The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. Leading the news this Thursday, President Bush threatened to veto loan guarantees to Israel if Congress refuses to delay them, and the United Nations Sec. General said there was movement toward a Lebanon hostage release deal. We'll have the details in our News Summary in a moment. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: After the News Summary, the third day of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing is our lead story. We have extended excerpts and analysis. Then the risks and benefits of estrogen therapy for women past menopause. We talk to the author of a major new study and we continue our conversations on why Communism failed with scholar-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: President Bush tossed a veto threat into the Israeli loan guarantee debate today. He repeated his desire to delay a congressional vote for 120 days, saying a contentious debate now would raise issues so sensitive they could destroy prospects for a Middle East peace conference. Israel has requested $10 billion in loan guarantees to help settle immigrants from the Soviet Union. Representatives of several American Jewish groups went to Capitol Hill today to lobby for quick action. At a White House news conference, President Bush defended his delay request.

PRES. BUSH: The best thing for peace is to move -- to move the process forward is just to have this deferral. But I'm going to fight for what I believe and it may be popular politically but probably it's not. But that's not the question here. That's not the question is whether it's good 1992 politics. What's important here is that we give this process a chance. And I don't care if I get one vote, I'm going to stand for what I believe here, and I believe the American people will be with me if we put it on this question of principle. And nobody has been a better friend to Israel than the United States and no one will continue to be a better friend than the United States.

MR. LEHRER: Later, Israel's foreign minister, David Levy, said his government was not seeking a confrontation with the United States. He said the request for the loan guarantees was not a provocation against anyone, nor a hindrance to the advancement of the peace process. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: United Nations Sec. Gen. Javier Perez DeCuellar said today he believed a resolution to the hostage issue was closer. In the latest developments, the body of an Israeli serviceman killed in Lebanon was flown to Vienna to be turned over to Israeli officials. In exchange, Israel said it would allow a Palestinian deportee to return home to the West Bank. A Shiite Muslim group yesterday released a photo of 77 year old British hostage Jack Mann. It was the first time any group had acknowledged holding him. Today the kidnappers of American hostage Terry Anderson were also heard from. We have more in this report from Richard Vaughn of Worldwide Television News.

MR. VAUGHN: It's the release of pictures like this one of American hostage Terry Anderson that's prompting speculation that more Westerners may go free. It was released with a statement by Islamic Jihad, which said the group wanted to settle the hostage issue but that Israel's release of Arab prisoners, 51 in all, was not enough. But it's the work of the UN Secretary General, Javier Perez DeCuellar, which seems to be prompting all parties into action. He's been talking to Iran's leaders about the hostage issue and now says he's moving towards an overall solution of the problem.

MR. MacNeil: Today marks the beginning of the sixth year in captivity for American hostage Joseph Cicippio. His abduction has been claimed by the Revolutionary Justice Organization, a group which yesterday released the photo of Jack Mann.

MR. LEHRER: Sec. of State Baker met in Moscow today with the temporary committee running the Soviet economy. Acting Soviet Prime Minister Iban Siyaev said a plan to convert the country to a free market system would be ready in a month. Baker has said aid to the Soviet Union is dependent on such a reform program. After the meeting, Baker had this to say.

SEC. BAKER: I think I have a much better understanding of the work of Mr. Siyaev's committee and the goals and purposes they are pursuing and let me say that these are goals and purposes that we fully support.

MR. LEHRER: European Community officials said they were reviewing a Soviet request for $7 billion in food aid. Soviet Foreign Minister Pankin said today the United States should also pull out of Cuba. He said in Moscow the U.S. should remove its 335 man Marine unit at Guantanamo Bay and stop all maneuvers in that region. President Gorbachev said yesterday 11,000 Soviet troops will be withdrawn from Cuba.

MR. MacNeil: It was the third day of Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas and again the Supreme Court nominee refused to answer questions about his views on abortion. He said it was irrelevant whether he had any personal opinions on the subject. The Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden, Democrat of Delaware, questioned him sharply on the issue of privacy. After it was over, he accused Thomas of "artful dodging." We'll have excerpts from today's session and analysis after the News Summary.

MR. LEHRER: Former CIA official Clair George went to court today. He pleaded innocent to 10 criminal charges that he lied to Congress and to a federal grand jury about CIA involvement in the Iran- Contra Affair. George was No. 3 man at the agency at the time. He was indicted last Friday.

MR. MacNeil: That's it for the News Summary. Now it's on to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, estrogen therapy for women, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan on why Communism failed. FOCUS - UNDER FIRE

MR. LEHRER: This was Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas's third and toughest day in the Senate witness chair. Roger Mudd has our coverage of the hearings, themselves, and the analysis.

MR. MUDD: If ever the Democrats were to slow down the seeming inevitability of the Thomas nomination, this was to be the day. The Democrats think that after two days of interrogation there are now enough contradictions and inconsistencies and backtracking in Thomas's answers to use against him and to damage his credibility.

SEN. HERBERT KOHL, [D] Wisconsin: Good morning, Judge Thomas. I'm glad to see you this morning.

