The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, the apparent death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 32 others in a plane crash, Kwame Holman reports on what is known about what happened, Mickey Kantor, Vernon Jordan, and Bill Gray talk about Ron Brown; then Fred De Sam Lazaro updates the state of genetic research; and Charlayne Hunter-Gault interviews Paul Taylor, a man with a new politics idea. It all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was among those on a military plane that crashed today in Croatia. Thirty-two others, including several American businessmen, were also aboard. There has been no official confirmation, but all indications pointed toward Brown having been killed. There was a report late this afternoon of one survivor being found, a woman, thus far unidentified. Search efforts were underway along the Adriatic Coast, where the plane is believed to have crashed into a hill near the city of Dubrovnik. The plane was on its way from Tuzla in Central Bosnia to Dubrovnik, where Brown was scheduled to meet with local officials. He was to deliver a speech on rebuilding the former Yugoslav republics. President and Mrs. Clinton visited the Brown family home in Washington this afternoon. At the Pentagon, Gen. Howell Estes explained the circumstances of the crash.

LT. GEN. HOWELL ESTES, Joint Chiefs of Staff: Sec. Brown's aircraft was scheduled to take off from Tuzla in Bosnia at about 7 o'clock Eastern Time this morning and proceed on a route of flight down to Dubrovnik in Croatia for landing. It's about a 45- minute flight, so they should have been on the ground there at about 7:45 to 8 o'clock Eastern Standard Time this morning. The weather down at Dubrovnik this morning was not very good, and so as the aircraft proceeded to the South, they were required to make what we call an instrument approach into the airfield. The aircraft was on the instrument approach, was in contact with the tower at the Dubrovnik Airport, when contact was lost.

MR. LEHRER: Brown's delegation had planned to spend three days in Bosnia and Croatia visiting with American troops, government officials, and business leaders. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. In Bosnia today, war crimes investigators began surveying possible mass grave sites near Srebrenica. An estimated 7,000 Muslims are missing following the Serb assault last July. Officials said no digging would begin until next week. In Egypt today, Secretary of Defense Perry declined to rule out military action to stop Libya from producing chemical weapons. He was responding to charges the Bolivian government is developing a chemical weapons program at a new underground site. Perry was in Cairo for talks with President Mubarak. In Chechnya today, bombs hit a village in the Southwestern part of the region. Villagers said several houses were destroyed. Dozens of people were injured. Russia's military commander in the region denied responsibility for the attack. On Sunday, Russian President Yeltsin announced a unilateral cease-fire in Chechnya. Chechen leaders have thus far rejected Yeltsin's offer for peace talks. In U.S. economic news today, the Commerce Department reported Americans earned more but spent more in February. Personal incomes increased by .8 percent. Consumer spending increased by 1.1 percent. Former Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes died this morning. In 1967, he became the first black to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city. President Clinton named Stokes ambassador to Seychelles in 1994. He had been on a medical leave of absence since diagnosed with cancer last June. He was 68 years old. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the Ron Brown tragedy, a genetic research update, and free air time for politics. FOCUS - PLANE CRASH

MR. LEHRER: Our coverage of the plane crash that apparently killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 32 others begins with this report by Kwame Holman.

KWAME HOLMAN: By late this afternoon, official Washington still had only sketchy details about the crash and the fate of the passengers and crew. At a Pentagon briefing, an officer with the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave this accounting of what happened to the military equipped Boeing 737.

LT. GEN. HOWELL ESTES, Joint Chiefs of Staff: Initial reports that we received and that we received in Europe were that there was wreckage sighted in the water, waters of the Adriatic. A search and rescue mission was launched initially from the U.S., involving U.S. special forces, which the closest place we had people that could respond to this were Italy, with the kinds of equipment necessary. No wreckage was found at sea by any of the search and rescue assets. About three hours into the search--and you got to remember now, the weather is bad, reasonably bad, requiring an instrument approach, as I will show you in a minute, there are, in fact, some hills in the area around the airport, to the North side of the runway, a reasonable amount of distance, but, nevertheless, there, and the fact is that we had some reports from the Croatians that they had found a crash site up on the side of the hill covered by the clouds. So it was obviously not easy to see, not easy to determine that there was, in fact, a crash site there, but they initially reported the crash site of an aircraft about three kilometers to the North of the Western end of the runway. The crash site has been reached by Croatian police, and I've, I've just received word that there is also a Croatian doctor on the scene. U.S. forces are striving to get to the scene, in fact, at this minute may be at the scene. There are helicopters on the ground at Dubrovnik's airport, U.S. helicopters that held about 50 U.S. personnel. Initially, they made an attempt to land at the crash site but because of the weather were unable to do that. And so they are as rapidly as possible working their way up to where the crash site is. I think it's important to point out at this point there is--at this point there is no evidence of, of any possible fire in the area, there is no evidence of any kind of an explosion aboard the aircraft, and, uh, I think at this point because of the location, we would rule anything out of that type.

MR. HOLMAN: Ron Brown spent the early part of today in the former Yugoslavia, where he shared some special chow with U.S. troops headquartered in Tuzla, hamburgers from McDonald's. A former Army captain, Brown told the soldiers he understood their homesickness.

