The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: The news of this Wednesday; then, what's really in the highway law President Bush signed today; a look at what is known about lung cancer; a report on cattle grazing on public lands; and a book conversation about fathers and war.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: Insurgents in Iraq killed four more U.S. Soldiers overnight. Their patrol was ambushed in Beiji. Guerrillas set off a roadside bomb, then fired grenades. A fifth U.S. Soldier died in fighting in the West. In Baghdad today, a car bomb killed seven Iraqis. Five U.S. Soldiers suffered minor wounds in that attack. And American forces ended a week-long offensive in western Iraq. 20 U.S. Marines were killed in the operation last week. The U.S. Military announced the death of another American in Afghanistan today. He was killed in a roadside bombing on Tuesday, in Ghazni Province. Five U.S. Troops have died in Afghanistan in the last week. Iran broke the U.N. seals at a uranium processing plant today. That put the site one step closer to going fully operational, despite an international outcry. We have a report narrated by Julian Rush of Independent Television News.

JULIAN RUSH: Iran is playing a careful game. Newly installed IAEA cameras will monitor uranium conversion activities at the Esfahan plant. Iran very publicly restarted it on Monday, but breaking the nuclear watchdog's seals, though widely anticipated, has a symbolism that escalates the political crisis considerably. But technically at least, Iran is playing within the rules.

MELISSA FLEMING: This was sealed on the basis of a voluntary agreement.

MELISSA FLEMING: What we required from Iran was that we had surveillance cameras in place and that we had measured the material, so that we could be sure that we could account for the nuclear material and that we would be able to watch the facility.

JULIAN RUSH: Intense negotiations have been going on all day behind the scenes at the IAEA Headquarters in Vienna. Since the meeting adjourned yesterday, America and Europe have been struggling to come up with an acceptable form of words for a resolution to condemn Iran. But because Iran has said it wants to continue negotiations, albeit on its own, more hard- line terms, it will get the benefit of the doubt and there'll be no referral to the U.N. Security Council when the meeting resumes tomorrow.

JIM LEHRER: Last weekend, Iran rejected a European offer to supply it with nuclear fuel. In exchange, Iran would have to halt its own processing. Today, the European Union said that offer is still on the table. Back in this country, President Bush signed the mass transit/highway bill into law today. It will cost $286 billion over six years, about $30 billion more than the president wanted. The money goes for everything from mass transit, airports and roads, to recreational trails. It also includes more than 6,300 special projects that lawmakers added. We'll have more on this story right after this News Summary. The price of crude oil reached a new record today. Traders reacted to word that U.S. Gasoline inventories fell last week. In New York, oil futures rose nearly two dollars to close just under $65 a barrel. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 21 points to close at 10,594. The NASDAQ fell 16 points to close at 2157. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the mysteries of the highway bill, a lung cancer update, cattle on public land, and fathers and war.

FOCUS - PORK PROGRESS?

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has our highway bill story.

MARGARET WARNER: Ronald Reagan Freeway-- California State Highway 118-- wends its way past the former president's final resting spot in Simi Valley. Now, thanks to the transportation bill President Bush signed today, the namesake byway will soon be sprouting all kinds of greenery, as part of a $2.3 million landscaping makeover. That's just one of more than 6,300 pet Congressional projects that tucked into the $286 billion measure. Its main purpose is to fund road and mass transit construction for the next six years. The bill was more than two years in the making, the subject of much wrangling between a White House intent on containing its cost and lawmakers focused on bringing home lucrative projects to their constituents. In the end, it passed both Houses with overwhelming majorities. Arizona Republican John McCain, one of just four 'no' votes in the Senate, noted the Reagan Freeway appropriation with some irony.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Here is my favorite so far: $2,320,000 to add landscaping enhancements along-- get this-- the Ronald Reagan Freeway. I wonder what Ronald Reagan would say.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I'm proud to be here to sign this transportation bill --

MARGARET WARNER: But today, President Bush said the bill would provide a timely and vitally needed economic boost.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: If we want people working in America, we got to make sure our highways and roads are modern. We got to bring up this transportation system into the 21st Century.

MARGARET WARNER: The money is expected to begin flowing soon.

