The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour this Monday, Charlayne Hunter-Gault takes two analysts through the Clinton-Yeltsin meeting at Hyde Park, Elizabeth Farnsworth interviews the president of China, our historian-writer trio, Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Haynes Johnson, along with Roger Wilkins and Irving Kristol, explore race relations in America, and Margaret Warner talks to James Wolcott about author Kingsley Amis, who died yesterday. All of it follows our summary of the day's news. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed today to work together to enforce peace in Bosnia. Yeltsin said he would provide Russian troops for the peacekeeping mission after the warring parties agree to a permanent cease-fire. They said other details would be worked out by their respective defense ministers. The announcement came after a one-day summit at Hyde Park, New York. The two Presidents embraced as they met at the Hudson River family home of the late President Franklin Roosevelt. It was chosen as a symbol of U.S. and Soviet cooperation during World War II. They held a joint news conference afterwards.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Our position is that we're going to have an operation that works. We want Russia to be involved in it. We made some progress today consistent with both of our objectives, with neither side giving up the things that were most important to it. The first and most important thing is make peace in Bosnia. That has not been done yet. If that happens--and we hope it will--and we've agreed on that completely, how we will approach it, then we have the responsibility to work together to make the peace work. And we will do that.

PRESIDENT BORIS YELTSIN, Russia: [speaking through interpreter] I want to say first of all that when I came here to the United States for this visit at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, I did not at that time have the degree of optimism with which I now am departing. Our partnership is not calculated for one year or for five years, but for years and years to come, tens of years, for a century. We're friends, and it's only together, together, we're going to be trying to solve not only our joint bilateral issues, but issues affecting the whole world.

MR. LEHRER: Yeltsin then broke up President Clinton by criticizing news media reports predicting the summit would be a failure. Charlayne Hunter-Gault will have more on the story right after this News Summary. British Prime Minister John Major was among those who criticized the United States today for holding back its United Nations dues. He spoke on the second day of the UN's 50- year anniversary celebration. The U.S. owes $1.25 billion, or 40 percent, of the nearly $3 billion members owe the UN. The U.S. has refused to pay its share, claiming the organization needs to economize and cut its bureaucracy. Major said the U.S. failure to pay its UN bill is pushing the world body into bankruptcy.

JOHN MAJOR, Prime Minister, Britain: The UN is in a financial crisis. It is not sustainable for member states to enjoy representation without taxation. Contributions should be paid promptly and in full, and arrears should be cleared. But this must be accompanied by a new focus on efficiency and by modernizing assessment to reflect the changing capacity of members to pay their dues.

MR. LEHRER: Spain's prime minister, Filippi Gonzalez, said countries which fail to pay their UN debt should forfeit their voting rights until they pay up. The Senate Budget Committee approved the Republican budget today. Republicans and Democrats traded barbs on the value of tax cuts for the middle class and on cuts in Medicare. Sen. James Exon of Nebraska said the Republican cuts were too drastic, but the chairman of the committee, Sen. Pete Domenici, said without those cuts the text generation of Americans would suffer.

SEN. JAMES EXON, [D] Nebraska: The Republican budget proposed to balance the budget in a manner and by means that bankrupt the social values and structures of America. My Republican colleagues may be rushing pell mell to get this to the Senate, but haste is one of the many problems with this budget.

SEN. PETE DOMENICI, Chairman, Budget Committee: Now, the time has come to be fair, and fairness demands that we stop giving our people what we can't afford and then seek from them great credibility and great admiration when right around the corner is the demise of our children having any real opportunity to get ahead. That's what this vote is about. I'm proud to be part of it.

MR. LEHRER: The budget is expected to be voted on by the full Senate on Thursday. Pete Wilson endorsed Bob Dole for President today. The California governor said he would also serve as a national co-chairman of Dole's presidential campaign. Wilson ended his own campaign for the Republican nomination last month. The murder rate in America is declining. A report from the National Center for Health Statistics today said the homicide rate fell 8.2 percent from 1993 to '94. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to Clinton and Yeltsin at Hyde Park, the president of China, a look back at race relations in America, and an appreciation of Kingsley Amis, the man who wrote Lucky Jim. FOCUS - SUMMIT

MR. LEHRER: The one-day Clinton-Yeltsin summit is first tonight. At a news conference this afternoon, the two Presidents said they had agreed on Russian participation in a Bosnia peacekeeping force, but they provided no details. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has some reaction. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Our reaction comes from the two Russia experts, Michael McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford University--he's just returned from a year and a half in Russia and joins us from Stanford--and Stephen Sestanovich is vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served on the National Security Council staff during the Reagan administration, and he too has made several trips to Russia in the past year. And starting with you, Steve, this was billed as a fence-mending summit, and as President Yeltsin said, all you experts, the media, everybody was predicting disaster. How does it look to you now? STEPHEN SESTANOVICH, Carnegie Endowment: Well, probably we experts didn't reckon enough on the, the incentive that President Yeltsin had to prevent a break. He obviously had to go back home from the summit showing that he hadn't made any of the excessive concessions that his critics there say Russian foreign policy has been based on, but it obviously doesn't do him any good to have, you know, a personal break, an unpleasant meeting. He's finding a line there. He was emphasizing positive atmospherics, but he also wasn't giving anything away.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So does it look like a successful summit to you?

