The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. Leading the news this Tuesday, a former Justice Department official told Congress he believed Attorney General Meese had probably committed felonies, an outside counsel was chosen to investigate House Speaker Jim Wright and the Iranian Foreign Minister held the first of the Persian Gulf peace talks at the UN. We'll have the details in our News Summary in a moment. Robin.

MR. MacNeil: After the News Summary, we focus first on the Ed Meese story. We have excerpts from today's Congressional hearing, then a Newsmaker interview with one of the two witnesses, Former Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns, next a new problem for journalists, legal damages for naming a confidential source, we have a report on a landmark Minnesota court case, then four newspapermen argue the ethics. Finally, a Roger Rosenblatt essay on a rite of passage.NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: Two former Justice Department officials told President Reagan they believed there was sufficient evidence to indict outgoing Attorney General Edwin Meese before they resigned in March. Yesterday Meese said that if those two officials had done a thorough investigation, a special prosecutor would never have been necessary. Today Former Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns and Former Assistant Attorney General William Weld told the Senate Judiciary Committee that if Meese had been an ordinary citizen, he would have been prosecuted. Burns said he resigned because of deteriorating moral at the Department which he described this way.

ARNOLD BURNS, Former Deputy Attorney General: So that you can get the flavor of what life was like in the Department of Justice, this gives you some idea. It was a world of Alice in Wonderland, a world of illusion, and allusion, a world in which up was down and down was up.

MR. MacNeil: There will be longer excerpts from that testimony and an interview with Burns after our News Summary. At the White House, Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said the President simply did not believe their charges and did not give them merit. He heard out their story and said he still has confidence in Ed Meese. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Vice President Bush spoke about ethics in government today. The sure 1988 Republican Candidate for President said a Bush Administration would create a new and better code of ethics for government service. He said it should apply to members of Congress as well as the Executive Branch and it should be clear and reflect common sense. He said it all in a talk to a meeting of Congressional interns at the Library of Congress.

VICE PRESIDENT BUSH: Those who take on the public trust must hold themselves to an exacting code of conduct. We can inspect and indeed tolerate nothing less from the people who work for the government.

MR. LEHRER: On another ethics issue, the House Ethics Committee today chose an outside chose an outside lawyer to investigate charges against House Speaker Jim Wright. The lawyer is Richard J. Phelan of Chicago. A spokeswoman for Newt Gingrich, the Republican who brought the Wright charges, said Gingrich was outraged over the Phelan choice because he was a Democrat. The charges against Wright are that he violated House rules in the publishing of a book and other ethical matters, all of which Wright has denied.

MR. MacNeil: President Reagan promised to give the Democrats hell on the campaign trail and said he was fed up with the tax on his Administration at the Democratic convention. The President was talking to Republican Congressional leaders at the White House.

PRESIDENT REAGAN: Last week the Democratic National Convention took place and my Irish is a little up, when I listened to those speeches and I couldn't help thinking that this is what the difference between us comes down to, they talk and we deliver. George Bush will cut taxes again. What would their nominee do? I mean, what would he really do? Yes, they've come out with their platform, but it's a platform that in effect hides their real policies in a brown paper wrapper.

MR. MacNeil: Some Republican leaders urged the President not to carry out his threat to veto the plant closing bill which has passed both Houses by veto proof majorities. House Minority Leader Bob Michel said some urged Mr. Reagan just to let it become law.

REP. ROBERT MICHEL, Minority Leader: There are some of us who went on the mark in the House of Representatives, made the point that we were within the range of being able to sustain the President's veto if there were some work done and there wasn't a diminution of votes on the Democratic side, but there were arguments made on the other side too that frankly it was probably impossible to sustain in the Senate and that maybe the President would want to give consideration to simply letting it become law if we were unable to sustain it in either House.

MR. MacNeil: The bill embraced as a hot campaign issue by the Democrats would require large employers to give at least 60 days' notice of a plant closing.

MR. LEHRER: The fires continue to burn in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The fire getting the most attention is one that came within eight miles of the Old Faithful Geyser. Winds changed its course but 800 firefighters have been moved into the Old Faithful complex of hotels and cabins protectively. So far, fires have blackened more than 52,000 acres of the park's 2.2 million acres which sprawls over three states. Fire officials are using helicopters that spew a napalmlike substance to try to redirect the blazes.

MR. MacNeil: The first round of talks aimed at securing a Persian Gulf cease-fire began a day early at the United Nations today. Iran's Foreign Minister, Ali Akbar Velayati arrived a day ahead of schedule to meet with UN Secretary General Javier Perez De Cuellar. De Cuellar described today's negotiations as covering a mutual cease-fire, troop withdrawals, prisoner exchanges and formal peace talks. Tomorrow De Cuellar is scheduled to meet with both the Iranian Foreign Minister and his Iraqi counterpart. Iran's military chief offered the U.S. a quid pro quo today which was promptly refused. Hashimi Rafsanjani said Iran is willing to use its influence to secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon if Washington agreed to free Iranian assets frozen in this country. Rafsanjani made the offer in a televised interview monitored in Cyprus. White House Spokesman Marlin Fitzwater reacted to the Iranian offer by saying, "We will not negotiate or pay ransom for hostages. No deals."

