The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight Senators Hatch and Leahy disagree about the way the Senate confirms judges; Mark Shields & Kate O'Beirne, substituting for Paul Gigot, offer some political analysis; Paul Solman visits an exhibition of African art; and Roger Rosenblatt, Richard Rodriguez, Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Haynes Johnson consider last year. It all follows our summary of the news this Friday.NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The defense rested today in the penalty phase of the Terry Nichols trial in Denver. It did so after Nichols' wife testified on behalf of her husband. Marife Nichols told the jury the man convicted of involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing was a loving father to their two children. Nichols faces the death penalty. Closing arguments are scheduled for Monday. The New Year brought old troubles to the space station Mir today. Its main computer broke down. That happened seven times last year, and a new one was installed in November. The three-man crew, including an American, is trying to repair the problem. They are said to be in no danger. Without the computer, Mir's solar panels do not remain fixed on the sun, and the power supply is reduced. In Hong Kong today government health workers tested dogs, cats, and rats for the so-called "bird flu" virus. It began after animals were found eating the remains of a million plus chickens killed to prevent the spread of the virus. We have more from Mark Austin of Independent Television News.

MARK AUSTIN, ITN: These are the pictures that have angered the people of Hong Kong. Rubbish bags full of slaughtered chicken remain uncollected in public areas outside poultry farms. Reports that dogs, rats, and cats were getting at the carcasses prompted fears about the possible spread of the mystery virus the slaughter was designed to eradicate. Experts have now ordered tests on animals who may have been infected. It's also clear some chickens have escaped the cull. Hong Kong's chief executive admits mistakes have been made.

TUNG CHEE HWA, Chief Executive, Hong Kong: There have been inadequacies, but we're looking at this thing very urgently. We hope this will all be sorted out sometime today.

MARK AUSTIN: 1 1/4 million chickens have been killed after evidence the bird flu virus has spread to man. It has caused alarm here even though there's no firm evidence of man-to-man transmission, and there's been no explosion so far in a number of cases. But an epidemic can still not be ruled out, and attention is now turning to the chicken population of Southern China, which experts believe to be the source of the virus, even though officials there insist they have no cases of the infection. The authorities in Hong Kong have banned all chicken imports from Southern China until regulations can be enforced, ensuring they're healthy. And in the next few days scientists from the World Health Organization will try and visit farms in the area to make investigations of their own.

JIM LEHRER: In the African nation of Kenya today unofficial election results showed President Daniel Arap Moi won a fifth consecutive five-year term in office. Police stood by as ballot counting continued by hand. Final official results were not expected before the weekend. Moi's two main opponents demanded new elections, citing irregularities in voting and ballot counting. Eight people have died in election-related violence. Back in this country Helen Wills Moody died yesterday in Carmel, California. She was the leading women's tennis player of the 1920's and 30's. She won 31 major titles, including seven U.S. Opens and eight Wimbledon Singles championships. She had no survivors. Her ashes will be scattered at sea. She was 92 years old. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the judges issue, Shields & O'Beirne, African Art, and last year. FOCUS - JUSTICE DELAYED

JIM LEHRER: Confirming federal judges and to Phil Ponce.

PHIL PONCE: In his annual report on the Federal Judiciary Chief Justice William Rehnquist warned that there is too much work and too few judges. He pointed out that 82 of 846 federal judicial posts are vacant, almost one in ten. Twenty-six of those posts have been vacant for eighteen months or longer. The Senate confirmed 101 judges in 1994 but only 17 in 1996 and 36 last year. The chief justice said vacancies cannot remain at such high levels without eroding the quality of justice that traditionally has been associated with the federal judiciary. Some current nominees have been waiting a considerable time for a Senate Judiciary Committee vote or a final floor vote. The Senate is surely under no obligation to confirm any particular nominee, but after the necessary time for inquiry it should vote him up or vote him down. Joining us now to react to the chief justice's report is Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking Democrat. Gentlemen, welcome to you both. Sen. Hatch, your reaction to the chief justice's report.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH, [R] Utah: Well, you know, I think that when you stop and think about it, we have 82 vacancies. Forty of them don't even have nominees. Now, we're good on that Judiciary Committee but we've never been able to confirm somebody who hasn't yet been nominated. I think we can do a better job. I think the President, if he sends up qualified, non-controversial nominees, they go through very quickly. If they have problems and they're not qualified, then it's a problem. With regard to the judiciary, if all judges were like Chief Justice Rehnquist, who were not activist in nature, I think we'd have a lot better time on the committee as well because some of the committee members do get upset at some of the activist nature of some of the judges. But, you know, there are those 82 vacancies and 42 nominations that are sitting there.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Leahy, your reaction to what Chief Justice Rehnquist said.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY, [D] Vermont: I'm sitting here in Vermont, and I can't see Sen. Hatch's face. And I don't know if he was saying that with a smile or not, but the fact of the matter is it's been an outrageous stall on the part of the Republican majority in the Senate. In 1994, we confirmed 100 judges, 101 actually. We had a handful a year ago, and then last year half of the judges that were sent up there. It's not the President's fault he sends people up and they stay there forever. Magaret Worrell has been voted in two different years out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She still hasn't been confirmed, and it's now the third year. In fact, the President is having a difficulty getting people to accept being named to the federal bench because they find themselves treated like--I don't know exactly how to describe it--but just treated miserably by the U.S. Senate-- they sit there and wait year after year, and they can't even get their names--can't even get voted on.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Hatch, how do you react to it, to the delays on the nominees who have been nominated and who have come out of committee?

