The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Good evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight President Clinton uses the line item veto; we have a report and analysis by Paul Gigot, joined by Tom Oliphant; also a Newsmaker interview with Richard Holbrooke just back from Bosnia; using cigarette taxes to deter smoking; and a David Gergen dialogue with Joseph Ellis, author of a new book on Thomas Jefferson. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday.NEWS SUMMARY

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: President Clinton exercised his line item veto authority today, becoming the first U.S. President to wield a power sought by several of his predecessors and used routinely by many state governors. He acted under a law that came into effect in January, allowing him to veto parts of a bill without killing it entirely. In an Oval Office ceremony the President struck two tax break provisions and a spending measure within the balanced budget agreement signed into law last week. Mr. Clinton said his action would change the way Washington conducts business and save hundreds of millions of dollars. Congress has 30 days to review the items and a court challenge is anticipated. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. On the UPS story today Labor Sec. Alexis Herman met separately with negotiators for United Parcel Service and the Teamsters. The meeting was the first intervention in the week-old strike by a top level Clinton administration official. Talks with federal mediators broke down over the weekend. Before the meetings today Sec. Herman urged both sides to be more flexible and open to compromise. The status of part-time workers and pension funds are two major issues in the dispute. UPS and Teamster officials talked with reporters at the Labor Department about whether there should be a union membership vote on the last company offer.

GINA ELLRICH, UPS Spokeswoman: The Teamsters leadership should not stand in the way of increased retirement security of its members or of their right to vote. The new democratic Teamsters should let our people vote.

RON CAREY, Teamsters President: The membership knows what the vital issues are. They know it's about good, decent jobs, about subcontracting, about an attempt to put their hands in the pockets of the pension money. They know all about that.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: No new talks have been scheduled in the UPS strike. On the Korean air crash story today the Federal Aviation Administration ordered safety checks for the low altitude warning systems at all U.S. airports. Over the weekend National Transportation Safety Board investigators said the failure of the warning system at the Guam airport may have contributed to last Wednesday's fatal accident. Two hundred and twenty-six passengers and crew died in the crash. Investigators said it will be months before they know what caused it. And in the Middle East today U.S. envoy Dennis Ross continued efforts to revive the Israeli- Palestinian peace process. He brought Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli security officials together for talks in the West Bank town of Ramallah. Yesterday, Ross held separate meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Arafat. Ross said the goal of his trip was to re-establish security cooperation.

DENNIS ROSS, U.S. Envoy: The American position is very clear that there has to be a security underpinning for the process to succeed. Clearly, there will also have to be a process that addresses the political differences because there isn't a peace process if you don't overcome the differences. Security is one part of it. The political is the other. In the current circumstances the first thing that must be done is to re-establish a basis for security.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The meetings arranged by Ross were the first between Israeli and PLO officials since the July 30th suicide bombing in Jerusalem's main Jewish market. Fourteen Israelis were killed. In Ramallah on the West Bank several thousand Palestinians demonstrated against actions taken by the Israeli government after the bombing, including closing off the West Bank and Gaza and jailing Palestinians suspected of ties with terrorists. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the President uses the line item veto, Richard Holbrooke just back from Bosnia, putting cigarette taxes to work, and a David Gergen dialogue. FOCUS - DRAWING THE LINE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: First tonight, the President uses the line item veto. Kwame Holman begins our coverage.

KWAME HOLMAN: President Clinton took the balanced budget agreement he signed last week and today tried to shape it a little bit more to his liking. He did so by using the line item veto--a new executive power granted by the legislative branch but certain to face a judicial challenge.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: In the past, good legislation could be cluttered up with unjustifiable or wasteful spending or tax provisions, leaving the president no choice but to sign or veto the overall legislation. With the line-item veto, the president can sign an overall bill into law, but cancel a particular spending project or a particular tax break that benefits only a handful of individuals or companies.

KWAME HOLMAN: The president said he asked members of his administration to find specific items in the budget agreement that were inconsistent with good public policy, benefitted a few at the expense of many, and weren't part of the good faith budget negotiations with the Congress.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: After careful scrutiny, and numerous meetings with my staff and cabinet members, we have found three provisions that meet those criteria. In a few moments, I will use the power of the line-item veto to cancel a provision that would allow financial service companies to shelter income, in foreign tax havens, to avoid all US taxation. I will also cancel a provision that singles out New York, by allowing it to tap into the federal treasury to reduce its state expenditures through the use of health-provider tax to match federal Medicaid dollars, that are impermissible in every other state in the country and actually in existence now in several other states. No other state in the nation would be given this provision, and it is unfair to the rest of our nation's taxpayers to ask them to subsidize it. Finally, I will cancel a provision that, though well-intended, is poorly designed. This provision would have allowed a very limited number of agribusinesses to avoid paying capital gains taxes, possibly forever, on the sales of certain assets to farmers cooperatives. And it could have benefitted not only traditional farm coops but giant organizations which do not need and should not trigger the law's benefits.