MR. LEHRER: Negotiations over the U.S. military bases in the Philippines collapsed today in Manila. The issue is the rent the United States will pay the Philippine Government for the use of Clark Air Force Base, Subic Bay Naval Base and four smaller installations. The United States now pays about $180 million a year. The Philippines wants it raised to 1.2 billion. A spokesman for the Philippine Government said the gap was so wide he didn't know if, much less when, the negotiations might resume. A U.S. representative, however, called the break temporary and predicted it would be resumed soon.

MR. MacNeil: That's our summary of the news. Now it's on to Edwin Meese and the law, journalists and confidential sources, and a Rosenblatt Essay. FOCUS - JUSTICE SERVED? [SAGA OF ATTORNEY GENERAL MEESE]

MR. LEHRER: There was another episode today in the saga of Attorney General Edwin Meese. It happened before the Senate Judiciary Committee and it is our lead story tonight. Two former top Justice Department officials, Arnold Burns and William Weld, told the stories of their highly publicized resignations. We have extended excerpts from their testimony, as well as an in person NewsMaker Interview with Mr. Burns. The object of it all, the outgoing Attorney General, actually opened this latest episode with his own attack yesterday on Misters Burns and Weld.

EDWIN MEESE, Attorney General: The original allegations made by criminals seeking to obtain leniency for their own crimes should have been quickly investigated, they would have been found to be false as they ultimately were, and the whole matter should have been brought to a proper conclusion. Indeed, the evidence now shows that if a competent and thorough preliminary investigation had been directed by the then Deputy Attorney General and the Former Head of the Criminal Division, there would likely have been no cause even for referral toan Independent Counsel.

KATHERINE KAHLER, National Press Club: How can you say that a thorough preliminary investigation of the Department would have prevented appointment of an Independent Counsel when a leak of the view of your Former Assistant for the Criminal Division indicated he would have sought indictment?

MR. MEESE: Usually, the responsibility of the Department of Justice is to go out, track those things down, make an investigation and determine whether there's even any basis to go on to refer this to an Independent Counsel. In this case, neither during the threshold inquiry nor during the preliminary investigation did anyone talk to me about these allegations and find out whether, in fact, any of these things had happened. To the best of my knowledge, no one talked to one of the other principal witnesses, Mr. Wallach, who at that time had already testified before a grand jury and was not taking the Fifth Amendment. Had anyone talked to the other people, they would have found that there was no basis for these statements on the part of these individuals in New York, and as I say, in all probability, the hear say would have been exposed for what it is, there would have been no credible evidence and there would have been no need to even refer this to the Independent Counsel.

MR. LEHRER: Now to the Weld/Burns testimony today. Weld headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department when he quit. Burns was the Deputy Attorney General. Both were Republican appointees. This morning, Mr. Burns talked about Meese's ties with Attorney Robert Wallach and his charge the original investigation was not thorough.

ARNOLD BURNS, Former Deputy Attorney General: At first blush this appears to be an attack on me and on Mr. Weld. On an analysis and one once has an understanding of the underlying facts, it is an unwarranted attack on the career professionals and the great lawyers in the Department of Justice who conducted the preliminary investigation and who unanimously concluded that under the governing law further investigation was necessary. On April 8, 1987, well over a year ago, I advised Mr. Meese that in my judgment, without getting into any detail, because I felt foreclosed, that E. Bob Wallach was in a lot of trouble, Bill Weld had spoken with Mr. Meese, and in his way he told Mr. Meese that Bob Wallach was in deep yogurt.

SPOKESMAN: I come from an agricultural state. Was that yogurt?

MR. BURNS: Y-o-g-u-r-t. And I advised Mr. Meese to distance himself from Mr. Wallach and told him to sever his relationship with Mr. Wallach. I told him to repudiate Mr. Wallach. My advice was not heeded. It became clear as a bell to me that I could no longer bear silent witness to the deterioration of morale, the paralysis in performance that was beginning to set in in the Department and the continuing erosion of public confidence in the Department. I concluded, gentlemen, that I had to do something. With my tongue tied by the confidentiality demanded of me by law, there was only one way I could make a statement that something was wrong. I chose it. I resigned.

WILLIAM WELD, Former Assistant Attorney General: I had had a close relationship with Mr. Meese, whom I have always liked personally. He's a wonderful man to work with. I had come to Washington to serve him. I've always regarded him as a highly intelligent and able man. I think it's fair to say, as Sen. Simon was intimating earlier, that I had come to the same conclusion that Mr. Meese was in the wrong job.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER, [R] Pennsylvania: Mr. Weld, I'm just a little puzzled by your conclusions here. You have gone through a recitation of excoriating facts. You've confronted your boss, the Attorney General, eyeball to eyeball, and said if it were up to you you'd indict him. You have a 40 minute meeting with the President, the Vice President of the United States, and then you say you can understand that a reasonable prosecutor might differ from your conclusions. How can all that be?

