The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight some perspective on the mission and history of the independent counsel's job; political analysis by Paul Gigot and Tom Oliphant, substituting for Mark Shields; a Spencer Michels update on the California floods; a David Gergen dialogue about society's influence on technology; and a Valentine poem read by poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky. It all follows our summary of the news this Friday. NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: President Clinton said today Russia's opposition would not deter the United States from using force against Iraq. He said he has already bent over backwards for months to achieve a diplomatic solution, and the U.S. could not just walk away from Iraq's defiance of the United Nations. He spoke to reporters at the White House.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: And I hope that whatever happens that our relationship with Russia will continue to be productive and constructive and strong because that's very important to the future of our people.

REPORTER: If push comes to shove, are you going to be able to go forward--if Russia says, "nyet?"

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I don't believe--nyet is not no for the United States under these circumstances.

JIM LEHRER: In other developments today Iraq's U.N. ambassador said two U.N. experts were going to Baghdad this weekend to survey eight presidential sites off limits to weapons inspectors. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Shelton, said a plan to strike Iraq with Cruise missiles and Stealth bombers has been developed, and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger said civilian deaths in Iraq could not be ruled out once a conflict started. He told the National Press Club in Washington that the American people recognized the seriousness of this matter.

SAMUEL BERGER, National Security Adviser: I think they understand that you have to stand up to individuals like Saddam Hussein who continually tries to push the limits of the box that he's in, and that if we don't do that, he is not simply going to stay in Baghdad and grow old in a rocking chair on the porch of one of his hundreds of palaces.

JIM LEHRER: Berger said the U.S. would still monitor Saddam's activities in the aftermath of force and warned the United States will not go away. Dr. David Satcher was sworn in as surgeon general of the United States today. It was done at an Oval Office ceremony with President Clinton and Vice President Gore. The President said Satcher will be America's family doctor; he would give plain talk and sound advice. Satcher said fighting under-aged smoking would be a higher priority.

DR. DAVID SATCHER, Surgeon General: Every day in this country, as you've heard, 3,000 children become regular smokers, falling into the grip of an addiction that eventually will claim many of their lives. More than 80 percent of adult smokers became regular smokers before the age of 18, meaning that many of them will be addicted before they are lawfully able to buy tobacco. Our promise to our children is to take bold action to help them to take tobacco out of their future.

JIM LEHRER: Satcher fills a position that has been vacant since Joycelyn Elders resigned more than three years ago. Later in the day in Philadelphia Mr. Clinton talked about curbing teen smoking in a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He said new government figures show his planned $1.20 hike of the cigarettes tax over five years would keep 2.8 million teens from smoking. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt told his employees today he wasn't going anywhere; he was going to remain Secretary and be cleared of any wrongdoing. He urged them not to be distracted by accusations against him. Attorney General Reno Wednesday asked for the appointment of an independent counsel to determine if Babbitt lied to Congress about an Indian casino license.

BRUCE BABBITT, Secretary of Interior: It has been tempting at times to throw it all up and say, you know, they hell with it, it's not worth it, I'm going home. But I never will because I'm bound and determined to stay with you to vindicate this department and this process that you made in the case the right decision, the right way, for the right reasons. And I'm here and I'm going to fight this out to the bitter end, and we will be vindicated.

JIM LEHRER: Babbitt said his problems stem from the corrosive, antagonistic, bitter culture that has settled over Washington. We'll have more on independent counsel investigations right after this News Summary. An agreement was reached today between Caterpillar and the United Auto Workers Union. It affects 13,000 workers in four states who have been working six years without a contract. Union members will vote on the accord next weekend. Caterpillar is headquartered in Peoria, Illinois. It's the world's largest heavy equipment maker. Also in business news today two large accounting firms called off their merger. KPMP Peat Marwick and Ernst & Young had announced last October they would combine to become the largest auditing firm in the world. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to some perspective on the independent counsel, political analysis by Paul Gigot and Tom Oliphant, the California floods, a David Gergen dialogue, and a Valentine poem. FOCUS - ACTING INDEPENDENTLY

JIM LEHRER: The unique role of the independent counsel. Kwame Holman begins.

KWAME HOLMAN: Earlier this week Attorney General Janet Reno called for the sixth independent counsel to investigate potential wrongdoing by a Clinton administration official. Once named, the newest prosecutor will examine Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's sworn statement that there was no improper political influence involved in his department's decision to reject an Indian casino application. Indian tribes who oppose the casino contributed heavily to the Democratic Party. At a confidence-building gathering of department employees this morning Secretary Babbitt repeated what he told two congressional investigating committees; that he did nothing wrong.

SEC. BRUCE BABBITT: Something really is out of whack in this system of ours where we--simply say the facts will not suffice and we will pile one investigative process on top of another, and we'll just keep going endlessly on and on and on. The system is clearly--the times are out of synch, and so is the system.

