The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MAC NEIL: Good evening. I'm Robert MacNeil in New York.

MS. WARNER: And I'm Margaret Warner in Washington. After our summary of the news this Tuesday, we look first at new rules for immigrants seeking political asylum. The Commissioner of Immigration joins us. Then Kwame Holman reports on congressional districts shaped to give minorities a majority. Charlayne Hunter- Gault talks about values with former Education Secretary William Bennett, and Roger Rosenblatt has an essay about New York's attitude. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MAC NEIL: Japan announced steps today to open its economy to American and other foreign made products, but the Clinton administration wasn't impressed. The measures are intended to break a six-week-old impasse in trade talks with the U.S. Prime Minister Hosokawa called the package a bold step. It mainly offers promises to ease regulations that make it difficult for foreigners to do business in Japan. Late today, U.S. Trade Rep. Mickey Kantor had this reaction to the announcement. He spoke at the White House.

MICKEY KANTOR, U.S. Trade Representative: We have reviewed these measures, and they do not meet the concerns the President raised on February 11 during his meeting with Prime Minister Hosokawa. We agree with Japan's Chamber of Commerce, the Japanese Federation of Bankers, and the Japanese press that the package of measures is of limited substance and appears to be half-finished work. We are not discouraged. The government of Japan has described this as a first step, and we see it as a work in progress. We have indicated that an enhanced package would be a necessary step to reopening discussions under the frame work which is not that package. However, as the President has said, our door remains open.

MR. MAC NEIL: Japan currently enjoys a $58 billion trade surplus with this country. In other economic news, the Department of Commerce reported sales of new homes rose 1.9 percent in February. The increase was only a slight rebound from a big plunge the month before. A surge in sales in the West offset declines in all other regions. Harsh winter weather was blamed. A private business group reported consumer confidence in the economy jumped this month. The Confidence Board said its index of Americans' Consumer Confidence reached its highest level in four years. But on Wall Street today, confidence seemed to be in short supply. At the final bell, the Dow Jones Average was down more than 63 points in heavy trading. Margaret.

MS. WARNER: White House officials today released documents relating to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's trading in cattle futures in 1978 and '79. The materials show that Mrs. Clinton invested $1,000 of her own money in 1978 then reinvested the profits several times for an eventual two-year profit of nearly $100,000. The White House released the documents to refute recent allegations that Mrs. Clinton didn't put up her own money in the commodities trades.

MR. MAC NEIL: The Immigration & Naturalization Service today proposed to revamp the way claims for political asylum are handled. The government is swamped with 150,000 asylum requests a year, and the backlog of cases stands at 370,000. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. A federal judge ruled today that a key spy, Aldrich Ames, and his wife could spend $500 a month from a bank account in Colombia for the care of their five-year- old son, but the judge refused to soften his earlier order that the couple hand over $2.2 million in alleged espionage payments that prosecutors say is stashed in foreign banks. So far the Ames have refused to comply. Ames is a former CIA agent who was charged with spying for the Soviet Union and Russia from 1985 until this year.

MS. WARNER: The National Cancer Institute is calling for the director of a federally supported breast cancer study to be fired. The Cancer Institute today asked the University of Pittsburgh to replace Dr. Bernard Fisher. Examiners have found that the study, coordinated at the University under Fisher's direction, relied in part on falsified data. The NCI is still examining the 1985 study, but it said last week that the discovery of fraudulent data hasn't changed the basic conclusion that lumpectomy and radiation are as effective as mastectomy in treating breast cancer.

MR. MAC NEIL: The PLO and Israel resumed talks today on ensuring security for Palestinians in the occupied territories. The talks were held in Cairo, Egypt. They're intended to renew full negotiations on implementing the Israeli-PLO peace accord. They came despite more unrest in the territories today and last night's killing of six members of the PLO's military wing. We have a report narrated by Vera Frankl of Worldwide Television News. VERA FRANKL, WTN: The incident was the bloodiest since the Hebron massacre last month. Six men, leaders of the PLO's elite Fatah faction, were shot dead in Gaza by undercover Israel troops. They'd allegedly refused orders to halt. Israel denies the killings were premeditated, but within hours of the incident, violence engulfed the occupied territories as Fatah activists called for three days of confrontation and revenge. At least 54 Palestinians were injured by army gunfire, 30 in the West Bank town of Nabluch. One 16-year- old youth was killed in the clashes. Masked gunmen defiantly tore up their access powers into Hebron, now under tight security. From his Tunis headquarters, PLO Leader Yasser Arafat said the killings had been planned and threatened to pull out of the peace talks due to resume in Cairo. But limited talks did go ahead, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was hopeful progress would be made.

SHIMON PERES, Foreign Minister, Israel: Today they will talk about Hebron, and I hope they will reach an agreement, so tomorrow they will start to talk about the finalization of Jericho and Gaza.

MS. FRANKL: Negotiations on Palestinian autonomy will only resume once security issues here in volatile Hebron have been settled.