KWAME HOLMAN: In exercising the line item veto Mr. Clinton fulfilled the wish of every President dating back to Ulysses S. Grant--the ability to delete specific spending items from a piece of legislation without having to veto the entire bill. Presidents Reagan and Bush renewed the call for the line item veto during the 1980's. But it wasn't until last year-- under the guidance of the first Republican-controlled Congress in 40 years--that the line item veto finally became law. And it could change the rules by which spending decisions are made.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The actions I take today will save the American people hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 10 years and send a signal that the Washington rules have changed for good and for the good of the American people. From now on presidents will be able to say no to wasteful spending or tax loopholes, even as they say yes to vital legislation. Special interests will not be able to play the old game of slipping a provision into a massive bill in the hope that no one will notice. For the first time the President is exercising the power to prevent that from happening

KWAME HOLMAN: However there is a process by which the Congress can override the action taken by the president today. It can approve each of those three items individually with a simple majority vote in both houses taken within 30 days. he president, in turn, can veto them again, in which case the Congress then needs a two-thirds vote in both houses to override those vetoes. A spokesperson for House Speaker Newt Gingrich today called the President' s actions "petty politics," while Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said he isn't sure he'll try to challenge the vetoes. But several other members of Congress are expected to challenge them in court. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia long has held the line item veto is unconstitutional.

SEN. ROBERT BYRD: Will be used as a club to be held over the head of every member of the United States Senate and every member of the House of Representatives by power hungry presidents who will seek to impose their will over the legislative process to the detriment of the American people whose elected representatives in Congress can no longer be free to exercise their judgment as to what matters are in the best interests of the United States, and the people whom they serve.

KWAME HOLMAN: Last April, federal district court Judge Thomas Pennfield Jackson sided with Senator Byrd when he ruled the line item veto was unconstitutional. Jackson wrote: "Where the president signs a bill but then purports to cancel parts of it, he exceeds his constitutional authority and prevents both houses of Congress from participating in the exercise of lawmaking authority. But in June, the Supreme Court let the line item veto stand, at least temporarily. The justices decided that no legal challenge to the law could take place until the law was put into use. And that's what happened today.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The power is given by legislation. The real question is does the Constitution permit or forbid the Congress to give the president this kind of power? I believe that, since if you look at the fact that 43 states have this--the power for the governor--and it has been upheld in state after state after state, the provisions of most state constitutions are similar to the provisions of the federal constitution in the general allocation of executive authority and legislative authority. So I think it is an implicit thing, as long as the legislature has the right to override the executive, than for the legislature to allow the executive to make reasoned judgments about particular items in these omnibus bills I do not believe is an unconstitutional delegation of the legislature's authority to the president.

KWAME HOLMAN: But until the court rules, President Clinton says he plans to exercise his newfound powers on items contained in 13 appropriations bills expected to come to his desk this fall.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now, when you get to the appropriations process, it will be somewhat more straightforward, you know, should this be built or not, should this vote be built or not, should this money be given to this agency or not for this program, and I think that those are the things where typically in use at the state level. But in the context of taxes and the entitlements, I thought each of these three things presented a representative case where the veto was intended to be used. Thank you.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: More on today's action now and to Charles Krause.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Now to look at the political ramifications of the line item veto we're joined by NewsHour regular and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot and also political columnist Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe. Tom and Paul, welcome. Paul, tell me, politically, what did the President gain from his decision to use the line item veto?

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: Well, Charles, he got a substantial new political power, be able to pick out specific items. He hasn't had that. Every President since U.S. Grant has had it. He gets to appear at the same time fiscally frugal, which is an image he's trying to project for the Democratic Party; sends a substantial deterrent message to members of Congress, Democrat or Republican, in future budgets. He makes a few enemies here. The specific sponsors of the items on the bill--but as Machiavelli said, it's better to be feared than loved. And I think they'll fear him for this.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Tom.

TOM OLIPHANT, Boston Globe: I might even go little bit further. And I think the President was helped today by the way he made this first use of this new power. Remember, we haven't even come to a pure spending bill yet and won't for some time. But he took on a tax issue, an entitlement issue, and an industry-driven tax break issue, all supported by rather powerful people in Washington, not weak people, so that it was an assertive, vigorous use of this new power in a way that I think made him look strong just in exercising it.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Now, there were those, though--you say he looked strong, but there were those who suggested this was really more political theater than anything else because there wasn't that much money involved.

TOM OLIPHANT: Well, certainly $600 million and a $1.6 trillion budget is not very much, though, I would note that where appropriations are concerned later this year, it's been estimated by some experts that a judicious use of the line item veto could probably take out 5 billion plus or so dollars from appropriations. And now we're talking about a significant piece of change. So the amount of money potentially involved with this power is not at all insignificant.

CHARLES KRAUSE: So not political theater?

TOM OLIPHANT: Well, of course political theater. But I think that merely dresses up the action in the kinds of clothes that help him. Theater is part of Washington.