MR. MUDD: The assignment fell first this morning to Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin, the only Democrat who had yet to have his first round of questions. Sen. Kohl began innocently enough.

SEN. KOHL: Judge Thomas, I'd like to ask you why you want this job.

JUDGE CLARENCE THOMAS, Supreme Court Nominee: Senator, umm, being nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States is one of the highest callings in our country. You know, on the -- on my current court, I have occasion to look out the window that faces C Street and there are converted buses that bring in the criminal defendants to our criminal justice system, busload after busload. And you look out and you say to yourself, and I say to myself almost every day, but for the grace of God, there go I. So you feel that you have the same fate or could have as those individuals. So I can walk in their shoes and I could bring something different to the court, and I think it is a tremendous responsibility and it's a humbling responsibility and it's one that if confirmed, I will carry out to the best of my abilities.

SEN. HERBERT KOHL, [D] Wisconsin: In the article by Juan Williams, you said you were troubled with the possibility of being selected for a position because of your race. In that instance you were speaking about your appointments to the head of the Office of Civil Rights and Education and also to head the EEOC. Did you have similar thoughts when you were nominated to the Supreme Court, Judge Thomas?

JUDGE THOMAS: Senator, my concerns were in being selected for the two positions that you stated was that I sensed that it was automatically assumed that since I was black, these are the positions for me. It's expected that I would go to that sort of a position, as opposed to the Energy Department, for example. The President indicated that he nominated me because of the result of his search, as limited or as broad as it may have been, among those individuals, he felt that I was the best qualified. I take him at his word. But I also believe that there is a need, umm, in all of our institutions on the Supreme Court and elsewhere in diversity. I think it's important to our society.

SEN. KOHL: Finally, Judge, with respect to all the things that you have said and written in the past and the things that you have asked us to discount today, my question is, why is it inappropriate for us to make an evaluation of your candidacy based upon all the things that you have written and said, particularly in view of the fact that you've been on the court for only 16 months?

JUDGE THOMAS: I think the record is relevant, but I think it has to be understood that when I was in the executive branch, I was in the executive branch. I'm a member of the judiciary and I think it's a fair question for you to -- from me to you is to see whether or not my policy positions have tainted my role as a judge.

SEN. KOHL: But when I ran for office, I wasn't able to say, umm, don't consider this, don't consider that. The voters wouldn't allow that. They consider everything I've done, everything I've said, and I think that that's the way the process should work in a democracy, and to the extent that you think I'm exaggerating, I'd be interested in your response, and then I'm finished.

JUDGE THOMAS: Senator, I think that if this were an oversight hearing that I could go back and discuss all the policies and tell you that, yes, it's relevant to me going back and running my agency, running the agency that I've been asked to run, permitted to run. When one becomes a judge, the role changes, the roles change. That's why it's different. You're no longer involved in those battles. You're no longer running an agency. You're no longer making policy. You're a judge.

MR. MUDD: Then began the committee's second round and it started with Committee Chairman Biden, who continued to press Thomas on his concept of liberty as a natural right and whether he would apply natural law as a Supreme Court Justice.

SEN. JOE BIDEN, Chairman, Judiciary Committee: Judge, if you're confirmed, you would go about interpreting the Constitution prior to Tuesday, I thought, and now I understand with natural law at least playing some part, as you described it, do you agree that the right to marital and family privacy is a fundamental liberty?

JUDGE THOMAS: Yes.

SEN. BIDEN: Now, am I correct in assuming that you believe that the right of privacy and the right to make decisions about procreation extend to single individuals as well as married couples, the right of privacy?

JUDGE THOMAS: [Pause] The privacy, the kind of intimate privacy that we're talking about.

SEN. BIDEN: The right about specifically procreation.

JUDGE THOMAS: Yes, procreation that we're talking about, I think the court extended in Izenstat V. Baird to non-married individuals.

SEN. BIDEN: Let me read to you from Izenstat the majority opinion. "The marital couple is not an independent entity with the mind and a heart of its own, but an association of two individuals, each with a separate intellectual and emotional make-up. If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single," -- stop here -- same point you make about civil rights -- individual -- "if the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married, or single, to be free from unwarranted government intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as a decision whether to bear or beget a child." Do you quarrel with the quote that I read you from the majority opinion?

JUDGE THOMAS: I don't quarrel with the quote.

SEN. BIDEN: Do you agree with the quote? Let me ask you that.

JUDGE THOMAS: Well, let me --

SEN. BIDEN: This is getting more like a debate than it is --

JUDGE THOMAS: The important point that I'm trying to make, Senator, is that the case was decided on equal protection basis.

SEN. BIDEN: I understand. I'm asking you whether the principle that I read to you which has, in fact, been pointed to and relied upon in other cases is a Constitutional principle with which you agree, which is that single people have the same right of privacy, not equal protection, privacy, as married people on the issue of procreation.

JUDGE THOMAS: I think that the -- the court has so found, and I agree with that.

SEN. BIDEN: All right.

MR. MUDD: At about this point, Biden began to run over his 30 minute time limit and suddenly there was an outburst of political temper.

SENATOR: How's the time, Senator?