MR. MAC NEIL: Gunmen fired at the African National Congress headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa today, but no one was injured. It came a day after 53 people were killed in and around the city in factional fighting. It was between members of the ANC and the Zulu-led Inkatha Freedom Party. Inkatha is boycotting next month's election and demanding an autonomous Zulu state. The Inkatha leader called yesterday's violence a final struggle to the finish with the ANC.

MS. WARNER: A rightist coalition has won a landslide victory in Italy's parliamentary elections. The victory could make media tycoon Sylvio Berlusconi the country's next prime minister, but defeated leftists predicted Berlusconi won't be able to form a government because of differences within his coalition. This was the country's first election since corruption scandals ousted the Christian Democrats, who've ruled Italy since 1948. That's it for the News Summary. Now it's on to some new rules for political asylum, shaping congressional districts to make minorities a majority, a conversation with William Bennett, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay. FOCUS - SAFE HAVEN?

MS. WARNER: First tonight, reforming political asylum. With immigration a growing political controversy nationally, the Immigration & Naturalization Service today announced new rules to control one small but provocative piece of a larger puzzle, the uses and abuses of the political asylum system. In a moment, we'll debate the new approach with the head of the INS and two critics, but first, this backgrounder from Correspondent Charles Krause.

MR. KRAUSE: The country's asylum policy has been under attack since the blast at the World Trade Center 13 months ago. That's because Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, inspirational figure for several of those convicted of the bombing, managed to extend his stay in the U.S. by asking for asylum. A few months later, the Chinese smuggling ship Golden Venture ran aground in New York City. Most of the passengers were coached to ask for political asylum if caught. Political asylum is really an exception to this country's general immigration policy which is based on bringing families together, or admitting skilled workers. The general policy is restricted by quotas, but there are no quotas for political asylees. All that's required is that they prove a well- founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, or political opinion. Political asylum wasn't always this controversial. Decades ago, most of the refugees fled across the nearest border to a neighboring country. They never came near the U.S. But the great refugee crises of the 1970's changed that. People were fleeing persecution harder and faster than ever before. A lot of them wanted to come to the United States. In 1980, a new refugee law designed to restore order was passed. It set up specific orders to determine the number of people who could enter the U.S. as refugees by applying at U.S. embassies abroad. But there were no quotas established for people asking for asylum once they arrived here. By the early 90's the system was swamped. Critics said a lot of people were getting through the door not because they feared persecution but simply because they wanted a better life. About 150,000 people applied for political asylum to the vastly under-staffed INS last year. Only about 45,000 cases were resolved. The rest of the applicants received work papers while their cases were pending. What that means is 70 percent of those who apply for political asylum go into a bulging backlog which now numbers more than 370,000 cases which could take years to resolve. Today's reform package is directed at fixing that problem.

MS. WARNER: The Clinton administration says the new procedures would make it possible to process all new claims promptly while chipping away at the backlog at the same time. The new system will do three things: Double the number of officials who process claims; delay giving work permits to applicants for six months; and charge applicants a $130 fee to help defray processing costs. Now we talk to the woman who announced the reforms today, Immigration & Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner. We're also joined by Bill Frelick, a senior policy analysts with the U.S. Committee for Refugees. His non-profit advocacy group supports refugees and asylum seekers. And Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation of American Immigration Reform; his group advocates a more restrictive immigration policy. He joins us tonight from Tampa. Commissioner Meissner, let's start with you. Let's try to put this problem in perspective. Now, in this country we get something like 1.2 million immigrants a year. And about, what, 10 percent at most ask for political asylum. Why is this problem receiving such high level intense attention from you and your administration?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: Well, it's true that the number of asylum seekers is not an overwhelmingly large number either from the standpoint of American immigration or from the standpoint of the number of refugees that exist worldwide. The problem is that our capacity to decide the cases is not sufficient. So that, we are receiving many more applications than we can handle, and that means that by not deciding, we not only fail to give protection to legitimate refugees, which we do want to do, we also invite people -- in so many words -- invite people to apply improperly. And because work permits are a precious commodity and because we give work permits as part of the application process, we're into a spiral which can be destructive.

MS. WARNER: What percentage of political asylum seekers do you think have illegitimate claims?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: Well, let's turn it around and say that we approve about 1/3 of the cases that we see and that 1/3 has remained fairly steady. Now, that proportion can change if the situations change in countries that the people come from. I mean, if there's all of a sudden a war or a terrible circumstance in a country, those numbers could increase. But about 1/3 we approve. That means that 2/3 are not approved. How many of those 2/3 are actually misuse of the system and how many of them are people that have a very sympathetic case but the case does not necessarily qualify for persecution as defined in U.S. law and in international law, that we would not really know.

MS. WARNER: So the challenge here, in other words, is to devise some system that will do all this more rapidly and weed out the illegitimate claims but let in the legitimate ones --

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: That's exactly right.

MS. WARNER: -- more rapidly.

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: That's exactly right.

