The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. I'm Robert MacNeil in New York.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And I'm Charlayne Hunter-Gault in Washington. After the News Summary, we first look at President Clinton's new candidate to head the Defense Department, then the first year of the Clinton presidency, historians and political scientists look back and forward, and we end with an Anne Taylor Fleming essay on January football. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: President Clinton revealed his new nominee for defense secretary today. He is William Perry, the current deputy secretary. His nomination follows Adm. Bobby Ray Inman's decision last week to withdraw his name from consideration. Perry appeared with the President at the White House this afternoon. Mr. Clinton talked about his qualifications.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: He has the right skills and management experience for the job. He has the right vision for the job. He has served with real distinction as both Undersecretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. For years and throughout his service this past year, he has been at the cutting edge on defense issues.

WILLIAM PERRY, Secretary of Defense-designate: The national security problems facing the United States today are complex and difficult. We are making a transition from the security posture involved to deal with the Cold War to a very different security posture. I look forward to carrying out your commitment, to make those changes in a way that addresses the need of the military and civilian personnel, our defense facilities, and the communities that depend on them.

MR. MacNeil: We'll have more on the Perry nomination right after the News Summary. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The Supreme Court today ruled that federal anti-racketeering laws can be used against protesters who block abortion clinics or use violent tactics to close them down. The ruling was unanimous. The case was brought by the NOW Legal Defense Fund with support from the Clinton administration. Helen Neuborne of NOW said the decision added "another weapon to our arsenal for attacking the terrorism of extremists in the anti- abortion movement." But Randall Terry, the head of Operation Rescue, who has led many clinic blockades, called it a "vulgar betrayal of over 200 years of tolerance towards protest and civil disobedience."

MR. MacNeil: Residents of Los Angeles tried to return to normal life today, a week after last Monday's earthquake. Traffic was snarled by the loss of several key freeway links, but officials said the situation was better than expected because many people opted for a new commuter rail service. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the quake will turn out to be the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history. Most estimates put the price tag at about $30 billion.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Sec. of State Christopher today said China was still lagging in its progress on human rights. He said China had not met conditions for renewal of its favored nation trade status with the U.S. Christopher made the comments in Paris after a meeting with the Chinese foreign minister. Christopher also discussed Bosnia with the president of France today. We have a report narrated by David Symonds of Worldwide Television News.

DAVID SYMONDS, WTN: Christopher's meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen was a part of their ongoing dialogue on human rights in China. For the first time China agreed to begin detailed discussions on 35 individual cases. The talks continued over lunch. Qian promised a detailed account on the relatives of nine Chinese dissidents forbidden to emigrate. Christopher asked that China use its influence with North Korea to get it to agree to allow inspection of its nuclear facilities. But Christopher said he wasn't fully satisfied.

WARREN CHRISTOPHER, Secretary of State: We have not, in my judgment, made enough progress to justify my saying that there's been significant overall progress. Nevertheless, this is an important step in the path to improvement of U.S.-China relations.

MR. SYMONDS: Turning his attention to the Bosnian conflict and Washington's disagreement with Paris over how it should be handled, Christopher headed for the Ilysee Palace for a meeting with President Francois Mitterrand. Christopher said the U.S. would stand by its commitment to NATO but wouldn't send in troops to impose a settlement. Mitterrand said France would soon announce new proposals aimed at ending the conflict.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: President Clinton also signaled that the U.S. would not support a French proposal to impose a settlement on Bosnia's warring parties. He said the International Community did not have the capacity to stop the war until the Serbs, Muslims, and Croats decided to stop killing each other.

MR. MacNeil: President Clinton's nominee to be Deputy Secretary of State today told a Senate committee that the process of reform was still alive in Russia, but Strobe Talbott warned that Western support would not be forthcoming unless the Russian government managed to keep inflation in check. Boris Yeltsin last week named a new cabinet which included only one strongly pro- reform minister. Talbott spoke at a Senate appropriations committee hearing on U.S. aid to Russia.

STROBE TALBOTT, Deputy Secretary of State-designate: President Yeltsin needs to have the confidence that if he continues to press forward on a strong economic reform program, western support will be swift and substantial, but he and his colleagues in both the Executive and the Legislative Branches of the Russian government must also understand something else, and that is the cause and effect relationship between internal reform and outside support. Our support will follow their reform. It cannot be the other way around.

MR. MacNeil: Russian Prime Minister Chernomyrdin today insisted Russia was not retreating from reforms and would not do so in the future. He said there was no cause for panic in the West, despite last week's resignation of two market-oriented cabinet members.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: A new round of Middle East peace talks began in Washington today. Israel held separate meetings with Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. The negotiations were held in secret locations to avoid media coverage. They had been suspended since the September signing of the Israeli-PLO Peace Accord. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin today reported progress in implementing that agreement. His comments came after a meeting with Egypt's foreign minister, who had been helping to mediate disputes holding up Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho.

