The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. I'm Robert MacNeil in New York.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And I'm Charlayne Hunter-Gault in Washington. After the News Summary, our lead story is politics and the Ross Perot phenomenon. Who loses as he gains? We'll from House Minority Leader Robert Michel, and then Perot's impact as seen by regular Friday night analyst Mark Shields, who will be joined by Republican strategist Ed Rollins and Washington Post Reporter E.J. Dionne. Next, Correspondent Roger Mudd reports on effort to revive the WPA, and finally Essayist Roger Rosenblatt has some thoughts on people making connections. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: The retrial of Officer Lawrence Powell in the beating of Rodney King will take place in Los Angeles County on October 19th. A Superior Court judge today rejected arguments from Powell's lawyer that a fair trial was not possible in Los Angeles. Powell's first trial had been moved to suburban Ventura County, when he was acquitted on all but one count. The jury remained deadlocked on a charge of excessive force and a new trial was ordered. Powell's three co-defendants were completely exonerated. The verdict set off three days of rioting in Los Angeles. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The U.S. Coast Guard announced it will no longer rescue Haitian boat people unless they are in imminent danger of sinking. The Coast Guard has been intercepting the refugees at sea and holding them at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. More than 12,000 refugees are now at the camp which was built to hold 10,000. Haitians began fleeing last September after a military coup ousted their first democratically elected president. Critics of U.S. policy say that economic sanctions have made conditions in Haiti worse, causing more people to flee. But State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher said today the sanctions have prevented the coup leaders from consolidating their power. Haitian refugees arriving on Cuban shores will no longer be allowed to continue their voyages. Cuba announced the new policy today in an apparent effort to control the exodus of boat people. Cuba has been providing free food and shelter to refugees headed for the U.S.

MR. MacNeil: The United States is considering taking further measures against Yugoslavia to force its withdrawal from Bosnia- Herzegovina. Reuters News Agency reported that the U.S. is about to expel Yugoslav military attaches and close two consulates. Sec. of State Baker will also reportedly discussion sanctions when he meets with European Community foreign ministers tomorrow. for two months, Yugoslavia's Serbian-led army has waged war in Bosnia to claim territory for the republic's Serbian minority. The flags of Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia were all raised today at the United Nations in New York. All three former Yugoslav republics were admitted, giving the United Nations 178 new members. Refugees continued to pour out of Bosnia today, including about 5,000 Muslims who'd been held hostage in the capital. An estimated 900,000 people have been displaced by the two-month old ethnic conflict. Many have fled to neighboring Croatia, or to already overcrowded camps in Italy and other European nations. We have a report narrated by Louise Bates of Worldwide Television News.

MS. BATES: After being held hostage for nearly three days by the Serbs, the Bosnian refugees make the dangerous journey to safety, buses and hundreds of cars carrying around 5,000 mainly women and children all escaping the fighting. No one is sure why the Serbs eventually let them go, nor do they care. All they wanted was to get to the Croatian Port of Split, and peace. Some have already found that here in Italy. The army barracks near Odiney are now home to around 370 refugees. The children play in the sunshine, their parents hoping they have forgotten the war. But not so. They may play peacefully, but they paint war and all its killing paraphernalia, a generation already showing their psychological scars. The refugee crisis threatens to swamp Yugoslavia's neighbors, an emerging European headache, but it's no crisis for these families. Shelter is an absolute necessity.

MR. MacNeil: Relief agencies today threatened to end their programs in Bosnia. The Red Cross demanded guarantees of safety from warring Bosnian factions, following the death of a senior staffer this week. U.N. officials said they were considering suspension of aid shipments after 13 of its relief trucks were hijacked. Thailand's governing political parties today put their support behind the plan that would oust the country's prime minister. At least 40 people died in protests against the unelected leader this week. The ruling parties initially supported the prime minister, but today introduced a constitutional amendment that will require all prime ministers to be elected. A final vote on the amendments could be more than a month away.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Americans are quitting smoking at a record rate. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control said 25 1/2 percent of Americans smoke in 1990, the latest figure available, down from 28.8 percent in 1987. Meanwhile, a separate British study estimated that one in five people in the industrialized world will die from smoking. It said the percentage of people dying from smoking is actually on the rise and may not fall for 30 years. The study was the first detailed estimate of smoking mortality rates in developed nations. That's it for the News Summary. Still ahead, what price Perot, reviving the WPA, and an essay on connections. FOCUS - WILD CARD

MR. MacNeil: Up first tonight, the impact the undeclared candidate, H. Ross Perot, is having on Presidential politics. In a national CNN-USA Today poll published today, Perot is running even with President Bush and 10 points ahead of Democrat Bill Clinton. Perot actually leads in statewide polls released this week. In Ohio, for example, he's given 25 percent of the vote -- of the respondents to the poll to President Bush's 23 percent and Clinton's 15. In California, Perot has 39 percent of a field poll to Clinton's 26 percent and Bush's 25 percent. And in Oregon, Perot was given 42 percent in a poll there to Bush's 31 and Clinton's 21. Perot's unorthodox challenge and unexpected staying power have rattled elected officials, insiders and operatives from both national parties. One of them is Congressman Bob Michel, the House Minority Leader. Yesterday, he called the Perot candidacy "a siren song and a wake up call." He joins us tonight from Peoria, Illinois. Congressman Michel, thank you for joining us.

REP. MICHEL: Glad to be here, Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Do you think Republicans should be pretty worried by the Perot phenomenon?

