The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight excerpts from President Clinton's news conference; analysis by Mark Shields & Paul Gigot; a Kwame Holman report on the problems of the District of Columbia; a David Gergen dialogue about African American writing, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay on painting for service. It all follows our summary of the news this Friday. NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: President Clinton defended his campaign's fund- raising practices today. He did so at a 50-minute news conference in the White House East Room. He said raising money for political campaigns was not inherently wrong, and Vice President Gore did not do anything wrong when he made solicitation calls from a White House phone but charged them to a campaign credit card. The President said he did not rule out the possibility that he too may have made such calls.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I don't like to raise funds in that way. I never have liked it very much. I prefer to meet with people face to face, talk to them, and deal with them in that way. And I also frankly was not busy I think most of the times that it's been raised with me. But I can't say over the--all the hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of phone calls I made in the last four years that I never said to anybody when I was talking to them, well, we need your help, or I hope you'll help us.

JIM LEHRER: We'll have extended excerpts from that news conference right after this News Summary. The President also said today's employment numbers underscored a healthy economy. The Labor Department reported unemployment fell .1 percent in February to 5.3 percent. There were 339,000 new jobs added to business payrolls. A 10 percent federal excise tax on domestic airline flights was reinstated today, a tax that expired at the end of last year, but Congress voted it back to raise $3 billion for airport safety improvements. Several major air carriers immediately raised ticket prices. Other airlines said they would not do so. United Parcel Service announced today it is getting into the passenger airline business. The delivery service said it will refit its cargo planes with seats. They will be available for charter flights booked by tour operators. Weekend passenger trips are scheduled to begin next week. On the flood story today, the Ohio River crested in Louisville, Kentucky, 16 feet above flood stage. Forecasters expect more rain over the weekend. National Guard troops helped fill sandbags for use farther down river. Medical teams offered free diphtheria and tetanus shots to flood victims and rescue workers. In Ohio, many residents returned home to survey the damage now estimated in the tens of millions of dollars. Overseas in Albania today armed rebels in the South ignored the cease-fire and amnesty called for yesterday by President Sali Berisha and opposition leaders. We have more in this report by Gaby Rado of Independent Television News.

GABY RADO, ITN: Not a great deal of attention was being paid to President Berisha's demands as the clock began counting down on his 48-hour ultimatum this morning. Opposition fighters were being fed by their friends and neighbors from the town's dwindling stocks. On this rooftop supplies of weapons and ammunition were far more plentiful. As to the deal whereby the rebellious townspeople lay down their arms while government forces holed back for two days, there was defiant contempt.

SPOKESMAN: [speaking through interpreter] People of Vlora will only hand over their guns if Berisha and his entire government resign, and he comes here in person to collect them. We are strong people, and we're sure we're going to win. And when we do, we will demand return of our money which was stolen by Berisha.

GABY RADO: A rally was held on Vlora's main square, where the towns' newly-appointed leadership read out its response to President Berisha's announcement. It said that the fighters would not lay down their arms until a government of technocrats was appointed to rule Albania, the message echoes by the crowds being that it should be untainted by links to the President.

JIM LEHRER: In Jerusalem today about 2,000 Palestinians and some Israeli leftists held a peaceful protest at the site of a planned the Har Homa housing development. Security forces were deployed but no violence occurred. The demonstrators were protesting the building of 6500 apartments for Jewish inhabitants. In New York, the United Nations Security Council was debating a European resolution criticizing Israel for the housing plan. In China today a bomb went off on a Beijing bus, killing two people and injuring at least eight during the evening rush hour. There was no claim of responsibility. The bombing was similar to other incidents in the western region of Zinging. Police believe Muslim separatists carried out the attacks there. Michael Manley is dead. The former prime minister of Jamaica died last night of complications from prostate cancer. He was 72 years old. He served two terms as a socialist prime minister from '72 to 1980 when he was defeated by a conservative. Manley re-emerged in 1989 as a pro-business candidate and won a third term. He resigned for health reasons in 1992. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the President's news conference, Shields & Gigot, troubles in the District of Columbia, a David Gergen dialogue, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay. FOCUS - Q&A

JIM LEHRER: President Clinton's afternoon news conference is our lead story tonight. He fielded questions for 50 minutes in the East Room of the White House. Most had to do with campaign fund-raising. Here are some extended excerpts.

