The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer in Washington.

MR. MacNeil: And I'm Robert MacNeil in New York. After tonight's News Summary we have a debate on Bosnia. Are we morally obliged to intervene or not? Correspondent Jeffrey Kaye looks at the slow pace of rebuilding after the riots in Los Angeles. Elizabeth Farnsworth reports on what Silicon Valley hopes from President Clinton. And Essayist Anne Taylor Fleming has a fresh look at Michael Jackson. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: The Justice Department today sought dismissal of federal charges against former Defense Sec. Clark Clifford and his law partner, Robert Altman. The two are accused of fraud and lying in the BCCI scandal. Federal prosecutors said they didn't want to interfere with the current trial on state charges in New York. They also said Clifford's ill health made it unlikely he'd be available for a federal trial in June. Clifford and Altman are accused of concealing BCCI's illegal ownership of a U.S. bank they control. Federal prosecutors said they could still bring new, broader charges against the two men in the future. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: A government commission will study the problems of the U.S. airline industry. President Clinton signed legislation today creating it. The members will be appointed by the President and leaders of Congress. They will have 90 days to make the recommendations. In signing the bill, Mr. Clinton said the government had failed to create a climate for the industry to thrive at home and in the global economy.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The problems facing this industry are quite complex. And it's important that we build a consensus as quickly as possible. I assure you that when that is done, I will move rapidly with Congress to take whatever action is appropriate based on the recommendations of the Commission.

MR. MacNeil: The President said again today he would compromise on his stimulus package but didn't say in what areas. Republicans have criticized the bill for pork barrel spending on projectslike swimming pools and parking garages. Labor Secretary Robert Reisch said today the administration would compromise on legitimate concerns but not on education spending or building roads and bridges. Last night, Mr. Clinton signed a bill to allow the government to keep borrowing money. Social Security checks and the government's credit ratings would have been jeopardized without the debt limit increase.

MR. LEHRER: France and Netherlands sent planes to Italy today to enforce the "no fly" zone in Bosnia. NATO members are expected to commit at least 70 planes to patrol the air space over Bosnia. Fighting and shelling broke a cease-fire around the Eastern Bosnia town of Srebrenica today. The U.N. commander led a force of peacekeepers to the town to prepare for more U.N. evacuations of refugees tomorrow. We'll have more on the Bosnian war right after his News Summary.

MR. MacNeil: Russian officials today played down the danger from an accident at a nuclear weapons plant in Siberia yesterday. A uranium waste tank at the plant exploded and burned, releasing radioactivity into the air and soil. But no deaths were reported, and no one was evacuated from the contaminated region. The accident happened at a once secret complex called Tomsk 7, about 1800 miles East of Moscow. Andrew Veech of Independent Television News filed this report.

MR. VEECH: The damage to the nuclear plant filmed by officials in Tomsk 7 today suggests there was a massive explosion. According to some reports, levels of radioactivity around the building have reached 10 times the Western safety limit. One of the firemen who fought the blaze received a high dose of radiation. Soldiers have been drafted in to clear away contaminated snow and top soil. Emergency teams said 16 miles of land Northeast of the plant have been contaminated. Radiation levels at a hot spot six miles away are said to be ten times normal. Reports that the explosion blew radioactive material three kilometers into the atmosphere were denied by Russian investigators at Tomsk 7 tonight. Russian air force planes were earlier said to have spotted a radioactive cloud heading Northeast. If true, the cloud is higher than the plume from the Chernobyl disaster and British experts warned it could travel for thousands of miles. Monitoring stations in Sweden, which first spotted the plume from Chernobyl, have reported no increase in radiation levels. There are five reactors at Tomsk 7. Three have been closed since the end of the Cold War. The plant separates plutonium from used fuel to produce the warheads for Russia's thermonuclear arsenal. The explosion happened in a separation plant. Uranium, which had been burnt in a reactor, was being dissolved in a tank with nitric acid to extract plutonium. The tank was 29 feet square with a thick concrete lid. The mixture dried and the explosion blew the lid through the roof of the separation plant. Wires short circuited and started a fire. The Russians say the radioactive material fell onto the roof and contaminated an area of more than a thousand square yards. More than a hundred thousand people live in the city of Tomsk 7, and about half a million live in the regional capital of Tomsk, twelve miles from here. The regional parliament has warned of safety problems at the plant. They say plutonium taken from warheads is being stored here in unacceptable conditions. The parliament has vetoed the plan to store another hundred tons of plutonium from the thousands of warheads to be dismantled under strategic arms reduction treaties.

