The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: Our summary of the news; then an interview with a Red Cross official on the organization's decision to scale back its Iraq operations; an extended report by special correspondent Simon Marks on efforts to make Iraq safe for the Iraqi people; the latest on the California wildfires from Governor Gray Davis; a look at the coming today of an unusual solar storm; and a book conversation with veteran AP reporter Walter Mears about covering presidential campaigns.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The U.S. Military passed a deadly milestone in Iraq today. More Americans have died in the fighting since the war formally ended than during the war. The latest two were killed during the night when their tank apparently hit a mine north of Baghdad. That makes 116 killed in action since major combat formally ended on May 1. A total of 114 U.S. troops died in the fighting before then. Also today, seven Ukrainian troops were wounded in an ambush south of Baghdad. It was the first such attack on that force. The International Red Cross announced today it will scale back foreign staffers in Iraq. Instead, the bulk of the work will be left to 600 Iraqi employees. The agency's headquarters in Baghdad were badly damaged on Monday, in a wave of suicide car bombings. Two Red Cross employees were killed. Today's announcement came in Geneva, Switzerland. A spokesman said the Red Cross had to make changes.

PIERRE KRAEHENBUEHL, International Committee of the Red Cross: We owe it to all of our colleagues in Iraq to think of their security as a priority. It is a responsibility of ours. For this reason, we are reducing the number of our international staff and implementing additional measures to increase security for our remaining staff.

JIM LEHRER: Another aid group, Doctors without Borders, also pulled part of its international staff out of Iraq today. We'll have more on the Red Cross decision in just a moment. The U.S. has blamed the latest attacks, in part, on foreigners entering Iraq from Syria and Iran. But today, Syria's foreign ministry condemned the attack on the Red Cross. It said: "Operations that target humanitarian and international organizations severely harm the interests of the Iraqi people." And Iran denied today that it was letting foreign fighters cross its border into Iraq. A firefighter was killed today, battling the wildfires that have swept southern California. Two others were hurt. In all, more than 13,000 firefighters were on the job, but the fire threatened more homes despite a change in the weather. Spencer Michels has our report.

SPENCER MICHELS: While cooler, more humid conditions provided some relief for crews, it also brought changing wind gusts of up to 35 miles per hour, which pushed the fires in new, unexpected directions. In San Diego County, the state's biggest blaze, the 45-mile long cedar fire began merging with the 40,000-acre Paradise fire near the Cuyamaca mountain town of Julian. The town of Cuyamaca, home to 160, was destroyed overnight. More than 3,000 firefighters concentrated on defending Julian, which is known for its apple crop. 300 homes have been destroyed. At a morning briefing, officials explained their plan of action.

RICK HENSON: Our number-one priority on that fire is to put as many people as we can in the Julian area to make a stand against that fire.

SPENCER MICHELS: In resort communities from Lake Arrowhead east to Big Bear Lake, tens of thousands of residents have been forced to flee their homes.

DAVID HARMON: Within five minutes of it cresting the hill, the house was gone. Imean, it was just gone. There was no looking back. We were down at the bottom of the driveway, got about halfway down the street, looked in the rearview mirror, and the whole house was on fire.

SPENCER MICHELS: Since the weekend, ten separate wildfires have swept over 600,000 acres-- an area more than half the size of Rhode Island-- destroying more than 1,600 homes. At least 17 people have died, but officials said they expect the death toll to rise as crews dig through hundreds of charred homes. Fire officials aren't sure when they will be able contain the blazes.

JIM LEHRER: One U.S. House member, Republican Duncan Hunter, was directly affected by the disaster. He lost his home to a fire east of San Diego. Today, California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger met with congressional leaders in Washington. He appealed for quick disaster relief. We'll talk to the outgoing governor, Gray Davis, about the fires later in the program tonight. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 26 points to close above 9774. The NASDAQ rose four points to close above 1936. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the Red Cross in Iraq, making Iraq safe for the Iraqi people, Governor Davis on the California fires, the solar storm, and reporting campaigns.

FOCUS IN HARM'S WAY

JIM LEHRER: The International Committee of the Red Cross decides to stay in Iraq but with reduced presence. Gwen Ifill has the story.

GWEN IFILL: In many war zones, the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross is one of first groups in and one of the last out. But Monday's attack on the group's Baghdad headquarters led to today's news that the Red Cross, known as the Red Crescent in Muslim countries, will reduce its foreign staff. Earlier this week, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged the group to remain.

COLIN POWELL: They are needed. Their work is need. If they are driven out, then the terrorists win.

GWEN IFILL: Before today's announcement, the Red Cross staff in Iraq was already dwindling. When major combat ended in May, more than 100 foreign staffers were working alongside Iraqi colleagues. But that number has dropped after a series of deadly attacks on aid workers, including the August bombing of the U.N. headquarters.