RON BROWN, Commerce Secretary: Being a former Army man, myself, I know what being away from home is like, so we thought we would bring a little bit of home to you. And there's no better reminder of home than McDonald's.

MR. HOLMAN: Brown and the delegation of U.S. executives were on a trade mission to put in place investment and reconstruction programs aimed at securing the new-found peace in war-ravaged Bosnia. The Commerce Secretary has undertaken more than a dozen such trips with groups of business leaders to promote access to new markets for U.S. companies. The trips have helped transform a usually invisible agency into a major instrument of domestic and foreign policy. Brown, the highest ranking African-American in the Clinton administration, has taken delegations to Ireland, to China, to the Gaza Strip after the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, and two years ago to the new democracy of South Africa. After that trade visit, Brown spoke about his feelings on the NewsHour.

RON BROWN: [December 2, 1993] And it did have a great personal impact on me to be sitting there opposite President DeKlerk as an African-American, as the first African-American Secretary of Commerce. And when you look at the ancestry of African-Americans in the United States, brought here in chains as a part of the international slave trade, and here I am talking about international trade policy in the United States of America.

MR. HOLMAN: Ronald Harmon Brown was born and raised in New York City. He spent several years with the National Urban League before taking a job as a top aide to Senator Edward Kennedy. Brown rose to national prominence as convention chairman for the 1988 Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign that won nearly 7 million primary votes and mounted a serious challenge to Michael Dukakis. A year later, Brown made history as the first black person to head a major national political party. As chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Brown took over a financially troubled and fractious party. But Brown turned the party around on both scores, raising millions of dollars and soothing old party wounds. He's widely credited with setting the stage for the election of his friend, Bill Clinton, who rewarded Brown with an appointment to head the Department of Commerce.

BILL CLINTON: [September 1, 1992] Come on up here, Ron. Now, Ron Brown is the best-dressed man in our party. He dresses like a Republican, but he's got a Democratic heart through and through.

MR. HOLMAN: Brown's career has not been without its rough spots. In February, 1994, the Department of Justice found no substance to allegations Brown accepted $700,000 from a Vietnamese businessman for Brown's help in lifting the United States trade embargo against Vietnam. Attorney General Janet Reno also appointed a special counsel to conduct a broader investigation into Brown's various business dealings before he became Commerce Secretary. While that investigation still is pending, Reno has asked the special counsel to determine whether or not Brown illegally accepted close to $500,000 from a former business partner and whether or not he deliberately filed inaccurate financial disclosure statements. And on Capitol Hill, Republicans have targeted the Commerce Department for elimination and criticized Brown for spending exorbitantly on trade missions like the one he was on today. Throughout Ron Brown's troubles, President Clinton has stood by his Commerce Secretary and close friend. Today at the Commerce Department, the President spoke with emotion about that friendship.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I've known Ron Brown a long time. I was always amazed at the way he was continually reaching out trying to bridge the differences between people, always trying to get the best out of people, always believing that we could do more than we have done. In a way, this job was sort of ready-made for him at this moment in history, and he loved it very much. Most of the time, Ron Brown spent using the power of the Commerce Department to find ways to give opportunity to ordinary Americans, to generate jobs for the American economy, and build better futures for American citizens. But when we met earlier this week, right before he left for the Balkans, he was so excited because he thought that along with these business leaders and the other very able people from the Commerce Department on this mission that they would be able to use the power of the American economy to help the peace take hold in the Balkans, to help people in that troubled place have the kind of decent, honorable, and wonderfully ordinary lives that we Americans so often take for granted. And I just want to say on a very personal note that I hope all Americans today will be grateful for what all the people who were on that plane did, for the military personnel, for the business leaders, who didn't have to go on that mission, who did it not out of a sense of their own profit but out of a sense of what they could do to help America bring peace. All the wonderful people in the Commerce Department that were on that plane, some of them very young, one of them who came to our campaign in 1992 thinking the most important thing he could do was to ride a bicycle across the country asking people to vote for the Vice President and me and wound up a trusted employee at the Commerce Department, and to all of their loved ones and their families and their friends, I want to say I am very grateful for their lives and their service. I also want to say just one last thing about Ron Brown. He was one of the, the best advisers and ablest people I ever knew. And he was very, very good at everything he ever did. Whether he was the Commerce Secretary or a civil rights leader, or something else, he was always out there just giving it his all. And he always believed that his mission in life was to put people's dreams within their reach if they were willing to work for it and believe in themselves. His favorite scripture verse was a wonderful verse from Isaiah: "They who wait upon the Lord shall have their strength renewed. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and faint not." Well, Ron Brown walked and ran and flew through life, and he was a magnificent life force. And those of us who loved him will always be grateful for his friendship and his warmth. But every American should be grateful that at a very difficult moment in our nation's history he made this Commerce Department what it was meant to be, an instrument for realizing the potential of every American. For all of you who played a role in that, I ask for your prayers for Secretary Brown and his family, for your colleagues and their families, for the business leaders and their families, and for our beloved military officers and their families. And I ask you always, always to be fiercely proud for what you have done and very grateful for the opportunity to have done it. I'd like to ask now that we bow for a moment of silence.

