The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, Betty Ann Bowser and Gwen Ifill have the latest on the EgyptAir crash investigation; Margaret Warner interviews Lord Robertson, the new Secretary-General of NATO, Fred De Sam Lazaro reports on a family's life in China after 50 years of Communist rule; Ray Suarez and Jan Crawford Greenburg look at today's Supreme Court argument over a police chase; and David Gergen talks about the meritocracy with author Nicholas Lemon. It all follows our summary of the news this Tuesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The Navy said today it had located signals from the black boxes of EgyptAir Flight 990, but the search was called off by bad weather brewing off of the Massachusetts coast where the jet went down early Sunday. The signals from the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were detected on Monday. Also today, officials told relatives of the victims, no intact bodies were likely to be retrieved. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. Boeing held up delivery of nearly three dozen new commercial jetliners today because of a faulty part. It also said hundreds of aircraft now in service may have the improperly made piece, called a drip shield. It's designed to keep moisture out of wiring and instruments. A spokesman said the problem was not related to the EgyptAir crash, and there was no immediate safety concern. In Oslo, Norway, today, President Clinton said talks with Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian Leader Arafat had revitalized the Middle East peace process. It was their first three-way meeting since Barak took office in July. The Palestinians and Israelis have set a September 2000 deadline to reach a final peace settlement. Mr. Clinton spoke to reporters after the private session.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: They have agreed to work very hard to avoid public comments or actions which will cause enormous difficulty for the other side in the next hundred days or so when they're trying to come to agreement on the framework. And they have agreed with me that we might well have a summit at the end of this process if enough progress has been made to make us all believe that in good faith we can actually get an agreement at a summit.

JIM LEHRER: Earlier today, President Clinton urged Russia to end its campaign against Chechnya. He met with Russian Prime Minister Putin, who was also in Oslo. In Chechnya, Russian jets and artillery again bombarded the breakaway republic. Thousands of Chechen refugees fleeing the attacks remained trapped at the border with a neighboring republic. Russian troops closed the crossing in both directions. Americans continued to spend more than they made in September-- so said the Commerce Department today. Wages and other income did not keep up with money going out for the third month in a row. Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan said new research showed Americans were quick to spend profits from selling homes. He said that was having a bigger impact on the economy than the stock market. On Wall Street today, the NASDAQ Index bounced above 3000 for the first time, but closed at 2981, for a 13-point gain. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 66 points at 10,581. Congress sent the 13th and final spending bill to the White House today, where it faced a veto. It would be the fifth one President Clinton has not approved. He signed eight others. Today's had $314 billion for labor, education, and health programs. It also included a 1 percent across- the-board Republican spending cut. Mr. Clinton has said it did not provide enough for hiring more teachers. Seven people were shot dead today at a Xerox Company building outside Honolulu. The suspect was said to be an employee. He fled the scene in a company van. Two hours later, police cornered him not far from the crime scene. The standoff has not been resolved, but the mayor said the public was no longer at risk.

SPOKESMAN: You especially never think it would happen here. As I said, we have such a safe community with almost no violent crime. To have someone snap like this and murder seven people is just absolutely appalling. But I'm very proud of HPD; they have done a superb job. And it appears as though they have the situation under control.

JIM LEHRER: A police negotiator was trying to talk the gunman into surrendering. There were elections today in a number of states. Three of the most noted were for governor of Mississippi, mayor of Philadelphia, and control of the Virginia state legislature. Republicans there were one seat away from a majority in both Houses there for the first time in 140 years. Lincoln Chafee will finish the remaining 14 months of his late father's Senate term. He was appointed today by Rhode Island's Republican governor. Lincoln Chafee is mayor of the state'ssecond largest city, Warwick. He was already running to succeed his father, who had planned to retire next year at the end of his fourth term. John Chafee died suddenly a week ago Sunday. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today about police pursuit. The Justices are weighing whether people who flee after spotting a police patrol can be chased down and questioned. The issue is whether such pursuits violate the Constitution's fourth amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. We'll have more on the story later in the program tonight. Also ahead, an EgyptAir update, the new head of NATO, China at 50, and a David Gergen dialogue.

UPDATE - EGYPTAIR CRASH

JIM LEHRER: Betty Ann Bowser begins our EgyptAir story again tonight.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Relatives of the passengers killed on EgyptAir Flight 990 arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, today. There, crash officials told them most of their loved ones' bodies may never be recovered intact from the crash scene. Off the coast of Massachusetts, in the search area, the weather worsened, with the coast guard expecting 14-foot seas, rain, and gale-force winds by late tonight. The Navy's salvage ship, the U.S.S. Grapple, arrived in Newport. Its side-scan sonar and sophisticated robotic underwater cameras will help find wreckage from the downed Boeing 767 at the bottom of the ocean. But officials of the National Transportation Safety Board have warned this recovery effort may be more daunting than two recent crash investigations, T.W.A. Flight 800 in 1996 and Swissair 111 off Nova Scotia last year. Those planes crashed in a little over 100 feet of water. Flight 990 rests in 270 feet of water. And in the earlier disasters, the water where divers searched was warm. In this case, Navy divers will be searching in water so deep and so cold they will only be able to make one dive every 24 hours in order to avoid decompression problems. And once they descend to the ocean floor, they will have poor visibility and be able to spend only about 35 minutes at a stretch on the bottom. But if and when the flight data recorders are recovered, they could provide more information about the crash than either the TWA or Swissair disasters. That's because one of the two so-called black boxes onboard the plane was equipped to monitor 55 different categories of data, including fuel flow, engine fires, and autopilot status. Late this afternoon at a briefing, crash officials said two recovery ships have located what appear to be sounds from the plane's black boxes.