GWEN IFILL: For more on the Red Cross decision to reduce its staff in Baghdad, we're joined by Roland Huguenin-Benjamin. He was the spokesperson for the ICRC in Baghdad during the war, and returned to London earlier this month. Welcome, sir.

You folks have been in Baghdad through three wars, including through the end of major combat earlier this year. What is happening now that is making you withdraw at least part of your forces there?

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: Well, the attack that took place on Monday was unprecedented against the international community of the Red Cross. We have had colleagues killed in various places around the world, but we have never, ever had a bomb attack occur against our premises. So, we do have to take stock and reconsider our position and take up the responsibility, the moral responsibility involved in sending people out there, or keeping a large number of Iraqi staff active in premises that have come under serious attack.

GWEN IFILL: When you say "serious attack," do you think for even a minute that the Red Cross itself is being targeted?

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: No, I believe that the Red Cross has been targeted as a soft and easy target to convey a message to the occupying forces by the people who wanted to gain as much attention as possible to the international community, for ICRC is a strictly neutral and humanitarian organization, and it doesn't benefit from the protection of armed guards and wouldn't want to have armed protection for its delegates. So, it was a very easy target. We believe in humanity, we believe in those values, and we were hoping that we will be protected by the fact that we are apolitical and not involved in the nature of conflict itself there.

GWEN IFILL: Because you are apolitical and you are widely known as being neutral, does it worry you that in some way you are being lumped in with the deputy mayor of Baghdad and others who have been killed since major combat ended because they were seen as being in cooperation with the occupation forces?

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: Well, we insist very much on the fact that if we want to be efficient in the humanitarian field we have to be perceived to be strictly neutral and independent. We cannot seem to be affiliated with either party, be it the Iraqi side or be it the coalition forces on the other side. So we want to make our decision independently whether we can stay, whether we can go on with the humanitarian activities we're carrying out now. The need is still there. As long as there is no serious reconstruction program going on, we are still needed to do quick fix, as we call it, on the water stations. We are still helping to reestablish hospitals. And we are involved mainly now in visiting the prisoners that are detained at the hands of the coalition forces. So in order to be able to deliver this mission in a credible way for all sides, we have to be seen to be neutral and to be respected as such.

GWEN IFILL: Because you are a party to the Geneva convention you have to stay, I understand, in Baghdad, or in Iraq , to do the things you were just describing. Do you... help us know how many people are we talking about who are left? How many have been about withdrawn? How many Iraqi nationals are still working there on your behalf?

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: Well, this year it's been going up and down, if I may say, because we used to have a large group of people before the war itself. Then in order to be able to perform in April we had kept a core team of expatriate workers who were all volunteering to stay throughout the war. And we had given the choice to our national Iraqi staff to either stay home during the bombardment or to come to work. Each one was volunteering to come to work. We are doing the same now. So, the numbers are not yet clearly defined of who will be present in the offices of ICRC or in the field as of now. But we are definitely keeping a team that will be sufficient to ensure that we are going on with our operations.

GWEN IFILL: As we reported, Colin Powell made a personal appeal to the ICRC not to pull out. Did that influence your thinking in deciding how many people to pull out, how many people to leave behind?

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: Well, we had been reassessing our presence in Iraq ever since the 22nd of July, when one delegate was killed at gunpoint on the road from Baghdad to Hillah. At that stage, we had decided to pull out a number of international staff members, and we had kept enough to have the operations going on. We also had a system of people moving in and out, flying in from neighboring countries for specific missions on a short term. Right now, we are reconsidering and taking stock of the new situation, and we definitely want to keep a sufficient number of people on the spot to make sure that the visits to prisoners can go on, and to make sure that the main urgently needed repair toward the stations can still go on.

GWEN IFILL: When you talk about the situation there right now, in your opinion, based on your experience on the ground and your experience now at somewhat of a distance, would you say that the situation, the security situation has dramatically deteriorated in the last few weeks because of these incidents?

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: I believe that the situation we are face facing now is totally different from the one we were expecting early summer. In the months of May and June, a large number of organizations had moved into the country with the hope to develop programs and to organize development activities. Because of the serious constraints on security on movement of people inside the country, because of the danger, most of these groups have had to pull out. Now the ICRC has been said to be the first to move in, the last to move out in many situations. I certainly hope that we can establish that it is possible to keep free space for humanitarian activity on a neutral basis, even in a conflict in which there are forces fighting against the occupation of the national territory, and a situation in which there is very difficult, serious constraints on the security of international staff.