MR. MacNeil: A federal judge in Washington ruled today that Sen. Bob Packwood must turn over his personal diaries to the Senate Ethics Committee. The Oregon Republican is under investigation by the committee for allegations of sexual misconduct. Packwood complied with earlier Senate requests for the diaries. He stopped cooperating with some entries led the committee to consider expanding the investigation to include possible conflict of interest abuses by the Senators. That's our summary of the day's top stories. Now it's on to the new choice for defense secretary, President Clinton's first year, and January Football. FOCUS - PENTAGON PROMOTION

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: First tonight, we focus on President Clinton's choice of a new defense secretary and the national security issues that confront the Pentagon and the White House. After the forced resignation of Les Aspin, the withdrawal of Bobby Ray Inman, and the latest -- the refusal of at least one other candidate to take the job -- the President selected the Number 2 man at the Pentagon, William Perry. Perry is a mathmetician who served as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration. He was a consultant and investment banker and professor at Stanford University until he was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defense at the beginning of Mr. Clinton's term. Here's an excerpt of his remarks at the White House ceremony where his appointment was announced.

WILLIAM PERRY, Secretary of Defense-designate: We read about the problems every day: Mogadishu, Sarajevo, Phnom Penh. But we must not lose sight of the opportunities in this new Post Soviet world. For example, this year we have what I would call a window of opportunity to make a major reform to the defense acquisition system so that we can buy modern equipment for our military forces at affordable prices. The President has already made a commitment to readiness, but the acquisition of new equipment deals with the readiness of the forces five years hence or ten years hence. We must look to that problem as well. I have the full commitment of the President to proceed on a vigorous program of acquisition reform, and I believe that we can work effectively with the Congress to establish real reform in this system, and it's long overdue.

REPORTER: Did you have to be persuaded to take this job? And what do you think will be the toughest part of it?

WILLIAM PERRY: No, I did not have to be persuaded to take the job. I met with the President Friday morning, and I left that meeting full prepared to take on the job. I had a meeting with my family that evening, because it's not just me that's getting into this job. I put them under considerable strains when I do it too. And we had a follow-up meeting on Saturday morning with the White House where I told them that I were -- had to accept the job at that time, my answer would have to be "no." I met then with the Vice President, and he told me I could take my time, take some more time on the decision, meet with my family further. I took advantage of that, and on Sunday afternoon, I called the Vice President back and said, "If you still want me to be Secretary of Defense, I'm eager to serve."

REPORTER: Is your answer categorical about the "nanny question," Dr. Perry?

BRIT HUME, ABC News: Could you talk about what the Pentagon faces and the possible difficulty you may have in actually carrying out the blueprint that the President has laid out?

WILLIAM PERRY: In order to carry out the bottom up review with the funds proposed for it, we will have to manage the Pentagon very well. We will have to have real acquisition reform. We will have to have careful planning and management of our programs. We have to do all of this while we're maintaining a very high level of readiness and a level of morale and cohesion in military forces. It is a difficult management job, and I believe it's doable, and that's what I'm undertaking to do. Thank you.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Now we get three assessments of the new defense secretary. Two come from the Senate Armed Services, which must confirm Dr. Perry. Sen. John Glenn is a Democrat from Ohio, and Sen. William Cohen is a Republican from Maine. They are joined by Retired Navy Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll. He's the director of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. And, Sen. Glenn, starting with you, assuming that you agree with the President that Dr. Perry is the right man for the job, what qualities do you think make him the right man for the right job?

SEN. GLENN: Well, I think he has all the things you'd like to see in a new Secretary of Defense, particularly at this time. You know, we're just coming off the Cold War. We're reorganizing. The new Secretary of Defense or new nominee at least is the one who ran most of the bottoms-up-review, as it's called, on how we'll reorganize. He wants to get into procurement review and do that, which is something that we have worked on, that Sen. Cohen and I have worked on, on the Governmental Affairs Committee and the Armed Services Committee for a number of years. He's had recent experience trying to implement foreign policy in some of his trips to the former Soviet Union and some of the other former satellite states, as well as other things there. Another one to me is a very important factor also, is that he will take a short time to confirm, I think. Of all places, all departments in government that we should not have vacant, it seems to me it's the Department of Defense. You may have to make decisions there in minutes that get carried out in hours in different parts of the world. And I think with Mr. Perry's background, with the Deputy Secretary's background, he has an ideal background to implement that, plus a real understanding of how the Defense Department works. He's been Defense -- he's been deputy over there. He's had hands on experience. He has the background to do it, and I applaud the President for making this decision.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you applaud him, too, Sen. Cohen, from the Republican side?

SEN. COHEN: Yes, I do. I would echo exactly what Sen. Glenn has said. This is a man who not only should be confirmed in a relatively short time, but he will take virtually no time to learn his away around the vast bureaucracy of the Pentagon, and that's something I think, if anyone's arguing on behalf of taking in an outsider, someone who's unfamiliar with the Pentagon, its operations, it would take, it would take weeks, if not months, to familiarize themselves with the kinds of details that are really inherent in a bureaucracy that large.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, I think we might get to that argument in a minute. But let me ask you this question before we do. If Les Aspin got into trouble and was effectively, in effect, fired, why wouldn't the problems that he had attach to his number two?

SEN. COHEN: First of all, I think that there are two problems here. Mr. Perry brings, I think, considerable skill and management. He is someone who I think is familiar both in the private sector and also at the Pentagon level of managing a large organization. But there's another side to the job, and that's political. In my own estimation, I don't think that Sec. Aspin was fully prepared to do battle with the kind of subtle or not so subtle hand-to-hand combat that one engages in between the State Department and NSC officials. I think that at least Bill Perry having been in the Pentagon for some time is perhaps at least aware, if not prepared to do that kind of battle. But one of the reasons there's been a lack of coherence within the Clinton administration program, national security program as such, is you have this conflict between state, NSC and Defense and as a result of that, you've seen the kind of on and off again policies in Bosnia, in Somalia, in Haiti, and perhaps even in North Korea. I think that Mr. Perry is going to have to contend with that, and we'll have to see. Time will tell whether he'll have the capability to deal with that.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Adm. Carroll, you don't think that Dr. Perry is the right man for the job. Why not?