MR. WELD: Well, I think the crux of the issue on the gratuity statute is the part of Mr. McKay's report that Sen. Metzenbaum referred to. I had a paper clip on that page as a matter of fact. The issue for criminal purposes is whether Mr. Meese believed that Mr. Wallach was motivated in part by appreciation for Mr. Meese's many official actions. As Mr. McKay says, and as I agree on the law, if you believe that's the case or if you believe a reasonable jury can infer that beyond a reasonable doubt, then a gratuities violation has occurred. Now they're very close friends, so I can see how a reasonable prosecutor could say, well, no, Mr. Meese couldn't have thought that Mr. Wallach was motivated even in part by the many things that Mr. Meese did for Mr. Wallach.

SEN. SPECTER: By the time you get through with the recitation of facts --

MR. WELD: That's why I come out where I do, Senator.

SEN. SPECTER: And you feel strongly enough about it to confront your boss and say you'd prosecute him if you had the power and you report it to the President. I'm just a little concerned about where the American people see this case ending.

SEN. HOWARD METZENBAUM, [D] Ohio: You indicated in a meeting with the President your concerns about the Department, Mr. Meese. How strongly did you make clear that there had been ethical violations as well as possible criminal misconduct?

MR. WELD: Explicitly, Senator, I laid out the facts, then I said I think this is over the line of two provisions of Executive Order 11222, namely preferential treatment and use of public office for private gain, and in my opinion it's over the line on the gratuity statute. Bear in mind, I'm on the aggressive side. Reasonable prosecutors could go the other way and, in fact, Mr. McKay has indicated he's going to go the other way.

SEN. METZENBAUM: Who else was present at the meeting?

MR. WELD: Sen. Baker, Mr. Culvahouse, the President, Vice President, Mr. Burns and myself, Senator.

SEN. METZENBAUM: Did the President ask you any questions?

MR. WELD: He did not, Senator.

SEN. METZENBAUM: Did anyone else present ask any questions?

MR. WELD: The Vice President asked Mr. Burns, is there malaise in the Department, how is the morale, one question, and the other question, are other resignations in prospect?

MR. BURNS: I just want to say that, No. 1, that the meeting with the President and Vice President was at their request. They initiated the meeting. They were both extremely attentive. The meeting, the things that were said were very frank and very candid in the extreme. When I left, I commented that the President wanted to hear the facts and that we had shared them with him. Without pulling any punches, the President seemed to my eye and to my mind distressed by what we heard.

MR. LEHRER: Now to a NewsMaker Interview with Arnold Burns. The Attorney General, Edwin Meese, was also invited. He declined our invitation. Since he left the Justice Department in April, Mr. Burns has been a Senior Partner in the Washington Office of a national law firm.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Burns, welcome.

MR. BURNS: Thank you.

MR. LEHRER: Let's pick up that point. When you walkedaway from this meeting with the President and the Vice President and the others, did you think something was going to be done?

ANTHONY BURNS, Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General: I wasn't at all sure. As a matter of fact, I thought that in all likelihood we would all wait until after the issuance of Mr. McKay's report which really didn't come out until July.

MR. LEHRER: But did you get the impression as you were talking to these people that they were hearing all of this for the first time?

MR. BURNS: That's a really fine question because it gets to the heart of it. I think much of it, yes, was being heard for the first time. The President seemed shaken by some of the things that we shared with them and the Vice President seemed -- he was very attentive. I think he seemed very concerned and yes, I think he was hearing a number of the things for the first time.

MR. LEHRER: From your perspective, what was the worst thing you told them?

MR. BURNS: Well, I think that we were talking about a mosaic and you had as part of the mosaic a deterioration of morale, an erosion of public confidence in the Department of Justice. We had graffiti in the halls of the Department of Justice probably for the first time since President Washington named Edmund Randolph Attorney General. We had very serious charges of impropriety and as we watched the clips, we saw that Mr. Weld had reached the conclusion that there were indictable offenses. So when you put this whole package together, we had a serious problem. We were talking about very serious business.

MR. LEHRER: And you laid this all out, as you say, in very candid terms to the President and the Vice President and you left the White House not thinking though that anything was going to be done about it.

MR. BURNS: No. I think I left the White House thinking that in their own way and in their own time this problem would be solved.

MR. LEHRER: The President did not say anything, he didn't ask any questions?

MR. BURNS: No, he didn't ask any questions, but as Mr. Weld indicated the Vice President did.

MR. LEHRER: I don't want to put too fine a point on this but when you say they were shaken and they were surprised, was it just body English, or how did you read that?

MR. BURNS: I think it was body English. I think it was expression on faces. I think it was coloration of faces. The Vice President seemed flushed and reddened. The President seemed ashen. This was a hard hitting, no holds barred, sharing of information among men.

MR. LEHRER: Did you share -- did you then and do you now share Mr. Weld's belief that Mr. Meese had committed indictable offenses?

MR. BURNS: I never made a judgment about that, Mr. Lehrer. There was no need for me to. Bill is an expert, he's got vast experience in this. He was backed up by the public integrity section. We had unanimity about the referral of which Mr. Meese spoke. I was concerned -- I was perfectly happy to have that issue resolved the way the law provides for it to be resolved, namely through the Independent Counsel process. My concern -- that of course was part of my concern -- but my concern really dealt with the overall picture of the workings of a Department of Justice that unquestionably in my judgment was wounded.