MS. WARNER: So how will your procedures actually affect this?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: Well, the reform that we've announced has two important elements. One is substantially increased resources so that we have a greater capacity both within the Immigration Service through asylum officers and through immigration judges which are an administrative law body which is in the Justice Department and reviews the decisions that asylum officers make. so there is the resource side of it, and that is a budget request that is currently in Congress that has been forwarded by the administration as part of the President's budget package for next year. The second part of it, which we announced today, is a set of procedural reforms that streamline the process and add some new elements. In streamlining the process, we drop out a set of steps that have been impediments to the actual core of the decision which is the interview that the asylum officer has and the effort to elicit in a non-adversarial setting the person's story. We give the person a chance to tell their story.

MS. WARNER: Are you saying that will no longer be the case?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: No. That will be the case. I mean, that's the core of the process. But we want that interview to occur as quickly as possible, and we want it to occur for all of the people that apply for asylum. So what we are doing is focusing on incoming cases, incoming applications, with the intention of interviewing them within 60 days. That means that after the interview, the cases of people who are approved, they are legitimate refugees, they can go on their way, and they can then get their work permit. They will not receive the work permit just for filing an application. The work permit will be attached to a decision to approve the case. For those people who are not approved by the asylum officer, the case will immediately be referred to an immigration judge. And that immigration judge will hear the asylum claim, but if the asylum claim fails, that hearing will turn into a hearing for exclusion or deportation. And if there is no other relief available, then there is a deportation order that comes out of that hearing. Those people, if they're denied by the immigration judge, we intend to have that occur within 180 days, and those people who fail at that point will not get a work permit. If we are unable to complete this asylum officer interview and the immigration judge review within 180 days, then we would first issue the work permit.

MS. WARNER: And so your assumption is that by speeding this up and making it more certain that, in fact, you will discourage some abusers of the system from even applying?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: That's correct. That is correct. We believe that we need to put discipline and certainty into the system at the front end. We have to have a timely interview for everybody, and that will have a self-correcting dynamic that then gets put into place.

MS. WARNER: I see. Well, I'd like to get Dan Stein in on this. Mr. Stein, what do you think of the administration's proposal as you've just heard it outlined by Commissioner Meissner?

MR. STEIN: Well, Maggie, the proof will be in the pudding. But, of course, we think that the administration has taken some preliminary steps to try to shore up an asylum system which is on the verge of total collapse and has really lost credibility with many of the American people. Most of these recommendations should have been put into the asylum system when it was first laid out in 1991. More importantly though, we're concerned that the President in 1993 stated clearly and unequivocally that the administration supported comprehensive legislative reform in Congress to try to empower the Executive Branch to handle claims in a summary fashion at the border, to shore up detention space, make the process more rapid. While these proposals as a preliminary matter may help streamline the process for some new claims coming in, we're also concerned that there is going to be 1/2 million, close to 1/2 million people in the backlog, and that the only way at this point the administration seems to be able to handle it is by implementing a form of rolling amnesty which, once again, is going to continue to erode the public's commitment to any kind of an asylum system. We'd like to see -- we'd like to see discipline put in the system which includes things that go far beyond what the administration has proposed.

MS. WARNER: Commissioner Meissner, what about this point that you're only doubling the number of officers and yet, last year, they only got through 1/4 of the cases? How can you actually chip away at the backlog with what you've instituted?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: Well, in the first place we've simplified the process so that the actual process will have less than half of the steps that it presently does, so that's an increase in productivity along with the governing of resources. We believe that we will be current with receipts by the end of this calendar year which will then allow us to begin to work the backlog in 1995. A backlog under those circumstances is not a stable number as it presently is. The backlog will begin to shrink as a result of the system having certainty and having -- being effective. People will drop out of the backlog; they will have in some cases gone on. They will in some cases have found other forms of relief. Some of them will have filed improperly, and they will withdraw their cases. So this backlog will be quite fluid when, when we're on top of receipts and there's discipline in the system.

MS. WARNER: Well, Bill Frelick, your critique of the administration's proposal here.

MR. FRELICK: Well, I think that it really discriminates against poor people. There's a $130 fee that they have to pay. In addition to that, they are prohibited from working legally for the first six months after the application is put in. Bear in mind, in the United States, unlike Canada and other countries, an asylum seeker does not have a right to a court-appointed attorney. So we are forcing people essentially to represent themselves. One of the elements which hasn't been mentioned so far is that these regulations say that the interview with the INS asylum officer will be discretionary. We fear that what will happen is people forced to fill out their own applications will fill out bad applications, and that what will happen is that a low level INS official will end up kicking the case directly into the immigration court, where the person will be face to face with a prosecuting INS trial attorney, an immigration judge in a black robe, and will be faced with a deportation proceeding.

MS. WARNER: Well, Mr. Frelick, do you agree with critics who say the system is being abused?

MR. FRELICK: There are abuses in the system.

MS. WARNER: So how would you correct the abuses and still, of course, have the United States provide a safe haven for people who legitimately deserve it?

MR. FRELICK: Well, your point is very well taken. There are only currently 150 asylum officers that completed 35,000 cases last year. With 150,000 new cases coming in, it doesn't begin, even doubling the core, you're still talking seventy, eighty thousand. That still falls well short, half of what the current receipts are. So there's a problem in terms of the amount of resources that we've been allowing to devote to the problem.