ADM. CARROLL: He is a right man for the Department of Defense. He has a distinguished career over 15 years working on defense matters in and out of the Pentagon, but he carries with him a peculiar problem as the current Deputy Sectary of Defense. The present strategy of the United States for security is that we must be prepared to fight and win two major regional conflicts nearly simultaneously and unilaterally all on our own.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: That came out of that so-called "bottoms-up review."

ADM. CARROLL: Came out of the bottom-up review. Unfortunately, the budget doesn't match the plan. There's at least a $50 billion hang out and Secretary -- Deputy Sec. Perry contributed to that. He was a major player in the bottom-up review. He particularly gave it the high-tech cast that it has. He places tremendous reliance on technological superiority.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Because that's his background.

ADM. CARROLL: That's his background as a way to compensate for reduced forces. He's willing to see 300,000 people leave the forces and make up for it by heavy investment in very advanced and expensive technology.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And so the bottom line is that you feel like having to take that policy forward is going to be --

ADM. CARROLL: Well, he can't take it forward. It doesn't match, because there's not enough money in the budget. Somebody's going to have to find 50 billion plus to make that plan work. How does Mr. Perry go back into his own planning, his own priorities, and find this money and take it out, take it out of the program?

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Sen. Glenn.

SEN. GLENN: Well, the Admiral asked some questions that are good questions, where the 50 billion comes from. I don't think that Mr. Perry, Deputy Sec. Perry, has addressed that yet. These things get fought through OMB. I'm sure that Bill Perry was not one that advocated that $50 billion cut. But if you have to make a cut like that, what are you going to depend on? Are you going to try and go low tech and get more people killed, or use the highest technology you can? It makes more sense to me to go as high tech at any time. In fact, through all this, these cutbacks that we've had, one thing I've -- the two things I've recommended are do not cut the intelligence budget as much as we were contemplating, because if we have a build-up again, which we may have, we want to build from the best intelligence base, and No. 2, build from the best research base. And it's that area that Bill Perry has had a great deal of experience in, so I don't lay all the budget problems at Bill Perry's feet. I'm sure he was against those budget cuts as much as anybody else. But I think he's had enough experience over there to know where the least harm will be done if we have to make some budget cuts, which I hope we don't have to do.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Sen. Cohen, is Dr. Perry going to be in an impossible situation trying to reconcile the plan with the money that's there to spend on it?

SEN. COHEN: Maybe not impossible but very difficult. I think Adm. Carroll points to a very important aspect of it. There's a 50 -- anywhere from a 30 to a 50 and according to Newsweek as high as a $90 billion gap. How Mr. Perry's going to reconcile that remains to be seen, as to whether he's going to advocate the kind of cuts that need to be made or increase the amount of spending.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, is this going to make it difficult for him to do the job, I mean, to Adm. Carroll's main point?

SEN. COHEN: It's going to be difficult for anyone to do the job. It wouldn't matter if they brought in a total outsider to do that particular job. don't forget, the commander in chief is Bill Clinton. He's the one who accepted the bottoms-up review. He's the one who advocated this policy. So anyone coming in is not going to be in any better position. I want to echo just one point that Sen. Glenn made. Bill Perry has been in the forefront of looking for high technology because he knows that more than half of the budget is consumed by manpower payments. If we're going to have a declining defense budget, we can ill afford to be having large forces and cut back on the technology side. The future of warfare is going to be high-technology and not expensive large forces.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Adm. Perry [Carroll], taking into consideration what both of these Senators have just said, I mean, would an outsider have been a better choice, and, if so, wasn't the President running out of options? I mean, they've referred to Dr. Perry as the last man standing in all of this.

ADM. CARROLL: It may be an impossible job, and it may be equally impossible to find that $50 billion, because there are a lot of people in Congress who want to see this spending stay very high. But let me make one thing clear. Sec. Perry brings tremendous emphasis on technology, on spending, investing in technology as the compensation for reduced force structure. He carries it to the point, for example, where he's strongly in favor of the F-22 fighter. This is a fighter we brought into the inventory or are bringing in to defeat Soviet aircraft of the 21st century. It's going to cost $86 billion to build F-22 fighters. Like Sen. Glenn, I'm a pilot, and I can't think of anybody out there in the next 20 years who's going to have technology that we need F-22s to combat.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Can you think of anybody who would have made a better choice?

ADM. CARROLL: I'd like to see Adm. William Crowe considered, but that would take an act of Congress, probably one to get him to take the job, and two for Congress to authorize it.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But one of the things that I've heard today about Dr. Perry is that he, that the military people have been very high on him all along.

ADM. CARROLL: Well, he gets along very well with the military. He is extremely productive and finds solutions to problems, but this problem of finding the solution, always a new technology at a tremendous investment, is the source really of this budget overrun, this need for more money.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, we can't resolve that one here, but let me go back to something you said, Sen. Cohen, about him -- Dr. Perry knowing his way around. But one of the things that was reported about his initial reluctance that he sort of downplayed today was that he didn't want to get into some of the bruising fights that he'd already experienced with industry people who believe that some of the reductions he's been proposing would affect our state of readiness. Is this man -- given the history now of this appointment -- is he tough enough to stay the course, do you think?