REP. MICHEL: Well, I think so, because, as I indicated yesterday in the remarks that I made, as I look at those folks who are supporting the Perot candidacy would seem to be predominantly, at least in the audiences, our kind of constituencies, elderly people, young people, farmers. And so I have to be concerned about that and I don't see any of the Democratic constituencies that normally are supporting Clinton opting out or serious erosion into that particular group, saying, we'd prefer Perot.

MR. MacNeil: So you see Perot stealing more from you than from Democrats at the moment?

REP. MICHEL: I really think so. Now, earlier on, when it was indicated, well, it was from both parties, or even maybe more from the Democratic Party, quite frankly, because they were unhappy with the nominating process, and Clinton wasn't making the kind of hay that he should have been making and, therefore, that was the option. But I would rather prepare for a worse case scenario so far as our own party is concerned.

MR. MacNeil: Marlin Fitzwater, the White House spokesman, also attacked Perot yesterday. He called him a "dangerous and destructive personality." Have you all got together now with the White House and you on the Hill to coordinate a policy of getting at Perot?

REP. MICHEL: No, not at all. I didn't talk to the White House, didn't talk to anybody in the campaign, and it's not the -- Ross Perot, himself, is not the problem here. He's a very fine individual, very successful, obviously. It's what -- the phenomena of what causes Perot to be all of a sudden ahead in the polls, what is it, the disillusionment out there with the American public that they would opt for someone they know so little about who hasn't answered any of the questions, basic questions that the other candidates have had to subject themselves to. And so this is the thing that distresses me and I have no quarrel with Mr. Ross Perot at all as an individual, because he's a fine, outstanding one.

MR. MacNeil: He said today you're very nice to him, you send him a Christmas card every year, but he wonders whether you're going to this year.

REP. MICHEL: I would do that again, and no question about that, but I think it's time now, you see, where he's got to be subject to the same kind of questions and queries that the other candidates, and frankly when I've heard him opt for, well, I'm not altogether sure we'd subject that to an electronic kind of town meeting proposition, that sounded to me like, you know, let's test the old air out there. And we don't have a pure democracy in our country. It would be inefficient to put everything to public referendum. We have a republic and the people vest in us the authority to speak for them every two years in the Congress, six years in the Senate, and of course, four years as a President. So so far, he hasn't indicated to us that he has really got the answers to some of the very basic questions that the people are asking out there even though they say, well, he trashes the Congress or trashes the institution. He says it's gridlock. I'd have to agree. The point I'm making is, is the very fact that we do have gridlock and that the President ought to be given an opportunity with a sympathetic Congress to enact his program.

MR. MacNeil: I'll come back --

REP. MICHEL: That's more central to what I'm talking about.

MR. MacNeil: I see. Okay. Let's come back to the Perot phenomenon though for a moment. You said yesterday the President could be in big trouble with the Perot phenomenon.

REP. MICHEL: Yes.

MR. MacNeil: How much trouble? Could it actually force stalemate the election and force it into the House of Representatives?

REP. MICHEL: Well, I suggested that. We're talking about maybe the possibility of three Presidential candidates, and then lacking a majority in the electoral college, throwing that into the House of Representatives for final adjudication. Now, with the kind of reputation the House of Representatives have enjoyed, you know, within the last couple of months, that would be the worst place to be deciding the Presidency of the United States. And then, of course, under the rules the Senate would be picking the Vice President, it would be an utter disaster and catastrophe if we got to that point. So I think we have to raise the specter if Ross Perot is able to get a significant vote in some of the big states to deny, or at least to have a significant number of votes to deny either one of the other candidates, you know, that state's plurality in the electoral college.

MR. MacNeil: You said a moment ago Perot is not the problem, himself. Is Bush the problem for the Republicans? I mean, in the exit polls, I was reading an interpretation today by the Roper organization, the recent exit polls from the primaries showed that Republicans who are strongly for Perot, most of that strength comes from Republicans who are dissatisfied with President Bush.

REP. MICHEL: Well, and I can understand some of that. Now, the President has indicated in the past he's been a great leader. Of course, in the Persian Gulf area, in international affairs, he's made his mark, and there's no question about that, very, very forceful and effective, and it's been in the domestic area where then in the foreign affairs he can take the ball and run with it and it's his decision that are all controlling. When you get to domestic agenda, you're really bound in part by what you can get out of a Democratic-controlled Congress. And, of course, here I am in the House, having spent 36 years now all dominated by a Democratic majority. So our Republican Presidents have been thwarted in their effort to get what they'd really like, because they've always got to compromise to some degree to get what little they can -- they can extract from a Democratic controlled Congress and heavy majority in the House by 101 votes. Now, if it were a narrower margin, where there'd be really much more cause for the Democrats to opt for the President's program, then, of course, he'd be in better shape, and I think it's all manifested in this, the inability of the President to really get his way on some of the very basic issues that I think the American people are interested in.

MR. MacNeil: Would Perot be such a threat to the Republican Party right now, if your President were demonstrating a different kind of leadership domestically? I mean, isn't part of the appeal of Perot that he sounds or appears so crisp and decisive?

REP. MICHEL: Well, I don't know what it's directed all that at the President, as it is, at the institution of Congress, and yes, the fact that there is gridlock between the executive and the legislative branch, distressing for me because here at a time when throughout the world governments are opting not only for free enterprise but for democratic democracies and maybe for parliamentary forms of government, and to see our own system really falling down on the job and not measuring up to what the American people would like to have. And that's the frustration that's out there in the country. I sense it. I can tell and the trashing that we in the Congress get particularly from time to time is we're out on the stump.

MR. MacNeil: Do you think the President should do more to stand up to Perot?

