The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. Leading the news this Friday, U.S. troops in the Gulf will be vaccinated to protect against germ warfare. Sixteen thousand more sailors and Marines were ordered to the Gulf and the monthly economic indicators report produced more signs of recession. We'll have the details in our News Summary in a moment. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in New York tonight. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: After the News Summary we go first to an assessment of where the Soviet Union and its President, Mikhail Gorbachev, stand after two of the most dramatic weeks in Soviet history. Then we turn to a documentary report on one medical researcher's campaign against heart disease. Next, a political signing up from the David Gergen & Mark Shields team, and we close with a look at the stand-up comedy of writer Calvin Trilling.NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: The Defense Department said today some U.S. troops will be vaccinated to protect against Iraqi germ warfare. Iraq President Saddam Hussein has denied having biological weapons which spread deadly viruses, such as typhoid and cholera, but CIA Director William Webster said recently Iraq has stockpiled large quantities of such weapons. Britain's Defense Ministry said its troops would also be innoculated. The USS Karen was the first of 17 ships in a U.S. fleet to leave their home ports this morning for the Gulf. They included the aircraft carriers America and Theodore Roosevelt and their battle groups. The sailings involved 16,000 Navy personnel and Marines. They are scheduled to arrive in the region before January 15th, the deadline set by the United Nations for the possible use of force against Iraq. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: There was another sign today that the U.S. economy is in a recession, or heading towards one. The Index of Leading Economic Indicators, which is the government's main forecasting tool, was down 1.2 percent last month, the fifth consecutive drop. Many analysts said it means the unemployment rate will continue to rise. Weather was the economic story in California. A citrus industry spokesman said up to 15,000 citrus workers could lose their jobs because of freezing temperatures that have ruined crops. Last week's cold weather was the worst since 1913. A spokeswoman for Sunkist growers said the price of oranges could double nationwide. Preliminary estimates said growers could lose nearly $286 million.

MR. LEHRER: There were major transit accidents in New York City and Boston this morning. One person died in New York when an electrical fire broke out in a Brooklyn subway tunnel. More than 140 others suffered from smoke inhalation. Officials said the fire apparently started when melting snow leaked onto electrical wires along the track. In Boston, more than 30 people were injured when a trolley car slammed into the rear of another stopped at an underground station. There was no word on why it happened.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: That ends our summary of the day's top stories. Ahead on the NewsHour, Gorbachev and the Soviet congress, the fight against heart disease, Gergen and Shields, and the stand-up comedy of writer Calvin Trilling. FOCUS - CRITICAL CONGRESS

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Our lead focus tonight looks at where the Soviet Union and President Mikhail Gorbachev stand after two of the most dramatic weeks in recent Soviet political history. Much of the drama has taken place at the Congress of People's Deputies, which finished a two week session late last night. It included the resignation of Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, the granting of new powers to Gorbachev, especially to deal with the rest of republics, the confirmation of a new vice president, but only after the second ballot, and yesterday's announcement by the Russian Republic that it would withhold a major portion of its contribution to next year's Soviet budget. We have a report on the closing session narrated by Louise Bates of Worldwide Television News.

MS. BATES: It was not a good day for Mikhail Gorbachev. Having struggled to persuade parliament to elect his choice for the USSR's first vice president, he could barely conceal his anger at the move by the Russian republic. Gorbachev categorically stated that the Russian parliament's decision to slash their contribution by some 80 percent was not in accordance with the Soviet laws. In his eyes, it was tantamount to a declaration of economic war. In the thinly veiled threat, Viktor Kecherienko, President of the Supreme Soviet's budget planning committee, said the Kremlin would force the Russian republic to raise its contribution to the national budget, adding that the situation was pregnant with dangerous consequences. This is a view endorsed by the Soviet leader who said it would destroy the country, itself. Nonetheless, it creates a huge question mark over the already complicated 1991 Soviet budget. Soviet Finance Director Valentin Pavlov warned the cutbacks put all federal programs, including science and education, in peril.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: We pick up the story now with three Soviet watchers. Richard Pipes is professor of Russian history at Harvard and author of a recently published book on the Russian Revolution. Martha Brill Olcott is a professor of political science at Colgate University specializing in nationalities issues. Stephen Cohen is a professor of Soviet politics at Princeton University and co- author of the recently published book, "Voices of Glasnost". Starting with you, Ms. Brill Olcott, you just heard Gorbachev's reaction and the warning about possible dangerous consequences of Russia's action on their contribution to the budget. How dangerous a pass has this congress led the Soviet Union to?

MS. BRILL OLCOTT: I think that the Soviet Union now is really on the edge of major confrontation. The next few weeks are going to put Gorbachev at critical decision making points where he's either going to have to decide to crack down on the recalcitrant republics, now the Russian republic joining the others, the Baltics, Moldavia, Georgia in defying Moscow, or to really see his Presidency and all his power just erode.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, how do you think Russia made that move?

MS. BRILL OLCOTT: I think they perceived the vulnerability of Gorbachev, that if Russia stands up against Moscow, then it makes a crackdown all the harder to pursue.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: I see. What do you think about that?

MR. PIPES: Well, we're in a critical situation. It's a crisis of great dimensions, such as Russia's experience since 1918, and we see two things happening. On the one hand, Gorbachev is accumulating more and more dictatorial powers, and collaborating with the most extremely right wing elements in the Soviet society, the KGB, the army generals, and the upper echelons of the party. And on the other, the republics are going their way and saying no to him, and particularly vulnerable to him is the Russian republic, which is the most powerful and the richest.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So you agree that this brings the Soviet Union to the brink of confrontation.