MR. MacNeil: That ends our summary ofthe day's top stories. Ahead on the Newshour, the moral equation for America in Bosnia, rebuilding Los Angeles after the riots, Silicon Valley and President Clinton, and an essay on Michael Jackson. FOCUS - MORAL DILEMMA

MR. LEHRER: The tragedy of Bosnia is where we begin once again tonight. As on most days, for the last 12 months more people died, more towns got ethnically cleansed, more refugees fled, more children were terrorized today. We hear from four American commentators with strong opinions on whether and how the outside world might stop it following this report from Eastern Bosnia about the relocation of both Muslims and Serbs. The correspondent is Jane Bennett-Powell of Independent Television News.

MS. BENNETT-POWELL: The military commander in Srebrenica has been instructed to allow women, children and the sick and wounded to leave on the convoys. Fifteen hundred should be brought out tomorrow. The U.N. denies the operation amounts to ethnic cleansing on the Serbs' behalf, which it belies the Srebrenica commander should appreciate.

JOSE MARIA MENDILUCE, UNHCR Special Envoy: Well, I hope that he will respect the authority both of the government as well as commanders here of the second corps and the deputy commander of the Bosnia-Herzegovina army. I hope that they will understand that they can't try to use the civilian population as hostages and that it's not our intention to start a movement to empty the town.

MS. BENNETT-POWELL: Mr. Mendiluce intends to meet the next convoy tomorrow, but its arrival then is by no means guaranteed, however, the Canadian U.N. force, 130 men due to cross the front line tomorrow morning, is being preceded by General Philippe Morillon, whose obstinate crusade in Srebrenica was instrumental in getting essential aid into the town. With military observers, the Canadians will supervise the convoys in and out. Whether or not the Canadians are successful, and the following days will be vital, these troops of the Bosnian army are preparing a push against the Serbs surrounding Srebrenica. As another contingent left Tuzla today, a convoy of Serbian civilians was also on the way out. Fifty were supposed to assemble at a shooting range on the outskirts of Tuzla to be taken to the front line and exchanged for Muslims. A dozen had incorrect papers. This man, who said he'd been referred to a multiple sclerosis specialist at the Belgrade hospital, was one of those turned away. Relatives talked of trying to escape intimidation by Muslims, death threats by phone in the middle of the night. None though said they'd been physically hurt. They spoke of spending hundreds of marks on previous unofficial attempts to leave. Today's evacuation was arranged by the Red Cross and was free, but one woman whose daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren were leaving, said the cost wasn't in money.

WOMAN: [speaking through interpreter] It didn't just cost anything. He just applied and was asked to give up the apartment he had over here. So he handed the keys and he's leaving today. They are taking away the kids also. I wish they had left the kids with me.

MS. BENNETT-POWELL: The parting from families and the uncertainty is painful.

WOMAN: [speaking through interpreter] When the war is over, maybe I'll see them. It will be impossible to see them before.

MS. BENNETT-POWELL: These people were leaving a region which before the war had thrived on mixed marriages and friendships. The animosity now too great and the final indignity to leave in the kind of trucks the Muslim authorities resented so much for the Srebrenica refugees.

