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MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, the China-Taiwan crisis cools down, Elizabeth Farnsworth talks to two analysts; economic insecurity part six, Margaret Warner gets some historic perspective from NewsHour regulars Doris Kearns Goodwin, Haynes Johnson, and Michael Beschloss, joined tonight by author Robert Samuelson; jazz gets a promotion at Lincoln Center in New York, Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports; and our Monday night essay, why the Oscars matter as seen by Roger Rosenblatt. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday. NEWS SUMMARY
MR. LEHRER: First Lady Hillary Clinton was in Bosnia today. She and her daughter,Chelsea, visited U.S. troops at the American base in Tuzla. They brought with them a planeload of gifts and mail for the soldiers, toys and candy for Bosnian children. Later in the day, Mrs. Clinton became the only First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to formally address American troops in a potentially hostile area. She told them their presence sent an important message to the various ethnic groups in Bosnia.
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: By your example, you are saying to the people of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Europe, the world, yes, people can get along with each other, you don't have to like everybody, but you should respect and tolerate each other, because together, we can do more, and this is what the American military stands for. By being here, you're letting people who have hated each other, who have killed each other, know there is another way. Look to America and that's what I thank you for.
MR. LEHRER: Mrs. Clinton is on an eight-day trip that will include stops in Italy, Turkey, and Greece. In the China-Taiwan story today, China announced the end of war games in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan announced a plan to ease a ban on direct trade links with China. State Department Spokesman Nicholas Burns said the United States welcomed these warming developments.
NICHOLAS BURNS, State Department Spokesman: We're very pleased to see the tensions recede to see Taiwan and China get back to a diplomatic, you know, a direct discussion of issues. That's the way it should have happened all along, and we're very pleased that the military exercises have ended. And I think the Taiwan--the people in Taiwan should be congratulated for the way they have conducted themselves in trying to pursue an election through--amidst the military exercises, and I think they have acquitted themselves quite well.
MR. LEHRER: China staged the war games to intimidate Taiwan before Saturday's democratic elections. It did not work. Taiwanese voters elected President Lee Teng-Hui, the man China had accused of scheming for independence. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. In London today, the British government said it would not slaughter 3 million cows to contain an outbreak of so-called mad cow disease also known as BSE. The illness has been linked to a fatal brain disease that has so far affected 10 people in Britain. The agriculture minister had said yesterday a mass slaughter was being considered. But today, Britain's health secretary told parliament a government committee of scientists found no need for the slaughter or a ban on British beef. The opposition disagreed.
HARRIET HERMAN, Member of Parliament: Last week, I said that public confidence was hanging by a thread. Now, public confidence has collapsed. Will the secretary of state admit that it his government's reckless disregard for public health and their dogma- -and their dogma of deregulation which has swept up into this process?
STEPHEN DORRELL, Health Secretary, Britain: The committee does not believe that additional measures are justified at this stage, but the situation needs to be kept under careful review. That is what will happen. What the honorable lady is asking is that the House should substitute her scientific judgment for the scientific judgment of the advisory committee. I can think of no more absurd proposition.
MR. LEHRER: Twenty countries and McDonald's, Britain's largest hamburger chain, have banned British beef since last week. It has not been imported to the United States since 1989. Back in this country, a former Arkansas municipal judge was sentenced for his role in the Whitewater affair. David Hale received a 28-month prison term and a $10,000 fine. He was also ordered to repay more than $2 million to the federal government. Hale pleaded guilty two years ago to defrauding the Small Business Administration. He claimed then Governor Clinton pressured him to make an illegal $300,000 loan to Mr. Clinton's Whitewater business partners. President Clinton has denied that accusation. In Supreme Court action today, the Justices ruled Louisiana may not deny Medicaid- funded abortions to victims of rape and incest. The state wanted such abortion funding limited to only saving the life of the mother. The Court also agreed to study state English-only laws. It will decide whether states can make English their official language, and, thus, require government officials to speak only in English. Twenty-two states have amendments or laws designating English as the official state language. There was bad weather in the Northern plains and Midwest today. Heavy blizzards closed hundreds of schools, roads, and highways. In Iowa, the governor declared one Northwestern county a disaster area and authorized state troopers to search for motorists trapped in the snow. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to a China-Taiwan update, economic insecurity part six, an upgrade for jazz, and why do we care who wins an Oscar? UPDATE - WHAT NEXT?
MR. LEHRER: An update on Taiwan and China is first tonight, and Elizabeth Farnsworth has it.
MS. FARNSWORTH: Just four days ago, China was conducting military exercises off the coast of neighboring Taiwan. China also warned the United States, which had dispatched two carrier groups to the area, not to interfere in internal Chinese affairs. The tension had been building in advance of Taiwan's first democratic presidential election. On Saturday, that vote went ahead with heavy turnout by Taiwanese voters and a big win for President Lee Teng-Hui. The president has been trying to expand Taiwan's ties with the rest of the world, but he has not advocated complete independence from China.
MS. FARNSWORTH: The elections were followed almost immediately by conciliatory statements from China and Taiwan. A foreign ministry spokesman in Beijing called for "a high level summit" and in Taipei, the government announced a plan to ease its decades-old ban on direct trade with China. We get two perspectives on these developments now. Stanley Roth was senior director for Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff from March 1994 until the end of last year. He is now director of research for the U.S. Institute of Peace. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker is a professor of diplomatic history at Georgetown University. Thank you both for being with us. Mr. Roth, how do you read the conciliatory statements that are coming from both sides now?
