The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

RAY SUAREZ: Good evening. I'm Ray Suarez. Jim Lehrer is off today. On the NewsHour tonight, a Jim Lehrer interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell; more information on the American missionaries shot down in Peru; Tom Bearden reports on the rising Mississippi River flooding one Iowa town; Gwen Ifill talks to Pulitzer Prize winner David Levering Lewis; and another in our series of favorite poems comes from High Falls, New York. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday.

NEWS SUMMARY

RAY SUAREZ: Peru and the United States offered differing views today on the downing of a missionary plane. A Peruvian fighter jet shot down the plane Friday near the jungle city of Iquitos, killing an American woman and her infant daughter. A U.S. anti-drug surveillance plane tracked the smaller aircraft for the Peruvians. But there were reports the surveillance crew objected to the attack. Secretary of State Powell addressed that issue today in an interview with the NewsHour.

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Our people performed the role they normally do of identifying and tracking such aircraft and turning them over to the Peruvian air force, which makes the final identification and judgment as to whether or not action should be taken -- some indication that our folks were trying to hold the Peruvians back from action. But we'll have to look into all these issues. But it is a tragedy, and should not have happened. It did. And we have to look at it. So we have stopped the program until we can complete our review and the Peruvians have done likewise.

RAY SUAREZ: Peru's air force denied today it had failed to follow the rules of engagement before firing. We'll have more on this story later in the program tonight. Also in his interview today, secretary Powell also said implementing a free trade zone for the entire western hemisphere by 2005 is a realistic goal. The U.S. and 33 other nations backed the idea at the weekend summit of the Americas in Quebec, Canada. We'll have the Powell interview in its entirety right after the News Summary. The navy held a disciplinary hearing today for the commander of a U.S. submarine that sank a Japanese fishing vessel. It did so at a hearing in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Commander Scott Waddle's lawyer said he would not be court-martialed but would receive a letter of reprimand. In a written statement Waddle said he would retire by October 1st; he was captain of the U.S.S. Greenville February 9 when it struck the Ehime Maru and nine Japanese were killed. In Davenport, Iowa, today, national guardsmen and city residents kept up their struggle against the rising Mississippi River. It's expected to crest there tomorrow at more than seven feet above flood stage. On Sunday, the water swamped a riverfront baseball stadium. Davenport is the only major city on the upper Mississippi without permanent flood control. We'll have more on this story later in the program tonight. Threats of a pilots' strike against Delta Airlines vanished today. The two sides agreed Sunday on a tentative four-year contract. The Airline Pilots' Association said it included pay raises ranging from 24% to 63%. That would make Delta's pilots the highest paid in the business. Union members still have to ratify the deal. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to Secretary of State Powell; Americans shot down in Peru; rising floodwaters in Iowa; Pulitzer Prize winner David Levering Lewis; and a favorite poem.

NEWSMAKER

RAY SUAREZ: Now to our Newsmaker interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Jim Lehrer talked to him this morning at the State Department.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Secretary, welcome.

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Thank you, Jim. Good to be with you again.

JIM LEHRER: What is the latest on why that American missionary plane was shot down over Peru?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Well, first let me express my condolences, as well as those of the United States Government, for the loss of those two people, the mother and the infant. It's a great tragedy, and that's what it was: a tragedy.

It happened as a result of a program that we have participated in with the Government of Peru for some time, a very successful program in interdicting drug aircraft. And in this case, something went wrong. Our people performed the role they normally do of identifying and tracking such aircraft and turning them over to the Peruvian air force, which makes the final identification and judgment as to whether or not action should be taken.

There is some indication that our folks were trying to hold the Peruvians back from action, but we'll have to look into all of these issues. But it is a tragedy and it should not have happened. It did, and we have to look at it. So we've stopped the program until we can complete our review, and the Peruvians have done likewise.

JIM LEHRER: Is it a CIA operation?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: A number of government agencies are involved in it. The CIA has the lead on it, and they will be taking all the specific questions on it. But don't read anything nefarious into the words "CIA." It was a good, solid program that has been well known. People have known about it. It is not something that is dark and secret. In fact, we have credited this program with helping to reduce drug trafficking coming out of Peru, so it's a successful program that has had this tragedy now associated with it, and we've got to review the entire program.

JIM LEHRER: A tragedy there. In the last few months, there was the tragedy, the submarine tragedy in the waters off Hawaii; there was the collision between our surveillance plane and the Chinese fighter; and now this ....is there a trend here to be concerned about, or is this just normal life in a dangerous world?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: It's normal life in a dangerous world. I have been around this business for many, many years, and I've seen these things happen. And when you're using sophisticated equipment, when you're using airplanes, when you're using weapons, and when you have young people who are doing these things, you try to do everything you can with respect to training, with respect to rehearsals, with respect to making sure you have procedures in place. And most days nothing happens. But every now and again something goes wrong and you have one of these tragedies, and it takes center stage for a while and you have to investigate it, redouble your training, take another look at your procedures, but at the same time continue to exist and work in this troubled world that we live in.

