Hillary Clinton’s Futures Trading
* In response to your article “Hillary Clinton’s Futures Trades Unusual, Experts Say,” March 31:
Mrs. Clinton is the victim of sexist critics who resent the fact that she is a bold and assertive woman. She is being criticized for her willingness to take risks, resulting in her turning small amounts of money into large amounts--something a man would be congratulated and admired for doing. Her critics cannot accept that a woman could have made such profitable investments.
Sure, some of her investments went sour (including Whitewater), but overall she came up ahead. It’s time for this nation to grow up and give women the credit they deserve.
CARLOS BARRON
La Palma
* Have any of your reporters investigated that possibility that Hillary Clinton may have won the California lottery? As a frequent visitor to the state, she certainly has had the opportunity to enter the lottery. It would make a marvelous story.
Winning the lottery is, of course, suspicious in itself. You could quote anonymous experts on the virtual impossibility of winning the lottery without good connections. Did Hillary get advice from Nancy Reagan’s astrologer?
If it turns out that Hillary never won in the lottery, that is equally damning. If she had bought a ticket, she might have won a bundle under highly suspicious circumstances. Not even a Democrat could pass up that opportunity! Obviously, she was frightened out of buying a ticket by the possibility of investigation and disclosure. Whom was she trying to protect?
Why don’t you drop that dumb cattle futures investment story and get cracking on something really good?
BOB WELLS
Huntington Beach
* Whatever the legal or ethical fallout is from the financial manipulations in Arkansas 10 to 15 years ago, it is not likely, in itself, to inflict terminal political damage on the Clintons. Rather, it is the revelation that Bill and Hillary are an ordinary, garden variety, yuppie couple who freely speculated in the high-risk real estate and commodity trading practices of the roaring ‘80s, an era whose alleged greed and corruption in just these types of investment has been so loudly condemned by both of them. This self-evident hypocrisy robs the Clintons of any claim to champion the poor, the honest or even the politically correct. In a word, they are not what they say they stand for.
In politics, the appearance and mystique of things is fundamental. The Clintons lack sufficient political capital in other areas to ride out an assault on their personal character, which is the real issue in Whitewater. To lose this battle is to lose everything, which explains why the White House staffers’ mad dash to cover up makes perfectly good--indeed indispensable--sense to anyone except lawyers.
And, for the same reason, certain phases of the cover-up probably must continue. If it should become evident, sooner or later, that Vincent Foster--finding himself morally trapped between the dictates of shielding his friends’ reputation from exposure and his own professional integrity--thus took his own life, political disaster is unavoidable. Even the morally numbed American body politic would pull down a President who extracted this “last full measure of devotion” from a friend.
DAVID MOZINGO Ph.D.
(Prof. of Government, retired, Cornell U.)
San Juan Capistrano
* The flap over Whitewater, futures trading, and what’s next is a classic demonstration of the lawyers’ desperate strategy for trying a defective case:
Attack the evidence (the Leaches in Congress, radio, TV and the print media know only of slurs and rumor).
Attack the law (to avoid libel, they must admit no law was broken; therefore, no law to dispute).
Attack the man and woman (their last resort is to challenge character, integrity, goals, whatever, anything beguiling).
LOUIS ST. MARTIN
Pomona
* “Re: “Obsessed With the Hunt,” by Susan Estrich, Opinion, March 27:
Ms. Estrich just doesn’t get it. Whitewater and Watergate have a lot more in common than water. Both concern primarily questions concerning the character, trust and ethics of a sitting President (and in Whitewater an unelected but very active spouse and her former law and business partners).
People are rightly judged by the company they keep. Let the facts come out. They will speak for themselves.
EUGENE P. CARVER
Rancho Palos Verdes
* Deficit remedy: Give Hillary Clinton $4 billion. She invests it in the futures market. Nine months later her profits pay off the deficit!
IRWIN GROSSMAN
Los Angeles