MR. PIPES: Oh, yes. It is a confrontation. We are in a condition of confrontation.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Stephen, what do you think? Do you think that this increases the chance of Gorbachev having to enforce?

MR. COHEN: Well, it worries me that we forget what country we're talking about. We're talking about a country with a thousand years of despotic tradition that has never experienced liberalism or democracy, that has during the last five years tried to make the transition to some kind of liberal democracy in markets. I think what we're witnessing is an inevitable part of that process. There have been confrontations from Day One. I don't know if this is the worst confrontation or the greatest crisis, but it's part of the process of change. The question we really have to ask ourselves is where are we at this moment and what are the alternatives?

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Gorbachev, himself, said, as you just heard, that his action on the part of Russia increases the chance of the country destroying itself.

MR. COHEN: Well, he has to say that. He's a political leader. He's saying if you don't follow me, there'll be chaos. What worries me is the implication of Professor Pipes' conclusion that Gorbachev has somehow become a reactionary or an anti-reform figure himself. I think when what we witnessed at this conference, at this congress, and during the last two or three weeks, is Gorbachev trying to reconstruct a coalition with conservative forces who continue to support some of the reforms and an attempt to ward off those reactionaries that Shevardnadze warned against, this rising tide of anti-reform, anti-democratic, anti- market, anti-detante even, policy that are associated with Gorbachev, and this was the main point of Shevardnadze's farewell speech, it wasn't a fairwell speech, but the main point of his resignation was he looked at the hall, he waved his finger at the hall and he said, I don't object to the conservatives here, you have a right to partake in this process, it's the reactionaries, the colonels, the tough guys who have risen their voices and their fist at Gorbachev now.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So do you see this in a sense as Gorbachev sort of heeding the warning of Shevardnadze and trying to strengthen the center?

MR. COHEN: I don't know, but look, it's terribly hard for Americans to imagine a real political situation in the Soviet Union. For example, Yelena was on your show two nights ago and told Americans that Gorbachev should move on, he should quit, but the question in my mind is what would replace him, who would replace him, and that raises the question of the real political forces in this country. The Democrats remain a tiny island in a vast sea of despotic politics in that country. Gorbachev has to make alliances with people that can help him save this historic process of reform.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But do you see Gorbachev still committed to democracy? I mean, because Yelena Bonner also said she expected to see more and more acts of repression, and there are those who stated even if Gorbachev is committed to democracy still, there's a chance that he'll have to use repressive measures to get there.

MR. COHEN: There is that chance. That is the great danger. Gorbachev is not an unknown quantity. We've had him before on the world stage for almost six years. What has he done in six years? He's brought this country closer to democracy than she'd ever been in a thousand years. How does he want to enter history? Does he want to enter history as the man who abolished his own greatness? I think not.

MR. PIPES: What we're seeing now is typical in Russian history. Czars come, Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Alexander II, they begin a program of reforms and they find reforms don't work out and after four or five or six years, they took a course of reaction, which is exactly what's happening now. Steve talks about an alliance, but the alliance is all over the right. All his liberal friends have left. Yakovlev is still remaining, but he is virtually without a post and he will probably go soon too, and these generals and colonels against whom Shevardnadze warned are crowing with joy that all these people have left.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: He's right, isn't he, Stephen?

MR. COHEN: It's easy for us to sit in the United States and say what should or should not happen in the Soviet Union, but the reality is that 90 percent of the country is still ruled by conservative administrative elites. What is Gorbachev supposed to do? Tell them he doesn't care. He's got to govern the country.

MS. BRILL OLCOTT: But there are real tensions between the conservative elites that rule that country and one of the big issues is the question of the role of the center and that's why Russia's refusal to pay taxes is so critical, because in a number of republics, it's the conservatives that are against the union treaty. It's the conservatives that are against a strong Moscow. So it's not just the way you depict the democratic reform versus the reactionaries. It's the whole multi-national republic center. Tension cuts across the whole thing.

MR. COHEN: But wouldn't you agree that if the republics were to go their own political way, 15 of them, that it's unlikely you'd end up with 15 liberal democracies, that many of those republics are going to become their own form of despotism.

MS. BRILL OLCOTT: Oh, yeah, but that's what makes the tension so much more complicated now between Moscow and the republics, because it's not just the democratic reformers versus the reactionaries, it's the democratic reformers plus strong republic people versus the reactionaries.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And Stephen, you said if the republics were to go their own way, but I guess the big question now that I asked a few moments ago is if they persist, I mean, Gorbachev says that he's not going to face the collapse of the Soviet Union. I know what you said in response to my question, but do you feel that Gorbachev might conceivably be used to move force if they continue along this path?

MR. COHEN: Sure.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: I mean, you conceive that --

MR. COHEN: It's easy to conceive. In fact, I would go further and say this, as we look back over the last five or six years, it's absolutely remarkable, almost a political miracle, that thus far to this date, to December 1990, Gorbachev, the center, has used almost no force. But liberals themselves in the Soviet Union have complained that Gorbachev did not use enough when the --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: We can't get into that, but Yevtushenko said on this program last night was the problem was half measures, that the motherland is only half saved. Do you agree with that?

