The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary offers a plan to dispose of plutonium, a four-way debate about a Supreme Court case on the use of rapes and drawing congressional districts, some remembrances of archaeologist Mary Leakey, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay about meeting the end. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday. NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The FBI offered a $1/2 million reward today for information about the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. One person was killed, more than one hundred were injured by the July 27th explosion. A television cameraman died of a heart attack afterward. FBI Deputy Director Weldon Kennedy announced the reward in Atlanta. He outlined the investigation today and asked for more help from the public.

WELDON KENNEDY, Deputy Director, FBI: The progress that we made is we're able to narrow the window of the placement of this bomb down to about a 20-minute time frame that morning. If there are additional photos forthcoming, we're going to be able to narrow even further down. And we firmly believe that somewhere someone has a photograph of a person carrying this bomb into the park. They may not know it; they may not realize they have it; and that's what we're asking the public to come forward with.

JIM LEHRER: Agents at the news conference did display the reconstructive knapsack which held the pipe bomb, and they played a tape of the 911 call warning of the blast.

ANONYMOUS CALLER: There's a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes. There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.

JIM LEHRER: The FBI's initial suspect in the case, private security guard Richard Jewell, reached a settlement with NBC News today. He sued the network over comments made on the air about him. Jewell was cleared on October 26th. The Energy Department will dispose of 50 tons of surplus plutonium over the next several decades. The material from nuclear weapons will be encased in glass and buried or burned at nuclear power plants. Energy Sec. O'Leary made the announcement today. The United States produced about 98 tons of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons before ending that process in the late 1980's. We'll have an interview with Sec. O'Leary right after this News Summary. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today in a prominent redistricting case. At issue are the congressional districts drawn recently in Georgia under a court order. The plan contains one majority black district. Opponents argued there should be two such districts. The Supreme Court ruled in 1995 the districts drawn mainly on a racial basis are usually unconstitutional. We'll have more on this story later in the program. In Belgrade today, new court appeals were filed to reinstate opposition victories in local elections. Yesterday the Serbian supreme court controlled by the Milosevic government rejected a similar appeal. Thousands of people marched again today in anti-government demonstrations. Students said they were protesting the arrest and beating of a demonstrator over the weekend. The 21-year-old student had paraded through the streets with an effigy of Milosevic in a prison uniform. The United Nations today authorized Iraq to export oil for the first time in six years. The $2 billion worth of oil every six months will be used primarily to buy food and medicine for the Iraqi people. Iraq was barred from selling oil after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. In Washington, White House Spokesman Mike McCurry had this reaction.

MIKE McCURRY, White House Spokesman: We see this as a humanitarian issue, as a way to--for Saddam Hussein to, however begrudgingly, meet his commitments to the international community to provide for his own civilian population. The sales now go forward, and there will be very careful and strict monitoring of the proceeds of those sales so that they arrive to the people and produce the types of supplies and materials that oil sales were intended to generate.

JIM LEHRER: Stocks recovered today from their difficulties of last Friday. Tokyo's stocks closed more than 1 1/2 percent higher. Markets in Europe were up 1/2 percent to 2 percent. And on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Average closed up 82 points. Friday's turmoil was triggered by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's wondering in a speech if stocks were overpriced. Mary Leakey, the world famous fossil hunter, died today in Kenya. No cause of death was announced. She and her husband, Louis, made fossil discoveries in East Africa that showed the evolution of man began far earlier than was previously believed. After her husband's death, Mary Leakey discovered footprints in volcanic ash that showed early human ancestors walked upright 3 1/2 million years ago. She was 83. We'll have more on her at the end of the program tonight. Between now and then, disposing of plutonium and minority congressional districts. We will close with a Rosenblatt essay. FOCUS - BURN AND BURY

JIM LEHRER: The plan for disposing of plutonium is first tonight. It has been one of the toughest scientific and political questions of the post Cold War era, what to do with the dangerous and powerful plutonium produced to build nuclear weapons. Today the Energy Department announced a new plan, and Energy Sec. Hazel O'Leary is here for a Newsmaker interview to explain it. Welcome, Madame Secretary.