MS. WARNER: So would you quadruple the number of officers?

MR. FRELICK: Well, I think if you do the math, you would have to have something like 650 cases to keep up with the current receipts. Now what the INS is suggesting they will do is reduce the case -- the amount of time spent per case from about six and a half hours --

MS. WARNER: That's what you said.

MR. FRELICK: -- down to two and a half hours. That's a tremendous reduction. And our fear is that there's going to be such pressure to meet quotas, to meet the numbers of people here, that they're going to rush through cases, they'll have an assembly line approach, and that people who need a face-to-face interview with an asylum officer, people who -- a system really that was created for people who are unrepresented, people who are fearful, traumatized, that, that these people, the most vulnerable people, will not have the opportunity to have that kind of an interview.

MS. WARNER: Well, Commissioner Meissner, if money were no object, would you rather have three or four times as many officers?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: Actually, we don't believe we need three or four times as many officers at this point. We have calculated this very carefully, and obviously, we will have to learn by experience, but we have cut important steps out of the system that are not necessary steps. We have preserved the integrity of the interview and the time that is devoted to the interview. The interview is the central feature of an effective asylum system, because it elicits information. And the officers are not being pressed to do their interviews any more quickly than they have done before. What they are being freed up of is a lot of written records, opinions from the State Department, rebuttal times, and delays that are apart from the interview.

MS. WARNER: I'd like to give Dan Stein a chance to tell us -- now if you were designing the perfect system that would let in legitimate asylum seekers while leaving out the abusers, what would your system be?

MR. STEIN: Well, first of all, we would put refugees who are outside the country and asylum seekers on equal footing. Right now, if you get into the country as an asylum seeker, you get enormous procedural opportunities which you would never get if you were knocking on the door overseas. It's like the difference between frank and beans and a steak dinner. Anybody, regardless of time or manner of entry, or how long they've been here, or how many countries they've been through, can file for an asylum claim and have opportunities for review which are quite impressive. Until you equalize the standard and ensure that asylum seekers, if they are going to come into the country to make a claim, have a rapid hearing within 72 hours, mandatory detention, one level of administrative review, and then if you grant asylum,you've got to make absolutely sure that the purpose of asylum is not a back door immigration program, it is to provide temporary, underscore temporary, protection for people who are working for positive political change back home. It was never intended to become a system or a program trying to handle hundreds of thousands of claims every year. It was originally designed as an adjunct to our refugee program for in most cases people who had entered in the normal course of affairs as ambassadors or students and who because of reasons which arose after entry had to file an asylum claim because it was no longer safe to go home.

MS. WARNER: Mr. Stein, I'm afraid -- let me ask Mrs. Meissner just before we go -- what's wrong with the proposal he just sketched out?

COMMISSIONER MEISSNER: We are a country that believes in due process, and when people are inside of the country, they do have certain access to the legal system which needs to be preserved. We're doing this as efficiently as possible, but we do think a level of review is fair.

MS. WARNER: Thank you very much. Thank you all. Robin.

MR. MAC NEIL: Still ahead on the NewsHour, a battle over congressional redistricting, a conversation on American values, and a Roger Rosenblatt essay. FOCUS - SHAPING THE VOTE

MR. MAC NEIL: Now the battle over how to shape a congressional district. The idea of creating one made up mostly of minority voters is on trial this week in North Carolina. Correspondent Kwame Holman has our report.

MR. HOLMAN: Election night 1992. Across the nation, especially in the South, minorities in record numbers were elected to the House of Representatives. In Florida, three blacks, the first from that state in this century, won House seats. Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas elected new black representatives. And Illinois and New York elected new Hispanic members. North Carolina elected two blacks, Eva Clayton and Mel Watt.

MEL WATT: I'm just happy to be here and be representing the new 12th Congressional District.

MR. HOLMAN: In all, twenty-two new minorities, fifteen blacks and nine Hispanics, were elected to the House. Why the big increase? After the 1990 census and prodded by new amendments to the Federal voting Rights Act, states tried to make it more possible for candidates favored by minority voters to win where they couldn't win before. They drew up more than 50 new congressional districts in which blacks or Hispanics are in the majority.

LANI GUINIER, Law Professor: The assumption was that the way you remedy vote dilution, the way that you empower a minority to elect representatives of its choice is to give that minority its own "safe" seat.

MR. HOLMAN: Lani Guinier is the former Clinton nominee to head the Justice Department's civil rights division. A law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Guinier says minority districts were considered acceptable.

LANI GUINIER: The Voting Rights Bar believed that this conventional remedy which had been affirmed or at least endorsed by the Justice Department and by the Supreme Court was the preferred remedy. It turns out that the Supreme Court started to question this remedy.

