General Had No Hint of Father’s SS Past : Military: Nominee for Joint Chiefs chairman tells Senate panel he was shocked, saddened to learn of it. Senators do not see obstacle to confirmation.

With the pain apparent in his voice, Gen. John Shalikashvili, President Clinton’s nominee to succeed Colin L. Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators at his confirmation hearing Wednesday that he “never had the slightest hint” his father served in an army unit commanded by the dreaded Nazi Waffen SS during World War II.

Although he knew that his father served in an expatriate unit of the German army during the war, the Polish-born Shalikashvili said he only recently learned of the SS association from his father’s own writings and had been shocked and “deeply saddened” by it.

Expressing sympathy, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee made it clear that his father’s past would be no impediment to Shalikashvili’s confirmation as Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman. It would be “grossly unfair” and “un-American . . . to judge you by anything your father may have done,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) told the general.

But while the senators’ comments signaled that Shalikashvili would be easily confirmed, Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) indicated that approval may be delayed until the Senate acts on the confirmation of the general’s successor as North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander--a post for which the Administration has yet to choose a nominee.

Nunn said that, given the continuing fighting in Bosnia and the swiftly escalating political crisis in Russia, it might be wiser to keep Shalikashvili in his current post as supreme allied commander in Europe until a successor is confirmed. Adm. David Jeremiah, the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would in this case temporarily succeed Powell as acting chairman if a new NATO commander is not ready to be confirmed before Powell retires Sept. 30.

“We’re going to have to decide whether we’re better off not having someone in NATO . . . or whether we’re better off having Adm. Jeremiah run the Joint Chiefs for what I hope will be only a few days,” Nunn said as Shalikashvili nodded his head in agreement.

In response to questions, Shalikashvili said that the latest information available to the Pentagon from Moscow does not suggest that the Russian military is about to take sides in the constitutional crisis now unfolding between Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and hard-liners in the Parliament he dissolved shortly before it voted to impeach him.

“For the moment, it appears like (Russian Defense Minister Pavel S.) Grachev is trying to keep the military neutral in this, in what he considers a purely political matter,” Shalikashvili said, adding that there are no indications of abnormal troop movements.

However, the 57-year-old general also said that the real “danger” lies in the possibility that lower-level military commanders could begin to take sides if the crisis persists, resulting in “the sort of unraveling effect that ought to give us all great, great concern.”

If that should happen, he added in response to other questions, a “nightmare scenario” could begin to unfold in which the democratic forces in Russia are suppressed and there is a “breakdown of control” over Russia’s nuclear weapons.

That possibility, more than whatever unfolds in Bosnia, is “my greatest concern at the moment,” Shalikashvili told the senators.

Shalikashvili also said that he supports sending U.S. troops to Bosnia to help enforce any peace agreement but noted that such an operation would be costly.

Although he was well received--and lauded for his skillful command of the immense operation to resettle and care for Kurdish refugees in Iraq after the Persian Gulf War--Shalikashvili initially faced questions about his father’s wartime past and whether he knew about, but sought to suppress, the elder Shalikashvili’s SS connection.