TERENCE HUNT, Associated Press: Mr. President, we learned this week that the Vice President solicited campaign contributions in the White House and that the First Lady's chief of staff accepted a $50,000 campaign contribution in the White House. This comes on the heels of news about White House sleepovers and White House coffees for big money donors. You, sir, promised to have the most ethical administration in history. How does all of this square with that?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let me begin by saying there were problems in the fund-raising in 1996 which have been well identified, and the Democratic Party commissioned its own audit, did a review, made the results public, and took appropriate action. I think that is very important, and I'm proud of that. The second thing I want to say is I thought the Vice President did a good job of explaining what he did and why and explaining exactly what he intended to do in the future. With regard to Maggie Williams, I'd like to make a comment about that. She is an honorable person. Se was put in a rather unusual circumstance. And, as a courtesy, she agreed to do what the relevant regulation primarily provides for, which is to forward the check on to the Democratic National Committee. Now, in retrospect, with all the--the publicity that's attended the whole contribution issue, would it have been better if Maggie Williams had said look, I can do this under the regulation, but I decided I shouldn't do it, and I want you to go mail it in yourself, or take it over there yourself? That would have been a better thing to do. In the future, I expect that the White House will follow that course should such an occasion ever arise again. But finally, I want to make the point I have been trying to make to the American people. We had to work hard within the law to raise a lot of money to be competitive. We did work hard, and I'm glad we did, because the stakes were high, and the divisions between us in Washington at that time were very great. We still fell over $200 million short of the money raised by the committees of the Republican Party. The real problem and the reason you have some of the questions you have I think unless you just believe that all transactions between contributors and politicians are inherently suspect, which I don't believe and I think is wrong for either party. The real problem is these campaigns cost too much money; they take too much time; and they will continue to do so until we pass campaign finance reform. If we pass campaign finance reform, as I've asked, by July 4th, then the situation will get better. If we don't, we will still be raising too much money, and it will take too much time and effort on the part of everyone involved. So I'm hopeful that we can. Helen.

HELEN THOMAS, United Press International: Mr. President, Governor Romer said that Maggie Williams was wrong to accept the check, and you obviously seem to agree in retrospect. But in--

PRESIDENT CLINTON: No. No. I'm not going to say Maggie Williams did anything wrong. And I don't want to be--you know--you all have to deal with this the best you can but I want to be clear. She is an honorable person. There is a regulation that deals with this which explicitly says that when something--if you receive a contribution and all you do is just pass it on and you've been involved in no way in any solicitation on public property and you're just passing through that that is what the regulation provides for. It is explicit and clear.

HELEN THOMAS: And in your zeal for funds during the last campaign, didn't you put the Vice President and Maggie and all the others in your administration top side in a very vulnerable position?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I disagree with that. How are we vulnerable, because only vulnerable if you think it is inherently bad to raise funds and you believe that these transactions are between people who are almost craving. I mean, that's how--I don't agree with that. Maggie Williams in this case was completely passive. She didn't ask someone to come in and give her a check. And she had no reason to believe there's anything wrong with it, with the check involved. She just simply did what the regulation explicitly provides for, which is to pass it on. Now, in the case of the Vice President he can speak for himself, but I have to tell you, we knew what we were facing. We knew no matter what happened we would be badly out spent. We believed in what we stood for, and we were frankly--from time to time we were surprised we had as many folks who were willing to stick with us if they were. But we are proud of the fact that within the limits of the law we worked hard to raise money so that we could get our message out there, and we would not be buried, literally buried by the amount of money that the other side had at their disposal. Rita, first, and then Wolf. Let's just do it that way.

RITA BRAVER, CBS: I'm going to ask your forbearance because this question is a little bit long, but this is about Johnny Chung, the person who gave the check to Maggie Williams. In April of '95, about a month after he gave that check, he came in here to the White House. He brought in five Chinese officials. Someone on your staff sent a memo to the National Security Council saying that you were not certain you'd want photos of you with these people floating around. I wanted to ask you why you were worried about that and also why, after a highly knowledgeable NSC official wrote back that he was a hustler who will continue to make efforts to bring in his friends, into contact with the President, First Lady, and whose clients might not always be in favor of business ventures the President would support, why did you keep getting back in here? What was your relationship with him? And he now says that it was a least implicit, if not explicit, that he would get this access for the money he gave.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: As I have said before on this question of White House access we did not have an adequate system here. I assumed, wrongly, as it turned out, that there were kind of established procedures which were sort of handed on from administration to administration that had nothing to do with whoever happened to be here about the controlled and developed, and access. And I was wrong about that. So that's what I assumed generally was in place until we became aware that they weren't. But on this particular day I just had an instinct that maybe whatever the rules were, you know, that we didn't maybe know enough about these folks to know whether there should be a picture there. I didn't assume anything negative about them. I just thought that we just didn't know. Now, with regard to the memo about Mr. Chung, I can't answer that question because I never saw it. And no one ever told me it had been written. And I don't know who did see it. So I really can' answer that whole cluster of questions because the first I knew such a memo had been written was when--when it was discussed in the public domain. I did not know that. I had no reason to believe that there was any problem there.

RITA BRAVER: How did you come to know him? How did he get into office and writing letters that you replied to? There's lots of records of that.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I don't remember how I met him, but I think I met him at some Democratic Party event. I'm sure that's where I met him. I didn't have a prior--a relationship with him prior to my becoming President, to the best of my knowledge.

PETER MAER, Westwood One: But cumulatively, Mr. President, what are your thoughts on the propriety and the appearance of all of these various actions?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: You know, you can make your own judgments about this. This job--even when you're traveling--can be a very isolated job. I get frustrated going to meetings and going to where you all you do is shake hands with somebody and you take a picture. No words ever change--you never know what somebody's got on their mind, or they never get a chance to talk to you. You never have any real human contact. I look for ways to have genuine conversations with people. I learn things when I listen to people. But I can tell you this: I don't believe you can find any evidence of the fact that I had changed government policy solely because of a contribution. It's just that I don't think I should refuse to listen to people who supported me or refuse to be around them or tell people, well, you contributed to the campaign, therefore, even though I'd love to have you come see me at the White House I can't do it anymore. And you'll just have to sort through that and evaluate whether you agree with that or not, but that's how I feel. Susan.

