The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, Margaret Warner looks at the crisis in the Middle East. Gwen Ifill reports on the presidential race in the important state of Pennsylvania. Ray Suarez examines the winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. And Elizabeth Farnsworth has a conversation about the lives and times of racial minorities in World War II. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: Major efforts to end the Middle East crisis were launched today. U.N. Secretary-General Annan went to Israel to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. The Russian foreign minister held talks in Syria. Palestinian Leader Arafat met in Cairo with Egypt's President Mubarak. But street fighting continued in the West Bank, past Israel's deadline for the violence to end. Israeli Prime Minister Barak called a late-night cabinet session to decide on his next move. We'll have more on the Middle East story right after this News Summary. The political revolution in Yugoslavia continued today. Loyalists to former president Milosevic began resigning from the government of Serbia, the main power center in the Yugoslav Federation. We have a report from Bill Neely of Independent Television News.

BILL NEELY: Protestors are back on the streets in the thousands, trying to destroy the old regime for good. And they were soon celebrating. The prime minister and the police chief have resigned. The Serbian government is now on the brink of resigning en masse. There will be new elections within weeks. Here they say it's just the beginning of the end. They're scraping off the posters that say, "Milosevic must go." He's gone. The new man, President Kostunica, began his first week in office today. The old president, Mr. Milosevic, took Eastern Europe's richest country and led it into the wilderness. The new president inherits a broken country, damaged by four wars in ten years, brutalized, isolated, humiliated. It will take a lot more than just lifting sanctions to cure all that. Yugoslavia's hospitals, once the envy of Eastern Europe, aren't short of patients, but they're short of everything else. And so they marched to change everything. Stopped tonight from storming the home of Mr. Milosevic, they then turned on his right-hand man, the former deputy prime minister. They clashed with his bodyguards; the bodyguards fired shots. So far it's been an almost bloodless revolution, but it's not over yet.

JIM LEHRER: The European Union today lifted an oil embargo on Yugoslavia. The United States is expected to follow suit soon. Both major presidential candidates spent today preparing for their second debate. It's set for Wednesday night in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Vice President Gore's campaign began criticizing so-called public policy bloopers, or misstatements, by Governor Bush. Bush aides said Gore was trying to deflect charges that he exaggerates his record and embellishes the facts. We'll look at the presidential race in the battleground state of Pennsylvania later in the program tonight. Two Americans and a Swede won the 2000 Nobel Prize for medicine today. The Americans are based in New York: Paul Greengard at Rockefeller University; Erik Kandel at Columbia University. They and Arvid Carlsson of Sweden were honored for studies on how messages move through the nervous system. Their work led to the development of drugs to treat Parkinson's Disease and schizophrenia. We'll have more on this story later in the program tonight. Also coming, the Middle East violence; a presidential battleground called Pennsylvania; and the story of racial minorities in World War II.

FOCUS - CYCLE OF VIOLENCE

JIM LEHRER: The crisis in the Middle East: We begin with a report from John Irvine of Independent Television News.

JOHN IRVINE: The Israeli peace deadline came and went largely unnoticed. Arabs and Jews took to the streets of Nazareth. The Israeli army were in the middle, preventing a huge street fight between neighbors. The latest international figure to try to find a way out of this mess is the U.N. Secretary- General, now in Israel for talks with both side

SPOKESMAN: The action must shift from the streets to the bargaining table. The bloodshed must stop, and the conflict must not be allowed to spread.

JOHN IRVINE: This has been Yom Kippur... (Gunfire) ...the Day of Atonement... (Gunfire) ...the most sacred holiday in the Jewish year. But there has been no rest for the Israeli army in parts of the West Bank. Here in Ramallah, the Palestinian revolt goes on. It has become a self- perpetuating tragedy. Each day starts with the funerals, but afterwards, many Palestinian men make their way to the usual flash points to confront their enemy. Then there is the familiar exchange... (Gunfire) ...stones or rubber-coated bullets... (Gunfire) ...stun grenades... (Explosion) ...and teargas canisters. (Explosion) The Palestinians are outgunned but defiant. This is mid afternoon in Ramallah, and if today follows the familiar pattern, then this is only a prelude to more serious violence tonight. So far, diplomacy has failed to deliver peace on the streets. And the Palestinians appear undeterred by the Israeli threat of a crackdown. This afternoon, outside the West Bank town of Nablus, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israeli soldiers, one of several gun battles over the past 24 hours. This was overnight in Hebron, a large Arab town with a small Jewish settlement in its center. For the Israelis, there is another conflict looming on the Lebanese border, where Hezbollah guerrillas kidnapped three soldiers. But on this potential second front, it has been q quiet day, as diplomatic efforts continue to secure the men's release. Inside Israel and the occupied territories, preparations go on for further confrontation. The Israeli prime minister has threatened to go on the offensive. The international effort to negotiate a settlement before the fighting intensifies involves the United Nations, the United States, and Russia. There is a very real sense of foreboding here about what may happen should the diplomatic initiative fail.