KWAME HOLMAN: Over the last 20 years there have been 18 independent counsels who have spent more than $130 million. It was President Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox that prompted Congress to pass the Ethics in Government Act, which includes the independent counsel statute. The longest running independent counsel probe was Lawrence Walsh's seven- year, $47 million investigation of the Iran-Contra affair. That involved allegations the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and used the proceeds illegally to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Walsh won 10 convictions, including that of National Security Aide Oliver North, although North's conviction later was overturned. Six others ultimately were pardoned by President George Bush. Current independent counsel investigations have produced indictments of former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy for allegedly accepting gifts from a lobbyist representing an agriculture company and of former Housing & Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros on charges he lied about payments he made to a former mistress. Kenneth Starr was appointed in 1994 to replace Robert Fiske, who had begun investigating then Governor Bill Clinton's and Mrs. Clinton's real estate deal known as Whitewater. Over the last four years Starr's investigation has been expanded to include the suicide of former Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, the firing of the White House Travel Office staff and how FBI files of permanent Republicans were used by the Clinton White House. On January 21st, it was revealed Starr was looking into charges President Clinton had encouraged former White House intern Monica Lewinsky to lie about an affair the two are alleged to have had. The latest investigation has intensified criticism maintained almost from the outset by the President that Starr is running a partisan vendetta.

JIM LEHRER: But you personally believe that that's what this is all about, is to get you and Mrs. Clinton?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: It's it obvious?

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is the vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President.

JAMES CARVILLE, Democratic Political Strategist: This is a scuzzy investigation. And I guarantee you one thing; that when the facts come out, people are going to be repulsed by this.

KWAME HOLMAN: But Starr's supporter say his investigations, including the Lewinsky matter, are justified. Federal Appeals Court Judge Alex Kozinsky has known Starr for 22 years since the two were law clerks together at the Supreme Court. He told NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels in San Francisco it's doubtful Starr has become overzealous.

JUDGE ALEX KOZINSKI, Federal Appeals Court: You put scruples and honesty, integrity above everything else. I've known him professionally; I've known him personally; I've known him big things and little things; and I've known him--I've never known him to be anything but straight. That guy thinks about whether it's the right thing to do before he thinks about anything else. Certainly, in his work as a judge, certainly his work as a lawyer, there's no ideology.

KWAME HOLMAN: Like the probes of other independent counsels, Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Clinton has no time limit and no precise cap on funding.

JIM LEHRER: Now, the overview perspectives of NewsHour regulars Presidential Historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss; author/journalist Haynes Johnson, joined tonight by Katy Harriger, professor of politics at Wake Forest University, who's written extensively on the independent counsel.Doris, first, remind us of what the general reasoning was behind--we know it began, as Kwame said, during the Nixon administration, but what was the premise on which independent counsels were created?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: Yes. I think it's so important to recreate the drama of that moment because we just sort of shorthand it when we say the Cox massacre that night. What had happened is after Attorney General Mitchell was indicted and Richardson was about to be nominated as a new attorney general, the Congress required him to appoint a special prosecutor before they would send his nomination forward. He appointed Cox, who interestingly was a Democrat and the Republicans were upset to some extent that he had once worked for John Kennedy and that his partisanship might be too clear. So this has always been a problem. But he, instead, went and was very discreet, worked very slightly during the summer, but then he was the one who found about the tapes, the tapes come forward, he goes to Judge Sirica to get an order for those tapes to be released, and Nixon refuses to release the tapes until finally he makes an agreement saying he'll release a summary of the tapes and Sen. Stennis will decide whether it's a real summary or not. Cox then refuses that agreement, goes to a defiant press conference at which point Nixon orders the Richardson--the attorney general to fire him. He refuses to fire him and then he resigns, himself, so then it goes down to Ruckelhaus, the next guy. Ruckelhaus refuses to fire him, and he is fired, himself. Finally, they get to the solicitor general Bork who does agree to fire Cox, and that produces an outrage in the country and in the Congress who begins to introduce the articles of impeachment and even begin to introduce a bill which is so incredibly interesting to take the attorney general out of the President's cabinet and put him in the judiciary, which is where the framers originally thought of maybe putting him. They wanted an independent person in the judiciary but they put him in the President's cabinet, and they introduce an independent counsel bill. Finally, they get a special prosecutor, and that is Jaworski--and Nixon accepts that he will come back; he turns the tapes over; Jaworski does a very good job. But that anger is still there, and several years later the independent counsel law is born out of the whole Nixon fiasco. Sometimes they say hard cases make bad law. In this case this drama did, in fact, create probably a bad counsel law.

JIM LEHRER: And, Professor Harriger, the idea, the premise was that an administration cannot investigate its own wrongdoing, is that it, that's what came out of that, and that's what has guided this ever since?

KATY HARRIGER, Wake Forest University: Right. I mean, the presumption was that there was a conflict of interest any time the attorney general had to investigate his superior or her superior. And by extension, the assumption was that really any time they had to investigate someone in the executive branch, where there might be some political fallout or damage, with those allegations that they had a conflict of interest.

JIM LEHRER: And in the Nixon case there were allegations that the attorney general was, in fact, too political to do this; that they really did have to have an independent counsel of some kind?

KATY HARRIGER: Well, sure. I think that Klindinse, Richard Klindinse, was alleged to have been feeding information to the White House about the investigation that was going on, and, of course, he was part of that first group of people that was forced to resign. And so there was some real distrust of the Department of Justice generally as a result of that.

JIM LEHRER: As a matter of history, Michael, how did these kinds of things get resolved before Nixon, before there was, in fact, special prosecutors and independent counsels?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: It tended to be done within the Justice Department. And they didn't oftentimes do a good time. One example is the administration of Harry Truman, who we think of rightfully as a very honest President and almost the incarnation of integrity, but we sometimes forget that in the late Truman administration there were serious allegations of fairly high level corruption and influence peddling. Truman actually got his attorney general to appoint someone to advise him on what should be done. The attorney general didn't like it and actually dragged his heels, and so that nothing really was done against the people who were possibly responsible for this corruption. The same thing happened to an extent in the Eisenhower administration. Dwight Eisenhower's chief person, Sherman Adams, the assistant to the President, equivalent to what we would now call chief of staff, was accused of having taken favors and property from someone with interests in front of the government.