MR. SESTANOVICH: It looks like a very insubstantial summit. The results are to be worked out by the experts. When you have a meeting where the experts work out the details, you haven't got very much accomplished.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Coming from an expert. All right. Let me just ask you, Professor McFaul, what does it look like to you now? MICHAEL McFAUL, Stanford University: [Stanford] No. I would agree. I would think the summit, itself, didn't accomplish anything substantively. It kept the U.S.-Russian relationship going. It was very important for the two Presidents to keep the atmospherics going positively, but they didn't achieve any results in this.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But the President said that they had reached complete agreement on Bosnia; they were just going to let their respective defense secretaries work out the details. I mean, wouldn't you assume from listening to that that at least maybe some framework was in place?

PROF. McFAUL: Well, from the American point of view, I think they did make progress on that. I would not--I pity Sec. Perry, that has to go into that meeting and work out exactly what that is, because President Yeltsin didn't say that he would back down on having his troops under NATO. That's a very sticky issue. They've got a long ways to go before they resolve that.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But that's the fundamental issue, isn't it, Steve Sestanovich? I mean, yesterday Boris Yeltsin at the UN was adamant that Russian troops would not serve under NATO command. Today they say they worked it out, and that he's going to provide Russian troops, but I also read that there was the possibility that he might be--they might be talking about having civilians work alongside the NATO forces. You think there may be an out there, or- -

MR. SESTANOVICH: They're obviously trying to work out some complicated command arrangements such that it doesn't look as though anybody is in command and certainly not NATO generals telling Russian soldiers where to go. But there are obstacles here. This is an operation that neither military establishment is happy with. Peacekeeping is what each side hates to do. And they are going to try to find--make sure that there is nothing that could go wrong with the kind of jerry-rigged arrangement that is going to be put together. I think they'll have trouble doing this.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Yeah. I mean, these defense secretaries have met before, haven't they, Prof. McFaul? I mean, why would anything change now? They've met several times, in fact.

PROF. McFAUL: They've met several times. They have a much more difficult relationship, quite frankly, than these two Presidents, and I think it'll be more difficult for them to make progress than these two Presidents in this meeting. I think it was unfortunate that we don't have a clear understanding exactly how that's going to work.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But you say both of these--well, you hinted that both of these Presidents needed to have something work here, right?

MR. SESTANOVICH: Well, neither one wants to let it seem as though the relationship has completely collapsed. That sort of cedes too much grounds to their critics as though it would--as though to admit that it was unworkable all along. Their premise is this is a workable relationship. It's a partnership for a thousand years, as President Yeltsin said.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: I think he said a hundred.

MR. SESTANOVICH: A hundred, the friendliest meeting ever. But those, those atmospherics don't provide much payoff in the way of substance.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, there were a lot of atmospherics. I mean, one is struck by the fact that yesterday Yeltsin at the UN was complaining that the West was responsible for the corruption in Russia, and he was saying that the U.S. was secretly trying to thwart Russia's arms sales, referring to the sales to Iran, nuclear weapon sales that we've--the U.S. has been opposed to. But today he was extremely expansive. I mean, how do you account for this extreme expansiveness not only in terms of the position but just in terms of the mood?

MR. SESTANOVICH: A good lunch is what you're suggesting.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: I'm not suggesting. I'm asking you.

MR. SESTANOVICH: The issues where he stated a tough position at the UN yesterday are the--remain the positions of Russian diplomacy today and also they remain the positions of President Yeltsin's reelection campaign. He's got to try to reconcile his record, which has been one of seeking strong cooperation with the West, with a mood in Russia which is more suspicious of the West. He's trying to do that without going, you know, in one direction or the other.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So are you saying that this was calculated, sort of bad Yeltsin, good Yeltsin kind of a pre-arranged strategy on his--pre-determined strategy on this part, to play it like that?

MR. SESTANOVICH: I think it's characteristic of Russian policy right now and has been for some time. It was true of President Yeltsin's last visit to the states, that there were a lot of negatives and a lot of positives. They're trying to keep that uneasy balance going.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: How do you see this dramatic change from yesterday, Mr. McFaul?

PROF. McFAUL: Well, I think the atmospherics were too positive. I think what you're hinting at is the incredible performance by President Yeltsin today at the press conference. I don't think this serves him well. The man is obviously ill, or sick in one way or the other, and the fact that this has happened, I think,proves that Mr. Yeltsin--we thought after the heart attack that he was going to be okay and everything's better now. This looks like a Yeltsin who is still ill, has some problems. And the real issue in U.S.-Russian relations is not these little issues we're talking about now. It's the future of the presidency in Russia.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Is there going to be a backlash for him? I mean, did he walk the fine line that he needed to walk, because there was also talk about--before this--that he wasn't even going to shake hands with President Clinton? And there he had him doubled over in paroxysms of laughter and so on, and they were just calling one another Bill and Boris.

