The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Wednesday, most of the world's nations pledge to rid the earth of chemical weapons. West Germany said the U.S. must produce solid evidence that its firms helped Libya build a chemical weapons plant. President Reagan planned a personal farewell address to the nation tonight. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: After the News Summary, we look at the new proposal to ban chemical weapons with former Defense Department official Frank Gaffney and Elisa Harris of the Brookings Institution. Then comes a News Maker Interview with Dr. C. Everett Koop on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Surgeon General's report on smoking, a Kwame Holman report from Southern Illinois about a black church that refuses to go away and finally an Amei Wallach essay about the artist Jasper Johns. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: Most of the world came out against chemical weapons today. Officials of 149 nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union signed an anti-chemical warfare agreement in Paris. It calls for the total elimination of chemical weapons through the adoption of an international convention now being negotiated in Geneva. The agreement climaxed the five day Paris meeting, the largest on chemical weapons in sixty years. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Reuters News Agency reported that the Bonne Government has secured evidence that West German firms did help Libya build a plant that Washington charges can make chemical weapons. The agency quoted government sources in Bonne as saying they had evidence which shows that the American allegations are not groundless. But Chancellor Helmut Kohl told a news conference that the U.S. needed to provide firm evidence that could be provable in court. He said, "In law abiding states, one cannot base one's work on speculation." At the United Nations in New York, the Security Council resumed debate on the American downing of two Libyan jet fighters last week. As they met, the U.S. announced it has cancelled plans for Navy fighters to hold aerial maneuvers near Libya next week. Another U.S. carrier group has entered the Mediterranean, but the Pentagon said it was a routine change over with the carrier John F. Kennedy. Also today Israel struck a blow at the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Five Israeli jets bombed Lebanese bases of the radical Fatah revolutionary council which is led by Nidal. There was no report on casualties.

MR. LEHRER: Smoking is still a major health problem in the United States, said the Surgeon General today. Dr. C. Everett Koop said there has been much progress in reducing smoking, but much work is still to be done. He spoke to reporters on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Surgeon General's report on smoking.

C. EVERETT KOOP, Surgeon General: Important challenges still remain. Women have been giving up smoking much more slowly than men. Smoking rates are higher among blacks, blue collar workers and less educated persons than in the overall population. Smoking among high school seniors has leveled off in recent years after previous years of decline. Because more than 50 million Americans continue to smoke and because of the residual increased risk of death and disease in ex-smokers, smoking remains the most preventable cause of death in our society responsible for more than one of our six deaths in the United States.

MR. LEHRER: We will have a News Maker Interview with Dr. Koop about smoking right after the News Summary.

MR. MacNeil: The Supreme Court heard arguments today on whether it is constitutional to execute a murderer who is mentally retarded. The case involves 32 year old John Paul Penry who stabbed a Texas woman to death after raping her. Penry is said to have the mind of a six or seven year old. His attorney argued that someone so retarded did not have the moral culpability to deserve the death penalty. Two law professors who heard the arguments, William Greenhalgh of Georgetown and Alan Dershowitz of Harvard commented afterwards.

WILLIAM GREENHALGH, Georgetown University Law School: I think they're probably going to find as a result of the competency hearing which was decided by a Texas jury that as a result of that they will permit the execution to go forward.

REPORTER: Can someone with Henry's mentality have acted deliberately?

WILLIAM GREENHALGH: I would say under the facts that what we have said, yes, because he's been found competent by a jury in order to stand trial.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ, Harvard University Law School: A seven year old can act with deliberation, indeed, animals can act with some degree of deliberation. That's not the issue here. The issue here is whether somebody who is so retarded, so bereft of judgment, so unable toweigh options, can act with a degree of culpability to make him qualified for the most extreme sentence that only 11 Americans were sentenced to last year?

MR. MacNeil: The Supreme Court has already outlawed executions of the insane. It ruled in 1986 that states must determine that an inmate is mentally competent before execution.

MR. LEHRER: A survey of public attitudes about race relations in the United States was released today. It said generally Americans of all races favored positive action to improve the situation. The survey was conducted by the Lewis Harris organization for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The results of this survey were announced at a Washington news conference.

JULIUS CHAMBERS, NAACP: I would say that the findings of this survey are encouraging. They reveal that we, that there is a solid base of support, black and white, for positive action on race relations, particularly in improving the situation of the persistently poor. By margins of 88 percent or more, Americans favor special programs for the children of the persistently poor and centers for businesses to provide job opportunities in poverty stricken communities, an extensive federal state government job program, and just as importantly, these are the kinds of opportunities the persistently poor want for themselves and their children.

MR. LEHRER: The report was based on interviews with 3,000 people conducted between June and September of last year.

MR. MacNeil: President Reagan makes his farewell to the American people tonight in a televised address from the Oval Office. The White House said the speech would be highly personal. On NBC's Today Show, Chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein said the President would talk about, as he put it, how fundamentally America has been changed, the world has been changed. Mr. Reagan, himself, told reporters, "I'm just trying to have a conversation with the American people."