JIM LEHRER: Famous Vicuna coat.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Vicuna coat, absolutely, and free hotel rooms from a man named Bernard Goldfine of New Hampshire. Adams finally had to resign. There was no legal action taken against him. We later discovered that Adams had actually taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Goldfine, and that was in late 1950's dollars. Had there been an independent counsel at the time, that would have come out, and that would have actually been investigated and gone through the legal process, so the point is before the moment of Cox and Jaworski these things were really not very well done at all.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think of the basic premise behind this, Haynes, that it is really impossible for a Justice Department, anybody's Justice Department, to investigate their own?

HAYNES JOHNSON, Author/Journalist: Well, if you take that point of view, you assume that the system, itself, doesn't work; that nobody's accountable; that you have to have some sort of god-like figure that can create some divine power to solve all of our problems. What it seems to me, Jim, what we've got here is an old American strain, fundamentally at the core of our country is concern over power. That's what our revolution was all about--the abuses of power; and we go through these continual cycles of reform and repression, reform and reaction. And we keep winding up with the question about who watches the watchman. That's where we are today. I suspect most people in this country are wondering how do we get from here to there? All of a sudden we're investigating acts that took place 20 years ago that were not about the acts of a sitting President. We're investigating sexual allegations that may not even be a federal crime, or a crime at all perhaps. And so these things seem to expand and grow and grow like amoebas, and I think there is a real problem about reining in the old American tradition of reining in power. And I think you can investigate yourself if you've got good people. If you don't, there are remedies for it. You remove them, you have extra people, and you can appoint outside counsels without this separate extra-legal group that now seems to be operating.

JIM LEHRER: Yes. Professor Harriger, the key word here is independent, is it not? I mean, that was the whole--that's the whole point of this, that they want something or some person or some group of people are truly independent, cannot be touched by presidents, attorney generals, and others, right?

KATY HARRIGER: Right. I mean, the assumption I think that Congress had was that in order to reassure the public that these investigations were, in fact, impartial that there had to be someone that the president didn't control doing the investigation. And that was the lesson of the Saturday night massacre. The President can't control the independent counsel. And so the independence is the key, I think, or at least Congress assumed it was--the key to having the public be willing to accept the outcome at the end, whether they decide that there is nothing there and that no prosecution is necessary, or they decide that prosecution or, in the President's case, impeachment is necessary.

JIM LEHRER: Now, Doris, some people are arguing now that maybe there's such a thing as too much independence.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, you know, there may be a sense in which it's understandable how after that Nixon problem, there was this impulse to create the independent prosecutor. What's harder for me to understand, however, is that after the experience of that independent prosecutor for the last 15 years, when it came up for renewal in 1994, because the bill had actually expired, creating the one post Nixon, that the Congress didn't spend the time to try and figure out, okay, we've lived with this thing for 20 years, what's gone right with it, what's gone wrong? Maybe it shouldn't have an unlimited budget; maybe it shouldn't be able to target people without having enough of a bill of particulars to begin with. Maybe there has to be some absolute clarity that the person is independent and doe have a partisan kind of cast to it because it's lost some of its legitimacy. You figure they could have done something. In fact, it's interesting because President Bush begged, or so I understand, Clinton not to sign the reauthorization. But at that point it had been mostly Republicans that had been hurt by it, and I think Clinton problem caught in the middle of a campaign where he had been a fan of the independent counsel did go for it. But you would hope that at least this whole mess that we've got now would make them say when it comes back again in 1999, do we want it in this form, do we need it? Michael's right. We need something perhaps more independent than a special prosecutor, but I don't think we need this thing now. It's become permanent embattlement. It's led to cynicism about the country, about the government, lack of proportion, Whitewater versus campaign finance, the latter, really important, got no outrage because we were so tired of Whitewater. Something's amiss.

JIM LEHRER: But, Haynes, back to your point, that some people would argue that cynicism or the lack of faith and confidence in the government requires that there be something independent.

HAYNES JOHNSON: There's no way--

JIM LEHRER: An attorney general or a president could get away with it--

HAYNES JOHNSON: Yes, it is, Jim, and the paradox is that what we're seeing now is going to sow more cynicism about unchecked power, looking into this and that, and how do we get from here to there. There are some simple remedies to this situation. Archibald Cox, for whom all of this flows, Lawrence Walsh was Iran-Contra prosecutor, are arguing that you can radically shrink the power of this act. You can limit it to specific acts, crimes that were supposed to have been alleged to have been committed during an act of the public office of three named people, only three people: the president, the vice president, and the attorney general. You can limit the money and the time and go for that and then reach a resolution. That seems to me reasonable.