MR. LEHRER: Did you ever share, did you ever talk to Attorney General Meese with the same directness and straightforwardness that you did to the President and the Vice President?

MR. BURNS: Yes, I did. But let me just say for you so that you understand the picture. I was the acting Attorney General in respect of the investigation of Mr. Meese and under the --

MR. LEHRER: He had excused himself obviously.

MR. BURNS: Well, the investigation was of him.

MR. LEHRER: Sure.

MR. BURNS: So that under the Independent Counsel Statute, the Ethics and Government Act, I was under wraps. I really could not discuss these matters with him. I couldn't discuss any of the details with the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation, and I did not. But I said yes in response to your question, and the explanation for that is that on March 29th, Mr. Weld and I sat down with Mr. Meese man to man, eyeball to eyeball -- it wasn't easy -- don't forget, we all worked together very closely, we were good friends -- and we shared with him again, no holds barred, man to man, shoulder to shoulder. And I explained to him that E. Bob Wallach, who is threaded throughout the various problems that confronted Mr. Meese, was his friend and not ours and that I frankly had had my belly full of E. Bob Wallach.

MR. LEHRER: Did you say to Ed Meese, Mr. Attorney General, I think you should step aside, you should leave, you should resign, you should take some steps to stop, you should do something?

MR. BURNS: Not in those terms. We went to tell Mr. Meese that we were leaving the Department of Justice.

MR. LEHRER: That's what I was getting at. You did not tell him before you quit that he should leave or lay this on him in any hard way?

MR. BURNS: No.

MR. LEHRER: Why not?

MR. BURNS: Well, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was perfectly apparent to me that one of the possibilities were that we would both be fired and that I would certainly be fired. That was before the Terry Eastland firing. But I had sufficient --

MR. LEHRER: Terry Eastland was his spokesman, the Justice Department spokesman.

MR. BURNS: I know him very well and he is an outstanding, outstanding human being and a great reporter I think. But Terry was subsequently fired, but I had enough sense to know that that was a possibility and that the net result of that would have been to have rendered my two and a half years of service in the Department of Justice nugatory.

MR. LEHRER: What's nugatory?

MR. BURNS: Well, rendered it a nullity. I mean, just in effect going out with a general cloud and story which said we had differences over policy which was not at all true. And I was really interested, as I said in a little clip that you saw, in making a point.

MR. LEHRER: But from Ed Meese's point of view, he did not know how you and William Weld felt until the day you walked in to quit?

MR. BURNS: I don't know, but I've been very responsive to your question. I didn't tell him in so many words. But he was embroiled in controversy and surely he had to know that this was impacting all of us.

MR. LEHRER: You told the committee today that it was like Alice in Wonderland there. Give me a story from Alice in Wonderland.

MR. BURNS: Well, we'd start off each morning looking at the Justice Department news clips, and of course --

MR. LEHRER: You mean that had been on the nightly news before?

MR. BURNS: The nightly news the night before or clips from newspapers around the country and sometimes the stories were scathing, excoriating. And again, I mean, you were in a situation where right was wrong and wrong was right. And as I said earlier, in was out and out was in and up was down and down was up. It was just a very peculiar, if I may say so, a very screwy situation.

MR. LEHRER: Screwy, but in just in terms of trying to function as you were the No. 2 man in the Justice Department, how did that influence getting from here to there on any given decision, any given case?

MR. BURNS: Well, because of the tremendous drain on resources. People were engaged in looking after Mr. Meese's problems. I think that a lot of important decisions became bogged down and stalled and in time I mentioned a paralysis setting in in the Department, in time the work that I was doing started to diminish. From the time I came to the Department of Justice in January of '86, until the end of 1987, two years, we worked very very hard, but all of a sudden, the flow of paper, the flow of matters started to slow and trickle and dry up.

MR. LEHRER: Finally, let me ask you the most difficult question of all, your analysis of having, as you say, worked close to this man, known him and liked him all this time, your analysis of what went wrong with Ed Meese.

MR. BURNS: I have to confess to you, Mr. Lehrer, that my mind is boggled. I don't know, but my best guess is that Attorney General Meese was really taken advantage of through a very close personal friendship and that slowly but surely he was completely hornswoggled by E. Bob Wallach.

MR. LEHRER: So if he did anything wrong, he didn't realize it was wrong.

MR. BURNS: I think that I prefer to say that he developed and operated with a tremendous blind spot.

MR. LEHRER: Toward E. Bob Wallach.

MR. BURNS: Toward E. Bob Wallach and the events and circumstances surrounding him and I said earlier today that in my judgment if you were to give Attorney General Meese some sodium pentathol and ask him some questions he would I honestly think believe that he did nothing wrong, committed no impropriety, committed no ethical violation, committed no error of judgment, was guilty of no bad taste, and that given the opportunity to do it all over again he would comport himself exactly the way he did. I call that a tremendous blind spot.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Mr. Burns, thank you very much.

MR. BURNS: It's been a pleasure being with you, sir.

MR. LEHRER: Thank you.

MR. MacNeil: Still to come on the Newshour, must journalists protect unnamed sources and a Rosenblatt essay. FOCUS - SOURCE STORY [Must Journalists Protect Unnamed Sources?]