STANLEY ROTH, U.S. Institute of Peace: I think it's an encouraging first step. I think both sides have recognized what their fundamental national interests are, which is a cross-straits dialogue process which allows continued trade and economic intercourse across the strait, and ultimately, a political resolution. And I think they now both scared themselves perhaps by the events of the past month or so, particularly this latest round of exercises, and they're now seizing the opportunity to try to get things back into a more normal condition.
MS. FARNSWORTH: So do you think that means that the crisis is over?
NANCY BERNKOPF TUCKER, Georgetown University: Well, the crisis in the sense of a military confrontation is certainly over, but the long-term problem, I think, is nowhere near resolution because the problem is too fundamental. Basically, you have two irreconcilable viewpoints on one central issue in that China demands reunification with Taiwan and Taiwan is, I would say, really dead set against reunification, certainly in the short-term but perhaps even in the longer term.
MS. FARNSWORTH: Do you think that President Lee is more pro- independence than he's letting on, the new president?
MS. TUCKER: I suspect he is, but in some ways that's irrelevant. What has been the case is because of domestic politics in Taiwan his position has been shifted increasingly towards a near independence position. He's really walking a very thin line in order to steal the fire from the Democratic Progressive Party, and so whether or not he wants independence, he has to be very close to the thing that he desires--for the people of Taiwan.
MS. FARNSWORTH: I want to come back to this question of irreconcilable positions in a minute, but right now, there's some talk, at least in the news reports today from both sides that President Lee might even travel to China. He said something about making "an important overseas trip." Is that a possibility, and if it is a possibility, would it be a good thing?
MR. ROTH: Well, it's certainly a possibility but it isn't anything new. If you'll recall about a year ago January, Jiang Zemin in his famous eight point proposal, famous to students of China-Taiwan issue, ordered such a summit, and, in fact, the issue was where would it take place and would it be a summit between two sovereigns, two equal heads of state, or would it be between an emperor and his vassal, as some people portray it on the mainland, and so we're a long way away from it, nevertheless, if it could take place, I think it would be an immense confidence-building measure, and it could lead to a breakthrough--
MS. FARNSWORTH: But President Lee has said that Taiwan would have to have a peace agreement with China first, right, so there would have to be so much that would happen before any kind of a summit could ever take place.
MR. ROTH: Well, one would expect a negotiation. This is the opening position. Whether it's the final position is another matter, and a lot of people are now drawing the Sadat parallel. He didn't place a whole lot of conditions when he went to Jerusalem, and he got quite a bit for it. The question is: Will President Lee do the same?
MS. FARNSWORTH: What about the Sadat parallel? I've seen that in several press reports.
MS. TUCKER: Well, it's certainly an effort to suggest that Lee has great international stature, which is, after all, what he's been after all along. And it also suggests that he may well try for a very dramatic opening to China. His talk during the campaign, his hints that people will be surprised at the next capital he turns up in, did seem to suggest that he thought he might go to Beijing, but I think as you were saying, this is going to need a long period of intense discussion at a lower level, which is really the most constructive thing we can look forward to now as a resumption of real dialogue. It doesn't matter whether it's about a summit or other issues. The fact that they would begin talking again is really central.
MS. FARNSWORTH: I want to go back to your point that there are perhaps irreconcilable positions here. China is deadly serious about Taiwan, isn't it?
MS. TUCKER: Yes.
MS. FARNSWORTH: Did the Clinton administration mislead--misread that?
MS. TUCKER: I think Americans have a lot of trouble understanding precisely what's going on here. The way I see it, on the one hand, you have a growth of very determined nationalism on the mainland, nationalism really has taken the place of Communism as a unifying principle for the people of China, and at the same time, you have a growth of nationalism in Taiwan. You have a generational change going on there. Many fewer people have nostalgic connections to the mainland, and they are beginning to identify themselves as Taiwanese and no longer as Chinese first. And so it's very hard to bring those two nationalisms together and try to get a resolution out of that.
MS. FARNSWORTH: You were in the National Security Council. Did you--when you allowed Lee Teng-Hui to come and speak to Cornell University, did you misread what the Chinese position would be?
MR. ROTH: I think Taiwan misread what the Chinese position would be, and it's quite interesting that President Lee made a statement a few weeks ago saying that he had seriously underestimated the Chinese reaction. Many of the things that China did were, in fact, predictable and were predicted, but Lee Teng-Hui dismissed them and said, oh, no, I understand what's going on in the mainland, our economic ties are so strong that this is not going to happen, and I think he was surprised. If you think about it, this has probably become the most expensive visit in history, a 25 percent drop in the stock market plus a 10 percent depreciation of the currency placed his visit at the billion dollar range or more, and so I think that's where the real miscalculation was. But the more important point is the future. And I am not at all persuaded that this is, in fact, an irreconcilable conflict. I think there is enormous pragmatism on Taiwan, and if this were even partially met by the mainland in terms of giving greater international space, for example, Taiwan's membership in international agencies that don't have sovereignty, economic agencies, that this would--
MS. FARNSWORTH: Like the International Monetary Fund.
MR. ROTH: Right. The World Bank, you know, that's already started in earlier--
MS. FARNSWORTH: This is your prescription now for--
MR. ROTH: Right.
MS. FARNSWORTH: --how this might be worked out.
MR. ROTH: An earlier, more confident Chinese regime did permit China and Taiwan to work out an arrangement that saw a Taiwan team in the Olympics, Taiwan membership in the ADB, Taiwan presence at the head of state level at the APEC meeting. There had been precedence for Taiwan showing up at major international organizations, and this could be continued, and it would lance the boil, in a sense, put some of this pressure for independence amongst a relatively small, roughly 20 percent minority, on Taiwan.
MS. FARNSWORTH: What do you think about that, Ms. Tucker?