CAPT. JAMES M. GRAHAM: The NOAA vessel Whiting and Mohawk, USNS Mohawk, both have found what appears to be debris fields and one of the two separate pingers that the UNS Mohawk has located appears to be in the center of one of those debris fields. UNS Mohawk has a special pinger locator device that she puts in the water, trails behind her. She has locate had appears to be both pingers that are associated with the two black boxes. Current weather conditions, though, have prevented the two ships from staying on station. They have retrieved their side-scan sonars. They have stopped their mapping operation, and they are seeking storm evasion. We've just learned that the on-scene commander has asked them to come on in to port here at Newport, so we anticipate both Mohawk and Whiting to arrive-- I do not know the exact time for you. They will be coming here to evade the storm. This is a very bad time of the year for weather, out where we are. We're 65 miles off, and the seas build quite rapidly, and the depth is somewhere between 250-270 feet out there.We do not know exactly the depth because we're still determining where that field is at. But this will impact how fast we can do operations or how long. What Grapple's mission will be, number one, to recover those two black boxes.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Officials said if the weather improves, the U.S.S. Grapple could be in place looking for those crucial black boxes by late Thursday.

JIM LEHRER: And to Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL: Joining me now is Captain Sam DeBow of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA's ship Whiting - as we just heard -- has been assisting today in the EgyptAir recovery mission. Captain DeBow, you were also the commander of a ship that was involved in the TWA recovery mission. You give us some sort of the sense about what the responsibility of the ship's recovery - responsibility is today?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: The NOAA units are there to assist the Navy and the NTSB in mapping the debris field and helping them with the recovery of the aircraft.

GWEN IFILL: Describe for us what you mean when you say, mapping the debris field. We just heard that term used.

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: The NOAA ship Whiting will be towing a side-scanning sonar array. It's a very sophisticated piece of equipment that it tows behind the vessel, and it's able to look out to both sides to about 150 meters on each side, and it's able to completely sonify and see what's on the seafloor.

GWEN IFILL: We're talking about 270 feet of water perhaps, much deeper water than in the TWA 800 crash. How much more difficult does it make this recovery mission?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: As Captain Graham said, from the United States Navy, it's going to be a very daunting task because it's so far from shore and the depth about twice the depth that the TWA and Swissair and the JFK recovery operations.

GWEN IFILL: And it's much colder water, which makes it more dangerous for the divers?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: I'm not familiar with that part of the operation. But I would think that the Navy has that covered.

GWEN IFILL: So what exactly does the -- side-scanning sonar technology? Tell me what that is.

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: It basically sends a sound signal out - out to the side of the towed array. It's got transducers that measure the distance. The signal goes out until it hits a hard object, and then it returns back. And we get a type of a mosaic out of it. The seafloor out there is a mud, hard sand seafloor, so if there is any manmade type of obstructions, you could easily distinguish that it was not normal, and it would be easy to find.

GWEN IFILL: So, it's not murky, the water. You can actually get a pretty clear sense of what's down there?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: This doesn't have anything to do with a visual type of operation.

GWEN IFILL: It's a sound?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: It's a sound detection operation.

GWEN IFILL: So, when they talk about finding two pings today, they said they heard from both radar boxes. How significant is that?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: The United States Navy has a pinger array that they tow and they can isolate and listen for the acoustic pinger, which is attached to the black boxes. Apparently, from what we saw in the briefing, they have identified and isolated those pingers. They will then be able to go and send people down...an ROV...a remotely-operated vehicle down to go and try to get the black boxes out of the aircraft.

GWEN IFILL: But probably more likely robots than people.

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: That part of the operation, again, I'm not familiar with. I'm only involved with the sonar search operation for mapping the seafloor.

GWEN IFILL: So, once you have a map of the seafloor, right now, obviously those vessels have been brought in because of the weather -- once you have map, then what happens?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: They'll be able to define a debris field and then they'll be able mobilize the Grapple in order to start the recovery operation.

GWEN IFILL: Today during the briefing, there was some discussion about exactly how you decide what a debris field is -- whether it's one, whether it's two? Is it the sheen on the water?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: The debris field will be decided from the sonar records that they will analyze, and they will be able to come up with somewhat of a mosaic showing where on the seafloor a lot of this debris sits. It's kind of like a negative picture, if you will.