JIM LEHRER: The Summit of the Americas in Quebec -- how much of a distraction were the protestors and the teargas and all of that for you and others trying to do business?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: It was a minor distraction at the beginning when it delayed the start of the summit, but once the authorities in Quebec and the police got on top of it, it wasn't much of a distraction at all. All of the rest of the meetings went off well and produced a very successful summit, in my judgment, a summit where 34 democratic nations came together. Rather remarkable when I go back 12 years to when I was National Security Advisor to look around the room and see nations that are now free and democratically led that, back in those days, were being pulled apart by insurgencies, by generals running countries and by all kinds of totalitarian regimes. And now thirty-four -- all but one nation in our hemisphere -- is democratically led. It doesn't mean they're all out of the woods. It doesn't mean those democracies aren't fragile. But here there were, all together, pledging themselves to want more democracy, that the best solution for the problems of democracy is more democracy, and making a statement that any nation that slides back, that starts to move in the other direction, will be ostracized by the other democratic nations of the region.

And secondly, in the second basket, pledging themselves to free trade, saying that the problems in our region will be helped by free trade, by reducing tariffs, by reducing barriers to trade. There are problems that come along with this, because it requires economies to transform themselves, requires people to learn new skills. Some people may find that the skills they currently have and the sorts of investments they are currently making in their economies have to be shifted. And so these dislocations cause problems, and those problems were candidly discussed. But as President Bush clearly said, free trade is the way to go; the United States is committed to free trade. More importantly, the Summit of the Americas said that all 34 of those nations are committed to free trade.

JIM LEHRER: But the Congress of the United States isn't committed to this as yet, is it?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Well, some are; some aren't. And the President said that he is committed, and he is determined to get trade promotion authority, what used to be called fast track, this year, because we have to make the case to the Congress that at the end of the day, once you get through the dislocations that come along, free trade works. We've seen it with NAFTA. Despite criticisms of NAFTA, when you look at what has happened to trade in the North American part of our hemisphere over the last ten years or so, from the Canadian Free Trade Agreement up to NAFTA, it has been successful.

JIM LEHRER: When you left there yesterday, did you have the feeling that a free trade agreement for the whole hemisphere by the year 2005 is a realistic goal, that it really might happen?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Yes, I think it's a realistic goal, and it's going to take some very tough negotiations to get this in place by January of 2005, and it will be even more difficult, as was noted, to get it all implemented by the end of 2005. But it is realistic. We can do it. And without setting that kind of a goal, that positive optimistic goal, then it may never happen.

Now, along the way there may be other agreements, first a US-Chilean agreement. There are lots of other groupings of nations that want their own separate agreement. What was fascinating about it is everybody is trying to cut a free trade deal with everybody else in one way or another. This is exciting, and it is a recognition on the part of these democratically elected leaders that we now have to have democratic economic systems that believe in free trade and the free flow of ideas and goods and technologies spread across the whole hemisphere.

The third basket I'd like to touch on is human potential; that if we're going to move in this direction with free trade and democracy, it's got to be free trade and democracy that ultimately will touch all the peoples of the region. One of the heads of state made a poignant plea about somebody he called Maria Soledad, who is struggling to put food on the table, struggling to earn a living for her family. Democracy doesn't have meaning for her yet, and democracy will only have meaning for her when she sees her life has been bettered.

And so human potential, the education of the people of the hemisphere, the explosion of the Internet, connectivity, training people in new schools, education, dealing with the indigenous populations of our hemisphere who have not yet been touched by the success that we see here in the northern part of the hemisphere, all of that has to be part of a complete package.

JIM LEHRER: Another part of the world, Mr. Secretary. There is a meeting this week in Nigeria about the AIDS problem in Africa. The Clinton Administration said the problem was so serious-- 30 million people are estimated might die in that part of the world from AIDS in the next few years-- that it was a national security issue for the United States.

How do you see it?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: It is a very serious issue. You can call it a national security issue; you can call it a pandemic; you can call it a destroyer of families and cultures. It is every bit that serious. Twenty-five to thirty million people are at risk of dying. And what we need is a full-scale assault coming from not just the United States but from the rest of the world to deal with this. And it has to have several aspects to it. It has to be, first, prevention and that's mostly educating people how to protect themselves and how to get treatment when they need it; secondly, treatment, doing all we can to get the price of the treatment down; and then third, constantly looking for the cure for this disease. But prevention, I think, is the most important part of it.

And the United States is engaged. We are totally committed to this. Secretary of Health and Human Services Thompson and I have formed a joint task force, cabinet task force, working under the direction of Mr. Everett in the White House. He will have the coordinating responsibility for what we're doing in the White House.

In the last several years, Congress has doubled the funding that we give to HIV-AIDS programs. In my budget submission for the State Department this year, we're asking for another 10 percent on top of that. We're going to pull together all of the elements of the Bush Administration toward this effort, and also reach out to the medical community, the educational community, the non-profit, Non-Governmental Organizations, bringing in the work of foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There are a lot of pockets of resources and wealth and talent out there that we have to bring together to deal with this problem -- not just in Africa, in the Caribbean, in other parts of the world. It is a worldwide problem that we all have to be engaged in.

JIM LEHRER: On the scale of priorities, where does it rest with you and the Bush Administration?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: It's one of the top priorities, as is Africa. But, you know, it's sometimes hard in my job and my business to say what's the top priority every day. And as I said on a number of -

JIM LEHRER: Something new every day.

