Bush Won’t Assign Blame in HUD Influence Scandal

WASHINGTON — President Bush refused to affix blame today for the scandal racking the Department of Housing and Urban Development, saying he wants to ensure “we don’t have any recurrence,” not “find winners and losers.”

“I am not going to assign blame,” Bush declared during a wide-ranging news conference at the White House. “I want to look to the future.”

Bush said he is confident his own HUD secretary, Jack Kemp, will correct the conditions that allowed influence-peddling in the assignment of lucrative public housing contracts during the Reagan Administration.

At the same time, however, he pointedly declined to criticize Samuel R. Pierce, who was HUD secretary for eight years under Ronald Reagan, or any of his own political associates who have been implicated in the affair.

“Let’s not be trying to find winners and losers,” he said. “Let’s guarantee the American people that we are not going to have cronyism and special favors and giving contracts because of who you know.”

“What I want to do as President is see that we don’t have any recurrence,” he said. “And I have total confidence that Jack Kemp is working to see that this will not happen again.”

Pierce, who kept such a low profile at HUD that he was dubbed “Silent Sam” and the “stealth secretary” of the Reagan Cabinet, has come under sharp criticism for lax management that enabled contractors to use Republican connections--in exchange for high fees--to win grants for housing rehabilitation projects.

In testimony before Congress, Pierce said he had no knowledge of the influence-peddling, involving such GOP luminaries as former Interior Secretary James G. Watt, Reagan-Bush political consultant Paul Manafort, and Bush campaign fund-raiser Frederick Bush.