October 25, 1986

The dispute between President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev over what was said at Reykjavik has raised new questions about how astutely President Reagan and his advisers conducted the negotiations and how they have characterized them to the public. The dispute could affect the President's ability to continue dealing credibly with Moscow on arms control and damage his reputation as a political leader at home. The immediate issue is what he led the Soviet officials there to believe he might agree to: Was it simply the elimination of all intercontinental ballistic missiles, as he and other top Administration officials now say, or did he go further and accept Mr. Gorbachev's proposal to eliminate all strategic nuclear arms, as the Soviet leader and several Administration officials maintain? A Dilemma for Reagan If Mr. Reagan did agree to the concept of eliminating all long-range nuclear weapons, but denies it, he risks undercutting his credibility in future arms talks with Moscow. But if he admits it, he runs afoul of most of his own Administration's military advice and faces charges of vacillation and incompetence. These are precisely the accusations he used to make, and made again today, about President Carter's handling of Soviet-American relations.

The Department of Agriculture today announced the largest program in history for paying farmers not to grow corn, sorghum, barley and oats. It offered up to $2 a bushel for not growing the feed grains, and economists said it could idle more than 10 million acres of land next year. The program was announced less than two weeks before the elections, in which a number of key Senate and House seats from the Middle West and other states with large agricultural industries will be filled. It was attacked by Democratic leaders as a political maneuver.

In the first Federal court decision on a subject of growing concern, a small group of fundamentalist Christian parents today won a ruling that shelters their children from the godless influences they detect in certain public school textbooks. The books at issue in the case in East Tennessee are part of a basic reading series published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston and approved by the state. But since they offend the plaintiffs' religious beliefs, and since the evidence of the recent trial showed that any other books on the state list would probably offend them, too, Federal District Judge Thomas Hull ruled in Greeneville, Tenn., that a reasonable solution would be to let the children sit out the class and learn to read at home. Other Means of Teaching Grounding his decision in the First Amendment's guarantee of the free exercise of religion, Judge Hull said the students, who were suspended for refusing to read the assigned texts, could not be forcibly exposed to material violating their religious beliefs when the Tennessee schools could fulfill their objectives without making students read a particular set of books. He found nothing wrong with the books themselves, which the publisher says are used in 15,000 school districts around the country, and he did not order their removal from the curriculum.

The British Government broke off relations with Syria today, charging that there was ''conclusive evidence'' that Syrian diplomats and intelligence agents were involved in the attempt to bomb an Israeli airliner in April. The announcement came soon after a jury here convicted a Jordanian in the bombing plot and sentenced him to 45 years in prison. The Jordanian, Nezar Hindawi, raised his hand in a V-for-victory sign as he was led away after being told by the judge, ''A more horrendous massacre it is difficult to imagine.'' [ Page 4. ] Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, said today in Parliament that evidence gathered at the trial showed the ''plain involvement'' of Syrian intelligence agents in the bomb plot.

An increasing number of Western and Middle Eastern intelligence analysts say they believe that of all the countries of the Middle East, none use terrorism more effectively as an adjunct to diplomacy than Syria. These sources offer long lists of examples of how the Government of President Hafez al-Assad has used violence to influence events in Lebanon and to strike at Israel. They also say Syria has not shrunk from turning to terrorism to eliminate its Arab enemies abroad and to try to dominate the Palestinian movement. Their comments were made in interviews with correspondents of The New York Times in the United States, the Middle East and Europe. The trial of Nezar Hindawi, a 32-year-old Jordanian convicted in London yesterday of trying to blow up an El Al Israel Airlines plane in April, was cited as an unusual case study of how Syria uses terrorism as part of its foreign policy.