MARGARET WARNER: And for a closer look at what's in this bill and some of the politics that shaped it, I'm joined by veteran Congress watcher Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

So, Norm, how much of this, first of all, is pork versus basic transportation spending?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, of course, pork is in the eye of beholder. One person's pork is another person's vital project. But one good rule of thumb here is that these special projects-- they're called earmarks in the terms of the trade-- which amount to about $24 billion of this $286.5 billion bill-- about 8 percent-- they're not vetted by anybody. They're just stuck in by individual lawmakers would qualify by most definitions as pork.

MARGARET WARNER: So let's look at the substance first. What is the country getting in real transportation projects for this two hundred and eighty-some billion dollars?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, this is going to last over a five-year period. That's the time which we authorize projects, and of course, they're across a wide range of things. It's a three-year delay that we've taken before we've gotten to this. This will take us to 2009, with a whole series of areas, including mass transit, which gets about 18.5 percent of this bill; new projects which includes bridges and waterways, walkways, and a lot of new highways, significant amount of highway repair. A lot of it is necessary stuff. The transportation network, including the highway network, is absolutely vital to the economy of the country, much less to individuals moving along it. But it's more than that of course.

MARGARET WARNER: So will this spending do anything major to relieve the traffic congestion that plague so many of our viewers?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Frankly, probably not. It will help a little bit because we are going to see repairs of horizon, and in some cases we'll see new lanes. Localities have been given some authority and some inducement to create toll roads and special roadways and the like. But this is not really aimed so much at a broad transportation policy to improve our quality of life as it should be.

MARGARET WARNER: And, of course, there is a big debate about whether new highways even relieve congestion or cause more.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Yeah, and, you know, I think the biggest complaint that we could have with this bill, beyond the fact that there's an awful lot of waste in here, you've got money that's spent in areas that don't meet anybody's reasonable definition of priorities -- is that we haven't done this as part of a comprehensive transportation policy that looks at highways, waterways, air transportation, and railways together and tries to make some kind of balance out of it.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, you pointed out that this should have been done three years ago. What held it up?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, money is a part of it. When Congress started, the wish list was more than $375 billion. It's still there, frankly, but President Bush-- who hasn't vetoed any bills yet-- started out early on saying that if this bill isn't held to a reasonable amount-- $284 billion was the figure that he set-- he would veto it. So they've taken three years struggling with that. And then there is one other element here, which is the distribution of the money to the states. This is paid for out of the Highway Trust Fund, 18.3 cents a gallon, basically, that we all put in from the money that we spend at the pump. And of course states put in money-- their citizens pay it. Then they get it back, and it's a question of whether you get back close to what you've put in. The original bill before this one guaranteed states 90.5 cents on the dollar; now, they've struggled and they've agreed to give every state at least 92 cents on the dollar. It took them a long time to come up with that kind of a reasonable formula, and part of the deal was tat every state would get at least 19 percent more than they got the last time.

MARGARET WARNER: And when they were having these debates, was is really basically about divvying up the pie, or was there the kind of substantive debate you're talking about, about really what are the nation's transportation needs? Are there new ways to meet them?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, you could make a case, at least, that some portion of the money in this bill was actually brought together in a reasonably thoughtful way by the members of the Public Works and Transportation Committee in the House-- the relevant-- or equivalent committee in the Senate. And then they distributed 8 percent, 10 percent or more in a kind of feeding frenzy at the trough. But as I say, the problem we have here is that to whatever degree this was carefully structured policy with tugging and hauling between states and localities over what they wanted and local politicians and Congress, it wasn't put into the larger context of overall transportation. So some people have declared victory. I think most people who follow transportation policy wouldn't see this in a particularly positive light.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let's talk about the 8 percent pork, what you define as pork. If John McCain's favorite project is the Ronald Reagan Highway, what's yours?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Well, there's no question that the grand slam homerun of projects here is in Alaska, and no great coincidence, because the Chairman of the House Committee Don Young of Alaska. It is $250 million, not $2.4 million-- for a bridge, larger than the Golden Gate Bridge - that would go from Ketchikan with a population of 8,000 to an island with a population of 50. Now, the next favorite actually is also in Alaska: $3 million to produce a film on how Alaska spends its highway money.