HAZEL O'LEARY, Secretary of Energy: Thank you very much.

JIM LEHRER: First, an overview of the situation. How much plutonium is actually involved?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: About 52 metric tons. More than half of the plutonium produced in the United States over the past 50 years.

JIM LEHRER: And where is it as we speak?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Well, it's in various sites around the United States, but principally in dispersed form. It's in Idaho and lots of what we call plutonium pits, which are the basket ball size guts of the nose cone of the nuclear weapon, are in Pantex and Texas.

JIM LEHRER: And these all came from nuclear weapons that have been disarmed, is that correct?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: That is correct. And so we've been about the business of disarming nuclear weapons for some years now. Four years ago, when I became Secretary of Energy, the Department was still grappling with the question of what should be done with its excess nuclear material.

JIM LEHRER: Now, what form is it in? For those of us who are not experts on plutonium, I mean, is it in containers that are now safe, or something is not done fairly quickly, there becomes a danger? Explain that to us.

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: No, I don't want the public generally concerned about its imminent danger. The real issue here is ensuring that this material is protected from terrorists, and it's also protected from someone who would want to steal it, which is not the biggest problem in the United States. What we're about in the United States is providing the international leadership, as we did on the comprehensive test ban treaty ending nuclear testing by saying we are prepared to get rid of our nuclear material, and we're prepared to do it in a way that makes it irreversible for use in bombs again. And that's the point we're making here.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Now there are two ways under your plan to do it. It's called the two-track way. First is to case it in glass. Now what's involved there?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: What's involved there is taking the plutonium out of its pits or out of its dispersed form and making it ready to be placed in some sort of cannister which can then be vitrified, as we call it, either put in huge ceramic logs or in glass logs. And we will determine in the next 18 months which one of those technologies is best.

JIM LEHRER: And what happens to the glass logs?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: The glass logs is in place in about a 15-foot high steel cannister, and they can be stored very safely in sight until we have the ultimate repository, that is, nuclear waste dump, as some people like to call it, to receive this material.

JIM LEHRER: Now hopefully, it will eventually be buried somewhere.

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Absolutely. And buried in this repository, which many people believe might be in Nevada.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Now, once in this glass or ceramic case, is it completely safe? I mean, can it ever be used again for nuclear weapons?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Well, our position in the United States is that this is one way to make it safe for use. Our colleagues in Russia have another view, and we will come to discussing why we're on two tracks because we want to bring our views closer together. The Russians really want to see us destroy our plutonium isotopically, that is, to reduce its power to create a weapon. And they believe that can only be done through disposing of it through the use of a nuclear reactor, that is burn it up.

JIM LEHRER: Burn it up.

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Burn it up.

JIM LEHRER: But you have taken the position--the Energy Department has taken the position at this point that you also want to do this encasing thing, right? Now, how much of this fifty some metric tons are you going to do encasing?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Well, we're not certain yet, and the reason we're not certain yet is because we need to finish playing out the experiments doing what we call bench models of both of these technologies to determine which one works best, to determine which one is the most cost effective, to determine also which one citizens living near by sites where the work will be done prefer. So we've got a lot of work to do, and what I've learned in these four years as secretary of energy is that you're very foolish to bet on one technology, because, more often than not, you're left to win an empty hand. So in this instance, we're going on a two- track system--this is the second time we've done that--with the idea that we'll have the right answer in terms of technology, we'll have the right answer in terms of cost, and we will have the right answer in terms of what citizens find acceptable because that's very important to licensing.

