The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

INTRO

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Once again the Middle East is at the top of the news. Washington says it's concerned about escalating violence in the Persian Gulf following attacks on oil tankers. After giving President Reagan a partial victory on MX, Congress handed him a defeat on nerve gas. Federal regulators announced a $2 billion bailout for the nation's seventh largest bank, Continental Illinois.

Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Our hour tonight is mostly the sum of three main parts. On the Persian Gulf story, The Wall Street Journal's diplomat correspondent David Ignatius is here to help sort through the scary possibilities. Also, Judy Woodruff puts the political past of Walter Mondale under a journalistic microscrope. Essayist Roger Wilkins looks at civil rights and the Supreme Court school desegregation decision 30 years later. And Assistant Attorney General Bradford Reynolds and civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg debate civil rights in the Reagan administration three years later. Persian Gulf Violence -- Oil Crisis Near?

MacNEIL: The scenario Washington has long feared, that the simmering Iran-Iraq war would cause another world oil crisis, looked more real today. The Reagan administration said it was concerned about escalating violence in the Persian Gulf and is considering offering U.S. planes and ships to protect foreign tankers from attack. Yesterday a Saudi tanker was attacked by an Iranian plane, bringing to five the number of tankers hit this week. Oil prices moved sharply higher and the Japanese yen dropped in value, reflecting the heavy dependence of Japan on Middle East oil. One sixth of the noncommunist world's oil goes through the Gulf. Iran today renewed its threat to all shipping in the Gulf if its own shipping was threatened by Iraq. Six Arab oil states held an emergency meeting in Saudi Arabia to discuss the Gulf crisis. They accused Iran of agression and said they would take the matter to the United Nations Security Council.

In Washington, the administration renewed its pledge to keep the Gulf open to shipping, but indicated it was reluctant to use force without backing from Western allies and key Gulf states. At the State Department, spokesman John Hughes said such help had not yet been asked for.

JOHN HUGHES, State Department spokesman: No specific U.S. offer of direct military support has been made, nor has any been requested by any of the Gulf states. We are concerned about what clearly is an escalation of violence, but as I say, I think the mood is -- and I'm not trying to diminish the concern on what is happening there, but I think we are trying to proceed calmly and weigh the true impact of the situation. Understand, for example, some shipping companies have indicated that they may not lift oil in the northern part of the Gulf, but that apparently does not apply to the lower Gulf. That activity continues to go on. The Straits are open. So I think you have to sort of look realistically at what's happening there, plus you have to look realistically at the world market in oil, the abundance of oil. And you have to bear in mind our own strategic supplies. So as I say, I'm not for one minute suggesting that there are not problems there; there are.

MacNEIL: Robert McFarlane, the President's national security advisor, was more specific this morning. He said "The U.S. commitment to prevent the closing of the Gulf remains. The commitment is clear." White House spokesman Larry Speakes said that U.S.-commanded AWACs reconnaissance and control planes are operating in the area to help the Saudis with aerial information. Mobil Oil and several other oil companies have decided to stop sending tankers into the war zone at the northern end of the Gulf.

Jim?

LEHRER: More on where the Persian Gulf story stands tonight from David Ignatius, diplomatic correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. David, how dangerous does it look?

DAVID IGNATIUS: Jim, the danger is certainly there. With yesterday's Iranian attack on a Saudi oil tanker, the worst scenario that the administration has feared since the beginning of this war seemed to be coming true: the Iranian revolution, moving across the Gulf and beginning to attack the lower Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. I think that today we have to say that the really frightening possibilities are still somewhat off the horizon. The Saudis today seem to have decided in Riyadh that they will not request American military assistance, at least notfor the moment. So for the time being the Saudis seem hopeful that diplomacy can somehow diffuse the crisis.

LEHRER: Are there active diplomatic things under way?

Mr. IGNATIUS: Well, since the war began nearly four years ago, there have been repeated diplomatic efforts to reach a settlement. And those continue every few months. At present, various countries, including Japan, which retains fairly good relations with Iran, are understood to be urging some kind of diplomatic negotiations. But I think we have to say that the prospects for settlement remain as remote as always.

LEHRER: Sure. Is the willingness of the administration to render military help to the Saudis and the other Gulf states, is that a reluctant offer or are they eager to do so?

Mr. IGNATIUS: Well, I think they're eager to demonstrate that they are ready and able to stand up to the threat of Iranian attacks on the West's most important shipping lane. I don't think anyone in the administration's eager to rush into a war in the Persian Gulf. But the administration wants to look strong in this crisis, and if the request for help comes, I think it's going to be pretty decisively met.

LEHRER: I read something this morning, it may even have been in your story in The Wall Street Journal, that the reason the Saudis are reluctant to ask the United States for help is they see that more or less as a red flag in front of Khomeini -- "Oh, here are the Americans" and it'll even get worse. Is that accurate?

Mr. IGNATIUS: I think that is accurate. It's characteristic of Saudi diplomacy that they'll do almost anything other than be seen publicly to be siding with the United States against any other major Moslem or Arab power. And we're seeing that now. The Saudis really don't want to publicly embrace the U.S., invite our tactical aircraft into the kingdom and be seen to go to war against Iran with us. That's the last thing they want.

LEHRER: How close do you think -- now, we just heard what John Hughes said at the State Department, putting the best face on this as possible. How close is the Gulf to actually being closed one way or another, either through military action or through high insurance rates or all the other possibilities -- or voluntarily, as some of the oil companies have already begun to do?