MARGARET WARNER: No.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: So, there you go. Honest to God, I kid you not. Then you've got all kinds of money for walkways, one in Hoboken to honor Frank Sinatra, an elevated highway that's going to be turned into a tunnel so that Donald Trump could build another building in New York. We could spend a week on the NewsHour just going through things that on the surface, even if they have any merit, are certainly not a particularly good use of federal taxpayers' money for what are purely local things, many of them kind of frivolous.

MARGARET WARNER: And did Democrats as well as Republicans share in this largess?

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Absolutely. This is one instance, despite the votes of the four lonely members of the Senate and a few courageous people in the House, another one from Arizona, Floyd Flaig, actually a couple of committee chairs, including Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin -- Democrats and Republicans who are at odds with each other over everything in Congress, unite over these. The money-- more of it went to Republicans. There are more of them, but it got distributed around pretty broadly. There's one other point to make here, Margaret, which is it's not -- this is a two-way street. The leaders in Congress have encouraged this kind of craziness of earmarking projects in part because they can use it in both directions in other areas. Three years of delay in this bill, but there was an extra day of delay in the House until they got the vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and some members who voted against them got money taken out that they'd expected to be put in--.

MARGARET WARNER: From the highway bill.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: From the highway bill, and others who finally provided those votes at the end got a little bit of a reward.

MARGARET WARNER: I guess the way the system works. Norman Ornstein, thanks.

NORMAN ORNSTEIN: Sure.

FOCUS - LUNG CANCER

JIM LEHRER: Now, to Jeffrey Brown for our report on lung cancer.

JEFFREY BROWN: For decades, warnings about smoking have kept lung cancer in the public eye. This week, the disease and its continuing toll were in the news in a very direct way. On Sunday, Anchorman Peter Jennings died of lung cancer at age 67. Mr. Jennings had said that he'd smoked for many years, quit, but had smoked again in recent years. And yesterday, Dana Reeve, the widow of actor Christopher Reeve announced that she's been diagnosed with lung cancer. Ms. Reeve, who is 44, has never smoked. Lung cancer remains the leading cancer killer in the world. In the U.S., an estimated 163,000 will die this year, more than the next three most-common cancers: Colon, breast, and prostate combined. Because lung cancer is so difficult to detect early on, the mortality rate is very high. The expected five-year survival rate for all lung cancer patients is just 15 percent.

JEFFREY BROWN: And for an update on the state of knowledge about lung cancer and its treatment, we're joined by, Dr. Mark Clanton, deputy director of Cancer Care Systems at the National Cancer Institute; and Dr. Joan Schiller, an oncologist at the University of Wisconsin, and president of the non-profit group, Women Against Lung Cancer. Welcome to both of you.

Dr. Clanton, let's start very simply. What do we mean by lung cancer?

DR. MARK CLANTON: Well, first of all, cells in our body have a normal life span. They normally stay in a particular place, and they grow at a certain rate. When lung cancer occurs, it means that cells that are on the lining of the lung, in the substance of the lung, or in the airways that lead to and from the lungs, they live longer, they replicate more quickly, and in fact when they get past a certain point in terms of their size, they begin to disrupt lung function.

JEFFREY BROWN: And smoking remains the leading cause?

DR. MARK CLANTON: Smoking remains the leading cause. 85 percent to 90 percent of lung cancers are directly related to cigarette smoking.

JEFFREY BROWN: Dr. Schiller, the rates I've seen have gone down in recent have gone down for men, but not as much for women. Is this related to smoking patterns?

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: It certainly is. Women started smoking later than men did. Women started smoking primarily in the 60s, so we're just starting to see the impact of that right now.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, Dr. Schiller we said in our introduction that it's difficult to detect early on. Why is that, and what are the symptoms that people would notice?

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: The reason it's difficult to detect early on is because lung cancer is a relatively asymptomatic disease, meaning that it doesn't cause symptoms until it really presses on something important, like an airway, for example, which would cause shortness of breath or cough, or a blood vessel, which might cause coughing up blood, but there are relatively few nerve endings in the lung so it doesn't cause pain. So it's only until it really gets larger that it starts to cause symptoms.