JIM LEHRER: And to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: Israeli Prime Minister Barak did convene his cabinet this evening, and as of 6 o'clock Eastern Time, they're still meeting. To assess the situation, we turn to three experts on the Middle East. Geoffrey Kemp was senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council during the Reagan administration; he is now at the Nixon Center. Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Middle East history and director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Chicago. And Menachem Brinker is chair of Modern Hebrew Studies at the University of Chicago, and a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Welcome, gentlemen. Geoffrey Kemp, how do you assess or what do you make of the developments we've seen today, both on the ground and diplomatically? Do you think we're on the brink of some resolution, or it is moving the other way?

GEOFFREY KEMP: I think we may be on the brink of some breakthrough, but we have to understand, Margaret, that what the leaders of the world and the region are now involved in is crisis management, not the peace process. The peace process we must put on hold. What we have to do is to prevent an escalation of violence between Israel and the Palestinians becoming a Middle East conflagration involving Lebanon, Syria, and then possibly other radical elements. And don't forget, Saddam Hussein is waiting to intervene in a crisis like this because he's still harbors revenge against us. This is a very serious moment, and the priority has to be to prevent escalation and violence, and we'll worry about the peace process next week or next month.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Khalidi, how do you see it in terms of looking at today and what's been happening?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, today is a continuation of 12 days of this. If once again the effort is to put a band-aid on a really serious problem, we're not going to get anywhere. Sooner or later the United States, Russia, the world is going to have to step in and make clear that the root problem of this is a continuation of the occupation. The sad thing is that had the various agreements that have already been signed been implemented, most of the flashpoints shown on your film would long since have been seeded to the Palestinians and the friction which results from 70% of the West Bank still being under occupation and 30% of the Gaza Strip still being under occupation after nine years of negotiation would hopefully be eliminated.

MARGARET WARNER: In terms of the crisis management that Geoff Kemp talked about, do you think this crisis is being managed?

RASHID KHALIDI: I'm not sure it is. Things have spiraled to the point that I'm afraid on both sides there is very likely no control possible or very little control possible. Clearly the Israeli military and security forces, clearly the Shabbat in the streets have now in a sense taking this thing beyond the control of the commanders, beyond the control of the politicians. And I think the United States has been almost derelict in its duty. There were things that should have been done at the very beginning. Sharon gave us a week's notice before he went...

MARGARET WARNER: You're talking about the right-wing politician who went to visit Barak.

RASHID KHALIDI: Precisely. One of the few people who will probably benefit from these events will be Ariel Sharon. Someone should have stepped and said, if Barak can't tell him not to go there, perhaps the United States should suggest it would be unwise and take the lightning that would have resulted. Similarly, I think that way back before Jerusalem was put on the table at Camp David, it would have been wise for people to understand how sensitive an issue it was and to understand that this is one of the many permanent status issues that should have been discussed years ago instead of deferred as it has been until now.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Brinker, let's try to stay on today, if we could, just for another minute, which is today was the day this ultimatum was due to expire. One, do you think that ultimatum was a good idea on what Barak's part, and two, now that the deadline's come and gone, what are Israel's options?

MENACHEM BRINKER: Well, I think it is not wholly symmetrical -- the extent of control that Barak has over the IDF and the extent of control that Arafat has over the Palestinian state. But I think Barak meant to dramatize the situation, and at least to bring it to happen that the leaders will clearly and unambiguously say that they don't want this violence. Then there would be perhaps some settlers on the Israeli side and perhaps some youth on the Palestinian side. But then the crisis would be manageable. As long as there is not such unambiguous declaration of Arafat, just the opposite -- he declares that we should go on fighting if necessary even from Tunisia, as long as there is no unambiguous declaration like this, of course the crisis will grow and grow and grow.

MARGARET WARNER: Geoff Kemp, do you think the ultimatum was a good idea?

GEOFFREY KEMP: I think some sort of strong message had to be delivered if only to console the Israeli passions. Don't forget, we talk a lot about the Arab street, and I think that's very real now. There is anger on the Arab street. But there's also growing anger and passion on the Israeli street. Now, Barak had to do something. Now, whether he should have given a deadline with a specific time frame I'm not so sure because clearly we've gone beyond that time frame. And he will look weak if nothing happens, and yet if he then acts tough, things could get even worse. So it's always good to up the rhetoric, but you need to have fudge factor. You need to have wiggle room so that if there is some progress in the next two or three days, Barak does not look weak.

MARGARET WARNER: When you say act tough, what do you mean?

GEOFFREY KEMP: Well, he's got to act tough to his own people, because if he does not, he's going to end up either without a government, he'll be out of office, or he'll have to form a government with Erik Sharon. And if that happens, we really can kiss good-bye to the peace process certainly for this administration. And when you kiss good-bye to the peace process, more trouble will erupts in the region.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Khalidi, some of the options that were floated and leaked and who knows from whom about what Barak could do included attacking Arafat's headquarters, they included some sort of attack on Lebanon in retaliation for the taking of these three Israeli soldiers. What impact would that have?

RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I think we should reflect on what Daniel Rubenstein, who's an Arab affairs correspondent for Ha'aretz, said this morning on American radio. What would Israelis do on the morning after? Let's say they reoccupied the West Bank or used their air force against the Gaza Strip. What is the solution then? Israel has to come to terms with the fact that the Palestinian people want the live in an independent state in what is left of Palestine, the 23% of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel sooner or later has to end the occupation. Barak can do anything he wants. And I think he can kill as many Palestinians as the Israeli public has the stomach for. That is, I think, not the point. I think the question is: How do you come to an equitable arrangement between these two people for sharing this land, which is the homeland of both?

MARGARET WARNER: Okay. If we go back to the crisis management we started talking about, Professor Brinker said, you know, obviously what Barak wants Arafat to do is at least come out publicly and say, stop the demonstrating, stop the shooting, stop the rock-throwing. Why has Arafat not done that, do you think?

RASHID KHALIDI: Because the numbers of dead and wounded would indicate that the shooting that has to be stopped is not coming from the few Palestinians who killed two or three Israelis soldiers and wounded a dozen. It's from the Israeli forces that have killed 90 or 100 Palestinians and wounded 1,500, including 200 children. Arafat is a politician, like Barak. His public opinion is looking at the 2000 or so Palestinians who have been killed, wounded and maimed and saying, the restraint has to come from the Israeli side. Obviously, both are going to have to show restraint. That's not the point. The point is that if we weigh in the balance, 2000 Arab casualties and a dozen or two dozen Israeli casualties, clearly the person not showing restraint is not just Yasser Arafat. Whatever ability he has to control his own population or forces or the people with guns, or the Shabbat in the street, it is I think also first and foremost in fact Ehud Barak.

MARGARET WARNER: Okay. Let me turn to Professor Brinker. Professor Brinker, now, what Arafat is saying he wants is for, I think, no live ammunition to be used by the Israeli defense forces and also to have Israeli troops pull out of these predominantly Palestinian-controlled areas. Why can Barak... Can Barak do that? If not, why not?

MENACHEM BRINKER: Well, there were several places at which the IDF, according to strict command of Barak, pulled and went back. For example, there was an agreement on the tomb of Joseph, and the IDF went -- and a promise of the Palestinian police that they will keep their sacred place. And then the Shabbat came and destroyed the tomb. So Barak... I don't think that the number of casualties will show you who is opening fire. The whole movement of protest, which I can understand, but I cannot agree to, started by the Palestinians after the visit of Ariel Sharon. That's true. But throwing rocks at people that pray at the Wailing Wall is not the answer to the provocation that was in Sharon's visit. The only answer to this provocation was to go on and negotiate the last two square miles that remained to be negotiated. Barak had made it very clear that Israel doesn't want to continue the occupation, that it is ready to concede to the Palestinian state or Palestinian Authority, later the Palestinian state, 92% or 94% of the territory and compensate them for the rest percentage that would be an annexed to Israel with Israeli territory. He agreed to the division of Jerusalem. No political leader agreed so far of Israel to the division of Jerusalem. He surprised even the dovesin his party by his willingness to turn every stone to get into a respectable peace for the Palestinians. He showed readiness to accept something like Mubarak's compromise in the old city.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me just get back the Geoff Kemp on a couple points. Geoff Kemp, what will it take now to end this, to manage this crisis and to keep it from expanding into what you warned about, something even wider?

GEOFFREY KEMP: Well, I think on the one hand, you have got to try to work with they Syrians and the Lebanese through the Europeans and the various Arab leaders to get some agreement on the three Israeli soldiers, because that is a burning humiliation for Israel and following their withdrawal unilaterally in May, there is an eager desire on the part of some people to punish Hezbollah. And that could get out of hand. And secondly, you do need some statement from Arafat that his people are going to cool the violence to give Barak the opportunity then to order a stand down or a standoff. Of course, Arafat cannot completely control the violence because it is now in the hands of some people who want to continue it. But he can make enough steps and enough noises to convince I think the Israelis that he at least means business. He needs to do that. And Barak then needs to lower the rhetoric.

MARGARET WARNER: But, I mean, everything you're prescribing is what President Clinton and Madeleine Albright and the Europeans and everybody else has been telling the parties for the last ten days, and it appears, judging from the other two guests on this segment and what we're hearing out of the region, that neither side sees an incentive or else has the ability to do what needs to be done.

GEOFFREY KEMP: No. Well, what may need to be done is for President Clinton to literally go to the region and sit down with Arafat, sit down with Barak, sit down with the Arab League and the United Nations or some other group and talk it through, because let's face it, it's not just Barak and Arafat and Clinton who have a lot at stake here. So does Mubarak, so does King Abdullah, so do the Saudis. All the moderate regimes that we call and like in the region are threatened if this gets out of hand. Clinton has a lot to play with if he's prepared to take a bold risk for crisis management.

MARGARET WARNER: So you would suggest he go over there even if or particularly if the violence hasn't ended?

GEOFFREY KEMP: Yes, I do. Because I think if the violence doesn't end, it will get out of hand. If it gets out of hand, it will spread, if it spreads, it will undermine the very security structure that Clinton and other American Presidents have nurtured and built up for the last 20 years in the region.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you. Geoffrey Kemp and Professors both.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, a presidential campaign report from Pennsylvania, the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and a book about racial minorities in World War II.