MS. TUCKER: Well, indeed, there's another interesting precedent as well, and that is that the Soviet Union when it first came into the United Nations back in the 1940s insisted upon and was granted three soviet seats for Moscow, for Byelorussia, and for Ukraine, and a similar kind of formula has been suggested to China that there could be two UN seats, a Chinese seat, and a Chinese Taiwan seat, if you will. So there are creative solutions available if people are willing to be pragmatic and try to follow them. The problem I think at the moment is that China feels too threatened by these alternative scenarios. It certainly might be more willing to concede on economic grounds but on the central political ground it's going to be reluctant. And yet, that's precisely where I think the people ofTaiwan want greater international visibility. And I guess I would say that though it's true that the people who are willing to say publicly that they're for independence hovers around 25 percent of the population. If China was not opposed to Taiwan independence, I think you would see 90 percent of the people opting for it tomorrow, so that though people recognize the status quo is necessary, that China is a genuine threat, I think the level of discontent with, with being pushed back towards isolation from the international arena is something that President Lee is going to have to contend with.
MS. FARNSWORTH: How much damage do you think was done in the last two or three weeks, damage to U.S.-Chinese relations? I'm thinking of Walter Mead, an analyst who was quoted today as saying that more and more Chinese officials believe that the U.S. is hostile to, to China, that the U.S. wants Taiwan to be independent as a way of weakening China. I want to get both of your viewpoints, but you first. How much damage do you think was done?
MS. TUCKER: Well, I think an enormous amount of damage.
MS. FARNSWORTH: This is because--and I'm thinking of the carriers.
MS. TUCKER: The ships going in.
MS. FARNSWORTH: Yeah, right.
MS. TUCKER: That's a palpable symbol, and a lot of Chinese have interpreted this as America making a choice and actually aligning itself with Taiwan. I don't think that's what the United States was doing. What the United States was doing was saying we want peace in the strait, but the Chinese chose to see us as aligning ourselves with Taipei. But the situation in U.S.-China relations has been bad for a very long time. The Lee Teng-Hui visit clearly was significantly detrimental to that relationship, but frankly, ever since 1989, U.S.-China relations have been in a lot of trouble, and what makes it worse is this Taiwan situation has aggravated things, and we are now facing the series of problems that is coming up very fast.
MS. FARNSWORTH: In trade, and--
MS. TUCKER: Corporations, trade, human rights.
MS. FARNSWORTH: How serious do you think the damage was?
MR. ROTH: I think minimal. I think that actually the United States probably gained something in terms of Chinese perspectiveness, or willingness of the Clinton administration to show the flag and make this demonstration. I think that they clearly worked. I think we got China's attention. I think the fact that the exercises terminated on scheduled and, in fact, they terminated the live fire portion early suggested that China did, indeed, get the message. This is a group of hard leaders who I think understand this type of use of force or at least the willingness to use force, and I think that had an impact. So I don't think it had any fundamental effect on how the Chinese view us.
MS. FARNSWORTH: And what should the role--U.S. role be now?
MR. ROTH: I think to the maximum extent possible we should try to get out of the middle of this, that we should try to stay out of the Chinese civil war, which has been the policy since 1979. Just remember that until last year China and Taiwan were making enormous strides in terms of their own relationship, in terms of political context, economic trade, tourism, and even the possibility of another summit. So it is not inconceivable that one could get back on this track without the United States in the middle. In the absence of further military provocations from the mainland, I think the United States should remove the fleet from the region, I believe that's the intent anyway, and let the two sides try to work this out amongst themselves. If it fails, then we may have to once again consider going back in.
MS. FARNSWORTH: What do you think about that?
MS. TUCKER: I think it's true and very important that the United States remember that we should not be mediating between Beijing and Taipei. This is a problem that only Chinese can resolve amongst themselves. The United States really has no role here, and by taking on a role, I think it misleads people on both sides. It lets the Chinese think that we are opposed to them and then they carry that over into a host of other problems which become then more difficult to solve. But it also reassures Taiwan that they don't have to make any compromises because the United States will always be there to protect them. So I think it's time. I'm not opposed. I think the idea of sending the fleet into the area was a good one, but now it's time for us to pull back and allow the two sides to talk directly to each other.
MS. FARNSWORTH: Well, Ms. Tucker and Mr. Roth, thank you so much for being with us.
MS. TUCKER: Thanks.
MR. ROTH: Nice to be here. SERIES - ECONOMIC [IN]SECURITY? HISTORICAL VIEWS
MR. LEHRER: Now part six of our series on economic insecurity. Tonight, some perspective. Margaret Warner is in charge.
MS. WARNER: Throughout last week, we examined the various facets of economic insecurity that many voters say they feel, debating the economics as well as the politics of the issue. Tonight: an historical view. We get it from three NewsHour regulars: Presidential historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss and author and journalist Haynes Johnson. Joining them is Robert Samuelson, national columnist for "Newsweek" and author of The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement. Welcome, everybody. Bob Samuelson, you've written extensively recently, saying you think all of this attention to economic insecurity is really grossly exaggerated. Why do you believe that?
ROBERT SAMUELSON, Newsweek: I don't--it's not that we shouldn't be paying attention to it, but I think it's been blown out of proportion. You have to remember that we have an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent. If you look at the average unemployment rate in the first half of the 90's and compare it to the first half of the 80's, it's slightly more than 6 percent in the 90's, it was more than 8 percent in the 80's. So in general, our labor markets are probably looking better today than they were 10 years ago. There is insecurity; there is downsizing, but there's always some anxiety and insecurity in a competitive economic system, and I'm not sure it's dramatically higher today than it has been in the past. In fact, I would argue that it isn't.