JEFFREY BROWN: And is it easy for people to know these are the symptoms of lung cancer, or is it confused with other things?

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: Well, unfortunately, shortness of breath, cough, perhaps coughing up blood can be due to other things. The most common example of that is going to be some type of infection, like the common cold. So for that reason, very often, people can have these symptoms for many weeks before someone thinks to get a chest x-ray. That's particularly important, I think, for non-smokers, because nonsmokers can often have these symptoms, and because no one realizes that nonsmokers, too, can get lung cancer; these symptoms could continue for a very long time before someone gets a chest x-ray.

JEFFREY BROWN: So Dr. Clanton, the issue becomes how to detect it as early as possible. What is the research into that?

DR. MARK CLANTON: Well, currently, there's a national lung screening trial going on sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. There are 53,000 high-risk people, people who are smokers, were smokers or are current smokers. And what we're trying to learn there is whether or not we can actually save lives -- reduce the mortality rate from lung cancer by looking at either chest x-ray as one way of detecting it early, or using a more sophisticated technique, called CT scanning.

JEFFREY BROWN: I understand there's some controversy, though, over whether to move towards CT scans.

DR. MARK CLANTON: Well, for example, there are studies that show that CT scans actually can find lung cancers early in some people. So there are physicians who would like to move very quickly to using CT scans today to screen for lung cancer. However, the real question that the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial is trying to answer is whether or not you can actually save lives or reduce the mortality rate from lung cancer by using CT scanning.

JEFFREY BROWN: Dr. Shilling-- Schiller, I'm sorry, what would you add on this question of early detection and the question of whether to move to a-- something like CT scans?

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: Well, it's certainly a very important question. Clearly, for lung cancer, we need something equivalent of mammograms as for breast cancer, but at this point, I would agree with Dr. Clanton, and that is although the technology is there, we have not yet determined whether or not it can actually save lives. We know it can pick up small lung cancers earlier; what we don't know is whether that's early enough.

JEFFREY BROWN: Dr. Clanton, I would like to clear up some things that are still confusing to people. For example, in the case of Peter Jennings, as for so many people, they smoked at one time, and then they quit. Now, when a person quits smoking, to what extent does his or her risk of developing lung cancer go down?

DR. MARK CLANTON: It doesn't matter what stage you stop smoking. Your lung cancer or your risk of getting lung cancer does begin to go down. And the longer you spend in terms of time between the time you smoked and the time you stopped smoking, your risk continues to go down. The problem is in those people who have smoked a great deal - a 20-pack-year history, it's clear that the risk never returns to zero --

JEFFREY BROWN: Never goes down to the case of someone who never smoked?

DR. MARK CLANTON: That's exactly correct. So the more you smoked, the less likely it is it will go back to zero. The issue is your risk does go down and continues to go down for as long as you stop smoking.

JEFFREY BROWN: Dr. Schiller, another thing that I think a lot of people wondered about this week, in the case of Dana Reeve, you mentioned earlier people who develop lung cancer who never smoked. Now, how unusual is that?

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: Well, actually, about 10 to 15 percent of all lung cancers occurred in people who have never smoked. And interestingly enough, in the majority of those patients, it tends to occur more commonly in women. So of all the never-smokers who have gotten lung cancers, the majority of those are women, for reasons that we don't understand yet.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do we know what causes it, even if we don't know exactly why it hits women more?

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: They do not. There are several different hypotheses. So one hypothesis is that women may metabolize the carcinogens found in cigarette smoke differently than do men, in such a fashion that those carcinogens, cancer-causing substances, tend to hang around longer; that's one hypothesis. The other thought is that somehow it may be related to the estrogen pathway, somehow estrogen may interact with carcinogens found in cigarette smoke in such a way to put women at a slightly higher risk.

JEFFREY BROWN: What can you add to this about - of course, we always hear about secondhand smoke. Is that a factor for people who are not smokers?