Mr. IGNATIUS: Tankers are still moving in the Gulf; the Gulf is not closed. Above all, the narrow strait at the entrance to the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, is open, and I think most people think it's easy to keep it open. The Iranian air force, which currently has perhaps 30 to 50 combat planes that they can put in the air, is going to have trouble militarily stopping all traffic. The problem obviously is the insurance companies' rates have gone up sharply this week and they'll probably go up more, and finally the simple unwillingness of the oil companies to send their big tankers into a volatile war zone. So I suspect that it's going to be economic pressure rather than Iranian military pressure that will close the Gulf if that happens.

LEHRER: Those of us who drive automobiles have one central question that we'd like answered tonight, David. Should we go out and start hoarding gasoline again, per 10 years ago?

Mr. IGNATIUS: Well, the Reagan administration is trying hard not to let that sort of scare mentality develop, and I suppose I should echo them. No one can give good advice on this sort of thing. I think that one can say that the oil market itself, although very concerned, is not in a panic. The prices on the spot market in Europe havejumped around some the last two days. But there's been no price explosion, so I suppose consumers should be careful. But the oil companies are not in a panic.

LEHRER: They're not in a panic. Now, that would not apply, of course, maybe if you were Japanese, you might want to go and get some, right? Because so much of their supply is dependent on that Persian Gulf oil.

Mr. IGNATIUS: So much of their supply is dependent that the Japanese, skilled businessmen as always, are said to have bought up five million barrels on Monday before this crisis exploded, so they have a little bit of a cushion to get them through. But it is true that the Japanese and the Europeans are the ones who really are at risk because of a closure of the Gulf, because that's where their oil comes from.

LEHRER: Difficult question but I'm going to ask it anyhow. We saw what John Hughes said; Robin quoted also what Speakes has said and other people in the administration have said. Obviously they're trying to keep -- and you just said it yourself -- are trying to keep the thing calm. But behind that is there a real strain of worry today?

Mr. IGNATIUS: Well, the administration has been worrying about this chain of events for months. This is probably the most well-planned crisis in terms of contingency planning that the administration has faced.They've sent teams out to the region repeatedly to try to make arrangements with the Saudis and others for exactly what would be done in the event of a crisis. So I think they're certainly worried; they've been worried for a long time. Right now they think it's sensible not to sound worried, to avoid rattling either the oil market or the Saudis. But certainly the worry is there

LEHRER: David Ignatius, thank you very much. Robin?

MacNEIL: After giving President Reagan some of the MX missiles he wanted last night, the House of Representatives said no to nerve gas today. In a 247-to-179 vote, the House for the third consecutive year rejected the President's request to build new chemical weapons. The U.S. has not produced them since 1969. The President argued that new chemical weapons were absolutely essential to keep the pressure on the Soviet Union to negotiate a new treaty banning such weapons. The House didn't agree. Mr. Reagan could take comfort today from his partial victory last night, when by only six votes the House approved 15 MX missiles in place of the 40 the President requested. Commenting this morning, the President said "That's the way they do business up there. Someday maybe they'll get around to doing it right." But Democratic House Speaker Thomas O'Neill, who opposed MX, said "We haven't given up. The year isn't over yet."

Poland today joined the Soviet Union and nine other communist nations in saying it wouldn't come to the Los Angeles Olympic Games. While echoing the reasons the others gave, the Polish announcement was unusual in stressing the disappointment the boycott caused. The Polish Olympic Committee said it was "an unpleasant decision which would also disappoint Poles abroad who deserve our gratitude." The committee recently reported it had received more than $110,000 in contributions, mostly from Poles and Polish Americans in the U.S.

Jim?

LEHRER: Presidents Reagan and de la Madrid put a diplomatic shine on their final day together. The U.S. and Mexican leaders held a closed-door session in Washington with legislators from both countries and talked of their personal friendship, of the candor with which they express their policy differences. Yesterday de la Madrid candidly urged the U.S. to take a diplomatic, nonmilitary approach to Central America.That was also part of the message today from a group of former high-ranking U.S., Central and South American officials. They're called the Inter-American Dialogue and include fromer secretaries of state Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie. Their spokesman at a news conference today was Sol Linowitz, former U.S. ambassador to the OAS and negotiator of the Panama Canal treaty. Linowitz also objected to U.S. aid for the anti-Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua.

SOL LINOWITZ, co-chairman, inter-American Dialogue: We believe that as a concrete step in support of the Contadora process, the United States should immediately end assistance for the military and paramilitary activities of the contras against Nicaragua. The greatest democracy in the hemisphere, in the world, ought to be leading the way to the establishment of free and fair elections in these countries, and not flexing its muscles by trying to show how much military power it can put into a country to achieve a military solution when there is none available. We say that clearly there is an East-West aspect and dimension to the conflict in Central America, but to exaggerate that dimension has a self-fulfilling quality. We should not fall into a credibility trap of our own making.

LEHRER: Also today, there were unconfirmed wire service reports [that] Congress forced the administration to scuttle plans to send 14 more helicopters to the El Salvadoran army. It was to have been a secret transaction but it was cancelled after Democratic House leaders reised objections, the report said. And in El Salvador, a May 23rd trial date was set for the five soldiers accused of murdering four American nuns in December 1980. One of the five, a sergeant, said in an interview today that he and the others are innocent and that they are scapegoats arrested and now to be tried only because of pressure from the United States.

Robin?