JIM LEHRER: Now, speaking of that, that's the second track and the one where there has been the most controversy, at least here in the United States, and the most concerned voice today, which is today, which is to use the plutonium and burn it in civilian nuclear reactors. Now, why are you going to--because of Russia, is that the reason you've decided to use that option?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: No, that is not the reason we've decided to use this option. Later I will explain that this puts us in closer partnership with the Russians. I think I've told you why. Why is because we're not certain which is the best option yet. Now, in the reactor, which would likely be a civilian reactor of moment, but the idea is that if this technology--

JIM LEHRER: How, a reactor that is generating electrical power?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Exactly. But the first point to be made is that this reactor would go out of the control of civilians and become a U.S. reactor. So that meets the concern of civilian control. The next thing is that we don't plan to produce plutonium in this reactor; we plan to destroy it. And that's been the thing that the Carter administration and our administration has been opposed to, use a reactor to produce or to breed plutonium. In this instance, we would be using a reactor to get rid of it. And that's a dramatic distinction.

JIM LEHRER: But what do you say to those who said today what you're proposing is the commercialization of plutonium because you're turning it into civilian use and nuclear reactors, the one thing that the Carter administration did not want done?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: The first thing I've told you it will no longer be a civilian reactor. And our model, the reactor is owned by the federal government. The second piece of it is that the Carter administration and the Congress through legislations that do not produce plutonium. What we proposed to do in this technology is to destroy it. It's the price of what we're after to destroy it beyond use ever again.

JIM LEHRER: But the Russians plan a different approach, do they not? In other words, they're still going to produce plutonium?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Well, we're not certain, I mean, of the moment, and this is the marvelous thing about trying these two tracks because we're now engaged with the Russians and working on this technology together. And before President Clinton and Yeltsin a year and a half ago made the decision that we would work on these technologies together, the Russians were not at all interested in the vitrification or glassifying this plutonium. Now they are. So we're working partnership to understand what works best. I believe that this is the best course to take because it engages both countries, without having pushed away one technology or the other. And our issue is to make certain that in a Russian federation, they get rid of their plutonium. And so we're engaged not so that the Russians can create the plutonium society but so that the Russians will follow the course we're following, which is to get rid of this stuff forever. It is the ugly stuff of nuclear war. And we're at peace now. Our job is to get rid of plutonium.

JIM LEHRER: Let's assume that your plan goes forward. How long would it take to get rid of these fifty some metric tons of plutonium?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: If we're very, very careful with our process, and we have been so far, we'll actually be engaged in bench scale demonstrations in two years.

JIM LEHRER: Bench scale demonstrations.

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: It's tiny. It's a model about a third or maybe a tenth of a size of what would be ultimately produced. This allows us to get the bugs out. We won't make any mistakes before we make the grand investment. We'll--we'll actually be churning up, burning up, or vitrifying waste within the next two years, a very modest amount. By year seven or eight we'll be getting rid of a ton and a half--

JIM LEHRER: 2007 or 8, right?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Well, actually 2006, 2005, we'll be getting rid of a ton and a half of the material. And by the tenth year, we'll be getting rid of five tons per year. And that's a pretty healthy rate. So two decades, two and a half decades it'll take us to get this done.

JIM LEHRER: And this, of course, operates under the assumption that there won't be any more plutonium being manufactured, right? In other words, this is a one-shot destruction, and there's no more coming in the year end?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Once through, that's all. We haven't made plutonium in years. There's no intention to. The President of the United States three years ago said no more nuclear testing. We are downsizing our weapons stockpile and moving on this course because we no longer have the need for excess material. It's a great story.

JIM LEHRER: You mentioned cost a moment ago. Do you have any idea what this is going to cost?

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Yes, we do. Approximately $2 billion. The vitrification of putting in glass technology is about one point six, one point seven billion dollars. The use of the reactor to burn up the plutonium is about $1.9 billion. A combination. Should we determine that need to use both technologies because of the characteristics of the plutonium, it would be about $2.3 billion. And when you consider that it costs the American taxpayer $4 trillion to make these weapons, it seems to me like a very cost- effective course to take.

JIM LEHRER: Madame Secretary, thank you very much.