MS. BRILL OLCOTT: I think that's true, and I think that this congress has produced another set of half measures. He's come out with a lot more power, but it's not at all clear that he has the capacity to enforce his decision, Russia breaking with him yesterday points up his weaknessso clearly.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What of the confirmation of his vice president now only on the second ballot, how do you read that?

MS. BRILL OLCOTT: I think it's again another one of those half measures, but it showed that he has the support of the Congress enough to push forward his programs when he threatens them, when he pleads with them the way he did between the ballots, but he only gained a hundred and thirty some odd votes by pleading. People don't trust his instincts. They're not willing to break with him, but they're not willing to show him confidence either. His own legislators aren't willing to show him confidence.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Stephen, Prof. Pipes said a few moments ago that this kind of further isolates Gorbachev, this selection as well as the direction he seems to be taking. I mean, do you feel that way too, that he is now isolated from the former allies he had and the kind of radical reforms he was trying to put through? I mean, especially with Shevardnadze gone and --

MR. COHEN: Yes and no. On the one hand, he clearly has decided against an open alliance with the left. And he's done so for a simple reason. The democrats cannot rule a country.

MR. PIPES: With the right.

MR. COHEN: No, with the left. He's decided against an alliance with the left for the simple reason that the democrats are a handful of people, very weak forces, and cannot govern the country. In that sense, yes. In another sense, no. He remains the father of whatever democracy exists and even many of the liberals, Stan Kavicks, the deputy mayor of Moscow, for example, are urging Gorbachev to act strongly, boldly, and restore order, because the fundamental question in the minds of real reformers in Russia is can you introduce reform in such a country in conditions of complete disorder, and you cannot.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Let me just turn briefly to foreign policy and the resignation of Shevardnadze and the assumption of the foreign policy position of Primakov. How different do you think the policy, foreign policy, is going to be now that Shevardnadze's gone? Is it going to change fundamentally, and specifically toward the Gulf?

MS. BRILL OLCOTT: I don't think that foreign policy will change appreciably with Shevardnadze's departure. I think Shevardnadze has been a team player with Gorbachev and Primakov has been a very conspicuous member of that team, particularly with regard to the Gulf area, because Primakov's own expertise is Arab politics. He spent many years of his life in the Middle East. He's a fluent speaker of Arabic. It's impossible to imagine that Gorbachev ever put together a Middle East policy without key consultations with Primakov at every step of the way. If anything, this will make not just for a smooth transition but make for a stronger Soviet statement in the Gulf, a capacity for a stronger statement. It's hard to predict how they'll come in on it, but they should be able to move faster in the Gulf area.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you agree with that, Prof. Pipes?

MR. PIPES: No, I don't. I think when Mr. Shevardnadze resigned, he mentioned as a critical point, the thing that he ensured the most were the attacks on him for his policy in the Gulf and the accusations that he intends to send Soviet troops. I think you're going to see a cooling of Soviet support for policy in the Gulf.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What makes you think that?

MR. PIPES: Well, because the people with whom Gorbachev is aligned with are people very much against any Soviet support to American presence in the Gulf.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why is that?

MR. PIPES: They are very worried about American strength in the Middle East. They worried that they might defeat the Iraqis in a matter of weeks and make him look very bad because they couldn't defeat the wrecked economy of Afghanistan in nine years. They think we may leave an army presence, an American presence in the Middle East. They just don't want it.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Are these the same forces who are also spouting a lot of anti-American rhetoric, like the KGB chief over the weekend, talking about American assistance to the Soviet Union --

MR. PIPES: Absolutely. Some of these generals --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: -- on the food crisis?

MR. PIPES: Some of these generals have been saying even before Shevardnadze resigned that, in fact, the Shevardnadze together with Gorbachev has sold out the Soviet interest in Eastern Europe and gotten nothing for it, and one of them, a very public general, has said that the third world war is where the United States is winning it, and if they don't watch out and don't maintain their nuclear posture, they will be under the heel of Uncle Sam. These are the people who are the friends of Gorbachev today.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Stephen, how do you account for all of this anti-U.S. rhetoric that's starting to emanate from the right?

MR. COHEN: It's not cultivated. It's been there all along. We chose in this country to focus our attention, our media attention on the democrats as though they were the future of the country for sure. But this right wing, this anti-detante position, has been there all along, and therefore, we have to remember something absolutely fundamental, that the foreign policies which we admire from the Soviet Union, that Dick now fears may be disappearing, those are Gorbachev's foreign policies. They weren't Shevardnadze's. They were Gorbachev's, and these attacks on Shevardnadze's foreign policy, and Dick's right, they're ferocious and nasty and threatening and ominous, they are attacks on Gorbachev, and therefore, why --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, how much are they going to affect his ability to deal with his domestic situation?

MR. COHEN: Well, of course, they affect it, because he's being attacked for his domestic and his foreign policies, but that reminds us what a central figure Gorbachev remains if reform at home and abroad is to continue in the Soviet Union.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: At this moment, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the past now in the next few weeks and months?