MS. WARNER: Haynes, how do you see this?
HAYNES JOHNSON, Journalist/Author: Well, we really have a difference on this one. I have spent the last ten, fifteen years in particular traveling around the country and it has been cumulative. It isn't just anecdotal. People really feel, and it is an attitude but it's also a fear that the old rules have changed. It isn't just the smokestack industries that are gone, but, but there's a whole tapestry of feelings about the system, the compact is broken, they can't trust government, they don't trust leaders, they don't trust institutions, and the most stunning figure I think Gallup is tracking, the faith in American institutions since 1975 to '91, they went down dramatically with one exception, the military. That went up. And so '91 on, it even got worse, so you may say that these attitudes aren't real or whatever, but people feel them, and it has powerful political and personal reactions in the country.
MS. WARNER: Michael, last Summer, Paul Taylor of the "Washington Post" took somewhat Bob Samuelson's view. In historical terms, he said, is a single mother working at McDonald's today really any worse off than the immigrant wife who had to work in the Chicago slaughterhouse in 1915? I mean, from an historical perspective, is there something to that critique?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: I think there is, but it does have a lot to do with expectations I think that Haynes was suggesting, and especially in recent times. You look at the period, for instance, since World War II. People were accustomed to a growth rate in the 1950's and the 1960's of upwards of 4 percent. They also assumed, as John Kennedy used to say, that a rising tide would lift all boats, that when you were in a period of great economic expansion, that everyone would benefit. Those two things are really no longer the case, and one problem that we have had, I think, in the last twenty years or so is that when we began to come down from that perhaps artificial boom after World War II, when we were benefiting from being the only economic superpower in the world, with Germany and Japan devastated, our political leadership, our Presidents did not do very much to prepare us for it. You had Presidents like Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon essentially saying not only is there a boom but we're responsible and you can expect to see that in the future. Interestingly, the one President in recent times who has tried to level with the American people about the fact that perhaps we will not be living in this artificial age anymore was Jimmy Carter. He paid for it so badly that very few political leaders in the future will do that again.
MS. WARNER: Doris, how do you think that current times compare to other times of economic insecurity in the past?
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: Well, surely, if you look at the 1890's or you look at the Great Depression in absolute terms, people lived in much worse conditions, the working conditions at the factories were horrible. Yet, that doesn't answer the question as to where the anxiety is coming from today, because what happened in the 1890's, when you had a similar kind of structural change from an agrarian to an industrial economy, just as now we're having a change to a global economy, people began to have an answer to their problems. They began to form unions, state and local governments began to form protective legislation, minimum wage, worries about the sweatshop were undone when they began to regulate them, so there was a feeling of forward motion in a certain sense, similarly, in the Depression, when unlike today, everyone was hurt. Stockbrokers were presumedly jumping out of windows on high rises, just as the working people were hurt. Today what's different is you've got an economy that's going forward. It may not be as fast a rate as it was in the past. Productivity is there, but the fruits of that economy are not being shared equally by the people at the top and the people throughout the rest. And people feel that unjustness, and they don't have sources to turn to. Unions don't have the strength they had in the past. They're much, much less powerful than they were as a protective tool for the workers, and people don't believe in government in the same way that they did either in the 1890s when the state governments took up the cudgel, or the New Deal, when finally the federal government set up unemployment insurance, Social Security, and pensions. So I think the people are feeling adrift. Leaders aren't addressing it. Their institutions aren't addressing it. And that anxiety, I suspect, is even deeper in some ways, even though the absolute conditions of their life may not be as bad as they were in the past.
MS. WARNER: Well, Bob Samuelson, do you think we are now in a completely different era in terms of economic growth, as Michael was saying?
MR. SAMUELSON: Well, the economy is always evolving, and that is one of the things that people, it seems to me, are having a hard time adjusting to, that in a competitive economy there is constant change. We had this sense of entitlement that we were going to be entitled to calm and security, but that's a complete antithesis of a market economy, and people have to get used to the notion, and we're having a hard time getting used to the notion that the kind of economy we have inevitably involves some anxieties and some insecurities. But I don't think we should exaggerate the extent to which people feel these today. Gelb does an interesting poll in which they ask people whether or not they're going to feel better. They expect to feel better in a year economically than they do today. The most recent poll done in March, 66 percent of the people expect to feel better in a year than they do today. In 1980, it was less than 30 percent. It's hard to imagine those people think they're going to lose their job in the next year, and probably most of them won't. What Haynes says is absolutely true. There has been this precipitous decline in confidence in institutions. But I would argue, and I do argue in my book, that the reason for this is that we develop very, very unrealistic expectations of what these institutions could, in fact, produce for us, government corporations. And now these expectations are being shattered, and people feel disillusioned with the institutions, but the pervasiveness of the pessimism, it's just not that pervasive. It's focused on our institutions, our leaders, and to some extent our ideas, but people are not walking around in kind of a collective depression in America about their own personal lives, so there's just--there's a schizophrenia.
MS. WARNER: Let me turn to one thing, and you've raised it, Haynes, but talk about it a little more. And Bob Reich talks about it too. He says there used to be a social compact between American companies and their workers and that that's been broken. Is he romanticizing the past, or was it different then? Was this relationship different?