SUSAN FEEHNEY, Dallas Morning News: You've said that you've operated within the parameter of the laws, but, in retrospect, do you have any regret about the quantity of campaign activity that happened in the White House?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: You mean--I do not regret the friends that I have asked to come and stay with me here. And in terms of the coffees I can--based on what I knew the facts to be and what I still believe they were, that no one was going to be solicited and that no--at the meeting and that there was no specific price tag on coming to the coffees, which is what my understanding was. But if you find the fact of the President having coffee at the White House with people who either have supported him in the past, or whom he hopes will support him in the future, I am personally responsible for that, and I take full responsibility for it, because I enjoyed them enormously. I found them interesting. I found them valuable. I found that all these people--many of whom have been active in public--in elections for years and have done all kinds of different things with their lives, were given the first chance they've ever had to just sort of say, here's my idea, and I hope you'll consider it, or here's what I think you should do, or here's where I think you're wrong. And I genuinely enjoyed them, and I did not believe they were improper. And I still believe, as long as there was no specific price tag put on those coffees, just the fact that they would later be asked to help the President or the party does not render them improper. That's what I believe. Mara.

MARA LIASSON, National Public Radio: Mr. President, you say that there's no evidence that you've ever changed a policy because of someone you met with, but what does appear to have occurred is that certain people traded on their access. In other words, access to you became a valuable business commodity to get new clients or impress their current clients. Do you think that that meets the higher standard that you want the White House to adhere to?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, what I think about that is that we need to evaluate whether we did anything which would give the impression that we were trying to help someone get business. In other words, I can't say who beyond the reach of our personal contacts would be impressed with people who had their picture taken with me. After today, it may be that everybody will go broke unless they take the pictures off the wall. I don't know. But I can't say that. What I can say is that the White House should not knowingly permit the White House or the Presidency or the Vice Presidency to be used to advance some private economic interest. And that--you put your finger on something that is troubling to me, and we have to evaluate that more. And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to make sure that we had a system in place on access and on all these things that will meet that standard in the future. And I believe we've done that, but I think that's a legitimate problem.

JIM LEHRER: President Clinton speaking this afternoon at a White House news conference. FOCUS - POLITICAL WRAP

JIM LEHRER: Now, some Shields & Gigot analysis of how the President did and other happenings of this week. Mark Shields is a syndicated columnist. Paul Gigot is a Wall Street Journal columnist. And, Paul, how did the President do?

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: Well, I think by his lights he probably did pretty well. I don't think the press corps really laid a glove on him, with all due respect to my colleagues in the press, I thought the best question was Rita Braver's of CBS News who asked about Johnny Chung and his multiple visits to the White House. She was trying to actually elicit information from the President, how could this have happened and so on, and the President managed to change it into a--very skillfully into an answer about how we had dropped our guard in this access. Well, I mean, was it the 12th time that he mentioned it, that he didn't know what was going on, and so I think the President was at his elegantly evasive best, and bested the press corps here.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. What do you think, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Jim, Bill Clinton had an awful week, starting with the Vice President, who'd been the beacon of virtue in the administration, getting battered around by one of the co-reporters that broke the Watergate case, Bob Woodward, followed up by the story apologists mentioned by the First Lady's chief of staff taking a $50,000 check in the White House for DNC, and most people would have been hiding. I was just absolutely amazed at Bill Clinton today. Anybody who wants to question why Bill Clinton is president and I'm not and you're not ought to look at him. I mean, you talk about resiliency or the energizer bunny, I mean, he just keeps coming. He did it. He was upbeat. He put as good a spin on it as you could. He wasn't defensive. There was no chip on his shoulder. I agree with Paul that nobody laid a glove on him but it wasn't for want of trying. He was in command of himself and of the situation. You know, I just--remarkable. I think most politicians after the week that Bill Clinton had, if they had experienced that, would have been in hiding probably with a bottle of Southern Comfort.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think about that?

PAUL GIGOT: The guy is astonishing. I mean, I think used to think that Ronald Reagan, the gipper, was gifted in his ability to keep his focus and to communicate. Bill Clinton trumps Ronald Reagan. Nobody does it better in that sense of communication and focusing and ability to shift away--subtly away from what the real issue is into the point that he wants to make. But with all due respect to Mark, the press corps didn't ask him, for example, about Web Hubble. I mean, there was a story in the New York Times this week which was that the--several associates and friends of the President had paid Web Hubble more as a convicted felon than he had learned as a lawyer practicing in Arkansas when he was in aposition to be able to testify against or on the part of the Starr investigation. That's very serious stuff because it raises questions about the potential hush money. Nobody asked him about that. I wonder how he would have responded to that.

