Buddy, Beware

On the eve of his announcement last week for the Republican nomination for President, Ronald Reagan phoned Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon. He would not, Reagan promised Ford, directly attack the incumbent President or do anything else that might split the party. But the next day, on a coast-to-coast TV hookup from the National Press Club in Washington, he got off at least one not so subtle whack at Ford.

With an American flag to his right and Wife Nancy sitting demurely to his left, Reagan rapidly and unemotionally read a four-minute statement that damned the "buddy system [that includes] the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business and big labor [and] functions for its own benefit -increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes." It took no vast leap of imagination to deduce that Ford, a veteran of 27 years in Washington, was one of the leading "buddies." Afterward, Reagan refused to be pinned down on specific issues, such as the right size for the U.S. defense budget or whether he would have condoned the FBI campaign to discredit Martin Luther King.

Brief Stops. Five hours later, Reagan was on the campaign trail in Miami. As he plunged into a crowd to greet an old friend, a swarthy young man pulled what appeared to be a black pistol from a small brown bag. Secret Service agents pushed the candidate and his wife back out of range and wrestled to the ground Michael Carvin, 20, a university dropout staying in Pompano Beach, Fla. His gun turned out to be a toy. After being charged with intimidating a candidate and interfering with federal officers, he was sent to a mental hospital for observation. Officials believed that Carvin was the same man who telephoned the Secret Service office in Denver on Nov. 10 and threatened to harm President Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller or Reagan unless authorities released Lynette ("Squeaky") Fromme, who is now on trial for attempting to assassinate Ford.

Reagan continued campaigning, with brief stops in Manchester, N.H., Charlotte, N.C., and Chicago. Meanwhile the Federal Communications Commission was heard from. Now that Reagan is an announced candidate, said a spokesman, TV stations might have to give Ford equal time if they broadcast any of Reagan's 50-odd films, or even reruns of Death Valley Days, on which he was a narrator and occasional pitchman for 20 Mule Team Borax.

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