MacNEIL: Contintental Illinois, the financially troubled Chicago bank, dropped another bombshell today. It was announced that federal regulators and several major banks have put together a $2 billion financial aid package to help restore depositors' confidence. That's been badly shaken by rumors of the bank's possible collapse. Those rumors began last week and prompted foreign and U.S. depositors to withdraw millions of dollars from the nation's seventh largest bank. A consortium of 24 major banks has also agreed to provide $5.3 billion in a line of credit to Continental. The chairman, David Taylor, told a news conference in Chicago that the package would give the bank time and support to seek a long-term solution of its problems, including the possibility of merging with another financial institution.

DAVID TAYLOR, chairman, Continental Illinois: The program will provide assurance of the capital resources, the liquidity and the time needed to resolve in an orderly and permanent way the bank's problems. This capital will be available for the period necessary to enhance the bank's permanent capital by merger or otherwise.

MacNEIL: Afterward, the bank announced it was suspending divident payments on its common stock.

For other businessmen there was some encouraging news today. Personal incomes in the United States went up by one half of one percent in the month of April, the same as it did in March. And there was an increase of 1.1% in consumer spending in April, a marked recovery from the figure for March, when many shoppers stayed home because of bad weather.

InNew York, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit against a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and a former stockbroker, charging them with profiting from inside tips on Journal stories. The suit alleges that R. Foster Winans, the reporter, received $31,000 for giving tips to Peter Brant, the broker, who helped two investors make $900,000. If the government wins the case, they'll have to pay it all back.

In Washington, the way was cleared for the Senate to pass a compromise package of measures to reduce the federal deficit by $144 billion over three years. The Senate defeated an amendment that would have restored $588 million that was cut from the Medicare program. The vote was 50 to 44.

Jim?

LEHRER: Attorney General William French Smith said to television cameras today what he said officially yesterday, that he would decide, thank you, whether a special prosecutor was needed in the Carter briefing papers case. A federal judge Monday said it was and ordered Smith to appoint one. Yesterday Smith appealed that decision and today outside the White House he explained his reasons.

WILLIAM FRENCH SMITH, attorney general: Well, in this particular case I think we had a judge who also wanted to be attorney general. And we just think his decision was wrong. It's my responsibility to apply the Ethics in Government Act in accordance with its terms. That's exactly what we did in this case. And we think that that is a decision that is the responsibility of the attorney general, and I made it. And we think the judge's decision is wrong; we're appealing it, and we will seek a stay.

REPORTER: Don't you think it has the appearance of something, though, when you as a Republican attorney general are saying that a special prosecutor shouldn't look into the Briefingate case?

Atty. Gen. SMITH: We don't act on the basis of appearances; we act on the basis of what is required by the applicable laws. And that's what we did in this case. Mondale's Record

LEHRER: It was New Jersey day for two of the Democrats who want to be president, while the third, Jesse Jackson, campaigned in California. Those are the two big states with the last big preconvention primary events on June 5th. Gary Hart visited a toxic waste site in New Jersey, where cleaning up such sites and their potential health risk is a major concern and priority. Mondale's New Jersey effort was actually in Washington, where he held a strategy session with six New Jersey congressmen who are supporting him. An overwhelming majority of all Democratic officeholders nationally are supporting Mondale, many because they see him as one of them. Judy Woodruff, in our continuing closeup looks at the candidates, charts the Mondale career in politics and government.

AL EISELE, former Mondale aide: Basically, with Mondale what you see is what you get.

STUART EIZENSTADT, former Carter policy advisor: He's a person who really likes people and politics and the art of politics.

Sen. THOMAS EAGLETON, (D) Missouri: Fritz is a cautious person by nature. I mean, if Fritz were standing at the crap table in Las Vegas -- and they have these bets out there called Hardway 8 and Hardway 6, and they're longshot bets -- you would never see Fritz Mondale be putting a chip on a Hardway 8.

Sen. ROBERT PACKWOOD, (R) Oregon: If you had him as an ally in a fight, you could count on having a whale of an ally. He would do his share of the work. If he was against you in a fight, then he was going to work at it; you knew you had a tough enemy.

JUDY WOODRUFF[voice-over]: The people who have either worked with Walter Mondale or observed him over the years have few disagreements about the kind of public figure he's been. Where they differ is on what his behavior says about the kind of leader he would be. Stuart Eizenstadt, former top policy advisor in the Carter administration, says Mondale would be a forceful president.

Mr. EISENSTADT: Having worked with him over a four-year period, seen him under very difficult circumstances, I saw a person who did have very strongly held beliefs, who expressed them very strongly, and who was willing to take and advised the President to take from time to time, some very difficult positions on issues that he felt were important.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: But former Senator Eugene McCarthy, a longtime Mondale critic, sounds as if he's describing a different person. He says his fellow Minnesotan has never taken an up-front role in politics.

EUGENE McCARTHY, former Senator: He's been an adjective, more or less, all his life, and now they want him to be a noun. And he's finding difficulty. I think he started with Orville Freeman, the governor, and then worked with Humphrey, and he was one of those people who was one of the young people around the party. Then he was appointed assistant attorney general first, and then attorney general, and so on. He went through that series of appointments, you know, and then was made vice president. He again was kind of an agent, say, "Well, I'm not the principal, I'm performing for someone." So it discounted his own personal commitment.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: McCarthy's point, that Mondale launched his public career on the coattails of other politicians, is accurate. After growing up as the son of a poor Methodist minister, Mondale cut his political teeth and Minnesota's Macalester College, where he joined the liberal Democratic Farmer Labor Party and became a protege of Hubert Humphrey. After Humphrey moved to Washington in 1948, Mondale became friends with another Minnesota politician, then-Governor Orville Freeman.