JIM LEHRER: Well, we don't know that, but Mark, just in terms of what the President did talk about and, as you said, all of the problems that were raised, how effective do you think he was in making his side of the story, in telling his side of the story, his side of the argument?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I mean, Jim, his side of the argument is a tough sell. There's no question--first of all, he had--the President has a big advantage going in; he is enormously popular in the country. He goes out in the country this week, and he has a wonderful visit to Arkansas, and then he goes to Michigan, where the relentlessly conservative Governor John Engler is joining him at the hip. He won't let him out of his sight. I mean, Clinton is so popular people are craving to get in the picture with him. So I mean, in that sense there is a disconnect here. I mean, Bill Clinton remains "the" most popular figure in the country by a major, major margin. There's nobody on the other side who can hold a candle to him, and yet at the same time he's been battered all week long on these stories. I think that the President is about to- -appears to be going to make the case on campaign finance to try and--try and change the system and to make himself as one of the- -sort of the third sponsor of McCain-Feingold and the charge that the other side is on the defenders of the status quo; that they don't want to change anything. That's what--that's the emerging-- with no insight particularly for the information, but that appears to be the emerging strategy. I don't know if it will go, but he's got to do something with that popularity, and in a stronger position to do it as he's ever been in this presidency.

JIM LEHRER: Well, let's go through some of the specifics. First of all, how would you respond to the Web Hubble, the point that Paul made? It didn't come up at the news conference, but this is the most serious shoe to fall so far? It hasn't fallen all the way yet, but it's beginning to fall. Do you agree?

MARK SHIELDS: I think--no--I think it is serious. I mean, the President made his statement today. I think, first of all, we are in a position or a time of political freefall right now. We don't know where the next shoe--if it's going to be a shoe--if it's going to be a shoehorn--we don't know if it's going to be a box of shoes. I mean, this week has just been unprecedented in events and information, so it's tough to sort of stop in the middle and say what's going to happen with this one. I don't know if this is going to be a big one or not. I mean, I always thought one of the biggest ones in Watergate that never even got reported was that the President's own lawyer was holding up United Airlines and American Airlines for routes for $100,000 contributions. It kind of got washed over because other things intruded. But, no, this is big, and you're tied to a policy, and now we're into China again, and whether, in fact, there was an administration policy was changed. I don't know if those payments, those payments made after the convention, Paul, as you said, I thought they were made after he had left the job and before the conviction.

JIM LEHRER: But we know, we do know about the Vice President's calls, Paul. What do you think about that?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I thought that the offense was probably a misdemeanor, but his defense was a political felony. I mean, the advice he got to go out in that press conference and use a phrase "no controlling legal authority," which is going to go down in scandal history, along with "modified limited hangout," and "that's inoperative," was bad advice. It made the Vice President look bad. It made him look evasive. It made him look legalistic. And it made him look like he was frankly picking some tips up from his running made, the President of the United States. And that's not a reputation that Al Gore had. I think the press conference hurt him a lot more, frankly, than did the question of whether or not you raised--he actually made those phone calls with a DNC credit card or with--

JIM LEHRER: Whatever.

PAUL GIGOT: --a Clinton-Gore credit card.

JIM LEHRER: How do you feel about the Gore situation, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think Vice President Gore has a legitimate beef in the fact, Jim, that I don't know where a President who lives in public housing or a vice president who lives in public housing and works in a federal building is supposed to make phone calls. Maybe it's a pocketful of quarters, goes over to the Mayflower Hotel and uses the pay phone. I don't think that was the offense, and doing politics in the White House is not the offense. I mean, when--remember when the esteemed Jim Baker, our good friend, and former Secretary of State left his job as secretary of state to run George Bush's 1992 campaign, where did he go? He didn't go to campaign headquarters. He went to the White House. So I mean, you know, this politics in the White House is a little bit- -there's a little bit of posing, posturing, and hypocrisy in this. As far as I think it's true that the--he did not serve himself well with the press conference. He put himself on the front page of every paper in the country in response to a story that had been in the "Washington Post." And it's certainly the solicitor in chief charge is a tough one because he had been, as I said earlier, the beacon of rectitude in this administration. It certainly makes it tough to explain that case of the Buddhist temple in California-- he didn't know what was going on--if he appeared--if he is as zealous and committed a fund-raiser as Bob Woodward reported.

JIM LEHRER: All right. The Maggie Williams case, Paul.

PAUL GIGOT: I think it's mostly technical, frankly, whether where she accepted the $50,000 check, I don't think matters a great deal.

JIM LEHRER: Why did the story get such big play? Why are we talking about it?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think frankly, that and the Gore situation got a lot of play because as evidence of crimes, however minor, they might figure the independent counsel statute and then put more pressure on Janet Reno to name a special counsel, and once that happens, then you have a whole big--that is a very big political story, and I think that's why a lot of the reporters in town paid attention to it.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: Yeah, I do, Jim. I think this is undoubtedly a stampede. There are some people who really believe devoutly, sincerely, honestly, intelligently that there should be a special counsel, independent counsel, appointed, but there are a lot of politicians in shoe leather in Washington on both sides of the aisle, mostly on the Republican side on Capitol Hill, who want an independent counsel for a very simple reason. They don't want to change the way we finance elections at all, and they know darn well, Jim, once you appoint an independent counsel, you're talking six or seven years, and that saves you from changing the laws in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, and that's what was behind Trent Lott yesterday.

JIM LEHRER: Well, so what, where are we now, in the Senate investigation?