SEN. BIDEN: My time's going real well, Senator, thank you. I don't have any idea. Just like you, I'm looking at that little clock and when it gets --

SENATOR: Who keeps this clock?

SEN. BIDEN: Some impartial person that works for me, Senator, back there.

SENATOR: I was afraid of that.

SEN. BIDEN: That's what I thought. Just so we don't have any problem here, I think your friends think you're getting in trouble and they would like me to stop so what I will do is I will stop now. Well, Chairman Danforth suggests we can go forward, but if you would, if we've gone over the time of a half an hour, we should stop, and if not, I'd be delighted to keep going, because I'd like to now talk about another phrase in the Constitution --

SEN. ALAN SIMPSON, [R] Wyoming: -- [in background] like that because when I started this hearing, I emphasized the issue of fairness, and that's what this is --

SEN. BIDEN: If I have gone over 20 minutes -- half an hour, I should stop.

SEN. SIMPSON: I can assure you have. You've gone about thirty- five or forty minutes.

SEN. BIDEN: All right. If I've gone five minutes over, then I stop.

MR. MUDD: The committee then went into recess and Danforth rushed up to Chairman Biden to insist that Clarence Thomas needed a break not because he was in trouble but because he needed relief. But during the break, Republicans told the press they thought Biden's questioning, while not exactly badgering, had been excessive. Following the break, Clarence Thomas must have found the written questions from Republican Strom Thurmond to be welcome ones.

SEN. STROM THURMOND, [R] South Carolina: Judge Thomas, I always want to ask potential judges for their comments on the topic of judicial temperament. How important do you believe this quality is in a judge and what are your views on this topic? Are there any special qualities that you believe you would bring to the Supreme Court if you are confirmed? What do you believe will be the most rewarding aspect of sitting on our nation's highest court? You mentioned yesterday in your opening statement that you wished your grandparents, who were a major influence in your life, could be here today. What do you think your grandfather would say and what advice would he give you?

JUDGE THOMAS: I can only repeat the last time I saw my grandfather was in the hospital and his final words to me -- because I was complaining about the difficulty of doing my job and criticisms and thinking about giving up -- and his last words to me, as I can remember, in 1983, February of '83, were, stand up for what you believe in, and, I think he'd give me the same advice.

MR. MUDD: After lunch, it was Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah who excoriated the Democrats for what he said was their preoccupation with the abortion issue.

SEN. ORRIN HATCH, [R] Utah: It is, in my view, inappropriate to keep this up. Thus far, you have been asked almost or a little bit more than 70 questions on abortion. Now, I don't know why you're being singled out, because Justice Souter was asked 36 questions on abortion. And that was way too many since he hadn't decided how he was going to go either. I just have to say that you've been asked double the questions as Judge Souter and what are we going to have, 64,000 questions on abortion before we're done with this, uh, this approach? I mean, you'd think from listening to what's going on here that that's the only issue the Supreme Court has to decide. And I have to say I think it's a tremendous mistake to condition the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee on any single issue. Now any Senator can ask any question he or she desires to ask, but I think there's a point where it's overdone, and in your particular case, I think you've been singled out, and I've even heard some Senators say that unless you answer the question the way they want you to answer it that they may not vote for you. Well, that's a decision that individual Senator has to make, but I think it's an abominable approach, because I don't think anybody should be rejected or should be voted against for the Supreme Court of the United States on a single issue or a single litmus test.

MR. MUDD: And from Democrat Howard Metzenbaum, who seems to be the point man on the abortion issue, came this response.

SEN. METZENBAUM: My colleague from Utah wants to know why you are being treated differently than Judge Souter with respect to the question of a woman's right to choose. I think it's pretty obvious that -- [background mutterings] -- well, all of them -- that you have written very extensively and have spoken out quite extensively in this area, and I think -- beyond that, I think, uh, there is a greater sense of alarm as to the direction in which the court seems to be moving, and I think to fail to inquire of you in that area would be irresponsible on our part.

MR. MUDD: The committee has now adjourned until tomorrow morning when Judge Thomas returns for what could be his final public appearance before the committee. And now we turn to our two guests this evening, Elaine Jones, deputy director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Dan Rodriguez, a professor of public and administrative law at the University of California at Berkeley for an analysis and comment on today's hearing. Ms. Jones, do you think, in fact, the Democrats are spending too much time on abortion?

MS. JONES: Well, they're spending so much time on it because they can't get any answer. What we're seeing here is that Clarence Thomas discusses any case, any Supreme Court case that he wants to discuss. He has discussed a host of them today. I mean, he talked about the Kansas City case; that's a school desegregation case and a legal issue in that case is in the court pending right now, and if he is, uh, confirmed, he may have to decide on a -- whether or not the court should take that case. He talked about the Massachusetts contraceptive case and whether or not contraceptives can be given to unmarried people and whether that violates a state law to do so. Izenstat Vs. Baird, he spoke on that. Martha Vs. Olsen, the independent counsel case, he spoke about that and, and he's going -- that's a case. Yet, when it comes to choice and Roe Vs. Wade, my issue of how he would decide a case was simply to discuss the Constitutional principles that one would consider in arriving at the decision -- again he brings down the curtain.