REP. MICHEL: Well, I don't -- I guess we get involved all too much in personalities from time to time, just as the statements that I've made -- I don't want to pit myself, Bob Michel, or the President, for that matter, vis-a-vis Ross Perot, but rather addressing what that phenomenon is out there that gives a fellow who people really know so very little about as to how he would handle the basic issues this kind of response in the public opinion polls. But let's bear in mind the President was 17 points behind Dukakis at the close of our convention and then we had a blow out. I don't look for the kind of overwhelming victory this time. I think it'll be a closer kind of race for any number of reasons. And so we ought to be prepared for the worst case scenario.

MR. MacNeil: Some analysts are suggesting that the White House - - the President and the Vice President -- are now going for a 35 percent strategy, that they assume that they are going to split the vote with Perot, and, therefore, they're trying to secure the hard core conservative Republicans and keep that. Do you think that's a good strategy?

REP. MICHEL: Well, I haven't been privy to any of those conversations at all. I was just suggesting, for example, in the remarks I made yesterday, that particularly in the Southern tier states where for example Clinton could very well receive maybe 80, 90 percent of the black vote and which is a significant vote if it's turned out, and then having both Perot coming from Texas, the President coming from Texas, and conservative element there splitting it down the middle, I'm not altogether sure how that translates in the New England states, in the Midwest, and some of the other parts of the country, but if you begin from that point as a base, because actually we in the Republican Party have been faring quite well in the Southern states and picking up House members and some who've actually left their Democratic roots and come over to join the Republican Party. It would be interesting, for example, for Clinton to be asked, you know, how would he like working with this current Congress, you know. He's really shied away from that, and I'd like to bring the attention back to what it is when we really have a government that works in harness, the executive and the legislative branch together, in the best interest of the people.

MR. MacNeil: Are you -- do you think there's a danger that Perot with his idea that he can kind of shake it all up in Washington and make it work, does he pose some kind of danger to the Democratic system?

REP. MICHEL: Well, I think that's very true, you know. It's one thing to be a chief executive officer, hire and fire at will and do your thing, and Ross Perot's been one of those domineering individuals. I think it's been demonstrated in the past. He's going to have any number -- if he were to be elected President, you know, he wouldn't be simply his own boss. He'd have, yes, the Congress to contend with, yes, the American people to contend with. And so it's one thing -- we don't have a dictatorial form of government and we strive for a strong Presidency to give direction to the country. By the same token, there are all kinds of pressures out there. They have to be catered to from time to time and you can't simply exert your own will and everybody else be damned. And up to this point, Ross Perot's given no indication, other than maybe suggesting some of the key issues to this public referendum by electronic media device of some sort which I think frankly just would not sell a lot of computers, but I'm not sure it'd do much better than that.

MR. MacNeil: Are you suggesting that Mr. Perot doesn't believe in the Constitution, that he would attempt to exercise some kind of authoritarian rule?

REP. MICHEL: Well, I would not question his allegiance to our form of government by any stretch of the imagination, but as I said, there's been so little really in the public arena discussed about how he would handle and deal with the various issues, or with the Congress, here's a man who would be running, I suspect as an independent, and we have no independent candidates for Congress or the Senate running, Republicans and Democrats. There would be a problem of lack of loyalty to any particular prescribed theme on the part of an independent. It just opens itself up to all kinds of problems out there. And it's about time the American people wake up and the media wake up to the fact that what this does portend for the American public and not to just let it happen without asking the serious questions that ought to be asked like every other Presidential candidate has got to face up to it, and I mean deep probing ones that really put the candidate right up against the mat and the wall.

MR. MacNeil: Okay. Well, Congressman Michel, thank you very much for joining us. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: We continue our discussion of the Perot factor and other things political. David Gergen of our regular Friday political analysis team is out of the country, but syndicated columnist Mark Shields is with us. So is Republican strategist Ed Rollins and Washington Post political reporter E.J. Dionne, author of the recently published book "Why Americans Hate Politics." He's in Los Angeles tonight. And E.J., let's start with you. You've been presumably hearing this conversation that just went on with Robert and Congressman Michel. Do you have a different explanation for Ross Perot's gains, is that right?

MR. DIONNE: Well, first of all, I think that I was very interested in what the Congressman said because when a politician says it's up to the media to save us, you know that the politicians, themselves, are in some kind of trouble. I think he's right, that we will have to probe Mr. Perot more closely than he's been probed, but I think it shows the frustration of where the parties are. I think there are three basic points to make about what's happened with Mr. Perot. The first is Congressman Michel is right. There has been the frustration of divided government. For 12 years, the voters have returned a Democratic Congress, more or less, and Republicans in the White House mainly because the Republicans didn't seem to have a coherent program and weren't really crazy about what the Democrats had on offer, so they voted safe and they split the government up. That created gridlock and frustration. I think the second thing that's happened is we've had a kind of ideological politics of false choices where really it's a politics of the rigid Chinese menu where you can't take two things out of Column A and one thing out of Column B, that on the Los Angeles riots, the debate almost immediately fell into these little boxes. Either the problem was crime or the problem was family breakdown or the problem was unemployment. Most Americans think all of those things are involved. And I think Perot is appealing to people's sense that there's something broken, we're not talking about things rationally, and he's stepping in there without saying all that much specific and appealing to that sentiment. The third point is we've always had an ambivalence about political parties. That goes back a long way.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What do you think the impact of the Perot phenomenon is on the political parties?