PAUL GIGOT: I actually think that what happened in the Senate was a pretty good political compromise. Everybody got a little bit of what they wanted. Fred Thompson still got the--his hearings. There are going to be hearings. The Democrats got a date certain for an end which they wanted. They got the scope widened to include Congress, which they wanted. And they got less money, which they wanted. And the fact is they're not going to filibuster now, which would have been embarrassing. So the Republicans, on the other hand, got the scope limited with a couple of other things thrown out that they didn't want covered.

JIM LEHRER: Like reform?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, wait a minute. That's a separate issue.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. All right.

PAUL GIGOT: I mean, that's going to be handled, and it can be handled by other committees. There's going to be a debate over--

JIM LEHRER: I think I heard Shields laughing just now.

PAUL GIGOT: If Mark Shields has anything to say about it, there's going to be a debate about campaign finance reform. That's not a problem, but it's going to be investigating what's not going to happen now, although it could. And a lot is going to depend on Fred Thompson's skill in handling this. But what may not happen is having people taking the Fifth Amendment--taking, excuse me--yeah, the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination on the same stage with people who happen to write checks honestly.

JIM LEHRER: I see. Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, first of all, we have a hearing agreed to we've never had before in the history of the country, and that is we're only going to investigate illegalities. Illegalities and crimes are investigated and administered and prosecuted by the criminal justice system, not by the Congress. So I mean, that idea- -I don't know where that came from, where it leads, except it obviously wants to keep all the attention on the 1996 Clinton campaign. Jim, great slogans in American politics--save Lake Erie, save the children, save the whales--what the Republicans said yesterday was we're going to save soft money. That's what this is about. We're going to keep all soft money out of this. There is nobody--there is no constituency in this country anywhere--people talk about inside the beltway and outside the beltway--there is nobody outside the beltway who thinks, gee, we ought to really preserve this 200,000, $500,000 contribution to rich corporations, to rich individuals, to labor unions, Political Action Committees, so they can give unlimited--so they can buy unlimited access to political leadership in both parties but the only place it is Jim has defended is in the Congress of the United States and in the places where they give it. And I think that to me was the real shame of yesterday, and it's the real outrage of these hearings.

JIM LEHRER: And you guys have been having this argument for weeks.

PAUL GIGOT: We sure have, and I think we'll probably continue.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah, but not right now. Thank you both very much. FOCUS - CAPITAL WOES

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the capital's problems, a David Gergen dialogue, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay. Kwame Holman has the Washington, D.C. story.

KWAME HOLMAN: Orange Hat patrols are common in urban cities, but here in Washington, D.C.'s diverse neighborhoods that spread East from the U.S. capitol building the anti-crime citizen patrols have a sense of urgency. Bill Ebbs lives 12 block from the capitol and organizes the Orange Hats.

BILL EBBS: The crime problem has completely gotten out of control up here, and we have a serious problem with drugs, a serious problem with burglaries into cars and to houses and we actually even had a murder in the alley behind the houses here about six months ago.

KWAME HOLMAN: The crime rate in Washington actually is down, but it's seen as emblematic of the broader problem. The city government is insolvent to the point that on Orange Hat Patrol Night the local National Guard donates its high intensity anti-crime lights. Over the last several years money and management problems often made it a daily guessing game as to whether the city could deliver such basic services as police and fire protection. Even a congressionally-mandated financial authority installed two years ago hasn't ended the district's rising budget deficit. Local officials say fear the city can't right itself helped drive out 63,000 mostly middle income families since 1990. A third of those who remain in this majority black city of 540,000 live at or near the poverty line, so middle class homeowners like dentist Bill Ebbs are vital.

BILL EBBS: I've tried for a year and a half since I've been here to have, for instance, public works things to happen as far as getting trees cut down, as far as getting allies cleaned up. And it takes months and months and months just to get answers. I think to keep me in the city much longer something drastically has to change, I mean, within the next year personally. If not, I'm going to sell my house; I'm going to move to the suburbs.

KWAME HOLMAN: President Clinton reportedly as concerned about the decline of the city he lives in throughout his first term, but aides say he hoped Washington's long-time mayor, Marion Berry, could work them out under the watchful eye of an independent control board. Finally, after rock bottom student test scores and a financial emergency forced the control board to take over the school as well the President acted. In December he proposed the federal government take over some of the city's financial responsibilities. The President talked about it at a Washington public school two weeks ago.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We made this proposal for the Congress to relieve the district government of some of its financial burdens. As I have said many times, one of the major problems with the District of Columbia is that it has too often been a not quite place. It's not quite a state, but it's not quite a city. So it has been loaded up with responsibilities that normally are only borne by states. I think that is wrong, and I think we should do better about that.

KWAME HOLMAN: Washington is, indeed, a hybrid of city-state. In addition to traditional municipal services such as police, fire, and schools, it provide state-like services, a 7,000 inmate prison, a four-year public university, a mental hospital, and it pays a state-sized share of the cost of the region's subway system. Inside one of the abandoned floors of the Wilson Building, Washington's city hall now awaiting renovation, District of Columbia council member Frank Smith is hopeful his city will be fixed as well. He says the district began running out of money to pay for the myriad services it provides as taxpayers fled at the same time an economic downturn took hold at the beginning of the decade.