MR. MacNeil: Next tonight we focus on the latest controversy over journalists and confidential sources. In the 1970s, the Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story of the Watergate scandal which ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation. One source for that scoop was known as "Deep Throat" and his identity was known only to the Post's reporter, Bob Woodward. To this day, Woodward has never revealed the identity of "Deep Throat", and many reporters have gone to jail rather than reveal their sources. News organizations have spent millions of dollars defending that right in court, but is there ever an occasion when that confidentiality can be broken? That was the thrust of a court case in Minnesota recently and our focus tonight. We begin with a background report from Fred Sam Lazaro of public station KCTA in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

DAN COHEN, Plaintiff: I'm pleased with the verdict and I felt it was a fair verdict. I'm pleased with it. And I also want to thank my wife. This was a long grind for all of us.

FRED SAM LAZARO, KCTA: For Dan Cohen, Friday's $700,000 jury award was the first taste of victory in years. Cohen is a former Minneapolis alderman who's run unsuccessfully for Mayor and County Commissioner. But Cohen's real grind began about six years ago when he served as a consultant to Wheelock Whitney, then the Republican Candidate for Minnesota Governor. Six days before the election, with polls showing Whitney trailing badly behind Democratic rival Rudy Perpich, Cohen contacted reporters from four news organizations. He offered them evidence that Perpich's running mate, Marlene Johnson, had been convicted 12 years earlier of shoplifting $6 worth of sewing supplies from a Sears Store.

DAVID NIMMER: Cohen and I struck a bargain.

MR. LAZARO: The bargain is one that veteran WCCO-TV reporter David Nimmer says he's made routinely for years. He was free to use the information so long as he didn't name Cohen as its source. Nimmer says his problem was that he didn't think the information newsworthy.

DAVID NIMMER: It was no story. A conviction when she was 18 years old for shoplifting, I think it was a needle and thread, and I remember telling Cohen, you're kidding, and he said no and he was kind of sheepish. He said, well, you know, I mean what the -- after all she is running for public office -- and I said, yeah, that's true, but this ain't going to see the light of day.

MR. LAZARO: Nimmer had no problem convincing his superiors at WCCO that the story should be tossed in the trash, but Cohen got a very different reception when he approached reporters with the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch. They readily agreed to Cohen's request for anonymity. Bill Salisbury works for the Pioneer Press Dispatch.

BILL SALISBURY, St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch: My immediate reaction was if she had been convicted of theft, that's something that the public, the electorate, had a right to know. My personal feeling about it, whether or not it was unsavory, was irrelevant. I thought it worth pursuing.

MR. LAZARO: After gathering a rebuttal from Marlene Johnson, Salisbury authored this article in the following day's paper, but in a decision made by Salisbury's editors, the story went further. It identified Dan Cohen.

MR. SALISBURY: I objected very strenuously. I told them that I had made a promise to Dan Cohen and I could not break that promise for a variety of reasons, personal, professional, and practical reasons.

MR. LAZARO: But in separate decisions, editors at both the St. Paul and the Minneapolis papers concluded that the source of the information was as important as the information itself.

TIM McGUIRE, Minneapolis Star Tribune: The fact that this political campaign which just three days earlier had been shown to be 19 or 21 points behind by our own poll is now engaging in this kind of last minute desperation is at least as important as the 12 year old shoplifting conviction.

MR. LAZARO: Tim McGuire is Managing Editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He says editors at his paper decided they could not even partially conceal Cohen's identity, the so-called "veiled source" option. That's because the Whitney gubernatorial campaign denied any involvement with the Cohen leak.

MR. McGUIRE: If you would have said a Whitney campaign worker, you would have been connecting it to the Whitney campaign. The Whitney campaign was saying, we had nothing to do with it. Another member of the campaign was saying it was a Cohen-inspired move.

MR. LAZARO: Albeit the need to name him.

MR. McGUIRE: The need to name him and to show his connection because to simply ascribe it to the entire campaign at that hour seemed improper.

MR. LAZARO: However, testimony later at the Minneapolis trial showed that the Whitney campaign at its highest levels was indeed in on the decision to leak the shoplifting story. Cohen was merely its courier.

MR. LAZARO: Cohen's Attorney, Elliot Rothenberg, says his client was disowned by the Whitney campaign, lost his job, and became a political pariah.

ELLIOT ROTHENBERG, Plaintiff's Attorney: You not only have the original articles, which I think caused him to be fired that same day, but then after that you had a series of venomous attacks by various columnists in the Star Tribune and also a cartoon of Dan Cohen showing him dressed as a garbage can for Halloween. So it's a situation where there was no let up on the attack on Dan Cohen. And that I think caused him grievous harm in his professional life.

MR. LAZARO: Rothenberg says the jury award he successfully sought will cover lost wages Cohen has suffered. Cohen, in a brief statement following the verdict, said it has widespread implications.

DAN COHEN: It's very important for people when they're dealing with other people to keep their word. That's the hard currency of journalism, it's the hard currency of politics, it's the hard currency of a lot of businesses and human activities, and when that currency is devalued, we all suffer by it.

MR. LAZARO: The Cohen case might reassure some sources that promises of anonymity from reporters will be kept, but reporters say those promises will be harder to make for fear of editors overturning their decision. Bill Salisbury says some of his most important stories were uncovered through confidential sources. Many of them, he says, no longer come by.