GWEN IFILL: Now, yours is, of course, not the only group to have reevaluated its presence there. When a lot of these humanitarian groups first arrived, I gather, you were around the country with the Red Crescent and the Red Cross visibly on your vehicles. They were bright yellow vehicles for some groups, there were stickers all over cars. Now it's a very low-profile way of getting around the country, I gather, because of the security constraints. Are you still able to do the job as you went there to do?

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: Well, up until last Monday we were operating normally. Of course we had given very serious orders to the staff members not to move about if it was unnecessary, not to travel on certain roads, not to go out after dark, and people were accepting those constraints on their own personal lives. It meant that they were basically going from home to the working place and not moving about very much. Now we are going to keep a number of people there. They are all volunteering, they are all seasoned workers, most of them have been working many other countries before. They have all expressed a will and a determination to stay. But certainly, the security constraints are going to be even higher.

GWEN IFILL: Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, thank you so much for joining us.

ROLAND HUGUENIN-BENJAMIN: You're welcome.

FOCUS DANGEROUS NEIGHBORHOOD

JIM LEHRER: Now, security for the Iraqi people is the subject of special correspondent Simon Marks' second report on postwar Iraq. He reports from Baghdad.

SIMON MARKS: The day starts early for the major crimes unit of the Iraqi police. It's 4:30 in the morning and already detectives accompanied by the U.S. Military police who escort them are rolling through the streets of Baghdad, preparing to launch a pre-dawn raid. Their target: A series of houses in a Baghdad suburb where they believe members of a gang responsible for a string of murders, kidnappings, and robberies is holed up. As the officers move in... ( gunfire ) ...gunfire is briefly exchanged, the bullets piercing the morning silence. Kidnapping is a new crime here, and one that the major crimes unit established just three months ago is desperate to stamp out.

LT. COL. ANWAR ABDUL JABBAR ( Translated ): We never had this before. In my 18 years as an officer, I never dealt with or heard about a single kidnapping case. Kidnapping started when the war ended. The gangs of looters that formed after the regime fell, they would kidnap each other and demand ransoms. Then they started to kidnap innocent civilians. Now they go after anyone they like. So it's absolutely a byproduct of our circumstances.

SIMON MARKS: As the suspects are arrested, some of the Iraqi detectives manhandled them. The leader of the gang is wanted for four murders. Iraqi kidnappers are known for preying on teenage women. There are no Miranda rights read here as the suspects are taken in.

SPOKESMAN: Compared to western law enforcement, things are different.

SIMON MARKS: Sergeant Michael Routh is a reservist serving with the U.S. military police. A police officer from Hannibal, Missouri he has been helping to train members of major crimes unit. At a time when human rights of organizations are accusing the U.S. Army of acting in an overly aggressive manner in Iraqi streets, he says he is trying to persuade the Iraqi officers to respect western concepts of justice and suspects' rights.

SGT. MICHAEL ROUTH: We're trying to let them know that their only role in law enforcement is to make the arrest, to gather information and not to pass the judgment. That is for a judge to do. If the judge finds him guilty, that's to the judge.

SIMON MARKS: By lunchtime, the major crimes unit is back on the road. This time, a counterfeit operation believed responsible for forging millions of Iraqi dinars is in its sights. When detectives reach the scene, they find the alleged counterfeiter isn't at home. Neighbors tell them that they saw a man leaving the apartment the previous night carrying printing equipment with him. The relationship between the Iraqi police and the Iraqi people is slowly finding a new dynamic. For years the force was a repressive tool of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Now the police say they are working hard to win the trust of the people.

LT. COL. ANWAR ABDUL JABBAR ( Translated ): Through working with the people, and as long as they can see us out there working to improve security, we're out there representing ourselves. As they see the situation improve they'll give us credit and won't forget the role that we're playing.

SIMON MARKS: It will, though, be a long, hard battle. The center of Baghdad looks normal enough. The city's markets were teeming with energy as shoppers stocked up for the holy month of Ramadan. But everybody cites security is a major concern. It's an issue never far from their minds.

KASIM HUSSEIN, Cement Trader (Translated): Security is nonexistent. We used to stay open until midnight. Now we have to shut down at 5:00, all the stores do. By 8:00 at night the streets of Baghdad are deserted. In the past, you'd see life on the streets at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. There's one way things are different from the way they were under Saddam.

MOHAMMED FAUZI, Spice Trader (Translated ): It's true we have freedom of speech, but we don't have security. Before we can't speak freely but we didn't have security; now we can speak freely but there's no security. So, what's the difference?

SIMON MARKS: The difference between the Saddam Hussein era and today, according to the doctor's wife Rafwan Abdul Raffour, is the difference between living and getting by.