FINLAY LEWIS, Mondale biographer: It was with Freeman that Mondale formed his first really close, important political relationship, and it was Freeman who became Mondale's first benefactor, appointing Mondale to the Minnesota attorney generalship post in 1960.

Sen. THOMAS EAGLETON, (D) Missouri: I met him at a national convention of the 50 state attorneys general. I had just been elected as a very young man, the attorney general of Missouri. And this fellow Mondale came up to me at the first convention that I attended of our group and said "I'm ticked off at you." I said "Why is that?" He said "Well, until you got elected, I" -- Mondale -- "was the youngest attorney general in the United States and now you've stolen my thunder." And from then on we formed a friendship.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton noticed Mondale's ambition even then.

Sen. EAGLETON: I remember discussing with him back at one of those attorneys general conventions the fact that both of us someday would like to end up in the United States Senate, and we said that's where the action is, that's where the decisions are made, that's where maybe someday we might be, God willing.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Mondale didn't have to wait long for his big break. In 1964, then-Senator Humphrey, at the urging of President Lyndon Johnson, asked Mondale to resolve a bitter credentials fight involving the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic national convention. The goal was to avoid a messy racial confrontation on the convention floor.

Mr. LEWIS: Mondale worked out a compromise which satisfied nobody on the extremes but was reasonable enough so that the moderates on both sides came together, and the thing worked; it flew at the convention, and the convention was held together. Johnson was duly appreciative and Humphrey was named vice president. That piece of work was greatly appreciated by Humphrey, and he then went to work on Rolvaag, who was the governor of Minnesota, to try to get Rolvaag to appoint Mondale to Humphrey's seat in the Senate.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Mondale was appointed to the Senate in 1964. From the beginning, his was a record of calculation and caution.

Mr. EISELE: I think that Humphrey and others certainly counseled him to not make the mistakes that he, Humphrey, had made, which was to barge into the Senate and try to run the place, as Humphrey did when he came in 1948. And so he took a fairly cautious approach, which was to learn the ropes and to get comfortable with it and find out what it was all about.

Mr. LEWIS: He made his way towards the finance committee and the budget committee, because he recognized that that was, you know, the crux of the matter in any legislative body. I mean that's really where the cutting decisions are made, and he wanted to be there to make his mark on those kinds of issues.

Sen. EAGLETON: He knew that in order to get something accomplished, amendments or bills just didn't speak for themselves by reason of their introduction, that it took a lot of, you know, blood, sweat and tears to get an amendment passed, and he knew how to get the job done. He's one of the most effective operators at legislation that I've seen since I've been here. He doesn't leave things to happenstance and chance. He in that sense is very purposeful, one might say very methodical.

Mr. EISELE: He's not -- he doesn't seek out confrontation as some politicians and senators do. He seeks out compromise and common ground, common denominators.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Eugene McCarthy says it wasn't just confrontation that Mondale avoided in the projects he took on, but substance as well.

Sen. McCARTHY: The budget resolution, the new way to handle the budget, as though that was going to somehow balance it or make it work. The federal election law, which is supposed to clean up politics. The reorganization of Congress. The code of ethics. These are things not only that he supported, but he was active, I think, in securing the passage of some of these. And mostly all of them have to do with procedure, and once you started looking at the substantive things that he took on, you find it pretty thin.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Republican Senator Robert Packwood calls Mondale a careful legislator, even though he disagrees with Mondale's liberal philosophy.

Sen. PACKWOOD: So long as you understand he's very, very liberal, and he works from that viewpoint. He is a traditional New Deal, Great Society, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson liberal, and the answer to problems is government. Now, so long as you understand that viewpoint, he was very, very good as an exponent of that viewpoint, and he crafted his legislation accordingly.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: But Mondale biographer Finlay Lewis says what was driving Mondale in those days was an ambition to move beyond the Senate.

Mr. LEWIS: His record as a senator is a mixed one, and it's certainly not an outstanding record; it's not an indifferent record either. So mainly it was his ambition, I think, that stamped him. He was somebody whose eyes were set on a goal other than simply being an effective senator for the rest of his life.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Even so, it was Mondale's actions in the Senate tha helped shape Washington's impressions of him. One was that when it came to a tough fight, Mondale often walked away.

Mr. ELSELE: He has never sought out controversy, he has never tried to stir up controversy for its own sake.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Al Eisele worked for Mondale while he was vice president. But before he did, he covered him as a reporter.And a story Eisele wrote in 1974 quoted someone as saying that when Mondale was undergoing an appendectomy, he hoped the doctor would put in some guts nefore he sewed him back up.

[on camera] One of the incidents used to back up that criticism was Mondale's refusal in 1975 to help lead the fight for repeal of a major tax loophole, the oil depletion allowance. Mondale's defenders said he didn't want to alienate the chairman of the tax committee, Russell Long, from the oil-producing state of Louisiana, because he needed Long for other fights he had to make. But Mondale critics cite that as evidence of his true stripes. Finlay Lewis recalls another example.

Mr. LEWIS: When Mondale took on this whole complex of issues dealing with the plight of migrant workers, migrant farmers, he did a two-year study of these migrant conditions, and the evidence was just appalling; about malnutrition and illiteracy and the whole sort of complement of things that one associates with the plight of the powerless. Having done all that and having built a record which was really damning in its depth and eloquence of detail, Mondale essentially did nothing with it. He did nothing with it because there was no constituency that he could mobilize, and I think that's an example of his maybe folding up his tent a little bit early and not really being willing to, if necessary, become a, you know, kamikaze pilot on the issues.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Stuart Eizenstadt, who worked with Mondale in the White House, says the criticism about his lacking courage is baseless.