MR. DIONNE: Well, I think Congressman Michel has started doing something that the parties are really going to have to do, that he raises the question: Is the two-party system good for the country? Republicans and Democrats have not had to defend the two-party system for a very long time, but I think in order to get votes from people, the Presidential candidates, Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush, are really going to have to say, look, we have something to do for the country if you elect a coherent government of Republicans in the White House and Republicans in Congress, or Democrats in the White House and Democrats in the Congress, here's what you'll get, so I think Perot could actually force the two parties to do something they probably should have started doing a long time ago. I think that's the only way they will contain this threat.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You think that Perot's appeal though is that he's not a partof either of these parties? I mean, is that why people -- I mean, you just heard Congressman Michel say that Perot is not the problem, and he can't understand the phenomenon that allows this campaign or candidacy or whatever it is go forward without any scrutiny. I mean, is it that he is not in either of the parties?

REP. MICHEL: Because he has no long history in either parties, in fact, has a history of dabbling a little bit in both, and because he hasn't taken clear positions, he's almost become the Worjack candidate. People can read into him any views they want, any hopes they have, any wishes they might have for government. He also doesn't have to answer for past failures. If you're a Democrat, you know that the Republicans are going to throw Jimmy Carter or George McGovern at you, if you're a Democrat. If you're a Republican, you know that the Democrats are going to throw Herbert Hoover at you. There's nothing you can throw at Ross Perot because he has no long history. And I think the Democrats are going to start talking at some point about his connections with Mr. Nixon and ask, what does this say to Democrats about Ross Perot? But I think that because he doesn't have any of these connections, he is going to get a lot of free rides from voters, themselves.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Mark, what impact do you think Ross Perot is having on the two parties?

MR. SHIELDS: I think they're terrified, Charlayne. I mean, there's just absolute terror and E.J.'s absolutely right when he says that when political operatives, managers, candidates, start saying, hey, why don't you take a look at this guy, Perot, why don't you expose him, you in the press, why don't you investigate him? That means that they're adversarily reluctant to engage in it. I think you add to that -- and it cannot be emphasized enough -- the fact that for 12 years we have had gridlock and stalemate, and just take one simple issue, the national deficit and debt, which has quadrupled in the past 12 years. We've had Democrats in the Congress, Republicans in the White House. You ask Democrats about it and they say, well, it's obviously the hypocrisy of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, neither one of them's ever said we had a balanced budget in 12 years, and they're right when they say that. Ask the Republicans and they'll say look, a President doesn't appropriate a nickel, that only Congress can appropriate money. And they're right when they say that. They're both wrong, because there is no accountability and I think what Perot represents in a strange way is a fundamental accountability. He's saying, give me the job, put me in charge.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Ed Rollins, is this a threat for both parties?

MR. ROLLINS: Sure it is.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The Perot thing.

MR. ROLLINS: And it could end up being a very positive thing, but it obviously is a threat. A Wall Street Journal poll over this week indicated strong affiliation with parties. 10 percent of Americans identify themselves as strong Republicans, about 15 percent as strong Democrats. That means 75 percent of the American electorate today really doesn't feel strongly about either party and I think Perot is appealing to a great many of those. Equally as important, you're finding people getting involved in this campaign because they don't think Washington works, they don't think the people that are here represent their views, and I think there's a crusade that's building. Ross Perot is the leader of that crusade and obviously he's going to come under further scrutiny. What they know about him is this is a "can do" guy. He'sa leader, and obviously they like that.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What do the parties have to do in order to reclaim their territory and -- or is the horse way, too far out of the barn?

MR. SHIELDS: I think, Charlayne --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Ross too far out?

MR. SHIELDS: Ross too far out, that's right. I think Ed put his finger on it. I mean, they see leadership. They see boldness. That has not been part of the job description of the President during the Bush administration. I mean, they say where is Ross Perot's ideas, or specifics. I think you could ask the same thing about George Bush. And they're looking for bold leadership. There's a sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction, that bold leadership and change policies are necessary.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But, I mean, -- E.J.

MR. DIONNE: What I was going to say is I think there is always something peculiar going on here. My colleague, Dan Bald, said that Perot people are people who like their politics without politics. And I think there is an element of let's throw up our hands with these guys in Washington and with normal politics, and then let's put somebody in charge who will take responsibility. Now, how that plays out, I'm not sure, because we are a country that's sort of anti-authoritarian. We don't like that. We're also a country that likes people to take responsibility, as Mark just said, and I think Perot has played that ambivalence quite brilliantly, because, on the one hand, he says, look, I'm going to have a really Democratic government, I'm going to have this town meeting approach where everybody's going to be able to talk, at the same time, I'm going to be able to be a strong leader. He's straddling this feeling in the public and I think it's going to be the job of both of the other candidates to challenge him and say, where does this really come down.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But what of the party, Ed Rollins, I mean, what do the parties have to do now to get back in the game?

MR. ROLLINS: First of all, the parties don't stand for anything. The parties try and cover all bases. You have everyone from Congresswoman Maxine Waters to Sen. Howell Heflin. That's the full range of American politics in the Democratic Party. In my party, you have everybody from Congressman Chris Shay, who is one of the most liberal, to Strom Thurmond. That covers the whole game. So everybody gets in there and they basically say, well, we're Republican, we're Democrat, this is our issue. Everybody is covering all issues, and I think what the American electorate is saying, tell me you stand for something, pay the price for standing for something, show me some convictions, and I'll either accept you or reject you.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: E.J., with the way things are going, I mean, is it possible that we could be seeing the end of the two-party system in this country?