MR. SESTANOVICH: Mike McFaul's right, that this is a risky, risky atmosphere for Yeltsin in this sense, that the dynamics, the underlying structural dynamics of Russian-American relations aren't good, and they are particularly bad because of one issue that we haven't mentioned right now, and that is the continuing movement toward expansion of NATO on which there is complete unanimity in Russia, that it's a bad idea, and they can't have anything to do with it, and they can't support it in any compromised form. That means--

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: To include countries that used to be in Eastern Europe.

MR. SESTANOVICH: In Eastern Europe, that's right.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Or used to be in the Russian orbit.

MR. SESTANOVICH: Yeltsin takes a chance in looking too buddy- buddy with the American President. But as long as he retains a tough position on specific issues, it's probably a chance that won't prove too dangerous for him.

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

PROF. McFAUL: No. I think it's going to play very poorly in Russia. I think that buddy-buddy, slap-happing atmosphere with the U.S. President is not what Yeltsin needs going into the electoral cycle. I think people--Russians will look at that and say, is this the President we want leading our country, and I don't think he gave a good performance in terms of his electoral chances come next year.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What about the other issues that Mr. Sestanovich just alluded to? I mean, as far as the press conference was concerned, we didn't hear anything about the expansion of NATO, we didn't hear anything about Russia wanting to maintain more troops than the U.S. is prepared to have it maintain along its borders. We didn't hear anything about the Iran arms sales, all those sticky things that have been leading people like you to say that we were entering a new period of Cold War, you know, dialogue, at least, with, with Russia. What do you make of that, the fact that none of those things came up?

PROF. McFAUL: Well, it's difficult to talk about all those issues in a three-hour meeting, and I think the fact that the meeting itself was just three hours tends to--in my mind, that the Americans didn't want to talk about all those things and then the fact that these weren't issues that we didn't have an announcement about different positions on NATO could be a success in terms of the American position. We don't want to talk about these things now. We certainly don't want to talk about them before the presidential elections in Russia, and the fact that this is a non- event as a summit may, in fact, be a good thing.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Briefly, how's this going to play for Clinton here in his domestic politics?

MR. SESTANOVICH: Well, it's another meeting. He doesn't have the same kind of pressure that Yeltsin is under at home. He can't gain anything very much from this, but he has certainly managed to get through it without emphasizing all of the many negatives on substantive issues that now are, you know, threatening Russian- American relations.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Well, clearly, we'll be coming back to this, Stephen Sestanovich and Mr. McFaul, Mike McFaul. Thank you for joining us.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the President of China, race relations in America, and remembering Kingsley Amis. NEWSMAKER

MR. LEHRER: Now, an interview with the President of China, Jiang Zemin. There has been rough going late between China and the United States. The status of Taiwan is the source of much of it. Last summer, the United States allowed Taiwan's President to come here for a college reunion. China responded with tough words and missile tests around Taiwan. President Jiang is in New York for the United Nations meeting and will meet with President Clinton tomorrow. He talked with Elizabeth Farnsworth yesterday.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Mr. President, in recent months, relations between China and the United States have been difficulty, rocky. There have been differences over human rights, over Taiwan, over trade. Do you think the United States has hostile intentions towards China?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN, People's Republic of China: [speaking through interpreter] The question of Taiwan has always been important and a sensitive question of principle in Sino-U.S. relations. In the three Sino-U.S. joint communiques, the United States has made explicit commitment on this question. It is known to all that recently the Sino-U.S. relationship has experienced some trouble. We're pleased to note that the United States has recently made a further commitment on its pursuit of a one china policy and also on opposing the independence of Taiwan and also opposing Taiwan's entry into the United Nations.

MS. FARNSWORTH: So, briefly, you were reassured by the statements from the administration on that?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] As I said, we are pleased to note that the United States has made such further commitment, but as a Chinese proverb says, we hope the United States will honor its commitment, and when it has taken some actions, it must produce some result.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Will you seek a pledge from President Clinton when you meet with him that, that Taiwan's leader not be allowed to come again?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] Indeed. President Clinton and I will hold a meeting in New York. On this question of the visit by the leaders of Taiwan to the United States, we hope in the future there will be no reoccurrence of such an incident.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Just last Thursday, a foreign ministry spokesman in China said that while China advocated peaceful reunification, "We also reserve the right to use force when necessary," talking about Taiwan. If Taiwan sought independence--and I suppose it could--would war be inevitable?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] I believe the answer to your question is affirmative. Our principle of unification with Taiwan is peaceful reunification on the basis of one country, two systems; however, if there is interference from certain international force, or if the decision is to force on the island of Taiwan going for independence, I believe then one cannot rule out the military option.