RAFWAN ABDUL RAFFOUR, Iraqi Mother (Translated ): You can say that life has pretty much stopped because of the security situation. For me, as a mother and as a woman, it's very difficult to leave my house. My children are almost imprisoned in their own home. There's no security in the streets. We're scared of the streets. There are explosives everywhere. Anyone can pass by them. Every time you leave your house you are taking a serious risk.

SIMON MARKS: So, on the streets of Baghdad today there are far fewer women than there were just seven months ago, and those who are out and about are unenthused about the risks they are taking

NADDIN KHATTAB, Baghdad Student (Translated): I didn't want the former regime to stay in power, but I didn't want this either-- a country can't come in here and preach liberation and talk about liberation when you have criminals on the streets. This is not liberation, this is a disaster.

FARAH JAWHAR, Baghdad Student ( Translated ): Even when we're in school we're scared because of crime that is happening even sometimes on campus. We're not seeing anything getting better. It's all getting worse

SIMON MARKS: That is not the case according to Captain Jeffrey T. Leslie of the 1st Armored Division.

SPOKESMAN: This is known for being a pro-Saddam area.

SIMON MARKS: Like the coalition officials he serves as he patrols some of the neighborhoods where the U.S. Believe Saddam Hussein sympathizers reside, he says the crime wave is being brought under control.

CAPT. JEFFREY T. LESLIE, 1st Armored Division: When we got here at the end of the May, there were no police anywhere. Now they respond really fast to everything. They are always there and they are taking a really proactive role. The Iraqis used to not trust them, but the more Iraqis I talk to, they are starting to get that trust back for them and they feel they are doing something good for the people.

SIMON MARKS: But it hasn't been easy to recruit members of the Iraqi police major crimes unit. The unit has 42 officers with the power of arrest to serve a city the size of Los Angeles. And with police stations now being targeted for attack by suicide bombers who accuse the Iraqi police of collaborating with the U.S. and its allies, the recruitment process here only gets harder. Concerns about security take on a number of different aspects. On the streets of Baghdad, people want to know that they won't be preyed upon by marauding gangs of organized criminals and that the city's murder rate of 16 per day-- double the prewar level-- will soon fall. But many have another fear: The concern that quite by chance they'll be caught up in the political violence that has rocked this city since Saddam Hussein's fall. The violent attacks that have dominated the headlines here are as unpredictable as they are deadly. Foreign embassies, downtown hotels, the headquarters of the red across and the United Nations -- all have been considered fair game by those elements seeking to force a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

MUWAFFAK AL RABBAIE, Iraqi Governing Council: It's not a very good experience, I have to admit, but this is the price. It comes with the territory.

SIMON MARKS: When the Baghdad Hotel was targeted by a car bomber, Dr. Muwaffak Al Rabbaie was inside. A member of the Iraqi governing council, which runs things here jointly with the coalition and has already seen one of its number assassinated, he and his colleagues know they are potential targets.

MUWAFFAK AL RABBAIE: If we want to build a country, we have to be ready and prepared to sacrifice. We're prepared to sacrifice ourselves for this. We're building a new Iraq, and they are trying to destroy it, this new Iraq. They are trying to derail the process of constitutional process. They are trying to derail the democratization of Iraq. We're not going to let them do that. We'renot going to be, if you like, excluded and isolated from our people

SIMON MARKS: There is, however, no indication that the attempts to derail the process will end anytime soon, partly because the bombers have easy and almost unlimited access to enormous amounts of ammunition -- 25 miles south of Baghdad doesn't look like much today, but before the war, it was home to a division of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican Guard. Today anyone can drive through the gates of the old base and find littered all over the site enormous piles of unexploded ammunition. Troops with the 82nd Airborne patrol here on a routine basis, but it covers ten-square miles and it's proved impossible to secure all the ammunition here all the time.

CAPT. ALEX URSEL: It's a huge ammo dump. The locals want it. We want it. Other military forces want it. So, yeah, it's definitely a threat to both the Iraqi populous and the coalition forces

SIMON MARKS: Anyone can come here and steal explosives that can be used in suicide bomb attacks or other acts of sabotage. In one storage facility we found enough propellants to have several large explosions; certainly enough to bring down one of Baghdad's large hotels. Local Iraqi police officer, Ali Hamsa Sultan, also occasionally patrols the base, and says it's vital for sites like this to be secured.

ALI HAMSA SULTAN (Translated): With the fuses you saw over there you could fill a car with two bags, light a fuse and there would be a huge explosion, a car bomb-- just from the materials you have seen right here. We want the U.S. Military and coalition to clean this up. It's a danger to our children, it's a danger to us; it's a danger to everyone who comes to Iraq.