FOCUS - ELECTION - BATTLEGROUND

JIM LEHRER: Gwen Ifill has our Pennsylvania story.

GWEN IFILL: Columbus holiday weekend in Pittsburgh: High school bands parade through downtown. The Sons of Italy gather for their annual picnic. And, one month before the November election, the politicians are out in force.

SPOKESMAN: U.S. Senator Rick Santorum.

GWEN IFILL: All competing for the attention of the Pennsylvania voter, voters who have proved hazardous to Republicans and Democrats for decades, and who, this year, may hold the key to the presidential election -- voters like Vera Fioravanti, a Pittsburgh Democrat. She likes what Al Gore has to say about expanding prescription drug coverage, but prefers George W. Bush's stand against abortion.

VERA FIORAVANTI: I definitely am pro-life. And I just --I can't see it any other way. I really can't. So -- I just don't know what to do. I don't know what I'm going to do at the moment. But I have to make a decision.

GWEN IFILL: Across the state, at an orchard in a Philadelphia suburb, Kate Gilhool, a mother of two, can't decide either -- but for a different reason. She favors abortion rights, and leans toward the Democrats. Her husband, Jim, is backing Bush.

KATE GILHOOL: I don't like what either of them have been saying so far. At least I haven't found anything that I've been able to latch onto that I really strongly like or dislike. What I don't like is, and we disagree on this, is I do think Bush would put somebody on the Supreme Court Justice that would reverse "Roe W. Wade," so that's my biggest concern right now.

GWEN IFILL: These are the voters Al Gore and George W. Bush have to win: Voters divided on abortion and Social Security, and the role of government in their lives.

SPOKESMAN: They got to hear in you Philly, Scranton and Allentown and Erie, Pennsylvania. What time is it?

CROWD: Gore time!

MUSIC PLAYING: Here's to the babies in the brand-new world --

GWEN IFILL: During the final month of an intensely competitive presidential campaign, both men are engaged in a heated, high- energy battle for the hearts and minds of a notoriously fickle state.

VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Do you remember how bad it was eight years ago? The deficits were $300 billion a year; the unemployment rate was high. We saw jobs being shipped off to overseas. We had all kinds of social problems getting worse. And thanks to you, we had a chance to bring some changes. Instead of the biggest deficit, we now have the biggest surpluses.

SPOKESMAN: The next President and First Lady of the United States, Governor George W. Bush and Laura Bush.

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: It's time for somebody who will unite this nation, not divide it. It's time for somebody to get rid of this class warfare, of trying to pit rich against poor. ( Applause ) Now that's what time it is. It's time for a change. And when America shows up, and when you vote -- and by the way -- I'm here in this important state, asking for the vote. I want you to go the polls and support me. I don't care what your party is. Get in that booth and vote for George W. Bush. ( Applause )

JOSEPH DiSARRO: The candidates haven't really talked about health care with respect to the details.

GWEN IFILL: Joseph DiSarro, dean of the political science department at Washington- Jefferson College near Pittsburgh, says it's a tough balancing act -- tougher, he says, for Governor Bush.

JOSEPH DiSARRO: If a Republican does not carry Pennsylvania, they will not win the race in my opinion, unless they carry a heck of a lot of other states. This is the battleground state, and it's clear. Both candidates have visited this state over 15 times. They will continue to come here. This is also a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

GWEN IFILL: To outsiders, Pennsylvania is a political puzzle. Democrats outnumber Republicans, but it has a Republican Governor and two Republican Senators. Yet nothing fits into a comfortable partisan box. Here in western Pennsylvania many Democrats are more conservative than the moderate Republicans in suburban Philadelphia. In order to win this critical state, a candidate has to appeal to both. Democrat Trudy Cruice, a mother of six who attended a Bush rally last week, says she can't decide what to believe.

TRUDY CRUICE: I'm really confused. I have been watching the debates and reading as much as I can, but I really want a man with integrity. And at this point, I think they both are coming across as men with integrity, but I have some issues with their issues. I'm very pro-life, but in my heart, I think, I tend to be a more Democratic person.

GWEN IFILL: In western Pennsylvania's Beaver Valley, Friday night football rules. The names in the local hall of fame include Mike Ditka and Joe Namath. The large elderly population also remembers when the steel mills closed two decades ago, and job security vanished. So now they worry about Social Security and Medicare and health coverage. Louis Pupi is a retired pharmacist.

LOUIS PUPI: The pharmaceutical companies, they have no mercy. The cost of the medication that they put out is extremely expensive. I mean, if you've seen the price of some of these prescriptions these people have to take and some of them don't take them -- I've seen some of them walk out and leave the prescription there because they don't have the money, or they weren't going to pay the kind of money, so they're taking they're health into their own hands, even though they may need the medication.

GWEN IFILL: Kristi and Jeff Koenig have listened to the same set of facts from the candidates. She remains undecided.

KRISTI KOENIG: They spin things without talking about the issues. For example, the prescription drug plan, why are drugs so expensive in this country? That is the issue - not who hast the better plan - because I think their plans are wrapped up in a lot of this rhetoric and, you know, my way's better than your way, without really looking at the true issues.

GWEN IFILL: He is supporting Bush.

