Clinton Aides Slam GOP for Summit Critique

Senior Administration officials reacted bitterly Thursday to Republican assertions that the one-day summit between President Clinton and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin was a failure that threatened U.S. interests.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher assailed Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) for violating a tradition that exempted the President from partisan criticism while negotiating abroad on the nation’s behalf.

Christopher also said Dole’s criticism of the summit outcome was groundless, adding that while progress on a number of contentious issues was not dramatic, the summit should not be scored like a baseball game.

“You know, in my generation there was an old-fashioned custom that Americans did not criticize the President when he was abroad,” Christopher said icily. “The thought was in those halcyon days that there would be time enough when the President returned home to assess his performance.”

Dole and other senior Republicans have characterized the Clinton-Yeltsin summit as a “failure” and a “fraud” that will force Congress to review the entire U.S.-Russian relationship and may lead to a cutoff of billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Russia.

Republicans said Clinton had failed to persuade Yeltsin to cancel the sale of nuclear technology to Iran, to accept the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or to end bloodshed in the secessionist republic of Chechnya.

Dole said the summit was “more successful in ceremony and atmospherics than in substantive results.”

He added: “Clearly Congress will be reassessing relations with Russia in the wake of the summit’s failure.”

Clinton, asked at a photo opportunity to reply to Dole and other critics, met the question “with a stone-faced silence,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said.

The President appeared to be literally biting his tongue, witnesses said.

The harsh, partisan exchange--at a range of nearly 5,000 miles--made it clear that presidential politics is in full cry and no aspect of policy or political performance will be exempt.

Christopher was uncharacteristically blunt in responding to Dole, stepping out of his usual buttoned-up persona to flay the Republican leader and presidential rival for undercutting the President and to defend Clinton’s summit performance.

“It seems to me to be a relic of the Cold War to think that every time the American President and the Russian president get together, their meeting has to be scored like a night baseball game with wins and losses and a box score. But if there is to be a box score, it seems to me very hard to put this in the loss column or the failure column.”

Continuing his baseball metaphor, Christopher said: “In the business of diplomacy, you frequently score runs by hitting singles, and I think the President and President Yeltsin hit a series of good, solid singles that will add up to scoring a great many runs.”

The post-summit flap overshadowed Clinton’s largely ceremonial visit to Ukraine, where the President is stopping for 24 hours to applaud President Leonid D. Kuchma for his steps toward economic reform and elimination of nuclear weapons.

Clinton and Kuchma met for 90 minutes Thursday to review Ukraine’s progress in business privatization, political reform and the dismantling of its large nuclear arsenal, inherited from the former Soviet Union.

But even National Security Adviser Anthony Lake acknowledged publicly that there was “no heavy lifting” on the agenda for the Clinton-Kuchma meeting, which was in large measure designed to make up for Clinton’s brief airport stopover last year that many Ukrainians took as an insult.

Clinton was to address the Ukrainian people in a speech today and to visit memorials to the dead of World War II before returning to Washington.

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Even as Clinton was heading to Kiev’s Mariinsky Palace for a state dinner with Kuchma, senior Administration officials launched a broad, obviously coordinated counterattack on Dole and other Republican summit critics in Congress.

Lake warned that GOP threats to end financial aid to Russia “could have profoundly negative consequences for our national security.” He said that halting multibillion-dollar support for Russian reform would “do terrible damage to ourselves as well as to the Russians.”

Joining the chorus of criticism, McCurry, the White House press secretary, said Dole had injected partisan politics into foreign policy, an area that traditionally has been bipartisan.

“I guess like so many things these days, those traditions of amicability are thrown out the window when politics roll around,” he said. “That’s unfortunate. It would have been nice for the majority leader to wait and get a briefing . . . prior to making a rash judgment.”

Officials said Christopher planned to brief congressional leaders on the summit when he returns to Washington. He hopes then to persuade them of the meeting’s achievements.

Asked if he believed that Dole’s comments marked the end of bipartisanship on foreign policy, Christopher replied frostily: “I hope not.”

Among the issues discussed by Clinton and Kuchma was Western financing for Ukraine’s promise to close the accident-prone Chernobyl nuclear reactor by the year 2000.

The meltdown and explosion that sent a radioactive cloud across Europe in 1986 is not the only potential nuclear threat emanating from the troubled Chernobyl reactor complex about 80 miles north of Kiev.

Less than a week ago, near a medieval monastery not far from the Mariinsky Palace, special forces arrested three Kiev residents carrying more than 20 pounds of purloined radioactive material in a Ford car, the Kiev daily newspaper Kievskie Vedomosti reported Thursday.

One of the detainees identified the material as uranium oxide from the Chernobyl plant, the newspaper reported.

If it does prove to be uranium oxide, experts said, the material is not weapons-grade. But the incident is worrisome, as it would be the fourth reported attempt to smuggle nuclear material through Ukraine this year, and the second in recent days.

The case reaffirms the potential security problems in the far-flung nuclear reactors, factories and other installations in the former Soviet Union.

In last week’s incident, the trail from a nuclear sting in March that uncovered more than 12 pounds of uranium-235 pellets led to a wider ring of Russians, Ukrainians and Uzbeks hiding more than 100 pounds of unidentified nuclear material in a Kiev apartment, Kievskie Vedomosti reported.

“Our preliminary conclusion is the substance was brought from Russia,” Victor Zubchuk, an interior official, told the paper.

Times special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev contributed to this report.