The President Didn’t Really Mean That : Sometimes misstatements are more than mere gaffes.

“The President misspoke.”

The official said it in a hushed tone as though committing some form of blasphemy, and immediately added that he should probably not be saying this, and that it was on very deep background.

He was trying to explain how it was that on Nov. 7, President Clinton had said, “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,” whereas now the Administration was pursuing a compromise that might “grandfather” any bomb that North Korea already had. What the President had meant to say, my source volunteered, was that North Korea would not be allowed to become “a nuclear power.”

“The President misspoke” is a tricky way out of an apparent contradiction, because the credibility of government rests on the tacit assumption that the President can say no wrong.

Vice presidents can misspeak, and that can be amusing, as when Dan Quayle, trying to quote the motto of the United Negro College Fund, said, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind.” Or when Al Gore, delivering a foreign-policy speech in Milwaukee, said that America’s ethnic melting pot shows that America is “ E pluribus unum-- out of one many.” (It’s the other way around, of course.)

But with the President, the acknowledgment of “misspeaking” suggests that either he cannot talk straight or that he doesn’t understand his Administration’s policies.

Once in 1953, President Eisenhower made a remark so egregiously out of line with known policy that James (Scotty) Reston of the New York Times, leaving the news conference with me, suggested that the only way out for Press Secretary James Hagerty was to say that “President Eisenhower does not necessarily speak for this Administration.”

Presidents sometimes do misspeak: The words that come out of their mouths are not the words they intended to utter. (Let’s leave Freud out of this, shall we?) President Bush was particularly prone to verbal accidents. Attacking Gov. Michael Dukakis on the Pledge of Allegiance during the 1988 campaign, Bush himself misquoted it, saying, “One nation under God with freedom and justice for all.” (Spokeswoman Sheila Tate said he was “paraphrasing.”) Bush also said, “I hope I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, anti-racism.”

President Reagan clearly misspoke in 1986 when, at a rally for a Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, he said Democratic voters had found “they can no longer follow the leadership of the Republican Party, which has taken them down a course that leads to disaster.”

But, more often in the case of Reagan, “misspeaking” appeared to be a matter of confusion about facts and policies. In August, 1984, he said that submarine-launched missiles were “less destabilizing” than land-based missiles because “they could be called back.” (They can’t be.) Earlier the same year, Reagan said, contrary to stated Administration policy, that Lebanon involved American “vital interests.” (“Less than precise,” explained an anonymous official.)

Ranking as a historic misstatement was the Reagan proposal to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit in 1986 for total elimination of nuclear weapons. (Just an “ultimate goal,” explained spokesman Larry Speakes, reluctant to say that the President not only misspoke, but also misperceived the nuclear stalemate.)

When ousted Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos complained of having been betrayed by being flown to Guam on an American plane after being promised he would be transported to a place elsewhere in the Philippines, Reagan blandly countered, “I think maybe he was misinformed. It happens to every president.”

In the first year of the whiz-kid Clinton Administration, there has been relatively little need to drag out the dread word “misspoke.” More common is being “misunderstood” or “misinterpreted,” as when Strobe Talbott, after the Russian election in December, said there would be “less shock and more therapy,” suggesting an easing of pressure on economic reform.

But something more was involved when Clinton introduced the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, as one whose “family fled in a cattle car westward (from Poland) to Germany in front of the Soviet advance.” In fact, the general’s father had been a major in the Nazi Waffen SS, enjoying a privileged life in Warsaw. (“Irrelevant,” said press secretary Dee Dee Myers, declining to say the President misspoke from a misleading biography.)

So when we are told “the President misspoke,” we are not sure if it was a twisted tongue, a twisted fact or a changed policy. But however it happens, it can sometimes put a serious misspoke in the President’s wheels.