PAUL GIGOT: The President did make a claim that I thought was too extravagant when he said the rules of Washington have changed for good. We should be so lucky. I mean, if he vetoes ethanol subsidies, then I'll say the rules of Washington have changed for good. But he did exercise the power. And just by exercising that power, he shows members of Congress that in the future they must be careful because if they put something in that turns out to be focused on by the President to veto, the run the risk of significant embarrassment not only to the people that they sponsored, who they said, look, I'll deliver for you, but also to the voters.

TOM OLIPHANT: How about this as an additional point? I think in the future if you've gota little special interest goodie in mind, you might want to consider going down to the President and talking to somebody close to him ahead of time before you go ahead and do it.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Well, let's take a look at the special interest goodies, as you call them, that he vetoed today. Let's start, Tom, with the agribusiness tax provision that was vetoed. What was that about and who lost politically?

TOM OLIPHANT: Well, this involved the sale by a processor of an asset to what turned out to be a food cooperative. In this case I believe it was involved with sugar beets. Now, there is some dispute about this even at this hour, but my understanding is that the person who did the selling, who turned out to be a mega bucks Republican contributor, has already benefitted from this and is not really affected directly by what the President did today. My understanding from the administration officials is that the impact of this line item veto is on deals like this in the future, so that the revenue estimate that was made in the veto message is really based on a fore test of what might happen had the President not acted. And, remember, that in doing this the President specifically encouraged those involved, including Minority Leader Tom Daschle in the Senate, to draw this again with a little bit more care so it doesn't have the effects that he singled out.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Who was behind this, though? Who loses politically?

PAUL GIGOT: The sponsors, including a lot of farm state Democrats. Charlie Stenholm of Texas, for example, power on the Agriculture Committee in the House, Tom Daschle, Tom Harkin of Iowa, the Farm Bureau Federation supported it--a lot of farm interests did because there are farm coops who'd stand to benefit from this, so they're the big losers.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Let's move on to the next one. The foreign tax provision; what was that about, and who loses?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, insurance companies and banks had wanted to have their foreign-sourced income treated the way manufacturing companies have it, which is sometimes they can wait until the district is taxed; they can delay until it is taxed, until it's distributed to the U.S. entities. And the sponsors of this included the Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, working on behalf of financial interests, as well as an awful lot of Democrats, Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut, who is a power in the House. She happens to have a lot of insurance companies in the state of Connecticut. Some other Democrats, I'm told, in the Ways & Means Committee in California, Bob Matsui. So it's--it was an industry-wide support for this.

CHARLES KRAUSE: And cut across both parties.

PAUL GIGOT: It cut across both parties. That's correct.

CHARLES KRAUSE: The last provision or the last part of this was this New York Medicare spending provision.

TOM OLIPHANT: Medicaid actually.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Sorry.

TOM OLIPHANT: Here is an entitlement program where, in effect, what Congress did was overturn a federal regulatory ruling involving the use by New York State and New York State alone of certain revenues from taxes on health care providers to kind of make up part of its share of this joint state federal program, something no other state can do. And interestingly, again, in terms of taking on the powerful, rather than the weak, the President singled this provision out, and it had the backing of the governor of the state, Republican George Pataki, who just happens to be up for reelection next year--no coincidence. But it was also very much supported by Sen. Pat Moynihan, senior Democrat, opponent of the line item veto, a Congressman, Democratic Congressman from the state, and, in effect, he was prohibiting Congress from using the back door to get around the rules governing entitlement programs that other states have to abide by.

CHARLES KRAUSE: So to all of these provisions there are a lot of important Democrats and Republicans both who are affected. Do you get any sense that Congress will decided to try to override the President's vetoes?

PAUL GIGOT: They will look at it. They will look at it carefully. There's a great irony here, though, politically, and this will, I think, restrain Republicans, and that is this would never be a power that this President had if it weren't for the Republican Congress. It wouldn't--in not a million years would Dick Gephardt give this to the President if he were Speaker of the House. They didn't give it to Reagan. So the Republicans are going to have to think twice about whether now with a Democratic President standing up for fiscal integrity, or claiming to, they're going to override him? I don't know that this is a fight that they want to pick. And the puzzling thing here is Newt Gingrich's reaction when he called it petty politics. I don't think you want to take credit for it and then say we'll look at these things on the merit.

TOM OLIPHANT: You have to understand the route that overriding this has to take. It takes 2/3 of each body, and it has to be a separate piece of legislation providing for this particular tax break so the route is almost impossible, and I think it understands how the court case on appropriations this fall will be much more important than what happens after this.

CHARLES KRAUSE: We're going to have to leave it there. Tom, Paul, thank you very much. NEWSMAKER

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, a Newsmaker interview with U.S. Envoy Richard Holbrooke, who has just returned from Bosnia. First some background.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Richard Holbrooke was the point man for the American team negotiating the Bosnian peace plan in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995. The deals he struck silenced the guns in the former Yugoslavia after three and half years of war. The human toll--tens of thousands dead, 1.2 million refugees abroad, and 1 million people internally displaced. The Dayton Accords paved the way for NATO troops to deploy in Bosnia to enforce the peace. Eight thousand Americans there now as part of what is known S-FOR--the stabilization force. At the signing ceremony in Dayton, then Secretary of State Warren Christopher described what he hoped would happen.