SEC. HAZEL O'LEARY: Thank you. FOCUS - POLITICS OF RACE

JIM LEHRER: Now, is gerrymandering necessary to assure minority representation in Congress? Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a Georgia case that centers on that question. Our coverage begins with this report by Kwame Holman.

KWAME HOLMAN: Six years ago, the Justice Department said 13 states, most of them in the South, weren't doing enough to protect the voting rights of blacks and Hispanics. The department's solution was to encourage creation of more congressional districts containing mostly minority voters. Twenty new so-called majority minority districts were drawn up from New York to California. The first elections in the new districts in 1992 brought dramatic results.

MEL WATT: I'm just happy to be here and be representing the new 12th congressional district.

KWAME HOLMAN: In 1992, voters in 19 of the 20 new majority minority districts elected a black or Hispanic representative to Congress, firsts for several southern states. But the district soon became the subject of legal challenges, most brought by white voters. And in 1995, the Supreme Court declared majority minority districts were unconstitutional if they were drawn primarily based on race.

A. LEE PARKS, Plaintiffs' Attorney: [August 1995] The Justice Department put us on a real bad road, and we've gotten back on the right road.

KWAME HOLMAN: As a result, the Georgia district, represented by Cynthia McKinney, the first black woman to win a congressional seat in that state, and several other new districts were ordered redrawn.

REP. CYNTHIA McKINNEY, [D] Georgia: [August 1995] The Supreme Court ruling deviated from 30 years of American history and said, well, all it takes is one disgruntled constituent who doesn't like the shape of the district, or who doesn't like the color of the representative and that one disgruntled constituent can file a lawsuit and can put us into court.

KWAME HOLMAN: In re-mapping Georgia's districts, a panel of federaljudges let stand one of the state's majority minority districts but eliminated the other two. So this year, McKinney and Sanford Bishop, a black congressman from the other majority minority district, had to run in districts that were majority white. But last month, both McKinney and Bishop easily won re- election in their new districts; so did black and Hispanic incumbents in Texas and Florida, where congressional maps also had to be redrawn. Nonetheless, the challenges to the Georgia congressional map aren't over. Today, the Supreme Court heard from attorneys for a group of African-American voters who want the court to restore at least one of Georgia's two lost majority minority districts.

LAUGHLIN McDONALD, Plaintiffs' Attorney: Congresswoman McKinney is Exhibit A in support of the proposition that the kind of highly integrated majority minority districts that were drawn around the South after the 1990 Census are good for minorities, and they are good for this country, good for American democracy. They support the concept of inclusiveness. I think they tend to break down racial barriers. Cynthia is Exhibit A in support of that proposition.

KWAME HOLMAN: Georgia's attorney general Mike Bowers defended the one district map.

REPORTER: Do you think you could ever draw another--a second majority black district constitutionally in Georgia?

MIKE BOWERS, Georgia Attorney General: Oh, yes, absolutely. And it's a question of three factors: No. 1, do you have a large compact minority population; No. 2, do you have political cohesion within that group; and No. 3, does the white vote always outvote it? They must satisfy those three criteria, or you can't draw the district. And that was our point to the court. You simply can't do it on this record.

KWAME HOLMAN: The justices also will decide a related Louisiana case, addressing in particular the role of the Justice Department which consistently has advocated creating more majority minority districts. Decisions in both cases are expected by next summer.

JIM LEHRER: Now to a debate and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: Now four different perspectives on what role race should play in designing congressional voting districts. They come from Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, who, as we heard, just won re-election in November, after her black majority district was redrawn by the courts; Elaine Jones, director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Whose Votes Count: Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights;" and Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and former staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission during the Reagan administration. Congresswoman, as we've just seen and heard, you've won re-election from a majority white district. Why do you continue to believe that these specially-drawn racially drawn majority black districts are necessary?