SEN. COHEN: Well, if he isn't tough enough for being Secretary of Defense, then he wouldn't have been tough enough to be Deputy Secretary of Defense. He is in a position to make many of those decisions. He would come into contact with the same industry giants, with the same kind of bruises and blows being struck. I think one of the rumors that was floated initially is that Mr. Perry's name was being floated, and I think understandably -- I don't know this for a fact -- but if I were Mr. Perry, I would say if my name were being floated just for cover for someone else, I wouldn't be interested either. I think he was interested. I think he wanted to check with his family to make sure they were on board, because it's a family commitment with many, many hours devoted to this job, and when he found out he had the full support of his family, he said, "I'm interested, and I want it."

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Sen. Glenn, the conventional wisdom in Washington is that the President's national security team is pretty weak. The New York Times today even used the word "inept." The President described Dr. Perry as a man of vision, although others have talked more about him being a manager. Do you think that he has the vision to make a significant contribution to upgrading at least the perception, if not the reality, of the competence and the forward thinking of this team?

SEN. GLENN: I think he certainly does. I think he's gone through this bottom-up review. You have to go through that with a vision of where you want the military to be in the future and how balanced it's going to be. And if, as the Admiral says, whether we can really do a two-front war with the size that we have, he's had to analyze that, if you look at the vision too, he's been involved in some of the foreign initiatives. He had a Perry initiative with Japan to develop high-tech trade initiatives. He was in charge of reviewing U.S.-Korean policy, worked closely with the state on re- establishing ties with China, been out in the Scandinavian countries, on and on in things where he's been out there working to implement the policies of this administration right now. So I think he has, and if you set out to try and set up criteria for what you would want, it's someone that has all of that, plus an appreciation for the budget problems the admiral mentions, and procurement, all the rest of it. I think he's ideal.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. We're going to have to leave it there. Just very quickly though, Sen. Cohen, Sen. Glenn has already said he didn't think confirmation was going to be tough. Do you think it's going to be a fairly simple, easy process?

SEN. GLENN: Unless it's something that we don't know, and I tend to doubt that, Mr. Perry having gone through several confirmations, I think he could be confirmed quite easily.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Well, Senators and Admiral, thank you. FOCUS - 1 YEAR LATER

MR. MacNeil: Tomorrow evening, President Clinton reports on the state of the union. Tonight, we look back at the first year of his presidency with a group of historians and presidential scholars. They are historian Arthur Schlesinger and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, now the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the City University of New York. Derrick Bell is a scholar in residence at New York University Law School. William Bennett was Secretary of Education during the Reagan administration and director of the national drug control policy during the Bush years. He's now co-director of Empower America, a Washington-based conservative research organization. Michael Beschloss is an historian who's written on the Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Roosevelt administration. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author and presidential biographer, is now working on a book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Richard Reeves is a professor of political science at UCLA. He recently published President Kennedy, Portrait of Power. Michael Beschloss, stepping back from the day-to-day headlines in the polls and the issues, how would you characterize the first year of the Clinton presidency?

MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, I think the first thing we have to remember, Robin, is that it's going to very much depend on how Clinton's policies turn out, the way historians look on him 30 years from now. If the budget bill, for instance, of 1993 leads to an improvement in the economy and a permanent and an actual reduction or elimination of the deficit, that's something that's going to make Bill Clinton in '93 look very good. But from the perspective of one year, I think you'd have to say that there are some lights and darks. This is a President who promised during the campaign to submit some pieces of very controversial legislation to Congress and fight for them. I think he's had more success in doing that than we might have expected from a former governor of Arkansas. At the same time, however, throughout 1993, this is a President who's been very quiet in public and in private on foreign policy. And if in the next two years the world situation should grow dire, I think Bill Clinton will be criticized very harshly for being less active in foreign policy than any President perhaps in the last forty or fifty years.

MR. MacNeil: Doris Goodwin, how would you characterize Clinton's first year?

MS. GOODWIN: You know, the interesting thing is I think intellectually he has changed the direction of the country. We're talking about health care. We're talking about welfare reform. We're talking about crime, things that we weren't talking about before. But emotionally, I don't think he's brought the country along. Great Presidents are able somehow to make you feel like you're part of a whole adventure, that you're moving with him in a certain direction. I remember, for example, when Franklin Roosevelt gave this incredible speech, a fireside chat, in February of '42, when the country was at its lowest ebbs in the war, he told everyone to get maps out so that they could follow what he was doing. There was a run on maps all over the country. They all sit there; they feel connected to one another as he tells them America will get through this. It's that emotional connection that I don't think Bill Clinton has been able yet to create, to make us feel we're part of his adventure going forward.

MR. MacNeil: Arthur Schlesinger, do you agree with that?

MR. SCHLESINGER: Well, I think there's a good deal to that. I think Bill Clinton has had some bad breaks. He's made some mistakes. But there's no preparation for being a President. It's the job you learn on, on the -- the training comes on the job. I think he's learned a good deal. He's ended up strongly. He's taken command of the national agenda. I mean, the great tip, the concerns of the Reagan-Bush years to the concerns of the Clinton years are evident. Doris mentioned some of them. This is terribly important, and I think that he's also some luck and good management on the economic situation. That's why he's doing so well in the polls today. He's borne out by the anticipations of economic recovery. He's a learner. He's a bright fellow. He's learned a good deal. I think that I would expect that he's going to accomplish a lot in his second year.