Mr. EIZENSTADT: No, I don't think it's a fair criticism. I suspect that in part it may come from his basic character, perhaps his Norwegian background, which is nonflamboyant, rather unemotional to the public, and that may give the false impression that he doesn't feel strongly about particular issues.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Good friend Thomas Eagleton says Mondale did show guts when it counted, except on one issue, the Vietnam War.

Sen. EAGLETON: I think Vietnam, in all candor, was for a long while a blind spot with Fritz Mondale, attributable in large measure to his devoted loyalty to Hubert Humphrey.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Mondale himself has said his waiting until late 1969 to come out against the war was the worst mistake of his career. Vietnam aside, Mondale's relationship with Humphrey left a mark on him. How much of a mark is disputed.

Sen. EAGLETON: I think the Humphrey tradition -- assisting the poor, assisting the needy, vigorous support of civil rights legislation, etcetera -- I think that tradition helped mold Fritz Mondale's thought pattern, and I think that thought pattern is still part of his political psyche.

Mr. LEWIS: I think the relationship between Humphrey and Mondale, which is often described as a father-son relationship, is overstated. There was a kind of protege relationship, but they weren't really that close in a personal sense until the final years of Humphrey's life. They were two different people; their personalities were very different. And I think there was a kind of envy, perhaps, on Humphrey's part. Humphrey, you know, made his way, every step of the way up the political ladder by, you know, fighting the establishment, tough political campaigns. He really bled. And at one point Humphrey was talking to somebody about the way Mondale was pursuing the presidency in 1974, and he said, you know, "I really wonder if Fritz has the fire in the belly."

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Humphrey's assessment turned out to be right on the mark. Mondale dropped out of the presidential race in 1974, saying he didn't have the stomach for it.

Sen. WALTER MONDALE [1974]: Basically I found that I did not have the over-whelming desire to be president which is essential for the kind of campaign that must be waged.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: That only reinforced criticism that Mondale wasn't tough enough. It was a notion he tried to defuse when he announced last year that he was going after the presidency again.

Vice Pres. MONDALE [1983]: I know the American people, and I know myself. And I am ready, I am ready to be president of the United States.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: But simply saying he was ready wasn't enough to convince some Democrats. For them it wasn't until Mondale's fighting comeback after he lost the New Hampshire primary this year that they believed he had the fire in his belly after all.

Vice Pres. MONDALE [to Gary Hart]: When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad, "Where's the beef?"

Sen. GARY HART: Yeah?

WOODRUFF: What may ultimately be more of a problem for Mondale, however, is the perception that he's so much a part of where the Democratic Party has been that he won't be able to lead the party into the future.

Mr. ELSELE: I think he's able to look at some of the Democratic Party's approaches to problems and approaches to governance and to apply those to modern-day problems. So I think he's an innovator in that sense. I don't think he's an innovator in the sense of coming up with some brand new fresh ideas, saying here's the answer to today's problems.

Sen. PACKWOOD: I still worry about that inbred liberalism of his. This is not 1935, this is not 1965, and what we tried in those days will not solve the problems of today. And I think he still wants to look back.

WOODRUFF [voice-over]: Some Mondale watchers agree; others don't at all.

Mr. LEWIS: He has spent all his adult life working within the confines of a system which survives on compromise and accommodation. It'd be very hard for him, I think, to kind of break out and become a strategic -- you know, sort of frame a strategic world vision as opposed to kind of tactically tinkering with it and trying to fine-tune it and make it work more effectively.

Mr. EIZENSTADT: One of the tests of his presidency and whether he gets the presidency is going to be whether or not he can convince the American people, which I think he will be able to, that he is not bound to old solutions and that he is going to move that part of the Democratic Party into a posture where it is prepared to face the very new economic and social realities that we face in this country.

LEHRER: And still to come tonight, Roger Wilkins' essay on the 30 years since the schools were ordered desegregated, and the administration's top civil rights official and a top civil rights lawyer take a look at what's still to be done.

[Video Postcard -- Belle Plaine, Kansas]

MacNEIL: At Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a court martial returned a verdict of guilty today against the Black Muslim Marine who said he would not go to Lebanon because he was afraid Allah would punish him for fighting against other Moslems. Corporal Alfred Griffin, who was missing when his unit was shipped out, was convicted of absence without leave and missing a troop movement. He was sentenced to four months in prison of hard labor, fines of $2,370, and dismissal from the service on grounds of bad conduct.

In Washington, 10 members of the Alabama chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, including the state grand chaplain, were charged with civil rights violations in a clash with black marchers five years ago. A grand jury indictment said the 10 went to Decatur. Alabama, with guns and clubs to break up a march organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in support of a black man charged with raping a white woman. In the melee, two black marchers and two Klansmen suffered gunshot wounds and five law enforcement officers were injured. The indictment was handed up just nine days before the grand jury's power to act would have expired under the statute of limitations.

Jim? School Desegregation -- Thirty Years Later

LEHRER: Two sentences of history became history 30 years ago today. "In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, they were the heart of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, eight-year-old Linda Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. She wanted to attend the public school in her neighborhood, but she could not because she was black. The Supreme Court declared that wrong and that segregated schools in Topeka or anywhere else in the United States were illegal. The country has not been the same since. Some personal words about it now from Roger Wilkins.