MS. FARNSWORTH: In a recent interview with the American magazine "U.S. News & World Report," you proposed a meeting with the leader of Taiwan. Do you think that might happen?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speakingthrough interpreter] This year in the traditional Chinese festival, the Chinese Spring Festival, I put forward an eight-point proposal on the question of Taiwan. In the last point of the eight-point proposal, I expressed the hope that the leaders of the Mainland and Taiwan can exchange visits. However, such visits should take place under the principle of one China, and also opposition to the independence of Taiwan, to one China/one Taiwan, and to two Chinas.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Mr. President, do you fear that the Clinton administration has drifted into a containment policy against China, that because China's growing stronger, that Washington feels it has to be contained in the same way as the USSR was once contained?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] Indeed. In recent years, thanks to our efforts of pursuing the policy initiated by Mr. Deng Xiaoping of reform and opening up, China has achieved considerable progress in its economic development; however, I do not believe that when China has achieved economic growth and has become stronger, China will necessarily pose a threat to the world. On the contrary, China will make for stability in the world. If the United States feel that somehow China has become stronger, then it should contain China, then I believe such approach would be a folly.

MS. FARNSWORTH: But do you fear that that is the approach the Clinton administration is taking?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] It is not a matter of, of whether or not I'm fearing it. There is such public opinion in the media; however, if the United States administration and government really pursue this as a government policy, then I would believe it would be a folly.

MS. FARNSWORTH: The Clinton administration has also objected to the sales by your government of missile parts to Pakistan. China promised, as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, to stop sending missile components to Pakistan. Has China stopped sending missile components?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] On this question, last year, Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Chen Sen and Secretary of State, Mr. Christopher, discussed this issue, and they issued a joint communique on this matter.

MS. FARNSWORTH: As I understood it, there were to be no more missile components sent to Pakistan, and is that stopped?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] China's sale of arms is governed by its policy. Naturally, this policy is consistent with the commitment China has made in the joint statement issued by Chinese Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Chen and U.S. Sec. of State Christopher.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Another difference that seems to come up often between China and the United States involves human rights. I want to talk about human rights a little bit. Dissidents are, at least according to human rights groups in the United States, dissidents in China continue to be imprisoned for signing petitions seeking greater political openness. The issue of human rights will, undoubtedly, come up with President Clinton. What will be your response, if he raises this issue?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] China as a fundamental of the United Nations has fully preserved the principle of the universality of human rights as contained in the United Nations Charter. I also believe that the principle of human rights universality must be integrated with the specific national conditions of a country, as we very often say, that blame not the critic and hate what he says, so in China, I believe we have complete freedom of speech. However, when a person has violated a law, that person will be sanctioned by the law, by the judiciary. And in this, either the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party may not intervene.

MS. FARNSWORTH: There has been a request over the years for China to let the International Red Cross visit its prisons. Is that something you'd be willing to do?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] There were such visits made. I do not know whether you refer to some other new visits.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Another issue that keeps coming up has to do with the South China Sea, the Spratly Islands, which China, as I understand it, has claimed, some of the islands in the South China Sea which are also claimed by the Philippines. Recently, the administration said that the U.S. was committed to open sea lanes in the South China Sea, and if there were any problem, it was implied that the U.S. would open those sea lanes by force. Do you have any comment on this?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] On the question of the Lance Islands, what you call the Spratly Islands, China's position is as follows: We believe that China has indisputable sovereignty over Lance Islands. At the same time, China is ready to put aside the dispute and to carry out common development of this area. As for the sea lanes through this area, there has never been any obstruction of the sea lanes, so any worry about the openness of the sea lane is unwarranted, I believe. And also, it is also my belief that the conflicting claims over the Lance Islands can be resolved through bilateral consultations between countries involved.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Let's move on to the economy. Commerce Sec. Ron Brown signed deals last year worth around $6 billion, deals that would involve American companies coming into China to build things like dams. And I believe not much of that is actually occurring right now. Some money has gone in, but nowhere near that amount. Why is it slow getting off the ground?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] Although I'm not in charge of the specific management of foreign trade, I can say that the deals concluded during Sec. Brown's visit to China last year can be divided into two categories. The first category is contracts which have been signed between our two sides. The second category is letters of intent, concluded within our two sides. As for this first group, contracts, they may be implemented by our two sides. As for the second category, letters of intent, there might be two outcomes to such letters of intent. If after feasibility study it is okay to proceed, and then it will be implemented, however, after feasibility study if some were found not feasible, then perhaps new further action will be taken, so I believe one should distinguish between the two categories.

MS. FARNSWORTH: So there has not been a slowing down of, of--or a lessening of interest in foreign capital. As you may know, there have been some reports in the press here recently that because of the dangers or the worries about instability in China, that there's been a general slowing down of accepting foreign capital and a slowing down of sort of economic reform. Is there any truth to that?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] I think there is a misunderstanding here. Not long ago, our Communist Party concluded the fifth preliminary session of the 14th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, at which conference I elaborated on 12 pairs of relationships. Here Iwould like to discuss with you three pairs of such relationship. First, I have asked--we in China correctly handle the relationship between reform, development, and stability. Second, we must handle properly the relationship between the construction of socialist market economy and also the use of macroeconomic management. Thirdly, we must pay attention to both the rate of economic growth and to the efficiency of the economy. So from these faces, you can see that there is no instability whatsoever in China. On the contrary, at present, China enjoys political and social stability. Very soon, we will be formulating the 15-year plan for national economic development by looking into the first decade of the next century.