MR. LEHRER: Now to our discussion. Jeane Kirkpatrick was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration. She's now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And she writes a syndicated column. Jim Hoagland is a columnist and chief foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. Anthony Lewis is a columnist for the New York Times. Stephen Chapman writes a column for the Chicago Tribune. Tony Lewis, you said in a column Monday that there is shame in the timidity of the United States toward taking stronger action in Bosnia. How is there shame?

MR. LEWIS: I think that President Clinton feels that shame. We have something going on in Europe that has not happened for 50 years since the Nazis, people being selected out because of their race or their ethnic character and killed, 100,000 killed so far. They're Bosnian Muslims, more than a million made refugees. It's just ghastly, and I believe Bill Clinton, I know Bill Clinton feels that, his statement yesterday reflected that anguish. What we don't see is any action to do something about it, and there's plenty available to do.

MR. LEHRER: Jeane Kirkpatrick, is "shame" the word that comes to your mind as well when you think about what the U.S. reaction and the Western reaction has been thus far?

MS. KIRKPATRICK: Well, I would say shameful. I think it's shameful. I think our inaction is shameful, and I think it should create, and I believe as a matter of fact and the President does create and Warren Christopher as well, does create anguish, but I just don't think we've felt enough anguish or enough shame for it, frankly. I think it's incredible that Americans but also Europeans should have simply stood by and be standing by just now while this continued incredible brutality really goes on.

MR. LEHRER: Is it for you an issue that goes beyond politics and all of that? Is it a moral issue for you?

MS. KIRKPATRICK: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It's -- I think that's very clear. That's more clear than today what it is we should do about it, but something, for certain. I think it is a major moral issue today, in fact, the major moral issue.

MR. LEHRER: The major moral issue, Jim Hoagland, would you agree with that?

MR. HOAGLAND: Well, I would agree with Amb. Kirkpatrick's view that this is a terrible situation but it's a lot harder to figure out what to do about it. It is a strong moral issue. It is a situation that is undermining the confidence of the public throughout Europe in their governments, in their ability to act. But at the end of the day the options are very limited about what we can do and about what the Europeans can do and are prepared to do.

MR. LEHRER: So you could feel anguish, you could feel that your country has conducted itself shamefully, but you're saying in the final analysis, there isn't much to do about these emotions?

MR. HOAGLAND: I think the shame belongs to the Serbs. The Serbs are the aggressors. They are the people who are committing the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II. The shame does not belong to the United States in the first instance.

MR. LEHRER: Steve Chapman, where do you come down on the question of whether or not this is a simple political thing where people are killing each other and we have responsibility through the United Nations to stop it, or whether it goes beyond that as a people, the American people, we have a moral responsibility to do more than we are now doing?

MR. CHAPMAN: I think, I don't think the United States has behaved shamefully at all in this. I think the United States, including the Clinton administration, which came into office proposing military action in Bosnia, has taken a very realistic approach to it. I think Bill Clinton came of age during the Vietnam War, and I think he realizes that the real moral issue in this, in this conflict is whether or not we're going to put thousands of American troops, hundreds of thousands of American troops, on the ground in what is probably going to be a futile undertaking that's going to get a lot of Americans killed.

MR. LEHRER: So that's a larger moral issue to you than, than what's going on on the ground now in Bosnia, is that correct?

MR. CHAPMAN: We have a very powerful moral obligation not to throw away American lives in another futile war.

MR. LEHRER: Is he wrong about that, Tony Lewis?

MR. LEWIS: Yes, he's wrong about that just as Neville Chamberlain was wrong when he agreed at Munich to let Hitler go on gobbling up innocent third parties. You have to stop tyrants and the process of ethnic cleansing as early as possible. This should have been stopped 18 months ago when the Serbs began shelling Dubrovnik. It would have been easy then. The Europeans absolutely funked the job. They proved that leaders of Europe, John Major and the other, that they were the successors to Neville Chamberlain, and George Bush failed to give the leadership that this country could bring. And right now we're still not doing enough. We hear President Clinton -- as I say, I believe he feels the anguish -- but we hear him talk about more sanctions. Well, let's be serious. We know that they are not going to stop the killing. What's going to stop the killing is American air activity, not those hundred thousands of troops that Mr. Chapman talks about. It's helicopters bringing in food and medical relief to Srebrenica and the other little towns in Eastern Bosnia, and if they are attacked, they attack the attackers. It's air activity at which we can totally dominate the scene. There isn't any doubt about that.

