Arms Deals Unmatched in History, Fulbright Says

WASHINGTON — J. William Fulbright, a foreign policy expert who spent 30 years in the Senate, said Tuesday that President Reagan’s Iran-arms deal is “much more important, much more involved than Watergate.”

Fulbright, 81, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democrat from Arkansas, said he is unable to find a precedent for the secret sales of arms to Iran, the diversion of proceeds to the Nicaraguan rebels and other activities recently disclosed.

“A lot of these things are just inconceivable to me,” Fulbright said. “I can’t imagine how they could have taken place, so I really can’t put it in historical perspective.

“I think it’s much more important, much more involved than Watergate,” he added. “Watergate was a domestic problem we had among ourselves. . . . It didn’t affect our relations with other countries, other than (that) some of them thought we made a mountain out of a molehill.”

Fulbright, speaking at the National Press Club, said that in a democracy, special interests and public pressures create “a powerful incentive, if not indeed a compulsion, to make serious mistakes in foreign policy.”

He said that Reagan and other presidents would have been wise to consult Congress and the State Department instead of relying on a “small clique of ideologues and amateurs in the White House basement.”

Had he done so, “I’m reasonably certain that President Reagan would not be in the difficulty he is in now,” Fulbright said.