MR. SALISBURY: Sources have dried up. I have nothing more to give them than my reputation for being trustworthy and honest. And I think my reputation was somewhat damaged.

MR. NIMMER: I like Dan Cohen. He's not John the Baptist, and he's not perfect, and maybe, I don't know what his motives were but he's a good source of mine and he hasn't been since that date, not at all. He'll never call. He used to have pretty good ideas. He was a good gossip. It's our stock and trade.

MR. LAZARO: Editors at the Twin Cities papers agreed that confidential sources are important in journalism but they say the decision to use them is sometimes best made in newsrooms by editors. As they appeal the Cohen case, they'll argue that the First Amendment guarantees editors the right to make such decisions.

MR. MacNeil: To discuss this case and the wider questions it raises, we have Tim McGuire, the Managing Editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who joins us from public station KCTA, Jonathan Alter, Media Critic and Senior Writer for Newsweek Magazine, John Seigenthaler, Editor of the National Tennessean, Editorial Director of USA Today, and current President of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and Richard Harwood, Press Critic and Ombudsman for The Washington Post. John Seigenthaler, is the decision of the Minneapolis papers right, there are times when sources should be named?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER, The Tennessean: I suppose that you could give me a hypothetical and I would say, yes, there might come a time if I had been fed false information by a source and I had advised that source in advance that if he gave me false information I would not be bound by the agreement, that I would, indeed, feel free under those circumstances to leak it. I have searched my mind. I cannot find another situation in which once having given my word to extend the pledge of confidentiality that I would then go back on that, and I would certainly say that the reporters who work for me in Nashville understand that rule and understand that that's where I'm going to be when the test comes.

MR. MacNeil: Jonathan Alter, your magazine made a decision -- Newsweek -- to the Minneapolis decision when it decided earlier this year to reveal that it was Col. Oliver North who, in fact, had leaked some of the stories that he was complaining about. You feel -- does the magazine feel as a matter of policy there are occasions when sources should be revealed even though they've been promised confidentiality?

JONATHAN ALTER, Newsweek: There are occasions. I should stipulate that they are very rare and Newsweek and most other news organizations believe that most of the time, the vast majority of cases, you do not reveal confidential sources, but protection of confidential sources is a very important value without being in all situations "the" paramount value. Sometimes other values, truth, the health and safety of individuals who could be affected, even the law, are also important in making this assessment. In the case of Newsweek, we also had a situation where everybody in Washington -- not everybody -- but large numbers of people knew that Oliver North was a source. The only people who didn't were the poor readers. So we were trying to give the readers a sense that North had been using the confidentiality as a shield to protect himself, to pin false blame on other people, and we saw that as a situation where he had lost claim to his confidentiality.

MR. MacNeil: Dick Harwood of The Washington Post, are there occasions when there should be exceptions to keeping a source confidential?

RICHARD HARWOOD, Washington Post: Well, I think I'm like John Seigenthaler in that I might be able to spend a few hours and think of one, but basically when a reporter, presumably with the authorization or the authority from his editor and from his newspaper, says to Robin MacNeil or Jim Lehrer or somebody, hey, if you give me this information I will not disclose or publish your name in my newspaper that is a verbal contract and I see very few circumstances under which one would be justified in breaking that contract.

MR. MacNeil: So you would agree with Mr. Cohen, the successful plaintiff in this case, that keeping your promise is the hard currency of journalism?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, I believe totally in that statement.

MR. ALTER: Who is the bargain really with? Is it with the reader or with the sources? And my concern is that over the years there's been a system of what you could call mutually assured seduction between reporters and sources where the press forgets that its first responsibility is to its readers. It's not like an attorney/client relationship or a priest and a confessor. Our obligation is the truth above all else. And there are times, particularly in Washington, it's a more serious problem there, where the relationship becomes a shield. Just to give you one example of something that seems to me a pretty harmless case, Henry Kissinger was using confidentiality for spin control on his airplane. Would you all consider it a gross breach to say at a certain point this was Henry Kissinger, he has been using it to spin?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, in fact, we did say that.

MR. ALTER: Isn't that an example?

MR. HARWOOD: But it was not breaking a confidence with Henry Kissinger. It was simply reporting what the White House informed a different reporter, that Kissinger had done the briefing. We then, for those who can remember that far back, attempted to break up this practice of background briefings by Secretaries of State and White House officials and so on, and our reporters would go to these meetings and say we want it on the record, if you don't, I'm walking out, and the briefer would say good-bye, and unfortunately nobody walked with our reporter. So in a very short period of time we lost that fight, because we wanted the information that came out of these briefings, we couldn't get our colleagues in the press to agree and there you were.

MR. MacNeil: That's just one of the wider issues I referred to, Dick Harwood. I'd like to come back to that, the sort of use of confidential sources. Can I go back to Tim McGuire for a moment. I assume that you and the Minneapolis paper would agree with Jonathan Alter that the readers' interest comes before the absolute interest of the source, the confidentiality of the source.