SIMON MARKS: With those dangers uppermost in their minds, many Iraqis have been forced to change their daily routine because of the bombing campaign. Seven months ago, the NewsHour met Imad el Sabakh, one of Baghdad's best-known auctioneers. Then he was a sidewalk star attracting enormous crowds to his furniture sale. Today he is off the streets. He says it's no longer safe to conduct his business affairs

IMAD EL SABAKH (Translated): There's no security. I'm afraid that if we have huge crowds the way we used to attract them before the war, it would become a target for the bombers. These days large crowds are not safe.

SIMON MARKS: By night, some Iraqis are slowly venturing back out into a city that used to swing until the small hours. The fish restaurants that line the Tigris River are gingerly reopening, but their clientele is entirely male, and dinners wrap up earlier than they did before. The talk is of insecurity, restrictions, and of disappointment with the U.S. and its allies.

ALAH AL-KAFAJI (Translated): They did liberate Iraq, I'm not saying they didn't. They liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but they did not liberate Iraq for these people sitting here. There are 13 of us sitting here and we don't know if we can get home safely. ( Singing in Arabic )

SIMON MARKS: Until that sense of security returns, many Iraqis say that the coalition's achievements will be eclipsed by the actions of those who seek to undermine America's goals here and by the criminals capitalizing on the power vacuum created by Saddam's fall.

FOCUS SOLAR STORM

JIM LEHRER: Next the story of an unusual kind of storm and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: One of the most powerful geomagnetic storms on record hit the earth today at 1:13 A.M., Eastern Time. It disrupted some airline and space satellite communications and led some electrical grids to curb their power transmissions as a precaution. The storm was triggered by a giant eruption on the sun's surface, known as a solar flare.

Here to tell us about the storm and the solar flare that triggered it is Robert Roy Britt, lead science writer for space.Com.

And Rob, welcome. Start us from the beginning here back to yesterday when scientists noticed an unusual event on the sun's surface. What happened?

ROBERT ROY BRITT: Well, there's these giant sun spots on the sun. And there's several right now and a couple of them are as big as Jupiter. They are huge. And the sun spots are areas where the suns magnetic energy gets all twisted up and it's -- it puts sort of a cap on the solar energy that's trying to get out of sun. It's a bit like a loose cap on a soda bottle and sooner or later that cap's going to blow off and this material is going to come flying out. That is what happened yesterday

MARGARET WARNER: And so is that what a solar flare is, is this huge eruption?

ROBERT ROY BRITT: Yes. It's a little bit complex. You have initially a solar flare and that's a visible event that is seen about eight minutes later from earth or it's seen even sooner from spacecraft. It takes about eight minutes for the sun's light and radiation to travel to earth. Then there's an associated event that is sometimes cast out from the sun called a coronal mass ejection. Yesterday's solar flare also had one of these coronal mass ejections. The initial event hit earth yesterday very rapidly after eight minutes or so. Today, earlier this morning the more devastating event or the more important event was this coronal mass ejection, a giant blob of gas, a big cloud that just expands outward and travels through space

MARGARET WARNER: And I gather it's just huge, what, 13 times the size of Earth?

ROBERT ROY BRITT: The sun spot itself is many times the size of Earth. It's as big as Jupiter. The expanding gas cloud is much larger than Earth, yeah

MARGARET WARNER: All right. So it approaches Earth and hits the Earth's what, atmosphere and magnetic field? What then could happen? What did scientists fear was going to happen?

ROBERT ROY BRITT: Yeah. You think of earth as a giant magnet, and coming out from the poles are these magnetic field lines that come out and go all the way around the earth and they actually go out beyond the atmosphere. Those generally protect Earth from these charged particles that race out constantly from the Sun. But when you get a big storm like this one, it can overwhelm the magnetic field. And scientists feared that the two magnetic fields, the one of earth and the one that's associated with the storm might be aligned in opposite directions. If that had happened, things might have been worse. As it turns out the magnetic fields were aligned in the same direction and the storm -- it was powerful and we felt it but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, I noticed the headline on your story this morning on space.Com was space storm hits, earth survives. I don't know if that was tongue and cheek but tell us what really was the impact. Was most of the impact precautionary steps that were taken or did it actually seriously disrupt some communications?

ROBERT ROY BRITT: One Japanese satellite has been temporarily disabled and it may have suffered some permanent damage, we don't know yet. Some power grids were reported to have shifted how they control their power. They try to reduce the amount of flow and not do any major power exchanges with other companies. The interesting thing is that because these storms can be forecasted now with some accuracy by the folks who run the Soho spacecraft and the equivalent of the National Weather Service for Space run out of Boulder, Colorado, the power companies and the satellite operators can take some measures to keep the storm from damaging things the way it might have/

MARGARET WARNER: So, in other words, that's why the effect wasn't half as bad as in 1989 when Quebec Province went dark for nine hours and there were all kinds of disruptions here?