REP. CYNTHIA McKINNEY, [D] Georgia: First of all, we need to make it very clear that the reason I was able to win in the new 4th congressional district of Georgia was because of the voters of the old 11th district and the chance that those voters and that district gave me to become an incumbent, and because I was an incumbent in the old 11th district, I was able then to develop a track record, to become known by the voters of the new 4th district, and most importantly to raise the almost $1 million across the country that it took for me to wage a viable congressional campaign. Otherwise, I would have been outspent. I would not have been able to get my message out to the voters of the new 4th district. I would not have had a track record. They would not have known me, and I suspect, quite frankly, that I would not have won. Now, on the district of--on the issue of contorted districts, I just want to remind people that minority districts are not the only contorted districts. This 6th congressional district of Texas was declared constitutional more than 90 percent white but this district was declared constitutional, I suspect, because it was "not" a minority district. So we also have established by the Supreme Court an extreme double standard on the treatment of minority voters.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Abigail Thernstrom, you've been very critical--you've written very critically of these majority minority districts. Why?

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM, Manhattan Institute: [Boston] Well, I don't like the racial sorting. That is, I like people treated as individuals and not on the basis of the color of their skin. There is an assumption behind these districts that whites and blacks cannot share the same pollutants space and that, indeed, this country is still whites in this country, indeed, are still so racist that it is not possible to have districts in which black candidates need to pick up white votes in order to win. When the districts in Georgia were struck down, Cynthia McKinney and others said it is impossible for us to win, the Congressional Black Caucus is all going to fit in the back of a taxicab, this is ethnic cleansing, Jesse Jackson said. Indeed, every one of the black incumbents that once were elected from majority black districts have been re-elected. They needed white votes, and they got white votes. In 1996, it is not 1960 still-- America has changed. And as for--as for the question of incumbency, the first place, I never heard that argument before the election. All I heard was Cynthia McKinney could not win. She doesn't know, and I don't know how many black candidate can win in majority white districts because not enough have tried. You can't win elections you don't run in. We have a very strong record, however, of black mayoral success in majority white cities. 67 percent of black mayors in this country have been--have needed white votes and have gotten white votes over the last 30 years. That is in cities 50,000 and up in population.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let me get Elaine Jones in on this. Do the results of the election last month at all shake your belief that these majority minority districts remain necessary?

ELAINE JONES, NAACP Legal Defense Fund: Oh, there's no doubt that the majority minority districts remain necessary. While I am very, very proud of the American people first, for seeing to it that a Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and for seeing to it that it black candidates has been proven wrong. It's been proven wrong not by the courts but by the people at the polls.

MARGARET WARNER: So Abigail Thernstrom, are you saying that you believe that despite this history--explain this history that Elaine Jones just cited--that until this year from the South no black or Hispanic--no black had ever been elected from a majority white district.

ABIGAIL THERNSTROM: Well, you cannot win elections in which you do not run. And black candidates were not willing to wade into the biracial waters and see what happened. Now, in part, they weren't willing to do that, I think in great part, because Elaine Jones delivered what I regard as a totally anti-civil rights message. That is, she says to potential black candidates don't bother to run where you're going to need white support, it's hopeless, this is much too racist a country, you might as well stay home, and she says to black voters, unless you are voting in a majority black constituency, don't bother to vote because your vote won't count. It seems to me that's not a civil rights message. If the message had been going out much earlier to potential black candidates, try it, it might work, we might have the record in Congress that we do in black--with black mayors. Black mayors have been willing to run where they needed white votes, the majority of black mayors in cities, as I said, 50,000 and up, the overwhelming majority. They knew they needed white votes. They went after those white votes. They got those white votes. That's a very, very heartening story. And we can, I believe, see the same heartening story with respect to Congress. But you can't win elections you don't run in.

MARGARET WARNER: All right.