GWEN IFILL: And debris can be anything? It can be pieces of a plane, it can be human remains?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: Most of the debris that they will find will be hard objects and manmade type of objects. That's what they'll be able to detect.

GWEN IFILL: And is it the role of these vessels to retrieve these objects or just to map them and leave it for someone else to retrieve?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: The NOAA ship Whiting's mission is to assist in the mapping of the debris field. The United States Navy would be the one that will be taking over the operation. They are running the operation at the present time in order to start with the search and recovery operation. So they would take care of the rest of it.

GWEN IFILL: And so after this is over, right now, your job is done. And the Navy takes over. Or is there a continuing role for NOAA?

CAPT. SAM DE BOW: We are working cooperatively with the Navy. The Navy is in charge of the recovery operation. And we are just assisting the Navy in that operation. We will be there until... as long as they want us to be there.

GWEN IFILL: Thank you very much, Captain DeBow.

JIM LEHRER: NATO's new Secretary-General, and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: George Robertson took over the NATO post last month, after more than two years as Britain's defense minister. A one-time anti-nuclear activist and union organizer in Scotland, he was first elected to parliament on the Labor ticket in 1978. He became well known for leading a campaign to ban gun ownership in Britain after a gunman murdered 16 schoolchildren in his hometown of Dunblane. As defense minister, Robertson took a leading role in prosecuting the war in Kosovo. In August, as he prepared to leave that job, Prime Minister Tony Blair made him a life peer, conferring upon him the title of Lord Robertson.

And Lord Robertson, welcome.

LORD ROBERTSON: Nice to be here.

MARGARET WARNER: Let's look first at the situation in Kosovo. Every week it seems we have another report of attacks mostly by Albanians and Serbs, though today a NATO-led force had to go in and rescue some Albanians who were attacked by Serbs. Why hasn't the NATO-led force been able to stop these revenge attacks that have driven out -- most of the Serbs out of Kosovo?

LORD ROBERTSON: I think you've got to realize, first of all, that it's less than 150 days since the conflict, since the war ended after a huge legacy of violence. So we weren't going to be able to restore law and order instantaneously, but in June there were 190 moderates per 100,000 of the population, the standard measurement. Last month, there were only 25. So serious reductions are being made by the KFOR troops in the area. Less than half of the Serbs who were there before are still there. That still amounts to some 9,000 and Serbs are coming back into Kosovo every day because life is better in Kosovo than it is in Serbia. So we're making big improvements. There's 1,800 U.N. policemen now on the streets in Kosovo. About half the time of the KFOR troops is devoted to protecting the minorities. And given the legacy of violence, I think that we've made big strides very quickly. And although there's still an unacceptable level of violence, the level violence is less than it is in the city of Moscow, the City of Johannesburg, and is maybe slightly higher than New York. But it is still much lower than it was.

MARGARET WARNER: Does NATO have the troops and equipment it needs to do the job on the ground?

LORD ROBERTSON: Yes, it does. There are some 50,000 NATO and friends of NATO troops on the ground in Kosovo, and they're making a big difference. I took all of the North Atlantic countries, all the ambassadors to NATO, to Kosovo, the week before last, and we were hugely impressed by General Reinhardt, the German general, who's the new commander of KFOR, and by Bernard Kushner, the U.N. Special representative there. And they've got a vision and a grip on the situation which, with the help of the international community and with perhaps some additional resources, they see is going to make a big difference. And that could mean that Kosovo, if it goes wrong, would be a dreadful stain on our reputation. But if it goes right-- and it can go right-- could be a multiethnic democratic model that will show that out of conflict, out of tragedy, we can build something that is new and good for the future.

MARGARET WARNER: Now you've said or you said on taking this job that one of the things you really want to do is to correct the imbalance in the defense capability between the U.S. and the European members of NATO. How serious a gap did the Kosovo conflict show?

LORD ROBERTSON: There was a big gap showing in some key capabilities. So despite the fact that we won-- and nobody should underestimate the significance of the victory in Kosovo, and what we were able to achieve in getting the refugees home and stopping the violence-- we've clearly got now to address the fact that we need much more in the way of precision-guided weapons for bombing attacks, because public opinion and international law don't allow us to do carpet bombing. And, therefore, we've got to have the right mechanism for getting military targets and avoiding civilian targets. And largely these assets at the moment are in the hands of the United States, so the European allies need to do more there. In terms of deployable troops who can be sent to trouble spots before they become a crisis, we've got to be able to do more. And at the moment, we've got too many static soldiers who are not trained, who are not deployable, and we haven't got the means of getting them to the trouble spots. So these were deficiencies which did not hinder our victory in Kosovo, but which we want to address if we're going to have a proper balance and save the Atlantic Alliance, which is so important to all of us.