DR. MARK CLANTON: Absolutely. The two factors are secondhand smoke-- that is, people who don't smoke, who are around others who do-- inhale the same cancer-causing chemicals into their lungs as do smokers. In fact, in the case of side-stream smoking it's the smoke that comes off the end of the cigarette-- they can actually inhale higher concentrations of those chemicals that cause cancer. So certainly environmental tobacco smoke does cause cancer and can cause lung cancer. The other issue is there is a colorless, odorless gas called radon that comes up from the soil in some parts of the country, and people exposed to radon gas have a higher risk of lung cancer.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, now, Dr. Clanton what, about treatment? Someone is diagnosed with lung cancer, what happens?

DR. MARK CLANTON: Well, first of all, there is greater opportunity for success if we find lung cancers when they're localized -- that is, stage one. It's possible to use surgery and also chemotherapy following surgery to treat those people with early lung cancer. There are also new drugs. A drug called Tarceva, which is very useful in certain people who have certain genetic mutations of their tumors, and also Avastin, which is a drug approved in March of this year, traditionally used for colorectal cancer but is also effective in extending the survival time for some lung cancer patients.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is there, Dr. Schiller, enough research going on, is there enough research money going in to this?

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: No, absolutely not, particularly when you consider the burden that lung cancer puts on Americans each year. As you mentioned in your earlier piece, 160,000 or more Americans will die of lung cancer each year. More women will die of lung cancer than they will of breast cancer, and yet, relatively speaking, only about one-tenth the amount of federal funding goes into lung cancer per death per year than it does for other types of cancers, such as breast cancer.

JEFFREY BROWN: Dr. Schiller, we just have a short time left, but I wonder if part of that is because of some stigma about lung cancer. We've been told so much about the person almost causes it, the person who smoked causes it.

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: I think that's true. That's one reason. One reason is also the fact that lung cancer is such a high mortality rate that there aren't a lot of patients who survive it who can advocate for it. You mention the guilt and shame associated with the disease, and that's true, as well. I don't think it's deserved, given the addictive nature of cigarette smoking. And lastly, there's a certain neolism out there, on the part of both physicians, as well as the public, that lung cancer is too difficult to treat, and so I think a lot of people are simply not aware of some of the new treatments that have come along lately.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Dr. Joan Schiller and Dr. Mark Clanton, thank you both very much.

DR. JOAN SCHILLER: Thank you.

DR. MARK CLANTON: Thank you.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, who runs the range, and a book conversation about war.

FOCUS - RULING THE RANGE

JIM LEHRER: Next, riding herd on cattle grazing on public lands. Tom Bearden has our story.

TOM BEARDEN: It's 4:00 AM in Southeastern Oregon, a typical morning for the hands at the O'Keeffe Ranch, saddling their horses and getting their marching orders to drive cattle.

JOHN O'KEEFFE And the other guy can take them cattle from the Hanolan Cabin on down the road and there'll be cattle to pick up at that water hole in the middle of the flat.

TOM BEARDEN: Like thousands of western cattlemen, John O'Keefe pays grazing fees to the government for his 1,100 head of cattle to feed on more than 70,000 acres of publicly owned federal land. It's nothing new. Cattlemen have been raising beef on public lands for nearly two centuries. But now the practice is at the center of a controversy over how the Bureau of Land Management supervises the 163 million acres under its control. Conservation biologist David Dobkin says cattle have severely damaged much of that land.

DAVID DOBKIN: The topsoil is gone. The topsoil was lost decades ago, through the action of, of livestock grazing, through the action, principally, of large numbers of hoofed animals walking across very fragile soils and destroying the protective layer, the protective surface.

TOM BEARDEN: But O'Keeffe insists he is a good steward of the land, that his cattle do no harm to open range.

JOHN O'KEEFFE: You know, my family's been here since the 1900s and we're proud of the condition that these lands are in and we intend to stay there. You know, the third generation's out here today, some of them helping them gather this allotment and make a pasture change, and we hope to pass it on to them and we're... we're proud of the condition that this is in.

TOM BEARDEN: Ten years ago, under the Clinton administration, grazing rules were tightened, some say tilted towards environmentalists. Ranchers were sometimes only allowed weeks to move cattle out when the BLM declared a grazing area damaged. The Bush administration is relaxing some of those rules. They are scheduled to go into effect next month. Bill Marlett, who runs the Oregon Natural Desert Association, an environmental group, thinks it's a step in the wrong direction.