WARREN CHRISTOPHER: I trust that one day we'll look back and say Dayton was the place where fundamental choices were made; this is where the--this is the place where the parties chose peace over war, dialogue over destruction, reason over revenge, and this is where each of us has accepted the challenges to make the choices made here meaningful and to put them into effect so that they will endure.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Dayton agreements did stop the war. NATO troops enforced lines of demarcation between the combatants and the massive killing ceased. But violence persisted; these car bombings last month, for example, outside UN police and military offices-- and attacks on returning refugees. Earlier this month Muslim farmers near the town of Jajce finally arrived home only to be forcefully evicted by local Croats. Of the more than 2 million total refugees, about 1/3 have returned to Bosnia according to UN figures. Of these, only about 10,000 have returned to areas where they were the ethnic minority.The Dayton Accords provided for elections and in September last year Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims chose a three-person presidency, as well as a parliamentary assembly. At the municipal level voting has been postponed and is now scheduled for mid September. $3.2 billion have been pledged for reconstruction of the ravaged country, but to date, only a small portion has been committed to actual projects. Real GDP has almost doubled since 1995 and unemployment has dropped from about 90 to 50 percent. Of the 75 people publicly indicted for war crimes and the smaller but unknown number of sealed indictments, only 10 are being held in custody. Just two--neither high level commanders--have been tried and convicted at the UN tribunal at the Hague in the Netherlands. One indicted suspect, the police chief of Prjedor, was shot and killed by British troops last month, and another suspect was taken into custody at that time and brought before the tribunal. But the two most wanted people indicted for war crimes, Bosnian Serb Leader Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, have not been arrested. Last summer, Richard Holbrooke traveled to Bosnia and hammered out a deal providing for Karadzic to remove himself from the Bosnian political scene. But Karadzic, who signed the agreement, has repeatedly broken it. In recent weeks, he has become more brazen in challenging the elected Bosnian Serb President, Biljana Plavsic, for power. This was one of the key issues Richard Holbrooke addressed on his trip late last week. He dealt with other problems too, meeting with the key players in the region, including Bosnian Serb President Plavsic and Yugoslavian President Milosevic.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And joining us now is Richard Holbrooke. Thank you very much for being with us, Mr. Ambassador.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE, U.S. Special Envoy: [New York] It's my pleasure to be back.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What agreement, if any, was reached about Radovan Karadzic?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Well, let me start with that. That was an excellent summary of where we stand. And starting with Karadzic, the--on Saturday morning, Milosevic brought President Krajnec, the Bosnian Serb co-president of Bosnia, to Belgrade to meet with Amb. Gelbhardt and myself. Amb. Gelbhardt, of course, is the administration's coordinator for Bosnia implementation. We said to Krajnec exactly what your piece said; that the July 18th agreement last year had been flagrantly violated in recent weeks by Karadzic, who had given an interview the previous day to a major German newspaper. Milosevic and Krajnec readily admitted that he was in violation, and they said we'll reissue the statement, and we said, you know the statement is insufficient; we want more, Karadzic has to go to the Hague. They have refused to make him go voluntarily, and they are thereby taking great risks. But in regard to the July 18th statement of last year Krajnec then said he would reinforce it and make sure that Karadzic now once again disappears from public view. I'm skeptical but I hope the world's press will note that Krajnec has committed himself this time speaking as co- president of Bosnia to get Karadzic back in his cave of silence and oblivion. Let's see what happens. I'm skeptical but I'd like to see Karadzic stop spewing out that racist, ethic hatred, which is so deleterious to the peace process.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: When you say that the two of them-- Krajnec and Milosevic--are taking great risks in not getting him to turn himself over, what do you mean? What kind of risks; that NATO will come and take him?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I think it's very clear what I mean. I'm not going to go into details about whether or not things will happen, but what happened at Prjedor should be a warning to everyone. And by the way, that police chief who was killed in your piece, let's be clear--he committed suicide. He was surrounded by British troops, and he chose to shoot back. So he could have surrendered and gone to the Hague for a free and fair trial.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Staying on Karadzic just for another minute or so, is he the main obstacle to the Dayton Peace Accords at the moment, or if he went, would there just be somebody to take his place?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: That's a very good question. He is not the only obstacle. But he is a real obstacle, and he should leave. And if he leaves, I think it will be a strong signal to all the people, but the obstacle is a mind set. The people who made this war are now being charged with implementing the peace. That's not what you normally do after wars, but it was the nature of the situation in Dayton that all the originators of the war are still in power. But, you know, on the other hand, as your piece made clear, some people have started to return as refugees to areas where they're a minority. Only 10,000, as you pointed out, but that in itself is something you and your colleagues would have thought impossible two years ago. Secondly, the ambassadorial agreement, which you didn't mention, was forged in the middle of the night by Bob Gelbhardt and myself. That's a remarkable agreement.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Explain that.