MARGARET WARNER: There are reports, however, that the German government, for instance, is now talking about cutting its defense budget yet again over the next four years. Do you sense an ambivalence among European members of NATO? I mean, on the one hand, they don't like being dependent on the U.S. as the sole superpower. On the other hand, they don't really want to pay the price, political and otherwise, that it would take. They don't really have the political will it would take to increase defense spending and change the way it's spent.

LORD ROBERTSON: Well, we'll see. I think that there is a desire to do more in the world. There is a desire to rebalance the alliance so that we are not so dependent on the United States, and that we, therefore, have got more capabilities that we could use if there was a domestic situation in Europe where the Americans didn't want to get involved. But I would make the point that the Europeans actually spend a lot of money on defense. If you take the European NATO allies together, they spend something like two-thirds of what the United States spend on defense. But we don't get two-thirds of the capability. We compete with each other, we duplicate with each other, and perhaps we're spending on the wrong things. So the first thing to do is to spend more wisely, to spend on the right equipment and on the right forces, and then some countries may well have to spend more because they are actually spending too little to be able to invest in the right equipment and the right forces.

MARGARET WARNER: Let's turn to the post-Kosovo environment in the United States. First of all, how do the European members of NATO read or interpret the Senate's rejection of the test ban treaty last month?

LORD ROBERTSON: Well, I think that a lot of people, not just the Europeans, were very disappointed that the Senate didn't follow the advice of the administration, and indeed the example of so many other allies.

MARGARET WARNER: And letters from... or an editorial by the leaders of three of our leading allies, correct?

LORD ROBERTSON: Well, there were a lot of representations made, and it's regrettable that the Senate took that decision. I hope it's not a permanent decision. I hope there are ways back, because the United States is a big example in the world, and the comprehensive test ban treaty was, to many people, a signpost along the route against proliferation, against those who might pollute the atmosphere with testing. I haven't given up hope as an individual, and I think others still hope that the Senate will do that. And I had meetings on my visit here with Senators. I think that they're looking at it again, and I hope they will look at it again, because we've got to move on this arms control issue. We've got to build a series of milestones that suggest that there is a better way than a new arms race or increased proliferation to go. And some of the concerns that existed in the Senate I think can be addressed and can be answered.

MARGARET WARNER: But President Clinton, as you know, he saw it as a symbol of something more. He called it a new isolationism among some Republicans. The "Financial Times" in London called it a "new unilaterist impulse." Do you sense that from your meetings here that there's a pulling back from foreign engagement and a more... a greater interest in going it alone?

LORD ROBERTSON: Well, there's a great diversity in the United States of opinions and views, even in the Senate, and they cross party lines. So it's very difficult to categorize, and very dangerous, I think, for people outside, or even inside, the U.S.A. to categorize people by groups. I think that there are a lot of concerns. We're at a point in our history, just as we're about to come to the end of the century, about where we go, what the direction is that we are going, and that has led to a number of people seeing the future in very different ways. I don't want to engage in the American presidential election.

MARGARET WARNER: Probably a good idea.

LORD ROBERTSON: Heavens, I've left elections behind. And the word isolation can mean a lot of things. What is important is that the United States remains engaged in this great alliance of 19 nations. In a world that is increasingly uncertain, unpredictable, with instability rife in every other part of the world, the Atlantic Alliance stands there as an island of predictability and of calm and of control. And I think we've got to reinforce that-- the success of Kosovo, but looking into the future as a reservoir of wisdom and common sense in the field of security. That's what I hope to contribute, and I hope that the American people will join us in that.

MARGARET WARNER: One other move being contemplated, which President Clinton and the Republicans agree, is trying to renegotiate the antiballistic missile treaty so the U.S. can deploy a limited antimissile defense system. Now, how do the European NATO members feel about that?

LORD ROBERTSON: Well, it's not really a debate that has become firmly engaged in people's minds at the moment. National missile defense has really become a matter of a bilateral negotiation and discussion between the United States and Russia at the present moment, but, again, what I hope will happen is that we'll have a transparent, open, inclusive debate where the fears and concerns and, indeed, the solutions adopted by the American administration are shared with allies so that any concerns can be allayed, can be accommodated so that we get the best solution. We want NATO to find the safest way of building the future world. In 1949, 50 years ago, when I was the age of three, some people made very visionary steps to create an alliance to allow you and I to live in the kind of peace and security we have, which previous generations didn't have. So I think we've got to include ourselves in the discussions and in the dialogue to make certain that we don't make mistakes that could fracture that alliance or possibly make the world less safe.

MARGARET WARNER: But right now, are you getting that consultation that you're looking for?

LORD ROBERTSON: I've been to the Pentagon and to the State Department on my visit, and I know that there are going to be no decisions taken without the maximum of consultation. And that is the right way for allies to behave with each other. There are serious concerns that need to be addressed in terms of rogue nation states and those who have got capabilities that might not be traditionally deterred. We have to address them. But as an alliance, we are strong. As individual nations, we are subject to the preys of an uncertain world.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you, Lord Robertson, very much, and good luck in your new job.