MR. JOHNSON: We're really not far apart here. What Bob is talking about, if you ask people individually about their own lives, they feel pretty good about their own life, most people, but institutions are more than just names. They are where you work. They are the people you trust. There is even your church, your union, your newspaper, the television you watch, and if the sense that somehow you can't trust or believe those, then you feel that something's broken. The social compact idea was in this most optimistic society tomorrow will be better than today, and there's always been a way up. You talk about the American dream. What that was, it's not just a myth. It was a way up, and the idea that it's a rigged society is very dangerous. If you see the disparity at the top to bottom, the increasing wealth given at the top, and it's not just a statistic, it's real, the increasing numbers of those at the top versus those at the bottom, and people begin to feel I'm getting hurt unfairly and unjustly. That's a recipe for real dislocation in a society politically and economically, and I don't disagree with your economic prescription, but I think the attitudes about, upon which the basis of the society operates, are at risk.
MS. WARNER: Michael, when have been the other times most vividly in American history where you had this sense in the population that some people were getting more benefits than they deserved, but that they were just getting rooked by the system, and what happened? What has been people's response to that?
MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, Doris touched on a couple of them, the 1890's and the 1930's. These were periods in which you had mass misery that came from a very bad economic depression, perhaps recession in the earlier case, and the result was that you had many Americans looking for an answer and an answer that suggested that the reason why I am poor, the reason why I'm suffering is that there is someone else who's benefiting and perhaps cheating the rest of us. In the 1890's, that is the reason why you had a great movement toward the populist, the populist candidate for President did awfully well, James Weaver. He suggested the reason why people were suffering was in part because there was a cabal of international bankers in New York who were benefiting in a way that was causing foreigners to go bust. In the 1930's, the same thing could have happened. There were other demagogues. It was only because there was Franklin Roosevelt to provide the political explanation to people that made them feel a little bit more assuaged. That's what we really have not had in the last 20 years because our leaders, our Presidents to a great extent I think have not quite leveled with us.
MS. WARNER: Doris, do you think then that what we're saying is in the past people did ultimately look to government at times like these?
MS. GOODWIN: Well, I think it's not only looking to government. I think, as I said earlier, they looked to their unions. I mean, look at what happened in the 1930's and the 1940's, when World War II came business was finally necessary to the government to produce the weapons, the tanks, the ships, the planes that were going to win us the war, and they went to Roosevelt and essentially said if we're going to do this task for you, you've got to undo some of these New Deal social protections you put in against capitalism, we can't afford speedy mobilization if we have to worry about minimum wage, about overtime, about good conditions in the factory. Roosevelt said, no way, the only way we're going to go forward is to have a healthy working place for the people. Unions got stronger during World War II. Business was productive. It's probably the model we should look for today. Never before has the partnership been greater than doing that period of time because both partners in this have to be at their strength. Now, I think what we have to figure out is how do we get corporations to realize they have as much responsibility to their employees and to their communities as they do to their shareholders because it's in everyone's interest that the consumer base stay strong. That's what happened in the 1920's. If you cut that consumer base, the rich get richer, you're not going to have a base to buy the product, and then you're in real trouble as a whole society. So we're all in this together, but I'm not sure that many corporations see it that way.
MS. WARNER: Bob Samuelson, what do you think history tells us about what the answer is at a time like this, what the model is, or is that the wrong question?
MR. SAMUELSON: I guess I don't--I have a hard time predicting the future, and I look back at the past, and I think I wonder about the future. I don't know. I think that, you know, this is a very messy society, and it always seemed that we're unhappy with something. People look back to the 1950's now as a very kind of nostalgic period when everything was fine, but I grew up in the 1950's, and that is not the way people felt about the 1950's in the 1950's, so my sense is that we are in a period in which we are undergoing a lot of kind of superficial turmoil, some of it quite deep. But I don't think it really compares with some of the other periods in which we've had really deep social tensions. If you compare the 90's with the 60's, for example, in the 60's, this country was really coming apart in many fundamental ways, Vietnam, civil rights, campus turmoils. These were deep social tensions which affected people at a very, very deep personal level. A lot of what is going on now is the normal operation of a very diverse, large society in which you have a lot of different people with a lot of different opinions, different people coming in. You know there's always going to be a kind of a level of noise and turmoil in a society like the United States. And I think if you compare today with a lot of earlier periods, it's fairly placid, relatively speaking. We're never going to be totally placid.
MS. WARNER: Do you think we're romanticizing the past?
MR. BESCHLOSS: I honor Bob and I'm very admiring of his book, but I guess I would disagree. I think in recent years we really have come to something of a rubicon, and the rubicon is that for most of our history we felt that America was unique, that we were perhaps not subject to the booms and busts as severely as, for instance, the countries of Europe. There was an expanding future, that the future would always get better, I think that's now changing. We're beginning to get like everyone else. When that happens, it's emotional shock, and that's a shock that I think we'll have to deal with politically and also economically.
MS. WARNER: Haynes, do you agree with Michael, the point he made earlier, that political leaders in general have not spoken sort of honestly in times like this and that you pay too big a political price if you do?
MR. JOHNSON: Yes, of course. I mean, we've seen that over and over again.
MS. WARNER: No examples of heroism that paid off?
MR. JOHNSON: Very few in recent times, and I think the role of the President is to be the public educator. That's about all you can do. You can't make the trains run on time. You can't make the- -nothing like that--you can't stop the weather. You can't solve diseases overnight, you can't--but you can educate the public to where the country's really going and what real problems are. And in the short-term politics we live in everything is fragmentary, and it's quick and it's a hit. And I think that really does do a disservice to the larger kinds of tensions we're talking about here. This ought to be the best time for the United States. We have no war. We have no Depression, as Doris says, we have no enemies, you know, we're not torn apart, we're not in riots, we're not in- -and yet, there is, I would argue very strongly, a pervasive distrust about who we are, where we're going, what is the purpose and value of the society, and we don't know where to look.