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Bosnia has now agreed--the three groups in Bosnia have agreed to distribute the ambassadorships overseas. What's so significant about this can be illustrated by the truly remarkable decision about Washington; the new Bosnian ambassador to the United States is going to be a Serb. Now, think of that because we all think of Bosnia as simply the Muslims beleaguered by their enemies. And yet, the three ethnic communities, represented by their three presidents, agreed to distribute ambassadorships. The UN will be Muslim, Washington will be Serb, Tokyo will be Croat, and so on. That's quite remarkable. We also forged the telephone agreement. Now, I was a little bit distressed to see the New York Times yesterday make fun of the telephone agreement as a minor thing. It's not a minor thing. We now have one country area code for all of Bosnia. Previously, each of the ethnic groups worked through the phone systems of Serbia or Croatia or whatever. And the area codes for Bosnia are not going to be divided ethnically, as was previously anticipated. So these are small but significant gains. Another major event that occurred during our trip was that the SFOR troops, the NATO troops, have now informed the three communities that henceforth the military annex will apply to the special military police. That is enormously significant because what several of the groups in Bosnia were doing was trying to trade in military uniforms for police uniforms, and then formed a kind of armed military unit pretending it was police. The new NATO commander, Gen. Clark, my former military deputy at Dayton and during the shuttle, has--who wrote the sentence in the Dayton accords covering that issue--has decided to get tough, and the new military team, Clark in Brussels and Gen. Shinseki in Bosnia, is going to be very tough, very evenhanded but very tough team. This plus Bob Gelbhardt's dynamic efforts are going to show the world that the United States is not only not walking about from Bosnia; it is redoubling its efforts. Now we are a little bit behind schedule in Bosnia; there's no question about it. But the Dayton Agreements were very ambitious, and we are making slow but steady progress. I'm concerned that we're behind schedule; so is the President; so is Secretary Albright and Sandy Berger. Gelbhardt will go back to the region within the next few days at the end of this week to pick up from where we left off yesterday. And I think you're going to see a real acceleration of the American and western implementation effort in the next few weeks and months, and I think everyone in the region already knows it. It's not so clear to Americans because the reporting on this trip was somewhat confused.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Let me interrupt you a minute. In--last month you wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which you called for just this. You praised the British troops' action, taking the police chief of Prjedor--actually he died, as you said- -but taking the other person prisoner. And you basically said in that op-ed piece that the enforcement troops should have enforced more of the Dayton Peace Agreement. I hope I'm summarizing what you said.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Absolutely correct.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And do you think that the corner has been turned on that? Is that what you're saying here, that you believe that is about to happen, or is still a little bit up for grabs?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I'm awfully pleased to see Gen. Clark there. He knows the agreements inside and out, having helped write them, and I think that the world should understand that the NATO SFOR command is going to be very vigorous but I stress evenhanded in implementing this agreement. And Gen. Clark called Gen. Milosevic during each of my meetings with him--during each of our meetings with him to make clear that we were all on the same team. Also, Gen. Clark, Gen. Shenseki and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Shalikashvili, met with Amb. Gelbardt and me in Tuzla to discuss these very events. So let the world understand there is a redoubling, reacceleration of the effort. Another point, the British. The British now have a new government and the new foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who is a real no-nonsense guy, went to Bosnia a few days ahead of us, and issued a dramatic realignment of British policy, so that for the first time in five years there is no daylight between London and Washington on Bosnian policy. That's a big event.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Look ahead just a bit for us, a year from now, the troops, U.S. troops are supposed to be leaving Bosnia. What will happen if they do leave, do you think?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: I want to be clear that the President has stressed that we are going to make Dayton succeed. What happens to the troops is a decision which the President and his colleagues will make in light of the events as they go forward. I think you ought to address that question directly to people who are full-time government employees. I was just a one-time visitor, though it's my third trip back there since I left the government, but I think the key thing here is that the United States is going to see this through. It's part of our foreign policy. It's a core part of it closely related to NATO enlargement which is equally important and the two cannot be separated, and to our continual support for reform and democracy in Russia. And, as you know, Russian troops are serving with American troops under an American commander in Bosnia.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I want to press this just a little bit because you know this region so well. I understand you're not an official representative right now. If--if the situation has not improved greatly and troops left in a year, would the warring parties go back to warring, in your view?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: There are two flashpoints on the map. One is Mostar, where the Croats and the Muslims still have to work out a way to live together in peace, as they had for centuries but have not been able to in the last two or three years. The second, which is even more difficult, is a town on the Croatian-Bosnian border called Brcko, B-r-c-k-o, where the Serbs seized the town and ethnically cleansed it in 1992, and it is a tiny corridor between the federation and Brcko. That was the one issue we couldn't settle at Dayton. We agreed to put it under arbitration. That arbitration must make a decision by the end of this year. If the arbitration is not successful, fighting could resume there, which was the area of the heaviest fighting during the war. So we're not out of the woods yet, but I think the kind of determination which the President and his team and the British and French have shown recently is very dramatic and I think we're going to see this thing through. I really am much more optimistic than I was a few weeks ago, although as I said at the beginning of this interview, we are behind schedule, and we have to redouble our efforts.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Finally, we don't have much time left, but speaking of that mind set, what did you find? You haven't been there for a while, were people acting differently with each other than they have been before?