MS. FARNSWORTH: I didn't mean to say that there was instability in China. I was trying to get at the difficulty that you must be facing in balancing the need for stability with the tremendous economic change that's going on, and is that influencing how much foreign capital will come in?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] I feel that foreign investors in China have a very broad prospect, and they have still a long way to go before reaching the point of saturation.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Back to the security questions for the end of this interview. On the military issue, while other countries are scaling back their military, China seems to be spending more money on weapons, and especially weapons that could project Chinese power like a Rapid Reaction Force, intercontinental ballistic missile. Why is China doing this?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] I believe in the capital terms, China's defense expenditure is the lowest, at least among the lowest, in the world. As the chairman of China's central military commission, I do not know that China has purchased foreign intercontinental ballistic missile. As for the development of Rapid Reaction Force, I believe this is necessary. China has a very long boundary. We cannot possibly deploy troops along all the boundary. We have to have Rapid Reaction Forces to defend our boundary. What is more, by building Rapid Reaction Force, we can save, economize on our national defense expenditure, because we don't have to build a large standing army.

MS. FARNSWORTH: There is a lot of press here, and articles about the Chinese military hinting that it is moving to a more offensive rather than defensive force. How do you explain that?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] I can tell you with absolute certainty the strategy of a national defense is to defend the Chinese territory. We have no intention whatsoever of battling with other countries.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Okay, finally, you're meeting with President Clinton this week. What do you most want to get clear with President Clinton? What do you hope will come out of the meeting?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] I will raise the question of Taiwan.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Taiwan remains the primary issue.

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: For me.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And what does he have to say to please you, to make you feel that the meeting has been good?

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] At present, I cannot predict what he is about to say. As I said, we're very pleased to note the recent commitments the United States has made.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Mr. President, thank you very much for being with us.

PRESIDENT JIANG ZEMIN: [speaking through interpreter] Thank you.

MR. LEHRER: A note on the President's comments about the Red Cross having already visited China's prisons. It has been allowed to visit Vietnamese prisoners of war in China but has not yet been granted permission to visit Chinese political detainees or places of political detention. FOCUS - RACE MATTERS

MR. LEHRER: Now, we launch a major NewsHour look at race relations in America. There will be reports, individual conversations, and various kinds of discussions about it over the next several weeks. The launch tonight is with some history. It comes from our regular trio of historians and writers, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and Haynes Johnson, joined tonight by Roger Wilkins, professor of history at George Mason University, and Irving Kristol, author and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Haynes, it's been said since the Simpson verdict that race relations in this country have never been worse. As a fact of modern history, is that true?

HAYNES JOHNSON, Journalist: Jim, I can only speak for myself. I saw Roger Wilkins here. We met on the march to Selma, Alabama, and when I was a young reporter and Doris was working for Lyndon Johnson in the White House, we met. If you go back to that period, things I watched in my own lifetime, where you couldn't march from here to that wall without being clubbed to death to register to vote, not to bomb the city, or to get on a bus, or to drink water, when whites and blacks--I mean, that is so unbelievable to me. That's twenty, thirty years ago, and so if you talk about what was good or bad, I certainly think the rawness has been- -is on us again, because of what we're seeing now, partly because we can't escape the television and all that. But in terms of reality, no, worst times, not at all. I think, if anything, we've made the most stunning progress in a legal way in the last 30 years in our entire history.

MR. LEHRER: How do you read it, Roger?

ROGER WILKINS, Historian: Oh, I agree with Haynes. I think that the fact that it's on the table now makes it a lot better than it was even three years ago when whereas much of our domestic politics was being driven by race, nobody was talking about it. But if you look at those men who were on the Mall, most of them--

MR. LEHRER: You're talking about the Million Man March?

MR. WILKINS: Yes. Most of them were employed. Some of them were fairly well educated. This was a huge group of black men who were assembled, that if you thought about 1958, you'd have a hard time putting that number of black men with that kind of accomplishment together on the Mall, so there's been terrific progress. We've still got a long way to go, and the fact that we've got a long way to go means there's friction.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Doris.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: On the other hand, if you define race relations as the relationship between the majority whites and the blacks, I think it is pretty bad today, and much worse than it was in these times that we were talking about. And I just keep remembering the mood of what it was like in the 1963 "I Have a Dream March" that Martin Luther King led to Washington. I was there, carrying a placard: "Protestants, Catholics, Jews Unite for Civil Rights." And I think--

MR. LEHRER: That's what the placard--

MS. GOODWIN: That was my placard.

MR. LEHRER: Your placard.

MS. GOODWIN: Yes. And you think of the contrast of that placard with the kind of anti-semitic language that has come out of Farrakhan with this recent march, where Jews are being baited and talking about Hitler being a great man, that kind of blending between Jews and Civil Rights which was so essential in the 1960s is completely divided today.

MR. LEHRER: So you would use the word "raw" too, right?

MS. GOODWIN: I would use the word. And I would even look at the Selma march that Haynes spoke about and think of that moment when Lyndon Johnson gave a speech where he took the anthem of the Civil Rights march as "We Shall Overcome" and thereby linked the Presidency and the Congress to in a joint session of Congress to the Civil Rights Movement's need for a voting rights bill. Four months after that speech, a voting rights bill got passed. So there was then a white-black unity operating for progress, the progress that has produced the reality that's better today. I don't see that out there today, that spirit, that mood, that unity.