MR. MUDD: Prof. Rodriguez, do you think that his position is a correct one in refusing even to discuss the standards used in Roe Vs. Wade?

PROF. RODRIGUEZ: Well, I don't agree that he has refused to discuss the standards. I guess I should say that I don't agree that he's refused to discuss the sorts of issues, the sorts of criteria, the sorts of questions that would arise in cases in connection with abortion. I think it's quite telling that he has discussed not only the court's reasoning in Griswold vs. Connecticut, but in response to questions from Sen. Biden, he has left open the possibility that he understands the liberty clause or the due process clause of the Constitution as understanding that the Constitution may permit evolving consensus, evolving standards. In that sense, he has stopped short of course today, as he did yesterday, of talking about --

MR. MUDD: He's caught really between a rock and a hard place. If he agrees to discuss it, he's going to lose a lot of support on the one side, and if he refuses to discuss it, he's going to lose support from people such as Ms. Jones who think he ought to discuss it. But he's really following a precedent in not discussing it, isn't he?

PROF. RODRIGUEZ: Certainly, certainly. He's following most recently the precedent of Judges Souter and Kennedy.

MS. JONES: But he has written so much about it and he has made preconfirmation statements and praised the Lewis Lehrman article as a splendid example of the application of natural law. I mean, he has -- and so when he has written articles and he's discussed Roe and talked about it and yet, to tell us, you know, the American public and the Senate, that although he's written about it and although that has been a forefront of our thinking and discussion and our national thought for many years now that he has had no discussions on the subject.

MR. MUDD: Well, last night, you both said as I read the transcript and listened to you that you thought Judge Thomas was probably a little bit worse off at the end of yesterday's hearing than he was when he began two, three days ago. What do you think now? How do you think he stands now, Professor?

PROF. RODRIGUEZ: I think today was a very good day for Judge Thomas. But more importantly, it was a very good day for the United States Senate and those citizens who haven't made up their mind on the nomination, because for the first time he has really developed and articulated, in my view, an affirmative approach to deciding the Constitution and deciding Constitutional questions. Again, with reference to his colloquy with Sen. Biden, he explained, I think very well, exactly how he sees the contours of the unenumerated rights in the Constitution. Once again, he didn't answer the abortion question. I don't think, frankly, that that is a consequence of the fact that he is in a dilemma, although I agree with you that he is in a dilemma. I think we have to give him credit for what he says, and that is that to answer a question as to Roe vs. Wade, not only a case that's been decided very recently and very controversially by the court, but a case that is likely to be reconsidered by the court very shortly, that he couldn't answer a question as to Roe and still remain impartial. But to answer your question directly, I think he did himself some great credit today. He did very well.

MS. JONES: On the question of Roe and his refusing to discuss the issues of choice in an open way with the committee, I would -- I would agree with Prof. Rodriguez if he had not discussed other cases that are also controversial, that will appear before the court, that he will have to decide on, but it is a selective discussion. And that's where my disagreement is coming.

MR. MUDD: How do you think he stands now after this third day? Do you think he's in better shape than you thought last night?

MS. JONES: Well, it depends on how closely one listens to Clarence Thomas.

MR. MUDD: Well, you listen closely.

MS. JONES: I've been listening closely. I think that he has several ways of evading, avoiding, and running away from his voluminous preconfirmation record. First, he changes his position and refuses to acknowledge it's a change of position. For example, he said over and over again that natural law can be a basis for Constitutional adjudication. He said it, he's discussed it, he's written it. Secondly, he now gives us also as a way of running from that record an implausible explanation of things. Oh, one, he's never discussed Roe. He urged -- uh, the newest Lehrman article, he didn't really intend the words that he said. He said it was a splendid example of natural law, but that's not what he meant. Then he -- as a third way of running from that record, he said -- makes very nice statements about Supreme Court decisions, certain Supreme Court decisions, and prior to his confirmation, he couldn't find a Supreme Court decision with which he agreed.

MR. MUDD: Prof. Rodriguez, what do you think, if I may ask, what do you think of the quality of the Democratic questioning of him and of the Republican defense of him? Do you think he's really having a rough time with them?

PROF. RODRIGUEZ: I think the quality is very good.

MR. MUDD: Do you?

PROF. RODRIGUEZ: I think that some Senators are more probing than others. I think, frankly, it's somewhat disappointing that with, really with only one exception, that exception being Sen. Specter, we haven't seen anything other than by and large cheerleading from the Republicans. I don't think it's unfortunate in the sense that I think they're not reviewing truly what they think about the nominee. That is to say, I think they agree that he should be confirmed, believed so a few days ago, still believe so now. But most of the questions about natural law, about very controversial issues, about aspects of his philosophy, come up in the context of essentially defensive posture, him trying to explain or defend his record. It would be nice if some of the Republicans -- and I think Sen. Grassley has done this very effectively, I might say -- it would be nice if some of the Republicans said, we too have concerns about the directions of your philosophy, we too have concerns about your approach to the framer's intents in the right to privacy, and ask the questions with somewhat of a Republican spin. We're not seeing that. What we're seeing is, I'm very proud of you, Judge Thomas, I hope you're confirmed, you're being savaged by the Democrats, you're being held to a double standard. So I think the quality of the questioning on the part of the Democrats, who understandably are more concerned to really pin Judge Thomas down on some of these questions, is at a pretty high level. The tone sometimes gets a little bit out of hand. You get the sense that this is more of a cross-examination. I think Sen. Biden mentioned that this morning, it seems.