MR. LEHRER: Steve Chapman, does the Neville Chamberlain analogy ring true with you?

MR. CHAPMAN: No. And I don't think Anthony Lewis really believes that this situation is comparable to Nazi Germany. If he did, I think he would be perfectly willing to send American ground troops to do whatever we have to do to stop the Serbs. He's not willing to do that, and I think that's because he realizes that Serbia is not Nazi Germany, and Milosevic is not Hitler. He is -- this is a small country. It's not a threat to the rest of Europe. Hitler was a threat to the entire globe. And I think, I think Mr. Lewis is mistaken in thinking that air power is going to solve this problem. Air power has had nothing to do with the Serbian games in Yugoslavia, and our domination of the skies is going to accomplish absolutely, absolutely nothing.

MR. LEHRER: Let me come -- we'll come back to that in a moment. Amb. Kirkpatrick, what about Steve Chapman's point that if it's such a big thing, if it's such a moral issue, why not commit the United States in a full way, why not commit a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand Americans if that's what it takes, if that's such a big deal, if it is such a big deal?

MS. KIRKPATRICK: I think that's the all or nothing approach, if I may say so, and I think that all or nothing approach has really blurred thinking about this crisis from the beginning. I -- there's no need to commit 100,000 troops. That's, I think, really an irrelevant kind of an argument to the realities of the situation. There a lot of senses in which Milosevic and Serbia are not Germany and Hitler. One is that Serbia is a relatively small country, and its armed forces, while much more powerful than the remnants of the Home Guard that the Bosnians have, are not the powerful armed forces. They have heavy artillery and against civilians the heavy artillery is very devastating. I believe that it is has been clear from the beginning though that a determined position, a determined ultimatum, if you will, and air power could, in fact, have dominated the situation, and forced the Serbian -- you know, forced Serbia to stop providing the heavy artillery to the, through the Serbian irregulars and forces in Bosnia. And I think that would have been enough. So I just don't think that it's, I don't think we need to get to the question about whether these lives are important enough to put in a balance against the hundred thousand American lives to, you know, in a whole scale war. That's not the issue, and no one need pose that issue.

MR. LEHRER: Jim Hoagland --

MR. CHAPMAN: Mr. Lehrer, if I could just say --

MR. LEHRER: Sure.

MR. CHAPMAN: -- air power has never defeated a guerrilla insurgency. It didn't defeat the Viet Cong. It didn't even defeat the Iraqis. And the military people know you can't win this war from the safety of the air. That's why General Powell has opposed American intervention all along, even air power, because he knows that it's likely to lead to a ground invasion by American troops, and it's likely to cost a lot of American lives. The military people lived through Vietnam and they don't want to repeat that experience.

MR. LEHRER: Let me ask Jim Hoagland, both the military people and the civilians calling the shots for the military people in both the Bush administration and thus far in the Clinton administration pretty much agree with the Steve Chapman approach, do they not?

MR. HOAGLAND: I believe they do.

MR. LEHRER: And what is their, what is their reasoning for that?

MR. HOAGLAND: Well, I think if you ask Gen. Powell that, he would want you to try to define for him what you want to accomplish by the use of air power and military force. And I think it's a good question. We cannot go back a year and say that we can achieve today what we could have achieved then. We can achieve what George Bush should have achieved. If we had been willing to use limited military force at that point, I think the Serbs would have been deterred. We're beyond that point now. You have to define very carefully what it is you want to achieve, and I don't think you can roll the Serbs back with limited air strikes anymore. Perhaps you could have at one point. I think you have to look now at military force, apply it against the Serbs for one purpose, and that is to punish them, to show them and to show the future aggressors that there is a cost to mounting systematic rape as a weapon of war, to establishing concentration camps, committing these atrocities. I don't think at this point you can change the political behavior of the Serbs with limited air power.