MR. LEHRER: Irving Kristol, how do you see it?

IRVING KRISTOL, Author: If you go back far enough, obviously the situation in race relations is much improved. I was raised in a segregated society, and clearly, the end of segregation represents progress. I think, however, that since the late 60's, early 70's, things have started to go sour. It's odd. I think most things began to go sour mainly within the black community. White attitudes toward blacks seem to be progressively more tolerant and more liberal, despite everything up until today, if the public opinion polls ought to be believed. On the other hand, black disillusionment, in my view, with all of the programs that emerge from the great society and all of the promises that emerge from the great society which were not fulfilled, I think that kind of black disillusionment has led to a certain souring of black attitudes toward, toward the whites in general, toward the majority in general, and Washington, in particular, I think the Million Man March was a really important event, but it depends on how you interpret it. In my way of looking at it, what it was, was the black middle class and the black working class saying, we don't want to be wards of the state anymore, we don't want Washington to control our destinies, we want to control our destinies, ourselves, we want the black community to deal with its own problems; give us a chance. We may need help, that help probably would be forthcoming, but we want to do it ourselves, and I think that's very heartening.

MR. LEHRER: Michael, what do you think that the promises of the success that everybody has talked about have not been fulfilled in the minds of a lot of folks, and that's what's caused this rawness today?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: I think that's right, and I think that we all have to go back to how far we really have come. You know, we were talking about personal experiences. In 1963, the year of the march on Washington, I was seven years old in Northern Illinois.

MR. LEHRER: Don't tell us--

MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, old enough to have a memory. The town next to us, Northern Illinois, this is not Alabama, and the first black family moved in. Someone burned the house down. This was only 32 years ago. That was the same--

MR. LEHRER: Northern Illinois.

MR. BESCHLOSS: Northern Illinois. Very different from what one would expect, looking back on things. But at the same time, that glorious moment of the march on Washington in 1963, in a way, those leaders and that group had it easy, because they were looking for tangible things: Basic civil rights, fair housing, voting rights, and the like. The people who were on the Mall that August were very much united in their purposes and behind basically the same set of leaders. Once those things began to be achieved, then black Americans and also white Americans moved on to the next level, which is much more difficult than that was, looking for aims that in some cases were contradictory and a lot more inchoate.

MR. LEHRER: Like what? Like what?

MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, for example, how you help the poor and people who have suffered in this case from brutality in the society for 350 years, including their ancestors, how you bring them into the society in the same way that other ethnic groups have done. Do you do it through free enterprise? Do you do it by aggressive government action? We really haven't had a serious national debate and certainly not on the presidential level on that since the mid 1960's.

MR. JOHNSON: You know, listening, Irving was right about the middle class was on the Mall a week ago. That's certainly true, but that middle class in the black community has expanded exponentially in the last generation. That's No. 1. But then you have over here what you're saying, this pocket of absolutely desperately, apart from society in the inner city. And it's not just black, by the way. We're talking about race relations as only black here. It's also Hispanic; it's also Asian; it's gangs. You go down to Oakland, California, tonight, or San Diego, or Los Angeles, you'll find the same pathology. It's economic; it's class. So while the pie has expanded, not shrunk in this case, we also have more differences in how we think about each other. But I think that happened in the whole country too.

MR. LEHRER: Roger.

MR. WILKINS: I agree with everything that Doris said about the march on Washington in '63, except I would add to things. First of all, everybody says it was Martin King's march; it wasn't. The person who organized that march, whose idea it was, was A. Philip Randolph, who was a labor leader.

MR. LEHRER: Remind us who A. Philip Randolph was, a man that most people--

MR. WILKINS: A. Philip Randolph--founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an enormously able and honorable old gentleman who threatened President Roosevelt in 1941, with a march on Washington, if he didn't do fair employment in the war factories. Well, Roosevelt signed the order but Randolph kept the idea in his head until '63. So he sold it to the Civil Rights leaders. He then had a fellow named Buyers Ruston, who was an assistant, who really organized the march, and most the signs said, "For Jobs and Freedom." And that's really important, because we look at that march through kind of--we gauze it up with this business about Martin's dream. It was a march for concrete stuff: Jobs and freedom. And the idea was you can't be free without a job.

MR. LEHRER: And that--isn't that what the problem is, that freedom was there, but then, the people said, hey, wait a minute, where are the jobs?

MS. GOODWIN: In fact, when you look back, there's a certain moment, I think, when it all began to go downhill, when you look at Johnson gave a speech at Howard University in 1965, well, he recognized that we no longer could just talk about voting rights, no longer could we just talk about desegregating the South, we had to get economic justice for the blacks in the ghettos around the country. And he said, you can't bring people to the starting line and just say you're free, and then let them go through the gate. They won't run the race, because they've been united by poverty, by family breakdown, by racism, by all of the discrimination that they face. It was almost like the beginning of affirmative action in that speech. But what followed that? Vietnam; black protest; whitebacklash; black power; and then Republican ascendancy, and a whole series of things that have meant we haven't looked at this issue again. It's back on our table now, and that's the good thing that we're facing now. But I don't know that we've come any further with that tangle of problems than we were in 1965.