MR. LEHRER: And that's it for the News Summary. Now it's on to banning chemical weapons, Surgeon General Koop on smoking, a black church in Southern Illinois that refuses to go away and an essay about Jasper Johns. FOCUS - LAST GASP?

MR. MacNeil: Our lead tonight is the declaration by most of the nations of the world that they would like to get rid of chemical and biological weapons. In Paris today an international conference, including the United States, agreed to language condemning chemical warfare. In the background was the ongoing controversy over U.S. allegations that Libya is about to produce chemical weapons it can fire hundreds of miles with ballistic missiles. We'll take up the issue of chemical weapons proliferation and attempts to stop it. First, a report from Kwame Holman on the weapons the world tried to ban 60 years ago.

KWAME HOLMAN: Chemical weapons cause painful injury and deaths. One type of weapon burns the skin. Another destroys the nervous system when it's inhaled or absorbed through the skin, forcing the victim into convulsions. The weapons are easy to make because they're composed of chemicals also used in common pesticides, paints and plastics. Because they're so cheap yet so lethal, they have been called the poor man's nuclear weapon. Recently there's been increasing concern over chemical weapons because some of the nations that have them also have acquired long range missiles to deliver the chemical weapons. During the 1988 Presidential campaign, George Bush promised to try to do something about the chemical weapons threat.

GEORGE BUSH: I want to be known as the President who working with our allies, and the Soviets and others led to the elimination of all chemical and biological weapons from the face of the earth.

MR. HOLMAN: Chemical weapons first were used in combat in Germany during World War I. Both sides ended up using them, killing nearly 100,000 people and seriously wounding nearly a million more. In 1925, some of the nations signed a treaty called the Geneva Protocol, outlawing the use of chemical weapons, but not all nations have abided by the ban. For example in the 30s, Japan launched several poison gas attacks in its war against China. Nazi Germany developed a new type of chemical weapon, nerve gas, and built up a huge stockpile, but Hitler didn't use it because he feared the allies had chemical weapons as well and would retaliate. The heaviest use of chemical weapons since World War I was in the Iran-Iraq War. Iraq used them not only against Iran but in this case against part of its own population, the Kurds, who sided with Iran in the war. UN investigators concluded Iran probably used chemical weapons as well. There's no definitive list of which countries have chemical weapons because they're so difficult to detect. The U.S. and the Soviet Union have the biggest chemical weapons stockpiles. The U.S. has about 30,000 tons. The Soviets say they have almost double that amount, though some Western analysts say the Soviets have much more. The U.S. stopped producing chemical weapons in 1969, but resumed in 1987, claiming the newest ones are safer to store and would help deter the Soviets from ever using theirs. Last week a Soviet Foreign Ministry official said the Kremlin made a mistake by continuing to produce chemical weapons when the U.S. stopped in 1969. He said if the Soviets had followed the U.S., it might have prevented the U.S. from resuming production and would have saved the Soviets a lot of money. Among the nations believed to have chemical weapons or to be developing them are Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Israel, in Europe, France, in Asia, North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, China and Taiwan, and in Africa, Ethiopia. The Reagan administration says this plant in Libya has the capacity to produce chemical weapons and the administration has debated whether to bomb it before it goes into production. Libya says it's just a pharmaceutical plant. In Paris, this week, representatives from 145 nations have been discussing and sometimes arguing over the spread of chemical weapons and how best to stop their use in the future.

MR. MacNeil: And in Paris today, the delegations agreed to compromise language urging negotiations for a treaty that would eliminate production as well as the use of toxic weapons entirely, but the resolution is non-binding and did not contain provisions the U.S. wanted to curb exports of chemicals that can be made into weapons. For two perspectives on what the conference achieved, we turn now to Elisa Harris, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. She worked on the chemical weapons issue for the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1980 to 1983, and to Frank Gaffney, who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy in the Reagan administration. He is now director of the Washington based Center for Security Policy.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Gaffney, the French Foreign Minister today called this a "major step towards the total elimination of chemical weapons". Was it in your view?

FRANK GAFFNEY, Center For Security Policy: No, I don't think so, Robin. I it amounts to what you might call voodoo arms control. In fact, what this conference was supposed to be about was calling to account nations of the world that have violated the existing arms control regime applying to chemical weapons. This is a regime which bans not their production or their stockpiling which are very ambitious tasks indeed as your own account I think just described. Rather it's the relatively modest task of simply preventing countries from engaging in the first use of chemical weapons and what we've seen and what your pictures very vividly demonstrate is that increasingly countries are making first use of these weapons and this conference originally at the instigation of President Reagan and ultimately at the invitation of President of France Mitterrand was intended to raise a ruckus about the activities, the performance of Iraq and other countries in using these weapons. I think it didn't do that. I think it clearly showed as people were unwilling to even name the countries that were using these weapons that the moral imperatives that are always talked about in this context, the impact of international opinion and so on, is irrelevant and is certainly not a basis upon which we would want to hope that a further ban, a much more ambitious ban on the production and stockpiling of chemical weapons would be, in fact, enforced.