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: In 1991, when the Democrats controlled the committee and George Bush was President, there were 148 vacancies. Nobody complained then. In 1992, there were 118 vacancies. Nobody was complaining. In fact, Chief Justice Rehnquist in 1992, when Bush was President and the Democrats controlled the Senate Judiciary Committee, he basically issued the same report condemning the fact that--well, not condemning anybody but basically saying that we need to get more judges. At that time there were 120 vacancies compared to the 82 today. I might add that we did a computer check of the articles written about those vacancies at that time--and about his criticism of the vacancies--and requested we get those filled. There were two in the whole country. I don't think there was any report even by the NewsHour at that time. So what I'm saying is, is that it's nice to complain, but we can't confirm people who aren't there, who aren't nominated. And I have to say it's difficult to confirm people who are controversial.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: There's a whole lot of people sitting now--there's a whole lot of people sitting now who can't even get a hearing, can't even get a vote. Now, if you have somebody you don't want, then vote them down. But what happens, they're not even allowed to come to a vote. I'm told that you can't bring somebody to the floor because, well, there's a whole lot of judges have problems, when they come to a vote, we have a roll call vote on them, all 100 Senators vote for them. It's an obvious stall. You've mentioned President Bush. In the last year of any President's term we have what we call the Strom Thurmond rule which slows down after about partway into the year. They don't have any more federal judges going through. And yet, President Bush in the last year of his term had the Democrats confirm almost twice as many judges as Republicans allowed to be confirmedin the first year of President Clinton's second term. Now, that is an outrageous partisanship. When we do twice as much--when the Democrats did twice as much for President Bush in the last year of his term than the Republicans are willing to do for President Clinton in the first year of a second term, I think something is wrong.

PHIL PONCE: Obvious partisanship, Sen. Hatch?

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: No, I don't think so. Actually there are 762 sitting active federal judges today. When President Bush was president, there were 720 at the same time as we have right now. In other words, there are 42 more judges on the bench today than there were when President Bush was sitting there.

PHIL PONCE: Even when the chief justice says there's one out of ten vacant.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: That's right.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: --substantially new cases--

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: Let me finish. There aren't that many more cases, and I know federal judges who tell me that they're not overworked. In some areas there are some problems, and we have to solve those problems, and Pat is right. We have to do a better job on the Judiciary Committee and in the Senate. But the fact of the matter is, is that there are 762 active federal judges today compared to 720 at the same time during the Bush administration. And there are 345 senior judges who have taken senior status, who are hearing cases, and who are alleviating the caseload.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: So you do not feel they are overworked as a group, as the chief justice--

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: I've had lots of judges on the federal bench tell me we're not overworked. Now, in some areas they may be. For instance, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals--there's no question that there's a lot of vacancies on that court.

PHIL PONCE: One third of the seats are vacant.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: Well, it's aggravated by two things. We've only had three nominees.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: And--600 forestalled hearings--these are taxpayers that come--want to have matters heard before that court; 600 of them have to be forestalled because judges aren't there. 80 percent of the panels in the 2nd Circuit have to bring a retired judge who could be very, very elderly, could not want to come--they have to come in to hear the cases. That's wrong. That is a breakdown in the justice system. And Chief Justice Rehnquist is absolutely right.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: Well, but the point is, is that they have the judges to hear it. They're not doing it. In the 9th circuit one of the problems was, was that there was a desire to split the circuit on the part of some. We had to work with that finally. There's a commission set up because there was a desire to split. There were Senators who felt like you couldn't go ahead with judges. Then we didn't have nominations. One judge had to withdraw after some difficulties unrelated to the committee. You know, there are lots of problems, and I don't think it should all be laid at the feet of the Republicans or of the committee, especially when we can show that we're doing a pretty darned incredible job in comparison to past Democrat--

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Leahy, let me ask you--

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: I might accept that if I didn't see fund-raising letters going out on behalf of Republicans saying help us keep judges from going on the bench; help us continue this stall. And when you find Republican-oriented groups having fund-raising letters extolling and helping to support a stall in the Republican-controlled Senate, you know, you can't accept that. This is a democracy, and it's a democracy that stays that way because wehave an independent judiciary. We've had a Republican leader in the House and a Republican leader in the Senate say we have to intimidate federal judges. That's wrong. That's unprecedented. I don't know of any time--certainly in my lifetime--when anybody--Democrat or Republican--has ever taken that position. This is something new, it's partisan, and it's damaging the federal court.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Leahy, how do you react to Sen. Hatch's earlier statement that the President is sending up "activist nominees?"

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Oh, baloney. These so-called activist judges get held up forever and ever. And then when they come to the floor, they get 100 Senators vote for them. To look at one decision somewhere and say, oh, somebody is an activist is like saying that Warren Hatch is a liberal because he joins periodically with Ted Kennedy on legislation. It doesn't make Ted Kennedy a conservative; it doesn't make Orrin Hatch a liberal.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: Well, that's what some of the conservatives think anyway. That's how they get upset at me. Let me just say this. Pat makes a good point. There's no excuse for some of the fund-raising letters. They haven't been sent out, as far as I know, by Republican candidates. But there was a group on the outside that was sending out fund-raising letters that I felt were reprehensible. And one of them actually had false facts in the letter. And that shouldn't be done. And I agree with Pat on that. And we should not politicize a judiciary. But, like I say, where was the screaming when there were 148 vacancies during the Bush administration, 120 vacancies during the Bush administration? Here we have 82, and a lot of the nominees that we have came in the last few weeks of this last session, so--this isn't a numbers game. We have to be able to look at these people fairly--

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: The fact of the matter is moved them a lot faster.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Leahy.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: The Democrats confirmed judges for President Bush one heck of a lot of faster than the Republicans--

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: I can give you five years where you confirmed less than 36, which is what we confirmed last year. I can give you five years in the last ten years.