JEFF KOENIG: I like his view on vouchers specifically. I also like the fact that I think he would put monies into the schools, and give the schools a choice of what to do with the money, instead of forcing the schools to hire new teachers.

GWEN IFILL: As the race has turned into a dead heat, both Bush and Gore have turned to local politicians for advice.

SPOKESMAN: Now who do you think trusts Pennsylvanians to make decisions about their money? Governor George Bush.

GWEN IFILL: Bush considered Governor Tom Ridge, a popular Republican who himself was elected by a narrow margin, for his running mate. Now Ridge is more valuable to him than ever.

GOVERNOR TOM RIDGE: We keep telling our friends in the Bush/Cheney campaign, come back to Pennsylvania, and then personalize that national message. And they've begun doing that rather successfully, and I think we've got the trend line moving in the right direction. We know their place is in Pennsylvania, we have to maneuver to and get them to deliver the message, but I think we're going to be okay. We never thought we could win by a large margin, it's impossible to win by a large margin in a presidential race, but we can still win this and the trend line's moving in the right direction. We have enough time, I think, to deliver.

GWEN IFILL: Republican Rick Santorum is defending his U.S. Senate seat this year. He too faces a vigorous Democratic challenge.

REP. RICK SANTORUM: Hand-to-hand politics is very important in this state. We're very diverse. And you can't go out and give a message to Pennsylvania and expect to connect because, you know, Harrisburg is not what Philadelphia is, and Pittsburgh is not anything like Philadelphia, and so if you were to go out and just sort of run a campaign and justsort of run a national campaign in Pennsylvania, you're going to lose. You've got to go out and run a campaign that focuses on issues and concerns because of the complexity of the state.

GWEN IFILL: Dan Onorato, a Democrat, is Allegheny Country comptroller. One of the issues that helps Gore, he says, is fiscal responsibility.

DAN ONORATO: The big debate right now is what to do with the surplus. You have two options: One, on the Republican side, is give it all back to the taxpayers; it's their money. Or, two, take care of the taxpayer's debt, because the debt is also the taxpayer's debt, and write that down so we don't have a problem with interest rates in the near future. I believe, that at the end of the day, writing down the debt is what the taxpayers are going to vote for.

GWEN IFILL: Democrat Tom Murphy, the mayor of Pittsburgh, agrees. He says Gore can win votes by emphasizing western Pennsylvania's new prosperity.

TOM MURPHY: Clearly, the economy, and what has happened for the last eight years, continues to be a remarkable selling point. In western Pennsylvania, that suffered really devastation with the collapse of the steel industry and had lagged behind significantly the success nationally with the economy until just a couple years ago. And we are now enjoying a really exciting surging economy here. I think that continues to be Gore's major, major strength here in western Pennsylvania.

GWEN IFILL: Both candidates are flooding the airwaves, the Planned Parenthood Federation supporting Gore with the testimonials of Republican women.

SPOKESPERSON: Bush says he wants to take away a woman's right to choose.

SPOKESPERSON: And Bush is willing to support Supreme Court Justices who oppose a woman's right to choose. That's a risk I don't want to take.

GWEN IFILL: And the Bush campaign driving home a more basic theme: Asking in its ads, who do you trust?

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Because when we trust individuals, when we respect local control of schools, when we empower communities, together we can ignite America's spirit and renew our purpose.

GWEN IFILL: Gore and Bush plan to return to Pennsylvania several times before the election. As each man travels the state, he implores voters to cross party lines.

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: I understand this is a county full of loyal Republicans, discerning Democrats, and independents that need to be convinced. ( Applause ) and I want to tell you all I'm not afraid to take my message to those discerning Democrats and open-minded independents.

VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: I want to ask you now for something that is difficult for you to give, and something that people hardly ever give anymore. I want to ask you to open your hearts and allow yourself to genuinely believe, without reservation, that we can do the right thing in this country and be the better for it. I ask you to push past the fear of disillusionment and disappointment.

GWEN IFILL: Joseph DiSarro of Washington-Jefferson College says, Pennsylvania voters are still watching and waiting.

JOSEPH DiSARRO: This race is going to be close; it's going to go back and forth until November. My own feeling is that the voter is confused; he is in a maze, a statistic, and numbers that he or she does not really understand. They're going to go into the voting booth; they're still going to be confused; they're probably going to vote not based on reason, and the issues but just simply gut feeling.

GWEN IFILL: And whoever ends up on the top of the Pennsylvania seesaw on election day, experts say, could very likely be the nation's next president.

FOCUS - AWARD WINNERS

JIM LEHRER: This year's Nobel Prize for Medicine, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: The award this year went for discoveries about how messages move around the nervous system and help us understand the functioning of the brain. Three scientists will share the nearly $1 million prize. One of them is with us now. Paul Greengard is a neuroscientist who heads the laboratory of molecular and cellular neuroscience at the Rockefeller University in New York. Also joining us is Dr. Steve Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

First, Professor Greengard, congratulations.

PAUL GREENGARD: Thank you very much.

RAY SUAREZ: How did you hear about the award?

