Andrew Young's Ill-Timed Call

Was he calling as a family friend offering compassionate advice? Or was the mayor of Atlanta bent on stopping an investigation? That apparently was what a federal grand jury in Atlanta wanted to know last week when it summoned Andrew Young to explain his March 25 telephone conversation with Alice Bond, the estranged wife of former Georgia State Senator Julian Bond. The call was placed six days after she told Atlanta police that her husband had been a regular user of cocaine and that she had once seen the mayor use coke.

Young, who was Jimmy Carter's Ambassador to the United Nations, said he called Alice Bond before he knew that she had implicated him as well as her husband. He did so, he said, only to suggest that she stop "passing rumors." After the call, Alice Bond told reporters that her charges were false, even though she had also named the alleged coke supplier and a limousine driver she claimed had sometimes delivered the drug to her husband. The three police officers who had taken the statements from her were then transferred to lesser duties without explanation. That led U.S. Attorney Robert Barr, a former chairman of the Cobb County G.O.P. organization, to launch an obstruction-of- justice probe.

The mayor, who contends that he has "never even seen cocaine except in the movies," rejected suggestions by his lawyer, Griffin Bell, Carter's former Attorney General, that he plead the Fifth Amendment lest the grand jury prove a political trap. Young and Bond, who also denied using coke, are prominent black Democrats, and they are eager to clear up the matter well before their party holds its national convention in Atlanta next year.