PHIL PONCE: Senator, what impact do you think the chief justice's remarks are going to have, Sen. Leahy? Will this light a fire under the Senate?

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: I sincerely hope it will because we should--the one area we should not be partisan is in federal judges. And it hurts--damages the court and damages the integrity of the court, and it damages the confidence people have in the courts if we allow it to become partisan. This is something Republicans and Democrats ought to sit down and say, we'll be partisan and other things, but not in judges.

PHIL PONCE: Sen. Hatch, what impact do you think it will have?

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: I think if Pat were the sole say in the Democratic side, that would be all right. But just go back and look at the Rehnquist nomination, the Bork nomination, the Thomas nomination, the Souter nomination. Those are Supreme Court nominations. You should have seen what they did to district and circuit court nominees. So to come in here and say the Republicans are playing politics, after what we went through for all those years I think sounds just a little bit like sour grapes because I got to tell you, there are those who want to play politics with judges on both sides, but I never saw anything like I saw during those years of Reagan and Bush.

PHIL PONCE: And, Senators, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. Thank you both very much for joining us.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH: Nice to be with you. FOCUS - POLITICAL WRAP

JIM LEHRER: And speaking of politics, now we have our political analysis by syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Kate O'Beirne, Washington editor of the National Review, who's substituting for Paul Gigot, who's on vacation. Mark, where do you come down on this judicial confirmation argument?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Well, both Senators I thought made their case well, Jim, but I think quite frankly what we're seeing is the last year rule that Sen. Leahy invoked--credit going to Strom Thurmond for it, in the last year of any president's presidency. There's a very cooling of the information by the--judges and a sort of gentleman's agreement that we're going to wait and see what the election results are.

JIM LEHRER: Because they're lifetime appointments.

MARK SHIELDS: They're lifetime appointments. The Republicans are trying to push this back just a little bit, and there's a little bit of payback. I mean, there's an awful lot of people in the Republican side who have never recovered and never forgotten the treatment that Bob Bork got. And they felt that that was really the worst of partisanship. I think when all is said, what Pat Leahy--the Senator from Vermont--made the point, this has entered into presidential politics. John Ashcroft, Senator from Missouri, running for President in the year 2000, using direct mail on this, activist judges. The problem is we've run out of demons in American politics. We've run out of villains, and now judges are being demonized and the villains that you're going to use to raise money.

JIM LEHRER: Is that what this is all about, demons, judges/

KATE O'BEIRNE, National Review: Jim, there are obviously two sides to most controversies, thank God, or we'd have to work for a living, Mark. But in this case the evidence is clearly on the other side. One simple fact-- because it's difficult to follow how many judges have been confirmed over what period of time--Ronald Reagan in his first term had a Republican Senate. Bill Clinton in his first four years has appointed 25 more judges than Ronald Reagan did in his first term with a Republican Senate. Two hundred and twenty-six Clinton appointees are now on the bench. They've only had three roll call votes, not a single one defeated. If anything, the Republican Senate is increasingly coming under criticism from more conservative groups that they're not looking at these judges who serve in very powerful positions for a lifetime closely enough. So poor Orrin Hatch is caught in a squeeze, though, unfortunately, between liberal groups complaining and conservative groups wanting more scrutiny. I think Justice Rehnquist was wrong in focusing on the supply side, and that is the number of judges. The demand side, the number of cases, I think, is the bigger problem. Federal judges nowadays are hearing cases they shouldn't be hearing. They're running school districts, state school districts. They're running state prison systems. They oversee environmental clean-ups. If they stuck to their constitutional duties, they would be far less busy.

MARK SHIELDS: Judges, it isn't the chief justice's job to come up with the demand side. I mean, the chief justice--the judiciary's job is to handle the cases that come before 'em, the laws that are written. They have 13,000 more drug cases this year than they had last year. This is a law and order Congress, writing tough federal laws. We're going to bring everything before you. Nothing is going to be negotiated. Everybody's going to go to trial. This means a bigger caseload. This means a need for more judges. Yes, Democrats did oppose judges, but there was usually a high profile. There was sort of a--they'd pick out one or two court of appeals judges or Supreme Court judges they'd make their fights on, but basically--

KATE O'BEIRNE: Republicans haven't even done that.

MARK SHIELDS: What Republicans are holding up now are district court judges' confirmations, and that's really--Kate's right--not voting on it--they're just not allowing votes.

KATE O'BEIRNE: They're rubber stamping them. Two hundred and twenty-six of them have been approved in five years.

MARK SHIELDS: No. I mean, Orrin Hatch is right, and Pat Leahy is, that they're--quite frankly, they're not coming to a vote.

KATE O'BEIRNE: I agree with Mark that Congress has exacerbated the problem by federalizing crimes on their law and order kick, and that has contributed to more federal cases, before the federal bench; however, it would be perfectly appropriate for Justice Rehnquist not to be criticizing Congress, except on that ground, because I agree, they shouldn't be federalizing crimes, many more crimes, but instead to talk to his fellow lifetime appointees and say let's show some self-restraint. As long as we federal judges put ourselves out there as the court of first resort if you disagree with the commencement speech, you don't go to your state Department of Education director; you don't go to the principal or school board; you go straight to federal court. And if federal judges showed some restraint and weren't hearing all of those cases--every court--every case is not Brown vs. Board of Education--

JIM LEHRER: Right.

KATE O'BEIRNE: --they would be less busy.

JIM LEHRER: Beyond the politics of it, does this issue matter to the average American? Is this something people should get worked up about and say, hey, I'm for Hatch or I'm for Leahy, I'm for Rehnquist, I think Rehnquist was right or wrong?