REP. CYNTHIA McKINNEY: I think that's absolute rubbish. And let me tell you why. In the first place we have something called the second primary in most of the southern states, where you have to run three times in order to win once. And because of the second primary, which was instituted in the state of Georgia for the express purpose of keeping Negroes and liberals out of public office in Georgia--

MARGARET WARNER: And let's just explain briefly what it is. If you don't get over 50 percent in the primary, then there's a runoff.

REP. CYNTHIA McKINNEY: Then there's a runoff, that's correct. And secondly, all we have to do if we are concerned about the racially- -the existence of racially polarized black voting, we need only look as far as North Carolina, with a poll that was taken where 30 percent of the respondents said under no circumstance would they vote for an African-American candidate. Then we see that in 1996, Harvey Gant failed to gain a substantial number of white votes and lost his race for the Senate. And then we need to go over to Louisiana, and we look at the Gubernatorial race of Cleo Fields, a bright, young articulate member of Congress who ran for governor after being redistricted out of his district, and he failed to garner enough Democratic votes in a Democratic state.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let me just let Elaine Jones get in. Then I'll get to you.

ELAINE JONES: Thank you, Margaret. On a couple of occasions. Let me say first that I represent an organization, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which was founded by Thurgood Marshall, and we for 56 years have fought very hard for a desegregated environment and an integrated country in all of our institutions, political, educational, social. We stand for that. We believe strongly. That's why we say you can't put our head in the sand and ignore the past. It has implications for the present. Over half African-Americans in the South, all of this century, the first time a black was elected to the Congress from the South was Andy Young and Barbara Jordan in 1972. It took majority minority districts to get them there. That's what it has taken. Now, what we say is keep referring to the mayors. All right. These mayors in this country who are elected in the South, who are elected in cities that have over 50,000 population. Those cities are Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, New Orleans, heavily black population, and over Georgia black population in this cities, as well as Dallas, which is half minority. So unfortunately, we have needed this remedy. Hopefully, it is a temporary remedy. We're not there yet. We're making progress. I applaud the 31 percent of the white voters in Georgia who for the first time reached out and supported Cynthia. And we're going to have more of that. But we're not there yet.

MARGARET WARNER: Linda Chavez.

LINDA CHAVEZ: Well, first of all, I'm pleased to hear that Elaine Jones still believes in integration, as do I. And I believe in integrated voting districts. I believe that it is important that we not just people totally on the basis of the color of their skin, we not presume that all black voters are going to vote for a black representative and that they're going to believe that only a black can represent them in Congress because the reverse of that would be that white voters will always vote for white candidates and that whites will believe that only whites can represent their interests. In fact, what we have as a result of the election this November is proof that whites are willing to elect blacks to represent them when they believe those black candidates represent their views. Now, in many instances, black candidates are more liberal and do not represent necessarily the majority view in the white community. And I think that it is commendable that we saw a third of white voters in these five districts voting for the black candidate.

ELAINE JONES: Margaret, just let me say quickly to Linda--

LINDA CHAVEZ: Briefly. We--

ELAINE JONES: --uncharacteristically she has missed the point. The point is not the race of the person elected to the office. The point is whether or not those voters in a district can elect representatives of their choice, no matter what color. And they have elected whites. They also choose to elect blacks. Also, the election of these blacks desegregates or integrates our Congress for the first time.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. And we'll have to leave it there. Sorry. Thanks very much.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, remembering Mary Leakey and a Roger Rosenblatt essay. FOCUS - IN MEMORIAM

JIM LEHRER: Now, remembering Mary Leakey and to Charlayne Hunter- Gault.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: "A real fossil hunter" was how a fellow scientist described Mary Leakey. Through decades of work in East Africa, Leakey, who died today at age 83, made discoveries that provide clues into the human past. To tell us about her and her work, we're joined by Richard Potts, director of the Human Origins program at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and a former colleague of Mary Leakey. Thank you for joining us. What discovery should Mary Leakey be remembered for?