BILL MARLETT: Now with the Bush administration in place, the tables have kind of turned, if you will, and we've taking from what I would say two steps forward, now we're taking a step backwards in terms of restoring the damage to our public lands that have been caused by over 100 years of grazing by domestic livestock.

TOM BEARDEN: BLM officials declined the NewsHour's invitation for an on-camera interview, but the agency has publicly claimed the new rules would "help facilitate a better working relationship with ranchers and improve rangeland conservation." One of the most contentious changes would increase the amount of time ranchers have to react when BLM says land has been damaged. The BLM must now monitor any damaged land for up to 24 months instead of demanding immediate action. And if the BLM forces ranchers to decrease the number of cattle on the ranges by more than 10 percent because of problems, ranchers will have five years to phase in those changes. However the BLM included an emergency provision that if the land is severely damaged, they can force the rancher to take action immediately. The BLM issued an environmental impact statement along with the new rules. It concluded the new regulations would help improve wildlife habitat, water quality and overall health of public rangelands. But two former BLM scientists who worked on that report for some two years, say that's not what they wrote.

BILL BROOKES: They don't want to know the truth. They don't want to know the science. They want to do what they want to do and where they want to do it.

TOM BEARDEN: Erick Campbell, a conservation biologist, and Bill Brookes, a hydrologist, both have more than 30 years of experience with the BLM. They say they submitted reports asserting the changes would hurt the land, wildlife and water quality. Now retired, Campbell and Brooks say their comments were eliminated from the final environmental impact statement.

ERICK CAMPBELL: I mean, they took out the peer reviewed literature because it did show that livestock grazing has been bad to arid western rangelands. But they also took out, for instance, our opinions under the environmental consequences, which is where our professional experience comes in. And my overall opinion for all of the changes was that it was going to have a slow, long-term, adverse impact on wildlife resources. And they turned around, they turned that around 180 degrees to where it was going to be beneficial to wildlife.

BILL BROOKES: And it's really interesting to see how the bureau is trying to get away from the science and do what it wants to do to make life easier for a rancher at the expense of the American public.

TOM BEARDEN: In response, the BLM issued a statement, telling the NewsHour that Campbell and Brookes' conclusions were, "based on personal opinion and unsubstantiated assertions rather than sound environmental analysis."

ERICK CAMPBELL: They are basically giving the cattle industry everything they want. And they do not want to portray the livestock grazing on the public lands, they don't want the public to know, that the livestock grazing on the public lands today is adverse and it's bad and it's across the range.

TOM BEARDEN: Environmentalist Marlett is particularly upset by the length of time, five years, that the new rules give a rancher to correct a problem.

BILL MARLETT: It's important that when the agency sees a problem, that they be able to make the corrections immediately so that we don't postpone the inevitable. I mean, by way of example, you know, if someone comes into the emergency room, you know, and they've had a heart attack, you know, the doctor doesn't say, "well, we'll think about it over the next five years and maybe we'll fix it then."

TOM BEARDEN: But O'Keeffe says it takes time to really evaluate impact on the land. He says the old rules often forced ranchers to move so quickly that their financial stability was affected.

JOHN O'KEEFFE: Of course you've got to have some lead time to make decisions and to make arrangements for where your cattle are going to be. And that was creating a situation where there can be some real problems and people would have to liquidate cattle and get in a real financial bind. While if you got a little time to make those arrangements, those things, it's a lot more likely you can do them without creating some hardship.

TOM BEARDEN: Oregon State University Professor William Krueger has studied grazing issues for 30 years himself, and he directly contradicts the BLM scientists.

TOM BEARDEN: Is it possible to raise cattle in the arid grasslands of this state and do so without hurting the ecosystem?

WILLIAM KRUEGER: Absolutely. We've been doing that for a couple hundred years in this state. And as time goes on, people are learning more and more how to do it better and there's lots of examples and experience of long- term sustainable use of these rangelands for livestock production.