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Well, exactly. I mean, the keys go up and down on the piano as you play every day. But what I've tried to say to people is that there is no part of the world that doesn't touch America; there is no part of the world that we can ignore any longer; there is no part of the world that we don't have an interest in. We are all joined together, increasingly joined together, by the power of the Internet, by the power of television, and everything is a priority. Now, that's a bit of a dodge, but I find that in the course of my day that I shift priorities about every 27 minutes.

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of priorities, where does the Middle East fit in right now? You and the President have both made it clear that you're going to do it differently; you're going to handle the Middle East differently than prior administrations. Meanwhile, the violence is escalating every day, speaking of the keys on the piano.

Are you changing your mind about maybe you need to get more involved or the President needs to get more involved?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: The President is completely involved. I am completely involved. We have been talking to the leaders on a very regular basis. Last week, the President spoke to Prime Minister Sharon and also to President Bashar in Syria. I talked to Mr. Arafat and I talked to Prime Minister Sharon and I talk to Foreign Minister Peres on a regular basis. I meet with the other leaders in the region who have an interest.

We are working the violence problem at two levels right now. We have a series of security meetings taking place under US "hospitality", I should put it, where we're getting serious people together to figure out how to get the violence down. And we have another level that we're working at to get other connections going on between the Palestinian side and the Israeli side.

The first step in restoring a sense of normalcy and getting back ultimately to a negotiation track is to get the violence down. I am absolutely convinced until that starts to happen we're not going to be able to make progress in other baskets. And hopefully, I think there's a little bit of traction now starting to take place as people see that we can't keep doing what we have seen being done in recent weeks.

This isn't a matter of lack of engagement on the part of the United States. It's just doing it a slightly different way without a lot of attention being drawn to all the things we are doing. But we are engaged. We cannot fail but to be engaged. It is a major challenge for the world, a major challenge for the United States, and it takes a lot of my time.

JIM LEHRER: Finally, where are we on getting our plane back from China?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Well, as you know, we had the meetings last week, and we exchanged very well known points of view. That team has now come back. And the task of working out with the Chinese how the plane is returned will be left to our very capable Embassy team in Beijing, working with their colleagues in the Foreign Ministry, and those discussions continue.

JIM LEHRER: Is it important to you to get the plane back?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: It's our plane, and there is no reason it shouldn't come back. This was an accident. It was a regrettable accident, and now let's clean it all up. Our young men and women are back. They shouldn't have been held for the length of time they were held, but they're now back. Let's get the plane out, get it back, and then let's get back to building our relationship with China by discussing with them both those areas in which we agree and those areas in which we disagree.

JIM LEHRER: A personal question. Are you at ease now being called "Mr. Secretary" rather than General?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: It's taken a while, but "Mr. Secretary" works fine. But as I recall, you had many other names for me, Jim, over the years, which you continue to be free to use.

JIM LEHRER: What's the major difference between being a general and a diplomat?

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Surprisingly, less than I thought. I have always tried to do my job in a way that I have people give me different points of view. This business of a general just shouts orders and screams at people a lot; that was not my experience in the military. And I've found that many of the techniques and procedures and way of doing business that worked for me in the military seem to work fine here in the State Department.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Secretary, General, thank you very much.

SECRETARY COLIN POWELL: Thank you very much, Jim, Mr. Lehrer.

FOCUS - WRONG TARGET

RAY SUAREZ: Now a closer look at the shooting down of the American missionary plane over Peru, which Secretary Powell called a "great tragedy." We start with some background.

RAY SUAREZ: It was a sad homecoming Sunday in North Carolina for Jim Bowers and his son Corey. They survived an attack by a Peruvian fighter working in tandem with a CIA plane. Killed in the shoot down were Jim's wife, Veronica, and the family's infant daughter, Charity. For the past seven years, the Bowers have worked in Peru for the organization Baptists for World Evangelism. The pilot, missionary Kevin Donaldson, also survived the crash, and is being treated in the U.S. for leg wounds. Donaldson and the Bowers family were flying the missionary group's twin-engine Cessna aircraft. On Thursday Donaldson flew them from their home base, Iquitos, to the town of Islandia, near the Brazilian/Colombian border. They then took a boat across the Amazon to Leticia, Colombia, to get a permanent visa for their adopted daughter. On their return flight the next day, a Peruvian fighter intercepted and shot down the Cessna, suspecting it of carrying drugs into Peru. Donaldson made an emergency landing on the Amazon. Also in the air at that time: A U.S. surveillance jet carrying a crew of C.I.A. contract employees and a Peruvian air force officer. That jet told the Peruvians about the small plane. State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher spoke about the incident today.

RICHARD BOUCHER: We've provided assistance to Peru in detecting and monitoring suspect aircraft that are passing through certain designated sensitive airspace, in an effort to control the flow of illegal drugs. Our aircraft provide location data about airplanes that are flying in the region, those that are apparently without flight plans. We hand off this location data to the Peruvian air force. In this particular situation, we acquired information on an aircraft. We passed it through the Peruvian liaison officer who was aboard our plane to the Peruvian authorities, and then we remained in the area while the events occurred.