COUNCIL MEMBER FRANK SMITH, District of Columbia: The decline in revenue has been slow and gradual up to probably five or six years ago, and it has become very dramatic. And we just didn't act fast enough to cut back on the government to keep us actually from going into insolvency, which is where we are now.

KWAME HOLMAN: To try to stabilize the district the President has proposed the federal government renovate and run the district's prison, relieving the city of a nearly $200 million a year budget item, oversee and fund the city's court, pay a higher federal share of Washington's bill for medical services to a large poor population in the Medicaid program, take over Washington's pension plan for retired city government workers, eliminating another $300 million annual item from the city budget. The President also has offered to spend millions to help Washington repair its notoriously potholed streets and to spur economic development in the city. Council Member Smith says the offer of help from the federal government is both appropriate and overdue.

COUNCIL MEMBER FRANK SMITH: I've sat here at this window and watched the inaugural parade a few weeks ago when the President marched down the street. We have plenty of our police officers out here guarding him every time he moves around or every time a diplomat moves around in this city, a visiting head of state. There's a big demonstration, our officers are out here; they use our water and our sewer, so the government is a consumer. The federal government is a consumer, and it should pay for those services that it extracts from the people of the District of Columbia.

KWAME HOLMAN: In fact, the federal government does pay the district an annual fee as compensation for federal and other land the city is forbidden to tax. But the so-called federal payment, close to $700 million this year, has been called unfairly low by city officials for years. Eleanor Holmes Norton is the district's non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives.

DEL. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, [D] District of Columbia: If you look closely, the federal payment worth over some $700 million on papers now down to only $1/2 million, $500 million, because it hasn't been raised since 1991, and I can tell you without fear of being contradicted, has almost no chance of being raised in the foreseeable future. So it's an amount that goes down, down, and down.

SPOKESMAN: Good morning. And welcome to the first hearing of the 105th Congress of the District of Columbia subcommittee.

KWAME HOLMAN: Indeed, Congress, led by a handful of committees that oversee the district, has been reluctant to increase that payment the city receives for untaxable federal land, calling on the city to improve service delivery first. Office of Management & Budget Director Franklin Raines says the plan he designed for President Clinton would eliminate that payment altogether.

FRANKLIN RAINES, Director, Office of Management and Budget: Well, the federal payment over the years has been pointed to as the compensation for a wide variety of limitations on the city, and the value of those limitations has always greatly exceeded the amount of the federal payment. But we tried to do a change of paradigm. What we tried to say is that this federal payment can't carry all of that weight. And what we need to do is instead of compensating the city by giving an annual lump sum payment, we should compensate the city by taking over some of its expenses.

KWAME HOLMAN: In the Old Executive Office Building Raines explained that like most things in the federal budget Congress is in no mood to spend more on the District of Columbia.

FRANKLIN RAINES: I think the prospects of getting large amounts of additional federal dollars are very small, given the effort to balance the budget. Indeed, we are going to have to work very hard to get the President's plan approved because it does involve additional federal costs, and I think going beyond the President's plan will be quite problematic in this year.

KWAME HOLMAN: But city officials, from the mayor to the city council to the control board, point out that some estimates show the President's plan actually takes away nearly as much as it gives and could leave the city exactly where it is now--strapped for cash.

COUNCIL MEMBER FRANK SMITH: The federal government, they shouldn't just be looking at us saying, well, we're going to take over a few things here and a few things there to make up for all of those services that you provide to us, and we're going to try to come out of this thing with a zero sum gain. That means you're never going to be able to pay police officers; you're never going to be able to fix your schools and your roads because you don't have any money to fix them with. So what they're doing is really dooming us to this situation that we find ourselves in now where we cannot provide adequate services for our people here in the District of Columbia.

KWAME HOLMAN: Delegate Norton acknowledges such potential problems but says the President's offer is the last best hope for the teetering district.

DEL. ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON: I think really the only option the district has now is to understand that this plan is probably the only thing we're going to have to work with, so what we have to do is work out the problems we see with this plan because we don't-- this is probably our last chance.

KWAME HOLMAN: Whatever the outcome of the revenue debate, working in the district's favor is an unusual amount of bipartisanship about helping Washington. Republican leaders including House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott support tax breaks to help Washington lure back middle class residents. And already there are tangible signs of hope for the city. Home sales are up. Work on the city's schools is showing progress, and major downtown construction is underway. And if Congress accepts the President's plan, it would be historic for the district. Congress would be removed from any further authority over the budget of the nation's capital. DIALOGUE

JIM LEHRER: Now, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor at large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Nellie McKay, the general editors of "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature." He's a professor of humanities and chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University. She's professor of American and Afro-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin. Professor Gates, Professor McKay, this anthology was published, all 2,665 pages, has been the occasion of a great deal of celebration in many circles in American life. Tell us why, what this is all about.

NELLIE McKAY, Co-Editor, "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature": Largely because it's about being a very special book. "The Anthology of African American Literature" brings to the general public for the very first time in American history the entire tradition of African American literature.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., Co-Editor, "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature": It was a tradition created by slaves, of all things. In the whole of human history you can search far and wide, and never do the body of slaves create an entire genre of literature, and that's what the African-American slavesdid in the United States.