[MOMENT OF SILENCE]

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Amen. Thank you.

MR. LEHRER: Now some thoughts about Ron Brown from U.S. Trade Rep. Mickey Kantor, Vernon Jordan, a Washington attorney, former head of the Urban League, and Bill Gray, former Democratic congressman, now president of the United Negro College Fund. Amb. Kantor, first, you're there at the White House. Can you add anything to, to the story at this point? The presumption is that, that Sec. Brown did not survive, is that correct?

MICKEY KANTOR, U.S. Trade Representative: I think we have to be pessimistic at this point. It appears that this was a great tragedy, although it's nighttime, of course, in that area of that world, and it's very difficult to determine just if there were any survivors, and, if so, how many, but I think everyone is very pessimistic at this point.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. On that presumption, Mr. Ambassador, how should we remember Ron Brown?

AMB. KANTOR: Always an optimistic, as a bridge builder, as a visionary, as someone who literally gave back to America what he believed America had given to him, and that is opportunity and hope, a person who had literally raised himself by his own bootstraps, but never forgot where he came from and no matter whether he was meeting with prime ministers or corporate chieftains, he always remembered his job was to build those jobs for the American people and grow our standard of living.

MR. LEHRER: Vernon Jordan, what would you add to that?

VERNON E. JORDAN, JR., Former President, Urban League: What I would add to that is first of all I've lost, Jim, a very dear, personal friend whom I met in New York in 1970, when I went to do what Bill Gray is now doing.

MR. LEHRER: At the United Negro College Fund.

MR. JORDAN: At the United Negro College Fund. Ron was then working for the Urban League, and--

MR. LEHRER: What was his job at the Urban League, do you remember?

MR. JORDAN: Well, he had many jobs at the Urban League. First of all, when he was there, he was working on youth programs and at the same time going to law school at St. John's at night. And when I succeeded Whitney Young--

MR. LEHRER: As head of the Urban League.

MR. JORDAN: As head of the Urban League--I was honored to make him general counsel. And after a few years as general counsel, I asked him to come to Washington and succeed Senoria Johnson to be Clarence Mitchell's equal in the Urban League, and he came here, and he just made a name for himself and for the Urban League, and he was really quite extraordinary.

MR. LEHRER: Did you know him before that? Had you--before 1970 had you heard of him?

MR. JORDAN: I did not. He was a New Yorker, and I was in Atlanta. We--Whitney brought us together.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. When did you first meet him, Bill Gray?

WILLIAM H. GRAY, III, United Negro College Fund: I met him at a very young age. I think I was about 12 years of age, growing up in Philadelphia. He was from New York, but we shared a mutual friend who was one of his best friends, as well as mine, and he would often come down to Philadelphia to stay at this friend's house. His mother and this person's mother were friends, and we would get together and play, and so we were sort of childhood playmates in the early teen years.

MR. LEHRER: Did you like him when he was 12 years old?

MR. GRAY: Oh, yes, very bright, uh, very insightful, uh, very articulate even at an early age, a likable person. And then I, of course, got to know him better when I came into the political arena and, of course, he had been a pioneer. And when I think of Ron, I think of someone who was a pioneer, who broke barriers, first African-American I think to be chief of staff of a United StatesSenator's staff.

MR. LEHRER: That was for Sen. Kennedy.

MR. GRAY: Kennedy. First African-American, I think, to be general counsel for a full Senate committee, first African-American to be deputy chairman of a national party and then to become the chairman at a critical time when people said that a party couldn't be pulled together, he did it. He was a very interesting guy who was excellent in everything he did.

MR. LEHRER: Now, Mickey--yeah, go ahead.

MR. JORDAN: Ron had drive and perseverance and tenacity and ambition, and a little taste of ego, and he knew what he wanted, and he knew how to go get it, and he had this incredible feel for people, which made him a good politician, which made him a good public servant. He--he was excited about life and excited about his work, and I think gave up opportunities to go into the private sector because he wanted to do public service, whether it was at the Urban League or whether it was in the government.

MR. LEHRER: Mickey Kantor, you worked with him in the 1992 campaign very closely, did you not?

AMB. KANTOR: Oh, we did. We've been friends for 23 years, but we were real partners in 1992 when I chaired the President's campaign and he chaired the Democratic National Committee and literally reinvigorated this party and of course--

MR. LEHRER: How did he do that? Everybody said that today, that he really brought the Democratic Party back to life. How does somebody go about doing that, or how did he go about doing it?

AMB. KANTOR: He was able to draw together, as he could in every pursuit in life he attempted, the various and disparate elements that make up not only the Democratic Party but the country and convinced them to work together, just like he convinced American businessmen and others to go to Bosnia to try to continue to build the peace there. He was an enormous infectious personality who was, as Vernon said, always committed and passionate to what he was doing. We have all lost not only a wonderful friend and a, and many young people have lost a great mentor, and certainly the country has lost someone who has been the most effective at this job in American history.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Bill Gray, where did the interest in politics come? Did he have that from the very beginning?

MR. GRAY: Well, we were born in the same month, the same year, and I think all of us in that generation were infected by the Civil Rights Movement and the natural next step was politics, to continue the revolution, continue the change. He grew up in a family where his father was manager of the Theresa Hotel, which was "the" black hotel in New York, so he saw--

MR. LEHRER: It's in Harlem, right?