RAY SUAREZ: The U.S. surveillance flights were suspended pending an investigation. Over the weekend, Peru's Foreign Minister, Javier Perez de Cuellar said, "the Peruvian authorities are responsible, and we regret what happened." At the same time, Peru's air force defended its action, and said the missionary plane had no flight plan, entered Peruvian airspace unannounced, and didn't respond to radio signals. But the missionary group says the Americans had a flight plan, and that their plane was easily identifiable by the dove painted on its side, as well as its registry number.

REV. E.C. HASKELL: The pilot was in radio contact with that tower at the time the shooting actually began. The tower people heard that and were aware of what was going on over the radio. Apparently, as best we understand it, our pilot was on a different channel in communication with the tower at the time the military planes had apparently attempted to contact him on another channel.

RAY SUAREZ: For more than five years, the U.S. has cooperated with the Peruvian air force as part of a program to eradicate that country's coca crop, as well as intercept drug shipments. But in 1995, Congress passed legislation saying such flights should continue only if cooperating countries take appropriate procedures to protect innocent life in the air and on the ground.

RAY SUAREZ: For more on the shooting down of an American missionary plane over Peru we turn to Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, and Major Andy Messing, executive director of the National Defense Council Foundation. He retired from the army in 1987. Let's begin with a little history of this program.

How long have American supplied flights been in the air over Peru, Peter?

PETER HAKIM: Well, I don't know the precise date. But let me say as part of a broader strategy that the U.S. works out country by country, particularly in the Andean region, the three major supply countries, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, works out a plan to reduce narcotics production, narcotics exports from each country, country by country, and this turns out to be a problem that in each country we've had some success in Peru, some considerable success, great success in Bolivia, and now the narcotics have moved to Colombia where they are fueling a guerrilla war. The question is, in some ways, as the history of this hub and spoke, this by lateral narcotics approach, whether we shouldn't now begin to think much more seriously about a regional approach to this; that if we don't do a regional approach we're going to run into a continuing problem that the production is going to move from country to country.

RAY SUAREZ: Andy Messing, I think a lot of people were surprised to find out over the weekend that the information on the whereabouts of this plane was supplied by American supported personnel. Tell us more about it.

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): Well, in 1992 is when this program first started, this shoot down policy, and was suspended for a while. And they retooled it and by late '94 into '95 that's when the Peruvians did it. It's a highly successful program as Secretary Colin Powell said in that previous interview. It had over 30 planes put down as a result, either forced down or shot down, somewhere in that figure. And that has meant tens of tons of cocaine, cocaine products didn't go to further processing and packaging and transport to the United States and other places, and Europe possibly. So thousands of lives were saved by the idea of that, the air bridge was interdicted, but unfortunately you also have a river bridge, you also have a land bridge, and you also have a sea bridge coming out of Peru. And whether they're all being dealt with with equal ferocity and effort is questionable. And this incident highlights this particular aspect also.

RAY SUAREZ: Why are there CIA contractors doing that work, is it beyond the current technical ability of the Peruvians?

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): Well, the American military can do it. They have the capability. As a matter of fact you may recall about a year ago an RC-7 wound up crashing in Colombia and they were doing the same kind of surveillance and also traffic stuff and things like this. The idea that the contractors were involved, that always distresses me. I think it should be American military or CIA employees directly because of the fact that the indigenous personnel have more respect for our people that are directly associated with our government than they do with contractors. And I think you'll find when this investigation is finished, that there's probably a screaming match inside that airplane between the Peruvian liaison officer and air force officer and the contractors, with the Peruvian finally making the decision to, you know, to accentuate a this thing and causing this incredibly tragic event to occur. But don't forget -- we've also had an American C 130 that was strafed and an American crew chief killed several years by the Peruvians. So this isn't the first incident.

RAY SUAREZ: Secretary Powell, Peter Hakim, called this a successful program that now has been marred by this tragedy. Do you agree with him that this is a successful program?

PETER HAKIM: Without sort of being too nitpicking, the question is what is success. Surely you're right, if you've interdicted 30 planes you've reduced the traffic in drugs by airplane out of Peru, no doubt it served as an important deterrent, the very existence of this program. No question about all that. The question, though, is has the flow of drugs really been reduced into the United States, into Europe. And all the evidence at least from the price of cocaine on the streets, whether it's Washington or Los Angeles, wherever, the flow of drugs hasn't really been reduced very much at all. And indeed even the amount of, the idea of intercepting plane flights is to reduce the amount of crops being grown in Peru ultimately. In other words do you cut off the market forgetting the stuff out of Peru and moving into Colombia and North. And certainly the amount of land production, production in coca leave, the forerunner of cocaine, has been reduced enormously in Peru, and this program is part of that effort. The problem is that it hasn't been reduced in the three countries that make up this Andean region where most of the stuff is grown. It's been shifted North. The Colombia coca importers instead of going to Peru and buying the stuff began to buy it from local producers. There's been a great expansion in production in Colombia.

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): The satellite on those comments -- in Colombia alone, there's been over 300,000 acres of pristine jungle torched, cut down, and tens of millions of animals killed and head waters of the Amazon polluted by precursor chemicals for the production of cocaine. The environmental devastation to the lungs of our world is phenomenal. And there's -- I think there was a quarter million acres in Peru at the height of their production.