MS. WARNER: Doris, how much honesty do you see in the public discourse on this point?
MS. GOODWIN: Well, I think what we need our leaders to do is to tell us that it's not simply that they have to prepare us for limits in a world that's different from before. That's part of it. But I think they have to figure out how we're going to become more competitive in a global economy. And the answer is not simply economic. It's partly making sure that corporations have given their employees what it is that they need to feel morale, to stay and not be turning over because they have a loyalty to the company. We've got to figure out how to strengthen unions so that that bargaining power with the business community is strengthened. They can educate the country. As I said before, we're all in this together. Somehow, I think that business has taken ahold of the dialogue and government seems like the enemy, so there's nobody out there really talking about ways in which Robert Reich is trying to do this. And I applaud him for doing it, and I think that dialogue has to go forward. There has to be some things, whether we believe in government as we did before, that us as a collective society can do to make our situation better. It's not written in stone that this thing has to keep going down, and we're not going to compete with third world countries, I don't believe that. I believe America has the capacity to be productive. There are other ways than downsizing, however, to be productive, and that's to get a lower cost and a better product. And maybe working with your employees in a better way can do that, and that's what we should be striving for, but that will depend on leaders having a real educative role about where our society is going in the future. And so far, no one wants to touch it. They just want to believe the economy is healthy, because they're afraid if they mention it, it will look like things are bad and they're responsible.
MR. SAMUELSON: Well, you know, I would say that our major problems are not economic. They're social, they're cultural, they're political. If you look at the economy, we have the lowest unemployment rate of all major industrial countries, with the exception of Japan. We are the world's largest exporter. We are the leader in most of the major technological industries, computers, commercial aircraft, pharmaceuticals. We were able to generate 46 million jobs since 1970. The economy is in relatively good shape.
MS. WARNER: So, Bob Samuelson, are you saying then that you think the political leadership is speaking on a certain honest level about this?
MR. SAMUELSON: No, the political leadership, part of the problem we have in our society at a political level is that government promises to do things that it can't do. Government cannot calibrate the rate of economic growth in a four-year election cycle. They cannot eliminate business cycles. When you lead people to believe that government can do this and then the people see in the real world that the government can't do it, naturally people feel disillusioned with their leaders, and one of the things we have to do is to discipline our expectations of government, not necessarily to have small government. We're never going to have small government in the near future, but to make sure that we concentrate government's efforts on things it can actually do so we don't pre- ordain ourselves to disappointment.
MS. GOODWIN: What about--if I could just add something--beside all those good economic indicators that you mentioned, we also have now the greatest maldistribution of income that we've had in our history, and that's what people are feeling as well, that the rich are getting richer, and that the fruits of that productivity are not spreading down to the middle class as they did in the past. One of the great things about World War II, it created a middle class which lasted for a long period of time. They're right to feel angry. They're right to feel anxious. All those indicators may keep going up, but if they're not getting the benefits from it, their living standards have gone down consistently if you look at it over time in these last years, and they feel that.
MS. WARNER: Speaking of time, we're out of time. Thank you all very much.
MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, two from the world entertainment, a report on jazz, and some Rosenblatt words on the Oscars. FOCUS - ALL THAT JAZZ
MR. LEHRER: Now, the jazz story and to Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: New York's Lincoln Center. For 34 years, home to the world of classical music. Now there's a new sound in the house. [music] It's a new sound for Lincoln Center but not a new sound--like Duke Ellington's New Orleans Suite. Although jazz concerts have been staged here since the late 1980's, jazz at Lincoln Center is about to take on a whole new identity. This Summer it will become a so-called constituent of the nation's premier performing arts center on a par with the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet. For Wynton Marsalis, the program's artistic director, it's a dream come true.
WYNTON MARSALIS: When we sat up there and they said we were going to be a constituent, I almost had a tear come into my eye. I had to catch myself.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Marsalis worked for years to elevate the official status of jazz. His friend, Al Murray, has worked decades. Murray is a writer and cultural historian and something of a mentor to Marsalis, who was deeply influenced by a book Murray wrote in the 70's, Stompin' the Blues. At a party last week celebrating the publication of two new books by Murray, a novel and a collection of essays, his editor, Errol McDonald, read an excerpt from the now classic Stompin' the Blues.
ERROL McDONALD, Editorial Director, Pantheon Books: "The main thing that it is always about is the also and also of dragging, driving, jumping, kicking, slinging or otherwise stomping way of blues as such."
ALBERT MURRAY, Author: Life is rough. So are you gonna cut your throat, or are you gonna get yourself together and stomp at the Savoy by 9:30 that night? Stompin' the blues means getting rid of the blues, but you don't stomp it with power; you stomp it with eloquence, like his trumpet, you see.
[TRUMPET PLAYING IN BACKGROUND]
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: They're a mutual admiration society, Marsalis and Murray, and we sat down with them recently to talk about jazz's place at Lincoln Center and in American cultural life.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Al Murray, tell me why jazz at Lincoln Center, home of the opera, the ballet, the philharmonic, why jazz.
AL MURRAY: Well, jazz should be perceived as a fine art. For many years it's been confused with pop art or pop music or folk music, whereas, it is fine art music. It's not played by amateurs. You've got to be a consummate craftsman in order to play it. So it belongs where the finest development of musical expression is performed.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So why did it take so long to get it to a place like Lincoln Center?
WYNTON MARSALIS, Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center: Well, we don't care why it took so long. We're here to swing. If it took- -it could take another 500 years--it's here now, and we're going to stop in the door, and we're going to take care of business. Now, this is our first year as a constituent, but we'regoing to try to expand our program and represent the music and include people.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Wynton, what exactly is jazz?