MR. DIONNE: We haven't seen a challenge to it like this since at least 1912 and I think you could have total political meltdown if you had a situation where there was no majority in the electoral college. I think one of the scenarios --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you think this race could be thrown into the House of Representatives?

MR. DIONNE: Well, that could happen. My favorite scenario, if you're cooking up crazy scenarios, is the runaway electoral college. I mean, those folks aren't bound by anything. Most state laws don't bind them to vote for anybody. So you could actually have all the bargaining happen before the electors cast their votes. That's another possibility here. So you could have a very, very bizarre system. But I think that the parties, themselves, are the only folks who can sort of preserve the two-party system.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But how?

MR. DIONNE: By trying again to say we have something to stand for if you vote for us, this is what you're going to get.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But we haven't had that happen very often. Ronald Reagan kind of did it in his '80 campaign, he kind of ran out of steam after about a year. Much of the rest of his program after he cut taxes was not all that popular. And you haven't seen that kind of clarity. I think the challenge of Perot, if he's going to be vague, the two parties are going to have to be specific.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You think this could go in the House of Representatives?

MR. ROLLINS: I think it could easily go in the House of Representatives, and something else. The two parties are never going to be quite the same and they're going to have to define themselves, or they won't survive, at least not in their present form. And you're going to have independent candidates in the future. What Perot will do is prove to you that you can go do it, you can go basically run for Congress --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You don't think this is some aberration.

MR. ROLLINS: -- you can run for the Senate. Absolutely not. This is going to change American politics like we've never seen I think.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you agree with that, Mark?

MR. SHIELDS: I think I do. I agree with both E.J. and Ed. I'd just simply say to both parties if they're interested in surviving, sit down, have an examination of conscience, and say, what are the three things that you really want to do, what are the three things that you want to accomplish, how do you want to make the world different by a Democratic administration, a Republican administration? I don't think the voters have any idea at this point what are the three; they know fifty-seven on the Democratic side and maybe one on the Republican, on traditional family values or something.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Speaking of that, at the risk of sounding like George Bush, the Murphy Brown question. What did it yield this week and for whom?

MR. SHIELDS: I think it probably did -- it was an acknowledgement that this is the only area of the entire electorate where George Bush is seen as strong. He is -- runs either second or third in who could best handle the problems of the economy, of unemployment, of poverty of the problems in the city, behind Ross Perot and Bill Clinton.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, they said --

MR. SHIELDS: This is one area, traditional values and crime, where the Republicans and Bush, in particular, and I think Dan Quayle -- I think he was speaking from conviction but I think it was a convergence of self-interest and political tactics.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you think it worked for Bush? Because you know, the Bush White House kind of waffled on it.

MR. ROLLINS: That's obviously the problem. You know -- but it would have much better to leave Murphy Brown out of this. She has 38 million viewers and she's a very popular and beloved figure. I think the critical thing, whatever Vice President Quayle says, and I think his overall speech was a good speech, the President needs to go that same direction. Whichever way the President goes, he needs to go in that direction. They need a strategy, consistency of message. You can't have it both ways anymore.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: E.J., you have a take on that?

MR. DIONNE: Yeah. I think that the problem with all the talk about family values is that it's easy to talk about it. And I think Vice President Quayle made a mistake also using Murphy Brown to get a lot of attention for it, but it was one sentence in the speech overshadowed everything else. The problem with talking about family values is what are you actually going to do, and it seems to me there are some specific things that you can do, but a lot of politicians have been unwilling to do them. I mean, family leave for mothers and newborns, that's a real way to help the family. Changing the tax code to be nicer to kids, to be nicer to parents with kids -- I'm sorry -- as soon as you get into that, people run away, so that you just get back to the generalities of family values.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, how do you think that Democrats responded, because Clinton did, because Clinton did respond?

MR. SHIELDS: Yeah. Clinton responded first haltingly, saying that he did agree that much of what was on television was trash and had no moral message and then he came back with sort of a programmatic answer and --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So did that help him at all?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, I don't know if it helps him. I do think that E.J. has touched upon, by his formulation, on the false choices. I mean, there are false choices involved. Are we going to do something to help the underclass stuck in the cities? Does that involve traditional values and different morality? Yes, it does. Does it involve education? Does it involve taxes? Does it involve job retraining? Yes, it does. Bill Bradley and Jack Kemp are about the only two I know who are talking that directly and candidly.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Okay. Well, Mark Shields, Ed Rollins, and E.J. Dionne, thank you for being with us.

MR. MacNeil: Still ahead on the NewsHour, Roger Mudd looks at a possible 1930s solution to the problems of the '90s, and essayist Roger Rosenblatt. FOCUS - BACK TO WORK

MR. MacNeil: Next tonight, in an effort to reform America's ballooning welfare system, some members of Congress want to dust off an old idea made famous during the New Deal. The question is: Can it work today? Contributing Correspondent Roger Mudd reports.

MR. MUDD: Mention to anyone over 50 the initials WPA and CCC, and who among them does not remember with some fondness, two of the New Deal's most famous social programs.

SEN. DAVID BOREN, [D] Oklahoma: Those initials are still on the sidewalks. They're on plaques on our national parks and it brings back some good memories of really contributing something back to the country.

SPOKESPERSON: I think almost the drawings of the '30s and the colors, males all basically, people in a Depression trying to help some others.

ROOSEVELT SANDS, WPA Alumnus: A disaster, I got laid off from the railroad, and there wasn't hardly any other kind of work, WPA.

MILTON KYHOS, CCC Alumnus: That was the smartest thing I ever did.

MR. MUDD: Really?

MILTON KYHOS: Yes.