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: Let me share with you the most amazing of many surprising vignettes that we saw. It was the joint presidency meeting. Here was Mr. Izetbegovic, Mr. Zubac, the Croat co- president, and Mr. Krajnec, who was Karadzic's closest colleague, and who we believe still gets some of his instructions from Karadzic. These men were killing each other two years ago literally and I watched Krajnec and Izetbegovic and during the breaks in the meeting they sat next to each other and they chatted with each other. At Dayton no one talked to Krajnec; he was completely isolated in his room. No one talked to him. And at the end of the meeting it was 4 in the morning, we worked for 14 hours, Krajnec went up to Izetbegovic and gave him a gift of some books, and I watched this in utter astonishment because we'd had some bitter arguments over the telephones, over the ambassadors, very emotional stuff, and I said what's going on, and they said, you know, we've known each other a long time, we're going to try to work with each other, I'm giving him a gift. I don't want to take that out of context. The problems are real. And I'm the last person to be a rosy-eyed optimist, but something is beginning to change on the ground.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: That's all the time we have.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: It's not there yet.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'm sorry. Mr. Ambassador, but thank you so much for being with us.

RICHARD HOLBROOKE: My pleasure. FOCUS - DELIVERING THE MESSAGE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Still to come on the NewsHour, the fight against teen smoking and a David Gergen dialogue. Lee Hochberg of Oregon Public Television looks at how several states are using cigarette taxes to fuel their anti-smoking campaigns.

LEE HOCHBERG: In Oregon and all over the country more and more teenagers are smoking. One way to stop them is to enforce the federal law which forbids minors to smoke and requires clerks to check ID for anyone under age 17.

MAN: Can I get a pack of Marlboro hard too?

WOMAN: Excuse me.

MAN: Marlboro hard, can I get pack?

WOMAN: Do you have your ID with you?

LEE HOCHBERG: Random inspections show 62 percent of kids in the county who want cigarettes are able to buy them and 25 percent of all teens in the state smoke. Clerks who sell to minors are subject to fines, but the people of Oregon wanted to do more than just crack down on illegal sales. Last fall, Oregon voters approved a 30 cent per pack hike in the state's cigarette tax, hoping the higher price would discourage consumption. The tax would also generate 8 + million dollars a year for an anti- smoking program. The question for Oregon legislators was just what kind of program would work.

STATE REP. FRANK SHIELDS, [D] Oregon: There has been a 400 percent increase in youth smoking. Did you hear me? 400 percent.

LEE HOCHBERG: Portland Democrat Frank Shields thinks a comprehensive program is needed using the schools, using the community, and using television to spread the anti-smoking message.

STATE REP. FRANK SHIELDS: Whether you like it or not, two or three hours, the kids watch television in the evening. Everybody sees it. Everybody responds to it. It creates the images that we live with all the time.

LEE HOCHBERG: He wants spots like this one, which already has aired in California, to appear in Oregon homes.

WOMAN IN AD: They say nicotine isn't addictive. How can they say that?

STATE REP. FRANK SHIELDS: A lady smoking a cigarette through a trach tube in her throat because of throat cancer, that will have an impact in kids. Some good, powerful ads that shock people into thinking are not at all bad.

LEE HOCHBERG: But legislator Lenn Hannon, a Republican from Ashland, insists it's not the place of state government to air commercials that assault a legal industry. Hannon, who smokes up to three packs a day, says the state should spread information, not propaganda.

STATE SEN. LENN HANNON, [R] Oregon: It really, quite frankly, insults the intelligence of the voter, and it insults the intelligence of the smoker. General persuasion works far better than taking a two by four and hitting them alongside of the head with it.

LEE HOCHBERG: Hannon and the tobacco industry proposed an alternative, put much of the anti-prevention money into anti- smoking school programs instead. Tobacco lobbyist Mark Nelson works for R.J. Reynolds.

MARK NELSON, Tobacco Industry Lobbyist: We believe very strongly that we need to take that message into the classroom; that we needed as much personalization between the individual delivering the message and the minor, the children. And we believe the best and easiest place, without having to, you know, make a large new bureaucracy, is through--in the K through 12 educational system; take it straight into the classroom.

LEE HOCHBERG: Ironically, Oregon educators don't think anti- tobacco education should be concentrated in the schools. They cite a 1994 surgeon general report which says the effects of school programs last only one to three years, unless they're enhanced by youth-oriented mass media and counter advertising. Judy Miller is assistant superintendent for the Oregon Office of Student Services.

JUDY MILLER, Oregon Education Department: Students only spend a small portion of their life in school. They're there thirty-five to forty hours a week for nine months out of the year. And then they're out in the community the rest of the time. If we have all the dollars, then we have all the responsibility for reducing the number of smokers in Oregon. And I don't think we can meet that as effectively by ourselves.

LEE HOCHBERG: Legislator Shields says the industry's effort to chair the money to schools is a veiled attempt to waste it.