MR. MUDD: Let me ask Ms. Jones, this afternoon during a break, Howell Heflin, the Alabama Democrat, came out and said listening to Clarence Thomas caused him to think that maybe some of the right wing groups that used to support him -- that do support him would be a little worried by now that he's moved so quickly to the center. Does that sound to be -- has he moved that much, Ms. Jones?

MS. JONES: Roger, I don't think that the right wing has a thing to worry about.

MR. MUDD: You don't?

MS. JONES: I think that they know their man. I think that when I hear a -- particularly a discussion today, and I think Sen. Metzenbaum began that discussion with regard to Johnson vs. Santa Clara County, I mean, that is a case, a 6-3 Supreme Court case --

MR. MUDD: That was a woman's --

MS. JONES: A white female -- a white female who applied for a job as an over the road -- on a road maintenance crew in Santa Clara County.

MR. MUDD: A dispatcher, yes.

MS. JONES: Dispatcher. And 238 white males had previously been hired. And the employer determined that Diane Joyce was one of seven qualified persons for the vacant position that they had. Diane Joyce was given the position. The employer determined that she met its qualifications and reached out to her. The Supreme Court of the United States in a 6-3 decision said that the employment statute, yes, that was within the employment statute, Title VII, for that decision to have been made, and it's perfectly appropriate and legal. Now here comes Judge Thomas. That was a 6- 3 decision in which that woman, Diane Joyce, who was a pioneer and who had been all through -- discussed the harassment in the case that she had gone through -- here he said that she should not have been given that opportunity. He uses the employment statute and turns it on its head to prohibit and limit her opportunity.

MR. MUDD: All right. We're beginning to run out of time. Let me get Prof. Rodriguez to make a comment on the Santa Clara case, if you would. Do you find the judge vulnerable on that case, as he was at that time chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission?

PROF. RODRIGUEZ: No, I don't think so. Although Sen. Kennedy spent the bulk of his questioning time about the Santa Clara case, I didn't get the sense at the end of the question that we really effectively did know exactly what Judge Thomas thinks about the case. There are a number of various dimensions about whether not the actions of Santa Clara County in that case constitute discrimination, since there were no findings of discrimination. But what we really wanted to know is Judge Thomas's attitude toward affirmative action, rather. We're beginning to know some of that. I agree with Ms. Jones. He does have a record. He has made statements on that in the past. But I think we'll see over the next day or maybe next day or two exactly what he thinks about the contours of affirmative action policy in the context of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and that will involve not simply the Johnson case but other cases, similar cases.

MR. MUDD: Let me ask just a final question. Everybody agrees, I think, that Robert Bork was probably his own worst enemy on television. Do you think, Professor, that America has passed the Bork test on TV?

PROF. RODRIGUEZ: I think he is doing very, very well. He's coming across as someone sincere, very tough under the fire of very tough questioning, mostly by Democratic Senators, he's coming across as somebody who's struggling with those issues, trying to come clean with the American people, and develop a Constitutional philosophy and articulate it, so yes, I think he's -- he's passed any, any Bork test.

MR. MUDD: Ms. Jones.

MS. JONES: Well, you'll be not surprised to hear that I disagree with that. I think Clarence is for the first time making these post confirmation statements and his record belies the credibility of these statements he's now making and he has indicated that Diane Joyce should lose that case and right now that case will be a 5-4 decision and with Clarence Thomas on the court, it will go 5-4 the other way and Diane Joyce will lose that case.

MR. MUDD: My credibility is at stake if I don't thank you both, Ms. Jones, and Professor Rodriguez. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the new estrogen study and what went wrong with Communism. FOCUS - AT RISK?

MR. MacNeil: Next tonight, an important finding in the treatment of heart disease in women. A paper published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that women who take estrogen pills after menopause experience a dramatic decrease in their chance of suffering heart disease. The findings are the latest to come from a Boston-based research group that has been studying women's medical issues by tracking the health of tens of thousands of nurses since the mid 1970s. Joining us from Boston is Dr. Meir Stampfer, the lead author of today's article. He's an associate physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard University's School of Public Health. Dr. Stampfer, thank you for joining us.

DR. STAMPFER: Good evening.

MR. MacNeil: Describe the basic finding in simple terms and using the statistics as they apply simply.

DR. STAMPFER: This latest report from the nurses' health study found that women who used estrogen, post menopausal women who used estrogen, had a 44 percent reduction in the rate of heart disease as compared to women who never used estrogen.

MR. MacNeil: That's almost -- putting it another way, that means they would stand half as much a chance of getting heart disease as women who didn't use estrogen, is that --

DR. STAMPFER: That's right.

MR. MacNeil: Almost half as much. Now, had not previous finding from the same long-term study found -- from the same group -- shown that estrogen therapy increases the risk of cancers in women?