MR. MacNeil: Ms. Harris, does today's result make a real ban on chemical weapons more likely? Does it advance us towards that as the French claim?

ELISA HARRIS, Brookings Institution: That's certainly one of the hopes of the countries that are participating or that have participated in this Paris meeting. It's their idea that this conference will draw international attention to the problem of chemical weapons, proliferation and use, and will give a boost to the negotiations in Geneva that are aimed at banning chemical weapons on a global scale.

MR. MacNeil: And do you think that it will give such a boost?

MS. HARRIS: I think that it will. For many many years, chemical weapons have been overshadowed by nuclear weapons and the problems of trying to control nuclear weapons and we've now had an opportunity for the international community to come together to focus attention on this problem of chemical warfare and to consider how best to deal with this problem so that we don't face situations in the future in which chemical weapons are used by countries like Iraq.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Gaffney, isn't there a benefit, wasn't there a price paid by the conference, which did not name the countries, Iraq and Iran, and raise a ruckus, as you put it, about their recent use of the weapons, although it did have an indirect reference to deploring the recent use of the weapons, wasn't there a gain in not naming them because you got everybody to agree to this document? They also didn't have the Arab desire to have a direct link with nuclear weapons mentioned specifically and explicitly, but isn't there a positive result in getting all these nations to agree on this one declaration?

MR. GAFFNEY: Well, I'm afraid I simply don't subscribe to Elisa's model here. I don't think getting everyone to agree to an essentially meaningless document is necessarily an accomplishment of either diplomatic or other proportions. I would be willing to wager right now that in part on the basis of this document and on what will come from it, we will get everyone to agree to a ban on chemical weapons, everyone, the Libyans, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Soviets, the Vietnamese, the Afghan regime and so on. The truth of the matter is that that won't mean anything because the problem with the negotiations in Geneva, far from the question of have delegations been adequately instructed or are they distracted by the work on nuclear weapons and so on, the problem is that there isn't a solution, a genuine solution to the difficult task of even constructing a model of how you would verify a global ban on chemical weapons. But the problem is this, and I think the Libyan plant epitomizes it. You have a plant there that has very remarkable signatures. It is clearly involved in some fashion or another with chemical manufacturing. The Libyans have said it's for pharmaceutical products. We believe that the 40 foot earthen wall around it, the air defenses around it, the heavy security provided for it, is very and powerful circumstantial evidence, I grant you circumstantial, certainly not what Chancellor Kohl would argue would be proof in a court of law, but powerful circumstantial evidence that it's for something else, and that's the tip of the iceberg. It's much more difficult even still to think about proving to someone that a plant that doesn't have those signatures is a chemical weapons facility.

MR. MacNeil: I don't want to get sidetracked too far into this, but are you familiar enough with the evidence that the United States has to say with confidence that it is just circumstantial and Chancellor Kohl is right, that it wouldn't stand up in a court of law?

MR. GAFFNEY: Well, I'm not able to say, nor have I acquainted myself with the classified information which I suspect also underpins the case and it is doubtless what Sec. Shultz has been using to persuade the Germans who now say there is evidence of German complicity in building the plant. But I am saying on the basis of the kind of evidence that one would likely have with a plant somewhere in the third world that there's a powerful circumstantial case that this is a CW facility and it's the best we're going to get in terms of proof.

MR. MacNeil: Ms. Harris, he seems to be saying, in effect, you're never going to get a verifiable, enforceable real ban on these weapons?

MS. HARRIS: Well, that's clearly Mr. Gaffney's view, but it's not the perspective of this administration, nor of the incoming administration, President-elect Bush. In fact, Mr. Gaffney was in the Pentagon in 1984 when the United States created this chemical weapons convention, a treaty draft, brought it to Geneva. That treaty was reviewed by the President, by the Vice President, it was reviewed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It had input from the intelligence agencies. It's not a perfect treaty and no one will say it's a perfect treaty, but it's the best we can do and in the judgment of this President and of the next President it's a goal worth trying to achieve.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Gaffney, aren't you saying that either the Americans are negotiating this as a purely cynical and hypocritical exercise or they're naive to be involved in it, one or the other?

MR. GAFFNEY: Well, I'm glad Elisa did point to my practical experience in the subject. I think that in 1982 when this administration decided it would announce its intention to pursue this worthy goal -- there's no question about it -- you look at those pictures and everybody recognizes we ought to try to get rid of these things if we humanly can. No one in the government with the exception of the traveling party with the Secretary of State knew anything about this idea of proposing a ban on chemical weapons and I was also in the Defense Department in 1980 when every agency of the United States Government concluded that a ban of this type was simply unverifiable and unrealistic, and I think but for the personal intervention of the Vice President of the United States, George Bush, they would have changed the position of the government to make it a more realistic one.

MR. MacNeil: Well, is he naive or being disingenuous or what in this, or is it just politics?