MR. KRISTOL: Can I--

MR. LEHRER: Yes.

MR. KRISTOL: I think you're doing an injustice to the poorest people in the ghetto. I think they could have made it. I think there were jobs, not very good jobs. There are jobs even today available, not very good jobs. But once--once you instituted the kind of welfare system that we then did, you created a system which competed with jobs and which unmanned a lot of the poor men, who saw why should they go to work when their whole family, in fact, will be better off on welfare, and I think that was what happened. It wasn't that these people didn't have a chance. I think they had a chance, but our public policies corrupted their possibilities and prevented them from moving on, as they ought to have done. I have no doubt of that, that they, on their own--

MR. LEHRER: Would have done it?

MR. KRISTOL: They would have done it.

MR. LEHRER: Do you agree, Roger?

MR. WILKINS: Irving, you can imagine I don't agree with that.

MR. KRISTOL: I thought you would. [laughter in room]

MR. WILKINS: The--what everybody leaves out when they make that argument is the fact that the economy stagnated about 1973, and unskilled workers of all colors started falling out of the economy. The middle class has been losing income shares, but the lowest skilled people in America have really gone down. And a lot of them have become economically redundant. There just aren't jobs enough for everybody who wants to work and needs to work. I don't say that welfare hasn't hurt some people. But the fact is the economy has not been robust enough to sop up all these people who need work, and that hasn't been on the political agenda of anybody of any party, and that's really been the huge failure.

MR. LEHRER: I've got a hunch we're not going to resolve that one here, but let me--let me--beginning with you, Michael, everybody agrees now that race is again on the table. Is it on the table in a healthy way, and, if so, what needs to be said that isn't being said, or how do you feel about the dialogue up till now?

MR. BESCHLOSS: Well, I haven't felt very good about the dialogue between the late 60's and about the current time. There's been all too often a tendency to break--bring race, for instance, into campaigns and presidential election campaigns in a negative way; Richard Nixon in 1968, law and order, '72 bussing, later on talk about welfare queens. There's been this very demagogic effort to deal with very serious, complex issues in ways that create a lot more heat than light. I think one result of what has happened over the last couple of months particularly, and I think this is a silver lining we might be able to yank out of this cloud, is that for the first time in a long time there is a possibility of a genuinely positive dialogue where people talk about these things in their own terms, and it's all on the table. It depends, I think, ultimately on what kind of leaders really are at the forefront of this debate.

MR. LEHRER: Can people be lead to go beyond a racial problem?

MS. GOODWIN: Certainly, they've been led in the past. I mean, you look at certain moments, but what it takes is a presidency, a national government, and a Congress linking up with some of this movement coming from below. Like in 1941, as was said when Roosevelt signed that executive order, blacks got--2 million blacks got jobs they wouldn't have had before. That was a linking of A. Philip Randolph's pressure and Roosevelt. In '63, '64, and '65, you had that march on Washington. Then you had Kennedy's death and you had sympathy for him, and then you had Lyndon Johnson in the Congress who got those bills through, but now we have President Clinton speaking parallel to the march on Washington, and you don't have a Congress that can lead with him. So I don't see that linkage which is going to produce real change.

MR. LEHRER: Can you have an honest dialogue about race right now?

MR. JOHNSON: Everybody in the country knows the problem. They know how they feel. They know what their emotions are. They know how their raw emotions, their fears, and all the rest, it's there. But I think if we're talking about it beginning honestly, not just as wonderful, it's going to be happy, we're going to march together with our signs and slogans. That's not what it's all about. It's about saying that this is what the country is. We've got to learn to live together, and then be honest about it and say, we all have pain, we all have anguish.

MR. LEHRER: How do you have an honest dialogue about it? Is everybody--do you think blacks are ready to talk about this in a very straight, honest way?

MR. WILKINS: Some are; some aren't. But I think that one of the problems is ignorance. The "Washington Post" had a poll the other day that indicated that almost 60 percent of whites in the country think that blacks have the same income as whites, that blacks have a chance to get jobs, as good housing. When I see my students, I know when they come into some of the classes I teach, they--some of them think that slavery was a happy time. If we don't know today's facts and if we don't know our history, it's very, very hard to have a real conversation.

MR. LEHRER: Irving Kristol.

MR. KRISTOL: When I hear the word "dialogue," I tend to turn off my hearing aid. It usually means you're not going to get anything done. I think it will be a mistake to look to Congress or to the White House for any kind of leadership on the issue of race relations in the United States today. They have nothing to say. All of the programs that they--that are now in place--are not well regarded either by the white community, especially, or by many people in the black community. What is needed is black leadership to emerge from within the black community. The traditional black organizations, the Urban League, NAACP--NAACP--really decrepid, and I think they're out of the action. Unfortunately, Mr. Farrakhan has moved in. I'm hoping he's just a temporary leader for this very good impetus for the black community to figure out what it wants done and how it wants it done and stop relying on the White House, stop relying on the Congress, stop listening to the media. It's up to the black community, itself, now to provide its own leadership that will look into the problems of the black community and figure out what should be done about it.

