Inman Quits as Nominee for Defense Secretary Post : Cabinet: Ex-admiral blames press and politics for his withdrawal. Clinton apparently did not try to stop him.

Retired Navy Adm. Bobby Ray Inman abruptly withdrew Tuesday as President Clinton’s nominee for defense secretary, saying he had been troubled by attacks on his reputation and by “reports” that Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) was preparing to begin a campaign against him.

The surprise withdrawal stunned official Washington and the defense community. It left the White House scrambling to minimize political damage to the Administration and to find a new candidate for one of the government’s most important foreign policy posts.

Although aides said Clinton had known about Inman’s intentions for several days, they said he had made no real effort to persuade the admiral to stay on, apparently believing it would be fruitless.

Inman’s explanation came in a letter to the President and in an hourlong news conference from Austin, Tex., where he lives, that appeared to confuse Administration officials as well as those who the admiral said were attacking him excessively.

In a statement, Dole said he never opposed Inman’s nomination nor had any intention of attacking him. “I have no idea of what’s gotten into Bobby Inman or what partisan response . . . he is talking about,” he said.

Inman, elaborating on the issue at his news conference, said he had expected his nomination to win unanimous backing in the Senate Armed Services Committee and to be approved “handily” in the Senate, despite any opposition Dole might have mounted.

He also said that with a couple of exceptions, he found virtually all press and television coverage of his nomination to be fair.

Inman’s principal complaint was about a Dec. 23 piece by New York Times columnist William Safire. It criticized Inman’s performance as an intelligence officer and a businessman and called him a “tax cheat” for not paying Social Security taxes for a housekeeper.

At one point, Inman alleged that Dole and Safire had made a deal under which the senator “would turn up the heat on my nomination” and “Safire would turn up the heat on Whitewater,” the Arkansas land development and savings-and-loan flap involving President Clinton.

Safire said Tuesday he would save any response for his column, scheduled to appear Thursday. Dole denied any suggestion of a possible deal between the two, snapping that Inman was “probably not qualified to be secretary . . . if he has fantasies like that.”

“I don’t have any habit of working out deals with the New York Times,” Dole told a press conference on Cable News Network. “There’s something strange about that letter,” he said of Inman’s withdrawal statement. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the real reason that he quit.”

Although the Administration’s response was muted, it was obvious that the White House had been caught by surprise and that neither the President nor his senior staff had made any real effort to dissuade Inman from it.

Administration officials said outgoing Defense Secretary Les Aspin, who announced his resignation last month after prodding from the White House, will remain in office until the new nominee is installed. Aspin had set Thursday as his resignation date but was expected to stay on until Inman’s confirmation.

While aides said White House officials began sounding out some candidates over the weekend, presidential Communications Director Mark D. Gearan cautioned that a replacement for Inman was “not imminent.” The President “wants to talk to some people,” Gearan said.

Officials said two candidates now being considered are R. James Woolsey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and William J. Perry, now deputy secretary of defense, the Pentagon’s No. 2 job. Each is widely experienced in defense issues.

Inman said Tuesday he had told a White House staffer about his decision on Jan. 6, but he did not deliver his letter to the President until Friday, to avoid disrupting Clinton’s privacy after the death of his mother and his visits later to Europe and Russia.

White House officials said Tuesday that Clinton “knew it was heading in this direction” before he left for Europe on Jan. 8, and did nothing to talk Inman out of it.

A White House official said Clinton and Inman talked by telephone for 10 to 15 minutes Monday night, but the President made no effort to persuade the admiral to stay on.

“The President expressed his feelings but accepted the letter,” White House Chief of Staff Thomas (Mack) McLarty said.

On Tuesday, Clinton sent Inman a terse, two-paragraph letter saying he would accept his withdrawal decision “with regret.”

All told, the incident added another strange development to an Administration struggling with its public image. “At best, it’s another problem for the President. At worst, it’s a major embarrassment,” said Joshua Epstein, a Brookings Institution analyst.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a member of the Armed Services Committee and a supporter of Inman’s nomination, flatly denied Tuesday that either Dole or Senate Republicans had been set to oppose him. He compared the admiral’s performance to that of Texas billionaire Ross Perot.

“This is a theory that ranks right up there with Perot’s allegation that Bush was going to disrupt his daughter’s wedding,” McCain told news services Tuesday, alluding to Perot’s stated reason for withdrawing from the presidential campaign in 1992. Asked about a possible deal between Dole and Safire, McCain said: “I just find that very difficult to believe.”

Inman, a retired four-star admiral, had been chosen to replace Aspin primarily to help Clinton restore credibility with the military and its backers on Capitol Hill. Inman had built a reputation in Washington as a skillful bureaucratic infighter.

But the former deputy director of the CIA and former director of the National Security Agency said Tuesday he had concluded that becoming secretary of defense was simply not worth all the criticism.

Whether the allegation about Dole and Safire is “true or not, I believed it was true on the (Jan.) 6th,” Inman told reporters. “And that’s the day I said, ‘I don’t need this,’ and made up my mind that, in fact, I was going to withdraw.”

“I’m simply not prepared to pay the current cost of public service in distortion of my record,” he said at another point.

Although there was some speculation that Inman must have a deeper reason than he gave publicly for withdrawing from the nomination, longtime friends of the admiral’s said they took his statements at face value.

Robert M. Gates, the former CIA director whom Inman defended in a contentious confirmation hearing in 1988, said he had “detected this frustration”--over the Safire column and the Dole rumors--in conversations with Inman.

“The important thing is not whether all those things are true,” Gates said, “but the fact that they shaped his perception. I know there’s a sense that something else is lurking there, but I think (what Inman said) is the story.”

Times staff writers David Lauter, James Risen, Thomas B. Rosenstiel and Jim Mann contributed to this story.