MR. GAFFNEY: I think it's a triumph. As Samuel Johnson once said about second marriages, Robin, it's the triumph of hope over experience. As a practical matter, the truth of the matter, I'm afraid the unavoidable fact of the matter is that you cannot ban these things verifiably and effectively globally. And I think we've got ban scam going on now. It is the case, in my view, that we hope that we can pay lip service to this goal and get away without having actually to enter into an agreement of this type.

MR. MacNeil: I know you don't speak for the administration parting or arriving, Ms. Harris, but how do you answer that? I mean, is this a fool's errand they're on?

MS. HARRIS: Well, Mr. Gaffney reflects one point of view on this subject. I think it's also possible to argue that the President- elect and others around him have a somewhat wider perspective on the problems that we're confronting. They recognize that if there is any hope of dealing with the problem of chemical weapons spreading around the world, it lies in achieving the chemical weapons treaty in Geneva, because essentially we're faced with a situation of either going for an imperfect treaty or living in a world where chemical weapons are completely unconstrained and a world in which Libya and Iraq and any other country that wants to acquire these weapons can continue to do so.

MR. MacNeil: Well, how do you address the -- if that hope, if that goal is desirable -- how do you address the practical objection that Mr. Gaffney referred to that a lot of third world countries can build plants which could be quite legitimately be chemical plants but convertible and the chemicals shipped from Western countries either used for reasonable innocent purposes or converted to these other purposes, that there is no practical way of policing that?

MS. HARRIS: Well, the negotiators in Geneva are, in fact, dealing with this problem and they're creating a whole regime for monitoring the civil chemical industry. There will be reporting requirements for civil chemical companies. There will be routine inspections of companies to make sure they're not being used for military purposes. There will be ad hoc snap inspections, challenge inspections. All of this is aimed to create confidence that one has an ability to detect illegal activities in these facilities. It raises the risks for a potential violator.

MR. MacNeil: How do you answer that, Mr. Gaffney, and what is your alternative to trying to do what Ms. Harris describes? How would the United States carry on in a world where you say no verifiable ban is realistic?

MR. GAFFNEY: Well, again, going back to your introductory peace, we have historical experience that where there is in place a reliable in kind capability to respond to chemical attack with chemical retaliation, that attack is generally deterred. I think in a world in which we live, not the world necessarily we would like or the world that we could imagine and certainly the world that our negotiators will try to negotiate. We are going to have to have a continuing capability in this country to deter the use of chemical weapons against us and or allies and that means not giving up our own stockpile, modest though it is, of chemical weapons and, in fact, taking modest steps to modernize it. I don't see any other way around it except to go through this exercise of whistling past the graveyard and hoping that somehow it'll all come out right. The option is not a world in which chemical weapons are uncontrolled and a world in which they're all, in fact, eliminated. It's a world in which ours are controlled and eliminated and the rest of the world that wants them in practice, in experience violates treaties when it suits their purposes will do so again.

MR. MacNeil: How do you respond to that, Ms. Harris, his prescription?

MS. HARRIS: Well, again, I think one has to bear in mind that the problem is not just as Frank is implying, a problem between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. We have a global problem here on our hands and third world countries are not going to forego this type of weapon unless the superpowers do so as well.

MR. MacNeil: All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Mr. Gaffney, thank you. NEWS MAKER

MR. LEHRER: It was 25 years ago today that the first Surgeon General's report on smoking was issued. The current Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Koop, marked that anniversary by issuing a new report. We mark it with a News Maker Interview with Dr. Koop taped yesterday from his office in Washington.

MR. LEHRER: Dr. Koop, welcome.

DR. KOOP: Thank you.

MR. LEHRER: What is the message of your smoking report, sir?

DR. KOOP: Well, this is the 25th anniversary of the first report of the advisory committee to the Surgeon General on the 11th of January this year. That's the famous report of Luther Terry. So we have a silver covered issue that reviews a great many things for the past 25 years. Some of the highlights would be these, that we started off 25 years ago with a little more than 40 percent of the population and that in 1987 dropped down below 29. That's the greatest progress that any industrialized nation has ever made with the smoking problem. We also know that about 3/4 of a million people in the last 20 years have either postponed or avoided death from smoking causes and that each of those that did so added about two decades to his life. We have looked at the demographics of the problems of smoking and we find that we have more problems with black smokers than with white, that blue collar workers are at greater risk than white collar workers and that the people with the lower education as measured by the years of schooling also tend to be in a much higher risk group. And whether you are talking about black, white, blue collar, white collar, or educated, females are much slower to hear the message and to change their habits.

MR. LEHRER: Now what does all that add up to you as the public health problem now on this day in 1989?

DR. KOOP: Well, it's good news and it's bad news. The things I've just told you I think are good news because to add that much life, to drop that much in the percentage of smokers is good. To know where the problem areas are, the black, the blue collar workers and the poorly educated, I think enables us to target our group for better education. But we certainly have not overcome the problem of smoking and although I think we're on a roll and will make real progress in the rest of this decade, we can't sit back on past victories and just hope it will happen. We have got to be vigilant because we are up against a very potent group of people who make their living by selling the very thing that produces the disease, disability and death that I'm talking about. And they spend as much money every week in advertising as the entire Public Health Service spends in the educational program, in the preventive program, in a whole year. So we've got a potent antagonist out there.