STATE REP. FRANK SHIELDS: So I think it's very clear. They want to make tobacco prevention campaigns as ineffective as possible. And if you can get it into a boring health class somewhere, nobody's going to listen. If I can speak to you directly and try to deliver a message about tobacco use and why you should not be using tobacco, I think that is 10 times more effective than something you're going to see on television.

LEE HOCHBERG: Oregon health officials are meeting with colleagues from other states to determine what has worked elsewhere. California started collecting a 25 cents per pack tax in 1989, raising $150 million a year for its prevention program. Mediator Director Colleen Stevens says the state's campaign has induced 1.3 million Californians to quit smoking, and she considers TV commercials an essential part of the package.

COLLEEN STEVENS, California Anti-Tobacco Programs: We are trying to combat what we see as a real resurgence of tobacco--pro-tobacco messages again in movies, in television, and places like that, where there is a real resurgence of smoking in school.

LEE HOCHBERG: The California campaign, though, has been unable to reverse the rising rate of teen smoking, so the state now is airing its most aggressive messages yet targeted directly to kids.

SPOKESMAN: [Ad] They spend millions trying to grab your attention, push you into smoking, because once they get you where they want you, they've got you for good.

COLLEEN STEVENS: That spot really twisted it around and showed kids that they weren't being independent and rebellious, starting to smoke. It made kids mad that they were really being manipulated by the tobacco industry.

LEE HOCHBERG: The surgeon general's report also recommends that media campaigns be backed up by community programs that create anti-tobacco youth culture. Several California towns have organized events like this gear exchange, where teens gave away clothing that promotes tobacco brand names. Arizona uses some of the $10 million a year anti-smoking money it generates from cigarette taxes to dispatch a Humvee to schools. Called the Ash Kicker, it houses vivid anti-smoking exhibits. Arizona also uses TV ads. The state says its campaign to label tobacco a tumor- causing, teeth-staining, smelly, puking habit has caught fire among young people.

TEEN IN AD: Tobacco--tumor-causing, teen-staining, smelly, puking habit.

LEE HOCHBERG: Thousands of T-shirts and other mementos with that slogan have been sold. A university study found tobacco sales dropped 8 percent in a year, but neither California nor Arizona health officials are completely satisfied with their programs. Arizona officials say a successful program would also target adult smokers. The tobacco lobbyists talked the state legislature out of that. In California, state media director Stevens also says opponents are trying to hamstring its program.

COLLEEN STEVENS: Every time you think you have a win, you have to realize there's just going to be another hurdle to get to your goal after that.

LEE HOCHBERG: In these letters tobacco industry lawyers pressured TV stations to drop one anti-smoking commercial, which featured an industry executive testifying that nicotine does not meet the classical definition of addictive. The commercial implied he was lying, an implication the lawyers called a false, defamatory, libelous attack upon his honesty and integrity. Two stations did remove thead but the state stood by it. In another maneuver tobacco interests spent $19 million last year on a ballot measure that would have rolled back local restrictions on smoking.

COLLEEN STEVENS: The smarter we get about fighting the issue of tobacco, they're getting smarter faster than we are.

SPOKESMAN: It's part of their modus operandi. You know, you've got to paint this evil, big corporation over here, and the truth being is that for, you know, for years now, the tobacco industry has millions of dollars to try and convince children not to smoke. But the opposition's goals is to stop all sales of cigarettes, period.

LEE HOCHBERG: Having heard all the arguments, the Oregon legislature decided to fund television spots and community and school programs. Believing it will be hard for the industry to fight every initiative in every community, the state will fund local, anti-smoking coalitions, which will lobby for local ordinances that control tobacco access. DIALOGUE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor at large of the "U.S. News & World Report," engages Joseph Ellis, professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and author of "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson."

DAVID GERGEN: Prof. Ellis, in your new book about Thomas Jefferson you say he has become the great sphinx of American history. When you think about Jefferson, what man comes to your mind?

JOSEPH ELLIS, Author, "The Character of Thomas Jefferson": Well, probably six foot two and a quarter, burnished, burned complexion, hazel eyes, reddish blond hair about the color of my hair, but a person who can convey to a variety of different people a set of images which different groups see differently. And so the sphinx title is an attempt to get at the fact that Jefferson is the most elusive and perhaps promiscuous President in American history.

DAVID GERGEN: Promiscuous in the sense that--

JOSEPH ELLIS: Promiscuous in the sense that what people believe he represents is so different. The North thought that they were fighting for Jeffersonian principles in the Civil War; so did the South. Herbert Hoover thought that Jefferson had the answer to the Depression, so did Franklin Roosevelt and conservative Republicans like Reagan have embraced Jefferson, and so have liberal Democrats like Clinton. So it's his--what I try to say is he becomes a kind of Rorschach test for Americans, and he becomes a kind of every man, and part of my effort is to explain how one becomes an every man. It's just not any man who can become every man.

DAVID GERGEN: Well, let's explore that just a bit because you say that he was a visionary.

JOSEPH ELLIS: Yes, indeed.