MR. HOLMAN: That questioning turned to outright rejection last summer when a legal challenge to Congressman Watt's 12th district in North Carolina won the support of the Supreme Court. Writing for a five to four majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor ruled the 12th had such an unusual shape that it resembled racial gerrymanders of the past and political apartheid. The ruling sent the case back to North Carolina, where the state must prove to a three-judge federal panel that the 12th district's bizarre shape was not drawn solely, as O'Connor wrote, "to segregate voters into separate voting districts because of their race." The ruling invited legal challenges to other minority districts in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida, threatening the seats of 14 minority members of Congress. The challenges galvanized civil rights groups who last month announced a campaign to defend the minority districts.

REP. KWEISI MFUME, Congressional Black Caucus: North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana are our 21st century battlegrounds. This is not a question of irregularity as it relates to the shape of a district. As any student of apportionment and reapportionment must admit, that districts have been drawn to reflect varied goals and representation throughout our history; those districts oftentimes have nothing to do with political representation.

MR. HOLMAN: But the Supreme Court's criticism of the shape of the 12th district is being used in the legal attacks on other minority districts like Louisiana's new 4th, called by its critics the "Mark of Zorro District," and Georgia's 11th, disparagingly known as the "Sherman's March District." North Carolina's 12th, called bizarre by Justice O'Connor, snakes 150 miles North from Charlotte across the center of the state. At some points it is only as wide as the lanes of Interstate 85 that runs through much of the district.

PAUL GRONKE, Political Scientist: This district looked really bad, as you pointed out. It looked bad, and so it was struck down for that reason. If it wouldn't have looked so bad, then it maybe would have passed muster.

MR. HOLMAN: Duke University political scientist Paul Gronke says the Supreme Court did not reject the concept of minority districts but raised new questions about their shape.

PAUL GRONKE: Suddenly we turn around here and O'Connor uses words like "compactness" and "contiguity," which are wonderful words, and, and exist in many state constitutions, exist in the North Carolina state constitution in regards to state legislative districts, but not congressional districts, not federal districts.

ANITA HODGKISS, Lawyer: If you're talking about geography alone, then, yes, it looks funny.

MR. HOLMAN: Charlotte attorney Anita Hodgkiss is helping defend the 12th District before a panel of federal judges this week. She says the North Carolina legislature could have drawn a more compact 12th District but the state's Democratic and Republican incumbents would have objected.

ANITA HODGKISS: Quite frankly, there was a lot of incumbency protection going on, and the shape -- the lines, the shape of the district is heavily determined by protecting the incumbent congressmen, keeping Democrats in the right place and keeping Republicans in the right place.

PAUL GRONKE: The League of Women Voters had a very nice plan, very nice-looking plan. The districts are very compact, they followed county lines fairly well, and they also had two minority- majority seats, but it paid no attention to incumbent interests at all, so no one paid much attention to that plan.

MR. HOLMAN: Defenders of the 12th District say it not only helps give voice to North Carolina's 22 percent black population but creates the state's first all-urban congressional district, uniting the gleaming banking center of Charlotte with the furniture manufacturing hub in and around High Point, and the heavily black communities of Durham.

REP. MEL WATT, [D] North Carolina: Congress people don't represent shapes. We don't represent trees. We don't represent highways. We represent people. The people have more in common with each other than any other congressional district North Carolina has ever had.

MR. HOLMAN: The Northern end of the 12th District is here in Durham. By the time it reaches this point, it has taken in hundreds of black neighborhoods in four major cities, creating a congressional district that is 53 percent black. Blacks in North Carolina say drawing such a so-called majority-minority district was the only way to end a nearly 100-year stretch during which no black was elected to Congress.

ANITA HODGKISS: They're in a very strong pattern of racially polarized voting, which means that black voters consistently and repeatedly vote together as a community. Similarly, white voters consistently vote for white candidates. So when you, when you have that situation, there's no opportunity for black voters' candidate of choice to ever be elected, because although they get 90 percent of the support in the black community, they don't get enough white vote to be elected.

REP. MEL WATT: I certainly don't think that I would have had the capacity or Eva Clayton would have had the capacity to get elected in districts as they were historically drawn without the benefit of at least some marginal percentage advantage for black voters.

ROBINSON EVERETT, Law Professor: These are some of the exhibits.

MR. HOLMAN: There might be no need to defend the majority- minority districts in court if not for Duke University Law Professor Robinson Everett. Using his own shoestring resources, the longtime Democrat wrote the legal briefs that were supported by the Supreme Court, charging the 12th District amounts to a racial gerrymander.

ROBINSON EVERETT: We've had, I think, ever improving race relations, and this was a step back, and this was wrong. It was a use of racial classifications in a way that tended to divide the North Carolina population into different racial blocs. And that really offended me.

MR. HOLMAN: Everett says the state's minority districts have the effect of increasing racial polarization.

ROBINSON EVERETT: The person who was elected from majority- minority district really goes up with the instructions to think only of the interests of the black constituents and ignore the interests of the whites. And by the same token, the ten, in our instance, ten white members of Congress would have a job description representing whites rather than blacks, and that is not the situation which is going to produce any constructive action. I think it tends to radicalize both groups on that premise.

REP. MEL WATT: Am I more responsive to the black community than other representatives have been? I think so, probably, unapologetically so. But do I fail to respond to the white community? No. I mean, I think I would do that to my political peril.