RAY SUAREZ: But given what Peter Hakim just said and your points following on, does the way this program is being managed make the skies over these countries more dangerous for people who aren't up to no good -- like this evangelical flight?

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): The evangelical flight had occurred, the pilot obviously knew about this policy -- because it's widely broadcast down there. The fact that the Peruvians didn't go completely, it's obviously there's some sort of Peruvian mistake here, they either didn't follow through with the procedures, firing warning shots, making sure they established either visual or radio communications, there some major screw up on the part of the Peruvians, and they are not going to readily admit it by any means.

RAY SUAREZ: Will evidence be produced? Is there a way that we can know what happened?

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): The NSA will have radio transcripts, the CIA plane will have transcripts, and the Peruvian air force will have transcripts. And there may be even some commercial group that recorded this. So the evidence is going to wind up coming out of Chile. It's almost like the China thing where people are screaming and running around in circles. But eventually the evidence came out which proved the essential points -- and that's what's going to happen here.

PETER HAKIM: Almost certainly the Peruvians screwed up. The foreign minister in Peru formally apologized for that, admitted that screw up. But remember, the person that gave the order was sitting on a U.S. plane at the time. This was a U.S. program, these people were trained by U.S. people. It's -

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): He didn't give the order.

PETER HAKIM: He sort of instructed the fighter plane that it was okay to fire.

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): No, that's not the case. The Peruvian air force ground commander gave the thing. But he was part of it. And that's not a bad point.

PETER HAKIM: Okay. My point is simply that the U.S. and Peru on this program were very much entangled. I don't think there was bad faith on anybody's part. This probably was an accident due to misunderstanding, inexperience. But simply to put the blame on one side or the other is very much a mistake. I think that the whole entanglement, whether it was poor training, poor instruction, misunderstanding, it was all part of a -- sort of a one program. And I think both governments have to bear blame for this.

RAY SUAREZ: But is this an entanglement that the United States heads into so as not to use its own military, so as not to use its own uniformed personnel ...

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): Yes. And I think that's a major mistake. I think any time you have this type of major high risk involvement, there should be American military or direct governmental personnel, like CIA operatives themselves. There shouldn't be this cutout of contractors, because they're not subject to the UCMJ, and, you know, there are all kinds of other ramifications. The indigenous personnel certainly don't respect them as much as if we had had like an air force major on that airplane talking to his counterpart. I think that may have gone a different way. So the problem is you got to get the American President and the new drug czar, who incidentally this guy Walters is a pretty good guy, to wind up making the case to the American people that we've got to do this kind of thing.

RAY SUAREZ: A quick final point.

PETER HAKIM: A quick, let me just ask, the this was a drug smuggling plane, would we have been justified to shoot it out of the sky? Would an American military plane have done that? I think there are real questions whether the U.S. should be assisting in a program that it itself would not carry out on American soil.

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): Well, I don't necessarily agree with that, because what they're doing in violation of Peruvian, American and international law, and they're killing Americans, making crack babies and creating crime. I mean, you know, you can go into the whole reasoning for why you have a drug war.

PETER HAKIM: But there's a presumption of innocence.

MAJOR ANDY MESSING (Ret.): -- whey they have a drug war. If they're established you can visually detect that there's product in the back of the airplane and that these guys are, that the serial number has been traced to this kind of activity, you know, it's - they're fair game.

FOCUS - FACING THE FLOOD

RAY SUAREZ: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the rising river; David Levering Lewis; and a favorite poem.

RAY SUAREZ: Tom Bearden spent the weekend in and around davenport, Iowa, as flood control efforts were under way. Here is his report.

TOM BEARDEN: Rescuing her dog Buddy was the last thing on Dolores Ogden's checklist, as she prepared for the latest Mississippi River flood. She had left her home on Saturday to spend the night with relatives, but Buddy went back and was stranded as the water rose. It took a boat to retrieve him. Otherwise, ms. Ogden was as ready as she could be -- a sandbag dike around her house, all the furniture up on blocks. Ms. Ogden has lived here in an area called the Garden addition in Davenport, Iowa, for more than 50 years. She lived through the infamous 1965 flood that destroyed most of her neighbors' homes, an even bigger flood in 1993, and others in between. In the past, she's taken floods in stride; but this time, she's worried.

DELORES OGDEN: Well, I'm getting up to the age where, yes, I'm beginning to. I don't know if I'm going to go through it again or not.

TOM BEARDEN: What will you do, move?

DELORES OGDEN: I don't really know.

TOM BEARDEN: Ogden isn't the only one getting tired of it. Government predictions say the water is supposed to get this high only once every hundred years, but this is the third so- called 100-year flood in the last eight years. Davenport's pride and joy, its riverfront park, has been inundated. The riverboat casino is inaccessible, and that will cost local governments an estimated $500,000 in tax revenue. Several businesses like the dock restaurant are merely islands in a rising stream. The sandbag wall around the baseball stadium failed, the brick walls have been damaged. It was even worse in 1993, the worst flood on record. The city suffered millions of dollars in damage to businesses and homes. Mayor Phil Yerington says it won't be nearly as bad this time because the city has learned by bitter experience.