MR. COHEN: I don't think it's my job to be that. I think it's my job to remember as a student of Soviet affairs that this is the greatest historical reformation in modern history. It's going to be long and painful and there are no guarantees it'll be successful, but we should hope and keep calm and not imagine Alice in Wonderland like that the alternative to Gorbachev is under the democracy -- this is the Soviet Union, this is Russia we're talking about, not Luxemborg.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You get the last word tonight, Stephen Cohen. Thank you for being with us. Martha Brill Olcott and Prof. Richard Pipes.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, changing habits to save the heart, Gergen & Shields, and Calvin Trillin. FOCUS - HEART TROUBLE

MR. LEHRER: This is the season to live well, but well does not always mean well the old-fashioned well. Here now is a story about a California cardiologist with some unorthodox ideas and procedures for redefining living well among other things that cut down on heart attacks, America's No. 1 killer disease. Spencer Michels of public station KQED-SanFrancisco reports.

MR. MICHELS: Bob Finnel appears to be the picture of health, but like 40 million Americans he has heart disease. Five years ago at age 49 while mountain climbing he had a heart attack, but he refused to let it slow him down. He quickly went back to work.

MR. FINNEL: My recovery consisted of 50 or 60 hour work weeks in New York, lots of travel, and the events that led to it, in my mind, were a very stressful job. I was almost a workaholic.

MR. MICHELS: Two years ago at age 51, Dwyane Butler was told by his doctor he could be heading for a heart attack. As manager for a truck leasing company he was under stress, his personal life was in crisis, and he was out of shape.

MR. BUTLER: I weighed 280 pounds and I couldn't hardly bend over and get back up, you know, without being out of breath.

MR. MICHELS: Both men were overweight and had dangerously high cholesterol. Finnel was told he needed a bypass operation, open heart surgery, to replace the blocked coronary arteries with vessels from his legs. But he feared the operation would be too risky. Butler enrolled in a cardiac rehabilation clinic and he didn't stick to the regime. Doctors told him he had to get serious, his life was at stake, so he took a less stressful job. Finnel went further. He quit his executive job. At potentially great risk, both men opted to be subjects in an experiment.

DR. ORNISH: The purpose of the group here is to simply have a safe enough environment where each of us can feel safe to talk about what's really going on in our lives.

MR. MICHELS: They joined the study headed by Dr. Dean Ornish, assistant clinical professor at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco. Ornish set out to prove lifestyle changes alone, without drugs or surgery could reduce the fatty deposits that clog arteries.

DR. DEAN ORNISH: When I was a medical student, I had the opportunity to learn how to do bypass surgery and we would cut people open, and we would operate on them, and we'd send them home, and they were told they were cured, and after a while though it became clear to me that that was an incomplete approach at best, that it literally and figuratively was bypassing the problem without dealing with the underlying cause.

MR. MICHELS: Forty-eight patients came to his study in stages of heart disease ranging from serious to alarming. The participants were split into two groups. Twenty-eight patients in the experimental program signed onto major lifestyle changes in three areas, diet, exercise, and stress management. They went on a strict, all vegetarian diet that restricts daily fat intake to less than 10 percent of all food eaten. Most of the participants take home gourmet vegetarian food each week to make sticking to the die easy. Ornish got the patients out of their sedentary lifestyles and into their workout clothes. They pledged to walk at least half an hour a day. The most unorthodox part of the program by Western medical standards is a twice weekly yoga and meditation hour. The participants are taught to visualize healthy hearts, then in group support sessions, patients and their spouses are encouraged to talk freely about their problems.

MR. FINNEL: All of these parts go together and I don't know if you told me that I could drop one of these elements that I would do it, because I know that I've benefited from the walking, I know that I've benefited from the breathing exercises, I know that the diet is good for me, so I'm going to stick with the full mix.

MR. MICHELS: Twenty of the patients recruited from two hospitalswere placed in a comparison group. They were told to reduce daily fat intake to the American Heart Association's guideline of less than 30 percent, far less stringent than the experimental group. They were told to exercise moderately but they weren't required to practice yoga and medication. Participants in both groups had to be non-smokers. All the patients were sent to Texas for a variety of high-tech tests that measured the changes in arterial blockage and blood flow to the heart. They were followed by a documentary film crew that tracked the study over time. [PATIENT TESTING SESSION]

MR. MICHELS: The results of Ornish's study recently published in the British Medical Journal Lancet are dramatic. 82 percent of the patients who followed Ornish's program showed a decrease in arterial blockage and reported less pain, while slightly more than half of the control group showed an increase in blockage and in pain.

DOCTOR TALKING TO PATIENT: Okay, Bob, this is a PET Scan showing your heart at the beginning of the study and then a year later, with the different colors responding to the degree of blood flow that each region of your heart is getting. White and red are the greatest amount of blood flow. You have much more blood flow appearing a year later than you did before and even in the anterior wall you have a lot more white appearing here than you did here.

MR. MICHELS: These computer-enhanced X-rays of Finnel's arteries show that after a year an artery that was 70 percent blocked now was blocked 60 percent. Even a small reduction significantly increases blood flow to the heart.

DOCTOR TALKING TO PATIENT: So your coronary flow has almost doubled.

MR. MICHELS: That significance was made clear in the case of 75 year old Werner Hebenstreit, the oldest patient in the study. He had two heart attacks before entering the program. He couldn't walk across the street. Now he goes mountain climbing.

WERNER HEBENSTREIT: I was really convinced that for the rest of my life I would remain a cripple, that I couldn't do -- I couldn't walk -- I couldn't do this, I couldn't hike, couldn't climb mountains, and then when I got into the Ornish program very soon after, after a few weeks already, my condition changed, and all of a sudden I had hope again.