MR. HOLMAN: Congressman Watt says Justice O'Connor's opinion advances a racist notion.

REP. MEL WATT: Obviously, I don't wish to call a justice of the Supreme Court racist, but the logical extension of what she was saying is that a 55 percent black district which happens to be 45 percent white is racial gerrymandering, is racial apartheid, yet, a 90 percent white district which is 10 percent black is somehow integrated. It didn't make sense what she was saying, except in some kind of historical context where there is an assumption that something that is majority black is inherently wrong, and so -- and I would characterize that as racist.

MR. HOLMAN: North Carolina is a fast growing state with a booming economy and diminishing tensions over race relations. The legal fight over the 12th District has highlighted the different perceptions among blacks who support it and whites who oppose it. We spoke to two groups of voters.

MELVIN SHIMM: My view is that we should have the ablest person and that elections in a sense should be race neutral, they should be gender neutral. I don't accept the proposition that blacks only or blacks best can represent the interests of blacks.

TAMELA WALLACE: We've had a hundred years of white representatives representing our interests, so whether they do it adequately or not, it's another story, that's something else, another issue altogether. We've had no choice but to have had other white representatives represent what they thought were our interests in Washington, but now we have Congressman Watt to represent our interests as well as white interests.

RICHARD SCHMALBECK: Black voters are more likely to be on the progressive side than the conservative side. What it does in a state like North Carolina is make two congressional districts more progressive than there would have been before and ten other districts less progressive than they would have been before.

KENNETH SPAULDING: When you talk about it rubbing them the wrong way and this could be polarization and they are liberal Democrats, I don't buy that. I don't buy that one bit. I think that the true colors have come out in regard to where they really stand philosophically.

LANI GUINIER: From the perspective of some of the white voters, they fear that their votes don't count. They are the minority, and their votes don't count because the majority has the capacity to elect representatives of its choice without necessarily consulting the minority. And that dilemma that was at the heart of the problem that the Voting Rights Act is trying to address in the first place. And on some level it is that dilemma that is being reproduced in these majority-minority districts.

MR. HOLMAN: Guinier and others say there are alternatives to majority-minority districts that would be more democratic but admit none of them is likely to be adopted soon. Congressman Watt says minority districts are only unfair if they're overwhelmingly minority, and he'll continue to fight for them right up through a probable rehearing before the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Watt continues to make history every day as one of two blacks sent to Congress from North Carolina for the first time in ninety years. CONVERSATION - AMERICA'S VALUES

MR. MAC NEIL: Now the fourth in our series of new conversations about values. They come from a proposal by the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sheldon Hackney. He suggested a national conversation about values aimed at resolving ethnic conflicts in this country. Tonight, Charlayne Hunter-Gault talks to William Bennett. He served Presidents Bush and Reagan as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Secretary of Education, and chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He's now the co-director of Empower America, a Republican public policy research group. He's the author of The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: William Bennett, thank you for joining us. You've been one of the leading voices talking about America's moral right, America as a degraded society. Tell me what, in your view, makes it so.

WILLIAM BENNETT, Former Reagan/Bush Official: Well, I think mainly we have forgotten the importance of what has been come to be called the values of our young people particularly. I think we haven't been paying attention. This is, this is a flower, a plant. If you don't irrigate, if you don't tender, it won't grow. Children do not come into the world with values in their beings. They don't -- they're not born with virtues. They have to be taught them fairly consistently and systematically, or they won't take. We know something about the nature of human beings left untendered, untutored, unnurtured, and it's not pretty.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: How did this happen? Who's to blame?

WILLIAM BENNETT: Oh, lots of people. I'd focus less on the blame than what do we do about it. I think since the advent of modern technology, modern communications, modern medicine, there's a, there's a feeling among many people that we have dispensed with the old ways of doing things. We don't travel like we used to. We don't communicate like we used to. We don't cook like we used to. So perhaps we don't have to do moral education like we used to. This is a mistake. This is a serious intellectual mistake, because it assumes that with a change in appearances, with a change in technology comes an essential change in human nature. There's also the sense, I think, in the last 20 years or so -- and this has happened before in human history -- that all the rules have changed; everything's new; it's a brand new world. John Dunn wrote about it in his poetry. Others have written about in different periods, so that there's a sense among some people that since the rules have changed, we no longer know as adults what guidance to offer young people. It's a brave new world, and young people must find their way in this brave new world. That, as Hannah Arent wrote, is a very, very serious abandonment, act of abandonment of the young. To throw up your hands, to say we don't know what to offer you, we don't have any guidance to give you is to leave, is to abandon them, if you will, and it is to abandon what I regard to be one of "the" essential responsibilities of adults to each generation of children, which is guidance on how to live.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You've written about and spoke about this abandonment specifically in terms of institutions that have existed in the past that transmitted values. And you've been very critical about the schools. Tell me about that a little bit and where you think they've failed.