ROGER WILKINS: On the afternoon of May 17, 1954, my classmate and drinking buddy Dan Weinberger grabbed me in a hallway in Hutchins Hall at the University of Michigan Law School and danced me around while he exulted, "We won, we won." Dan didn't have to tell me who "we" were or what it was that we had won. We were Jewish, worldly-wise Dan from Chicago; innocent and idealistic Roger from Grand Rapids; our uptight wasp dean; Jackie Robinson, who was still playing baseball; and wven the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who didn't like the decision one bit. All of us together had won when the Supreme Court decided that day in Brown vs. Board of Education that public school segregation was unconstitutional. And what we had won was not just an end to segregation; it was also the end to the idea that the basic law of the United States required that blacks be treated separately and sanctioned the practice that separateness could be as degrading as the custom of any particular community cared to make it.

Dan had been clear all along about what the Brown decision would do for him. "My kids, when I have them," he had some day over coffee, "won't have to wait until they're army vets and in law school to have the pleasure of having friends who aren't white." There was no question in my mind about what I had won. I was 22 years old and had been born into segregation in Kansas City. During my early life, the dictum in the Dred Scot case, perpetuated by the decision in Plessey vs. Ferguson, which permitted segregation, had been drummed into my spirit by the little ordinary events of my daily life. In the Dred Scot case, Chief Justice Roger Tawney had written that blacks were considered to be "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

When I was five, the authorities in my city put me on a bus and sent me past any number of nice-looking schools for white children, down to the colored section to a beat-up old school which was near a club where a man named Bill Basie had just become a Count. The message burned into my young soul was that power and moral order had something to do with each other, and that the people who relegated me and those who looked like me to hand-me-down lives had the right to do what they were doing because they were somehow better than I. The lesson was clear: it was their country, not mine. Because we had been taught that ours was a law-abiding nation under a government of laws, Dan and I naively thought that the Supreme Court's decision would cause massive change to occur immediately. And my wife, who was than a 12-year-old eighth-grade pupil in Norfolk expected that she would be enrolled in an integrated school the following fall. Instead, the people who ran her state designed the strategy of massive resistance, so Patricia finished high school five years later never having seen the inside of an integrated school in Virginia.

Well, it's been a long time since Thurgood Marshall and his team of black lawyers and white lawyers paid the greatest possible tribute to our nation by rebelling against the old order through the courts on the basis of our laws and our Constitution. And yet there remains more segregation and racially based injustice and equality than I then could have imagined there would be. At least as much ingenuity and energy have been thrown into the effort to thwart the drive for equal justice as have been invested in the effort to achieve it. Nevertheless, Dan Weinberger and I were not wrong. We did all win that decision day. America is different and better. The decision made the 14th Amendment into an instrument for giving America the talents not just of blacks, for whom it was intended, but of women, of the handicapped, of gays and of other minorities as well. And though the spirit of Roger Tawney is not yet entirely dead in this land, because of Brown there are stronger people here to fight it. Amy, my oldest child, who was born five years after the decision and who fights self-confidently for economic and social justice in Massachusetts, has no doubts that this is her country. And I suspect that Dan Weinberger has had similar experiences. Our children are bigger and richer because of that decision 30 years ago, and so is our country.

MacNEIL: Thirty years later the argument still rages over how to achieve racially balanced schools, an argument reflected in two very different reports published today. The National Institute of Education found that desegregation did not help black children in mathematics and improved their reading skills only slightly. The report was prepared for the Reagan administration, which has opposed mandatory busing and favored voluntary desegregation plans.But another report, by the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, found that desegregation, including mandatory busing, was working. NEA president Mary Futrell, in releasing the study, attacked the administration's record.

MARY FUTRELL, National Education Association: Since the 1954 Brown decision, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have shouldered the responsibility of leadership in upholding the law of the land. But the present administration unfortunately has dragged its feet and in some instances even stepped backward. Our panel has some recommendations for the Reagan administration. We believe that the chief executive officer of our nation must set the tone for achieving desegregation in all the nation's schools. The President must direct the secretary of education, develop a timely desegregation plan, and initiate administrative proceedings to cut off federal funds from school districts that practice segregation.

MacNEIL: The man behind the Reagan administration's school desegregation policy is William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division. Mr. Reynolds, how do you reply to that charge by Mrs. Futrell, that your administration is dragging its feet, even stepping backwards on desegregation?

WILLIAM BRADFORD REYNOLDS: Well, I think that the administration's record in the school desegregation area belies that contention. I would say to Mrs. Futrell and everybody else that what this administration has done is really taken the next step and the necessary step forward to realize the full legacy of Brown vs. Board of Education. We have gone through a period where there was a dragging of feet as the clip at the earlier part of the show showed. We've gone through a period of forced mandatory busing that has sought to desegregate schools, and we have come up short in both of those efforts. What this administration has done is presented an alternative way through the use, primarily, of magnet schools and emphasis on educational improvement, to desegregate the school systems and to fulfill the promise of Brown, which is to give to everybody in these school systems, whatever their color and whatever their race and whatever their sex, to give these individuals, these students, a meaningful quality-enhanced education in a desegregated environment. Something that the busing decrees and the forced busing technique has not done and has failed to fulfill. And I think that the real promise of Brown is on the horizon now and will be fulfilled with this alternative.

MacNEIL: In the opinion of your division, Mr. Reynolds, how incomplete is desegregation 30 years after Brown?