MAYOR PHIL YERINGTON: The city will look at about a half a million dollars worth of damage, cleanup and preparation for the flood. We can get into the millions if it gets into property loss, the people who have houses, the businesses who have some foundation damage. So there will be damage. I think as the years have gone on, and we progressed from the '93 to the '97 and now the 2001 flood, we've gotten a lot better at protecting the businesses. So I think that the damage, even though it'll be there, will be less than it was in 1993.

TOM BEARDEN: For example, Union Station has been flood-proofed with special shutters and pumps. The city bus terminal is elevated and has its own floodwall and is still in operation. Not so for the Front Street Brewpub. The old warehouse that owners Steve Zuidema and Jennie Ash restored nine years ago is huddled behind a sandbag wall that was built over the past week. If it fails, their business will be deluged. There's already a steady stream of water leaking into the basement brewing area. Floodwater covered the main floor in 1993, and it took them nine weeks to reopen.

TOM BEARDEN: Have you been surprised at the frequency of the floods?

STEVE ZUIDEMA: Absolutely. I grew up in Fulton, Illinois, and we had a flood of '65, which at that time was the record- breaking flood in recorded history. And we came down here to Davenport, it never occurred to me that we'd ever see a flood like that. And here we are nine years later, and we've had four of them, and several of them are top, top floods.

TOM BEARDEN: You ever get discouraged?

STEVE ZUIDEMA: Certainly. It's a tough thing to go through a flood, and go through the weeks of preparation, and the weeks afterward of cleanup, and you'd like not to do that when you're running a business. Running a business has its own problems, and to have to think about doing something like that is tough.

TOM BEARDEN: Yet businessmen and homeowners on the other side of the river in rock island, Illinois, don't have any such problems. They're safely ensconced behind a floodwall that was built after the 1965 flood. Their casino is still operating and still generating tax revenue. Davenport had the same access to federal funds and could have built a wall back then, too. But Mayor Yerington says the city made a conscious decision not to.

MAYOR YERINGTON: What happened is we decided we could keep the only unobstructed view of the river park in the quad city area. Because of that, we have about a five-, six-acre park, LeClair Park, that is the scene of festivals that bring 150-, 160-, 200,000 people to our riverfront each year. That generates a lot of money.

TOM BEARDEN: Davenport is the only major city on the upper Mississippi that doesn't have a flood wall.

TOM BEARDEN: Ever envious when you look across the river and see the flood wall that's on the other side?

STEVE ZUIDEMA: Yeah. I think if I had my choice, after having gone through almost nine years of floods, if somebody said what would you have, I would probably have a floodwall here.

TOM BEARDEN: Floodwalls aren't even an option for Wiley Plummer. He and his wife, Heidi, own a house that sits directly on the river bank, when the river isn't out of its banks. He and his neighbors have traded their cars for small boats to navigate the country lane that leads to their little cluster of houses near Pleasant Valley, a few miles east of Davenport. The first level of his home is under several feet of water, but that's no surprise. It's happened many times before. It's a price they're willing to pay to live in their dream home.

WYLIE PLUMMER: This is the original house, when we first bought it. And I told Heidi that I could make it look like this.

TOM BEARDEN: Did she believe you?

HEIDI PLUMMER: No.

WYLIE PLUMMER: Well, actually she didn't. So we had to be a little creative because of the way the house was built, with the short ceiling and things. So she says if you can make it look like that, we'll buy it. So we bought it.

TOM BEARDEN: They've put an enormous amount of work into the home: Tearing out floors, rearranging walls, putting in large windows and a fireplace. They've also made the house more tolerant of flooding, moving heating and water systems high above ground level. Even so, they still expect some damage.

TOM BEARDEN: Do you get a lot of mud down there when it floods?

HEIDI PLUMMER: Yes.

WYLIE PLUMMER: There'll be probably about three or four inches of mud, and what we'll do is, we'll scoop out most of it and then take it back out to the river and put it where it belongs.

TOM BEARDEN: But there's more to it than just mud. Davenport's water treatment plant, and others like it up and down the river, have been flooded. That means raw sewage is flowing into the river, risking the health of everyone who comes into contact with the water. The Plummers will have to chemically disinfect their house.

TOM BEARDEN: So you're facing a lot of hard work, disinfecting the house, you have a potential health threat, and yet you still want to live here?

WYLIE PLUMMER: Yeah.

TOM BEARDEN: Some people might find that puzzling.

HEIDI PLUMMER: I know, I work with a few of them.

TOM BEARDEN: What do they tell you?

HEIDI PLUMMER: They tell me I'm crazy.

WYLIE PLUMMER: Yeah. But then we invite them out here, and when it's nice out here, we have a little party or something on the deck and cook up some hot dogs or whatever, and then they see why we like it out here too, so there's good with the bad.

TOM BEARDEN: And the good outweighs the bad?

HEIDI PLUMMER: Definitely.

TOM BEARDEN: Davenport hasn't been alone in preparing for the flood. The Iowa National Guard is helping build levees and guarding against looters. People who live in the little town of Buffalo, Iowa, 12 miles southwest of Davenport, are also getting help. These young people are Americorps volunteers who have been given a crash course in how to build sandbag barriers against the river.