MR. GRAY: In Harlem--so he saw all of these famous people, but he grew up with one foot in Harlem but also his parents had the ability to send him to private schools and to go to a college like Middlebury, and so--

MR. LEHRER: That's in Vermont, yeah.

MR. GRAY: Yeah. He also--

MR. LEHRER: A small, private college.

MR. GRAY: At a very early age he understood how to manage in the white world, and so it was very natural for a talented guy who wanted to be about change to go from that to the Urban League, working for Vernon, and then into the political arena, as he did when he started out with Kennedy in Kennedy's first political campaign for President.

MR. LEHRER: But why did he never run for office, Vernon?

MR. JORDAN: Well, he thought about it.

MR. LEHRER: Did he really?

MR. JORDAN: He thought about running for mayor of Washington one time, and he was actually working for the Urban League at the time. And I had the unfortunate duty to explain to him that he couldn't serve God and them and he'd have to make a choice. And I think he made the right choice, and in 1980, he decided to go work for Sen. Kennedy, and, uh, it was a logical step in his career to go from running the Washington office, dealing with legislation, and policy, to actually working for a senator and the Judiciary Committee, and, uh, it was a natural progression.

MR. LEHRER: Mickey Kantor, he was criticized, as Kwame said in his piece, for these trips he made, praised by some, criticized by others. Did those trips accomplish what they set out to do? Did they actually bring more business to American industry like the one he was on today?

AMB. KANTOR: He brought tremendous amounts of business. More importantly, he grew high wage, high skill jobs through these trips. He identified the so-called big emerging markets for the first time. He knew how to put technology and trade together. He understood what it took to open up these markets for U.S. exports, which means jobs for ordinary Americans, as, again, he could connect these things together in the most extraordinary way.

MR. LEHRER: Was that his deal, or was that something he inherited, or was this something he really believed in himself and started?

AMB. KANTOR: Oh, he started, he believed in it. You know, we worked together in serving the President, and I was always blessed by, frankly, his leadership and his ability to identify these areas and his creativity in going after them.

MR. LEHRER: You were--did Ron Brown enjoy being Secretary of Commerce, Mr. Jordan?

MR. JORDAN: He loved it.

MR. LEHRER: Did he?

MR. JORDAN: Looked forward to every trip. Ron was tireless in every job that I've known him to be in, he, he was a real worker, with enthusiasm. He was a very quick study, very smart, very alert, and when he was staffing you, he gave you talking points, but he also knew how to get staff to give him talking points, and he knew what to do with him.

MR. LEHRER: Does that jibe with your recollection? Did he really enjoy this work he was doing?

MR. GRAY: Oh, he loved it. I mean, I think when you think about Ron Brown, at least I do, and especially someone who served in another branch of politics, two things stand out: one, his amazing ability to take various elements of a political party and make them cohesive, as he did from 1989 to 1992, when people said you can't get the conservatives, the moderates, the aggressives, and the liberals in the Democratic tent to all sit down and support anything, and secondly, to take the Commerce Department really over the last two or thirty years has become sort of a secondary post, and make it into a major player in the administration and begin to connect jobs, exports, and take a party that was seen as anti- business and begin to state that there can be a relationship with business.

MR. LEHRER: How about the, the move from running Jesse Jackson's campaign, then becoming head of the Democratic Party to being Commerce Secretary, some people would say that is a huge move.

MR. GRAY: No. If you look at his background, if you look at his training, if you look at the fact that he went to Middlebury, went to a private school, he grew up in Harlem, he worked for Vernon Jordan at the Urban League, he worked for Ted Kennedy, this is a man who had unbelievable credentials and qualifications that could allow him to work for Jesse Jackson, as well as for Bill Clinton, and be extremely successful because he had a good foot in both areas of American life.

MR. LEHRER: Was he ideological, Mr. Jordan, in a, in a political sense?

MR. JORDAN: Yes, he was ideological. He had very fundamental beliefs, especially about equal opportunity, and about the great policy issues of the day. Ron also was a very pragmatic man, and he understood that, and oftentimes, that in politics compromise is what you have to do, not on principle. I don't think you can ever find him having compromised principle. I do think you can find him as you saw him at the Democratic Convention in 1988, working things out, and you have to work things out to make other things happen.

MR. LEHRER: Did he work things out as a member of the cabinet, Mr. Kantor?

AMB. KANTOR: Always, always understood how to move the ball forward, how to make progress, how to achieve what we're about in terms of righting this economy, growing jobs--

MR. LEHRER: What about the bureaucracy, how did he handle the bureaucracy and all those things that people always complain about in jobs like his?

AMB. KANTOR: You know, it's fascinating. Ron Brown had this infectious personality, the ability to inspire those at the Department of Commerce and frankly, those of his colleagues in the cabinet to do more, to do better, to really reach out beyond ourselves and accomplish more than we ever could. It was because of this incredible passion he had for what he was doing and his understanding of what he was about. I think Vernon and Bill would agree to that. It's really something we're all going to miss. We're going to miss the friend, we're going to miss the, the wonderful grace and charm, and his ability to articulate issues, but most of all, we're going to miss his ability to provide the leadership that he did for so many years.