WILLIAM BENNETT: For 25 years, more or less, we have been conducting something of a social experiment in this country which is let's have a lot of children and let's see if we can raise them without the traditional restraints and the traditional moral lessons from family and from home and from school and from church. Well, the results are now coming in, and they're not attractive. They're not good. Increase in crime, that everybody knows about, particularly a dramatic increase in juvenile crime. Where is that coming from? Well, not to go too long on this, but judges said to me when I was drug czar, they said to me a lot, they said, you know, in sentencing, Mr. Bennett, we're talking to these defendants, and I ask these defendants, I say, Did anyone ever teach you the difference between right and wrong? And these judges would say to me that the defendants would look me right in the eye and say, no, no one ever did. And you know, Mr. Bennett, the judges would say to me, I believe them. Well, I believe them too. I think there is a big vacuum out there.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So you're saying that, that the parents -- are you citing the parents as part of the cause of this?

WILLIAM BENNETT: Sure. Parents are crucial. Not every teacher is a parent but every parent is a teacher. It is still true, I think, across-the-board from psychologists and child therapists that will tell you this is the single most important influence in a child's life. Prof. Bradfin Brenner at Cornell says there's really just one essential condition for a successful child, that at least one parent be absolutely crazy about that child and defer all sorts of her or his, usually her, needs and desires, and wishes for the sake of that child, those, that infinite number of sacrifices that are made for the sake of the child. And lots of those are made in the form of lessons and instruction to the child. So, yeah, I mean, if you look at the public opinion polls, there's plenty of data, as we say in the social sciences. What is the priority of children in your life? What is the priority of taking care of them as opposed to your own satisfaction? It's shifted in twenty-five or thirty years. Look at the divorce rate. Look at the family dissolution rate. Of course, there are some marriages that shouldn't, that shouldn't continue. There are, there are abusive husbands. There are abusive relationships that just can't work under any circumstances. But haven't we been a little casual about this? I mean, marriage has gone from a sacrament to a contract, to what is now essentially where the laws are written as a matter of convenience. And it seems to a lot of people that people are taking themselves out of what are supposed to be very, very serious relationships a bit too casually, at least for the sake of the children.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So there's the family. That's one "institution."

WILLIAM BENNETT: Right.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The schools. Let's talk about the schools, because you feel very strongly that the schools have forfeited or abandoned their responsibility.

WILLIAM BENNETT: Well, one of the reasons I put together The Book of Virtues was, harkens back to when I was Secretary of Education, and I went around to schools, and I tried to find out what was being done on this whole area, which you might call moral education, teaching of right and wrong, which, by the way, Thomas Jefferson said there was an equally important kind of lesson to intellectual training which the public schools of the United States were founded to, to practice, this moral education for an entire country, and which in public opinion polls the American people continue to tell us they want schools to do, teach our children how to read and write and how to think and help them develop reliable standards for right and wrong. That's what the opinion polls say. So I went around on my visits, 150 schools, and I didn't see very much of this going on. I saw, of course, the good example of many fine teachers. I saw sensible places with sensible rules and expectations but very little attention to the explicit teaching of values or the talking about the values, lessons in great stories, great moral stories, if you will. And that bothered me. And that was one of the reasons I decided to put the book together. The book, The Book of Virtues, and I use it only illustratively, these describe people's values unless you're a criminal. I mean, unless you're pathological or criminal, these are values you ought to agree with. Now, that doesn't sign you up for any political party.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, I think that one of the reasons, as I have discussed this book and its messages, one of the reasons that people seem to be so excited about this is because there has been this growing concern about America's spiritual place, and so forth, anda certain point the liberal-conservative divide which has prevented a constructive debate about values seems to be narrowing. Do you -- do you see that?

WILLIAM BENNETT: I think it depends what the question is. Look, when any question you're talking about in Washington, and you get liberals and conservatives or Democrats and Republicans, they're going to accentuate the differences, not the agreements. You can talk about abortion. You can talk about euthanasia. You can talk about affirmative action or reverse discrimination. You can talk about all sorts of things where people have strong disagreements. Or you can talk about another area, such as good character, honesty integrity, responsibility, self- discipline, where people can come together and realize no matter what our politics, no matter what our politics, we all want to live in a society that is made up of individuals who have these virtues or qualities at least to some extent, because if we don't, everything falls apart. We can't trust each other; we can't work with each other. And that was the task of the book.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you think that -- because Sheldon Hackney has -- the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities - - has called for a national conversation on values in which a part of the discussion would be to clarify what are American values -- do you think that there are -- there is such an animal as American values?

WILLIAM BENNETT: Well, in American values or Chinese values there are values and there are non-values. There are human values and then there are things that are not human values, and there are their opposites. Courage, self-discipline, loyalty mean pretty much the same, pretty much the same culture-to-culture, so I don't think there are distinctive American values in that sense. There are American traditions, you know, individualism, community, things like that, which one can see. The American tradition of individualism is much stronger than the tradition of individualism in Japan, for example. But, no, you can no more invent a new value or virtue than you can a new color. We've got 'em all. They've been there for a long time, and so they will always be.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: One of the things that's made this debate so contentious is the growing complexity of the multicultural society. I mean, do you think it's possible to, to have an agreement and teach civic virtues and traditional values within the context of a society that is so pluralistic?