Mr. REYNOLDS: Well, I think that the desegregation effort that was begun with Brown vs. Board of Education has indeed taken great strides, and I believe that some tremendous gains have been made. There is still more to be done. There are still areas where schools are segregated and a desegregation effort has to be made, and those are indeed being made. But I think we have made tremendous progress and tremendous strides, and I think that with this new approach that presents a meaningful alternative, takes the burden off of all the black students in the school system, who are the ones that are being forced to go long distances on bus rides to get to their educational opportunities -- take that burden off and emphasize education, that we will be able to realize the full meaning of Brown.

MacNEIL: You say there are school districts where there are still schools segregated. Is that in willful disregard of Brown and of government compliance efforts, or is it because of de facto segregation through economic or class segregation or geographic segregation?

Mr. REYNOLDS: Well, I think that what Brown vs. Board of Education and the other court decisios require us to do is to look at those situations where there are intentionally segregated school systems.

MacNEIL: And there are some of those still?

Mr. REYNOLDS: And I think that there cerainly are some of those. The law does indeed permit school systems to exist where you have predominantly one-race schools that are not the product of intentional segregation by the authorities. And those are not areas that I think we would look at or indeed that the law would say that you would look at.

MacNEIL: Are voluntary plans and magnet schools adequate to combat segregation where it is still willful or intended?

Mr. REYNOLDS: Very definitely. And I think this is one of the exciting things that we have seen with our program. You can indeed combat segregation; you can enhance the whole desegregation effort and you can do it by improving the quality of education throughout the system, by a comprehensive magnet program, a voluntary transfer program that gets the community involved and participating in the system, that keeps people in the public school system rather than fleeing from the public school system, and really as a result does provide a very healthy educational environment in a desegregated situation.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Next, a man directly involved in the Brown decision as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. He's Jack Greenberg, who is still with the fund as director and thus still involved in the same issues. How would you assess the extent of desegregation since Brown, Mr. Greenberg?

JACK GREENBERG: Well, I hope you'll permit me a little bit of history, because I think what Mr. Reynolds says and the administration's position is the direct descendant of a whole series of evasive concepts which in substance amount to a denial of the spirit of Brown. We have to remember, we're all applauding Brown today, but when the decision came down in 1954, it was generally denounced. There was a congressional manifesto, there was the impeach Earl Warren movement, and so forth. When Little Rock came there were those in the South who got up with doctrines of interposition and nullification, saying states' rights. Nowhere saying that it's right to segregate people or to treat them as inferior, but one principle or another after being offered. When the civil rights acts were passed in 1965, Ronald Reagan, who was then active in politics, was against the Voting Rights Act because it interfered with states' rights. He was against the Public Accommodations Act because it interfered with private property and so forth. And now those who express the legacy of that political philosophy are against school integration and the means to achieve it, which sometimes involves transportation. And so all school integration is characterized as forced busing and counterpoised to that is offered magnet schools.

Now, busing, as the NEA indicated, is frequently successful. The RAND Corporation has demonstrated it's very often successful. Sometimes it's not. Magnet schools sometimes are successful. The point is, one should have a program in which one seeks to achieve integration, not which one characterizes --

LEHRER: Is it your position that Mr. Reynolds and the Reagan administration are not seeking to achieve integration?

Mr. GREENBERG: I think that's quite manifest. If one looks at the whole category, the list.The Bob Jones decision giving tax exemption to segregated institutions. Foot dragging on the Voting Rights Act was the most extensive form, and coming along at the last moment when there was no alternative. The gutting of the Civil Rights Commission. And now the -- we're in a lot of school cases, and Mr. Reynolds' division I think is quite well aware of the fact that usually they oppose us. And we attempted to interevene in one case in Charleston in which he instructed his lawyers to "make us jump through all the hoops." That is not what I would call an effort to try to achieve integration, but it's an effort to satisfy a constituency that doesn't like integration.

LEHRER: Well, whether they like integration or not, whether anybody likes integration or not, let me get back to my original question. How would you assess the state of integration in the 30 years since that Brown decision? You heard what Mr. Reynolds said.

Mr. GREENBERG: Yes. I would say that the school integration in the South, where about half the black population is, in the small towns and rural areas is pretty good. In the big cities both north and south, particularly where there are large ghettos, it is poor. It is inhibited in many places by urban-suburban district lines and so forth. But it's a continuous process. Populations move, political efforts are made for one reason or another to try to undo what the decision has done; sometimes it happens accidentally, not purposely. The effort to achieve justice is one that you have to keep working at. Brown has had enormous success outside the school area.As we know, it's transformed the country from one --

LEHRER: But there are still people resisting. And you would include the Reagan administration.

Mr. GREENBERG: Oh yes, certainly. And the interesting thing is, just as in 1954, they're resisting on principled grounds which purport to have nothing to do with the issue. States' rights, legislative supremacy, federalism. Nobody says we don't want the black people to be rubbing shoulders with the white people.

LEHRER: Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Mr. Reynolds, how do you answer that? It's a big charge. You're trying to satisfy constituencies that dislike integration and it's manifest that you're not trying to achieve integration.

