Curtains for Callaway

When not politicking or tending to his Georgia-based family businesses, Howard ("Bo") Callaway is happiest schussing down the slopes of his Crested Butte ski resort in Colorado. Last week, his excursion from deep powder to deep trouble as President Ford's campaign manager was complete. White House officials said Callaway soon will be permanently replaced by former Commerce Secretary Rogers Morton, a longtime Ford friend and trusted adviser.

Callaway's political trouble is a result of the Ford Administration's keen --and fully warranted--post-Watergate sensitivity to voter intolerance of even the whiff of scandal. The worst that had been alleged about Callaway was that in a variety of ways he had misused his muscle as a Government bigwig to promote and enlarge the $10 million Crested Butte complex that he and his brother-in-law own. But that was enough.

Sweet Talk. A genial, sometimes bumbling Georgia millionaire whose family fortune (mainly from textiles) is estimated at $40 million, Callaway is the focus of investigations by the FBI, a Senate Interior subcommittee and the Civil Aeronautics Board. The primary accusation was that on his final day as Army Secretary last July, he persuaded officials of the Agriculture Department to review a ruling by its subsidiary, the U.S. Forest Service. The original ruling had barred Crested Butte's promoters from leasing 2,000 acres of federal land on which to build new ski runs, which would have tripled the size of the resort. In succession, other charges swirled around the beleaguered former Republican Congressman. Among them:

P: That since 1969, the CAB has enabled Callaway to establish fairly reg ular flight service from Atlanta to Crested Butte by waiving restrictions governing charter flights, including an "affinity" requirement that charter passengers belong to an organized group. Crested Butte's original request for such waivers has been re-approved annually and routinely by the CAB. The board is now investigating its own alleged favoritism.

P: That three times when he was Army Secretary, Callaway flew by Air Force executive jet to another family-owned resort at Pine Mountain, Ga. Callaway says he paid for the trips.

P: That in February of 1974, Callaway arranged to fly top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements, by military helicopter from the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs to Crested Butte for skiing. Callaway says Clements paid for the trip.

Woven through the allegations is a too-familiar pattern of the Washington buddy system that Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter have condemned all along the campaign trail. The official to whom Callaway took his plea for a reversal of the Forest Service ruling was J. Phil Campbell, a close friend and fellow Georgian; indeed Callaway had recommended him as Under Secretary of Agriculture. Campbell admits that he urged reconsideration of the Crested Butte expansion. The reversal followed. By strange coincidence, the key decision maker in the Forest Service's reversal of its earlier decision was Jimmy Wilkins--who was assigned to Colorado from Atlanta after the transfer of two other Service officials and one ranger who had opposed Callaway's expansion bid. In addition, Robert Timm, a former Washington State wheat farmer and another friend of Callaway's from Republican circles, became chairman of the CAB at about the time the board began expediting requests by Crested Butte for scores of flights yearly.

Last week Callaway said that he had not put pressure on anybody. He admitted arranging meetings in 1973 between the CAB and his partner and brother-in-law, Businessman Ralph O. Walton Jr. Callaway pointed out that he was not in Government at the time. But as the coordinator of Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign in the Deep South, Callaway was the sort whom many a Government bureaucrat would likely heed.

Callaway's associates in Georgia--even some of his political enemies--question his judgment but not his honesty. Says a top Atlanta businessman who knows Callaway well: "He's not the kind to piddle around in this kind of stuff."

Boo-boos. In the end, Callaway may be judged guilty only of a series of indiscretions that might have stirred relatively little notice in bygone eras. But a President who came to office after scandals forced his predecessor to resign--and who has so far come through to voters as a man of honesty and decency--cannot afford to wait for the final verdict on Bo's boo-boos.

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