MR. MICHELS: These slides show that Hebenstreit had an artery that was 100 percent blocked.

DR. ORNISH: At the beginning of the study the blood flows up here, down here, and just stops here.

MR. MICHELS: After two years, it opened 27 percent, a significant improvement. According to Ornish, Hebenstreit and Finnel, the oldest and most blocked patients, stuck to the program the closest and showed the most improvement. The prospect of slowing down heart disease has tantalized researchers for decades. Two recent university studies have shown that arterial blockages could be shrunk, but both those studies used cholesterol lowering drugs. Ornish is the first to report reversing heart disease using lifestyle changes alone. Leading cardiologists call Ornish's results a milestone, but they criticize his study for being too small. Virgil Brown, president-elect of the American Heart Association, says that mixing together the variables of diet, exercise, and stress reduction makes Ornish's conclusions scientifically muddy.

DR. VIRGIL BROWN, American Heart Association: The problem is we don't know whether already did contribute and to what extent they contributed. Much of what happened may well have been due solely to dietary change.

DR. ORNISH: The more time people spent doing meditation and yoga and stretching and so on, the better they got, independent of the amount of time they spent doing exercise or how much fat and cholesterol they were eating, so we know that the stress management is playing an important role. In fact, the corrolation with the stress management was as strong, if not stronger, than it was with the diet.

MR. MICHELS: Dwayne Butler agrees that diet alone wouldn't have caused the difference. He came to the program as a self-described macho redneck. His life was in turmoil. He says learning to talk about it helped the most.

MR. BUTLER: I decided to drop a few of the walls, talk about it, and you people accepted me like I was. You loved me for what I told you about myself and I felt much, much better. I felt a release. It still does.

MR. MICHELS: One patient, Bill Ranney, died of a heart attack. Ornish attributes his death to the fact that he pushed exercise to the limit and tried to ignore stress reduction.

DR. ORNISH: It was a tragic but important lesson that without dealing with the deeper issues of our emotions, it's hard for the healing to be complete.

DR. JOHN FARHUHAR, Stanford University: I think that we're all going to have a little trouble with Dr. Ornish if he extrapolates too far into how to solve the problem. I think we need to stick with the basic facts, that lowering risk factors help.

MR. MICHELS: Dr. John Farhuhar conducts heart disease prevention research at Stanford University. He says Ornish's program is too strict for most Americans to follow.

DR. FARHUHAR: We have spent 20 years working in communities with real people in their real environments. We know what you can do and what you can't do.

DR. ORNISH: I mean, I'd like to be able to tell people you can have roast beef and ice cream and it's fine and your arteries will just be perfectly clean. That's not the way it is. I want to distinguish between what is easy from what is true. It'd be nice, I'd be real happy if it turned out that a 30 percent fat diet was enough to cause reversal. It isn't for most people and they need to know that.

MR. MICHELS: The American Heart Association says it won't change its basic dietary recommendations based on the publicatin of Ornish's findings, but Ornish believes the medical establishment must be open to change.

DR. ORNISH: We've gotten to a point in medicine where it's somehow considered conservative to cut people open, to put them on powerful drugs for the rest of their lives with known and unknown side effects, and it's considered somehow radical to get people to walk, to manage stress better, to eat vegetables and to stop smoking. I think things are a little topsy turvy.

MR. MICHELS: Ornish struggled to fund the first phase of his study. Traditional funders were skeptical that lifestyle changes could reverse arterial heart disease. But now that he's presented proof, he's getting federal money from the National Institutes of Health to follow these patients for four additional years. FOCUS - GERGEN & SHIELDS

MR. LEHRER: Now the final Friday night conversation of 1990 with our regular analysis team of Gergen & Shields, David Gergen, editor at large at U.S. News & World Report, Mark Shields, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. David, this is our last time to talk, 1990. Have the people been well served by their government this year, sir?

MR. GERGEN: Until a year ago I think there was an atmosphere of euphoria in the country. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and peace seemed to be at hand, the economy was rolling forward and clearly that bubble was burst and the sky is grayer now than it was because we're looking into a deep recession possibly, the economy is unraveling faster than people thought and the prospects of war I think are even more serious in the Persian Gulf, so that I think you have to say that I think the country's mood is much grayer, more pessimistic but I do think there are a few rays of sunshine. So I don't want to write things off entirely before we finish our discussion.

MR. LEHRER: Overview, your overview, Mark.

MR. SHIELDS: Well, I think David is right in the sense that savings & loan story, $500 billion owed, something's terribly wrong with that. Where the ultimate blame lies we may never know. On top of that, we've had scandals in the Congress. It seems that the House Ethics Committee is meeting almost regularly. Keating Five with Senators and access and contributions and campaign finance system that is true scandal, but ironically I really think that the government is working. I think if one thinks in terms of today's grandparents are more economically secure than were their parents, that's a direct consequence and result of federal government programs. They're healthier, they have greater access to medical care. That's a direct result of a federal government program. Our air is cleaner. The water we drink is cleaner. Those are -- that's the amazing part -- we don't know it and nobody's trumpeting it and I think that's a direct consequence.

MR. LEHRER: In effect, you hear just the opposite. Every poll, every comment that you hear from outside Washington is that the people in Washington do not know what they're doing, they're on the take or they're this or they're that or they're weak or they're whatever.

