BUCHANAN TO PARE ADS WITH IMAGE OF CHALLENGER.

Byline: Associated Press 

Pat Buchanan used a quick image of the exploding Challenger in a TV ad to show he helped the country heal after a national crisis. But in Concord, where the decade-old image is more than a distant news event, it has opened old wounds, and Buchanan said Thursday that he would change it.

"It looks like we are being used," Michael Garrett, assistant principal at Concord High School, where astronaut Christa McAuliffe taught, said of the ad.

The Republican presidential candidate's ad contains a clip of the explosion, followed by a photo of Buchanan at President Reagan's side.

Buchanan said he will delete images of the explosion "out of sensitivity" for the family of McAuliffe. She and six other space shuttle crew members were killed in the disaster 10 years ago this month.

"We'll change that particular little slide or picture as soon as we can, out of sensitivity, out of concern for the family," Buchanan said during a campaign swing through Iowa. "We'll have that changed by Tuesday or Wednesday."

His campaign said the image, along with those of the Vietnam War and the shooting of Reagan, were used to show that Buchanan stood with Presidents Nixon and Reagan in tough times and helped them guide the country beyond the crises.

"Through triumph and tragedy, war and peace, I served the two most important presidents of our time," Buchanan says in the ad. "Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were not men of compromise, and neither am I."

The notion was not lost on Garrett, but he said earlier Thursday that he thought Buchanan should pull the ad or delete the shuttle images.

"It's an exploitation of a person's contact, indirect as it may have been, with a national tragedy for personal aggrandizement," said Garrett, who was a friend of McAuliffe and her family.

McAuliffe's mother, Grace Corrigan, said she had not seen the ad, but did not like what she had heard about it.

"I can't imagine any other place where he would make such a goof as in Concord," she said in a telephone interview from her home in Framingham, Mass. "I think it's in very poor taste," she said, especially because of the coming anniversary.

Concord still is sensitive to references to the Challenger. Residents and school officials avoid talking about it to outsiders or the media for fear of offending McAuliffe's family.