KATE O'BEIRNE: The idea of powerful federal judges I think--and I think Sen. John Ashcroft, as Mark pointed out, could be on to an issue here. Based on people's experience with individual cases, people, for instance, in Missouri, were very mad at a federal judge who ran the school system for 18 years--he actually--he actually ordered a property tax increase. That kind of activism or a judge in California who overturns a popularly passed referenda--those kinds of situations do get people riled up, and they do begin paying attention to federal judges who exercise far too much power outside their prescribed power.

MARK SHIELDS: I think, quite frankly, Jim, there's been a loss of confidence on the part of both political parties and both political sides in their ability to win a majority to the public square of argument. And there is a willingness to resort to courts as a first resort. I mean, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives--

JIM LEHRER: What should they be doing first?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, they ought to--we ought to be trying to win things. It began, quite frankly. You could see it in Roe vs. Wade. We were working out in this country a position, a policy on abortion, a public policy. Legislatures were working on it, and all of a sudden it gets short circuited, you go to court, and that becomes oh, that's what we'll do; we'll find a friendly judge, whether it's a conservative, whether it's liberal; we'll go judge shopping, instead of trying to win a majority win and prevail in argument and debate, in the state legislature, in the Congress, and that, to me, is what's at--

KATE O'BEIRNE: A self-governing people--but a first line of defense should not be an unelected federal judge.

JIM LEHRER: It should be a legislative--

KATE O'BEIRNE: Absolutely. State judges.

JIM LEHRER: Look, on this relationship between Congress and the President, several newspaper editorialists and columnists have been saying the last few days that this is the last chance, 1998 is the last chance that President Clinton has to have a legislative legacy beyond welfare reform. Do you agree with that, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: Yes, I sure do. I mean, Bill Clinton, Jim, right now--January 1998 we'll have held--will hold the highest favorable rating of any president in the sixth year of his presidency in the history of the country, bottom polling--I mean, that's remarkable--more popular than Ike, more popular than Ronald Reagan--he is the most admired man in the country, in the world, according to the CNN-Gallup poll just conducted. So, I mean, here is at the top of his game. He is Dwight Eisenhower without the military achievements, without the military credentials, without a national hero, but he is in terms--he's astride the political planet right now. And for him to just kind of drift and to kind of nibble at the edges, and I think that's- -that's the problem. People look at a president two ways. Is a plumber, or is he a poet? Some people just want a plumber--makes the pipe work, makes everything flush and the water run. And Bill Clinton is superb. He's been superb in that respect. I mean, the lowest unemployment, lowest inflation, jobs created, deficit balanced, all of this stuff, but there's a yearning for poetry, there's a yearning for a sense of what we're about as a people, what is our national purpose, what is it we collectively should do? That is missing, and there's sort of an emptiness of the soul right now, especially among his Democrats.

JIM LEHRER: And is he going to get that chance in 1998 from the Republican Congress to write poetry or do some plumbing?

KATE O'BEIRNE: It seems--leaving that aside--

JIM LEHRER: I promise never to mention that again. Go ahead, Kate.

KATE O'BEIRNE: It seems he's obviously searching for that kind of legacy but might have to settle for a Labrador. It's difficult to see how this president is going to get a legislative legacy out of a Republican Congress. He had two years in the Democratic Congress. He didn't know it was only going to be two years, and he had very modest agenda with the singular exception of a huge overreach, i.e., the health care reform that even a Democratic Congress wouldn't pass. So that was his window. As I said, he didn't know it at the time. And since then everything's compromised--not that he has any grand schemes, it seems--but even if he did, they would be diminished, I think, by a Republican Congress. He will be known for what Mark noted, I think. He will go down in history, it seems to me, as having been enormously resilient. Look at the enormous popularity, despite an unprecedented number of scandals surrounding him in his administration, and I think his resiliency and his political reflexes. He is very quick to responding to the political reality.

JIM LEHRER: And what about the Republican Congress, how do they play that in 1998? What have they got on the table versus what President Clinton has on the table?

KATE O'BEIRNE: Well, they'll benefit, as does President Clinton. I think we saw that in elections last November. They'll benefit from a very good economy, no overarching issues. It's a quiet environment, therefore, we incumbents will take credit for that, they'll tell voters, and you ought to send us back to do more of the same.

JIM LEHRER: Not a party issue, an incumbent issue.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, the Republicans, you have to understand, the Republican Party has become the bigger party. It's a more complex party. There's a lot more arguments and tension and fault lines within the Republican Party. There are internationalists; there are nationalists, as far as trade or not trade. There is those who want to balance the budget; there's those who want to cut--but there's one idea, Jim, one idea alone that holds all Republicans together, cutting taxes. It is the only idea the party has; it's the only idea that they agree upon; and the more that taxes can be cut on those who pay taxes, a lot of taxes, then the better, and that's I think will be the only Republican idea in '98.

KATE O'BEIRNE: And I think there'll be some competition because I think Bill Clinton will feel compelled to come up with some sort of tax cut; Dick Gephardt has a version of it; we'll be talking taxes.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. And thank you both very much. And Happy New Year to you both.

MARK SHIELDS: Thank you.

KATE O'BEIRNE: Thanks, Jim. FOCUS - AFRICAN ART

JIM LEHRER: And still to come on the NewsHour tonight, African art and 1997 revisited. Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston has the art story.

PAUL SOLMAN: A major exhibit of African art. It debuted at the Smithsonian in Washington this summer, opened in Fort Worth, Texas, in November, and will tour America and Europe for the next two years, before returning home to Belgium's Tervuren Museum, outside Brussels. Founded by King Leopold II one hundred years ago, the Tervuren boasts the world's greatest collection of Central Afican art--a quarter of a million objects, including some key works of African art history. It's been a mecca to scholars like the Dallas Museum of Art's Ramona Austin.