MR. MacNeil: William Bennett, would you say he's taken control of the agenda and changed it?

MR. BENNETT: Well, to some extent he has. I mean, he's an eager President. He loves the job. He's a "hands on" President. He has his hands on everything, maybe too many things. Doris Kearns is talking about the adventure. One gets the sense sometimes this is an adventure, and as one commentator in Washington put it, one sometimes gets the feeling you're dealing with a teenager who appears at the door, and you don't know whether he's going to say on a given day whether he waxed the car or wrecked the car. So there has been a kind of adventure quality to, to this year. I'm not a fan. That aside, I think he's brought eagerness and intelligence to it. He loves the job and loves governing and I think wakes up in the morning thinking how can I get into somebody's business today and make it the government's business. That's a problem for Republicans, but he's eager to do his job.

MR. MacNeil: Derrick Bell, how do you see him after one year?

MR. BELL: Well, I certainly agree that there have been good things and disappointing things, but I think overall, there's been a great deal of disappointment of friends, encouragement of enemies, and some measure of frustration for those who see this country in a very dire plight, particularly domestic, and recognize that in leadership there must be a willingness to go against the public opinion polls, to go against even the likelihood of re- election and to deal seriously with problems in which there is far more opposition to what needs to be done than there likely is support.

MR. MacNeil: Problems like what?

MR. BELL: Problems, crime, for example. You get great applause from liberals and conservatives alike when you indicate you'll sign a bill for $6 billion for new prisons and work camps. But those who are involved every day with people who are going to be filling those prisons know that that is not the answer. You get great applause by going out and speaking to a group of black ministers in Memphis about the need for the black community to clean itself up, pull itself up morally. That is not going to provide the employment without which in this country not only can't you pay your bills, your self-esteem goes down to nothing, and everything else unravels after that, so that what I'm hoping and what I think a lot of others are hoping in the future that after this breaking in period, this learning period that Arthur speaks of, that we will have a President who recognizes that this is a tough job, I'm going to get an awful lot of heat, I'm going to do what needs to be done, and let the next election take care of itself.

MR. MacNeil: Richard Reeves in LA, how do you see the first year?

MR. REEVES: Well, differently than, than most of the others here. I think that Clinton has been an astonishingly successful President. I think, as Arthur said, he's made the government a player again, that we've been trying to deal with a lot of problems with one hand -- government -- tied behind our back. I think he's gotten a good deal of what he wanted from Congress, the budget. He has changed the health care debate in this country from whether until how and when, what kind of program will we have. Where he's weakest in foreign policy, he's also been able to shift the ground. This is a great political animal, and he's shifted it to not wars but economics. He's shifted it to a trade issue and emphasized Asia above Europe to try to get around the Atlanticists who have dominated American foreign policy and finally I think politically he has managed to marginalize two people who could cost him a second term, Ross Perot and Jesse Jackson, so that I have been amazed with how well I think across-the-board he's done over this 12-month period, I think a lot of the eagerness that Bill Bennett talks about, but the country watching this. We've been looking into the national mirror, television, and seeing old men. And now we look in and we're young again, and there's energy in the government and at the center, and I think people like that. They may not trust Bill Clinton totally yet, but they have a feeling he's out there knocking himself out every day, and I think they like that.

MR. MacNeil: Doris Kearns, when you said he hadn't connected yet, in your view, did you mean people don't trust him yet?

MS. GOODWIN: Partly I meant that, but partly I think it's the message that he's used to communicate with people. He's a great speaker at times. I mean, I think his joint session speeches were fabulous, but then they weren't followed up as events. He goes on Larry King and he talks one-on-one to people like that. That somehow doesn't make people feel a connection with one another when they're listening to him. So that's part of it, and I think underneath it all, there is a distrust that's left over from the campaign. Sometimes when he's speaking his heart, we believe every word he's saying, like when he spoke at Memphis. I thought it was a fabulous internal him speaking. Other times he's so political like Lyndon Johnson was that you feel a politician is speaking, and you have a hard time trusting, that he's not saying what he's supposed to say and what we want him to say, rather than what he believes. So that he's got to work on.

MR. MacNeil: Yes, Derrick Bell.

MR. BELL: Don't you think that that was the politician speaking at Memphis, the politician speaking at the Jesse Jackson meeting when he really struck out at Sister Souljah, that he was looking for applause from the white suburbs on those occasions more than anything else?

MS. GOODWIN: Jesse Jackson, yes, I do, but not at Memphis. I thought there was something deeper that came out of him at the Memphis speech.

MR. MacNeil: Bill Bennett, how do you think about Clinton and the trust factor?

MR. BENNETT: Well, I think he's got serious problems. I agree with Mr. Reeves. This is a great political animal. Now, there isn't any doubt about it. We knew that during the campaign. His nickname was the "terminator." You know, you can stop him and slow him down, but you can't really put him away. He is a political animal all the time. He's also, I think, not cynical. I think he's sincere about what he's saying, but the trust deficit is real. And we shall see where that goes. We now have an independent counsel looking into Whitewater, but apart from the great political animal, I mean, I think when you look at the achievements, the ledger is very spotty in a lot of serious ways. He is the commander in chief. Foreign policy I think is clearly his weakest area. It's been a mess in foreign policy for the most part. I think this business at the Pentagon has been terrible for them. And the other point I would make about Clinton as President -- I know there are presidential experts here with whom I should defer but let me start with this. It seems to me he gets pushed around way too much by the elders. You know, he gets pushed around by Sam Nunn on gays in the military. He talks about health care, and Moynihan just totally changes the agenda on him, says we don't have a health care crisis, we have a welfare crisis. He gets pushed around by Boren. Recently, he even got pushed around by Joycelyn Elders, who came out suggesting legalizing drugs, Clinton said, no, and she came back and said it again, no penalty, no fear, very little respect, it seems to me, from his own team.