DR. STAMPFER: Yes. We have studied this issue also in the nurses' health study because the study is designed to look at a broad spectrum of health outcomes among women. We looked at the issue of estrogen in breast cancer. This was a study done by my colleague, Graham Colditz, and we found that -- two things really. One was that long-term estrogen use was not associated with any increase in risk of breast cancer, but current users of estrogen did experience between a 30 and 40 percent increase in the risk of breast cancer.

MR. MacNeil: All right. And also cancer of the lining of the uterus, is that not so?

DR. STAMPFER: That's another risk that's associated with estrogen use. We have not studied that yet in the nurses' health study because the incidence of this cancer is so low that up till now we haven't had a sufficient number of cases to make a meaningful analysis.

MR. MacNeil: Okay. Well, my purpose in raising that was to ask you: How does the cancer risk compare with the heart disease risk for most women?

DR. STAMPFER: On the average, for most women, the benefit from a reduction in heart disease far outweighs the possible increase in risk of breast cancer.

MR. MacNeil: Why is that?

DR. STAMPFER: The reason is that heart disease is by far the leading cause of death in women. For example, heart disease causes about 38 percent of deaths in women, are attributable to heart disease, whereas, about 4 percent of deaths in women are attributable to breast cancer. Second, the protective effect of estrogen for heart disease is now pretty well established. It's not just our study. Ours is the most recent and the largest study to look at it, but more than a dozen prospective studies have found similar findings. For breast cancer, it's still a controversial issue. Some studies find no effect. Some find an increase. I think we can say with confidence that there is not a large increase in risk of breast cancer associated with estrogen use, but there's a strong suspicion that there may be a small risk.

MR. MacNeil: Just because all this may be a bit confusing, let's just go over it again. The risk of dying from heart disease for women over menopausal age is very much greater than the risk of dying from cancer, so that a significant increase -- or decrease in the heart disease risk is many times more significant, is it, than the increase in the cancer risk, is that -- have I put that correctly?

DR. STAMPFER: You put it very well.

MR. MacNeil: Now let's come down to the woman and her doctor, because this has been the -- whether to advise the treatment with estrogen has been a puzzling and unclear one. How does your new study clarify the position for a doctor who is treating a woman of menopausal age?

DR. STAMPFER: Well, it still remains a difficult decision to grapple with, but what our study does is highlights the importance of the cardio protective effect, in other words, the reduction in risk of heart disease, as a major component that should be considered in this decision making process, because heart disease is so important a factor that can reduce its incidence so strongly has to really be weighed very strongly in making the decision.

MR. MacNeil: But not yet definitive?

DR. STAMPFER: Not definitive, no. And the reason it's not -- there are several reasons for that. The most important is that there is no average woman. Women are different in terms of their risk factors for heart disease, their risk factors for breast cancer, and other, other reasons for or not to take estrogens. So each woman and her physician have to look at their own individual situations to come up with a good decision.

MR. MacNeil: Even with the apparent benefit in terms of reduced heart disease from taking estrogen, are there women who should not take it?

DR. STAMPFER: Well, the only class of women who I think most physicians would say definitely should not take it are women who have a history -- a personal history -- of breast cancer. These women may be at risk for having their cancer stimulated by estrogen therapy. Other women I think should consider it. By no means should they all take estrogen, but I think they all ought to consider it.

MR. MacNeil: Tell us a bit more about how the nurses' study is done. I'm just interested in knowing how you get this information and where are the nurses and how many of them are there.

DR. STAMPFER: Well, as you know, research in women's health issues has lagged behind that of men, particularly for heart disease, and for this reason, the nurses' health study was established in 1976 at Brigham and Women's Hospital under the leadership of Frank Spizer. The study cohort consists of 121,700 U.S. female nurses who were at that time living in 11 large U.S. states. We send them questionnaires every two years and ask them all kinds of questions -- what they eat, how much they exercise, do they die their hair, all sorts of things -- and we also inquire about the onset of a new illness. Whenever they report an illness, we get medical records to confirm this. The study's still going on now. It's in its 15th year and the participants have been fantastic. The whole success of the study rests on the high response rate that participants have given us.

MR. MacNeil: Something I read today suggests that these findings in the case of heart disease are not as definitive as they would be if you had done a scientific controlled study with some women taking estrogen and some women not. Describe the -- what remains uncertain about this kind of study, even though your sample is very large.

DR. STAMPFER: Well, what those comments referred to is the fact that ours is an observational study. In other words, the women, themselves, choose whether or not to take estrogen in consultation with their physicians. We don't assign it. It's not an experiment. Since it's not an experiment, it leaves open the question, are these women somehow different in other respects, in respects that would make them healthier, in other words, is estrogen just a marker of good health, such that only women choose to take it or doctors only select healthy women? Now we, we tried to address that issue by looking at risk factors in the users and non- users of estrogen, and we found that actually the distribution of risk factors among estrogen users was very similar to that of non- users, so we do not believe that there's a strong likelihood that such a selection is taking place. But, nonetheless, it's still not as definitive as an actual experiment which randomly would assign women to, to estrogen or to placebo.