RAMONA AUSTIN: When I was a pre-doctoral fellow at Tervuren, the Royal Museum for Central Africa, I used to pass by this object every day, and it just knocked me out. You know, it was in such contrast to this big, colonial building. And what got me was the gesture of the object. Because you usually think of African art as static, you know just facing you frontally. But this guy was twisted around, and he had this incredible back, and you could feel the notches of his spine and that tongue that's sticking out.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now for African art, as we know it, this is pretty naturalistic--as are these two Yombe masks, worn by priests to connect with the spirits of the dead, whose color is white. In Yombe culture, masks were called "ngobudi," from the word that means "a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach." There's huge range to central African art styles, no surprise since the so-called Congo region, from which most of this comes, is home to more than 250 different cultures. But the African art that so affected the West is more abstract: simple and dramatic, startling and exaggerated. Above all, this African art packed an emotional wallop. In generalizing forms and emotions, its impact became more immediate, especially on the early masters of European modernism at the turn of the century; artists like Picasso.

RAMONA AUSTIN: What it did for the modernist was to allow them to get away from realistic representation, was to give them a visual vocabulary to use. It gave an idea about how to give a psychological truth to the human form or to any other figures or to a scene that they wished to depict.

PAUL SOLMAN:Even today's cliches of modern art, remember, were breakthroughs a hundred years ago.

RAMONA AUSTIN: Edvard Munch--"The Scream"--the face is very plain; it's very simplified. There's a wonderful Luba vase that you have with the mouth open and up, and it's like it's yelling. It allows us to tell a great deal economically by taking the figure away from the realm of reality.

PAUL SOLMAN: Austin points to this Suku statue of a clan mother as a case in point: a reminder of its culture's origins, with distortions that inspired modern artists, and still have the power to impress.

PAUL SOLMAN: This is the woman.

RAMONA AUSTIN: Yes. She is the essence of womanhood. She is fertile; and she has us.

PAUL SOLMAN: So, when someone says, gee, they couldn't, you know, do naturalistic images of people; they were very primitive, you say no, no, these are abstract ideas that called for abstract means to get 'em across.

RAMONA AUSTIN: Exactly. The form that it takes really is a system of signs in the way that things were put together that can be read by the people in their society.

PAUL SOLMAN: The artists of central Africa glorified the mothemess of their mothers--the chiefness of their chiefs--the blade here symbolizing the power of the chief's word--and the artists gave a grandeur to even the most workaday objects: From hair combs--to a wooden cup--to part of a bed--this from a house of seclusion in which young girls were prepared for marriage. But many of these art objects were magical more literally than western art almost ever is. These figures are what noted anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey has called forces from the land of the dead, with actual containers for magical potions to augment their potency. Often, they are totems of revenge, nails driven into them to stick it to an enemy. The most common magical art objects of all were masks.

RAMONA AUSTIN: This is a mask that has two sides; it has a white side; it's the side that is of a healthy person. The black side is the side of illness. We can see the small spots where this was a victim of small pox; we can see the nose twists; we can see that the face falls and the mouth twists --this is a person who has been paralyzed. The side of the face is black because in this person's awkward, paralytic movements, the person has fallen into the fire and blackened this side of the face.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now masks like this were designed to scare you--in this case, so you'd treat handicapped people well because, hey, it could happen to you. And this mask served to frighten young candidates for manhood into respecting their elders. Unfortunately, much of the magic is lost today, at least on a Westerner like me.

PAUL SOLMAN: I feel bad sometimes when I look at an object like this that I'm not scared of it the way it was meant to make people feel when they looked at it.

RAMONA AUSTIN: That's okay.

PAUL SOLMAN: You're not scared by it?

RAMONA AUSTIN: No.

PAUL SOLMAN: Were you ever scared by it?

RAMONA AUSTIN: No. Because I find it wonderful to get into these swelling forms. And I want to understand it visually. And then I go after it intellectually. So how can you--you're not frightened by it because you get over that first fear of the unknown because there's something else far more exciting.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now as you look at this mask, from the Boa culture, I should warn you: our story is about to take a very sharp turn. Masks like this one were meant to intimidate enemies in battle. The Boa stopped making them when it became. clear the magic didn't work. "Didn't work against whom?" you might ask. Against us westerners.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: From about 1880 on it became very clear that masks were not good protection against machine gun bullets.

PAUL SOLMAN: Journalist and author Adam Hochschild has spent the last three years researching a book about Central Africa and its colonization by Belgium's King Leopold II. He's surprised there's no mention of this history in the exhibit.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: It's a little bit as if we were in an art exhibit that the government of Germany had sent around the world of great pieces of Jewish art and sculpture but within this exhibit there was nothing said about the Holocaust. The Congo was the scene of "the" bloodiest part of the European conquest of Africa. During about a 40-year period the population of that territory was cut in half. It dropped by 10 million people.

PAUL SOLMAN: Now, the Belgian massacre wasn't the deliberate extermination of a people so much as the result of, in essence, slave labor, over an area one-fourth the size of the United States. King Leopold II conquered and bought off local chiefs, then played the major European powers against one another so he could make the Congo "Free State" his own personal, very profitable colony. Wrote a Belgian senator and reformer in. 1898, referring to the area from which these objects came: "Unceasingly we meet these porters--Black, black, black, miserable, frizzy and bare heads supporting the load. They come and go like this by the thousands, dying along the road or the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages."