MR. MacNeil: Does he get pushed around too much by the Elders?

MR. SCHLESINGER: I believe there has been a tendency on his part to cave in too quickly. I think he ought to have moreconfidence, and I think he will gain more confidence in his capacity as public educator. He doesn't have, therefore, to defer immediately when opposition arouses him. He ought to think of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, of course, had the great advantage of a palpable national crisis to facilitate his appeal, but I do think all Presidents begin with the illusion that they can please all the people all the time, and they learn, particularly if they are going to change things, that when you change things, you antagonize the people who like things the way they are. There's been, I would say, a kind of hair breadth Harry quality about Bill Clinton. He always seems, or someone suggested a better comparison perhaps, the great old magician Harry Houdini. Houdini, you remember, kept blindfolding himself, manacling himself, entering a locked box, and then manage to escape, extricate himself just in time. There's been that aspect to Clinton.

MR. MacNeil: Now we discover Houdini got a big kick out of it too. Michael Beschloss, how good a predictor of presidential performance is the first year, looking back historically?

MR. BESCHLOSS: It's actually a very poor one. If you look at many of our great Presidents, much of what they did that was great didn't happen until well into their presidency. If you look, for instance, at Truman on foreign policy, including certainly the Marshall Plan, that that did not take place until well after the end of the first year. At the same time, some Presidents who were seen as at least sufficient Presidents, like Warren Harding, I've read recently were not looked at very badly at the end of -- in Harding's case at the end of his first year. So I think one thing we should be terribly modest about is our ability to really find a judgment that's going to last thirty or forty years from now. That's going to depend very much on how these things turn out. It's also going to depend, Robin, on a lot that we don't know right now, for instance, what kind of things Bill Clinton is saying to the people who work on his staff in private. We might find that this is a much more commanding and effective figure in private than we might conclude in public.

MR. MacNeil: What's your observation on how good the first year is as a predictor?

MR. SCHLESINGER: Well, I agree with Michael Beschloss. I mean, the Kennedy third year, 1963, was a much more successful year for John Kennedy than 1961. Theodore Roosevelt did better later on. It's impossible to tell, and there are so many external factors. One is the economy, which is partly external. Another, of course, is foreign affairs. I would say on foreign affairs that comments were made a couple of times about Clinton's weakness in foreign affairs. On the other hand, we're entering a new situation in foreign affairs. I don't know any foreign office anywhere in the world that's developed a post Cold War framework for foreign policy. We haven't, but neither have the British, the French, the Russians, the Japanese, the United Nations, anyplace else. Everyone is groping at this period, therefore, the reactions are incremental and ad hoc. But -- so I wouldn't fault him too much in preparing to solve a problem that no one else has solved either.

MR. MacNeil: Bill Bennett.

MR. BENNETT: It's not the systematic development of a theory of the new world order that I'm faulting. I'm faulting him for first this way then that way, contradicting himself, saying to North Korea, you cannot develop nuclear capability and then having an aide at the White House say a week later, oh, no, it's not nuclear capability, it's just that we don't want to become a nuclear power in the world. We're in on Bosnia, we're out on Bosnia. Somalia, the mess over there, whatever happened to Haiti, it's not the failure to develop an overarching theory. It's the failure to send anything like a consistent signal.

MR. MacNeil: Derrick Bell, you were stressing earlier the problems at home. Do you care at all about the performance on foreign policy, or do you --

MR. BELL: I think I care. I guess my priority would be my reading of history indicates that countries like ours don't fall from without. We're likely to be bungling along as the other nations are, as Bill pointed out. But at home, I see us facing a real crisis, not simply because of race, although race throughout our history has been an indicator of what is happening to society generally. I think -- we talk about, well, the economy is picking up, but also, don't you agree that we are in a transition from whatever kind of economy we have always had -- a market economy, if you will -- to something new where increasing numbers of our people, not just black people or minority people, but an increasing number of hard working Puritan ethnic whites, there's simply no longer work? Every day you pick up the paper, another major corporation is laying off or cutting back or downsizing five thousand, ten thousand. What does this mean over, over a period of time? And who's addressing the problem of, of work and the importance of work in our society when there is no work?

MR. MacNeil: Dick Reeves, how would you address that with your observation that this was a good year for the President?

MR. REEVES: I would think that we can never tell exactly from a first year or any year because the presidency is a very, very reactive job. He's the man or the woman who has to react to whatever is helping in the world, but when Derrick talks about jobs and, and a new kind of economy, I think he may be framing where this administration has to go. The two Roosevelts were our two great Presidents, and a big part of the reason was that they had to tame capitalism. Capitalism tended to be a very savage piece of business, and the robber barons and Teddy Roosevelt, the Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt, and now we see what the real savagery that there can be in capitalism is running -- had run amok I think in this country in the 1980's, is running amok in much of the world, whether it's Southern Mexico or the Soviet Union, and it may be that Bill Clinton historically is being groomed to be the next American President who has to take on capitalism, itself, to try to keep the productivity up, to try to keep the savagery of it down, and in this new world, that savagery shows itself in the total elimination of work as an organizing principle for the society. So that whatever he's done in the first year, my guess is that, unless there are events we can't foresee at all - - and there may well be -- that it will be the way he deals with redefining capitalism, free markets, and democracy, itself, as President, and perhaps greatness comes, if it does to him, with challenge and opportunity rather than from a set out plan.