MS. KIRKPATRICK: Well, one, I don't think -- I think it would have been much better to do it a year ago. I mean, there were options that existed a year ago. A year ago Bosnia still hadn't been destroyed, in fact, entirely, and that's when limited air power would have been most effective. I regret to say that the same people who oppose it today opposed it then, as I think we all understand. That's -- and for the same reasons basically we use the same stated arguments.

MR. LEHRER: You mean the same military people.

MS. KIRKPATRICK: The same military people.

MR. LEHRER: Because the same folks that were there then are still there, right?

MS. KIRKPATRICK: They're the same folks. They're the same folks now, and the approach is basic -- and I have a lot of respect for them, I have a lot of respect for Gen. Powell, for example, and his principal associates. There have always been military persons who disagreed with that, including our former air force chief, who --

MR. LEHRER: Who's that, Gen. McPeak?

MS. KIRKPATRICK: No. What's his name? The air force chief who was fired at the beginning --

MR. LEHRER: Oh, Dugan, Gen. Dugan.

MS. KIRKPATRICK: Gen. Dugan.

MR. LEHRER: He was fired during the Persian Gulf War, that's right.

MS. KIRKPATRICK: That's right, at the beginning of it for exactly, for taking the position to do more with air power than Gen. Powell and some others wanted to --

MR. LEHRER: I think he said we could target Saddam Hussein, did he not? Wasn't that the thing that he said that he got fired for?

MS. KIRKPATRICK: He said that we could target anybody in a room in Baghdad basically.

MR. LEHRER: Right.

MS. KIRKPATRICK: And he's taken the same view on Bosnia. He knows a lot more about air power than I do. But he is an expert. I just - -

MR. LEHRER: So it's not unanimous?

MS. KIRKPATRICK: It's not unanimous at all, but today it would - - we can't accomplish the same things. That does not mean, in my opinion, that we can't accomplish anything. We could stop the bombing of specific towns today with air power if we chose to do it just as we were able to drop, to air drop food, we could air drop the kinds of force that would inhibit those bombers.

MR. LEHRER: Tony Lewis, is it your position that regardless we're not going to be able to resolve the military argument here tonight, but moving back to the moral question, the obligation that the United States has as a people to do something, that whether or not it will do the trick alone, the air power thing, is we're obligated to at least try it, and if it doesn't work, then rethink it and keep moving that way, is that your basic position?

MR. LEWIS: No. I'm not a believer in futile actions, Jim. I agree with, with what both in a sense Jim Hoagland and Amb. Kirkpatrick have said. We can't roll back time a year or a year and a half ago, but we can specifically stop artillery around Sarajevo. We can stop the artillery shelling Srebrenica, and we can punish them in Jim's words, Jim Hoagland's word, and we can show that there's a price to be paid, and that hasn't been shown at all. Milosevic and the Serbs have paid no price, and essentially they've been getting the message that you don't have to pay a price, and I want to say something to Mr. Chapman on the military point. This is not a guerrilla insurgency, the phrase you used. These aren't brave partisan guerrillas. These are cowards who have the only heavy weapons and are standing on hills, safely out of range, popping shells into civilian neighborhoods. They will turn tail and run if anybody has an equivalent force or knocks them from the sky. I just resent the notion that they're brave insurgents.

MR. CHAPMAN: Mr. Lewis, you're, you're just mistaken on that. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, who is the commander of the U.N. forces in Sarajevo --

MR. LEWIS: And a failed commander I may say.

MR. CHAPMAN: -- who has been there on the ground, says there is no way you're going to accomplish this without, without forces on the ground. He thinks it would take a million men to pacify Yugoslavia.