JIM LEHRER: But, Michael, the idea behind this is that the confidence of the American people is what this whole thing is about.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That's--

JIM LEHRER: All right. Lawrence Walsh, which everybody's talked about, Iran-Contra, became a very controversial person. And when he came out with his report, it was torn apart politically, just like any other political document. Kenneth Starr's in the middle of a political storm now, as much as a legal storm. What's the difference?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That's the problem, because this was always a critique of what had happened to attorneys general and the Justice Department. Could Robert Kennedy, for instance, have investigated his brother if there was a serious charge against John Kennedy when he was attorney general? Pretty doubtful. Could John Mitchell, Nixon's former campaign manager, have done the same? Also pretty doubtful. But now there is the same kind of cynicism growing about the independent counsel. Take Lawrence Walsh--investigated Iran-Contra, yet, three days before the election in 1992, when Bill Clinton and George Bush in some polls were neck in neck, the Friday before the election, Lawrence Walsh releases information that suggests that George Bush had not been truthful about Iran-Contra. From that moment, Bush's poll numbers began sinking through that Tuesday. Many Bush people feel that Walsh's timing helped them lose that election. Now there is a lot of cynicism about Kenneth Starr, whether he has a similar political agenda from the other side. So, oddly enough, we now have a mirror image of the old charges about attorneys general.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Jim, just listening to Michael, it seems to me what we have is the question of discretion and judgment. That's at the heart of whomever is going to be appointed to any of these jobs. You have to rely upon their good judgment and care with which they apply the law, particularly with the power to investigate elements that might shake and affect the direction of the country.

JIM LEHRER: Professor Harriger, you've studied this thing. Have you--can you figure out a way through all of this that it might work and do all the things we've been talking about, give it a fair and non-political investigation of legitimate charges against people in power and then have results that would be welcomed, or accepted by the American people?

KATY HARRIGER: Well, you know, one of the ironies, I think, of the history of its implementation is that in all the cases where you did have, I think, public acceptance of the outcome were really cases where the public had really very little knowledge. So most of those 18 cases are pretty much off the public's radar screen, and it's really Iran-Contra and Whitewater where you actually have some recognition of the significance that--

JIM LEHRER: Let's go through some of that. For instance, you're talking about even the Espy case and of course, that has not been resolved yet.

KATY HARRIGER: Right.

JIM LEHRER: Cisneros has not been resolved.

KATY HARRIGER: Right.

JIM LEHRER: What are some of the others that you would mention on your list?

KATY HARRIGER: Well, there were two investigations of Ed Meese, one of which got some attention because it came up during his confirmation process, but the other really very little; an investigation of Michael Deaver, an investigation of Lynn Nofsiger, both of whom were prosecuted. Way back into the Carter administration was two allegations of cocaine use. So really pretty minor cases that didn't get very much attention outside the beltway and which were resolved fairly quickly and where the outcome was widely accepted by people who were paying attention as impartial. So the two cases where you get the real controversy and you realize the real political nature of this office involve the President. I think that the idea that we should shrink its coverage significantly is a good one, but frankly I don't think the republic would fall apart if we didn't have one. I think the history suggests that when the public's sufficiently upset and concerned about impartial investigation and when the press is helping the public feel that way, that you do get independent counsels appointed even without a statute.

JIM LEHRER: Yes. Do you have a feeling, Doris, that this is going to change?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I do think so now. I mean, I think certainly when it comes back up again in 1999 for debate, this widespread sense, I think what's really fueling it this time too is when special prosecutor Cox was working on the early Watergate stuff, there were very few leaks that came out of his office. It was pretty quiet, as I said, that summer, until the tapes thing exploded. And I think what you've got now is this incestuous combination between the media, the leaks, and this independent counsel and even the political process that may be leaking on their side. So we've got this fourth branch. It used to be said that the media was the fourth branch. Now, this sort of independent counsel is like the fourth branch. Somewhere there has to be some limits on the discretion that's used and the quiet that is--or the secrecy that is employed. People's lives are being destroyed by this thing right now, and it's not only Starr's fault; it's the process, itself, that's gotten screwed up. So I think hopefully we're not going to--if this thing comes to some resolution, we're not going to forget how badly we felt about it and just say, okay, let's go on and reauthorize it because it's easy.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. Well, look, we have to leave it there. Thank you all four very much. FOCUS - POLITICAL WRAP

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight Gigot & Oliphant, California floods, a Gergen dialogue, and a Valentine poem.

JIM LEHRER: Phil Ponce is with Gigot & Oliphant.

PHIL PONCE: Mark Shields is not here tonight but NewsHour regular and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot is, and joining him is Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant. Gentlemen.Paul, how would you assess Kenneth Starr's performance?

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: I don't think you can answer that question unless you start at the beginning and look back four years ago to where--how Ken Starr began. He was at the time every Democrat's favorite Republican lawyer. When the Senate wanted to look at the Packwood diaries, they needed Bob Packwood's personal diaries. They needed a non-partisan source, somebody who they thought could look at them fairly and assess them.

PHIL PONCE: To look at the sexual harassment charges.

PAUL GIGOT: That's right. Who did they call? Ken Starr. John Kerry said he's certainly a neutral party. He's a professor type. He was brought in precisely to be special counsel precisely for that reputation. He's not a prosecutor. What happened over time is he found himself having to perform more like a prosecutor and particularly found himself up against the smash mouth brand of politics that this administration has played. The administration unleashed first Carrier, James Carville on 'em, started hitting him up for his clients, which he shouldn't have kept--I agree--tobacco companies, playing a very rough brand of politics. And over time I think that has had the ironic effect of hardening him to the task, making him more like some of the prosecutors he's brought in, and slowly to exaggerate the point but still make it, they've turned Clark Kent into a super prosecutor who's playing their own rough brand of politics.

