even discussed his fears with former President Richard M. Nixon, and seemed reassured that Nixon “called the difference between this and Watergate (sic) ‘the tempest in the teapot.’ This is the teapot--interesting, interesting.”

Yet later that day, he said: “My mind goes back to the old Watergate days--rumor and innuendo. The President made a mistake which he never makes of this size.”

And still later: “We had a nice dinner for the staff, and we tried to tell them what it was like during Watergate days. That this was better--that we’d make it. That the President was telling the truth and that I must and will stay with the President. I know my staff is uneasy about this.”

Much of Bush’s account centers on the bitter squabbles and angry recriminations that erupted among then-National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, Shultz and former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan as they groped for a way out of the controversy.