MR. MacNeil: Bill Bennett.

MR. BENNETT: I'd certainly hope he's fonder of capitalism than Richard is. I wouldn't -- he would almost have to be fonder of capitalism than Richard is, and I actually give him fairly decent grades at least on some of those things. I'm worried that he's going to harness poor capitalism with so much more that he may kill the beast, and the alternatives I think are not, are not good. Can I go back to what Derrick Bell was saying, because I agree the real challenges are at home, and I think he's got himself a problem. Richard said earlier that, you know, he's gotten health care out on the national agenda. That's right, but will it last as the No. 1 item on the agenda? Crime is up there now, and this is not coming really from Bill Clinton. This is coming from the American people. And that has pushed, I think, health care off to the side. I'm not sure he's going to get this health care thing through. And there's also tremendous interest in welfare and all the attendant issues and ideas and problems and controversies incident to welfare. I think those, those two are much more on the minds of the American people, and I think he should be riding those much more vigorously than the health care. Those, I think you could argue, are crises. I do not think health care is a crisis.

MR. MacNeil: Doris Kearns.

MS. GOODWIN: I think the one thing we haven't mentioned is that while I do think Clinton is a fabulous political animal and I think that's so important, the other side of the presidency is dignity. It's a lot harder today to be a dignified President when we know that on your tax returns, you took a deduction for your used underwear. I mean, there's a privacy level that's not here. On the other hand, he has to be careful to guard that. I think sometimes he's too overexposed. He's on too many talk shows. He's talking when he's next to somebody in the yard of the White House, and somehow that means the focus like on health care gets lost because he speaks about so many other things. But more deeply there has to come from him a sense of being President. It's a pretty special job.

MR. REEVES: I think it's very special and much more difficult to do these days. But he doesn't have to go out in front of the White House every day in short pants. I'd also like to say to Bill, I think one of the amazing political achievements of this guy is that by moving quicker on guns than the Republicans that he has flanked them for the moment on the law and order issues which they have been living off lo these many years. So I think that Bill better get his oar into his own side too and get them to understand that people are very, very upset, and guns have become the symbol of that upset.

MR. MacNeil: Derrick Bell.

MR. BELL: But wouldn't you agree, Richard, that the outflanking you may go along with or not but the serious problem in this country is an alternative life for those who now at the age of ten or twelve see guns and their uses as their only connection with power, their only connection with meaning, and, and that means the creation of, of jobs back to that level again in a way that we had very little experience except again with, with Roosevelt. And with Roosevelt we had a, a crisis, an emergency with the fall, the tremendous depression after the Wall Street collapse in 1929. Would you agree with me that what we need is a major crisis that would cause the people to recognize that new prisons and more police are not the answer to this very serious problem?

MR. MacNeil: I'm surprised you don't say it's a crisis anyway with so many particularly African-Americans unemployed relative to their proportion of the population.

MR. BESCHLOSS: Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Yes.

MR. BESCHLOSS: If I could come in on this, I think another thing that we're hearing tonight is something that is a political problem that Bill Clinton really created for himself during the '92 campaign. There are really two Bill Clintons. One comes from the early '70s, a liberal, polarizing activist. The other is the centrist Democrat, new Democrat of the 1980s. He's never really resolved the relationship between the two. He tried to bring both of them into his camp in '92, both of those constituencies. He was quite successful. Now you see a process by which voters who felt they were voting for one of them feel disappointed by other things that Bill Clinton is doing, and I think what you are going to hear for the rest of this term is each time Clinton goes for a conservative, traditionally conservative issue like crime or welfare reform, you're going to displease many traditional Democrats. Every time he goes for something like gays in the military, or perhaps the stimulus package of '93, he's going to displease the others. And I think this may account for this that we heard everywhere, hair breadth Harry quality, a tendency in this administration to stop and start and encounter all these near death experiences we've heard so much about.

MR. MacNeil: Arthur Schlesinger.

MR. SCHLESINGER: I don't think there is that great a conflict between the two sides of a Democratic Party. Clinton clearly is in the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson tradition of affirmative government. He believes that the government is one of the means by which free people promote the general welfare. That may be -- I'm not sure whether that is an old or a new Democratic view, but I think that as applied to the problems of the 1990s, we have to work out things. I mean, the health care is an intricate problem. I do believe that in the end the health care bill will pass embodying two principles of universal coverage and cost containment. It's going to be a hard fight to get it. I don't think that's an issue on which traditional Democrats or new Democrats or whatever terminology you want to use differ particularly, so I don't -- I wouldn't exaggerate the importance of this conflict.

MR. MacNeil: Does he have the power, Doris Kearns, compared, for instance, as a President you studied -- you -- his biography you wrote -- Lyndon Johnson -- does he have the power with Congress? Has he demonstrated enough power to be, to make us optimistic about this health care reform?

