Daily News from New York, New York • 177

DAILY NEWS, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4. 1980 34 Miller may be another Carter broken Lance foreign officials in order to sell them goods, Textron was clean because he. Miller, had a firm policy against such activity. Proxmire raised the question again last summer when his committee was considering Miller's new appointment as secretary of the Treasury. But by this time the Securities and Exchange Commission had Issued a lengthy report showing that Textron had paid more than $5 million in bribes to 10 governments in the course of selling helicopters and other military hardware.

Miller denied any knwledge of the bribes and managed to win Senate confirmation, although Proxmire voted against him. "Should Miller have known about payments to foreign government officials on a worldwide scale by Textron-Bell?" Proxmire asked. Then, answering his own question. Proxmire said: "It appears to me that any reasonably prudent chief executive officer in his position would have known." Now, thanks to the documents released by the SEC as part of a consent decree agreement last week, we are told that Textron spent $600,000 to "entertain" U.S. defense officials from 1971 to 1978.

even though Textron was "aware of directives" prohibiting these officials from accepting "gratuities and entertainment" from government contractors. More importantly, the SEC said "senior Textron officials and its chairman (Miller) knew of this practice" and that the company's books were kept "in a manner designed to conceal that WASHINGTON President Carter's reflexive "no" reply to the question of whether he planned to ask for the resignation of Treasury Secretary G. William Miller following disclosures that Miller former firm had a $600,000 slush fund to wine and dine Pentagon officials is just another sign of how image wars with reality in the Carter administration. The image, of course, is that of government "as good and honest and idealistic as are the American people" an image that Carter carefully nurtured during his 1978 campaign for the presidency. It was an important image to project in the aftermath of the massive official corruption and abuse of power of Watergate and thus played an important role in Carter's successful campaign.

Carter even went so far as to suggest that his cabinet officers would go before joint sessions of Congress "to be examined" on their decisions and their conduct Yet in the case of Miller, ho was chief executive officer of Textron while that conglomerate was bribing foreign governments to the tune of S5 million and lavishly entertaining top American military brass in violation of Pentagon regulations, Carter seems perfectly willing to accept Miller's assertions of blissful ignorance about the hole matter. The question of foreign bribery was raised two years ago when Miller's appointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board came up for confirmation before the Senate Banking Committee. Miller assured Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) that, unlike other U.S. conglomerates then in trouble for bribing corrupt Textron was entertaining United States government personnel." So, the question now is not only whether Miller's conduct as chairman at Textron was such that he should not hold high public office.

Since he has denied before two Senate confirmation hearings any knowledge of wrongdoing by Textron or its agents, Miller's basic honesty and integrity are now under a cloud, not to mention the question of whether. Miller may have been guilty of lying to a congressional committee. Over the weekend. Miller again denied any wrongdoing on his part and said he has no intention of resigning nor had he been asked to by Carter The President on Saturday merely said "no" when he was asked if he intended to ask Miller to resign. Neither Miller's self-serving assertions of innocence nor Carter's refusal to pursue the matter will disperse the cloud of suspicion that now hangs heavy over this city.

Perhaps Proxmire will resolve the question once and for all by reopening hearings on Miller before his Banking Committee, a course the Wisconsin Democrat says he is considering. Thus Carter, instead of holding his key appointees to the high standards he insisted he would maintain if he were elected! is once again passing the buck to Congress and to the press and public. This is precisely what Carter did in the case of his close friend and former budget director, Bert Lance, who is now being tried by a federal court jury in Atlanta on 33 counts of bank fraud and conspiracy. Not only did Carter defend Lance and keep him in office for months after serious charges were raised against him, but he and his top aides also bitterly attacked the motives and integrity of those in Congress and the press corps who pursued the allegations. It is perhaps with this in mind that Proxmire seems reluctant to press the Miller case any further.

After all, what Democrat would relish the task of taking on a Democratic President on an integrity in government issue, particularly a President committed to installing a government "as good and honest and decent and fair and competent and compassionate and idealistic as are the American It's the FBI at the keyhole again JACK AM)EHSO WASHINGTON The FBI has had an ugly habit of smearing its critics with unfounded sex rumors. In its campaign of harassment, the bureau has spread unsubstantiated rumors about the supposed sexual peccadilloes of a powerful congressman, a dedicated congressional staff aide, a respected newspaper publisher and a persistent union official. My office has obtained dramatic new evidence in the celebrated Karen Silkwood case, which inspired "The China Syndrome" movie. Silkwood was the 28-year-old lab technician who was killed in a mysterious car crash in 1974, while she was on her way to give a reporter documentary evidence of lax safety regulations at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant in Oklahoma. There was considerable evidence that her car was run off the road and the incriminating evidence stolen.