MR. GERGEN: Jim, I think we have come to the end of an era and we're experiencing the fruits of those who went before us now. I think as the second world war ended, we had a government that was filled I think with some very strong people, the wise men of that era, the John McCloys and George Kemmons and so forth had a vision of the future. We shared a commitment to the common good in the country. We laid a foundation after the second world war which has paid off here in the last couple of years and I think we do feel we've made a great deal of social progress here. Clearly, democracy is on the march, capitalism is on the march around the world as a result of that earlier foundation. I think what now concerns us we're in the beginning of a new era and we're not laying the foundations for the future in the way that we should, that we don't seem to have the wise men in government that we should have, that we don't seem to have a common vision of the future, we don't have a common commitment to our future together as a people.

MR. LEHRER: Is it because we don't even know what the new era is supposed to do?

MR. GERGEN: Absolutely. I think at the end of the second world war people sat down and they thought long and hard about what kind of world we were trying to build and we set about that task and I think we largely succeeded, Democrats and Republicans working together, and I do think we're missing that right now.

MR. SHIELDS: The other thing we did have, we had a defining villain.

MR. GERGEN: Sure. We had a war too.

MR. SHIELDS: We had a war which would -- against the most villainous hordes the world has ever known, the third reich of Adolph Hitler and Imperial Japan, then we faced Joe Stalin with the arrayed nuclear power of the Soviet power and we vanquished them, and that's one of the problems. I mean, we don't have a bogeyman right now, because it wasquite convenient for a number of politicians, many on David's side of the aisle, a few on mine, over the past generation to blame all the nation's problems on the Communists. Now the Communists --

MR. GERGEN: Or Washington.

MR. SHIELDS: Or Washington, but the Communists were really the real menace, but as Mickey Edwards, a conservative Congressman from Oklahoma, says if you want to see Communism in 1990, you've got to go to a theme park in Albania. I mean, there just isn't any around, so you can't blame them for international restlessness or poverty or just people rebelling against tyrannical, despotic regimes, so that's a continuing -- plus we didn't get the peace dividend and that, I think that's traceable. We thought once the end of that terrible cold war came that there would be freeing up to address the problems at home that Americans really do want to turn --

MR. GERGEN: But I think that after the second world war that we were more optimistic about ourselves as a people in our capacity to achieve and to build and now we know we have deep seated problems in education and health care and just in race relations, and it seems to me we're acting as if we're tired, that we don't have a commitment to it.

MR. LEHRER: We sit here discussing a new era, and as you said a year ago, my goodness, we were talking, all of us on this program, everybody in the world, everybody in this country was talking about it, and here we are on the verge of another war, possibly another war. Who knows whether we're going to have it, who knows how big it will be, whatever. Do you think -- how big a factor is that?

MR. GERGEN: Well, I think that we were, the pessimism and the ascendancy in this country was in the saddle even before Saddam Hussein came along, but that has only increased our sense of foreboding, and I have to say, as you know, I have thought for some time that war is in the offing, and Jack Nelson had a piece today in the Los Angeles Times saying President Bush is determined to go to war as soon as possible after January 15th, that this has come very quickly upon us, and I think what Mark has been saying all along is that we do need to have a sense of what we're about and why we're doing this. I think that would help the nation's psyche.

MR. LEHRER: Mark, what is your -- you are a Washington person, as is David and as am I, and yet, you travel a lot more around this country than I do -- what is your analysis of why the people out in the country think that the people running things here in Washington are such jerks?

MR. SHIELDS: I think we've given an awful lot of empirical evidence to support that thesis. I mean, we did go through 20 years of failed, flawed, and tragically ended presidencies from 1960 to 1980. We didn't have a single two term President. We had assassinations; we had impeachments; we had, Spiro, could I have the envelope, please, Agnew, we had a whole, I mean, wrenching national experiences, our fundamental optimism, which David's absolutely right about, was sorely tested and depleted. On top of that, there's one little wrinkle here that's going on, and that is with a divided government, the Democrats in apparent permanent control of the Congress, and the Republicans with almost a lock on the White House, what comes out of Washington to the rest of America is every problem, from the outbreak of ring worm to declining Sunday school attendance, being blamed by the Democrats in the Congress on the Republicans in the White House and every other problem by the Republicans in the White House being blamed on those Democrats in Congress, so what you end up getting is this din of negativism about Washington, and nobody sits down and says, hey, 57 percent of Americans between the age of 20 and 24 are in college. That's remarkable. I mean, that's three times as high as most industrial nations in the world. Sure, we have feelings. Sure we have our flaws. My goodness, two generations ago or three generations ago, three or five out of Americans the ages of 20 to 24 are going to be in college, you would have said you're crazy, that couldn't be done in the America approaching World War II.

MR. GERGEN: But I also think, I think, Mark, you're right on most of the analyses. It's good to hear it as 1990 ends that you're so optimistic about it.

MR. SHIELDS: Well, I'm not optimistic about the war. You know that.

MR. GERGEN: I know that. I worry.

MR. SHIELDS: I know.

MR. GERGEN: We are walking into a war as if there is no return.

MR. SHIELDS: That's right.

MR. GERGEN: But --

MR. LEHRER: How can you say there hasn't been a debate? My goodness, the debate is going on today, you know, here and everywhere.

MR. SHIELDS: The debate is going on in the country but it's not going on in the leadership positions. It has not engaged the nation. We come back -- I don't mean to take David's time -- but we come back on the 2nd of January, if the Congress doesn't come back and confront that issue head on and have a full airing, rather than periodic serial hearings and this, that, and the other thing, we haven't had a full debate.