TOM BEARDEN: One of the key points of dispute is how grazing affects streams and creeks, so- called riparian areas. Environmentalists say they're important because they provide habitat for many species of wildlife, and have long asserted that cattle virtually destroy such ecosystems. But the BLM says the new rules will improve riparian habitats. Dobkin is not sure how.

DAVID DOBKIN: I have looked through the regs. I'm not a policy person on this per se, but I cannot see anything in the grazing regulations that could possibly produce that kind of an outcome.

TOM BEARDEN: Dobkin says allowing cattle to graze in a damaged ecosystem can affect a stream like this one-- steep banks, no trees and foul water. In contrast, he took us to an area where cattle have not been allowed to graze for more than a decade.

DAVID DOBKIN: This is what a desert stream ecosystem should look like. I know from my experience of working as an ecologist in western landscapes for the last 30 years or more now that riparian systems certainly have not gotten better, have continued to deteriorate for the most part, and that this is an extraordinary exception, an example of where things should go.

TOM BEARDEN: Krueger says he's studied riparian areas, too, and believes such areas can prosper under the new regulatory environment.

WILLIAM KRUEGER: In terms of the fish, there's, there's no real effect on the fish. At the same time we're increasing our average calf weights by twenty-five to forty pounds in those riparian zones. So we're getting a little better production for the agriculture enterprise and no negative changes towards the wildlife and environmental benefits in the area. So it's kind of a good. The kind of range management situation you're looking for is to figure out a way to integrate all these multiple uses together and make it work.

TOM BEARDEN: Bottom line, it can be well managed.

WILLIAM KRUEGER: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

TOM BEARDEN: Complicating the argument is the fact that there are no overall baseline studies to compare changes to the public lands against; only anecdotal reports on small parcels of land. Despite the differing scientific conclusions, one environmental group has already filed a lawsuit to stop the new grazing rules from going into effect next month.

JIM LEHRER: Yesterday the BLM said it will soon publish a supplement to its environmental impact statement, "to go the extra mile to ensure the agency has fully considered all views" on the proposed changes.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: We close tonight with a Terence Smith book conversation about fathers, sons and the shadows cast by war.

TERENCE SMITH: The book is "Our Fathers' War." The author is Tom Mathews. Along with senior writer and editor at Newsweek, Mathews' latest book is subtitled, "Growing up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation." It recounts the complex father- son relationships that often developed after veterans came home from World War II. Tom Matthews, welcome. What drew you to the subject in the first place?

TOM MATHEWS: I think I wrote "Our Fathers' War," Terry, because it became clear to me that World War II had never ended for my own father, even more than a half a century later. And the truth was that between my father and me, we were at war every day of our lives from August 1945, on.

TERENCE SMITH: You, in fact, write about that very early in the book, and maybe you could read that passage to us where you talk about the relationship and the way it was affected by the war when he came home from the war.

TOM MATHEWS: "I wanted my father's love; he longed for mine. But from the day he came home, the kinetic energy of World War II struck at our center of gravity. To what might otherwise have been the normal primordial course of battle between fathers and sons, the war added its own peculiar convolutions. In our case, from that first day, my father thought, not without reason, that he was looking at a soft little pain in the neck; and I thought, on balance, that my life would be off to a much better start if only the Germans had killed him."

TERENCE SMITH: (Laughs) So things were rocky when he came home. You were a small boy.

TOM MATHEWS: Yes, the first day he came home, I was sitting on the doghouse out behind our house in Salt Lake City. He came across the backyard, threw his arms open to me and said, "Jump." And I thought it was too far and hesitated. And he said, "No son of mine will be a coward," wheeled and disappeared. So we got off to a very rocky start.

TERENCE SMITH: And you write in the portions of the book that deal with your own relationship with your father that this led to a real breach and that the breach was actually, eventually closed. Explain that.

TOM MATHEWS: Yes, the breach was closed after only nearly 60 years. And it was closed when I invited him to take a trip back to Italy, where he had served with the 10th Mountain Division in World War II.

TERENCE SMITH: And to retrace...

TOM MATHEWS: And to retrace his old battles. I called him on the phone one day, and I said, "Look, why don't we go back over the old battlefields where you spent the six months before you came home and started to drive me crazy." And he said, "That's a great idea."

TERENCE SMITH: So you did. What was that trip like?

