Gifts to Hayden

Mayor Richard Riordan’s attack on Tom Hayden (Feb. 27) for “lining his pockets” with gifts is so off the mark it would be funny were it not so cynical and dishonest.

The largest gifts that Hayden reported were the use of movie studio corporate jets. Here’s the real story: In 1987, then-Lorimar chairman Merv Adelson (a Riordan supporter and contributor), made a plane available to Jane Fonda and Hayden for two trips that I organized: the first to Poland, where they met with Lech Walesa and other members of the then-outlawed Solidarity movement and traveled to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps; and the second to Israel, where they greeted (on her arrival from Moscow) Soviet refusenik Ida Nudel--whose case they had championed for many years--when she was finally allowed to emigrate. Hardly the type of junket that we associate with most politicians.

STEPHEN M. RIVERS

Los Angeles