YOUNG GIRL: The local citizens have been very, very supportive. They've been coming around offering us water and support and being very thankful for our efforts here.

TOM BEARDEN: The Mississippi is some six feet above flood stage now, and is expected to crest in davenport tomorrow morning at a near-record level. People up and down this stretch of the river have their fingers crossed, hoping that all their preparations will keep damage to a minimum. But they also know it will be weeks before the river completely returns to its banks.

SERIES - WINNER

RAY SUAREZ: Now, another in our conversations with winners of this year's Pulitzer Prizes in the arts. In January, Gwen Ifill talked with David Levering Lewis. He has now won the Pulitzer Prize for the second volume of his biography of W.E.B. Dubois. The first volume also won a Pulitzer in 1994. Here is a reprise of that earlier conversation.

GWEN IFILL: We are joined by David Levering Lewis, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of History at Rutgers University. The book is the second and final volume of his Pulitzer prize-winning biography of W.E.B. Dubois. This volume, "The Fight for Equality and the American Century: 1919 through 1963," covers the second half of Dubois' life, charting 44 years of the culture and politics of race in the United States. Welcome, Mr. Lewis.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: Thank you. It's good to be here.

GWEN IFILL: You won the Pulitzer Prize, as I mentioned, for the first half of this massive biography. Why was there a need for more?

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: Well, because I hope to see the second Pulitzer. There was another 50 years of his life, roughly, to tell. I stopped volume one in 1919, as you indicate, at the end of World War I, when Dubois was midstream in his life. He would live, until 1963, a life as full as the years antecedent to the time that I interrupted. And because, as the subtitle of this volume indicates, "The Fight for Equality and the American Century," I wanted to take Dubois out of what was not certainly parochial concerns about civil rights for one group of people, but quite focused concerns about one group of people, and put him in a larger forum in which he becomes concerned about equality and economic justice for people of all colors everywhere.

GWEN IFILL: W.E.B. Dubois is one of those figures who has been defined by different generations in different ways. Some people know him as the person who talked about the talented tenth of talented Negroes. Other people know him as someone... In fact, have lately come to define him as someone who is actually more of a... had more of a bootstraps mentality; was not as radical as other leaders of today. But in fact you found... or you wrote that that was... none of that was really the case, that was not the sum total of this man.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: No, but it's true to say that there is enough in capacious life for everybody. I've heard Dubois' name invoked as an enemy of affirmative action, someone who might favor vouchers. Those things seem quite unlikely to me, but I concede that a life as protean as Dubois', in which perhaps every decade there is a certain degree of reinvention, that there are inconsistencies above, of course, the basic consistency of his concern for the widening and deepening of rights for people of color and for economic justice for all people.

GWEN IFILL: So if you picked and choose... chose different parts of his life, you could find a time when he advocated segregation and a time he advocated integration, and a time he was a big capitalist and a time when he was a big Communist.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: Well, he never advocated segregation. That was a very controversial series of articles he wrote in which he was saying in the...

GWEN IFILL: "Social reconstruction" was the term.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: ...of the Depression, right, when things were falling apart, not very good for people of whatever color, that one strategy that was worth exploring for African Americans was a kind of social democracy within the group. And so it was not so much segregation as a kind of cooperativist movement amongst African Americans who prepared themselves for survival in what he thought was a fatally flawed and dying capitalist regime.

GWEN IFILL: Yet W.E.B. Dubois, like other larger-than-life figures, had these great flaws as well. He spent a lot of his time, it seemed, at war with various people who had been friends or weren't friends. What was it about him? Was he severely flawed or was it just that he just believed so strongly in his own beliefs?

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: Well, I think the latter, that here is a man of great principles and great inflexibility who was not a politician, but who sees with a kind of Calvinist insistence that America is an exceptional place and that it's very exceptionalism imposes a greater duty to live up to those opportunities; an enormously wealthy country with people who were divided by the artificial wedges of race and class. And he thought that if he talked about economic justice and talked about civil rights insistently, that that would tweak the conscience of his fellow Americans. And then when the consciences were insufficiently tweaked, he thought that there were other avenues -- economic-- which would motor justice and redistribution of wealth, because he became increasingly to view the problem of race in the 20th century as an economic problem as much as a problem of color.

GWEN IFILL: He was also quite the pan-Africanist, and in fact when he died, died living abroad in Ghana with his passport revoked, actually. Yet he had this ongoing tussle, this war, this struggle with Marcus Garvey, who was certainly very well known for his pan-Africanist views.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: He did, and that's a chapter in which I expend as much salience as I can in pointing out that that was a dispute, which perhaps need not have happened. It was a dispute based upon personality rather than the content of ideas, because if you look at the page, the men were singing from the same pan-Africanist hymnal. Later, Dubois, in fact, acknowledged that there had been a misunderstanding which was premised more on dislike, personal dislike, than upon real concepts about changing things for people of color.