ROBERT NATHAN: I'm sure there was a lot of waste, but it was a lot better than your sitting home and fretting away time and getting a relief check for $5 a week.

MR. MUDD: As both the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, and the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, approached the 50th anniversary of their demise, both relief programs are back in the news. David Boren of Oklahoma and five other Democratic Senators have introduced legislation for an updated WPA and CCC in order to break the welfare cycle.

SEN. BOREN: Our goal is not to get people off Welfare and permanently into a WPA kind of job. Our goal is to get them off Welfare, get them into a habit of working, let them get used to working and get some training as they work, and then cycle them right into the private sector, not keep them permanently in these WPA type jobs.

MR. MUDD: At last count, more than 13 million Americans were on welfare at a cost of 210 billion federal, state and local dollars.

SEN. BOREN: The worst thing that can happen to anybody is not to have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, no job to go to, no feeling of being productive. What a difference we can make in the lives of people. I'm convinced a lot of the drug problem, the breakdown of families, the crime rate, a lot of it comes from the sense of worthlessness, idleness, no sense of purpose.

MR. MUDD: But in the early '30s, when the CCC and WPA got started, it was unemployment, not Welfare, that was driving the New Deal. In the spring of 1933, there were almost 13 million unemployed in America, 25 percent of the labor force. Public relief programs were still basically a local and private responsibility. Among Roosevelt's early responses during his first hundred days was a bill establishing a civilian conservation corps to give unemployed young men useful work, helping conserve natural resources. By mid June of 1933, 1300 CCC camps had been set up. This is the class photo of the camp at Beltsville, Maryland. By August, 300,000 men were at work. By the time the camps closed down during the Second World War, two and a half million men had passed through. One of the earliest enrollees was 18-year old Milton Kyhos, a farm boy from Musini, Wisconsin. He was assigned to a CCC Camp 648 near Loretta, Wisconsin, and assigned as a scalper.

MILTON KYHOS: Scalping is with a great big hatchet-like appendage here that you took and you scalped the surface of the Earth by probably three feet by four feet or four feet by four feet, taking off all the sod. And subsequently, trees were planted in there, but you did the scalping and there were just, hundreds of us guys just covered hundreds and hundreds of acres in a week or so.

MR. MUDD: Milton Kyhos, now 76, is a retired field agent for the Internal Revenue Service, living in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. He is still proud of his three years in the CCC. Where did you live?

MR. KYHOS: In barracks, in barracks.

MR. MUDD: Did a bugler wake you up in the morning?

MR. KYHOS: Yes. The guy's name was Olson.

MR. MUDD: Olson. A Swede?

MR. KYHOS: Yes, he was. He could really do it -- the best bugler.

MR. MUDD: And would he blow Taps at night?

MR. KYHOS: Taps at night, mail call.

MR. MUDD: Right.

MR. KYHOS: Yeah.

MR. MUDD: It sounds like a fairly military life.

MR. KYHOS: It was 100 percent military.

MR. MUDD: And how much, what was your pay?

MR. KYHOS: Well, our pay was $30 a month, 25 of which went home.

MR. MUDD: So you sent it home, or they required you to send it home?

MR. KYHOS: The government sent it home.

MR. MUDD: Is that right?

MR. KYHOS: Yes.

MR. MUDD: So you got a dollar a day.

MR. KYHOS: A dollar a day.

MR. MUDD: Room and board.

MR. KYHOS: Room and board.

MR. MUDD: Worked from sun up to sundown.

MR. KYHOS: Yes.

MR. MUDD: But what do you think of that experience when you look back?

MR. KYHOS: Well, it was just a perfect experience, I think. It taught us a little bit about money, which the modern generation seems to forget, I think.

MR. MUDD: All told, the CCC men planted 17 million acres of new forest, built thousands of bridges and dams to control soil erosion. In Maryland, for instance, there were 35,000 CCC men in 21 camps. Two of those camps operated here in the late 1930s on land between the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Potomac River Northwest of Washington, D.C. Within three years, the men of the CCC had turned this place into a federal park. They cleared the canal. They cleaned up the toe path. They restored many of the gatekeeper's houses and they returned 23 of the canal locks to operating condition. In Virginia, the CCC helped complete the Skyline Drive along the Blue Ridge Mountains and developed the new Shenandoah National Park. In the summer of 1936, President Roosevelt, himself, came to the park to dedicate it, and to break bread with the CCC during an early, early photo op.

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: [1936] It's very good to be here at these Virginia CCC camps. I wish I could see them all over the country. I wish that I could take a couple of months off from the White House and come down here and live with them, because I know I'd get full of health the way they have.

MR. MUDD: Everybody seemed to love the CCC. But Roosevelt's other big relief program, the WPA became a favorite target of conservatives. Robert Nathan, who was a New Deal economist in the Commerce Department, remembers the stories about one WPA crew digging a hole and the next crew filling it.

ROBERT NATHAN, Economist: Well, not in the course. The Wall Street jargon for WPA was boon dogging or leaf raking or waste, but no matter what it was, it certainly wasn't highly efficient and certainly not hardly technical, nor a technologically well-equipped undertaking. It was the people who worked so you did something useful.

MR. MUDD: The WPA was set up in 1935 and run by Harry Hopkins to give work to the unemployed to build public improvements or perform public services. Nearly 8 million worked for the WPA during its eight years. An average of two to three million were on the payroll during any given month. Their average wage was $60 a month, the equivalent of $300 today. About 80 percent of WPA's funds were spent for construction work, 655,000 miles of roads, including highways, farm to market roads, and city streets, 125,000 public buildings or facilities, like this reservoir in Atlantic City, 75,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, 800 airports, including Newark and LaGuardia and New York City. One of the WPA's most ambitious projects was the takeover of Key West, Florida. Economist Robert Nathan says the town was bankrupt.