MR. GERGEN: Jim, I think the debate effectively ended when the Congress went home, and I think we've been on a course since then that does not allow for the option of sanctions. I think the President, if he asks for a vote from Congress, as you know, I think he will get the most, most of the Democrats will vote for him. To come back to your original question, which is the country - - I think the country is increasingly disaffected and distanced from Washington in large part because Washington does not seem to be responding to the problems in their everday lives.

MR. LEHRER: The real problems.

MR. GERGEN: The real problems. How they live, how they get to work, what kind of schools their kids go to, how they pay their bills. Increasingly, the answers are coming from state and local government, even county government.

MR. LEHRER: But what's wrong with that?

MR. GERGEN: I think that there is a certain strength to that because I think we're seeing a lot of vitality now out in the state governments. In fact, you know, one of the people that George Bush has tapped, the education secretary, I think all of us applaud as a decision Mr. Alexander, innovative governor, I think it's good to have the states as laboratories of democracy, but still I think what's wrong is that there is no cohesion to the national -- there's no sense of national purpose -- there's nothing that Washington is providing is a sense of mission about where we ought to be about and let's in the next 10 years really get three problems solved, any three.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. You know, three or four months ago, before the Gulf thing, we were talking about and so was everybody else, well, maybe Washington is irrelevant now because the action has moved to Eastern Europe, the action has moved elsewhere, and the action has moved to the state capitals. Does Washington look as irrelevant tonight at the end of 1990 as it did a few months ago?

MR. SHIELDS: It certainly doesn't to Saddam Hussein; it certainly doesn't to the future of peace or war in the world; certainly America's dominance internationally, leadership internationally has been more firmly established than ever.

MR. LEHRER: I'll tell you what. Let's continue this next Friday. Happy New Year to both of you. FINALLY - STAND-UP WRITER

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Finally tonight a writer of many talents tries his hand at another one, stand-up comedy. Arts Correspondent Joanna Simon was there for Calvin Trillin's one man show.

MS. SIMON: New York theater is best known for its musicals like Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, and Cats, lavish spectacles with big casts and expensive sets and costumes. But recently, a non-musical with a one man cast and an almost bare stage also drew sell out crowds. They came to watch a balding, middle aged man make a spectacle of himself.

MR. TRILLIN: We're absolutely serious about the title, "Words, No Music", so those of you who came here hoping to here me hum and whistle at the same time tonight are out of luck. It's true that that's my talent in the way the Miss America people use the word talent, as in Miss Minnesota will now do her talent.

MS. SIMON: His name is Calvin Trillin. Two years ago when the American Place Theater asked Trillin, a humorist and journalist, to do his talent in a one man show he declined. But when he learned the show would have a play bill with his picture on it and a poster, he changed his mind. Recently, Trillin, who's known to his friends as "Bud", returned to the theater for a second one man show.

MR. TRILLIN: I believe that many people have similar talents deep within them. I used to look at pictures of Gen. DeGaulle and I'd say I bet that man could play "Lady of Spain" on his head with spoons. He may not want to, but he's got the capacity. During all the coverage of German reunification, I thought if you gave Helmut Kohl some waxed paper and an ordinary pocket comb, I think he could turn out a very credible rendition of Pop Goes the Weasel. And I've always thought that Mrs. Thatcher could throw a lighted cigarette up in the air and catch it in her mouth. And sometimes I think she'd be better off and we'd be better off if she just went ahead and did it.

MS. SIMON: When Trillin isn't on stage playing stand-up comic, he's at his typewriter. He's written 14 books, including comic novels, short stories, and books chronicaling his culinary adventures. His column, Uncivil Liberties, is syndicated nationally, and he is the staff writer for the New Yorker. Accustomed to spending most of his time solo, Trillin was understandably worried about performing before an audience.

MR. TRILLIN: The first time I did it I had this awful idea that the audience would be made up mostly of people who had gone to the half price ticket booth hoping to get Cats and got me instead. You know, production values really aren't up to snuff here for these people and they would be horrified and run from the theater. But it worked well, because it's a limited run and it's a small place, which means it's not hard to gather an audience that fills it, and also we have something going for us that Cats doesn't have, and that is, my show lets out at 9:30, so you can get a table anywhere in the theater district when you go to my show.

MS. SIMON: Trillin's show had another thing going for it during its two week run. It offered an opportunity to hear Trillin talk about his wife, Alice, who's been immortalized in several of his books, among them "Alice, Let's Eat", and "Travels With Alice". A college English teacher and educational television consultant, she has been his chief editor, critic, meal mate and foil for25 years.

MR. TRILLIN: I wrote a poem for Alice's 50th birthday. It's called "Conversation With Somebody Who Doesn't Believe Alice Could Be 50". The first stanza is "No way you say, it simply cannot be, I would have thought that bar men often ask her for ID. I know, I know, she has that youthful glow that still gives young men vapors. She's 50 though. I've seen her papers." [laughter from audience] It's a love poem really.

MS. SIMON: You've been part of his humor for years. Do you enjoy being his foil?

ALICE TRILLIN: Yeah, because I'm not really his foil. I think that one of the things that's nice about the way Bud writes about me and the children is that he uses us as, you know, kind of roles, but he doesn't reveal anything embarrassing or terribly personal about us.