DAVID GERGEN: And at the same time he had a realistic side to him too, so much of his writing had a visionary quality to it, and that's where people could often find--

JOSEPH ELLIS: True. I think that he's good at projecting onto a screen or above us in some kind of upper region, a set of attractive notions about what's possible, and what the future could be like. I try to say somewhere in the book that he's sort of like that dirigible at the Super Bowl that floats above the football stadium and flashes inspirational messages to both sides.

DAVID GERGEN: Well, what is at the core of Jefferson then?

JOSEPH ELLIS: One thing that's at the core is a--and I think that this is something that is becoming a more potent force in American politics of the last decade or so--is a fundamental aversion to federal power or aggregated, or what he would say consolidated political power of any sort. Now, in certain international contexts, this makes a lot of sense. If you're standing in front of tanks at Tiananmen Square, if you're trying to rally the troops in Gdansk, or participating in the Velvet Revolution in Prague, boy, you want to have Jefferson on your side because Jefferson is a person who can really be a useful tool in beating down totalitarianism, despotism, tyranny in all forms. That's really true. But for modern Americans I think that the evil empire that we've come to regard as our major enemy is the federal government, the inside-the-beltway world of Washington, D.C., and that's very Jeffersonian, the notion that you can't trust people who have political power, who are far removed from you geographically; that Jefferson is a firm believer that the less political power the better, and I think we're--since the end of the Cold War and since the Cold War ended and before that World War II and before that Depression, the Depression allowed us to justify or to believe that emergency powers at the federal level were necessary. Now, those threats recede, and the natural Jeffersonian strain comes back again. In some sense, it's the point of view of the right wing of the Republican Party, but it really goes beyond party labels. It's a deep primal feeling. And it's Jeffersonian.

DAVID GERGEN: The primal feeling about the less government--

JOSEPH ELLIS: That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: We should be left alone. You think that's-- Jefferson is coming back today, in effect, because the Cold War is over.

JOSEPH ELLIS: In that way--if one said why is he coming back, I would say it's because he speaks to that part of our political life that has come into existence since 1989. The notion that we've had a suspicious attitude towards federal power, that's back.

DAVID GERGEN: Right. Well, just as Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan are all claiming Jefferson, there are others in the economy in particular who have been knocking Jefferson a lot. Why is that?

JOSEPH ELLIS: Primarily because over the last twenty to twenty- five years, race has become one of the major windows through which people looking back at American history are trying to see things. And if you start looking at the issue of race and you look at Jefferson through that window, things are not going to look too good. Jefferson wrote there words that we are the magic words in American history, the ones that begin "We hold these truths to be self evident," that in some sense are responsible for the most liberal reforms, including the end of slavery, civil rights movement, the suffrage of women. But Jefferson, himself, didn't intend those words to mean all of those things, and on the issue of slavery, Jefferson remained a slave owner his entire life. He owned about 200 slaves throughout most of his life. And he really didn't believe that blacks and whites could live together in the same society. And I think that's what really upsets people in a world in which integration and multi-cultural values are the national norm, and we remain committed and wedded to the possibility of that kind of society, Jefferson doesn't quite fit. And there are those who even argue that we should tear down the Jefferson Memorial on the tidal basin, take his face off of Mt. Rushmore, and I think that that's the major reason that he is vulnerable. I think within the academy too there is--there is a more general aversion to patriarchs who are dead white males, and he's one of the deadest, whitest males there is. And so there are people wanting to go back and, in effect, bring him back into the present as a kind of trophy in the culture wars.

DAVID GERGEN: Part of Jefferson's elusiveness that you point out in the book is that he could walk past the slave quarters at Monticello and be thinking brilliant thoughts about human liberty and human equality.

JOSEPH ELLIS: Right.

DAVID GERGEN: And you have this sentence in your book that I'd like you to address, if you might. You say, "He had the kind of duplicity possible only in the pure of heart."

JOSEPH ELLIS: Jefferson was not a hypocrite, in my view. Jefferson didn't conceal from us or from his peers his deeper thoughts about slavery, for example. He had almost separate chambers in his psyche, where he could put things and seal them, where you didn't have to--he didn't have to confront them. I think, for example, both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are capable of analogous forms of political behavior, Clinton walking into a room and being able to read that room and understand what people want and tell them what they want to hear, Reagan believing that he did not endorse any arm sale to the contras. And I think that political success at the national level has come to require a lot of the same psychological skills that Jefferson possessed naturally. Jefferson wasn't what we would call a spinner. He wasn't a person who sort of did this in a calculating way. It came to him quite naturally, who he was, because he didn't like argument; he didn't like conflict. He didn't like debate, and he wanted this to always come out nicely, and, therefore, he would tell you what you wanted to hear.

DAVID GERGEN: Prof. Joseph Ellis, thank you for telling us about Jefferson.

JOSEPH ELLIS: My pleasure. RECAP

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Again, the major stories of this Monday, President Clinton exercised his line item veto authority, becoming the first U.S. President to wield that power, and Labor Sec. Alexis Herman met separately with UPS and Teamsters negotiators. Company officials said after their meeting that UPS would not submit a new offer to the union and called for a union vote on their last contract proposal. We'll be with you on-line and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Thank you and good night.