MR. LEHRER: Do you see what the smoking industry is doing, do you think that's an evil?

DR. KOOP: Well, it's hard for me to say what an evil is in this context. I can tell you, knowing what I do, I could not work for a tobacco company. I couldn't even work on an assembly line making cigarettes. In fact, I once talked to a man in one of the cigarette producing cities and he said, you know, I've come to believe that even the machine that turns out those little white things is evil. I think you've got to recognize that if we suddenly ran on tobacco tomorrow as something we didn't know anything about before, there would be no doubt about the fact it would be treated the way we treat toxic wastes or other things that threaten the health of our people, but for the entire life of this country tobacco has held a very important place. It helped us win the revolution. It was the first cash crop of the colonies. It has always been treated with deference by Congress. It's been declared non-regulatable by Congress, and although Congress is getting I think more and more aware of the tremendous health hazard that they have on their hands, it is still very hard to do things that are anti-tobacco in this country.

MR. LEHRER: Now the industry is beginning to fight back very openly, you know the series of ads that they're running now, enough is enough, et cetera.

DR. KOOP: Yes.

MR. LEHRER: But the point is made that 2.3 million people work in the tobacco industry, have jobs related to the tobacco industry, it's an $82 billion a year industry, and it is not good for the government to try to abolish all of this.

DR. KOOP: Well, I think you have to decide whether you'd like to face the economic problem there and settle it and find an alternative, or whether you are content to have more than a thousand of our citizens die every single day from a preventable cause. If this were anything else, we would stand up and scream. Ever since I've been in this job, Jim, I have from every platform that I could, I have begged agriculture, labor, commerce, trade people to get together and have a dialogue on how we can begin to make a shift in this country that will prevent those people who make their living from tobacco from being disadvantaged. Other countries have done it. New Zealand has stopped growing tobacco. It's a smaller country to be sure, has a different climate. But their tobacco farmers are now making more money selling kiwi fruit than they ever made selling tobacco. We have never taken on this problem as a nation and tried to find a way out.

MR. LEHRER: But the efforts of the public health service and the medical profession and media generally has been to discourage people, individual people, from smoking. Now that has not -- it's worked, as you pointed out at the very beginning, but there are still a lot of people out there smoking and there are still young people every day starting to smoke.

DR. KOOP: That's right.

MR. LEHRER: What's wrong? Why is the message not getting over as fully as it should?

DR. KOOP: Well, I think one of the reasons is that it takes so long for the effects of tobacco to be felt and that the disease, the disability and the death do not follow immediately after the insult to the human body so if you talked to a kid in high school about dying when he's 56 of cancer of the lung, he couldn't care less about that. If you could convince him some way that he couldn't be an athlete, that he wouldn't be attractive to girls, I think we'd beon a better track. But we have never, Jim, had enough education of our young people in school about the hazards of smoking. Now the coalition for smoking or health, that's American Heart, American Lung, American Cancer, is undertaking what I think is the best chance we have to do that. They started last year in the kindergarten, this year in the kindergarten and first grade, next year in the second grade, so by the year 2000 the graduating class of high school students will have had 13 years of smoking education. And I think that's the way we will slowly begin to keep youngsters from starting. As I travel around, I'm amazed at how much kids know about the dangers of smoking and how many of them have pledged not to do it.

MR. LEHRER: That just was my point. Can there really be anybody who's alive and aware who does not know about, at least what is said about the health hazards of smoking?

DR. KOOP: No. I think that 90 percent of the American people do understand that and understand it quite deeply. But remember that tobacco contains nicotine, nicotine's an addictive drug, and that's why 43 million Americans still smoke. They cannot kick the habit. It is not just something they can kick when they want to and they realize it. You know, after I did the addiction report last year, I was amazed at the mail I got from smokers that said thank you for that report, now my family and friends know I'm not just being cantankerous, I really can stop, and family members wrote and said, thank you for making it clear what's wrong with mother or father or my son and so forth, we're now going to seek help. So I think that addiction report did a lot to surprise the American people, but it also set them on a good path.

MR. LEHRER: What do you say to some members of Congress and others who say, look, the information is out, people know about the health hazards, if they want to kill themselves it's none of the government's business?

DR. KOOP: Well, I think it is the government's business because we spend a tremendous amount of money each year in taking care of those people in their health needs, and in addition to that, for every dollar that we spend in their care, the nation loses about three dollars in productivity. You were talking a minute ago about the Tobacco Institute's advertising and they talk about enough taxation and how they seem so pleased that $9 billion worth of taxes come into this country. Well, about seven times that amount of money is spent because of the people who are sick.

MR. LEHRER: You have also said that you want a -- in fact, you mentioned it in passing a moment ago -- that you want a smokeless society by the year 2000. Is that realistic now?