MR. LEWIS: Well, that's a million, that's men, as Jim said, toremake the political map, and I don't think you can do that, but you could do enough punishment to stop the military aggression even if you stop it now.

MR. CHAPMAN: You can't even find these artilleries.

MR. LEWIS: You can save some lives. I want to quote one thing.

MR. CHAPMAN: They're mobile. They're small. You can't even find them, much less hit them.

MR. LEWIS: Jim, if I may, I'd like to quote one thing from a forthcoming issue of the New Perspectives Quarterly. It's from a French philosopher, an important one, Paul Henri LeVie. "The rest could not be making a bigger mistake by living with ethnic cleansing. If it wins in Sarajevo, it will win everywhere else, in Georgia and Azerbaijan and Armenia, in Transylvania. The fuse of racial hatred is long and winds through all of Europe." That's why I think we ought to care.

MR. LEHRER: Jim Hoagland, based on your reporting, are the leaders of the Clinton administration trying to figure out something else to do to punish the Serbs, to do what they haven't, what nobody's been able to do now, which is to stop the aggression and stop ethnic cleansing?

MR. HOAGLAND: I think it's important to note here tonight on the first anniversary of the war in Bosnia that two and a half of those twelve months are now on Bill Clinton's meter. He came to office with a strong feeling that Bush had missed an opportunity to try to make things better there, had rejected the fact that America does have interest there and wanted to change that and laid out an elaborate, diplomatic strategy that Warren Christopher voiced on February 10th. It was too elaborate. It was too complicated. Events have overtaken it, both on the ground, where the Serbs have shown that they will create a greater Serbia by the use of force and by events in Moscow. Russia was supposed to be a major player.

MR. LEHRER: Because of its influence on the Serbs, the historic connection.

MR. HOAGLAND: And also the Clinton administration had the laudable objective of wanting to involve Russia in a very constructive way in European security matters. Well, Yeltsin told Clinton at Vancouver that he's not able to do that now. Russia will not play a major role.

MR. LEHRER: Just because of his own problems, you mean?

MR. HOAGLAND: That's right.

MR. LEHRER: Forget it.

MR. HOAGLAND: That's right, because he's got so much opposition and they seize on the Serbian issue. So that strategy's been overtaken by the events on the ground, the events in Moscow, and the administration hasn't really responded in real time to those changes. It hasn't come up with adaptations to its strategy that would show that it's taking these into account. The second thing is that the administration has begun to open a credibility gap on its own statements. It's talking far tougher than it's prepared to act. We saw that the other day. I think it was Monday when Warren Christopher went on morning television and said perhaps we'll lift the arms embargo against Bosnia, and then on your program that evening said, well, maybe that's not such a good idea. That kind of back tracking really begins to open up a credibility gap. I think the administration is in an urgent need to restore some of that original credibility that they did establish by taking a new approach, by using new language and really by looking at it in a new way.

MR. LEHRER: Steve Chapman, finally, beginning with you, if this thing continues to go the way it is, which is the way it has gone for 12 months, whatever, wherever the shame belongs, wherever the blame belongs, or whatever, where the ethnic cleansing continues, people continue to die, and there doesn't look, at least down the immediate road, there doesn't look to be a solution at any time, anytime soon, will this, will the American people tolerate this? Is this something that's on the front burner of American concerns, or is this something they feel is out of their control, it's too bad, but we've got other problems?

MR. CHAPMAN: I think that the American people realize that as Mr. Lewis said there are dozens of these ethnic conflicts going on all over the world and if we're going to commit ourselves to military intervention every time there are people dying, then we're going to bleed ourselves dry and we are not going to accomplish anything. I think the American people know that some things are outside of our responsibility, outside of our ability, and unfortunately, Yugoslavia and most of these racial and ethnic conflicts are exactly that.

MR. LEHRER: Tony Lewis.