WYNTON MARSALIS: Essentially the creation of blues-based melodies and, and improvising in a form in which other musicians are improvising with a certain type of rhythm and syncopation and feeling. Of course, if you talk to a musician, you talk to a musician, you say, let us--you say let's play some blues--they think you're going to play 12-bar chords, right?
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Let's hear that.
[WYNTON MARSALIS PLAYING PIANO]
WYNTON MARSALIS: Now when you're talking about percussion, that's the way--I play a certain way, you know, with access. [Marsalis playing piano] That was 12 bars. It was kind of long, you know .I know you have to cut that, but we take that form and we improvise with it, so now with that 12 bars I might start the blues off and you might say one, two, three--uh--[playing piano]--or, you know, I might start it off and go--[playing piano]--you feel blues, but either way I'm playing with the rhythm, and Duke Ellington used to always say it was musical freedom of speech, but, you know, that's as a general overwhelming, but it's democracy in sound, because everybody has choices to make, and we all have the right to our individual path, our way, but we have the responsibility of attempting to make a coherent statement.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Albert Murray has a slightly different definition of jazz.
AL MURRAY: It was down-home people. It was down-home African- derived people who had a disposition to refine all musical statement in the direction of dance, beat, elegance.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Rehearsing for a concert of great orchestral arrangements from the 1930's, Marsalis told his band members they had a long way to go.
WYNTON MARSALIS: We got to jump on the rhythm a lot more. It's got to be crisp and swinging, like something we want to dance to. We just play well. You'd be sitting, sitting in a room with flowered wallpaper and potpourri. The main thing that we want to do is we want to bring jazz to the people. We want the public to come out and have a good time, listen to our music. Whether we're at Lincoln Center or not, everybody's got to be like they--it's not like that.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You want 'em to swing.
WYNTON MARSALIS: Yes. We're out here to swing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: While performance has been the focus of the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, attaining constituent status brings other responsibilities, educational for one thing, teaching students how to play and audiences how to appreciate. For another, archival, collecting important documents like music scores, in some cases even creating them.
WYNTON MARSALIS: We have a lot of transcriptions which is very painstaking. You have to sit up with recordings and try to get every note on the recording right. When you're dealing with seventeen or eighteen pieces in the record that was made in the 1940's or something, early, you got to try to figure out these voices, it requires a lot of concentration and patience.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Is that because the jazz musicians just improvised, they didn't write things down?
WYNTON MARSALIS: I know from writing music myself, you write it down and you work it out, and you don't really take care of the score, like it's not the most precious document. The recording is the document that you think of, because that's what everybody is going to buy; that's what everybody is going to hear.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But you want to write this down now becausewhat?
WYNTON MARSALIS: I think when you had scores in a high school band, somebody can play it. You know, it's not like you're going to have a band of 17 people sitting around, I think you play a D like you used to do when you were in the band in high school, you know, in the folk band or something, so it's very important for us to have scores for the younger musicians and the professional musicians also, to have access to it.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: In terms of greatness, where does jazz say compare with some of the musicians that are celebrated here, Beethoven, Bach, Handel's "Messiah"?
AL MURRAY: Well, they were doing what they were doing for European culture, European society, European customs and so forth, and what jazz does is an interaction of the learned tradition that was imported, plus the frontier situation, you see, and the improvisation that just took place. The adjustment which they made to that added up to something which, in effect, was original.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: That sensibility, says Murray, is what makes jazz a uniquely American art form.
AL MURRAY: It's based on the way we think about, about things. The Constitution of the United States is very much like a jazz arrangement. It has vamp, you know, the preamble has a vamp, then you have a series of choruses, you know, and how it sounds depends on who's in the band.
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So are you saying that this--are you saying then that this is the American form of music, you think?
AL MURRAY: I think so. I think it encapsulates the so-called black culture in the United States or blues--it's comprehensive it's mulatto. It takes in all of the other cultures, and it synthesizes it. Ironically, it's because they--the captive Africans who became slaves in the United States were freer culturally speaking than other people because they didn't bring as much baggage, as much cultural baggage as other people, so they made a synthesis.
WYNTON MARSALIS: It's like gumbo in New Orleans, you know. We put everything in there, shrimp, chicken, you can even put chitlins in there if you want 'em--you can put what you want in there, you know what I mean, and it's going to taste good because it's going to be a part of it, but you got to have that rule, and the rule is the thing that makes it a gumbo, and that's like the blues and that's like the consciousness, the disposition to integrate with other things.
[JAZZ PLAYING IN BACKGROUND]
MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Marsalis has taken some heat lately for decisions he's made about jazz at Lincoln Center. The main complaint, that he's shut out newer, more experimental artists, in favor of the old masters, Loui Armstrong, Count Bassey, and above all, Duke Ellington. Marsalis doesn't particularly deny the charge.
WYNTON MARSALIS: Well, I'm gonna do what I like. That's my job as artistic director. I don't think that I'm gonna program the type of like avant garde music that sounds a lot like European classical music, which I love classical music, but when the music starts to sound like not swinging, that's not a style that I'm personally fond of. I want to look out in the audience and see people swinging. I don't want it to look like a postcard, you know, and get a great review. I want to get--if it means getting a bad review and the audience is swinging, hey, I want to swing.
[JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING] ESSAY - WHY IT MATTERS
MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight, essayist Roger Rosenblatt is here with some thoughts about tonight's Oscar ceremony. Roger, why are these Oscars such a big deal to all of us?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Well, Jim, they're the great American ceremony, at least the awards tonight will be, and it--they've got the kind of serious joy, really the serious joy of the jazz we just heard that is equally serious, equally joyful. They have to follow certain forms and traditions, we like it that way, so that when somebody gets nominated, they always say it's an honor to be nominated, and when they are selected, they have to look startled, and they have to sound humble, and the best part of the convention is the envelope, when they say the envelope please, then everybody seemingly looks to that envelope for some celestial jury that has selected someone above all the other people, and people identify with that, so maybe the answer is that we take, we take the Oscar ceremony seriously because we win the Oscar.
MR. LEHRER: So it's the ceremony more than the award, itself?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: I think so, mainly because this award, like lots of awards, is often not given to the most deserving person, Marlena Dietrich, Carey Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin never won a competitive award, and people don't mind it that much. I mean, they say they mind it at the time, but the idea that once those awards are given, and the ceremony seems to take over, all sorts of questions of competition, of talent versus celebrity.
MR. LEHRER: Yeah. And it's the movies and it's movie stars, and it's all that sort of frilly kind of silly movie thing, but it's serious business to people, is it not?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Well, certainly it's serious business to the movie industry, but they started this, as you know, to fortify a very powerful business and to establish American dominance in international film, which they did, and an awards ceremony kind of gives a decoration to that. It distracts you from what the real money and the power is.
MR. LEHRER: David Letterman was the host for it last year, and he bombed. What was behind all--why was he such a flop?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: It really was the most interesting thing. I think he flopped because he did not take the Academy Awards ceremony seriously. David Letterman, as you know, succeeds because he does a parody of a talk show. Well, he did a parody of an Oscar host, and we don't want that. Most people did not want that. You want the kind of thing that Bob Hope did and that Johnny Carson did, umm, before him--the idea of taking it seriously and playing along with something that we don't regard as the most important thing in the world but that we do want to see the conventions honored.
MR. LEHRER: Yeah. The--do you watch a lot of movies yourself?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: I do.
MR. LEHRER: You--you watch 'em--you go to the theater to watch 'em--
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Oh, yes.
MR. LEHRER: --or do you watch 'em on videocassette?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Oh, no, it's much more--
MR. LEHRER: What's the difference?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Well, for one thing, you're sitting in the dark, umm, and the idea of sharing a movie with a lot of other people I think is a wonderful experience. It was a particularly wonderful experience when I was a kid and the movie houses looked like old castles with balconies and chandeliers and became a sort of movie in itself. So the idea of a community experience I think is very important to going to the movies.
MR. LEHRER: And that's a very important part of the American life, is it not?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: It always has been, to get out of the house, to join your fellows, join your block or your neighborhood or your town, and have something in common. Television took that over a great deal but not entirely.
MR. LEHRER: But that's why the Oscars are so important, is it not, because it is something that is a uniting thing.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: It is. It's more so than the Super Bowl. I don't know how many people see it in this country, and probably a couple of billion see it around the world. So it's not just an American phenomenon.
MR. LEHRER: It's the ultimate awards ceremony, is it not?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: It is.
MR. LEHRER: And God knows, there are many, many award ceremonies.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: In fact, you know, what's interesting, Henry Mitchell, a wonderful writer for the "Washington Post," said a number of years ago in talking about awards, meaning in a sense that we don't really care about the award, itself. He said the only thing I know about awards is that Mozart never won one.
MR. LEHRER: All right. Have you seen all five of the movies that- -"Babe," "Brave Heart," "Apollo 13," "The Postman" and "Sense & Sensibility?"--have you seen them all?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: I haven't seen "The Postman." I hear that's wonderful, and I have to confess something now for which I surely will get a lot of mail--I hope it goes directly to you. I walked out on "Babe."
MR. LEHRER: You don't like talking pigs?
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Well, I think of pigs mostly as football or breakfast, but most of--most of the--umm--the effect of "Babe" on me was, was nil. I know I'm going to be educated by our viewers.
MR. LEHRER: Yeah, right. But--okay--it's an important night, and you've told us why, and thank you very much.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: I thank you. RECAP
MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Monday, First Lady Hillary Clinton visited U.S. troops in Bosnia. She stressed the importance of the American role in the peace mission there. The United States welcomed the end of China's war games in the Straits of Taiwan. Taiwan announced a plan to ease a ban on direct trade with China. And blizzards closed hundreds of schools, roads, and highways in the upper Great Plains and Midwest. We'll see tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.
Series
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
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NewsHour Productions
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NewsHour Productions (Washington, District of Columbia)
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cpb-aacip/507-m03xs5k63b
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Episode Description
This episode's headline: What Next?; Economic [In]Security? - Historical Views; All That Jazz; Why it Matters. ANCHOR: JIM LEHRER; GUESTS: STANLEY ROTH, U.S. Institute of Peace; NANCY BERNKOPF TUCKER, Georgetown University; ROBERT SAMUELSON, Newsweek; HAYNES JOHNSON, Journalist/Author; MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian; DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian; ROGER ROSENBLATT; CORRESPONDENTS: ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH; CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT; MARGARET WARNER
Date
1996-03-25
Asset type
Episode
Topics
Literature
Global Affairs
Race and Ethnicity
Military Forces and Armaments
Politics and Government
Rights
Copyright NewsHour Productions, LLC. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode)
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00:58:40
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Producing Organization: NewsHour Productions
AAPB Contributor Holdings
NewsHour Productions
Identifier: NH-5491 (NH Show Code)
Format: Betacam
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Duration: 01:00:00;00
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Chicago: “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” 1996-03-25, NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-m03xs5k63b.
MLA: “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” 1996-03-25. NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-m03xs5k63b>.
APA: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Boston, MA: NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-m03xs5k63b