MR. NATHAN: They didn't have money to clean the streets. They really didn't have jobs. It had been a big Naval base and the Navy had closed down. It had been an important place for cigar manufacturing. For some reason, the cigar industry had moved to Tampa. It had been an important source of sponging, but the Greeks finally, they went up to Western Florida also, and the town really had no jobs. They just couldn't carry on the duties and the essentials of community of life and WPA went down and literally took it over not as a military effort, but not with resistance, the town welcomed it.

MR. MUDD: With 80 percent of Key West on Welfare, Florida's governor, David Shultz, declared a state of emergency and turned the entire island over to the WPA and its regional director, Julius Stone. Stone immediately put the town on the WPA payroll and work began, clearing tons of garbage from the streets, parks and beaches, repairing dilapidated homes, building roads. One of those roads, a boulevard, still bears the name of the father of the WPA. Another Roosevelt, Roosevelt Sands, went to work for the WPA helping put in Key West's first sewer system.

ROOSEVELT SANDS: I ran the jack hammer. You had the corners -- had to put the manholes right there. You know, the jack hammer had to do that. They had another machine that did the cutting on the straight line, where the manhole would be round and I'd do that kind of work with a jack hammer, made $26 every two weeks and had plenty of money. [laughing] Only got $7.20 a week and that's his -- didn't call in consecutively, you know -- had some good friends.

MR. MUDD: To promote tourism at Key West, the WPA hired artists to illustrate travel brochures and postcards. Two of their murals are still in one of the town's elementary schools. Within a year, tourism caught on. Within a few more years, Key West no longer needed the WPA. Wilhelmina Harvey, now the mayor of Monroe County, which includes Key West, was a school girl at the time.

MAYOR WILHELMINA HARVEY, Monroe County, Florida: It made a great, great difference in the people at Key West. We sort of had a laissez-faire attitude, you know, and sort of we had given up, so when they came in and they made these jobs available, there was a little income to come into the home, then too they brightened up the town. We were kind of dull and dismal. It got us loving ourselves again. I think we were so that we didn't even love ourselves. So it was like a psychiatric treatment, as well as an economic one.

MR. MUDD: By 1943, a wartime economy had virtually eliminated unemployment and in June of that year, the WPA died, with 42,000 left on the payroll. Now, 50 years later, Democrats here on Capitol Hill are talking about a new version of the WPA. David Boren calls it the CWPA, the Community Works Progress Administration.

SEN. BOREN: What we can do is take an old concept -- we don't want to create a whole new bureaucracy -- let's use our existing structure, including some private sector committees that exist at the local level -- the mayors already have a list of 7,000 projects ready to go, things we really need in this country, infrastructure. We don't have to recreate the wheel. Let's just bring back the best parts of an old concept, the concept of giving someone work instead of just mailing someone a check through the mail, and bring that back.

MR. MUDD: What would be the price tag for a year of this program?

SEN. BOREN: I think you could really get a meaningful program underway probably for four or five billion dollars, and because, remember, you're not going to have to duplicate what you're now paying. If you're paying someone a welfare benefit, let's say someone's getting $200 a month, that's going to be mainly their salary for doing the WPA projects. As I say, we're going to make it 10 percent more, so if it's say two, three hundred dollars a month, it'll be now three hundred and thirty dollars a month, instead of three hundred.

MR. MUDD: One of the biggest boosters of a 1992 WPA CCC is the 79-year old comptroller of the state of Maryland, Louis Goldstein.

LOUIS GOLDSTEIN, Maryland State Comptroller: I think these kids - - you saw them on TV out there in Los Angeles -- a bunch of young kids doing what, breaking into stores, stealing every damn thing that was in their way. They're frustrated. Something's wrong with them, but if they had an opportunity to live in one of these camps today you'd probably have to pay them maybe $200 a month.

MR. MUDD: Instead of 30.

MR. GOLDSTEIN: Instead of 30. And let them keep 50 and send 150 home, and build up a little reserve, and be sure to get the high school equivalent of education or even a little higher education, so they'll be prepared to go out of the new CCC camp and take a job, whether it's mechanics, plumbing work, sheetrock work, electricians, work on computers, all kinds of opportunities.

MR. MUDD: What about the CCC veteran himself? Does Milton Kyhos think a CCC would work in 1992?

MILTON KYHOS: I don't think so.

MR. MUDD: Why?

MILTON KYHOS: Discipline.

MR. MUDD: What do you mean?

MILTON KYHOS: You can't discipline the modern generation like you could discipline us in 1934, '33. We were down and out. We didn't have any money. We were tickled to see that $5 bill once a month. You know, I mean, people have no concept of what it was like. And there is a probability that you'd have nothing but trouble, that's what you would have.

MR. MUDD: You mean, you don't think American youth between age 17 and 24, or whatever it is, is desperate enough to submit to the discipline of a CCC?

MILTON KYHOS: You've got it. They're not -- they would not submit to that type of discipline.

MR. MUDD: And what about the Bush administration's position? Labor Secretary Lynn Martin answers carefully.

LYNN MARTIN, Secretary of Labor: The fact is that government public programs have to be very carefully designed because although memories are wonderful things -- and I don't want to destroy any of them -- it's not 1933 anymore. In fact, it's 1992, and what's needed in the work place now, and the people that need our help, and the kinds of skills that they're going to have to have, if we tried to do a 1930's program, we would be trading on a memory and we would end up ruining a memory.