PAUL SOLMAN: At first, they hauled ivory, being used by African artists at the time to make icons like this Yombe clan mother, whose open mouth, it so happens, spoke to the departed dead. Then, when bicycle tires were invented, rubber was discovered growing wild in Central Africa. A man of vast appetites, Leopold wanted to get the rubber out--fast. His private army of 19,000, under white officers, would go into villages, buying slaves from local chiefs, or often simply taking women and children hostage to force the men into the forest.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: The hostages were treated terribly. You know, the women were frequently raped. They were given nothing to eat. The men would have to go into the forest sometimes for a week, two weeks, three weeks at a time, in order to get enough rubber to, you know, meet their quotas. The whole thing was administered by the whip and gun. And then when you have a traumatized, malnourished population like that, as we know from the concentration camps, disease takes a terrible toll.

PAUL SOLMAN: The most chilling images of the atrocities became standard reformist propaganda at the turn of the century: severed right hands. Bullets, it seems, were expensive in the 1800's, to be used only to kill mutinous workers. To prove this, soldiers had to bring back a right hand for every bullet fired. Apparently, sometimes they'd miss, shoot an animal, even hoard the bullets for a mutiny of their own. So they'd chop off and deliver the right hand of a living native.

PAUL SOLMAN: So there were lots of people in the Congo at that time who had no right hand, just so that somebody could prove they hadn't wasted a bullet?

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: Yes, and there are photographs of them that British missionaries took, and this was something that really shocked the world at that time.

PAUL SOLMAN: While they were doing all this, the Belgians were also bringing back objects--to them, curiosities of a primitive people. Leopold set up the museum in Tervuren in 1897 as part of aworld's fair which also featured live Africans on display.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD: They set them up living in two "uncivilized villages" and one "civilized village" on the fair grounds. More than a million people came to look at these folks. Several of them died during the time that they were there. But they were basically put on exhibit as if they were animals at a zoo.

PAUL SOLMAN: Exotic curiosities. For many, that's what Africans were in the West just a hundred years ago, as was their art. And yet, the images began to take hold to suggest new ways of looking at the world, to enrich western culture, though not in the way King Leopold imagined. The West won all the battles, Ramona Austin says, but in their art, the cultures of Central Africa have managed to outlive, even transcend, the horrors they endured.

RAMONA AUSTIN: If we see Africa or other places in the world as falling to Western dominance because the Gatling gun was an invention of such destruction it allowed the Europeans to dominate in a technical way, we misunderstand what culture is all about. It's all about the nature of existence.

PAUL SOLMAN: And to Austin, the nature of existence is what this art, what all art maybe, explores--for those who are willing to take the time to explore it.

JIM LEHRER: That exhibit now at the Kimball Museum of Art in Fort Worth will close January 25th. Its next stop is San Francisco and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. FINALLY - 1997 - GOLDEN AGE?

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight the year that just was and to Margaret Warner with a discussion she recorded earlier this week.

MARGARET WARNER: As the New Year begins we take a look back at the past year with five NewsHour regulars: Presidential Historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss; Journalist and Author Haynes Johnson; and Essayists Roger Rosenblatt and Richard Rodriguez. Happy New Year to you all! Roger, what do you think was most distinctive about 1997?

ROGER ROSENBLATT: The emotionalism of the people and the publicity of that emotionalism. There's so much that happened that brought people to a kind of fever pitch, sometimes of hysteria, sometimes attractive, sometimes sympathetic, everything from the Heaven's Gate terrible suicide to the Promise Keepers' meeting, to the Roswell, New Mexico revival of the saucer business, to the reactions to the Nanny Trial, the so-called "Nanny Trial" in Boston, and, most amazingly, astonishingly, to Diana's death, of course.

MARGARET WARNER: The year of emotion, Michael?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: I think it was. And that was a sign largely of the fact that in many other ways it was so quiet. This was a very quiet year, for instance, in international policy, military affairs, very quiet year in the United States. We had basically peace and prosperity. And I think one reason why we could focus so much on things like the death of Diana and the things that Roger mentioned was that this all took place against the background of very little political turbulence. Take a look at something like 1927, when Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. That was an important event but one reason it was so important was because it took place during a period in which not a lot otherwise was happening. Had that taken place, for instance, during the depth of the Depression and perhaps a run-up to World War II, that would have been much smaller.

MARGARET WARNER: Doris, did it strike you that way, as the year of emotions and emotionalism?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: Well, I might call it sentiment, instead of emotion. I mean, I think there's something to what Michael says. In times of peace and prosperity, as we're exhibiting now, as we had in the 50's, as we had in the 20's, there's a certain luxury that allows us to focus on these kinds of events that really have no impact on our daily lives, the same way a Depression or a war would obviously have. When you think about Diana, when you think about the Nanny Trial, when you even think about O. J. Simpson's civil verdict, all of which were the big stories of the year, none of those were grounded in the personal realities of people's daily lives. They were simply vicarious kinds of feelings, which is more sentiment than real emotion, and it's almost an artificial hunger for some sort of community and attachment that isn't really representing the same kind of loss or grief as when a father dies, a mother dies, or a whole community is suffering in a certain way.

MARGARET WARNER: Richard, how do you see this theory about the year of emotions and emotionalism? RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Well, I think Doris is right; that is, I think that there is something of sentiment about the year, rather than of emotion. And, yet, I think that the yearning for mother and the yearning for father were very, very telling. Clearly something is not right with our American family, and that so many of us are mourning the loss not only of Diana but of Mother Theresa. So many of the questions raised by the Nanny Trial, for example, had to do with the place of the nanny in an otherwise parentless house. The questions at the Mall with Promise Keepers were all questions about whether or not fathers are behaving like fathers, husbands like husbands. It seems to me that the expressions may have been sentimental at times but clearly there is some expression here that suggests that something is not well with the American soul.