But the FBI declared there was no foul play involved. Last May, a federal jury awarded her estate $10.5 million in damages after finding.that she had been subjected to excessive radiation at the plant Sources have revealed to my associate Gary Conn an insidious pattern of FBI harassment directed against those who have been critical of the agency's role in the Silkwood case. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) conducted an investigation into the case in 1976 a probe that was extremely embarrassing to the FBI. During the hearings, a news story appeared about a prostitute with Mafia connec- tions who supposedly kept a list of her clients stashed in a shoe box.

The Detroit story claimed Dingell's name was on her list Dingell denied the unsubstantiated accusation. Competent sources told us that the FBI leaked the spurious charge. Peter Stockton conducted the Silkwood investigation for Dingell's Small Business subcommittee. In the course of their digging, Dingell and Stockton learned that Jacque Srouji, a copy editor at the Nashville Tennesseean, had gained access to FBI documents in the case that had been denied to the subcommittee. They further discovered that Srouji was an FBI informant and had been used by the bureau in a case involving a Soviet diplomat Disclosure of this brought criticism of the FBI from the Justice Department, Congress and the press.

The bureau evidently put Stockton on its enemies list and in 1977 found a way to strike back at him. Compelled to release certain internal documents for use in the Sttkwood lawsuit, the FBI, as required by the Privacy Act, diligently deleted the names of third parties not involved in the' s'uH-s-all except Stockton's. Jack Javits: the next Clifford Case? politicans who preferred getting even to getting mad. Neither spent much time in anyone's pocket but their own. Nor were they ever charged with being nice guys.

Case could probably have been renominated in 1978, but he was, in his own way, arrogant too arrogant to bother to run hard against the guy who beat him, a conservative nobody named Jeff Bell who dropped in from nowhere. Javits, if he runs, won't make that mistake. He knows well enough that the conservatives are out to get him, not to mention assorted county chairmen, who are already lining up against him. If he runs, he'll have to get after it night and day right up to the September primary. When Nelson Rockefeller died, Javits lost his political rabbi the one man whose power and money could keep the conservatives off his back.

Javits has never lost an election in a career that goes back to his first run for Congreess in 1946. He has also never had a serious primary challenge before. And every day in every way, the Republican Party in New York grows more conservative. Even if he survives the primary, "Javits is something less than a shoo-in in the November general election. The last time out, in 1974, he got only 46 of the vote in a three-way race.

He is a proud man. He's been fighting his fights for 34 years. If he retires, he will go out with a reputation as one of best and the brightest that the Senate ever, produced. So why put himself through it? Why not take the honors and run? Why run the risk of rejection at this late date? Why take a chance on winding up like Cliff Case who, after it was all over, was to "The miracle is that I lasted as long as I did." Because Jacob Javits doesn't believe in miracles, except, of course, for those he personally has performed. What he believes in is Javits, and if the voters pick somebody else, -well, that's their hard luck.

joicv Mclaughlin SEN. JACOB JAVITS hied himself off to West Palm Beach last weekend, there to contemplate whether or not to call it a career. Some time this week or early next week, he will let us in on the best kept secret in New York. Keeping friends guessing and enemies dangling is a routine political strategy. And for the past several months Javits has been behaving like any other politician gearing up for a campaign; showing up in the provinces, massaging the egos of county chairmen, declining to get mixed up in the presidential campaign.

But no one has ever suggested Jacob Javits was a fool, and only a fool given Javits' age and political liabilities would jump into a reelection campaign without thinking very carefully about what he was doing. Clifford Case of New Jersey forgot to do that two years ago, and that's why he is an ex-senator now. Case was 75 then; Javits 75 now. Both were from the liberal wing of the Republican Party, and both got consistently good report cards from Americans for Democratic Action and the AFL-CIO; very bad ones from the business and defense lobbies. Case was elected in 1954; Javits in 1956.

Both enjoyed reputations for being bright, articulate, hard working and for possessing extraordinary personal integrity. Both were staunch friends of Israel, unbending on civil rights and both devoted much of their energies to foreign policy. Both stood despised by conservative ideologues in their own party; both earned a reputation for spending as little time as possible in their own states. Neither was much for the cocktail circuit or ever regarded the Senate as' a "private Both were very tough.