MR. LEWIS: The specific danger here is that a tyrannical demagogue, Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia, has played on ethnic feelings to create this horror, and it's that example that I don't think we want to let spread to other places where there is tension, but where it hasn't, by any means, approached the horror of a million refugees from a tiny country and a hundred thousand dead.

MR. LEHRER: But has it gotten the attention of the American people, Tony?

MR. LEWIS: It has to a degree. I wish originally that the Europeans, the West Europeans, had taken their responsibility. They were on the scene. They were the first to take the responsibility, and I can't blame Americans for feeling we're a bit remote, but I believe very strongly that it isn't just a moral issue, it's our interest in a stable Europe, and we aren't that far away, and Americans will care more as they understand it.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Well, Amb. Kirkpatrick, gentlemen, thank you all very much.

MR. MacNeil: Coming up on the NewsHour, rebuilding LA after the riots, the information superhighway and entertaining Michael Jackson. FOCUS - SCARRED CITY

MR. MacNeil: Next, rebuilding Los Angeles. Tomorrow a jury will hear closing arguments in the second trial of four police officers charged in the beating of black motorist Rodney King. Los Angeles is bracing for the possibility of more violence once a verdict is handed down. The city is still recovering from three days of rioting that followed the officers' acquittal last year. More than 50 people were killed and a billion dollars' worth of property was damaged or destroyed. Correspondent Jeffrey Kaye of public station KCET has this update report.

MR. KAYE: Eleven months ago just after the Los Angeles riots, Dr. William Faulkner got presidential attention on a walk through the damaged shopping center where he practices dentistry. The prominent political visit gave Faulkner hope for a new beginning. Today the president is gone, most of the Crenshaw Shopping Center has been razed to the ground, and boards still cover the windows of Dr. Faulkner's looted office. Business is down while he waits for the owner to reconstruct the building in which he works. He's not alone. Despite a flurry of political promises after the explosive verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, riot-torn Los Angeles has seen little reconstruction. From South Central Los Angeles to the mostly Latino Peko Union neighborhood, one year later the scars remain.

DR. WILLIAM FAULKNER: You can see it's been slow in building back physically, but one of the things that is not seen is the moral building, the building of people. Buildings didn't tear themselves down. The people tore these buildings down. The people have not been changed since the riots. There's been nothing that I have seen in any large amount.

MR. KAYE: Changed in what sense? What kind of change would you expect to see?

DR. WILLIAM FAULKNER: I would expect to see programs set up that would occupy the people in terms of training, education, in terms of vocational possibilities for them, more of an aim towards drug rehabilitation and an annihilation of the drugs being pushed in the neighborhood and so on. You would see it in people maybe holding their heads a little higher up or maybe not being as idle walking around the street, or maybe not snatching a purse or breaking into a car and carjacking and doing other things of that nature.

MR. KAYE: We're doing a story about the shopping center and the rebuilding, the rebuilding of LA. He's seen you guys hanging out a lot around here, and he's concerned about the fact that it does appear that there's nothing for people to do.

DR. WILLIAM FAULKNER: What do you think you'd like to be doing right now?

DECCION MAHDI: Honest truth?

DR. WILLIAM FAULKNER: Yes.

DECCION MAHDI: Honest truth is that I feel like working right now. If there was more jobs, then there'd be more people off the streets because they'd be busy working, making money. So that would be one thing which I would like to do. I would like to work, you know, like full-time, you know, make money.

MR. KAYE: As what?

DECCION MAHDI: As whatever, whatever.

MR. KAYE: Altogether the riots caused $430 million worth of damage in LA City but only $93 million has been spent so far on reconstruction. Only one-third of the twelve hundred buildings which suffered major damage have been repaired or rebuilt. Frustrations over the slow pace of rebuilding have put pressure on Rebuild LA, a private organization given the very public task of wooing businesses into the area. Leo Estrada is a board member of Rebuild LA, or RLA, who agrees that the pace of reconstruction has been slow.