DR. KOOP: You've got to know what I meant by that when I said it, Jim. A smoke free society was the term that I used, and what I meant was that smokers would not smoke in the presence of non- smokers without having their permission and that is already happening, and you know, smoking is getting more and more socially unacceptable. And as I told you a bit ago, it is the blue collar worker, not the white collar worker, who is increasing his smoking, and so it's becoming almost a class issue. And I think that as I said a moment ago we're on kind of a roll and I think that we will by my definition reach that goal in the year 2000.

MR. LEHRER: Whose responsibility is it to see that we do?

DR. KOOP: Well, it always has seemed to fall on the shoulders of the Surgeon General, and I have taken it on, as you know, rather vigorously. When I came to Washington, it was on my desk and whenI leave next year it will still be here for my successor. I think the thing that made me get so enthusiastic about delivering this message is when I realized how many young people are being led down the garden path by the seductive advertising and the general attitude that the tobacco people take that no health message has ever been truly proven and it's the same old stuff and why do we listen to that? I just think that's a tremendous disservice to our kids.

MR. LEHRER: Are the doctors doing everything that they could do?

DR. KOOP: No, they're not, but they're improving. The American Medical Association has done a great deal in the last three years and I would like to congratulate those medical students because they're the ones that made the AMA move off their duff, shall I say, and get out there with the message. The one thing I would like -- if I could do one thing with doctors, I would want them to become the teachers of their patients about the hazards of smoking. We have shown in our own National Institute of Mental Health that the best way for a smoker to stop is to have his doctor sit down, look him in the eye, and have his doctor say, George, if you don't stop smoking, you're going to die, and he listens.

MR. LEHRER: What if you had one thing that the government could do, the federal government could do, what would it be?

DR. KOOP: Just one thing. Right now I think I would ask for equal space on health message for advertising and let me tell you why, you remember the television story when Luther Terry published his work, the next year there was an arrangement on television that for every minute of cigarette advertising, the public health service, had a minute to talk about the health hazards. In a very short period of time, the cigarette industry cried uncle. They said we'd rather have no advertising than to hear those health messages because they're devastating.

MR. LEHRER: So what you want would be, you mean magazine advertising, newspaper, everything, right?

DR. KOOP: Exactly. Suppose you have a full page picture of a beautiful girl standing in a satin dress at the side of a pool, surrounded by attractive men so that the people who look at that say, gee, if I could just smoke, I'd be all those things. I'd like to show what a lung looks like after she's finished smoking or perhaps show a father coming home to his wife and children when he's 37 years old and collapsing in the driveway with a coronary. I think we've got to get that message across.

MR. LEHRER: I don't think you're going to get your one wish, do you?

DR. KOOP: No, I don't think so at all.

MR. LEHRER: Dr. Koop, thank you very much for being with us.

DR. KOOP: It's a pleasure. Thank you, Jim. FOCUS - WE SHALL OVERCOME

MR. MacNeil: Next tonight we have a story about prejudice and perseverance from Southern Illinois. It's the story of a small country church which was founded more than a century ago by freed slaves. Correspondent Kwame Holman has the details.

KWAME HOLMAN: The original Bethel Church was built in an area called Rocky Fork near Alton, Illinois, 125 years ago. It was rebuilt 50 years later. Its founder was a freed slave named Arasmus Green who was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a union soldier. When the original church was finished, Green vowed that Rocky Fork will always be a place of refuge against trouble and strife in the world. This year that refuge was destroyed. Early on the morning of April 16th, someone broke into the church and set a fire that burned it to the ground. A foundation and some charred timbers were all that was left of a building that had stood through a century of slavery, segregation and church burnings in the South. Rocky Fork wasn't much to brag about, just a drafty old country church. It had no insulation or running water and in the spring, the congregation's prayers mixed with the hum of honey bees that infested the east wall. And over the years, church membership dwindled as families moved away, but for the 25 or so who stayed, Rocky Fork was more than just an old church, it was home. [Group standing at graves]

MR. HOLMAN: Wes Matlock's great grandfather helped found Rocky Fork. Matlock grew up here and still owns the land next to the church. He and his wife, Kathleen, rarely missed a Sunday service.

KATHLEEN MATLOCK: Well, to me, it's a very hurt feeling. I never thought it would ever happen, to tell you the truth about it. I never thought that anybody would ever do a thing like that. Some of our members said they always looked for it, but I never did.

FLORINE EDWARDS: I was born and raised out there so that's where my roots are.

MR. HOLMAN: Florine Edwards' six sons and daughter all were christened at Rocky Fork Church.

FLORINE EDWARDS: We lived out there all these many years and never had any trouble. They never had to lock the church or nothin'; nobody would ever bother anything.

MR. HOLMAN: Mrs. Edwards' sister, Clementine Kennedy, often visited Rocky Fork to be near the graves of her parents. Now she's afraid to go there alone.

CLEMENTINE KENNEDY: I used to go out there and just sit and you know, you could just sit out there and it was so quiet and so peaceful and you could pray and talk to the Lord and you would get that inner peace that you needed and you couldn't get nowhere else.