DAVID GERGEN: It's ironic, as someone said, from the soil of suffering can come such great writing.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: That's right.

NELLIE McKAY: Yes.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: And then to take the king's English. We were forbidden from learning to read and write after 1740. A year after this famous rebellion, the Stoner rebellion in South Carolina, the South Carolina legislature passed a statute forbidding literacy training and the use of the drum, two forms of African literacy, as it were. And despite that, black people appropriated the master's language to dismantle the master's house. And that's a great story. And they believed in the principles of liberty and democracy as much, if not more, than their oppressors.

DAVID GERGEN: What I found striking in reading your anthology was to go back to this essay by James Weldon Johnson in 1922 at the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, when he talked about the anthology, smaller anthology, put together black poetry, and he made the argument that the purpose, the central thrust of black literature was not just literature, itself, but to achieve civil rights to show that blacks were equal to whites through their intellectual capacities.

NELLIE McKAY: Well, I think that literature has always served more than one purpose. I think it has been used. It began as a source of black people explaining to the rest of the nation that they were--they were people because they were not considered to be the kinds of species that would be able to produce literature like other people. So the writing of the literature begins as a way of proving their own humanity, but beyond that, the literature has also served as a way of expressing that which is, for want of a better word, the soul of the people. It's a way of expressing their own creativity, a way of not necessarily always caring what other people have to say or think but of making themselves who they want to be.

DAVID GERGEN: Your book introduced me to the story of Phyllis Wheatley, the young girl who was a slave writing poetry back in the early 1770s and then being tested--

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: --by white elders to see if she really knew what she was talking about.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: No one believed that a person of African descent could create imaginative literature. There's a whole discourse, Hume, Kant, Thomas Jefferson, Hagle. All of them said in one way or another that Africans were a different order of being, and they could never possess reason in the same way the Europeans could, and the manifestation of reason of course was writing. So she shows up with this book of poems. Her master takes it to Boston publishers, and no one will publish it, till finally 18 of the most respectable characters in Boston, as they later identified themselves, gave her an oral exam. And she had to prove that she had written them, herself. That is the origins of the African American tradition. It is the most ironic origins.

DAVID GERGEN: Now, Prof. Gates, you more recently have been arguing that an anthology should not be simply one proving that blacks are intellectually equal. That argument, you think, is won. But essentially, you've embraced a different approach here in this anthology. This is more a celebration of differentness.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: As well as equality.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: That's right, both within the written tradition and the unwritten tradition, the African American vernacular. I mean, our main innovation in addition to the length is to include a section on the vernacular which is not an innovation, but to include a CD with the anthology which in that student edition comes affixed to the back of the book--76 minutes of oral literature and songs, jazz, and the spirituals--to show that our literature, like every other literature, had its foundations in the vernacular, in the oral tradition, but that out of that came a mastery of the king's English. And I tell my students not only the king of England's English but Martin Luther King's English.

DAVID GERGEN: And also that vernacular--many have written the jazz, the blues, the gospels, and the other traditions--seem to be very creative and, in fact, are American originals. Some would argue the only American original--

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: Dvorak said that in 1893. He came here and he said the only thing America has given to the world civilization is its spirituals, at which point a lot of black people started saying, we've got sing those spirituals; we've got to sing those spirituals. And ideas like Johnson's came out of that.

NELLIE McKAY: That's right.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: The idea that we could be free.

DAVID GERGEN: I'm glad it didn't persuade Dvorak not to write-- not to write a new world symphony. Let me ask you about female authors because there's been such a flowering of literature by black women authors since 1970.

NELLIE McKAY: There have been a large number of black women writers since 1970. There were--we know historically that there have been large numbers of women for a long time, certainly from the 1920's, but many of these women were never able to get themselves into print. As our society has changed, as women have become more accepted, and I think the women's movement has a lot to do with this, we see many more black women being able to come into--into print and making themselves visible, and the--the consumer, one may say, has been impressed by this, and so it means that many more black women have gotten themselves in print.

DAVID GERGEN: What four or five things would you recommend that are your favorites that you really like?

NELLIE McKAY: That's really a hard question. I think my top favorite would, in fact, be E.D. Dubois's "The Souls of Black Folk." It was one of the first things that I really read and understood the meaning of black history and culture in the way that developed for me as an adult, and it had an awful, awful--it had a wonderful--made a wonderful impression on me in the kind of way in which I can always remember the first time I read it. And I would recommend it to others.

DAVID GERGEN: All right. Professor Gates.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: I would start with Zorno Herstin's "Their eyes were watching God," which I think my all time favorite like Nellie is "The Souls of Black Folk" by the great Dubois, but "Their Eyes are Watching God" is a fantastic novel. It's a novel of becoming. A woman is--a young, beautiful woman is oppressed by a series of males, and also by her grandmother, actually, and is-- and finally liberates herself. She falls in love and then tells her own story. She has command of the facts of her life in the form of a narrative that she shares with her best friend, Phoebe, and we're overhearing this conversation take place on her back porch. It's quite exciting. And then I would also recommend Frederick Douglass's "Slave Narrative," because it shows that the blackest thing that you could be in the tradition was literate. The ultimate way to be a black person for Frederick Douglass was to master the ABC's and to master a form of rhetoric that were--that predominated in the 19th century, to demand your freedom. And I think more and more of our young people, instead of spending time thinking about so-called "Ebonics," need to understand the great tradition of literacy mastery that our people manifested through standard English, making standard English our own. That's been very, very important and very political for us. And Frederick Douglass exemplifies that beautifully.