PAUL GREENGARD: About ten minutes past five this morning, the secretary of the Nobel Committee called to inform me I had been one of the recipients of this year's Nobel Prize in medicine. It was about 20 minutes... apparently in Sweden they announce at 11:30 in the morning, which is 5:30 Eastern Standard time. So they called to let the recipients know in advance of the deluge of telephone calls that come after the announcement of the prize.

RAY SUAREZ: It's kind of tough. Who do you wake up at 5:00 in the morning to let them know?

PAUL GREENGARD: Well, that's what my wife and I said: "Who in the heck is calling on the telephone at this time in the morning."

RAY SUAREZ: You've been recognized for your work in studying how brain cells communicate with each other. Maybe you could walk a layman through what you've been recognized for, what you've been working on all these years.

PAUL GREENGARD: Well, yes, we've been interested in how those nerve cells talk to each other. And when one nerve cell releases a chemical, this chemical, which is called a neurotransmitter, then regulates the activities of a second nerve cell. And we've been studying the biochemical machinery, if you will, the various components of the factory that responds to this chemical signal with an appropriate response.

RAY SUAREZ: And the things that you've been trying to find out helped move us where in understanding how the brain works?

PAUL GREENGARD: Well, one of the... there are many of these neurotransmitters, about 100. So I can give you a specific example. I think the prize recognizes a broader area, but this specific example illustrates the point. There's a neurotransmitter called dopamine. And abnormalities in dopamine signaling are implicated in several major neurological and psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, Parkinson's Disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and drug abuse. And by elucidating the biochemical steps by which the dopamine produces its effects in its target neural cells, it's been possible to learn more about these diseases and to develop new targets for pharmaceutical industries to develop drugs that hopefully will have a better therapeutic action and fewer side effects.

RAY SUAREZ: One of your co- winners is Dr. Arvid Carlsson from Sweden. Tell us how his work meshes with yours. He also was working on dopamine, correct?

PAUL GREENGARD: That's correct, yes. Dr. Carlsson had obtained very clear evidence a number of years ago that dopamine was involved in abnormalities in schizophrenia and Parkinson's Disease, and the work we did was to show how the details... the details of how dopamine produces these effects -- in other words, what's wrong in these diseases and what can be con to correct them.

RAY SUAREZ: Dr. Hyman, the third winner is Erik Kandel, also working in New York. Is there a thread that runs through all three winners that sort of connects them intellectually and what they've been working on?

DR. STEVEN E. HYMAN: Well, I think there really is a thread. The important thing about all of these discoveries is they taught us more about how nerve cells communicate with each other. And Dr. Carlsson's work showed us what happens, for example, if the brain lacks dopamine or something good in the case of schizophrenia, when you block dopamine with medications. But Drs. Greengard and Kandel have really helped take science to a new level of understanding the brain's complexity. You know, one of the important things that the brain has to do is to convert short-term stimulation or short-term experience into long-term changes in brain function. That's how we have memories. That's how a lot of drugs work. And those kinds of processes go along in disease. And Dr. Greengard really focused on an important switch. He didn't use the word "phosphorylation," but that's a critical switch that's used by lots and lots of cells, including nerve cells to make changes long-term, more permanent. And then Dr. Kandel showed how these kinds of changes modify the synaptic connections, the connections between nerve cells. And memory really requires that the connections between nerve cells be altered. That is the pattern of communication will be changed in short-term memories, from minutes to hours, and in long- term memories, for years or maybe even permanently.

RAY SUAREZ: Reporter: So without this modification, every time something happened to you, it would be like the first time?

DR. STEVEN E. HYMAN: That's exactly right. Without these fundamental processes that would convert short-term experience into long-term change, we could literally learn nothing. In fact, the whole success of humanity, indeed all of mammals, depends on our ability to learn, to respond to new occurrences based on our prior experience.

RAY SUAREZ: So standing on the platform, cobbled together with decades of work by these three scientists, what do you push toward next with the knowledge they've helped us find?

DR. STEVEN E. HYMAN: Well, I hope that this knowledge in short order will help us understand some really terrible diseases and lead to better treatments. Dr. Greengard already mentioned schizophrenia, Parkinson's Disease. One could add manic-depressive illness, of course, drug addiction. These are in many ways diseases of signaling in the brain. These are diseases in which the normal communication between nerve cells goes awry and in which the wrong kinds of messages get laid down. By really helping us understand the nitty-gritty of the processes by which nerve cells change in response to experience, these scientists have given us molecular targets that are going to give us, I hope, the next generation of therapies for these kinds of diseases.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Professor Greengard, are you still going into the lab full-time, burning the midnight oil?

PAUL GREENGARD: Well, yes, I am. It was a bit hard to do so today; there have been some interruptions. But I'm planning to get back there pretty soon.

RAY SUAREZ: And what are the kinds of things that you're working on? You've been rewarded for this body of work. But what's turning you on now and still getting you into the lab? What riddle do you have to solve?

PAUL GREENGARD: Well, it turns out that this neurotransmitter dopamine, not only dopamine, but many other chemicals or neurotransmitters interact with them -- all intersect on the same biochemical pathways. And it's turning out to be extremely complex, and at the same time, beautifully simple. All of these neurotransmitters converge on a certain kind of chemical reaction which Dr. Hyman mentioned called phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. And this then produces all kinds of very complicated intercellular physiological... excuse me, physiological changes in the properties of these nerve cells. And so there's beginning to be a kind of unified principle involved in how these nerve cells respond. And ironically, the more complex this story becomes, the more beautifully simple in the principles.

