President Trots Out Personal Baggage in Radio Interview

President Clinton tried Thursday to clear up a widespread misconception about why he carpeted the bed of his old El Camino pickup truck with Astroturf: It was just to protect his suitcase from scratches.

In an interview with New York disc jockey Don Imus, a regular Clinton banter buddy, the President explained that the truck bed was metal and that “I carried my luggage back there--it wasn’t for what everybody thought it was for when I made the comment, I’ll tell you that.

“I’m guilty of a lot of things,” he joked to the raucous deejay, “but I didn’t do that.”

Clinton’s memories of his El Camino got wide publicity after he told an audience of General Motors auto workers earlier this month about the “real Southern deal” he drove in the 1970s.

“I had Astroturf in the back--you don’t want to know why,” he told them. Few of his listeners, who roared their approval at his story, seemed to need elaboration.

Since first appearing on Imus’ show during the 1992 New York primary, Clinton has gone on the air about half a dozen times with the radio host, whose audience is primarily young men. On this show, Imus kidded Clinton about his hearty eating habits and controversial investment in the Whitewater Development Corp.

Saying he didn’t want to be “disrespectful,” Imus wondered aloud how Clinton ever got interested in the no-frills Whitewater project. “That model home looked like some place that Tonya Harding’s bodyguard holed up in,” Imus said.

But Clinton defended the development. “It was a little place where a lot of working people without much money were looking for a place to retire and own some property in a beautiful place,” Clinton replied.

Imus wanted to know how Clinton, who says he has lost 15 pounds, could have eaten a “Clinton burger, a pastrami sandwich and an apple fritter the size of a baby’s head” on a trip to Ohio.

Clinton confessed to eating the Clinton burger. He said the pastrami was in fact corned beef on pumpernickel and insisted, “Hey, hey, the fritter--I had one bite of the apple fritter.”