GWEN IFILL: How much of that was Dubois' thought that he ought to be the one, the great definer of what the arguments would be? Someone... You describe it in your book that someone once described the crisis at the "NAACP Magazine," that he was editor of for so many years, as... one of his critics described it as "one man's soliloquy"; there was no other room for another world view than Dubois'.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: Well, I don't think he was as exclusionary as that, but it is true that there is a grand monologue that one can be heard through the decades uttered by Dubois. For me as a biographer, a man who is as contrary as Dubois, who is as principled, who is as flawed-- to use your word I think is apposite-- is a wonderful challenge. He... it's seldom that you have a life that spans the greater part of the 20th century that is emblematic of so many issues that are central to our time, and will continue to be. He said, you remember, that the problem of race would be the problem of the 20th century. It may well be that the 21st century is one in which race continues, but the problem of economic well being and a kind of capitalism that is unfettered by government, by consumer forces, is as great a problem, and in Dubois' late pronouncements, he very much focused on that aspect of inequality. And so there is so much in the life, that you really are writing about America as you write about him with his contrariety and flaws.

GWEN IFILL: You talk about his prescience -- about looking forward to racism as the problem of the 20th century. He also, however, seemed kind of sad when he died; was considered, I think-- there is a phrase in the book-- as "a proud pariah."

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: That's a nice phrase. I suppose it is in the book, and there is verity in that description. I resist tragedy, though. At the end of the day, I think Dubois illustrates a profoundly inquisitorial mind, brilliant racialized mind in the racial... racialized world who won't give up and who is never satisfied even when the ideals that he's espoused are beginning to come to pass. It's at that point that he says, characteristic of the true intellectual, "what is going to be the shortfall of that? How can we make better what we are getting that we demanded?" And that puzzled many of his allies, as you point out, people who had marched shoulder to shoulder with him. They'd say, "my goodness, it looks like the nirvana is here. It looks like the civil rights movement is reifying the things we want." Dubois would say, "ah, desegregation, yes; but what about the economic insufficiencies that will flow from the dismantlement of white supremacy in the South and the policies of racism in the North?" And indeed, that prophecy is one that should detain us today.

GWEN IFILL: That is my final question. So that is the imprint that he left on today's civil rights movement?

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: I think so. In skepticism, inquisitiveness, Martin Luther King is invoked as, you know, saying that people must be judged by the content of their character. But in a world today where we are supposedly moving beyond race, I think you would hear Dubois modify that and say that people of color must be judged by the content of their politics.

GWEN IFILL: David Levering Lewis, thank you so much for joining us.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: Thank you.

FINALLY - FAVORITE POEM PROJECT

RAY SUAREZ: Finally tonight, another poem from then-poet laureate Robert Pinsky's project asking Americans to read their favorite poem. Here are Jake, Sarah, and Martin Miller of High Falls, New York.

JAKE MILLER: I discovered this poem called "Polly's Tree" by Sylvia Plath when I was on tour with my band up in Maine. I had made a new friend who'd recently lost her boyfriend, and we were talking about grieving the loss of loved ones. And I had a sister named Polly who I had just lost a few months previously to an asthma attack. It was amazing how much the words in the poem reminded me of her.

SARAH MILLER: It does really seem to describe that beautiful, and really quite luminous pastel that Polly had done not too long before her death, which my husband Marty and I watched her create, and it was just... It just happened. It's just like, in the poem it says something about "it sprung from her pillow," and that's what it was like when we watched her create this thing. And it was just born.

MARTIN MILLER: It was so beautiful. It took us so much, both Sarah and I. It hit us so strongly, and we wanted immediately to bring it home and frame it. And then when Jake read that poem five, six years later, it was almost as if the poem was written to instruct or to inform Polly about the painting, and that the painting was a necessary event in the life of Polly to allow us to have that as a talisman of her life.

MARTIN MILLER: "Polly's Tree," by Sylvia Plath:

A dream tree, Polly's tree: a thicket of sticks, each speckled twig

ending in a thin-paned leaf unlike any other on it

or in a ghost flower flat as paper and of a color

vaporish as frost-breath, more finical than any silk fan

the Chinese ladies use to stir robin's egg air.

SARAH MILLER: (continuing reading of poem)

The silver - haired seed of the milkweed comes to roost there, frail as the halo

rayed round a candle flame, a will-o'-the-wisp nimbus, or puff

of cloud-stuff, tipping her queer candelabrum. Palely lit by

snuff-ruffed dandelions, white daisy wheels

JAKE MILLER: (continuing reading of poem)

and a tiger faced

pansy, it glows. O it's no family tree, Polly's tree, nor

a tree of heaven, though it marry quartz-flake, feather and rose.

It sprang from her pillow whole as a cobweb ribbed like a hand,

a dream tree.

SARAH MILLER: (reading portion of poem)

Polly's tree wears a valentine arc of tear-pearled

bleeding hearts on its sleeve

MARIN MILLER: (concluding reading of poem)

and, crowning it, one blue larkspur star.

RECAP

RAY SUAREZ: Again, the major story of this Monday. The U.S. And Peru offered differing views on Peru's downing of a missionary plane Friday. On the NewsHour, Secretary of State Powell said a U.S. surveillance plane crew may have tried to prevent the attack that killed an American woman and her baby, but Peru's air force denied that it failed to follow the rules of engagement. And the Navy decided to reprimand the commander of the U.S. Submarine that ran and sank a Japanese fishing vessel in January. Commander Waddle said in a statement he would retire by October 1. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Ray Suarez. Thanks and good night.