President Reagan’s Comments on Choices of the Homeless

I have just mailed a letter to the president of ABC Television, registering my negative feelings about the Brinkley/Reagan interview of Dec. 23. I found the interviewee’s questions were “soft,” and it was apparent that he was playing to Reagan’s biases and ability to remain “Teflonized.”

In particular, the lack of follow-up questions to the answers President Reagan gave to the questions about the “homeless” who are sleeping on the grass across from the White House. When “our President” blamed it on the Civil Liberties Union for having had the mentally incompetent released, and on the fact that “they are that way (outdoor sleepers) by choice” I screamed for David Brinkley to follow that ill-spirited, heartless, self-serving and uninformed answer with another pertinent question--but none was forthcoming.

And this in the face of yet another part of the answer, which stated that the President’s reading of the Sunday Washington Post classified section showed no dearth of job openings, which would preclude the need to be homeless. Not just overkill, but oversimplification.

So much for TV interviews, and for our family, at any rate, so much for Mr. Brinkley.

LAWRENCE H. WALTON

Culver City