TOM MATHEWS: It was a transforming trip. We were deeply suspicious of each other when we started, and when we finished, we made peace.

TERENCE SMITH: And why was it necessary? What was it closing over those years that hadn't been discussed or that could never have been discussed before?

TOM MATHEWS: My father always had a secret, it seemed to me, and he would never talk about World War II. He also had a code of honor which was a refusal to talk about World War II. So to me, he was remote, moody. His mood shifted. He was a heavy drinker. And we just couldn't reach each other for our entire lives. And I began to think that that might have something to do with what happened to him in World War II.

TERENCE SMITH: And since you write about nine other fathers and sons and the impact of the war, you found that this experience, your experience, wasn't really unique.

TOM MATHEWS: Yes, in the beginning I thought it was just me, just me and my father. But when I started to do the reporting on the book and just started to follow my own nose, time after time I ran into other people whose experience was almost the same.

TERENCE SMITH: This tendency of World War II veterans not to talk about this, code of silence, what explains that? What was behind that?

TOM MATHEWS: Well, there were several things. I didn't understand it until it was explained to me by Louie Simpson, who is a poet and one of the men in this chapter. He explained to me things that he could never explain to his own son and that is... that my father had never been able to explain to me. There is something in the nature of combat. A man who goes into combat never comes back the same man that he was before. I didn't understand that. This is universally true, and I failed to understand that.

TERENCE SMITH: But not all the stories are as difficult, as contentious as yours, your own family story. But every relationship, every father-and-son relationship, was affected.

TOM MATHEWS: That's right. The common denominator was this mysterious secret and a reluctance to talk about it. The best father was Private Edgar Person, who ran the hardware store next to me. He was an ideal father. I would love to have had him as my own father. He never talked to his son about the war until the last summer of his life, when his son found him going over an old photo album and pointing to a picture of an empty field in France, and saying, "60 men died in that field," and breaking into tears. It was the first time Bob Person had ever seen his father cry. So even with the people, with the best relationships, something was going on under the surface.

TERENCE SMITH: And I guess there were moments, you write there were moments like that when you and your father went back and followed the route that he followed up Italy...

TOM MATHEWS: Yes, we retraced the march of the 10th Mountain Division. And at first, I think he thought this was going to be just a father-and-son outing. But by the second day, it became quite tense. We were sitting in a small cafe in Bagna di Lucca and all of a sudden, from nowhere, he leaned over and a great convulsion came up within him, and he broke into tears, and he said, "I killed so many people. My God, I killed so many people." And then he sobbed for just a minute, caught himself, and said, "I've never said that to anyone. I've never said that to myself." And the secret came out, the code was cracked, and after that, we were able to talk and it transformed our lives.

TERENCE SMITH: In this book, you're recounting the darker side of an era, the greatest generation that has been romanticized and covered in the last ten years to an extraordinary degree. I wonder why you think that is.

TOM MATHEWS: I came out of seeing "Saving Private Ryan" with a feeling that was a little different from other people. I came out saying, "How could it be that this group of young heroes could come home and be such lousy fathers?" Now, I was working from a sample of one. This was not scientific. It was just the beginning point. But I feel very strongly that while we have done honor to the greatest generation, and while they deserved it, that we've only touched the surface of what went on within them and that we didn't really understand the full nature of their sacrifice, which is what it cost them in their heart and soul in the moments they were in combat. That to me is the most important thing.

TERENCE SMITH: And now, for record, the breach with that sample of one has been closed.

TOM MATHEWS: Not only with a sample of one, with the other nine, universally things came out very well when we worked our way through.

TERENCE SMITH: Okay. Tom Mathews, thank you very much. The book is "Our Fathers' War: Growing up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation." Thank you.

TOM MATHEWS: Thank you, Terry.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of this day: The U.S. Military reported the deaths of five more U.S. Soldiers in Iraq. Iran broke the U.N. seals at a uranium plant, moving it one step closer to full operations. And President Bush signed the mass transit/highway bill into law.

JIM LEHRER: And once again before we go, to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. We add them as their deaths are made official and photographs become available. Here, in silence, are seven more.

JIM LEHRER: We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.