MR. HOLMAN: The arsonist has not been caught so no one can say whether the crime was racially motivated or just random vandalism. At the time, Rocky Fork's pastor, Rev. Steven Jackson, was reluctant to call the act racist.

REV. STEVEN JACKSON: [April 16, 1988] I would not come out and say that it is racism, but we leave that still up to the sheriff to find out. [Choir Singing]

MR. HOLMAN: In the months following the fire, black churches in Alton rallied to support Rocky Fork. They gave the congregation money to rebuild and strength to carry on. [Choir Singing]

MR. HOLMAN: In Alton, a racially mixed town of about 38,000, many whites were shocked that the church had been destroyed and were anxious to help rebuild it. [Radio Show]

MR. HOLMAN: When the local radio station, WBGZ, held a six hour phone-a-thon for Rocky Fork Church, $28,000 in cash, labor and materials were raised. White congregations also took up collections to help out. The local lumber yard donated $6,000 worth of wood and materials.

DON BOLLINI: Those people out there were always friendly and always warm, nice people, wonderful people.

MR. HOLMAN: Don Bollini is a salesman at Great Central Lumber. As a boy, he sometimes camped out near the church and church members always looked after him.

DON BOLLINI: When it burned, there was a lot of people that felt the way I did, that it just shouldn't have happened, there was no rhyme or reason in it and we were going to do what we had to do to get it put back together for them and for us. I mean, it was a community effort.

MR. HOLMAN: On a hot June morning, a crew of more than 30 men donated by a local contractor began framing the church. The crew worked for 13 hours. Members of the congregation provided food and drinks. When the steeple finally went up, whites and blacks watched with tears in their eyes.

RESIDENT: Every congregation, be it white or black, has been drawn together by the circumstances that occurred with the church.

CONGREGANT: It feels good to have a church back, not the new one, but it just feels good to have a church to go back to.

MR. HOLMAN: This is the only photograph Rev. Jackson has of the almost finished church. Two weeks before it was to be dedicated, the church was torched again. All the hope, the volunteer work, the donated money and materials, all the good will went up in smoke.

KATHLEEN MATLOCK: When that deputy said your church is on fire, I nearly had a fit. I just, I couldn't get myself together, I couldn't believe it, and when he said the church is on fire and I said, oh my God, no, it can't be, it can't be. And it just seemed like it did something to me, it just hurt me so bad.

CLEMENTINE KENNEDY: I felt like taking me a shotgun and goin' out there and shootin' everybody. I had, I just forgot all about it, then I started prayin', I started cryin'. And then I thought about what my mother used to say, "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord". The hardest thing I ever did in my life was to see our church go down again. It was nothing but a shell again, lookin' worse than it did before.

MR. HOLMAN: Mrs. Kennedy and other parishioners say the vandalism began after white middle class families moved into a new subdivision near the church. The area had been a black farm community. In 1974, a pipe bomb destroyed the church basement. More recently, windows were broken, pews overturned, a six foot cross stolen and tombstones were toppled. In nearby towns, crosses were burned on the lawns of four black families.

FLORINE EDWARDS: These later years has just been heavy, I'm tellin' you. They've tried us everywhere.

MR. HOLMAN: Lots of vandalism?

FLORINE EDWARDS: Vandalism, wrote slurs on the doors and on the - - we had a little step like, it was concrete, and they spray painted slurs on there, terrible, called us pigs and oh, everything.

MR. HOLMAN: Shortly after the second fire, James Russell Calvin, a young Alton man who was AWOL from the Navy was arrested and charged with arson. Calvin was angry because his new car had been stolen. He said he'd been drinking, that he heard a story about an old country church and went out to investigate.

LT. DENNIS FISCHER, Madison County Sheriff's Office: His only explanation to us was that he heard from friends that this was the devil's church, which obviously it's not.

MR. HOLMAN: There have been rumors of incidents of devil worship near the isolated church, especially among teenagers who are known to park their cars in the area late at night. But Rev. Jackson doesn't believe James Russell Calvin's story. In the past, Jackson stopped short of labeling the attacks on his church as racist, but not anymore.

REV. STEVEN JACKSON, Rocky Fork Church: I probably couldn't come up with stats or facts to back it up but its there, racism is evidently throughout this whole community and is evident in large numbers. You can see it everywhere. If the fire first of all -- if the vandalism wasn't racially motivated, why put "Die nigger" on there?

LEWIS DREITH: I know of no racial problems in the Alton community.

MR. HOLMAN: Louis Dreith ran the fund-raiser for Rocky Fork Church and has discussed his problems with callers to his talk show. Dreith says the people who vandalized the church probably were young hot heads, not racists.

LEWIS DREITH, WBGZ Radio: We've got a lot of nice black churches in the Alton area that are never neverbothered and I just think that this possibly is one of those types of things that you might sit around a bar and talk about. I just don't link the two. I don't think, I don't want to think it's racial.

MR. HOLMAN: Many people in Alton's business community don't want to think the church burnings were racially motivated either. The town's economy has been depressed for years and finally is showing signs of reviving. Some fear negative publicity could hurt the recovery.