LORD ROBERTSON: Thank you very much.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, China at 50, a Supreme Court argument, and a David Gergen dialogue.

JIM LEHRER: China's government is celebrating 50 years of Communist rule. Across the country there are many reminders of the turbulence and change of the past five decades. Fred De Sam Lazaro of public station KCTA-Minneapolis-St. Paul reports on one man's return to Shanghai.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Shanghai has long been China's window to the world. It is the country's commercial and industrial capital, and it's seen billions of dollars in construction and economic development over the past decade. The modernization is so vast that Shanghai is hardly recognizable to someone like Xinshu Zhao, who left the city 15 years ago to study in the U.S.. He now lives in North Carolina.

XINSHU ZHAO: Yeah, the school is gone. This is a new building. I don't know if we can find new... my old buildings anymore. They probably have been all taken down. So the only thing that's left now looks like just the place.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: We followed Zhao on one of his periodic visits to his native land. He saw several landmarks of his youth, landmarks which reflect the turbulent history or communist rule.

XINSHU ZHAO: And I still remember the buildings here, the old buildings here and the old buildings there.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: But now everything has changed.

XINSHU ZHAO: Yeah, right.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: But that's your house right over there?

XINSHU ZHAO: It's right behind us, yeah.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Okay.

XINSHU ZHAO: I will take you into it. (Speaking Chinese)

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In the home where he grew up, the present-day tenants and old neighbors welcomed the unannounced visitors.

XINSHU ZHAO: My younger brother and I, when we grow up, after we grow up, we live...we slept on this bed-- 24 square meters, six of us. Then two families shared the kitchen, and this was used as a bathroom.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Zhao's father was a railroad worker, his mother a teacher, and spartan as life seemed, his family was considered middle class. That made them a target during the Cultural Revolution. The slogans of that period three decades ago, like the memories, haven't faded easily.

XINSHU ZHAO: Yeah, "loyal to Chairman Mao," and "loyal to Mao Zedong's thoughts."

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Under Chairman Mao Zedong, China endured several campaigns that caused widespread social upheaval, famine, and millions of deaths. The decade-long Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, was Mao's attempt to recreate the long march and revolution he'd led in the 20's and 30's. Richard Bohr is a China historian at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University in Minnesota.

RICHARD BOHR: He wanted these young people, the so-called Red Guards, to relive revolution, but as he gave them the power to live their own revolution, to experience their own revolution, they got a hold of guns and arms, and they became militant.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Zhao vividly remembers when he was 11 the night Red Guards showed up, and their campaign against the so-called elite. They took jewelry and the family's entire savings of about a thousand U.S. dollars.

XINSHU ZHAO: My grandfather was a landlord, and so... actually, it was against the policy at the time to ransack the second generation or the third generation's house. But they did it anyway, and I still consider it as a turning point in my life. You know, I began to realize was not supposed to be fair.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Zhao and his older brother, Xin Yung, spent four years doing rural farm labor, the entire curriculum for Chinese school children during the Cultural Revolution. A third brother was too young to be conscripted.

RICHARD BOHR: These are the ten years which the Chinese call the ten lost years, when most young people in China could not get an education; when virtually all the schools were closed; and when the only opportunity for any sort of education was self- study at home in the middle of the night, in clandestine ways.

XINSHU ZHAO: During the night, in order to read, I sit on the stair and use this side of some table as my reading... just about this side for reading, and use this light.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: At a time when education was frowned upon, Zhao says his parents encouraged it. The elder Zhao couple have lived in Shanghai since the 1940's. Both are now retired.

JUNGHUI MIAO: (speaking through interpreter) I experienced the same thing during World War II, during the Japanese occupation. I lost the opportunity to get an education. Eventually, I was able to go to night school and complete college. During the Cultural Revolution, the slogan was "the more knowledge you have, the more antirevolutionary you are," so education was not encouraged. But I knew from my own experience that my sons would someday be educated. That's why I encouraged them to read.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: When he turned 18, Zhao was placed as an assembly worker in the 27th radio factory of Shanghai. Under the controlled economy, he didn't have a choice. In any event, during the Cultural Revolution, the university education he'd wanted was reserved for children of so- called workers and peasants. Still, Zhao persevered, as coworkers at the plant still recall.

XINSHU ZHAO: She remembered one detail that I didn't remember. She said I studied so hard, I put English words on my hand, in order to work and at the same time recite the English words.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: To his former work mates, Zhao is now a role model for Chinese kids. But 25 years ago, few shared his aspiration to attend university.

XINSHU ZHAO: Some people openly commented that I was being foolish for spending so much time studying just to go to college, because you lose the salary and you risk leaving Shanghai. You know, this was considered a very good life.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: And college graduates earned about the same wages as other workers. Still, Zhao persisted, and his break came after Mao died and the Cultural Revolution ended. Zhao was admitted into Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University. The imposing statue of the chairman quickly went from being a metaphor for Chinese thought to a historic relic.