RAY SUAREZ: Reporter: I understand you've already decided what you're going to do with your one-third share of the Nobel Prize money.

PAUL GREENGARD: Yes.

RAY SUAREZ: Tell us about it.

PAUL GREENGARD: Well, I've decided to give it to Rockefeller University to establish a fund to provide an annual prize for an outstanding woman doing biomedical research.

RAY SUAREZ: And why that particular cause?

PAUL GREENGARD: Well, my mother died in childbirth. I never knew her. And it seemed a very nice way to honor her memory.

RAY SUAREZ: Are you starting to see more women at your side at an elite research institution like Rockefeller?

PAUL GREENGARD: Absolutely. There are real major changes now in the recognition of the talents of women, and in many excellent laboratories, over half of the students and post-docs are women. And I think as people move along in their academic careers, we're going to see a very large percentage of women in professorial positions.

RAY SUAREZ: And quickly, Dr. Hyman, are we going to see the practical effects of some of these discoveries quite soon?

DR. STEVEN E. HYMAN: Well, I think so. I think one of the wonderful things about these prizes, in some sense they're almost overdue because these scientists have been producing very, very important discoveries for a long time. And people are already exploiting them to find better drugs for schizophrenia, for Parkinson's Disease. And I think with the information coming out of the various Human Genome projects, we're only going to see progress accelerate.

RAY SUAREZ: Thanks a lot, Dr. Hyman, --

DR. STEVEN E. HYMAN: A pleasure.

RAY SUAREZ: -- and again, Professor Greengard, congratulations.

PAUL GREENGARD: Thank you very much.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: Now, another of our conversations with authors of new books, and to Elizabeth Farnsworth.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Ronald's Takaki new book is "Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II." Takaki is professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of nine other books, including "A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America." Why "Double Victory"? Where's the title come from?

RONALD TAKAKI: Well, we always think of World War II as the good war, but this good war contained a contradiction. We were fighting the Nazis with a Jim Crow army. And so why did minorities, the excluded Americans, go to war? They went to war for double victory, for victory against fascism abroad, but also victory against racial inequality and prejudices here at home.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And I find it... I found it very interesting. This is a book about a struggle, about inequality. There are very sad letters in it, and yet essentially it's a very uplifting book. It has a kind of happy end in that people really did change their lives. For example, the war industries were... you were not allowed to be in the war industries, most of them, if you were a minority -- until what? What happened?

RONALD TAKAKI: Well, what happened wasthis: Here we were celebrating in a way this war as a war to be fought by the arsenal of democracy, and yet this arsenal for democracy was not democratic. It excluded blacks. And so you had this march on Washington, or a threatened march on Washington led by A. Philip Randolph. And Randolph met with the President, President Roosevelt. And Roosevelt said, "well, how many Negroes can you get around the White House?" And Randolph said, "100,000, Mr. President." And that shook Roosevelt up. And that's what led him to sign that executive order. He did not want to give Hitler the opportunity to laugh at America's hypocrisy. So this war had its upside in that it was a moment when Americans of all races had to confront a contradiction, an internal contradiction. And out of this confrontation came a transformation of America itself.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Why did you want to write this book the way you did? You use letters. You use songs. You have the stories of people from various ethnic and all kinds of other groups. You have Jewish Americans, German Americans are discussed, Italian Americans. Why did you want to write this book?

RONALD TAKAKI: I wanted to write a history from the bottom up, and I wanted to bring together the American people, the diverse American people, and their struggle against forces aboard and also forces at home. And so I wanted to tell this story from the bottom up, and this is where I had to rely on letters and songs and diaries and so forth, and also oral histories, conversations, like the conversation we're having. It's through the stories that we learn about what happened. I like to use the term "bilevel" view of the war. That's what I try to present in this book.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You have a very important letter. Would you read it for us please and tell the story of this letter?

RONALD TAKAKI: This is a letter written by a group of wounded American soldiers sharing a hospital ward in Europe, and they've been reading about the terrible race riots exploding in cities across America in 1943. And the worst one occurred in Detroit. So they wrote a letter that was published in the Detroit newspaper, and this is what they wrote collectively. They said... They wrote, "Why are these race riots going on there in Detroit and in other cities in this land, supposedly the land of freedom, equality and brotherhood? The riots make us fighters think, what are we fighting for -- the principles that gave birth to the United States of America. In this hospital ward, we eat, laugh, and sleep uncomplainingly together." And then they signed their names: Jim Stanley, Negro; Joe Wakamatsu, Japanese; Ing Yu, Chinese; John Brennan, Irish; Paul Calosi, Italian; Don Hultheimer, German; Joe Wojzeziewski, Polish; and Mike Cohen, Jewish. Just think about that. These are diverse Americans, but they all are saying, "we are Americans, and we belong to a nation founded, dedicated to this principle of equality."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: There were two of the chapters that I found quite dark actually. Most of the chapters have... there's some kind of progress that's made. I found the chapter about Japanese Americans quite dark and also about Jews. Talk about both of those, and give us a little bit of your family history.