MS. GOODWIN: I think nobody has the power Lyndon Johnson had. I mean, there was a man who woke up every morning and had a chart at his breakfast table knowing which bill within which committee and who should he call at 7 in the morning, he'd start calling a Congressman. If the Congressman wasn't home, he talked to the wife, if the wife wasn't home, he talked to the daughter. This was Johnson's life. So I don't think anyone we're going to see is going to be quite like that. But I do think Clinton has part of the same technique, the style, the love of the game that the Congressmen respect. They want to be schmoozed. They want to have their arms put around. They want to be given things, the patronage. He understands how to deal with Congress. Whether he can at the same time connect what the Congress is doing to the country at large and if the country feels it's behind him and Congress, that's the harder challenge for him I think.

MR. MacNeil: What makes you so pessimistic, Bill Bennett, about the health care reform?

MR. BENNETT: I just, I just think it's losing support, and as the arguments have been mounted against it, I mean, he's lost Allen Entholdman who is one of the original sponsors of this. Lots of other people who have looked at this program who were originally enthusiastic are now not enthusiastic. And Moynihan is a real headache to Bill Clinton on this because, again, he is one of the elders, and he has not only criticized the plan, itself, but has put it in a priority list not where the President has. Could I make one comment?

MR. MacNeil: If you can make it briefly.

MR. BENNETT: Very briefly. I don't think it's guns, and I don't think it's work. I think the problem is values. I'll tell you I think the President thinks the problem is values too. What I'm very interested to see is how he talks about values, because when he talks about values, of course, the public will make judgments of value about him. I think he's smart enough to know he should talk about it, but he does so at some risk to himself.

MR. MacNeil: Well, thank you all. We'll listen tomorrow night, and maybe we'll have you back next year to see how it went two years in. Thank you. ESSAY - EYE ON THE BALL

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Finally tonight, California journalist and essayist Anne Taylor Fleming with some thoughts about men, women, and football.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: What I always forget about January is the maleness of it. It is the most male of months, with the constant rumble of football, its endless tackles and fumbles, and the crack of helmets and men gathered together in those time-honored, sports- watching rituals. It starts, of course, on New Year's Day, with those interminable college bowls, Sugar Fiesta Cotton, Rose, et cetera, et cetera. Then we move on into the end of the pro season, the month coasting upward on a kind of hyperventilating, masculine way, the commentators' and fans' frenzy seemingly rising with each conquest, till the explosive confirmation of Super Bowl Sunday. So what does a woman do during these intensely gendered months? I watch too, football and the men, mostly the men. Football I can take or leave, though I did come from a female household of serious sports fans. When I'm able not to take offense at the unnecessary roughness, as it's so elegantly called, I can actually get into a game, get caught up in the choreography, the arc of the perfectly thrown ball, the elegant S's the running backs are able to carve through the pack. I get caught up too in the dramas, old Joe Montana feeling forced out of San Francisco now seeing revenge against his younger successor, Steve Young, and Marcus Allen finally having his say in the sun, or is it snow, after leaving California and joining Montana in Kansas City? How could you not be for those guys? Clearly, I'm a Quixotic fan. Or is it just a female fan? Looking for the human element in the brutal contest. After all, football does still carry for many of us women a kind of gladiator sting, and not incidentally reminds us of our own, long-ago, gawky adolescence when the pert cheerleader with the perfect hair and the quarterback boyfriend seemed to be light years ahead of us in the game of life. That was a very male-female world. They played; we cheered them on; and no, I don't want to go back there. But in January, something in me is touched by the spectacle men make of themselves over football. It is them I watch as they watch, gathered in pretzel-eating, beer-drinking, cigar-smoking groups, men in living rooms and sports bars, in my own house, nice men who aren't going to get tanked up and knock somebody around in some post-game alcoholic disappointment. Allegedly, more women are beaten up on Super Bowl Sunday than any other ordinary day, and not many women tiptoeing around the edges of the frat pack passion these games seem to engender do so unmindful of the vicarious violence, or not so vicarious in so homes, that lurks inthe gathering. But nice men, it is those I am talking about, men who don't like Howard Stern any better than I do, and are plenty in touch with their feelings and their children, and still like football. There is something so naked about a group of men watching the athletic daring do of men half their age, a third their age. It is at such moments they often seem most knowable, most fragile, less male than ever, ironically, their own long lost dreams audible under their cheers. Would I be happier in a country that honors its poets and scientists with the same fervor it showers on its athletes? Probably. Am I just going a little soft in my middle years, having survived like a lot of women those waves of rage both personal and political that swirled through so much of my earlier life? Probably. Perhaps it's just a little beginning- of-1994 hopefulness, the sense that maybe this year we can be better friends, we women and men. I am hearing a lot of that again, people hoping to be reconciled to the opposite sex, instead of always poised for combat, for affront, Packwood and pals notwithstanding. So right here in deepest winter, in this most overtly male of months, as I watch a crowd of waist-thickened, hair thinning mid-life men cheering on their team, I find myself struck by a sense of tenderness towards men and a cautious optimism. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. RECAP

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Again, the main stories of this Monday, President Clinton nominated William Perry to be Secretary of Defense. Perry is currently the Deputy Secretary. And the Supreme Court ruled that federal anti-racketeering laws can be used to sue protesters who blockade abortion clinics. Good night, Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Good night, Charlayne. That's the NewsHour for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night with a preview of President Clinton's state of the union address plus live coverage at 9 PM Eastern Standard Time. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.