MR. MUDD: Do you think boondoggle is the right word?

SEC. MARTIN: No. But failure -- I mean, they don't work.

MR. MUDD: But what?

SEC. MARTIN: Failure could be the word.

MR. MUDD: Failure.

SEC. MARTIN: We had public programs that put people to work at government, for instance, and yet, when the end of the program comes, it's as if it didn't exist. They're back out on the street. What we have to figure out is a better way to let people have real jobs that can last and no matter how well intentioned a full public program is, at the end of it, there's nothing. How much more sense it makes to train people for jobs that are going to be there that can be a career, that can be a future, not just, you know, we'll plant a bush.

MR. MUDD: What Lynn Martin is pushing is the Bush program called "Jobs 2000," establishing what she calls one-stop shopping, a network of local skill centers to make access quicker and easier to more than 60 federal job programs now run by seven different federal agencies at a cost of about $18 billion a year.

SEC. MARTIN: If I lose my job or you lose your job, why shouldn't you be able to go to one place, maybe where you pick up your unemployment check, for instance, and say, look, what's going to be available to me, what kind of training, what kind of jobs are going to be in my community so I don't have to move, and that's crazy with the new technologies we have that we don't have that readily available to people. So I'm a bit of a student of the '30s and I love the memories of those, but just as that was a creative idea then, we must have the ideas for the '90s, not just a rehash 50 or 40 or 30 years later.

MR. MUDD: Economist Robert Nathan acknowledges Sec. Martin's criticism.

MR. NATHAN: You're certainly not going to get any nuclear physicists out of the WPA project, but you know, not all jobs are the high skilled. I don't think there's any question about it. But let's just take work discipline. Let's just take work practices. Let's just take coming to work on time or coming to work regularly rather than any day you want. These are valuable in our society.

MR. MUDD: After a one day hearing, the Boren Bill now goes to the Senate floor. At the very least, that floor debate will be filled with nostalgia. In fact, America's conservative king of nostalgia has said, having lived through the Depression, he thought a WPA would be most helpful. That's a quote, a quote from Ronald Reagan. ESSAY - ONLY CONNECT

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Finally tonight, essayist Roger Rosenblatt has some thoughts about making the right connections.

MR. ROSENBLATT: "Only connect. Only connect the pros and the passion and both would be exalted and human love will be seen at its heighth. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect. And the beast and the monk robbed of the isolation that is life to either will die." I'm quoting E.M. Forster's great novel, "Howard's End." There's a movie of "Howard's End" playing now, but for some reason it leaves out that passage. Too bad. Americans could make use of those two words "only connect" these days as the country continues to quiver in reaction to the Los Angeles riots and to the lesser riots in other cities and perhaps most of all to the subterranean feeling that the riots could happen again, anywhere. They could. Everything destructive could happen, does happen in America nowadays. In a way that E.M. Forster did not intend, all the elements of American life only connect. Remember the term "white flight." The premise behind the term was that white flight was, in fact, possible. White people fearing the disintegration of life in the cities, fearing black people, in particular, would be able to build their dream houses in the suburbs and live free of the civil wars in urban America. White flight, the image of sea birds bound for open waters, not a chance. If there ever was such a thing as white flight, that very soon became grounded in and bar reality. Fly to the suburbs, the neat little houses, the patches of lawn. But look, the suburbs and the same terrors as the cities, the same poisons, the same shabby education, the same race hatred, low health, teenage pregnancy and on and on. Fly to the countryside, the open fields, the nice red barns. Are things better there? Hardly. I spent part of a summer in Iowa recently, where the corn is knee high in July, as the Iowans say, and too many kids are higher on drugs which they do not say, drugs, drive by shootings, race beatings, neglect of children, poverty, houses falling down, families falling down. Where did you see such a sight before? Only connect. Everything connects and corrupts and spreads like a disease. There is no place for white flight. There was never was. There is no place to hide. There never is. That is the meaning of that passage from "Howard's End." Though Forster makes his prescription sound awfully easy. Only connect, as if a simple gesture of human will could eradicate all the terrible isolations in a society. Yet, what does one start with? A simple gesture of human will. "The beast and the monk," he says, "the callous killer and the callous ferment." How to end their choke hold on their American life unless one connects to others, to the life of others that stares you in the face, even scares you half to death, but only half. Forster was writing about the falling empire in "Howard's End," the British empire and its stiff-necked class system would, he warned, "break apart like an egg," if it did not learn to connect stratum and stratum, color and color. No need to shout that warning here. The warning is palpable, blatant, in the fragments of glass, brick, wood, and bone, in the fragments of thought. Live in fragments no longer. Time to try? There is no white flight or black flight or Latino or Asian or rich or poor or city or country flight. Instead, there is a vast, roiling civilization in which people have a choice to run to nowhere or toward one another in a simple gesture of human will. Only connect. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again, the main stories of this Friday, the retrial of a white police officer charged in Rodney King's beating will be held in Los Angeles in October. A judge rejected a defense request to move it to Simi Valley, site of the original trial. The U.S. Coast Guard said it would no longer rescue Haitian boat people unless they were in imminent danger of sinking. Tonight Sec. of State Baker announced the U.S. would close two Yugoslav consulates to protest aggression by the Yugoslav army against Bosnia. Baker called the situation there, "a humanitarian nightmare." Good night, Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Good night, Robin. That's our NewsHour for tonight. We'll be back Monday. I'm Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Have a safe Memorial Day Weekend.