XINSHU ZHAO: I remember that there was some talks, even amongst Fudan students, that this particular statue might be removed. But it stayed.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The towering influence at Fudan and throughout China soon became Deng Xiaoping, a pragmatist who had survived two purges. Deng quickly began to open China's economy to the outside world, and made it possible for young Chinese to seek training in the West.

XINSHU ZHAO: And it was somewhat by accident that I was later picked to be a so-called preparatory student, to be chanting English and then have a chance to apply for the scholarship and university admission in the United States.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: It was followed by Stanford University, then Wisconsin. Today Zhao is a tenured Professor of Journalism at the University of North Carolina, where he lives with his wife Peilu and two daughters. His younger brother became an engineer and settled in Ohio. His older brother, Xin Yung, is a manager in a Shanghai bicycle factory. His wife is a business executive who was away when we visited the Shanghai high-rise home they share with daughter Ii Ping.

XIN YUN ZHAO: (speaking through interpreter) The best would be one girl and one boy, but it's enough to have one. She's a good kid. We have to think of the next generation. Look at our family when we were growing up. Because we had so many children-- there were three of us-- it was so crowded.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: He notes that Ii Ping already enjoys more space than her father's entire family once did. The prospects are also looking good for the radio factory, after a long struggle at the edge of bankruptcy. The aging plant was saddled with debt and outdated equipment, until it was recently purchased by a state-owned electronics conglomerate. The new owners infused cash, new products, and a market-savvy manager. Unlike in many Chinese factories today, Huang Zhuxiang says attrition made layoffs unnecessary here. Still, there are no longer guarantees of employment or equal pay for all-- hallmarks of the old system

HUANG ZHUZIANG: (speaking through interpreter) Today we can choose our workers, and at the same time, they can choose to work for us. In the controlled economy, workers were assigned here, and all the jobs paid the same. But in the market economy, some jobs require more skills, and should be paid more salary. Of course, some of our older workers will have difficulty with this, but this cannot stop us from joining the market economy. For people who don't have the skills, we've tried to find lesser jobs, like cleaning.

XINSHU ZHAO: Now, this would be similar to what I did. Most of this is done by the machine now, so he can focus on one thing.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Overall, wages and living standards for most workers have improved significantly since Zhao worked here. It's a symbol of the economic advancement, especially in China's eastern cities, achievements Zhao says he's proud of.

XINSHU ZHAO: I'm sure that this city and this country will have a bright future, when I look at the progress that it has made in the past ten or twenty years.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: At the same time, Zhao says progress on the political front has been much slower to take hold.

XINSHU ZHAO: People cannot recognize the importance of freedom of speech, does not recognize the importance of freedom of press, does not recognize the idea of let ideas freely compete with each other eventually, since we'll... the good ideas will come, and the society will improve, and a lot of ideas like that has not been widely accepted by the people. It's not that one government does not allow it. It's not that one official does not allow it. It will take a long while. It has to be a natural process.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Zhao says his children's generation may enjoy those freedoms someday, including the option to live either in China or the United States. For now, his own freedom to write and publish, especially on the Chinese media, is guaranteed only in the United States, where he now has permanent residence.

FOCUS - SUPREME COURT WATCH

JIM LEHRER: A Fourth Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court today, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: The constitutional right protecting American citizens from unreasonable search and seizures, the Fourth Amendment, is at the core of today's case from Illinois. Simply put, can police detain an individual and search him solely because he ran away from them? For more on the hearing, we turn to NewsHour regular Jan Crawford Greenburg, national legal affairs correspondent for the "Chicago Tribune." Well, let's start with the arrest that leads to this case. One day on the west side of Chicago.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: That's right. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and William Wardlow was standing in front of a building on Chicago's west side when several police cars approached. He saw them, and he had one reaction. He ran. He ran down a gangway and through an alley, and two of the officers in one car -- who hadn't really noticed anything suspicious about Wardlow before -- saw him run and followed him. They stopped him and patted him down. And when they did that, they noticed he was carrying a gun. Wardlow ultimately was convicted for illegally carrying a weapon and on appeal, he argued that the search was illegal because it violated his constitutional right under the Fourth Amendment to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

RAY SUAREZ: The precedent in this case is, I guess, about 30 years old -- the idea that there has to be reasonable suspicion before the police can make a warrantless search. Does this have a chance of overturning or just refining that precedent?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, it would refine it. In general, you know, police can't stop and search someone unless they have probable cause to believe the person has committed a crime. But in that 1968 case, which is called Terry Versus Ohio, the Supreme Court said that because of the great interest in helping prevent crime, some stops may be justified. So therefore, if a police officer has reasonable suspicion to think that someone has committed a crime or is about to commit a crime, as Justice Kennedy said today, criminal activity is afoot, they can briefly stop and briefly question that person. And for their own safety, they can pat them down. Now, that's the extent of the stop. They can't, you know, search any further than that. It's really just considered a brief stop and pat-down.