MR. MacNeil: Why should estrogen protect women from heart disease when previous experiments and studies have shown that it doesn't protect men from heart disease?

DR. STAMPFER: That's true. It does not protect men from heart disease. Indeed, there was a randomized trial in the mid 1960s where men were given, men who had had a heart attack, were given estrogen and this trial was stopped because they actually had an increase in risk. Those were very high doses of estrogen, far higher than are used today. But still, I don't know why -- I think it just highlights the difference, that men and women are different, because the evidence among women is very compelling.

MR. MacNeil: Yes. Well, Dr. Stampfer, thank you very much for joining us.

DR. STAMPFER: Thank you. SERIES - THE LIGHT THAT FAILED

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight another of our conversations about what went wrong with Communism, the light that failed. It is with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York. He was a professor of government at Harvard, the U.S. Ambassador to India, among many other things before being elected to the United States Senate. He's the author or editor of 14 books and hundreds of magazine articles, including one in Newsweek in 1979 that predicted the fail of Soviet Communism. Sen. Moynihan, thank you for being with us.

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Was it a bad idea from the start and doomed from the start, or was it a good idea, poorly implemented by human being Communists?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Jim, the most important fact is that it was a wrong idea. The Marxist Leninist doctrine had two central predictions. The first was that socialist production would be more efficient than capitalist production. That we know about. The other less known was that ethnicity, nationality, as they say, would disappear. That was there in the Communist manifesto in 1848. Back in the 1950s, Nathan Glazer and I did a study of the ethnic groups of New York City, figuring if that was going to happen, if the workers of the world were going to merge anywhere, it would be in New York. It didn't. I have a remark; I say that what Carl Marx wrote in the British museum, Nathan Glazer disproved in the New York public library, but while you see or used to see statues of Marx all over the place, you hardly ever see a statue of Nathan Glazer.

MR. LEHRER: What did they get wrong about ethnicity? What did the Communists think was going to happen that they just didn't figure out ahead of time? What was there about the human spirit or whatever that they miscalculated?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: I suppose it was too generous an assumption about the human spirit. Daniel Bell puts it that men in social groups can create a community of love as long as they have others to hate. Freud was clear on this. See, he spoke of, how do you say, homo homoni lupus, man is a wolf to man. And I'm sorry, that is the way the world has been and the way it becomes even more in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It was thought it would disappear. There was a liberal expectancy that it would disappear, a Marxist prediction; it didn't happen.

MR. LEHRER: And they thought, on the ethnic issue, they thought that there was something basic about human beings that could be transmitted as a worker, right? In other words, it didn't matter whether you were Irish --

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Polish or German or whatever.

MR. LEHRER: Right.

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Rosa Luxemborg would say -- the red flag is that because the blood of all men and women is red and religion and language and those things would disappear. They didn't. They can become even more intense in our age than they were in the past. That is the, the event. By the late '70s, Jim, it was clear to them, clear to anybody watching, that their economy was not overtaking us as Kruschev has said, as, in fact, we thought it might, and also that language and religion and nationality was becoming more a form of detachment than it had ever been. And that let you deduce that there was going to be a crisis of belief and that would lead to the crisis of the regime, which it has now done.

MR. LEHRER: What will -- what is there about human beings that, that makes them hang on to their culture and their language and their nationality, that they didn't see?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: I wish we knew more about it. There is in that sense that Marxism was one of those optimistic, utopian, 19th century expectations that all could be worked out easily and friendly-like. There -- as I say, there was a liberal expectation of this kind. It didn't prove true, and what we're going to have to do now in what was the Soviet Union and in the rest of the world is learn to deal with this. We have -- our analysts of the Soviet system and Communism generally tended to take their propositions at face value. We thought they could out produce us. As late as the late '70s, the CIA had the Soviets at 62 percent of our GNP. In 1985, our intelligence community published the information, if you like, that the growth, the per capita GDP in East Germany was higher than West Germany. You know, any taxi driver in Berlin could have told you that wasn't so, because what do taxi drivers know, they know a lot.

MR. LEHRER: What was the flaw there, Senator, in the -- I remember you've written that Kruschev, he really believed that the Soviets were going to bury the West, or bury the United States economically. What caused him to believe that and the other people who believed that, and what was the flaw in their thinking?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Those were their numbers. They had already developed a secrecy system in which they were lying to each other and nobody really knew, but, you know, he could have listened to Allen Dulles, as the director of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency under President Eisenhower. In 1959, Dulles testified in the Congress that the Soviets were growing at 8 to 9 percent a year. That doubles in a decade.

MR. LEHRER: In what way, you mean economically?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Yes. The GNP going up at 8 to 9 --

MR. LEHRER: They were making more things, selling more things, the whole bit.

SEN. MOYNIHAN: And he complained that we weren't putting enough money into weapons; we were wasting our money on consumer goods. They were going to -- all Kruschev needed to do was cite Allen Dulles. We had mirror images. Jorgensen at Harvard has said it was the greatest failure in economics in history, maybe only not being able to deal with the depression in the 1930s.