MS. SIMON: That's not Trillin's style. His is a gentle, wry, bemused brand of humor, a humor that ranges over the entire American landscape. President Bush talking to a recovering dope addict.

MR. TRILLIN: And he said, what did you say, the heck with it, I don't need this darned stuff.

MS. SIMON: Letters he receives from readers.

MR. TRILLIN: People say to me, aren't you ashamed of making a living by making nasty, snide, underhanded remarks about decent public servants? My only defense is it's not much of a living.

MS. SIMON: His native Kansas City.

MR. TRILLIN: Kansas City is what the real estate people would describe as equally convenient to either coast.

MS. SIMON: But he always returns to the subject he knows best, his family.

MR. TRILLIN: We usually went West. My father would be in the front seat driving, pointing out the bukes and the mesas. My sister and I would be in the back seat, guarding our territory, vigilant against any incursions over the imaginary DMZ line that had been drawn in the middle of the back seat. It's kind of like a national border, kind of like the border between Finland and the Soviet Union. I played Finland. My sister was the Soviet Union. Then my father said something that I now know is politically regressive and politically incorrect, sexist, several other things that he didn't know about at the time. He said to me, we do not hit girls. He said, you will never hit your sister again. My sister was not visited with a similar injunction. I became a unilaterally disarmed Finland. She was the Soviet Union, bristling with weaponry. I think if I hadn't had a sister with expanionist back seat policies, I would probably now know the difference between a buke and a mesa.

MS. SIMON: As an adult, Trillin learned to hide his ignorance of topography and geology by studying gastronomy. One of his favorite gastronomical haunts is New York's China Town, which he loves to explore, looking for new restaurants. To show off his expertise, Trillin took us to one restaurant where he ordered dishes of Chinese dumplings called din sum. Do you know what the exact translation of din sum is?

MR. TRILLIN: You mean in the Cantonese dialogue?

MS. SIMON: Yes.

MR. TRILLIN: I think in Cantonese it means eat as much as you possibly can, grab everything of any cart that's going by, and if necessary, push other diners out of the way.

MS. SIMON: Trillin began writing about food in the mid 1970s while traveling the country doing a series of reports for the New Yorker. His experiences at regional eateries, barbecue joints, chili parlors and street festivals fill three books, his so-called "Tummy Trilogy".

MR. TRILLIN: I was interested in say the fact that people in Cincinnati argue about what the best chili parlor is and can go into a chili parlor and order by number. It can be a three way or four way and people in any chili parlor know what that means. That interested me enough to write a story about it. The reason I pretty much quit writing about it is I never seemed to be able to persuade anybody that I wasn't really interested in what the best chili was in Cincinnati. I think the fact that people argue about it is interesting.

MS. SIMON: Back in China Town, Trillin took us to see something else he finds interesting, a chicken, not just any chicken, but a chicken in a gay marquis who for 50 cents will play tic tac toe with any challenger passing by. Trillin brings all his out of town visitors there.

MR. TRILLIN: And I provide the 50 cents for the guest, because after all, I'm the person that's showing them around. I'm the host. It's funny. They almost always say the same thing when they look over the situation. They say, the chicken gets to go first. I say, but he's a chicken, you're a human being. Surely, there should be some advantage in that. I hesitate to tell you the second thing a lot of them say, not all of them, but a lot of them, because it doesn't really reflect very well on my friends I don't think, a lot of them say, the chicken plays every day. I haven't played since I was a kid.

MS. SIMON: When Trillin isn't writing humorous pieces about the China Town chicken, he's likely to be writing serious ones about a murder in Miami Beach or a mysterious disappearance in Texas. His writing has always been schizophrenic, part Will Rogers, part Alexis DeTokville.

MR. TRILLIN: I find it kind of a nice change. I mean, on Monday through Thursday, for instance, I might be writing a relatively serious piece for the New Yorker. I think of it as having my reporters have on, the little fedora that says "press" in the band, and then on Friday, I put my clown hat on with the pom poms dangling around my eyes and I write the column and then I write a poem over the weekend, because you can write poetry anywhere. The kind of poetry I write -- Wordsworth may not have been able to write anywhere -- but the kind of poetry I write you can write on an airplane.

MR. TRILLIN: [Performing] "The birds we always thought were faithful until the day they died, are almost sure to have a little something on the side."

MS. SIMON: Despite your rather "doer" personna on stage, you seem like a very happy man, are you?

MR. TRILLIN: Sure. I guess. I mean, I grew up in the Midwest where it was not considered against the law to be content and happy and we'd have this -- I think the secret is we've had this sign on the city limits in Kansas City that said psychoanalysts don't let the sun set on your ass in this town, and most people from Kansas City are pretty content people.

MS. SIMON: Especially those who can do two talents, like hum and whistle at the same time and make people laugh.

MR. TRILLIN: I was in Milwaukee signing books at a bookstore. When people walk in, they said, one of their number was also able to hum and whistle at the same time. They thought the two of us might like to do a quartet. RECAP

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Once again Friday's top stories, the U.S. and Britain said they would begin innoculating their troops for protection against possible Iraqi germ warfare. Two more U.S. aircraft carrier groups with 16,000 Marines and sailors left for the Gulf today, and the government's main economic forecasting gauge, the index of leading economic indicators, went down for the fifth straight month. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Charlayne. Have a nice weekend. We see you on Monday night. Thank you and good night.