MR. LEHRER: Did he participate in a, in a very strong way in cabinet meetings and things that even--and areas that didn't even affect the Commerce Department? Was he a presence, in other words?

AMB. KANTOR: Ron Brown was always a presence in any room he was in. He filled a room, and I can remember during the times when the majority in the Congress shut down the government and Ron Brown articulated so clearly how the President could go out and connect that to the--what the American people were feeling and did it, and the President did it, and it was done well, and helped to turn that situation around.

MR. LEHRER: Vernon Jordan, when you first met him in 1970, did you say, hey, this is a kid we're going to hear something of?

MR. JORDAN: No question about it.

MR. LEHRER: Why? What was there about him then? He would have been in his--

MR. JORDAN: Keep in mind when I met him, he was working full-time at the Urban League, had a wife and two kids, and was going to law school at night. Cuomo, Gov. Cuomo was one of his professors. He can tell you about that drive and that ambition and this tenacity and this perseverance and an extraordinarily good and quick mind.

MR. LEHRER: Did you know it early too?

MR. GRAY: Yes. He came from a family where all of the things and qualities that Vernon just talked about and values were paramount. Ron had to be tenacious; he had to be persistent; he had to be a pioneer, achieve excellence, because that's what he was taught by his parents, and he was taught to overcome any barrier and to make a contribution.

MR. LEHRER: And he did. Thank you all three very much. FOCUS - BREAKING THE CODE

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, a genetic research update and free air time for political candidates. Fred De Sam Lazaro of KTCA, Minneapolis-St. Paul, has the genetic research story.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The field of gene therapy has been brought into a new realm with the work of Dr. Ralph Brinster. He's a leading expert on infertility at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine. Brinster is the first scientist to successfully transplant the cells that produce sperm, called stem cells, from a fertile mouse into an infertile one.

DR. RALPH BRINSTER, UPENN Veterinary School: This is a testes of a recipient. These are actually transplanted cells. You see how dark they are? They're carrying the blue dye or the blue stain that marks them as coming from donor cells. These are--

MR. LAZARO: The blue dye or stain is a genetic marker, a gene inserted into the donor cells. It not only proved that the transplanted cells produced sperm but also helped Dr. Brinster track the crucial next step in his experiment.

DR. RALPH BRINSTER: I wanted to have live young because that shows you unequivocal that the sperm are functional, that these cells are functional, that you don't have a partially functioning cell that can just make sperm which can't fertilize an egg. I wanted the infertile animal to sire or to have children of his own.

DR. RALPH BRINSTER: This is the first mouse that produced young that we did. This is the testes taken out of the mouse, and these are the tubules that carry the donor cells. And this is the son of one of those mice. And he carries the marker gene. You can see it if you were to stain his testes or look at any cell, he has it in every cell in his body. This is his son, so this is the grandson of a cell that we transplanted, if you would like to look at it that way.

MR. LAZARO: The way many ethicists look at it, Brinster's work is not just a potential cure for infertility but also offers a chance to alter the genes of the sperm stem cells before they're implanted. That would change the genetic make-up of not just one animal but of all its descendants. Medical ethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan, who called this recent conference on genetics, said this once tedious science is moving at break-neck speed. He said the new prowess of manipulating genes comes at a time when knowledge about the location of genes responsible for various diseases and conditions is exploding.

DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN, Medical Ethicist: They're a sort of gene of the week phenomena. The BACR 1 and 2 breast cancer genes, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, some forms of Alzheimer's, depression, homosexuality, alcoholism and on and on the disease of the week reports go.

MR. LAZARO: What excites Caplan and others if Brinster's work is applied in humans, and it's a big if that could be decades into the future, it could someday be used to eradicate many genetic diseases. Men who carry the genetic flaw for Huntington's or Tay- Sachs, for example, could have them removed from their stem cells. The worry, however, is that the search for genetic perfection could extend beyond fatal diseases to mere traits or conditions, like the dwarfism with which Ruth Ricker was born.

RUTH RICKER: We could see dramatically fewer dwarf children being born to average size parents and pressure on parents of all sizes to screen for and prevent the birth of what we would call healthy dwarf babies, kids that would grow up to be like me.

MR. LAZARO: Ricker said people with dwarfism have only in recent years been assimilated into larger society after a long struggle to overcome a history of being at its margins, targets for abuse, ridicule, and in Nazi, Germany, annihilation.

RUTH RICKER: We're still getting a feel for this dilemma, just as we have like a first generation of us where a majority of us have had these opportunities, that we're now presented with the prospect that, umm, that we may be gradually eliminated.

MR. LAZARO: Others at the conference like the Reverend Walter Brandon oppose any genetic manipulation on religious grounds. Brandon suffers from sickle cell disease, a fatal blood condition that affects people of African and Mediterranean ethnicity.

REV. WALTER BRANDON: If you're a creationist, and you believe in the order of creation, then you say to yourself, God created everything, and everything that he had created, He made it good, because it says so in the Holy Scriptures. If we as men believe that man can be improved through the control of hereditary or the gene factor or genetic or eugenic engineering, should we follow our assumptions, should we follow our assumptions no matter where they lead? I don't know.