PHIL PONCE: Has Ken Starr morphed into something evil, as he would put it maybe?

PAUL GIGOT: I don't think evil. He's playing a rougher game.

PHIL PONCE: Overstating your position; acknowledged.

TOM OLIPHANT, Boston Globe: I think there's an awful lot in what Paul just said that I agree with from a different perspective. Where I think the problem arises is what the office under this stupid law does to the man. And I'm reminded of what it did to a very similar man with a very similar image, Lawrence Walsh a decade ago. He could not extricate himself from the quagmire of Iran Contra, and the deeper he got into it against an administration that played smash mouth politics against him, the more he became wedded to a particular theory of the crime, the more he spun stories, the more money he spent, the more he got nowhere. Very much the same thing has happened to Judge Starr. He has become part in a way of the allegations, spin, fight over scandal politics system that Washington has evolved into. And as a result, he has become more an advocate for a particular point of view than a dispassionate investigator in the public's eye, and particularly in recent weeks since this controversy burst into full bloom, he has appeared to be a part of the spin mechanism behind a number of specific stories that have not turned out to be true, above all involving eyewitnesses to events that somehow disappear the more you examine them. So I don't think the fault is in the man. I think the problem is what this particular office does to people who cannot figure out a way to bring investigations to a conclusion.

PHIL PONCE: Paul, but how about this man's specific tactics, for example, bringing in Monica Lewinsky's mother?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, I think you can fairly say that Starr's made mistakes, but I think they've been political mistakes, not legal mistakes. He shouldn't have taken that detour to Malibu, nice as it is, for a while, resigning temporarily, and he should have dropped his clients to avoid even the--other clients to avoid even the appearance of any conflict of interest. But the tactics he's playing, while considered rough, are, nonetheless, standard operating procedure for an awful lot of prosecutorial investigations. Remember, you're dealing with an administration that has resisted and litigated everything he's wanted to do. It's always fought. It's always resisted, and he's found himself to get to the essential truth and to the bottom he's had to play that kind of prosecutorial effort.

PHIL PONCE: Tom, do you think those are standard prosecutorial tactics?

TOM OLIPHANT: Well, you know, Paul is right. If you look at each one of these decisions, whether to hold Monica Lewinsky without a lawyer more or less for several hours, whether to call her mother before the grand jury and subject her to the particular kind of questioning and exposure to those audio tapes that he did, any one of those decisions can find its parallel in things that prosecutors do every day. But if you take them as a whole, I think you can say accurately that every time he's had a call to make, he has chosen the roughest, most invasive procedure and in a political contest, which is what this is in the end, you have to take responsibility for--one forgets that the target of this investigation is the President of the United States. All of the chips are on the table right now. This is not a decision about whether to indict him. He is not going to indict him. It is when to submit evidence to the House of Representatives. And I think in some ways Judge Starr may be mixing the idea of impeachment investigator and independent counsel in a way that the public has problems.

PHIL PONCE: Tom, I just wanted to clarify something that I think you might have said. Are you saying that when Monica Lewinsky's mother was in the grand jury room that they played--

TOM OLIPHANT: My understanding of what happened in that room is that the prosecutor would play a particularly raunchy section of those audio tapes for her, and then ask her questions like: Did your daughter ever say anything like that to you? And I think, from what we understand after she left the grand jury, was that the cumulative effect of that kind of exposure, as it would be on any parent, was particularly painful for her.

PAUL GIGOT: He has a lot better grand jury sources than I did. But I will say this about these leaks. We don't know that Ken Starr's people are the source of things. There are a lot of FBI agents who know an awful lot here, and there are an awful lot of other people, attorneys on all sides, who know some things, and one thing I've tried not to do in this city is run down leaks because you can't.

TOM OLIPHANT: Paul makes a point that's very important and I happen to agree with it. I think the problem comes not from leaking but from spinning, which makes you appear to be a political partisan on one side.

PHIL PONCE: And speaking of spinning, Paul, do you think the White House has been successful in making Ken Starr and his conduct the focus of attention, as opposed to any allegations involving the President?

PAUL GIGOT: Judging by the last five minutes on this show, yes. I don't think there's any question that in a narrow political sense it's worked, the strategy has worked. Ken Starr is down there with Newt Gingrich in the polls. They've really demonized him, and ultimately that might help them as Tom Points out when this goes to the House Judiciary Committee as a report, because it'll affect the credibility of what is presented there because of the author. But in a legal sense it may not be working, and that means--that gets back to the point I made earlier, and that it has hardened Ken Starr and it has hardened his people to their duty, and I think that that may end up making them more determined to actually pursue this all the way to the end as far it goes.

PHIL PONCE: Tom, switching gears, what is your reaction to the attorney general's call for an independent counsel--yet another one--this time to investigate Interior Secretary Babbitt?

TOM OLIPHANT: Well, first of all, that if we needed a final nail in the coffin of this stupid law, the attorney general's decision this week I think constitutes that nail, and it goes to the nature of the case that is now about to be referred. This is a perjury case, at least on its face, against a man with probably the finest reputation of anybody in public life I've ever run into in the last 30 years. Half of this case was thrown by Janet Reno into the waste basket. This involved the dispute and the testimony as to whether there was a mention of campaign contributions. She found the accusation not credible; she found the former friend of Babbitt who made the accusation not credible--deep-sixed, no basis to proceed. What's left is a conflict in Senate and House testimony- -or Senate testimony basically between Babbitt's former friend and Babbitt over whether or not Harold Ickes had anything to do with the timing of the announcement of this decision on the casino license.