DAVID GERGEN: And showing both of you--in your first response, to go back, pretty far back, because many college students today are raised on Richard Wright, for example, or Ralph Ellis or James Baldwin--my generation--

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: The big three.

NELLIE McKAY: It's easier--it's easier to read the contemporaries, the near contemporaries, than it is to go back. But we're interested that people should understand something also that comes from the back. Where does the tradition begin? Where do we begin to see the quality and the depth of the kind of writing that we now have? Where did it come from? And we can look back to the earlier writers and find it there.

DAVID GERGEN: Have we come full circle? In fact, we're going back to find the roots and celebrating those roots and as a way of understanding ourselves today.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: Well, I used to think that our generation would be remembered for being--bringing literary theory into the African American literary tradition. And now I think--I think that that's been important but I think as important, if not more important, is the fact that we are reassembling the tradition. Each generation of scholars of African American studies has had to reinvent the wheel because we didn't control access to the means to pass on our anthologies as reference works, and our generation is spending quite a lot of time producing works like "The Norton Anthology," the "Oxford Companion to African American Literature," the great encyclopedia "Africana," which Dubois dreamed of in 1909 and which we're going to be producing at Harvard. These are things which will provide a common ground, a foundation, a base line of knowledge that students can then stand on, so no one will ever have to do this research again. That's exciting.

DAVID GERGEN: Don't want to take 10 years again?

NELLIE McKAY: No, not at all.

DAVID GERGEN: Well, congratulations to you both. Professor McKay, Professor Gates, thank you both.

NELLIE McKAY: It's a great book I have to say.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: She's the mother and I'm the daddy. ESSAY - SERVICE INCLUDED

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, essayist Roger Rosenblatt considers America's service culture.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Can Americans do anything for themselves anymore? The question may seem unduly antagonistic, but it arises in the context of a recent news story. In Minnesota a few weeks ago a well-to-do dentist and his family hired a personal shoplifter to steal the following items for them: Baccarat crystal, a full-length white fox coat, and other stuff. A personal shoplifter--I concluded a people who will hire a personal shoplifter will do anything or not do anything, and a people who will not do anything are in trouble. The phenomenon is widespread. In New York City a person who calls himself "Plate Man" will stand in line for you at the Division of Motor Vehicles. VIP Services in Houston, Texas, will stand in line to get you your passport. The National Association of Professional Organizers, 800 members nationwide, will organize anything for you. One member, Linda Rothchild, of Cross It Off Your List, will come to your home and reorganize your closets or your life, assuming, of course, that you ask her to. Corrine Tuque of Huntington, Long Island, will decorate your Christmas tree. Andersen At Your Service, the corporate concierges located in Chicago, will pick up baby and wedding gifts and wait in your home for appliance repair personnel. College application services will do that; term paper writing services will do that; dog walking services will do that. A concierge in Palm Beach, Florida, reports that a woman in his hotel requested that an English professor be sent to her room. He did not indicate the purpose. There are people who will supply urine samples for other people. I can only guess what to call a professional urine supplier. Are you getting the picture? Caroline Gillis of Burbank, California, is a professional letter writer; Alan Epstein of Los Angeles, a professional match maker. Mr. Epstein interests me because his match-making work suggests this debilitating impulse may be sewn into the American grain. Wasn't it the pilgrim Miles Standish who engaged John Smith in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to plead the case of his love sickness to Priscilla Alden a few hundred years ago? "Speak for yourself, John," she said. I don't think so. Match- making, pandering, it is all personal service. Mercenaries were hired to fight wars for other people. Work ethic my foot. We were always a lazy lot. So diluted is the culture of personal service that people will hire anyone to do the most delicate task. One can't pick up a newspaper these days without reading about some husband or wife paying $100 to the local God knows whom to knock off a mate. That nut case woman in New Hampshire who hired a high school kid to do her old man in--they never use professionals anymore--too lazy.

ACTOR: [Scene from Movie] I want you to get out of that bed and walk to the window. I want you to scream out in the street.

ACTRESS: I can't walk, Henry. I'm confined.

ACTOR: Keep trying. Otherwise, you've only got three more minutes to live.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: It has all come to strangers on a train and "Sorry, Wrong Number," idiots and blunderers engaged to do work that requires real skill and polish. Signs of a fading civilization. Can Americans do anything for themselves anymore? I'm Roger Rosenblatt. RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, President Clinton defended Vice President Gore's calls from a White House telephone to raise money for their re-election. Mr. Clinton did not rule out the possibility that he too may have made such calls. The Labor Department reported unemployment fell .1 percent in February to 5.3 percent, and a 10 percent federal tax on domestic airline tickets was reinstated, and some airlines were raising their ticket prices accordingly. We'll see you online and again here Monday evening. Have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.