ROBERT ROY BRITT: That's right. This was a similarly powerful storm but people have learned, the engineers have learned a lot since then. We didn't have a solar forecasting department then -- solar weather forecasting. We do now

MARGARET WARNER: This afternoon the federal scientist as the NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said this storm, first of all, is still going to kind of be around on Earth, I'm probably not using the right word there, but anyway, with us up for to 24 hours, and there could be further eruptions in the next week. Do they think the worst is the over or could the worst get be to come?

ROBERT ROY BRITT: Yea. I talked with Joe Conchus there at NOAA's lead forecasting office for space weather this morning. He told me that this storm will probably linger about 24 hours, so that puts us into tomorrow morning, still. We could have some bright colorful lights, the aurora tonight that could extend this evening into the United States and into Europe. And I just spoke with Paul Brecky a scientist with the Soho spacecraft just before I came in here. There was another major eruption this evening from the sun and the effects of that storm we could feel tomorrow or the next day

MARGARET WARNER: Rob Britt, thanks so much

ROBERT ROY BRITT: Thank you.

CONVERSATION DEADLINES PAST

TERENCE SMITH: Now a conversation with the author of a new book and Terence Smith.

TERENCE SMITH: The book is "Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Presidential Campaigning: A Reporter's Story." The author is Walter Mears, the Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for the Associated Press, who covered national politics from 1960 until his retirement in 2001. His 40-plus year career spanned nine presidencies and untold thousands of miles covering the men who would and would not be president. Wally Mears, welcome.

WALTER MEARS: Thank you.

TERENCE SMITH: Nine presidents, 11 campaigns, long days, long nights, and yet you make it read like and sound like a joyous experience for you.

WALTER MEARS: It was indeed. I can't think of a more rewarding or enjoyable way to have made a living than what I was able to do for those years.

TERENCE SMITH: It gave you a great perch, did it not, on American history in those 40 years?

WALTER MEARS: I was... never failed to be conscious of the fact that I was in a very privileged position, able to tell my fellow citizens what I heard and saw, and could report to them about the people who would or would not lead them.

TERENCE SMITH: Did you have in all of this either a favorite candidate or a favorite campaign, one that was vintage for you?

WALTER MEARS: "Favorite" is a hard word to use on 1968, but it was by far the most fascinating campaign that I covered. It was a campaign of the revival of Richard Nixon, the fall of Lyndon Johnson, the Gene McCarthy insurgency that helped knock Johnson out of the race, Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, great names all. It was just a fascinating time.

TERENCE SMITH: And if fact you describe how you actually went and told Eugene McCarthy while he was at an appearance that Lyndon Johnson haddropped out.

WALTER MEARS: Barged right up onto the stage in mid-speech. He looked at me like I was crazy, and I told him what had happened, and it fascinating. He kind of froze for an instant, and then he flinched a little bit as though he'd lost his target. He chased the car and he caught it. ( Laughs ) It was a fascinating moment.

TERENCE SMITH: It was certainly an extraordinary year. When you look back on it, I get the suggestion that you might think Richard Nixon was perhaps the best politician, in the political senses of the world, of them all. Is that fair?

WALTER MEARS: I think he was certainly one of the best. I mean, you can't short Bill Clinton for being a master politician. But there was.... there were a great many parallels between the two men back from setbacks, both impeachment presidents. But Nixon was indeed an incredible politician, and the amazing thing to me was that he was so ill at ease. He was always-- what's the word-- he was uncomfortable being there. And yet that's what he did for a living, for his whole life.

TERENCE SMITH: This book encompasses what we could call the television era in politics. As you look back over it, how has television changed presidential politics?

WALTER MEARS: Totally transformed it. I remember earlier the first national story I covered with John Kennedy was a speech he gave in New York to the Overseas Press Club. And I remember the huge movie cameras in the back of the room that the TV network sent, and the feud between the print reporters and the television reporters, which the print reporters always won. Television was going to go back and develop the film and maybe get on the air eight or ten hours later. And I watched over the years as the television stand moved to the front. And now, as a print guy, you are lucky to look between the tripods and see the candidates, because it's right up in the prominent position. And of course it became the method of political communication that it is now.

TERENCE SMITH: You also describe how it robbed, essentially took away private moments between the candidates and the reporters who covered them?