Mr. REYNOLDS: Well, again, I would go back to the point that I made earlier. We have looked very hard and very long, as have a lot of others, at what has happened when the forced busing remedy has been used in order to achieve integration. And the history of that 10-year span, where we have really emphasized busing, has shown that that remedy has been counterproductive in so many ways that it has really caused resegregation rather than desegregation in major metropolitan areas. In fact, I would agree with Mr. Greenberg that our principal problem is in the large metropolitan areas, and that's because many of them have been subjected to these busing decrees. You've had a tremendous degree of white flight, and you wind up with almost 85-90 percent black communities in the schools, and desegregation in that kind of an environment is virtually impossible to accomplish. Chicago is a very good example. What we have done, taking Chicago as one example, is to substitute an alternative remedy that indeed is proving to desegregate the systems by attracting people from outside the cities into the cities to these magnet schools, which are schools that by their curriculum attract people, to attract whites back into the inner city to go to these schools to get an education, and at the same time to attract black students into the white areas in order to get the kind of education that they're desperately searching for. And we find that this is indeed doing wonders in terms of enhancing desegregation.

MacNEIL: Mr. Greenberg?

Mr. GREENBERG: Well, now, a magnet school can be a magnet only if it's somehow attractive and attracts people, as a magnet does. The Reagan administration has slashed educational budgets severely, making magnets quite difficult to achieve. And the fact is, I don't disparage magnet schools. Sometimes a magnet school is the remedy.Sometimes transportation is the remedy rather than the pejorative term, forced massive busing. One ought to use such remedies as they've available to achieve integration. But to characterize all integration as massive forced busing and say that there is a remedy of magnet schools with no money to support them, I think supports my analysis, which is that they don't like integration very much and they're trying to satisfy people who don't.

MacNEIL: Mr. Reynolds?

Mr. REYNOLDS: Well, again I would repeat, that we are indeed for integration. We're desegregating all the school systems. But the real promise of Brown that has been overlooked, I think, for so many years, is the educational promise, and you have to include with the desegregation objective, getting enhanced quality education to all the children in that school system. And it seems to me that we have lost sight of that by being preoccupied with transportation, and now what this administration is saying is we're going to couple the desegregation objective and we're going to -- with the education objective, and the two hand in hand are going to be the program that we put in place.

MacNEIL: Mr. Greenberg, how do you reply to Mr. Reynolds' point that busing, transportation, whatever you call it, has often exacerbated the problem by driving -- by creating more white flight from central cities and so on?

Mr. GREENBERG: Well, I think that's really very questionable. New York City has had white flight; it's never had busing orders. Chicago never had busing orders.In the '50s and the '60s there was a natural migration caused by a great variety of causes of white people from the cities to suburban areas. So to blame that on busing is manifestly untrue in the examples I gave you and many others. Charlotte, North Carolina, is a marvelous example. Charlotte was the first community to have busing, and there hasn't been an integration issue there. No one has run on an anti-integration ticket since things have settled down there. Black and white reading scores and all other measurable indicators have gone up, and children are bused to school. There's no necessary connection. There is a connection, if one tries to exploit it and use it as a shibboleth to attack integration.

MacNEIL: Mr. Reynolds? He says busing does work.

Mr. REYNOLDS: And I would agree that there are certainly places where busing works. But I think that the overwhelming majority of places where it has been tried, the burden has fallen in an inordinate way on the black families. It has not worked well. The NEA study that just came out today found three school districts where it worked. There are any number of studies that have found many, many, many more school districts where it has not worked. And our view is that when you have a scheme, remedial scheme that is coming up a failure in so many places, that it's time responsibly -- and collectively, I would say -- for everyone to look for an alternative that is going to avoid the kind of social disruption that comes with the busing remedy, and to arrive at an alternative that will indeed fulfill the full promise of Brown that 30 years ago was given to this country.

MacNEIL: In the time we have left I'd like to ask each of you gentlemento look to the future. We're here 30 years today after Brown. With the problem that remains -- and you've both measured it in a different way -- how soon do you see, Mr. Reynolds, starting with you, the time coming when your department of the Justice Department will be able to relax and stop pushing this issue?

Mr. REYNOLDS: Well, I don't know at this time that I could say comfortably that I could pick a date. I think that the civil rights division has always been pushing from the time it was created in 1957 and I see it in the foreseeable future continuing to push. I do believe that with the new approach that we have taken and that I think is being taken across the board with regard to the whole desegregation effort, that there is more promise today that we are going to get to a resolution hat is what we would all to have by now -- get to that resolution in the future, but I could not predict at this time when anybody is going to feel comfortable enough to relax and not to continue to pursue this mandate of Brown.

MacNEIL: How do you see the future, Mr. Greenberg?

Mr. GREENBERG: Well, I'd like to first say Mr. Reynolds made my point. Seattle is one of those communities where busing works well, yet he attacked the Seattle plan in the Supreme Court of the United States. I see the thing developing out of enough -- sort of a flank attack coming out of Brown. The massive back political involvement which we've seen this year through Jesse Jackson but which will continue through other candidates and other means in years to come, I think now will become the principal engine to effect change. And I think black people really want to live in an integrated society and that change will take the form of a transition to greater integration.

MacNEIL: I'd like to thank you both, Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Reynolds, for joining us. Jim?

LEHRER: The Senate late this afternoon passed a $144 billion deficit reduction package. The three-year plan includes a $48 billion tax hike.

A final look now at other major stories this Thursday. There is rising concern about the rising violence in the Persian Guif following the attack by Iranian planes on a Saudi tanker.

President Reagan got what he wanted yesterday on the MX but lost in Congress today on nerve gas.

And the federal government announced a $2 billion bailout of the Continental Bank of Illinois, the nation's seventh largest bank.

Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: Good night, Jim. That's our NewsHour tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.