MR. LEHRER: What was wrong with it? What was wrong with the Communist approach to economics?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: I think you have to go back to those Austrian economists who said they could not produce a pricing system so they never knew what anything was worth. And absent a pricing system, they -- basically they had no information in their system.

MR. LEHRER: Was there a human element in there too? Do human beings require incentives, competition, all of those things that are part of our system, in order to produce, in order to do this kind of thing?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: I think you do. That seems to be the record. You surely require information. You need to know what something costs in order to know what you pay for it or what you charge for it. They, the planning system failed, absolutely failed. It may have failed because it destroyed agriculture in the late '20s, we don't know, but what is the real question is: How come it took us 50 years to find it out?

MR. LEHRER: Yeah.

SEN. MOYNIHAN: I mean, you know, in the 1980s, we were talking about the -- you know, they're two days' drive from Harligen, Texas, and they're coming at us. Good God almighty, they were falling apart!

MR. LEHRER: Are you suggesting that maybe it was, we were politically intentionally blind, because we needed the enemy?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: No.

MR. LEHRER: No?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: No. I think that was the honest judgment of serious people, but also we caught in a secrecy system that we couldn't correct our own mistakes. For 25 years, meaning no unfriendliness, for 25 years, the CIA told the President of the United States everything there was to know about the Soviet Union, excepting the fact they were about to collapse.

MR. LEHRER: Now why would they do that, Senator?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Because that was the information they had.

MR. LEHRER: Where were they getting it? Why was it so flawed?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: We were mostly getting it, in effect, from the Soviets. Their techniques weren't that bad, but the range of error was so great they never insisted, you know, this is a possibility, Mr. President, not a probability. Nobody went over to East Germany to buy a cup of coffee and say, no, I don't think they're doing as well as they do in West Berlin.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Can we Americans and we others of the West take any credit for the fall of Communism?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: Well, no. We could hug ourselves a little bit. You know what I'd like to see, I'd like to see the President come up and speak to a joint session of the Congress and say, all right, now's our moment again, we have been at this since 1918, Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to Russia, to Vladivisak, to Mermansk, along with the allies in 1918, we messed up on Korensky's provisional government, insisting it stay in the war. We set him up for Lenin, but all right, for the first time in almost a century, a horrible century which we thought we'd never get out of, we thought totalitarianism was irreversible, it wasn't -- we're free to choose, do what we want, do what we want -- what do you say we ask ourselves just that question. I'm willing to have another parade just to get it in our head that our institutions which just somehow we resisted the idea that this was happening. A year and a half ago the press secretary at the White House referred to Gorbachev as a drugstore cowboy. There were people in Washington who thought maybe it's a trick, what are they up to. We can get beyond that and be what we want to be.

MR. LEHRER: Looking back on it, there -- the Communist threat and the Communists, themselves, particularly their leaders, were seen as evil people.

SEN. MOYNIHAN: They were plenty evil in their time. The worst were evil beyond the experience of the species, the dark night of Stalin, sure.

MR. LEHRER: If they had not been evil people, could they have brought this thing off, do you think, if the thing had not been taken over by evil people, the idea of Communism, would it have had a chance?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: There's just one thing to say and William Faulk makes this point, that totalitarianism came out of World War I, total war which utterly shocked the species; we thought it was impossible. Total war produced the totalitarian state. It appeared in a defeated country, Russia, at the end of a hideous war in which the -- we'd learned to take control of everything -- didn't have to happen. You know, we always talk about, you know, storming the Winter Palace. When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, they didn't overthrow the czar. The czar had abdicated seven months earlier. They overthrew the democratic government of Korensky.

MR. LEHRER: All right.

SEN. MOYNIHAN: And it was that moment -- you know, it wasn't far away in Germany either, another defeated nation. I think totalitarianism could turn out, Jim, to have been a one time experience for the species, and what a deliverance that idea is, because at mid century, they'll think back.

MR. LEHRER: Do you believe that there's something basic in all human beings, no matter where they come from, that hungers and needs freedom like food?

SEN. MOYNIHAN: I'd like to believe that, but you have to know more than I know about those things. What I could tell you is in 1979 that the Soviet Union was going to break up in the 1980s. That wasn't hard.

MR. LEHRER: Because of the human desire for freedom, was going to throw off totalitarian --

SEN. MOYNIHAN: No, because, because the predictions of Marxism- Leninism were -- was a real time prediction -- you know, the sun will rise in the morning. They had so absolutely failed that you get a great situation -- a pre-revolutionary situation where everybody has private preferences, they don't dare tell others about them, one person speaks them up and speaks out and then suddenly it turns out everybody agrees. It happened in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. You know, this was a living, fighting fate of mid century, but it had died by the '70s.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Sen. Moynihan, thank you very much. I enjoyed it. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again, the main stories of this Thursday, President Bush threatened to veto loan guarantees to Israel if Congress refused his request to delay them. He said a congressional debate on the subject could jeopardize plans for a Middle East peace conference in October. And UN Sec. Gen. Perez DeCuellar said he believed momentum was building towards the release of Western hostages in Lebanon. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night with more Clarence Thomas hearings, plus Gergen & Shields. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.