WALTER MEARS: Certainly that, and radio. I mean, the technology overall, the boom microphone that hangs over everybody's shoulder now as soon as it goes into public, the end of the era when there was a glide path into a presidential campaign. Now you see these people declaring their candidacy, and they're in it with both feet right then, and every word is recorded. And, in a way, I suppose that's an advance in my mind. It's also a terrible loss because I don't think we know the people as well as we knew them when they could have times when they were off stage and could be unguarded and could just say, "here's who I am and here's what I think about things"-- not on policy matters, but just what kind of people are these.

TERENCE SMITH: Now we know the public person versus the private person.

WALTER MEARS: It strikes me, when I began I used to see fathers holding little kids up on their shoulders saying, "that man might be president of the United States." You don't see that anymore, because they see them in their living room every day, they see them nonstop for months and months and months.

TERENCE SMITH: Another big change, another big factor in these 40 years was the impact of money on presidential campaigning.

WALTER MEARS: Certainly, and very closely tied to the rise of television because the price of politics went up steadily with the demands of television and television advertising. Money was always something of a factor because it was never inexpensive to run for president. It's just geometrically more costly now. You remember the wonderful John Kennedy story about his father telling him not to spend one cent more than necessary because he certainly wasn't going to buy a landslide.

TERENCE SMITH: (Laughs ) You also describe the development of what we now call "the bubble" around presidents and presidential candidates created by the secret service protection, and that was not always the case.

WALTER MEARS: No, it wasn't. And until June of 1968, candidates provided their own security. They would... the campaign would hire somebody and that would be the security detail. And they would work with the local police, and so forth, but the Secret Service was not a factor until after the election, actually.

TERENCE SMITH: And in June of 1968?

WALTER MEARS: June of 1968, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson had... there was legislation pending that would have made Secret Service protection available to the candidates. Johnson did it by executive order.

TERENCE SMITH: Sent the secret service out?

WALTER MEARS: Sent the Secret Service out. They didn't have enough agents, and they had people from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Mo Udall, Morris Udall, the Democratic candidate from Arizona in 1976 always said that he liked having the Fish and Wildlife guys with him; they were his kind of people.

TERENCE SMITH: You also talk about changes in the press corps and the reporting that you saw from the days in which you were one of the "boys on the bus" to the crowd that follows the campaign now.

WALTER MEARS: It really doesn't belong in quotes. Those were boys on the bus. And there were one or two women who were reporting presidential politics, but essentially, it was a male fraternity with a very much fraternity house atmosphere. And obviously that's changed markedly. There's been an explosion in the size of the media corps that surrounds presidential candidates, in part, again, because of the technology, because you get reporters and you get crews and pretty soon you've got sixty or seventy people surrounding a fourth-tier candidate who is going nowhere.

TERENCE SMITH: So, it's a mob traveling along with them. Finally, I wonder about this. There's another presidential campaign, Walter Mears, getting underway. Any stirrings in you to go out and do it one more time?

WALTER MEARS: Well, if anybody knows my phone number, they are welcome to call it. I would love to get a hand in. I kind of miss it.

TERENCE SMITH: Okay. The book is "Deadlines Past," the author is Walter Mears. Wally, thank you so much.

WALTER MEARS: Wally, thank you for having me.

FOCUS - ETHIOPIA

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight the dire situation in Ethiopia. Better Ann Bowser narrates this report that was initially originally shot for the High Definition Network HDNET.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: It is a painful cycle that takes place almost every seven years in Ethiopia: Drought followed by famine and death. So at feeding centers like this one in the southern part of the country, anxious parents desperately try to get emergency food and medicine for their sick and starving children. This little girl's name is Hamdiya; she weighs six-and-a-half pounds, about the weight of an average American newborn. But Hamdiya is one year old. She is extremely malnourished. Nevertheless, she is one of the lucky ones. Most of the 450,000 acutely malnourished children never make it to a feeding center. Mary Lewellen is the mission director for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

MARY LEWELLEN: If you talk to a mother who has gone into the therapeutic feeding centers and ask if you have other children at home, the answer is yes. But she could only carry the one or two children on her back to get the feeding center because she's had to walk for four hours. She has had to make a decision as to which child she brought into the therapeutic feeding center, which child was going to live today or get fed today. Those are hard things to listen to as a parent, as a mother, and as an individual.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Tens of thousands of Ethiopian children have already died this year. They are victims of a family minimum that many think could prove to be as deadly as the infamous one of 1984, which killed one million people. Getachew Dinku is a relief worker with World Vision.

GETACHEW DINKU, World Vision: This area is very severely affected by drought. It's very frequently affected, one of the most severely affected areas in the entire country. And in the total district, you have over 200,000 people. The majority of them like more than half of them are affected by the drought. They have nothing to drink, no food as such.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: This latest food shortage was caused by long periods of drought which began three years ago. When the rains did come, it was too late for the crops to bear fruit. So even though some of the countryside looks lush with vegetation, there's nothing to eat. Ethiopians call it "green famine."