MR. WILKINS: You may have leadership problems with the black community, Irving, but I'd say there are plenty of difficult white leadership problems as well.

MS. GOODWIN: And I think personal regeneration can only go so far without some real help in terms of jobs, housing, segregation, and education. And those things have to be dealt with somehow.

MR. KRISTOL: I think segregation is of no importance. There's no reason why blacks can't live comfortably in houses that--with other blacks.

MR. JOHNSON: You cannot expect 12 percent of the population to solve a problem that's 300 years old alone. We're all in it together. It's all our problem.

MR. LEHRER: Call it a dialogue, or call it a discussion, call it whatever--we started it tonight, and we're going to go on and on and on with it in many ways on this program over the next several weeks. Doris, gentlemen, thank you all very much. FINALLY - KINGSLEY AMIS - 1922-1995

MR. LEHRER: And finally tonight, to Margaret Warner for some thoughts about British writer Kingsley Amis.

MS. WARNER: Kingsley Amis, who died in London yesterday at the age of 73, was a novelist, poet, critic, and all-around man of letters for more than 40 years. A "New York Times" obituary called him something of an institution in Britain, but he's been known in the United States too ever since his first novel, Lucky Jim, was published in 1954. To tell us more about the man and his work, we're joined by James Wolcott, a staff writer at the "New Yorker," who wrote a piece on Amis in this week's magazine. Mr. Wolcott, welcome.

JAMES WOLCOTT, The New Yorker: Thank you.

MS. WARNER: In your piece this week, you said you've read virtually everything Kingsley Amis ever wrote. Why? What most distinguished him as a writer?

MR. WOLCOTT: Well, part of it is that often you read writers, and their books are something separate. Their books are very crafted. They're sort of a production. Kingsley Amis sort of suffused his work. I mean, when you read his books, you also--you enjoyed him, you enjoyed the mind that was at work, and you wanted to see that mind in different situations. You didn't feel as if somehow he was holding himself aloft from the reader.

MS. WARNER: What did he write about in terms of his content? What were his books about?

MR. WOLCOTT: Well, he wrote many different genres. He wrote science fiction books. He wrote spy books. Most of his books are what would be called social comedies. They have small casts of people, and they're basically about the ways that different people get on each other's nerves, the ways that people thwart each other, the way that you want a little thing in life, and these other people are blocking it, and how you either get around them or manipulate them.

MS. WARNER: Would you say--some people have said he wrote satire- -was it satire?

MR. WOLCOTT: I don't really think it's satire in the sense of Jonathan Swift or what we think of as satire. It's more of a--it's almost like theatrical comedy that was done on the page. I mean, his characters are very much aware of their sense of the way they play roles. And one of the things that he was brilliant about was he would talk about how people drew faces from what they saw in movies, or what they saw in theater. So, for example, that a person--a person who was striking a pensive pose was striking an almost with quotation marks around it. They would stand a certain way and hold the missiles a certain way.

MS. WARNER: Now, was there anything about his writing, or what is it about his writing, if he is influential, that has influenced other writers, either British or American?

MR. WOLCOTT: Well, I think it's his very commonsensical approach. He didn't--he didn't have a mandarin style. He didn't act as if he wrote in a silk robe and was sort of--that literature was something that was a connoisseur's delight. He wrote as if he were sitting in a corner table and just chatting about books and chatting about writers.

MS. WARNER: And do you think that he helped bring--I mean, we certainly have a lot of informal and direct writing today--was he part of what brought that on?

MR. WOLCOTT: Well, he was part of a generation. The other person who was probably the most famous of that generation, was Philip Larkin, who was his friend, the poet Philip Larkin. Larkin was the one who encouraged Kingsley Amis to put more comedy into Lucky Jim, more faces as he called it. Larkin was--did in poetry what Amos did in fiction, although I would add that Amos was also a very good and underrated poet.

MS. WARNER: Before we go--and I'm afraid we have so little time- -you met him once. What was he like as a man, as a person?

MR. WOLCOTT: Well, I met him shortly before his memoirs were going to come out, and so he was--he was very much--I described him--this is a very odd way to describe him, but I saw him walking ahead of me, and he reminded me of Fred Mertz of "I Love Lucy." There was a kind of portly roll to his walk, and I remember this sort of mild horrified look he had when he saw that I wasn't drinking liquor. I was drinking a Coca-Cola. But then he saw that I was drinking it out of a bottle, and that was better. But he was very much an institution at that point.

MS. WARNER: I'm sorry. I'm afraid this institution has to close up shop tonight. Thanks so much.MNEIL

MR. WOLCOTT: Thank you. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Monday, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin held a summit meeting today in Hyde Park, New York. They agreed Russian troops would go to Bosnia to help enforce a peace. On the NewsHour tonight, China's President Jiang said war with Taiwan is inevitable if it seeks independence from the Mainland, and the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee sent their massive budget-cutting bill to the Senate floor on the straight party line vote. We'll see you tomorrow night with an interview with PLO Chief Yasser Arafat, among other things. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.