MARGARET WARNER: How do you see it? HAYNES JOHNSON, Journalist/Author: Well, I'd say that this is an age of spectacle and not so much emotion and sentiment. It was there, but if it didn't happen, we would create it through these red lights that shine on television. We have this vast electronic culture, more and more entertainment given, reaching to every corner in the world. So whatever happens is going to be magnified. Yes, Diana, had an enormous event, but it was also broadcast live and in color around the clock, all over the world, in little villages, and I think you're seeing that more and more, that the void will be filled. I agree with what Michael and Doris said particularly about this period in time in which we are, that there is seemingly the best of times, and yet, there are the disconnects that we're not even paying attention to.

MARGARET WARNER: Roger, you've heard your colleagues say they think it's almost more sentiments and spectacle than emotion.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: I'm not sure that there's much of a difference when it's all played out. A lot of the things that happen this year happen at the end of eras. We are at the end of another time. The 1690's had witch hunts--the 1790's ideological upheavals--1890's vapors and other forms of hysteria. You don't have to go back many years to go back to the ebola virus panic, or Gulf War Syndrome, or the very harmful recovered memory syndrome. These things seem to happen as people head for another age. And then there was the recent detachment from emotion. There was a time, the time in which all of us on this panel grew up, in which to simulate machines was the end of happiness. That was the worst thing that could happen to somebody. Now we're in an era where people wish to be machines, and the idea of actually becoming a machine, which was anathema before, takes away all the feeling that it's ready to explode. Now we come to Richard's observation that we are in some period of melancholy that needed a vent. And it could be anything. It could be something important, or it could be something remote. It could be the death of a celebrity like Diana, in whom we were ready to invest Godhead, as we were in other celebrities like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, but it requires their death in order to do it. But I think with Richard there is something serious under this, and I don't think that people necessarily knew why they were grieving Diana, but that doesn't make it any less real or important a feeling.

MARGARET WARNER: Michael, let's move on to the political times, as historians look back on this year. You talked about peace and prosperity. Charles Krauthamer, the columnist, has said we're living in a golden age. Is this a golden age? What will the historians say about the political times and how the political leadership responded?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: You know, the great case, you know, history always depends on hind sight. We do not know today how historians in America 30 years from now might look back on 1997. Yes, it's a moment of peace and prosperity. So was 1927 and so was 1957, but with those earlier years, what historians oftentimes look at is, for instance, Republican presidents of the 20's did nothing to prevent the Great Depression, or how Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 did virtually nothing about civil rights at a time that he could have. So I think one thing in the future that scholars will look at is in 1997 how much did our political leaders not take this opportunity of this moment of tranquility and also a president with huge popularity ratings and use it to address problems in the future in a way that would prevent us getting into great crises perhaps after the year 2000.

MARGARET WARNER: Richard, how do you see the political times in that light? RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Well, I do--somebody 2,000 miles away from Washington--I do feel disconnected from the dramas of Washington just in my everyday life. And my sense is that the political leadership of the country seems to be talking about an America that I don't see around me; whether it's the area of civil rights or the sense of direction that the country is feeling right now economically. It seems to be coming from other quarters, either internationally through global organizations, or it's coming in negotiation at the very lowest levels of society. The other thing about golden age that always perplexes us, it's rather like being sort of lonely and depressed at Christmastime; that when you have a golden age and not everything is golden, you begin to wonder what's wrong. And, clearly, what a golden age suggests, of course, is that not all is well with the world around us. People are sleeping in the streets outside the building that I'm in right now. And clearly, that the powers that be, the elites do not know quite how to handle whatever it is that's going--that seems to be unraveling at the bottom.

MARGARET WARNER: Haynes.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Well, I think that he's right about that. There's a loneliness along with all the good times. We ended this year with the highest consumer confidence rating in 28 years. The deficit's come down. We're going to have a balanced budget maybe, maybe not. All these things that we were fearing about--the economy is booming--but underneath there's a great deal of anxiety. And I think also what we said earlier, Roger was saying about the passing of a new era, a new age, I think that's part of it. We don't quite know where we're going. Michael's right; that there hasn't been the voice of leadership to say here's what we ought to be talking about; we ought to be moving toward. Here are the goals that we--there's an unfinished portrait of American society that we aren't even talking about. We're kind of luxuriating in good times.

MARGARET WARNER: Doris, do you think this is a fair critique of our political issues? Have there been other times of great peace and prosperity in which political leaders, nonetheless, challenged America?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think that's the really interesting question. I mean, what you saw this year was this strange disconnect between, on the one hand, personal contentment in the polls and very low interest in news events, which really means low commitment to your fellow Americans to what's going on, to trying to do something about the problems of society. And it's true that in periods of peace and prosperity it's harder for leaders. That's what the 20's showed. But if you don't deal with the problems, as they didn't in the 20's and you had a mal-distribution of income in 20's, that led directly to the Depression. You had problems in the 50's, as Michael said, in civil rights that weren't dealt with in that time of peace and prosperity--led to the turbulence of the 60's. But there is a moment--there was certain kind of prosperity in the mid 1960's after Kennedy's tax cut--and you did have Kennedy's death and Lyndon Johnson able to deal with problems in a time of prosperity and before the war in Vietnam heated up in a time of some sort of peace--and so it shows that it is possible for leaders to do. I mean, Lyndon Johnson was able--I must say I look back on him with some kind of respect. The more you realize it, to get people's attention to poverty, to get people's attention to health care-- obviously Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement held the attention on civil rights. Teddy Roosevelt did it at the turn of the century in a time of peace and prosperity. So it is possible, though it's harder, but not doing it means that we lend ourselves to the problems being still there. They're not going away because no one's thinking about them. Now, I think it's unhealthy for the society to revel in that personal contentment. You hope that they could also care about public affairs, even while they're contented, perhaps even more so if they were challenged to do so.

