Impeachment
* Re “Managers Question Lewinsky as Vital Senate Votes Near,” Jan. 25: The total arrogance and disregard for the will of the people are most evident by using the presidential suite at the Mayflower Hotel for $5,000 per day to hear Monica Lewinsky add nothing new. You can’t tell me that Kenneth Starr or the Republican House impeachment managers could not find a meeting room in a government building on a Sunday in Washington. What about in the Reagan Office Building (second-largest office building in the world) down the street? What about the Washington lodging ceiling of $126 required of all federal employees by regulation?
The wasteful expenditure of public funds by the independent counsel and now the House managers is the crime of the century.
BILL DEACON
Redondo Beach
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A picture is worth a thousand words. Your Jan. 26 front-page picture of the guard at the front door of the U.S. Senate can be used to define “Star Chamber.”
WALTER J. HAUENSTEIN
Garden Grove
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Senators, if I may borrow a line from those paragons of virtue, the Republican House managers, “What have you got to hide?”
LENARD E. McDONALD
Culver City
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Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is wrong in condemning the Senate for debating the issue behind closed doors (Jan. 25-26). How else but unhampered by the harsh media glare can the ladies and gentlemen of the Senate relax, take off their coats, loosen their ties and addressing each other by first names get down to the serious business of calling a halt to this unseemly charade?
GEORGE MARGO
Malibu
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What does Sen. Harkin fear? That in a closed-door discussion some of the senators of his party may voice their consciences, free of political reprisal?
E.J. NEWTON
Dana Point
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For the first time in years I agree with Alan Dershowitz (“Leading the President Astray,” Commentary, Jan. 25). Attorney Robert Bennett has made a hash of his defense of the president. Why he did not insist that the Paula Jones case be settled early on (given the president’s prior history) is almost impossible to understand. Only a self-destructive impulse by his client, or Bennett’s hubris, can explain it.
MICHAEL KENNEDY
Mission Viejo
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Does Dershowitz really expect us to believe that President Clinton, a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former professor of law, was unaware of the possibility of defaulting or settling in the Jones case? Clinton’s problems do not stem from bad lawyering but from his own behavior.
ALFRED HIMELSON
Woodland Hills
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So now we know. I’ve wondered why Michael Ramirez’s amateurish cartoons were so consistently anti-Clinton. Ramirez “vaguely remembers talking to a group [Council of Conservative Citizens] with a name like that” (Jan. 26). When? Where? Why? Shame on The Times!
HOWARD F. EATON
Mission Viejo