PHIL PONCE: And it boils down to a conversation the two of them had.

TOM OLIPHANT: That's correct. And underneath that conflict the attorney general says, I don't have any basis for believing that Babbitt lied, that he had any criminal intent. But because there's a conflict--

PHIL PONCE: The conversation between Babbitt and the lobbyist.

TOM OLIPHANT: And the lobbyist, that's right. But because there's a conflict in the testimony, I can't resolve it, so there has to be an independent counsel. If Bruce Babbitt's name were Joe Schmo, this case wouldn't exist.

PHIL PONCE: Final nail in the coffin, Paul?

PAUL GIGOT: Well, she didn't do Bruce Babbitt any favors because the focus of the issue is really on him and on his truth or the falsity of his statements. But what you did was I think she did the administration--the broader administration a political favor because she kept the framework very narrow, focused on Babbitt, and she basically said, ask the court that has to appoint an independent counsel and the counsel not to expand it to the broader questions which have prevailed here and which have been most politically risky for the White House.

PHIL PONCE: General questions regarding fund-raising. The China connection and that kind of thing.

PAUL GIGOT: And in this specific case, was the casino decision by Bruce Babbitt overturned because of White House pressure or political contributions, and she basically said, don't go after that.

PHIL PONCE: Paul, real quickly in the time we have left, what is your sense of the amount of congressional support there is for an attack against Iraq?

PAUL GIGOT: Less this week than last week, if you can believe that. Usually when an administration makes it case, it increases the support. This week, there were some very, very tough, testy internal sessions, meetings up there where Secretary of State Albright went to make her case with the National Security Council Sandy Berger, one Republican senator said this was the gang that couldn't shoot straight, very tough, the Secretary said, well, we didn't leave Saddam there. That was implying that that was George Bush who left him in place after the Gulf War. There's real doubts up there about the plan and the strategy, number one, and there's also doubts on Capitol Hill about--real doubts about how much they can trust the administration to follow through.

PHIL PONCE: Tom, I'm sorry. We're out of time. Thank you both. FOCUS - COPING

JIM LEHRER: Now a California community copes with El Nino. Spencer Michels reports from California's coast region south of San Francisco.

SPENCER MICHELS: News storms are predicted over the weekend and beyond for rain-soaked California after a brief respite this week. Along the Russian River, where some homes have already been destroyed, nearly 150 more have been evacuated in the face of a giant mudslide. So far, agriculture has not been hit as hard it was three years ago, with damage this year estimated at up to $60 million. Still, farmers concerned about storms on the horizon are not having it easy. The mud is deep, and the coastal valleys of Northern California where almost all of the nation's artichokes and a good portion of its strawberries are grown. Weeks of rain, more in February than they usually get in a whole year, have inundated the artichoke crop, making some of it unfit for market and some of it unharvestable. The company running this operation, Ocean Mist Farms of Castroville, has been around since 1924, and partner Hugo Tottino says the heavy rains of the past month are unheard of in these parts. And that's caused expensive problems.

HUGO TOTTINO, Artichoke Farmer: Artichoke does not like wet feet or wet roots, and it depends on the weather from now on how much more rain we're going to get.

SPENCER MICHELS: What does that do to you and to people who buy artichokes?

HUGO TOTTINO: They'll probably be more expensive, but the expenses are the same to the grower, if not more right not, because we have all these added costs and trying to keep our water down, keep the ditches drained, and what have you.

SPENCER MICHELS: A few miles to the North there is more damage. Strawberry farmer Ed Mehl, who farms right along the Pajaro River, found that the levees by his farm were completely inadequate to handle the rains and the runoff from further upstream.

ED MEHL, Strawberry Farmer: So out of the 80 acres I've planted 60 of it's been underwater and covered with mud. It's a total loss, at least $7,000 an acre times 60, so four or five hundred thousand dollars just in out-of-pocket cost.

SPENCER MICHELS: Because of the high water, Mehl couldn't even get to his farm during the worst of the flooding.

ED MEHL: I already knew what it looked like, because I could just picture it, but when I brought my wife, she started crying. Boy, pretty tough.

SPENCER MICHELS: No one is working on Mehl's farm this week; it's just too wet. And work will be difficult to find this spring.

ED MEHL: Normally I have a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty people work for me; now, I'll probably have forty. So that's a real concern. They're probably more worried than I am because these people work nine--or eight or nine months for me, and a lot of them aren't going to have a job.

SPENCER MICHELS: The farm workers at the Pajaro Valley suffered perhaps more than others because of the storms. Faced with a major flood, Latino farm workers who live in the community and others who live in low-lying areas nearby were ordered into shelters, even though there was no serious flooding. For most of them it was not a pleasant experience, or one they want to repeat. Once they got back home they formed a committee to express their concerns, concerns that center around their children and families and their jobs.

INTERPRETER SPEAKING FOR ANTONIO ROMAN, Farm Worker: First of all, he says, you know, it affects us psychologically because our children are afraid, and they're just expecting that we can evacuate at any time. The problem that we had to be taken out of our homes, you know, every time that it rains very bad, and it's not good to be in the shelters, we thank everybody that has helped, but we need a better solution.