TIM McGUIRE, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Certainly no one is arguing that promises aren't crucial to be kept. Promises are the way we live our lives, but this was a situation in which readers had to be served by knowing the source of some very obscure information. As Mr. Nimmer said in the report that we saw just before this discussion, this wasn't much of a story. This was a 12 year old conviction involving a theft of $6 worth of sewing equipment. The issue was where was this information coming from at the eleventh hour of a campaign in which the Republicans were 19 points behind. We were in the position of only telling half the story.

MR. MacNeil: Are your readers now served first by the publicity about your revealing the source and now by this court judgment? One of your reporters says that confidential sources don't call him so much anymore.

MR. McGUIRE: Well, we get a lot of mixed reviews on that. Some reporters say there's been no change. Others believe there has been some change and certainly it is always difficult when you think that you might be cutting off some news. If you look at my paper each day however you see that we probably run far too many confidential sources. We're still using a lot of them.

MR. MacNeil: Before we move on to that question which everybody wants to talk about I know, let's just go to the two Washington guests for a moment. John Seigenthaler, what impact do you think - - wearing your third hat now, the American Society of Newspaper Editors -- what impact is this Minneapolis decision awarding that man $700,000 because the court ruled it was a breach of contract to reveal his name, how is that going to affect newspaper work?

JOHN SEIGENTHALER, The Tennessean: I don't think it's going to have a chilling effect on what most of us do, but I'm much more concerned about the devastating effect of a newspaper breaking a pledge of confidentiality on a story as trivial as this one. I mean, I agree with Tim McGuire that it was a very trivial story. I agree with Nimmer that it was a trivial story. It seems to me that if you're going to get into the business of exposing dirty politics, then the time to do it is when the reporter talks to the dirty politician who comes to you with unsavory information about an opponent, and that's the time to say I'm not taking it as a source. As a matter of fact, this is dirty pool you're playing and I'm going to expose that in the morning. I mean, if he had done that I don't see that there's any difficulty with exposing him. Once you gave him the pledge though that you were going to take the information and protect him, then I think you're bound by that and I think it is, in fact, damaging to all of us in this industry to go back on that pledge.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. McGuire, do you want to come back on that?

MR. McGUIRE: Yes. The problem here is that the information was given in an envelope. The reporter had no idea what it was and secondly, if the reporter does not make that point and does not catch on to that, what do you do? Has the editor lost all control? That's the real issue we're dealing with and we get back to stories like the Janet Cook story that Mr. Howard is familiar with. Does the editor have no control at all over a situation like that?

MR. SEIGENTHALER: No, Tim, I think the editor has the control all the way. He has the control in the first instance. I mean, he has the ultimate control to put that reporter on the street and to tell him to go work somewhere else, to sell insurance or to go into personnel work. I mean, I think professional journalists should act professionally and to take information in an envelope and to give a pledge of confidentiality blindly seems to me to be unprofessional, and then having done that, to turn it over to you, not understanding that you were going to disclose it and ruin his reputation, sever his bond with his source I think is unconscionable as well.

MR. McGUIRE: Another important problem here is the same as Mr. Alter's. People throughout the state capitol building knew who was giving that information out, they knew it was out. Four different organizations got it. This was a topic of much discussion during that day.

MR. MacNeil: Richard Harwood, do you feel bigger, to move from a very small story, $6 shoplifting to the Oliver North thing, do you think in the Newsweek case it's different?

MR. HARWOOD: No. I don't think it's different. I think that to go back to the $6 case, that if it really was in the public interest to reveal that to those people, to the people of Minnesota, you know applying that example to the Watergate case and "Deep Throat", I mean what are you comparing here? And we certainly would not have exposed the source on the Watergate stories, but there was a huge public interest in that issue as opposed to this one. I just disagree with his handling of it and so far as giving up control of the newsroom, he didn't have to print anything on the story, period.

MR. SEIGENTHALER: Robin, I would like to say the remarks I just leveled at Tim were given as an independent editor, not as the President of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, but I stand behind them nonetheless.

MR. MacNeil: In the remaining time we have, is there too much use -- Dick Harwood, you work in Washington -- is there too much use of confidential sources?

MR. HARWOOD: Sure.

MR. MacNeil: What do you do about it?

MR. HARWOOD: I don't know. If I knew, I suspect we would have done something about it a long time ago, Robin. A part of it comes from laziness. A part of it comes from time constraints. A part of it is just that old Washington habit of when you start dealing with somebody on the telephone or in his office some day, you sort of open the conversation by saying hey off the record on background, what's going on here, when many times if we'd push for the attribution as Bradley has tried to get people to do in the dictum in our style book, you make every effort to get specific attribution. If we did that more, we would have less of it, but I think we've fallen into this easy habit and I don't think we've served the readers all that well by doing this so promiscuously.

MR. ALTER: I think the easy habit is partly a function of how sacred people now perceive this relationship to be. They don't quite have their priorities straight. Talking to sources is a means to an end and if the source is using the relationship to shield himself from accountability or if in the case of Oliver North, the source himself, becomes the subject of the story, then you have to reassess. I don't think these constant reassessments are so damaging. The source gets something out of the relationship. It's not like he's doing a lot of favors. It's in his interest to spin, to get the word out, to shiv somebody in the back, whatever he's doing, talking to the reporter, and so we have to understand that his motivation is not necessarily affected by how we treat this story.