MR. LAZARO: Caplan is not surprised at such reactions to the idea of genetic engineering.

DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN: I think the history of eugenics in the 20th century with murder and genocide and sterilization and racism, that frightens people, and they want to know what happens when these worst aspects of human value come into play with these new abilities to, to change our germ line.

MR. LAZARO: The eugenics Caplan fears for today is not the racist, Nazi style campaigns. Rather, it's one that reflects cultural values. For example, he fears there will be pressure on parents to enhance their children's capabilities by infusing them with genetic traits society considers desirable like tallness, mathematical ability, or musical aptitude.

DR. ARTHUR CAPLAN: What would be dangerous and risky is if someone was forced or coerced into doing that, if society shamed people into doing that, if there was a penalty for those who chose not to do that, and we said, we're not going to insure your child, you should have not had one that was sick or we're going to penalize you because we don't like brown-eyed kids and you picked one. In other words, it's more the consequences for social policy and social interaction that seem to be, to me to be scary.

MR. LAZARO: For his part, Dr. Brinster says his work is far more likely to be used to study infertility and to design certain animals, not children. These animals would be useful models to study human diseases.

DR. RALPH BRINSTER: If it would be possible to make mutations, for example, in an animal such as a rat or even a larger animal, like a dog, and create models in several species that would be affected by the HIV virus, then I think we would have models in which to test AIDS that would shed information on what's happening in humans. And the same can be said about cancer, various types of cancer.

MR. LAZARO: If and when his technique is ever applied in humans, Dr. Brinster is confident there will be safeguards built into the system.

DR. RALPH BRINSTER: If restraints need to be established, they'll set up committees like the recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, which passes on how genes are used on the fetal research committee that passes on how human fetuses can be used, and they will decide how to do this.

MR. LAZARO: As Brinster prepares to apply his experiment on larger animals, rats, domestic animals, perhaps primates, his employer, the University of Pennsylvania, plans to apply for a patent on what's become known as the Brinster technique. FOCUS - FREE TIME

MR. LEHRER: Now a new idea for politics. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has that story.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It's a new idea forPresidential candidates, and if it catches on, for other political hopefuls as well. It's free air time for the candidates for the last month of the campaign. So far, five former network anchors, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Roger Mudd, Howard K. Smith, and Robert MacNeil, have joined in support of the idea with four senators, five former party chairmen, and others who run the gamut of the political spectrum. The drive is being organized by former "Washington Post" reporter Paul Taylor, now a consultant with the Pew Charitable Trust. I spoke with him earlier today.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Paul Taylor, thank you for joining us. Spell out for me the details of your proposal for offering free time to the Presidential candidates this October.

PAUL TAYLOR, Former Washington Post Reporter: Well, I'm trying to persuade the networks to offer two to five minutes a night in the heart of prime time in the last month or so of the general election, so from roughly October 1st through election day. The key to me is in the heart of prime time to reach out to an audience, they may have sort of dropped out of the public square, they may not watch the nightly news, they may not read their newspapers, and they may not vote, and try to give them substance, give them a format, a couple of minutes a night, long enough for the candidates to say something substantive, short enough to engage their attention, and, and the other critical thing is to make sure the candidates, themselves, are on the screen. I think what a lot of people don't like about the way the conversation is now held on television is that it's either these 30 second attack ads, or these eight or nine second sound bites on a network evening news. The 30 second attack ad, in 30 seconds, you don't really have enough time to make an affirmative case for who you are or what you believe in, but particularly in a cynical culture, you have plenty of time to gouge the other guy's eyes out, and, and so that's why you get so much attack in these 30 second ads. Rarely, these have the candidate carry the attack. It's usually some unseen narrator or some visual image. Let's have the candidates talk. If they want to attack their opponents, fine, but then bear responsibility for it.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: How would this work? I mean, would they have- -would you have a moderator, or would they just stand there and talk to each other? Explain that to me.

PAUL TAYLOR: No. In the model I'm proposing no moderators, no journalists, and no surrogates--you know, if we project forward to this October--Clinton gets five minutes on a Monday night, let's say, 8:55 or 9:55 in the evening, Dole gets the same five minutes on a Tuesday night, Clinton again on a Wednesday. You build in some mechanism for third parties to qualify. You know, I'm an ex- journalist. I spent 25 years as a journalist, and I believe journalists have a vital role to play as vigilant watchdogs and independent analysts of what the candidates say, but I think particularly on television the journalists have--need to occasionally back out of the screen.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why?

PAUL TAYLOR: Well, there's a group called the Center for Media and Public Affairs which their content analyses are the network evening news broadcasts, and when they cover politics, you get eight minutes of reporters and pundits for every one minute you get of the candidates. I think we need to carve out a new format of communication on, on network television which gets to the biggest audience and give the candidates in this last month a clean shot at the voter.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why is that? Why do they need that?

PAUL TAYLOR: Well, I mean--

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: I mean, what is this designed to achieve?