MARY LEWELLEN: When you drove down the road you would see blooming crops, corn head high. We thought there's not a problem. The problem is when you stopped your vehicle, got out and walked over into the field, pulled an ear of corn off the stalk, there was nothing on it. The rains had either come late or too erratic, but had not been there during the critical time of pollination.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The famine is father exacerbated by poverty in this country. The average Ethiopian earns an annual income of $ 100. The only way for 12 million Ethiopians to survive then is to rely is to rely on food aid from other countries. Food aid has begun to pour in, about 1.5 million metric tons so far. More than half of that comes from the United States. Relief workers say food stretches further in Ethiopia than in most places. The grain in this bowl is both breakfast and lunch.

MARY LEWELLEN: There's a saying within Ethiopia, "you eat alone, you die alone." When the family receives rations, they share it amongst all of the others who need food. In one area that we visited, we were told the official caseload, beneficiary numbers, were approximately 20,000, but they were feeding 127,000.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Yet still there is not enough to eat. The Ethiopian government put out a plea for an additional 250,000 tons of food aid. Professor Deryke Belshaw directs the Institute for Development Research in Oxford, England

DERYKE BELSHAW: There are 65 million people in this country, and if you calculate the aid per head, it is one of the lowest in Africa despite the obvious need for assistance at this stage.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Belshaw and others believe that the only way Ethiopians will be able to break the cycle of drought, famine and starvation is for developed rather than food handouts. Most Ethiopians are subsistence farmers. During normal weather patterns they grow just enough food to survive. But in times of drought they have no room for reserve. They harvest food before it's grown to stave off hunger. They sell off equipment to get money for food and are able to afford fertilizer and seed for the next growing sickle. Development experts say instead of subsistence farming, they need to move to market agriculture, which requires seed voucher programs, veterinary medicine, the construction of wells and dams, and improved transport and storage.

SPOKESPERSON: That over there is eggplant. Next to it that beautiful plant coming up is cabbage, and right above it is head lettuce.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: It's something being done on a small scale with much success through a program called Project Mercy. It was founded in 1977 by Ethiopians in a remote part of Ethiopia: Its mission to develop self-help programs for the desperately poor.

DEMEKE TEKLE-WOLD: We have to start educating the grassroots people: Giving them the capacity of knowledge; at the same time, helping them to understand knowledge by itself is no good unless it is applied into the need of sustaining a personal life.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Knowing it would be impossible to develop sustainable farming without a regular water source Project Mercy's first task was to clear a swamp and tap into a natural spring. The organization then built a six-mile road to connect the people with neighboring communities. Today, Project Mercy serves a community of 75,000 people. It has taught Ethiopians how to farm more effectively, cultivating hybrid varieties of fruits and vegetables that thrive in Ethiopia's climate. The organization has also built a school and is in the process of building a hospital. In addition to teaching farming, it runs training programs in metalwork, carpentry, construction and weaving. All are skills designed to help break the cycle of poverty.

SPOKESPERSON: Thank you very much for every one of you that have come all the way, halfway around the world to see this tiny little project here.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Project Mercy survives on donations and help from volunteers. This group had just arrived from Denver, and includes two volunteers who will teach Ethiopian women to make jewelry. Each piece will sell for about $ 100 in the United States.

MARTA GABRE-TSADICK, Project Mercy: What we really hope is that this will be duplicated. I wish I could say all through Africa, but definitely all through Ethiopia.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: But even the project's long-range work is being affected by the famine. The erratic rains have not provided enough water for the natural spring which is running low. Training programs in farming and construction have been put on hold so that Marta and Deme can concentrate on the immediate effort to distribute emergency food and medical aid. Volunteer Carrie Harrington, a surgical nurse from Colorado, said nothing in her medical training prepared her for this experience.

CARRIE HARRINGTON: This is just very, very sad. I've never seen children that were this really malnourished. You see the pictures and hear about it, but it's hard to see

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The emergency measures are helping to save lives. Little Hamdiya is back at home and getting healthier. But unless the cycle is broken, she is likely to face the crisis again in just a few years.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of the day: The U.S. Military passed a milestone in Iraq, as two more soldiers were killed in action. That means more Americans have died in fighting since the war than during the war. The international Red Cross announced it will scale back foreign staffers in Iraq. And a firefighter was killed battling the huge wildfires in southern California. We had hoped to talk to Governor Gray Davis about the fires, but a scheduling conflict prevented that.

JIM LEHRER:And again, to our honor roll of American service personnel killed in Iraq. We add them as their deaths are made official and photographs become available. Here, in silence, are four more.

JIM LEHRER: We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.