MR. MacNeil: John Seigenthaler, you edit one paper. You're Editorial Director of another one, a national paper. Can you do without confidential sources?

MR. SEIGENTHALER: Well, USA Today, as you know, does instruct its reporters not to quote confidential sources. I think the rules differ from paper to paper across the country and I think they have to. I think independent editors have to be able to make independent judgments. My perception, however, is that there is less reliance on confidential sources today than at any time I can remember in the last 40 years, and I think that it's a recognition that our credibility is damaged by the flippant or trivial use of confidential sources, and the decision by USA Today not to rely on anonymous sources was one that was reached with credibility in mind.

MR. ALTER: I think that's going too far to the other extreme and USA Today suffers for not having some confidential sources. In some cases, it's the only way you can get the story. There is some kind of a middle ground. What scares me about this case is that you can have all kinds of possible plaintiffs in the future saying, well, I didn't tell them they could use my name and they say that after the fact. Then you go through a long complicated discovery process as to whether the pledge was granted in the first place and this raises very serious I think questions for the future.

MR. SEIGENTHALER: I agree with you that Tim's done us all a favor in that he's made us reappraise our positions on this. I don't an editor that's not going to turn this over in his mind. I'd put a memorandum on our bulletin board immediately just after that story moved on the wire and said, here is our policy, let's reappraise it.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. McGuire, what is your policy now in Minneapolis?

MR. McGUIRE: Well, our policy has been that in major cases if a reporter has a doubt he should consult, he or she should consult an editor whether or not to take the information confidentially. Obviously, we're currently evaluating that policy and trying to figure out exactly what we ought to tell reporters, because the real significant thing about this decision could turn out to be the fact that courts are saying that relationships between a source and a reporter have a contractual base. That could cause real problems for our peers and for the industry notwithstanding whether or not this particular decision was correct. If those relationships are covered by contracts, we could all have serious problems.

MR. MacNeil: Are you appealing this decision?

MR. McGUIRE: We have not made that final decision but I think it's very very likely.

MR. SEIGENTHALER: I hope you do and wish you good luck.

MR. McGUIRE: I do too.

MR. MacNeil: Thank you, Tim McGuire in Minneapolis, Jonathan Alter in New York, John Seigenthaler, Richard Harwood in Washington. ESSAY BY ROGER ROSENBLATT - SUMMER COURAGE

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight some summer words about courage from our essayist Roger Rosenblatt.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Courage threatens children in the summer. So much courage required to do the things deemed necessary, indispensable by grown-ups. You've got to learn to ride a bike, simply got to do it, can't be a real kid without knowing how to ride a bike. So bravely you mount the impossible contraption and you are like a high wire act caught in the balance. But there is no balance, no matter what your parents swore. And it's so much easier to stop than push ahead. Do we have to go through with this? Does absolutely every kid have to learn to ride a bike? And while we're on the subject, does every kid have to learn to swim? Suddenly there you are again, in another uncomfortable perilous position, flat on your back in the water, held up by mom or dad or by a camp counselor who, you're positive, would let you drown in a second if you squawk. But of course you'll drown. I mean, who can exist in water except a fish? It isn't natural. Come on, kids, swim. Push ahead, ahead. Like the movie "Breaking The Sound Barrier", in which the pilot who pulls back on the wheel crashed the plane to earth, but the pilot who pushed the wheel forward, who had the nerve to push ahead, well, he broke the sound barrier and flew like a supersonic bird forever. Still, that was the movies, wasn't it? Oh, why do they insist that I learn how to dive? What more do they want from me? I learned how to swim. Wasn't that enough? How much courage does a kid have to have anyway? I remember when "I" learned how to ride a horse. It took a very long time and I was scared stiff, scared of the animal, terrified of falling. My severe riding counselor would have none of my terror, "Get up boy, get up on that horse and ride, push ahead." For weeks, I clung to the mane, to the neck, my eyes shut tight as a newborn baby's. The counselor called out his commands, "Walk, trot, cantor," oh God. Eventually, I rode. I even grew to like it. Going over jumps, I could not remember the coward me, face wet with tears, trembling at the prospect of mounting the beast. Yet, miraculously, we do it. Sooner or later we learn to ride horses and bikes, we learn to swim, to dive, to kiss, to fight, to make love, to work, to stand up for what we believe, to marry, to have children of our own, to teach them all we know. Courage in all things, triumph in a few of them. But go back a moment to summer. See all the small fry tottering on the edge, afraid to push ahead, wanting desperately to quit, bewildered by the puzzling assurances that life is manageable, conquerable. Who would believe it? So hard a road, so deep a lake, so high a horse. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again, the main points in the news today, Former Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns appearing on the Newshour described President Reagan as ashen faced and said Vice President Bush reddened when Burns and a colleague told them they believed Attorney General Meese probably committed felonies. The White House today said the President did not believe them. An outside counsel was chosen to investigate House Speaker Jim Wright, Persian Gulf peace talks began in the UN with the Iranian Foreign Minister and Iran said it would use its influence to try and free American hostages if Washington released Iranian assets frozen in the U.S. The White House rejected the offer. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.