SPENCER MICHELS: The solution these workers is very simple and very direct: just to fix the river so it won't flood them out.

INTERPRETER: That they repair the levee, the river, prepare it for the water that it runs through it and repair it completely.

SPENCER MICHELS: When the Pajaro River burst through a few spots in levees built to contain it, emergency crews patched the holes at night. And when the water receded--and no one knows how long it will last--the Army Corps of Engineers started shoring up the levees to keep the river from spilling into urban and agricultural areas. County officials like Michael Armstrong worked with the corps to prevent a disaster for this small valley.

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG, Monterey County Water Manager: The levee is ready to fail, you know, and the town of Pajaro and the ag land in the surrounding area definitely would have been flooded.

SPENCER MICHELS: You were worried?

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: Very worried. The water was right up to here--right up to here--

SPENCER MICHELS: Armstrong says the levees along the Pajaro were built in 1947 as a federal flood control project, and so the federal government has a responsibility to fix them. But artichoke grower Tottino and his manager Art Barrientos say that fixing the levees is not the only solution. They point out that the holes in the levees were caused by clogged ditches and rivers which can't carry the runoff in heavy storms. The men say the rules protecting the environment get in the way of cleaning the channels.

ART BARRIENTOS, Artichoke Farmer: If you want to move some dirt around here, you need to go through a permitting process that can get very bureaucratic and very tiring. And that is one of the principal obstacles that we are up against.

HUGO TOTTINO: It's just hard to get much done. It takes time, money. It always involved attorneys, what have you.

SPENCER MICHELS: Monterey County official Armstrong admits that farmers have a legitimate beef when they complain about regulations that prevent good maintenance.

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: I think there is truth to that, absolutely. As the years go by, the bureaucracy is getting thicker. And if you are the property owner whose land is endangered, whose home is endangered, it's really tough to go before the county, the coastal commission, state fish and game, and other organizations and get what you need.

SPENCER MICHELS: Kind of interesting coming from a guy who works for the government?

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: Sorry. You know, that's the way it is.

SPENCER MICHELS: Many of the disputed regulations in this area stem from the California Coastal Protection Act, which was passed by voters in the 70's to protect the coast and its waterways. Environmentalists say such rules preserve endangered species and prevent degradation of the river. But strawberry grower Karen Miller says it's up to the federal government to find a way to fix the river and to pay for it.

KAREN MILLER, Strawberry Grower: The only thing I know is that in 1947 the Army Corps of Engineers decided to build a federal flood control channel here. We bought land here in good faith here. We have 275 employees that come back and work for us year after year, that depend on us to be here. And I want to be here, and I think I and our company and the employees in the Pajaro Valley are worth it.

SPENCER MICHELS: So fix that river?

KAREN MILLER: Fix that river, please.

SPENCER MICHELS: So far in this storm alone the federal government has spent $4 million for repairs to the Pajaro River. The corps says fixing it long-term would cost at least $100 million, and there is no plan or moneyor consensus for that. DIALOGUE

JIM LEHRER: Now a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages science writer Robert Pool, author of "Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology."

DAVID GERGEN: Robert, most of the time when we talk about technology and society, it's about the impact of technology on society, the invention of the printing press leading to the reformation, the invention of the compass leading to the age of exploration, but you've written and taken a very different kind of approach toward technology and society.

ROBERT POOL, "Beyond Engineering:" Exactly. I turn the question on its head, and instead of asking how technology pushes and shapes society, I asked how society changes technology, how society shapes technology. The idea here is that normally when we think about technology, we assume that it's the product of engineers sitting in their labs, working with calculators or slide rules or whatever, and coming up with some rational reasons for why a technology should be this way or that. But if you look at it closely, what you find is that that's not the case at all; that certainly engineers play a large role in shaping technology, but other forces from larger society also play a large role.

DAVID GERGEN: Yes. The typewriter, that's a low-tech piece of equipment, obviously, but it was a fascinating example.

ROBERT POOL: Yes. This is something that most people don't stop to think about, but the keyboard that we use on the typewriter right now, the Qwerty keyboard, is the product of the late 1800's from an early typewriter design. And the reason that the keys are laid out as they were is that at the time the technology was so primitive that if you typed too quickly, the keys would stick together, and so they decided to lay out the keys in a rather inefficient way so that you couldn't type so quickly, and the typewriter would, in essence, work much better. But that inefficient layout got locked in to our system. Once everybody had learned how to type on Qwerty and everybody was buying Qwerty typewriters, it became impossible to actually get a better typewriter even when a better typewriter came along. And such a typewriter does exist right now. It's called a Dvorak keyboard and you can type anywhere from 10 to 40 percent faster on it, depending on who you believe. But there seems to be no way we can actually more Qwerty to Dvorak because it would just involve too great an effort.

DAVID GERGEN: I also found that the example about the automobile--the diesel engine versus a Stanley steamer--to be an interesting illustration of your point.