RONALD TAKAKI: Well, Japanese Americans, on the mainland, on the West Coast were interned. But Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not interned. I was born in Hawaii. I grew up in Hawaii, and I was not sent to an internment or concentration camp.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Why the difference?

RONALD TAKAKI: Why? Well that's an important question, because there were more Japanese Americans living in Hawaii than on the mainland. Well, the main difference was this: We had a military governor named Delos Eamons and he said, "look, it's not the American way to round up people and incarcerate them without due process." He said, "we have a Constitution to respect." And so Delos Eamons resisted pressure from Washington to intern the Japanese Americans in Hawaii. But on the mainland, it was a different story, where our governor of the West, our military commander of the West Coast, John DeWitt, said, "a Jap is a Jap." And he said, "it doesn't matter what generation you belong to, you still are a member of the enemy race." And that, combined with political pressures and economic pressures, led to internment. But there's an upside to the internment story. These Japanese Americans left the internment camps to serve in the United States armed forces. They served in the 442nd. They gave their limbs and their bodies to defend this nation, but they fought for a double victory. They wanted to liberate their families still in the internment camps. And when they came back, they were sending a message to this country. They said, "This government should never have questioned our loyalty. This government should never have violated our constitutional rights." With the Holocaust, I have a chapter in this about the Holocaust, and it's not about what happened over there, but what did not happen over here. Our government did virtually nothing to admit and to rescue Jewish refugees; but there is an upside to this story, because Jewish Americans had to ask of themselves, "What is our responsibility to our brethren in Europe"? And in the middle of the war, after waiting patiently for Roosevelt, who was heeding the polls-- the polls said that 70% of the American people did not want to admit Jewish refugees-- Jewish Americans began to protest and began to break the silence. They began to have plays that toured the country, saying that this nation should do everything possible to rescue these Jewish prisoners of the heart of horror in Europe.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So even that, there were lessons learned that were then used in the future?

RONALD TAKAKI: Just think about what came out of this struggle for double victory. The civil rights movement came out of it. The integration of the armed forces came out of it -- and also new laws, like the Immigration Act of 1965 that reopened the gates to Asian immigrants. And then, of course, the 1988 Redress and Reparations Act. This is a powerful act. Here you have our government apologizing to Japanese Americans for interning them and also paying each one of them $20,000. Of course, $20,000 was only symbolic, but still, think about it. This is amazing that our government would acknowledge that this is a wrong that it had committed during World War II.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Ronald Takaki, thanks for being with us.

RONALD TAKAKI: Well, thank you for this opportunity.

FINALLY - FAVORITE POEM PROJECT

JIM LEHRER:: Finally tonight, former poet laureate Robert Pinsky's project that asks Americans to read their favorite poem. Tonight's reader is a computer website manager in Seattle.

LAURA TREADWAY: I'm Laura Treadway. I live in Seattle, Washington. Denise Levertov died a few years ago, and I'm not sure what year it was-- 1997 or 1998. When she died, some of her poems were published in a local literary magazine, kind of in honor of her passing. And I got a hold of the magazine, and I was looking at it. And I read that poem, and I wasjust completely struck by it. And the reason I love this poem is because it's about what it was like to move to Seattle, and it really captured for me what it was like to come here for the first time and see Mt. Rainier. And I made a photocopy of it and I carried it around in my backpack for like a year. And I would just pull it out occasionally. So when I heard about the favorite poem project, I knew exactly which poem I wanted to submit to it. "Settling," by Denise Levertov. "I was welcomed here. Clear gold of light summer, of opening autumn. The dawn eagle sunning himself on the highest tree. The mountain, revealing herself unclouded, her snow-tinted apricot as she looked West, tolerant in her steadfastness. Of the restless sun, forever rising and setting. Now I am given a taste of the gray foretold by all and sundry, a gray both heavy and chill. I've boasted I would not care. I'm London-born, and I won't. I'll dig in, into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Gray is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen." I eventually lost that photocopy of the poem I made, and the one line that I could remember that I used to find it again at the library was the last line, which is, "Gray is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen." So it's kind of talking about how living in the gray most of the time of the year is what you have to do in order to live in this great place, and, you know, be able to see bald eagles, which I have done, and to know the mountain. And whenever you see it, it's always much larger than you remember. And it's hard to take pictures of it. I remember my first year that I lived here, I had housemates who would... in fact, I did this once, took this great picture with the mountain in the background, and then when you get it developed, there's no mountain there. It's just like sky. So it's kind of mysterious.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Monday. There were diplomatic moves to end the crisis in the Middle East, but street fighting between Israelis and Palestinians continued, and an Israeli deadline for restoring order came and went. And in Yugoslavia, loyalists to former President Milosevic began resigning from the Serbian government, the country's main power center. Before we go, a program note: A two-part "Frontline" documentary, "Drug Wars," begins tonight at 9:00 P.M. on most PBS stations. The collaboration with national public radio tells the history of America's 30-year war on drugs. Please check your TV listings to confirm the time in your area. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you, and good night.