PAUL TAYLOR: This is designed to arm voters with the information they need to make the most important choice any democracy makes, which is to elect the highest office, officer in the land, and I think at the moment, the, the candidates don't get an unfettered message, that we currently have the debates, which I think are terrific, and they get a big audience. They happen--they'll happen four times this year. But this is an effort to have an ongoing format night after night that sort of carries the conversation for the final month. Now, the conversation, as I say, is carried in these short sound bites and in these attack ads and I think the net, the net result of that is for the viewers to sort of look at it and look at the sort of circus, what I call kind of the pro wrestling of campaigning, and say, doesn't interest me, there are these two jokers, they're going after each other, and they have surrogates going after each other, and one of the results is you've got the lowest voter turnout in the world, or one of the half dozen lowest voter turnouts in the world. Virtually every other country in the world, every other mature democracy, does make time available to its candidates in this kind of format to ensure substance and civility.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What assurance do you have that the candidates would rise to a different level of discourse? I mean, why not--I think it was Marvin Kalb who in a somewhat critical article on this approach said that in those last few days the candidates were more likely to be cautious or more likely to try and attack their opposition.

PAUL TAYLOR: I'm all for the candidates doing whatever they want to do. It's their campaign. What I'm suggesting is we would like to create a format--right now the debate is carried by attack ads and sound bites. Let's make the most important thing they do for the last month a two or three or five minute speech to the biggest audience America assembles. Will they rise to the occasion and give us better discourse? I don't know. But if they don't, I trust a jury of the American public to punish them for it.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You've taken this idea to the, to four networks.

PAUL TAYLOR: Yes.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What's been the reaction?

PAUL TAYLOR: Well, Rupert Murdoch, Fox Network, came on their own, having nothing to do with my efforts, came forward about a month ago and proposed something similar. I've gone to the other three. I've gotten a good, respectful hearing from them. I think they're considering it.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Comments I've seen in the newspaper, though, from the network executives range from ABC saying that they already have public affairs shows like the Brinkley Show, which gives an opportunity for more than sound bites, thoughtful discussion. CBS' vice president said this abrogates journalists' responsibility just to turn it over to the candidates to let them have at it. On those two points.

PAUL TAYLOR: Yes. You know, if you are a conscientious consumer of political information, you can get more on television in 1996 than you probably could get at any time in human history, and that's all to the good. But the fact is there are a lot of people who aren't conscientious consumers, because there is something in the way that the conversation happens on television that does not draw them into the democratic process; it drives them away. I think part of what drives them away are the reporters. And, again, I spent25 years as a reporter. Cronkite, Chancellor, Mudd, MacNeil, these are all pretty serious journalists. I don't believe they would advocate anything that suggests that journalists don't have a vital role to play. Of course, we have a vital role to play. What I'm suggesting is I think in some ways we perhaps overplay our role and overplay our hand, and there are moments where part of our responsibility is to back out of the screen a little bit and let the candidates get direct, clean shots at the voter.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Give me a specific of how journalists get in the way.

PAUL TAYLOR: Well, one oft quoted statistic is the shrinking sound bite. Twenty years ago, on the network evening news, presidential candidates got an average of 42 seconds of uninterrupted speech when they, when they were shown. Now that's down to eight seconds. And the, the people who have replaced the candidates have been the journalists, themselves. Yes, there have been a proliferation of, of talk shows, but what you get is more and more talk from more and more journalists sometimes in a rather cynical mode that it seems to me encourages viewers to sort of tower above the political system and look on it with a smirk.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The other argument I've heard against this idea from network executives who don't necessarily want to go on the record, but they say that--to us and to our reporters, people won't watch, they just will not watch two minutes or five minutes of talking heads.

PAUL TAYLOR: That's part of the reason to put it in the heart of prime time. Go fish where the fish are. That's where most Americans are at 8 or 9 o'clock in the evening, settled down to watch their favorite shows, try to borrow their time. There's something a little bit intrusive about this, I'm the first to acknowledge. People have said it's kind of an "eat your peas" sort of approach. Pay attention, it's the presidency. I think in the last month, you know, in October of a presidential year, I think the vast majority of Americans would watch, would be interested, and if you, again, did it night after night, they would remember what Clinton said last night and they'd be maybe curious about what Dole had to say in response. Meantime, the other thing I hope would happen is in the intervening 24 hours, all of the journalists, all of the pundits would get their whack at this. I mean, we, of course, would have a role to play, but this would then become sort of a base line for defining what happened that day, rather than the photo op, the sound bite, the little snippets. And I think it's a much healthier base line--

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why television and not print?

PAUL TAYLOR: Well, I would say two reasons. First, television is the most important medium for political communication, but I would think that if, if this were to happen on television, virtually every newspaper in the country would carry transcripts of these two or three or five minute speeches because they would be the most newsworthy thing that happened in the campaign that day. The second distinction is that the air waves belong to the American people. They are licensed to broadcasters, the broadcasters have a public interest obligation. Printing presses belong to publishers, and there is no government license, so there is a distinction there as well.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Why would networks give up millions of dollars in advertising revenue, which is what they would have to do, in order to give these minutes? Why would they do that?

PAUL TAYLOR: Because it's good, it's good--I think it's good for America, I think they feel sensitive, I think they should feel sensitive that many people in the political system and many voters are not happy with the way the political conversation is currently conducted on television.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Could this be ready by the Fall?