RICHARD POTTS, Smithsonian Institution: Oh, a whole series of discoveries in and around the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. One, of course, was the trail, a series of trails, of fossilized footprints. It went on for about 20 meters or 20 yards, 25 yards. That showed that early humans were walking upright on two legs. The date of that was three and a half million years old, a very long time ago. Also the discovery of the famous fossil known as Zinjanthropus, a name that's been a bit forgotten but she discovered that in 1959. And it was the first really significant early human discovery in the Rift Valley of East Africa.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And what do those tell us that we wouldn't have known otherwise?

RICHARD POTTS: Well, one of the most important revolutions in our thinking about human origins is the change from a single trunk. We used to envision our evolution as a tree with a single trunk, with ape-like fossils or ape-like species at the base with human beings, of course, up on top. We know that it's a much morecomplex treaty with many branches, and Mary Leakey's discoveries helped to establish some of those extra branches on our family tree through which we trace our own ancestry back through time.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: To what extent are her contributions different from her husband, Louis Leakey, who was a scientist?

RICHARD POTTS: Right.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And they worked together.

RICHARD POTTS: Mary Leakey would not have gone to East Africa without Louis's initial invitation for a variety of reasons. He needed someone to illustrate his--one of his books that he was doing in East Africa and to help him in the fled, but there surely was a romantic interest as well at that point. But Louis was extremely flamboyant, a wonderful popularizer of the discovery of hominid fossils, early human fossils. And Mary was much more of the behind-the-scenes person. She was the real scientist in the family, the person who wanted to stay out of the limelight.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And yet she never--she wasn't a trained scientist, was she?

RICHARD POTTS: No, but she always had a great love for the origin of things, for discoveries about pre-history, and also for drawing, drawing of stone artifacts, of cave paintings, which she greatly admired and enjoyed work on in East Africa, and that gave her a tremendous degree of skill in observation and in detail.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Give me some examples of some of the things that she observed through her--and how she did it--how she went about what she was doing.

RICHARD POTTS: Sure. Well, as an example, in the early 1960's, she led the earliest excavations on what were at that time the oldest known stone tools and actual sites. It was typical in anthropology to go around and strive for the luck of what you find on the surface. Nature does the first excavation of eroding sediments that contain fossils of early humans and stone tools. Leakey--Mary Leakey this is--decided to dig, and she took the painstaking effort of digging sometimes some fairly large holes in the ground and pulling things out and recording every single detail about where they came from and what they were. And that--that discovery--there are discoveries of stone tools that were four times older than had been known previously, were very important, but more important--

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Important--go ahead.

RICHARD POTTS: But more important than that was the legacy she left of description, of recording, and young researchers like myself or younger researchers like myself have come along and have been able to stand on that--that legacy, and to do new things.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: How did she get into this?

RICHARD POTTS: Well, she grew up in England, and she spent a bit of time in France, where she learned about pre-history. France was, of course, a big center of prehistoric studies in the 1920's, 1930's. And she was then very, very good at drawing, as I mentioned, and she was asked to draw stone artifacts for several volumes by archaeologists in England. Louis then came upon her at a dinner party, and he at least was fascinated with her and asked her to come to East Africa to help him.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And what was she like as a person? How would you attribute this fascination?

RICHARD POTTS: She was very driven. She was extremely curious about the pre-history and the roots of all humankind, and I think that she believed Louis when he said go to East Africa to find it.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: And of course she loved East Africa.

RICHARD POTTS: She loved East Africa. That's right. And that made her a very complex person. It was--she was very simple in the sense of her enjoyment of the natural world, of the Rift Valley, and of everything about it, from the birds to the fossils in the ground, and everything. But at the same time, I think that her enjoyment of that led her in complex ways to shun some people. And she led for a number of years a fairly reclusive life.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: But she also liked Cuban cigars and malt whiskey I heard--I read somewhere.

RICHARD POTTS: Yeah. I think on one to one, which I had the fortune to experience, she could have a good time.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: How do you think "she" would like to be remembered?