RAY SUAREZ: Was it argued today in the court that the very act of running away was sufficient to create this reasonable suspicion and thus meet the standard?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Yeah, that's right. Generally, the court has required that police officers, before they would stop and frisk somebody, look at all the circumstances. And they've been very reluctant to say, yes, this specific behavior would justify a police officer stopping and patting somebody down, you know, would give police officer the reasonable suspicion that was necessary. But today, the Cook County state's attorney, Richard Devine, asked the court to issue a very specific and clear rule. If someone runs away from the police, then... and the police officer has identified himself and he has not provoked any kind of encounter, in that situation, police officers should always be able to run after the person, stop them, detain them, pat them down, and then ask them some questions to find out, you know, what's going on.

RAY SUAREZ: During today's oral argument, was there an attempt made to demonstrate that there might be a perfectly innocent of legitimate reason for running away?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Yeah. That, to me, is one of the most fascinating things about this case. It involves very, you know, difficult legal questions. But it turns, I think, a lot on how people perceive the police and how sympathetic someone might be to someone's differing perceptions of the officers. And that's what the Justices spent the very first part of the argument on. And really, based on their questions, you could tell that how they viewed that, why would someone run from the police in the first place, went a long way to determining how they might decide the case in the end. The more liberal justices, Justice David Souter, Stephen Breyer, came up with a lot of reasons why someone might run from a police officer. Maybe they're afraid of the police. Maybe there's a racial element involved, as Justice Breyer suggested. Justice Souter said, you know, people might see a rapidly developing politician station. Bullets may be flying. They want to get out of there; they're going run. The conservative Justices on the other hand, followed more what the state's attorney in Cook County argued. Why would you run from police if you're innocent? Certainly, as Justice Scalia said, can't imagine people would run away when they see a rapidly developing situation. In fact, police have to push people out of the way because everybody is trying to crowd around and see what's going on. So they didn't buy the argument that there is a lot of other reasons that it could explain why someone would run away. They recognized and Justice Scalia recognized that sure, this might sweep in some innocent behavior, innocent people, but the overall compelling need for this was greater than that.

RAY SUAREZ: There have been a lot of cases like this in the last couple of years -- ones that sort of reexamine police powers, the extent of a reasonable search. There was that firestorm about that drug case in New York that was decided by a federal judge.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Right. And these are very... I mean, I think they're very important issues. They are issues that everyone can relate to. They go to the heart of how much power we want police officers to have -- what kind of balancing decisions we're going to have, police power on the one hand versus people being able to walk away from police -- be free from police intrusion, because the Supreme Court has never questioned the basic foundation that you have a right not to talk to police if the officer doesn't, you know, suspect you of doing anything wrong. You can just walk away. And the lawyer for William Wardlow today said, you know, this is crazy. We're going to have a situation where you can walk away from police, you don't have to cooperate. But if you run away, that's going to justify police officers coming after you and stopping you.

RAY SUAREZ: So when can people pick up the paper and see a decision in this case?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, I think this was a pretty controversial one. So, it may be a few weeks or months. But we'll have to the end of June, so stay tuned on this one.

RAY SUAREZ: Jan Crawford Greenburg, thanks for coming by.

DIALOGUE

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen engages Nicholas Lemann, staff writer at the "New Yorker" and author of "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy."

DAVID GERGEN: In your new book, you argue that the scholastic aptitude test, the SAT which is such a cultural landmark in this society, has basically in the last 50 years gone off-track from what it was intended to be. Help us understand what it was supposed to be and what's happened.

NICHOLAS LEMANN, Author: Well, I'll sort of answer in reverse if I could.

DAVID GERGEN: Sure.

NICHOLAS LEMANN: The SAT now is taken now by about 2 million kids a year. There's a very kind of creepy national obsession built around it, including test prep, very expensive test prep. Now we have super test prep that lasts years and costs much more than the regular test prep. High schools teach to the test academically. There is social conflict around it. You know, there are initiatives and lawsuits.

DAVID GERGEN: It's the passport into college.

NICHOLAS LEMANN: Because it's regarded as the one thing that is most likely to determine where you end up in life in America for everybody -- that is not what the test was intended to do. It would horrify the founders to see what's happening now. What they were up to was kind of...it's an interesting and untold chapter in American history. What they wanted to do was a bit of social engineering. They wanted to get rid of the then national elite, which is what we would call roughly speaking, preppies -- get them off the center stage and bring in a new kind of elite which would be people of very, very high academic ability. So the test was supposed to discover a few people like this, send them to college on scholarship, and then slot them into the establishment.

DAVID GERGEN: This is what they intended. Who is they and when did they do it?

NICHOLAS LEMANN: The key figure really is James Bryant Conant, who was the president of Harvard in the 1930's and 40's, a name people don't know now, but a highly influential citizen. He is also responsible for the atomic bomb - among his accomplishments. He was the driving force in selecting the SAT as a scholarship test and then creating the educational testing service of which he was the first chairman as a kind of big single, sort of benign monopoly agency to manage the transitions in life for everybody.