PAUL TAYLOR: Oh, it can happen tomorrow. I mean, there are mechanical and logistical problems, but all you need is a nod of yes from the networks, and this will happen.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Are you optimistic?

PAUL TAYLOR: I'm very optimistic.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Let me ask you this, Paul Taylor. You, yourself, had something to do with changing the political discourse in America years ago when Gary Hart was running for President. You asked the "A" question: Have you ever committed adultery? Looking back on that and looking at the thing you're working on today, what are your thoughts about that? Did you make a mistake?

PAUL TAYLOR: No. I don't think I made a mistake, although it did, it did lead me to doing a lot of soul searching about what the nature of journalism was in this era. Here was a case where a candidate was found to have spent a weekend with a woman who wasn't his wife and half his age, and he denied any impropriety, and he had, he had said, you know, judge me on my record, I've always held myself to the highest standards of morality. It seemed to me that that opened a normal line of inquiry to what his standards of morality were. But to the extent--

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Would you ask it today?

PAUL TAYLOR: Only if you had--if you had the same set of circumstances, absolutely, but one of the things I reacted to was the notion because that question had been asked once of a presidential candidate and was perceived to have led to his, you know, the demise of his candidacy, this was now a threshold test that we should ask every public official, to which I said, ah, come on, that's ridiculous. And, you know, what, what we saw between '88 and '92, in '92, Bill Clinton had his own sort of firestorm, you know, on the adultery question with Gennifer Flowers coming forth, and there was the usual media frenzy, and everything else, and the public took it all in, was titillated to some degree by it, but the candidate got beyond it. In some ways, the country got beyond it, so--and so I, you know, my sense is I really do have a lot of faith in the American public, and they sort these things out, and they decide what it's important and what isn't.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Paul Taylor, thank you.

PAUL TAYLOR: Thank you. ESSAY - SCREEN TEST

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight, essayist Jim Fisher of the "Kansas City Star" has some thoughts about one man's contribution to his community.

CECIL BENSON: [Cutting Man's Hair] I've got the board here that you sat on, just five years old. Now, you're a grandfather.

JIM FISHER: As barber shops go, Cecil Benson's here in Plato, Missouri, isn't much. It's the stucco building on the West end of town, with the obligatory pole painted on the outside. That's Cecil cutting hair. Some kid told him that he's older than the droughty soil that covers the surrounding Ozark hills. Cecil's 89. Started, as they say here, hair cutting out on the farm in 1921, which, with a little figure, means he's been barbering for 75 years, a fair time.

CECIL BENSON: I bought my first shop in 1923 from a man by the name of Largent, and, uh, I bought it for $15. I started with hand clippers and in '28, I got electric clippers. I got 25 cents when I started, and then the Depression come in the '30's, and I got 15 for kids, for men, and 10 cents for kids, yeah.

JIM FISHER: Was--

CECIL BENSON: Well, then I went on to the dollar, and I stayed that way.

JIM FISHER: The price is right. Of course, nobody pays just a dollar. They tip, a couple of bucks here, five there, you know. Still, here in the hills, Cecil's had to figure out other ways to make money, so he used his hands, making cabinets, wagon boxes, john boats, grandfather clocks, even coffins. But his real contribution to this small part of America has been these--screen doors, screened windows, to keep the bugs out and let the air in. Cecil, in those days before standardized window and door sizes, made thousands.

CECIL BENSON: There's great demand because lots of people never knew there was a screen door, and, uh, I'd make 'em, they'd be standard wood, but they would most always be a little short. That's the reason they couldn't buy a standard door. I had to make 'em. They, uh, had to have them. They thought, well, they did have to have 'em to keep the flies out of the house, so the screen door was the answer, yes. It's the most popular thing I ever made, yes.

JIM FISHER: Forget propane and paved roads, cars and airplanes, rural free delivery and electricity, atomic power and space exploration. The real wonder of the 20th century for a lot of Missourians who lived in places like this was a piece of screen made in far off factories and made to fit their windows and doors by somebody like Cecil. Somehow, a lot of that's been lost. Now we extol the wonders of the Internet.

ON-LINE SERVICE: Welcome.

JIM FISHER: Although only a few have the time to fool with it-- or throw around acronyms like CBO and CPI, CR. Above all, there's the endless talk, mind boggling in its sheer volume, following which nothing much seems to happen. Screens: A simple material in answer to a problem. And Cecil Benson, who will soon be 90, has bettered folks' lives really. How many of the pundits, the economists, the think tank residents, newspaper columnists, and academics can say that? Probably not many. Cecil can, plus cut your hair for a dollar.

MAN IN BARBER SHOP: There's your dollar and there's your dollar tip.

CECIL BENSON: Well, I thank you.

JIM FISHER: I'm Jim Fisher. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 32 others were aboard an Air Force plan that crashed in Croatia. The sole reported survivor of the crash, a woman, went on to die on the way to the hospital. Brown was heading a delegation of business leaders to the area. And late today in Lincoln, Montana, the local sheriff said 20 FBI agents searched a cabin where the man known as the Unabomber is believed to have been living. He's alleged to have killed three people and injured twenty-three others in a string of bombings over the past eighteen years. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.