President and Starr’s Probe

Re “After Earlier Missteps, Sure-Footed Clinton Tries New Approach,” National Perspective, Feb. 23: Only The Times could view the shrinkage of Bill Clinton in the office of the presidency as a growth experience!

Clinton’s major achievement as president has been to adopt Republican programs like welfare reform and a “balanced budget.” He is in the midst of personal scandals that can only be discussed with your children if they have reached adulthood. He is now being fed his hat in the latest of a long list of embarrassments, when the United Nations will dictate America’s foreign policy.

Yet The Times applauds Clinton’s performance as “a gradual, but nonetheless striking, evolution in his ability to manage his presidency.” Wake up and smell the coffee! Clinton has demeaned not only himself but also the office he holds! He is the most corrupt, most reckless, most defective person to ever occupy the Oval Office!

P. DENNIS KEENAN

Glendale

* Clinton has a legal defense fund and now one is being suggested for Monica Lewinsky (Feb. 23). Hey, aren’t we taxpayers already providing public defenders for the tapped out? At the very least it would seem that a few bucks could be pried from Kenneth Starr’s apparently infinite budget.

TERRY E. DE WOLFE

Monterey Park

* Starr is loathsome and humorless and has far exceeded his authority. Clinton is a good president who has done a remarkable job, despite the many obstacles placed in his path by the rabid right-wing elements.

Monica Lewinsky hasn’t been injured by anyone except Starr, Linda Tripp and the FBI, which ought to have better things to do than harassing a young woman about such intimate matters.

As I understand it, before Starr’s appointment to investigate Whitewater, he was known to be a Clinton-hater who had already offered his staff and services to assist Paula Jones in her lawsuit. Such a zealot, incapable of fairness, should never have been appointed.

The media is also complicit in the degradation of the president and the presidency. There is no restraint evident in their search for titillating tidbits they insist the public craves. Far more coverage was given to the FBI seizure of Lewinsky’s supposedly semen-stained dress than to the report that no stains were found. This is despicable journalism.

A dangerous precedent is being set here, affecting our image elsewhere in the world as well as future presidencies. Congress will rue the day its members didn’t stand up and terminate this lunacy.

NANCY DAVENPORT

Culver City

* In our world of double-think and doublespeak, we have achieved the ultimate. We have now cast the alleged perpetrator of adultery and suborning perjury as the victim, and the man assigned legally to the task of seeking the truth, namely Starr, as the evil person.

Wake up, America! Seek justice and truth for all and from all before the Constitution becomes less valuable than the paper it is written on. Adultery isn’t just fun sex--look at all the broken families--and lying and cheating are not moral attributes.

I’m a teacher. Next time I catch a student cheating on a test and then lying about it, should I simply say, “It’s OK. After all, our president does it”?

LILY S. JOHNSON

Sherman Oaks

* It seems obvious that Starr has become fixated on the technique of betrayal to achieve his goals. If one is willing to betray Starr’s target, good things will happen, such as a reduced sentence or immunity from prosecution; if not, they go to jail like Susan McDougal. In Tripp he found a natural ally whose dreams of literary fame had already induced her to betray her young “friend,” sometimes even taping her illegally under Maryland law. His relentless pursuit of government employees to betray their leader would be seditious or traitorous in some societies. But he has reached an all-time low in interrogating Lewinsky’s mother in front of a grand jury, for what could only be to betray the confidences of her child.

Instead of passing laws to protect celebrities from the press, Congress should be passing laws to protect parents and children from “Big Brother.”

FRANCIS BREIDENBACH

Hermosa Beach