RICHARD POTTS: I think--you know, it's interesting--one time when she was, in fact, drinking scotch and smoking cigars and she said to me, you know, I think that a scientist would be very lucky if maybe one or two of their ideas were remembered past their lifetime. And I think that she knew that the interpretations meant less than the legacy of actual discovery and of the actual part of work of describing those and documenting those and caring for those finds, that what really belonged to all people, and I think that's what she wants to be remembered for.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Dr. Potts, thank you for helping her be remembered in that way.

RICHARD POTTS: Thank you, Charlayne. ESSAY - APOCALYPSE NOW

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, here at the end of the program, our Monday night essay in which Roger Rosenblatt considers another kind of end.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Whatever happened to nuclear annihilation? You remember--the overarching monumental fear that for decades shaped nearly all of American diplomacy and culture. Gone in a flash. Replaced by little terrors, such as the sub-culture of terrorism, itself, an up and down menace that surfaces in discreet events like the bombings of buildings and planes. Or, if that particular little terror is not felt, then there is the one of spring plagues and deadly viruses. This particular terror probably began with AIDS and then grew like a plague, itself, to encompass the Ebola virus and other chilling news. So it goes these days. Little terrors mean a lot, mean everything. The heart that fears the cataclysm now freezes at the bulletin. But whatever happened to nuclear annihilation, the end of the world in one big boom? Until a few years ago, that often-imagined unimaginable event was the fear of fears. Not ten years ago I went down into the earth of a Montana farm and saw a little room containing two young Air Force officers, a console, lots of buttons, and a couple of keys. A few yards from that room stood a missile--armed, solemn, alert, waiting to take off over the pole on a half hour one-way flight to Moscow. It had a counterpart in the Soviet Union waiting to fly to us. I'll tell you, if you were not scared by a sight like that, blood does not course in your veins. Yet that sort of fear has been scattered to pieces these days and quite irrationally. Americans, who spent their school years ducking and covering and watching Russian leaders rant and bang their shoes on the table, no longer fear the end of the world by bomb. Yet, it's still possible. It will just take a bit longer. Not only are there portable missiles that get around by suitcase; there is still plenty of the old- fashioned silo variety out there in nut land, waiting for some nut's command. Does the threat seem less real because there's no longer one big bad enemy, ready to launch? Do we feel safer in the gun sights or the bomb sights of Iran or Iraq?As Seinfeld would put it, "What's up with that?". It may be that our collective nervous system could no longer take the continuing pressure of envisioning the final blast, and that this weariness occurred simultaneously with the dissolution of the Soviets. Even a massively fearful imagination can run out of steam.

SPOKESMAN: I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: How many "Dr. Strangeloves" could one take? How many "last men on earth" episodes of the "Twilight Zone"--one of the last end-of-the-world films produced was a TV movie called "The Day After," in which the Soviets blew up Kansas City. Unthinkable--enough. Whatever the cause, when the big red machine said Das Veedahnya, we immediately began to think micro instead of macro, think small. A bomb in a briefcase or a germ in a monkey may do the world in, but it will take more time. Death appears manageable. There was within the vision of nuclear annihilation an odd sort of beauty. A real apocalypse is nothing to love, but, as an image, a dream, as nuclear war fortunately remained, it had its moments. One was loathe to admit it, but a mushroom cloud was kind of lovely to look at. When Slim Pickens saddled up the missile and rode down through the clouds in "Strangelove," it looked kind of fun. So big was the idea of a nuclear finale that it took on the beauty of every grand tragedy--sweet and terrible all at once, and too overwhelming to bear. America is no longer overwhelmed by the prospect of the end. There is nothing grand anymore in the vision. And the finale is foreseen perhaps as it always really was as a nasty little series of murders. The world, which was to end in one big bang, will now pop off in small doses, administered by serial killers. This may not be progress, but it's different. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Monday, FBI officials offered a reward of $1/2 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, and Energy Sec. O'Leary announced a plan to dispose of 50 tons of surplus plutonium from the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.