DON BOLLINI: We've got new businesses coming in, and we want to, you know, for everybody concerned, we have to keep the ball going, we have to keep this going. Anything that would hurt the white or the black community in bad publicity or in bad press is going to hurt everybody. [Choir Singing]

MR. HOLMAN: Many of Rocky Fork's parishioners wanted only to rebuild their church and worship in peace, but Rev. Jackson and other church leaders felt it was time to take a stand against racism. [Choir Singing]

MR. HOLMAN: Jackson, who also ministers to a second church, urged his parishioners to send a message to the community, that attacks on black churches would not be tolerated. Recently, more than a hundred members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and others from Illinois and surrounding states held a rally for religious and racial equality.

REV. C.J. HENNING: Painful as that may be, the fact still is that bigotry and racism is real all around us. We live in the midst of it and be better not forget it.

MR. HOLMAN: The turnout was smaller than Rev. Jackson had hoped for but Rocky Fork's message was heard through the local news media. It's too early to say whether the rally will help heal old wounds or open new ones. The only thing that seems certain is Rocky Fork Church will be rebuilt.

CLEMENTINE KENNEDY: We're going to have a church out there and nothing they do is gonna stop us.

FLORINE EDWARDS: A lot of people have said well, why are you going to build back in the same place, they're liable to do the same thing again? Well, it's just the chance we just have to take because we just have or memories there, so many memories. ESSAY - FRAMING AN ENIGMA

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight some thoughts about the work of artist Jasper Johns from art critic Amei Wallach of Newsday.

AMEI WALLACH: Okay. What do you see here? Do you see a Toulousse LeTrech beauty with a feather in her cap or do you see the wicked witch of the west? If it's the beauty, squint hard and see the neck as a pointed chin and you've got the witch. If you see the witch, look at the nose as a chin and you've got the beauty. You have found your way into the enigmatic world of Jasper Johns. For three decades, he's been making paintings that question the nature of perception. The oddity is that this difficult and diffident painter has at the age of 58 become the world's best selling living artist. His 1959 painting False Start brought over $15 million at auction at Sotheby's. There's no rational way to explain a price like that, but those questions about how we see and what is real are at the heart of the praise that's been lashed on Jasper Johns since he first showed his targets, flags and numbers at the Leo Custelli Gallery in 1958. Johns was 28 then, the first of the young Turks who've appeared on the art scene every year since and almost immediately faded away but Jasper Johns didn't fade away. He continued to baffle and enthrall. Johns made his subject the real world of concrete objects. The flags and the targets were flat, which meant you didn't have to accommodate the big modernist question. How do you deal with the fact that the canvas is flat and the real world is not without the renaissance lie of perspective? Johns didn't lie. He painted flat maps but with a brush work that was painterly, the brush work drained those maps and flags of their everyday meaning. You didn't want to salute the flag or read the map, you wanted to ponder them. Once he wrote in a notebook, "Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it." He attached spoons, cups, rulers, brooms to his paintings. He cannot resist a pun. When hatch marks began to replace maps and targets, he tried to draw critics off the scent by insisting the hatch marks weren't just the basic building block of print making, in other words, metaphors for art. He said he'd seen a pattern on a car that was passing him on the expressway. The hatch marks began the phase of his work that the Philadelphia Museum celebrated in an exhibit that won Johns the grand prize and every available kudo at the venerable Venis DiAnali last summer. The climax of this phase began in 1984, the year the Whitney Museum paid $1 million for three flags and set off the Johns sweepstakes. Then as now he had to find a way to respond to what money was doing to his art. He did it by letting down his guard. He began work on the Four Seasons. The monumental four panel painting lets us in on the secret that all along in his obsessive repetition of objects out of every day, Johns is making his own portrait. The painter whose austerity and visual puns once set critics scurrying to decode their arcane meaning took on the grand operatic themes, old age, dissolution, loss, sex and death, and the whole damn thing. His latest paintings are of people in the process of dissolution, maybe even himself. He's always preferred to paint in the melted wax technique of encaustic. In the newest paintings he lets it go runny and drip. The face comes from Picasso of the 30's to remind of Johns that Picasso used to sit in the bathtub and wonder why he didn't melt like a lump of sugar. She's a post Hubous Aphrodite who keeps on challenging our notion of perception. She could as easily be a hat or a tree. Like the witch/beauty, it's an hilarious concept but it's also chilling. It's about despair. This is the age of AIDS after all. How we see may be a question worth painting about. So is why we die. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again the main points in today's news, in Paris, most of the world's nations approved a declaration to rid the world of chemical and biological weapons and pledged to work towards enforcement. West German Chancellor Kohl said the U.S. needed to provide more evidence to back up allegations that West German firms helped Libya to build a chemical weapons plant. This evening, the U.S. vetoed a UN resolution condemning it for the shootdown of two Libyan jet fighters. France and Britain also vetoed the measure and President Reagan planned a personal farewell address to the nation this evening. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.