DAVID GERGEN: From Conant's point of view hasn't an institution like Harvard, which once did have a lot of preppies become much more of an institution where public high school graduates, many more public high school graduates, there are many more blacks, there are many more Asians.

NICHOLAS LEMANN: Conant, of course, had no thoughts about race and ethnicity when he was setting up this radar screen. That was not on his radar screen. Class was on his radar screen. Geographical diversity was, too. He won-- and he deserves credit for this because the character of the Ivy League elite universities has definitely changed. It's changed in the direction he wanted it to change. We forget, when he started, you know, a college kid at Harvard or Yale wasn't supposed to be very brainy or academic. They were suspect if they were. He changed who is at these schools. He changed who controls the sort of establishment institutions and professions that these schools track into. And he changed the definition of merit that operates in this whole world. That's a big change. On the whole, it's a change for the better.

DAVID GERGEN: So, what's wrong?

NICHOLAS LEMANN: There's two things. One is, the people selected in Conant's view... he called them American radicals in one of his writings. He wanted them to be selfless public servants, the leadership class of the country. They wouldn't try to pass on what they had to their kids. They wouldn't look like an aristocracy. They would like, you know, public servants. That's not the feel of it today. There's a tremendous competition for college admission. And that's a competition because people think college admission to an elite college equals status. So that's what people are trying to get. The people who go to these college, by and large, do not go on to devote themselves to public service. They're not regarded by the rest of the country as leaders. But the real issue comes in when you go from saying we're going to select 500 or a thousand kids a year to groom them for leadership positions - no problem there -- to saying we're going to grow this organization and this system to where it processes 2 million kids a year and it feels to them like it's assigning all of them to a permanent place in life.

DAVID GERGEN: So where would you go? What alterations would you recommend?

NICHOLAS LEMANN: This system... let's divide it into 50-year chunks, since we're end of the century. The last 50 years is the half century of this system that I write about, the SAT meritocracy. The design principle is let's not worry about the quality of American education. Instead, let's find the few of very high ability and kind of nationalize education for them, pull them out of the education system, and get them into a university system whose quality we trust and put many opportunities in their way. So that worked. What should be the goal and I think will be the goal and is already the goal for the next 50 years is let's fix the public school system in this country. Let's make sure that, you know, everything from kindergarten through 12th grade in public education is reliably good for everybody. Let us guarantee that no kid is going to have to go to a school that just doesn't teach, because one thing that has happened as a kind of accidental result of this system is if you don't go to college, you're out of town. There used to be a lot of elaborate opportunity for people who hadn't been to college. When this system was set up, we had our last President who had not been to college .. Harry Truman. Now you can't get any white-collar job without having gone to college. So the country really has to deliver on the mass opportunity side of the equation through improving the education system and not worry so much about elite selection. Conant thought, if I take care of elite selection, everything else will take care of itself. That did not happen.

DAVID GERGEN: Instead of reforming the test, you would reform curriculum and reform the way we help kids meet the standards of the curriculum.

NICHOLAS LEMANN: Tests are tools. There's a lot of cart-and-horse going on here. You don't start by writing a test and then ask the world to adapt to it. You start by deciding what you want to do and then devise a test to accomplish that thing. The SAT is devised to pull the superstars out of the public school system and not affect the public school system at all. Instead, what we should do is have, you know... we should phase in over time, I think, a replacement for the SAT which would be a national achievement test based on a national curriculum. So you'd say to the kid, yes, you still have to take a college admissions test at the end of high school, but it's going to be test a on what you actually learned in school.

DAVID GERGEN: There are a lot of folks that try to go down the road of a national curriculum, national testing. There is an awful lot of resistance, as you know.

NICHOLAS LEMANN: First of all, there really is a prairie fire going across this country to do this very thing on the state level. All the big states have done it. It's the hot thing in state government. It's the centerpiece of Governor Bush's campaign for President, which is going quite well. Once all the states adopt their own state curricula based on state tests, they're not going to billion that different from each other. I mean, it's a fairly minor point whether you trump them all with the national curriculum. Colleges can look at the state tests and see what they mean without a national test. The other thing I'd ask people to remember is we have a national curriculum. The SAT, in effect, other tests like advanced placement and SAT 2's, the achievement tests, textbook sales, there's all this stuff going on in the private sector that in effect, creates a national curriculum. But it works a lot better for the most prosperous and studious kids than it works for everybody. So if we have one already, let's go all the way and say we're doing it and do it right.

DAVID GERGEN: I'm afraid we have to leave it there. Nick Lemann, thank you very much.

NICHOLAS LEMANN: Thank you.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Tuesday: the Navy said it had located signals from the black boxes of EgyptAir Flight 990, but the search was called off because of bad weather. Boeing held up delivery of nearly three dozen new commercial jetliners because of a faulty part. And President Clinton said his meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Oslo had revitalized the peace process. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.