ROBERT POOL: Exactly. Most people driving around in their internal combustion engine cars today assume that the reason that we have internal combustion engines is because at some point engineers decided that was the best technology. But that's actually not quite the case. Back at the turn of the century we had actually three options. There were the internal combustion engine, the steam-powered cars, and the electric-powered cars. Now, the electric-powered cars had the same trouble then that they have now. Batteries just didn't last long enough. So, in essence, they weren't an option at the time. But the steam-powered car and the internal combustion car seemed to be pretty equally matched. They each had some advantages and some disadvantages, but some people preferred the steam-powered cars, some people preferred the internal combustions. And there was no engineering consensus on what the best technology was. Instead, there were anumber of factors that pushed the internal combustion out in front. One of those was people like Henry Ford and Ransom Olds set up shop in Detroit, with their mass production of automobiles and made hundreds of thousands of these things so they could sell them very cheaply and flood the market; whereas, the people who are making the steam-powered cars, like the Stanley Brothers, were much more interested in making very high-end cars for the afficionados. So they made custom cars actually. You could order your car custom-made from the factory, and so they made very few. As a matter of fact, toward the beginning of the first world war the Stanley Brothers were making about as many cars in a year as Ford was turning out in a single day. That was part of the reason. But there were a number of other factors along the way, one of which was an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in New England. And the reason that played a role is this--the steam-powered car was originally built with an open boiler so that the water would boil off and create steam. Well, that was not a problem in New England because there were all these public horse troughs around, so you drive for twenty or thirty miles, stop, and fill up your water tank at a horse trough. But with this outbreak of hoof and mouth disease they closed the public horse troughs in New England, and all of a sudden you couldn't drive wherever you wanted because you would run out of water for your steam engine.

DAVID GERGEN: Bye-bye Stanley Steamer. Let me ask you about the technology today. You say it is changed dramatically from the 19th century. We're living in a new age--much more complex machines, and the engineering, which has much more of an impact on society. It's changed society's attitudes toward technology a lot.

ROBERT POOL: Exactly. There are a couple of things where technology is extremely different than it was a hundred years ago. One of them is a power of technology. A hundred years ago a technological accident might kill a few people at most. Now, a technological accident in a nuclear power plant could conceivably kill thousands or even millions of people, so the power of technology is something that we've never experienced before. As I said in the book, it's like having a Great Dane in the room. It may be friendly, but you've got to be very careful to put your breakables out of reach. Another major change in technology is the complexity. A hundred years ago, two hundred years ago technology was a relatively simple thing. A single person could understand the entire workings of a steam engine or a telegraph. Today technology has gotten to the point where it's so complex that no single person can understand the workings of something like a Boeing 747. And with that complexity comes an uncertainty in how technology is going to behave. When you start to build something, you can never quite be sure how it's going to act. You have to try it and see what happens, and even after five or ten years with a particular machine, you can't always be sure what's going to happen. So that risk, coupled with the complexity, makes technology a very different sort of creature.

DAVID GERGEN: With the boom in the Internet and all the publicity that's attended that, many argue we're living through the greatest age of technological change in history. Is that true?

ROBERT POOL: I think it is. You can look back at the end of the 19th century where there was also an age of tremendous technological change with the things like the telephone and the telegraph before that--electricity--Thomas Edison and his lightbulb and so on. And if you go back and look at the newspapers of the time, you see the people realized they were living in a golden age, so to speak, where things were changing much more rapidly than they had ever been before. What's happened is over the last hundred years we've gotten used to that. We've grown up in a society where technology is constantly changing and pushing our society in different directions, and so somehow we've become enured to that change, and it may not seem that we're living in an age of so much change as the people were a hundred years ago, but, indeed, we're moving actually much faster than we were then.

DAVID GERGEN: Final question. Are you an optimist about the future of technology in society?

ROBERT POOL: I am. And the reason is that there are people out there who are asking the right questions. One of the questions is: How do we start thinking about designing technology with humans in mind? A hundred, two hundred years ago when people designed machines, the designs came about through the needs of the machine. They asked, what is going to make the best machine, and then they let people worry about how they were going to run it. That doesn't work so well anymore. When you have something like a nuclear power plant, you can't just say we're going to make the best nuclear power plant we can and then figure out how to run it later. It gets too complex; you can't figure out exactly how it's going to behave in certain situations, and so people have come to realize that we have to start thinking about technological design with humans and organizations in mind. And when we do that, it's going to completely change how we think about technology and probably make technology a better servant of people.

DAVID GERGEN: Robert Pool, thank you for that final note in particular.

ROBERT POOL: Thank you. $ FINALLY - A VALENTINE

JIM LEHRER: And before we go tonight a reminder that tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and here now is the Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky.

ROBERT PINSKY, Poet Laureate: It may be that when we think of poetry and Valentine's Day and love, we think of words that are like a box of chocolates, or like a lace doily in a pink heart. But the experience of love can be like the experience of a dragon or a serpent. It can be powerful. It can be frightening. William Butler Yeats in the poem I'm going to read to you captures the dragon of sexuality, the liberation of love, the power and strangeness of the emotion very memorably, I think. It's the fourth poem from his sequence "A Woman Young and Old." It's spoken by the woman, and it's called "Her Triumph." I did the dragon's will until you came because I had fancied love a casual improvisation, or a settled game that followed if I let the kerchief fall: Those deeds ere best that gave the minute wings/And heavenly music if they gave it wit;/And then you stood among the dragon-rings./I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it/And broke the chain and set my ankles free,/Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;/And now we stare astonished at the sea,/And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us. RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, President Clinton said Russia's opposition to the use of force against Iraq would not deter the United States. A plan of attack calls for the use of Cruise Missiles and Stealth fighters, not bombers, as we said earlier in the News Summary. And Dr. David Satcher was sworn in as surgeon general of the United States. We'll see you on- line and again here Monday evening. Have a nice Valentine's weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.