MARGARET WARNER: Roger, weigh in on this.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: I'm not sure that people are as contented as any of the indices would suggest. And if it's a golden time, it's a golden time in terms of interest rates, or a golden time in terms of the deficit, or in terms of personal income, then I don't think there's much to the gold. It's certainly not a golden time artistically. It's not a golden time ethically. It's not a golden time morally. People know these things. People are no fools. So then you think even in moments of hysteria, even when there are explosions of emotion that we don't understand, when people do things in vast numbers, it is interesting--and they are trying to tell us something, or they're trying to tell themselves something, and it comes from some wellspring of discontent that probably is yet to be discovered. There is a guy at Diana's funeral--and he was interviewed that morning on television--and he was weeping. And he said he wept today but he did not weep at his own father's funeral. And anybody who says that is saying something very strange, indeed.

MARGARET WARNER: Richard, how do you think history might look at this past year in terms of how we dealt with one of the real enduring conditions of the American nation, which is our relationship among the races? I mean, I was struck by what Michael said about the 50's and not paying attention. That's one of the issues--some might argue--we're not stilling with. RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Well, clearly, Bill Clinton is not--to coin a phrase--is not Lyndon Johnson. But it strikes me that this is both a very good time and a very bad time. Optimistically, I see the races in America quite busy and marrying each other, falling in love with each other, as much as they are at each other's necks. They're at each others' lips too, to be quite frank, and that there is a kind of browning going on in America. I don't mean only the Hispanic--the rise of the Hispanic--but clearly there are children in the world now in America who've never existed, the children of European-Asian marriages, the children of African-Korean- Mexican-German--in that sense of a new messiness of America, I think there's a great deal to celebrate. The worry that I have is that the official discussion of America, as to races, is so unconnected to them right now. Largely from the White House we have the sort of black and white discussions of the President's Commission on Civil Rights, which really seems mired in politics and policies of the past and does not seem to be able to realize what the change is going on around us. For example, at the University of California here in California, at all eight campuses, you are going to be seeing Asian majorities in the very near future, at which time we should begin to talk about African-Asian relations and not simply black and white America. I think largely Bill Clinton has--unfortunately, John Hope Franklin are black and white Americans--they have yet to discover that television is colored and that, in fact, America exists in many colors, and all of those colors now are playing against each other.

MARGARET WARNER: Haynes, you've written a lot about this subject.

HAYNES JOHNSON: The fragmentation of the society is there. It's clear. The have and have not world is clearly there, as Richard was saying, we've all been saying in a way. Golden age? No, it's not. It's not, and the idea is we in some ways are more disconnected from each other, and the thing that worries me the most--this is one person--is this pervasive disbelief at a time of seemingly good economic conditions in which people don't trust their leaders or their institutions. And we seem to be withdrawing farther and farther into our own little pockets, and we don't seem to know each other as well as we maybe once did in the metrical past.

MARGARET WARNER: And how do you think that plays into the relationship among the races?

HAYNES JOHNSON: Well, I think it just exacerbates it. It further alienates and isolates the groups. I mean, I--Clinton was great to try to say start a dialogue, but the idea of having a few conversations isn't enough. You've got to do this--Doris mentioned Theodore Roosevelt--the idea of the bully pulpit--pushing, running-- Lyndon Johnson, storming about poverty, the war on poverty--that's what leadership requires on a daily basis, not an occasional.

MARGARET WARNER: Doris, you want to weigh in on this briefly?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think one of the difficulties for leadership today is that bully pulpit is harder to garner. We don't have those events that pull us together as a nation. The state of the union used to be one where everybody watched Roosevelt's fireside chats, everybody listened to; the acceptance speeches at the conventions were mobilizing events, and I'm not sure it's just the absence of a leader who can talk. I think it's the absence of a citizenry that's willing to listen, a media that's willing to put this as a focus, so granted that it's much harder, but on the other hand, that's what leadership's all about. That's what they get paid for. They have to figure out how to get our attention on the problems that really matter. And so far, the race dialogue is a good attempt, but it hasn't made us talk about it at the water coolers, in our office, in our places in the same way he might have hoped it would have.

MARGARET WARNER: Roger, your thoughts on this.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Well, when Haynes talked about the disconnect, that's when I think the emotionalism came into play this year; that people don't want to be disconnected; it's an uncomfortable condition; it's not a naturally human condition. Biologists will probably tell us it's not biological condition. And there will be occasions where we will get together. Now, there were such occasions this year. They didn't have the high-mindedness that some of the panel was talking about; they didn't have the high-minded effectiveness in the long run that they should have; but they were kind of explosions or assertions or eruptions of feeling that said whether it's grief or elation or anger or something, we do belong together as a species. We may not be able to get along but we do go along from time to time. And if we're still fragmented after all these years, we still--we also urge in the other direction.

MARGARET WARNER: Michael.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: And that is one of the things that a leader can address in a tranquil moment like this when he doesn't have to deal with things like war and economic depression in this country. And I hate to start the New Year on a downer, Margaret, but if next year the economy goes South or we get into some terrible crisis over Iraq or Bosnia or Korea or our president and Congress become very unpopular, I think one thing Americans in the future will say, they will ask, how did we use this tranquil moment?

MARGARET WARNER: Well, thank you all five very much. And Happy New Year! RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, the defense rested in the penalty phase of the Terry Nichols bombing trial. Closing arguments are scheduled for Monday. The main computer on the space station Mir broke down again. The three-man crew was not in danger. And health workers in Hong Kong are now testing dogs, cats, and rats for the so-called bird flu virus. We'll see you on-line and again here Monday evening. Have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.