WILLIAM BENNETT: Yeah. It matters a lot less what people look like or where they're from or where they came to America from in terms of the differences among people. It matters a lot more how they were brought up, the kinds of institutions in which they were nurtured.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, that's what -- that was what I -- where I wanted to go to next. What relevance is it to some kid in a ghetto who, you know, doesn't know where his next meal is coming from, t have spiritual values or a moral renewal or whatever?

WILLIAM BENNETT: To me, to me, the interesting question is not that kids live in environments where it's very hard for them to make it. To me, that's a fact, and that's something we need to do something about. And one of the things that I've proposed is we should be a lot readier than we are as a society to take some of these kids out of those environments.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, if we can put people on the moon, if we can do fax machines and fiber optic revolutions that transform communications, you mean we can't cure these spots of decay in America? They're not very big.

WILLIAM BENNETT: The problem that you've described is a problem of changing the human heart, and that, I suppose, as Huxley wrote in Brave New World we can do if you want to get everybody into the lab, we can fiddle with their brains so that they're all good citizens, you know, at birth. But change the heart of man in a way that it is self-generated. That is a much more difficult problem.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Bill Bennett, thank you for joining us.

WILLIAM BENNETT: Thank you. ESSAY - LOST AMBITION

MS. WARNER: Finally tonight, essayist Roger Rosenblatt has some thoughts about the New York that was and the New York that is today.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: "The March of the Successes." Whatever happened to that tune? Everybody used to know it, playing in the inner ear that heart-thumping drum and trumpet rag. Everybody in New York certainly knew it. What Brooklynite was not aware of the thudding of the "March?" In the seagrass of Staten Island, someone cocked an ear and heard it every day. Everyone in Manhattan absolutely heard it, because to hear the "March" at full throttle, one had to be in Manhattan, having made it there, down in the open- air tunnels of Wall Street, or preening in the precious shop windows of Madison Avenue, or most brazenly of all, strutting one's stuff on the Avenue of the Americas, the glory road cutting through the heart of the island. Only a few years ago, the double-breasted armies of the hopefuls used to march under the sightless windows of Simon & Schuster, CBS, NBC, and Time and Life, and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison. If the great God ambition sputtered its first whimper on Ellis Island, it bellowed its roaring "I am" on the island of Manhattan. This is New York I am describing. Or it was, at least it was. Something strange has happened to the city in the past few years. It has lost ambition, or misplaced it. The economy may have driven ambition away. It's hard to think you can make it here if nobody's making it anywhere. Race hatred, violence, drugs, they may have driven ambition away. The other day, a man from India who was saving up to study medicine by working in a newsstand was shot in the face and killed at 11 in the morning near Penn Station -- ambition murdered in broad daylight. Yet, ambition was the luggage that man carried when he arrived in New York. Why else would anyone come to New York or to the country for which it stands, were it not for ambition? When all those Irish, Jewish, Germans, Italians, Slavs, Chinese, Dominicans, and everyone else on earth who left everything they had on earth to swing into the port of New York, America, they were not looking for culture or even for gold, not gold alone: They were looking for their lives. So what has happened to all that? Money has been scarce before, scarcer than now. People have been homeless before, violence high, bias crimes too. The 1970's and 1980's saw the beginning of the age of grievance. But long before that, tribal warfare was part of New York. It was taken for granted that as you walked from one neighborhood to another words like "wop, kike, nigger, spick and mick" would follow, so would sticks and stones. To put things into their nightmarish perspective, it was a common practice of Irish gangs at the turn of the century to set upon enemies and pluck out their eyes. To be fair, ambition has not disappeared entirely. The rise of Asian-Americans continues to be impressive. Korean-owned fruit and vegetable stores bloom like fruit and vegetables all over the city. Indians still produce the highest number of doctors of any ethnic group, daylight murders notwithstanding. Hispanics are filling the labor jobs that every American immigrant group has always filled before rising, and they are rising now. The reports of their death being greatly exaggerated, 2/3 of African-Americans are well established, having risen successfully. It is only the remaining third, the so-called "underclass," that remains down and out in New York. Yet, there is almost no feel of the "I'm going to make it" life in this city anymore. And it isn't season, though the season doesn't help. Defoliating winter reveals the essence of places, and the essence of New York these days is cold. The place is as big as it ever was and as noisy, and at night it still lights up like a flare. But no one plays "The March of the Successes," and the city doesn't feel like itself. Take a look. The street is to be crossed; the bus is to be caught; the day is to be gotten through. You're home. You close the door. Does anybody hear a drum? I'm Roger Rosenblatt. RECAP

MR. MAC NEIL: Again, the major stories of this Tuesday, Japan announced steps to open its economy to America and other foreign- made products, but the Clinton administration said they didn't go far enough. And the White House released documents showing Hillary Rodham Clinton made nearly $100,000 on commodity trades in 1978 and '79 on an initial $1,000 investment. The action was taken to counter charges she didn't use her own money. Good night, Margaret.

MS. WARNER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Margaret Warner. Good night.