LEO ESTRADA, Urban Planning, U.C.L.A.: I think that for the average person on the street as they look around them they can't see what RLA has done. They cannot see tangible evidence of what's there. In part, it's because they judge it by whether or not those places that were destroyed have been replaced.

MR. KAYE: No progress has been made on behalf of many former tenants of the Crenshaw Shopping Center, among them Young Mah's looted Rooster's Golden Chicken Restaurant. Mah, like many Korean- American victims of the riots, is angry that neither his life nor the neighborhood is changed.

YOUNG MAH, Businessman: Yes, angry of course because this is not directly my own problem. It's, I think the whole society has some problem to deal with in all the crimes and gangsters and gangs, drugs.

MR. KAYE: Peter Ueberroth is co-chair of Rebuild L.A. He says frustration is understandable but the rebuilding takes time because businesses need to be convinced to invest in parts of Los Angeles.

PETER UEBERROTH, Co-Chair, Rebuild L.A.: Usually when you burn somebody down, they don't run back to say this was good, I think I'd like to come back and be in this game again.

MR. KAYE: When we went out to the shopping center and we've spoken to people there, the developer, the young men who hang around there, very very frustrated, they don't see much changing, what can you tell those people out there?

PETER UEBERROTH: First of all, you burned the damned place down. You know, what does burn it down means it's going to get better? You don't burn something down and say that's going to make it better. It makes it worse.

MAYOR TOM BRADLEY, Los Angeles: This board is truly representative of and reflective of the diversity of this great community of Los Angeles County.

MR. KAYE: Rebuild L.A. has tried to satisfy local residents by making sure L.A.'s diverse ethnic interests are represented. That's left it with an unwieldy 80-person board and 11 task forces. Despite criticism that the group lacks leadership, lacks accountability and just hasn't done enough, Ueberroth says L.A. is attracting more businesses than other riot-torn cities.

PETER UEBERROTH: The phenomenon of Southern California is that the private sector is coming back with great strength and coming back in a bigger way than they were before the riots. And if that kind of trend could work in the other inner cities, then we really can have a success story in America of how inner cities can come back to life.

MR. KAYE: So far, 30 companies have agreed to invest over $500 million in the blighted areas. Among them a drugstore chain and a discount store say they'll rebuild in the Crenshaw Shopping Center. Grocery and auto parts chains say they'll be in South Central Los Angeles, and Disney has plowed $1 million into a black-owned bank. Hundai, IBM, and Southern California Edison have put millions of dollars into job training facilities like this one Toyota is building.

JOHN MACK, Urban League: We're excited about the fact we're going to have a very talented staff of individuals who have backgrounds in specific areas of automotive repair.

MR. KAYE: Toyota donated 3 million towards a joint venture auto training facility with the Urban League which will teach skills to 100 people. LA Urban League President John Mack says other companies must follow Toyota's lead.

JOHN MACK: The challenge is to make sure that the money doesn't end up in San Fernando Valley or on the West side. We have to make sure that our share of the dollar's coming to this community so that our businesses can thrive and prosper.

MR. KAYE: Some of the money from the newly attracted businesses is making its way to the community. Black contractors like Joe Thompson, who's building the Toyota facility, have started to benefit from the rebuilding effort.

JOE THOMPSON, Contractor: Right now we've got approximately 20 subcontractors or 20 contractors, a mixture of what our community's made of, the Afro-American contractors, Hispanic contractors, Korean contractors, and other contractors.

SPOKESMAN: Lump sum is 3,564,000.

MR. KAYE: The developers of the Crenshaw Shopping Center say they intend to provide more work for minority contractors. After they opened bids recently for the rebuilding job, company president Robert Shields pledged a commitment to the local community.

SPOKESMAN: Price is an important element but it's not the only element that's important to us. The affirmative action and training is extremely important.

MR. KAYE: Local workers are being hired for reconstruction projects but some are pessimistic about the long-term prospects of rebuilding Los Angeles.

WORKER: In terms of building the community, nothing has happened. There's been a lot of promises, but there's been no results from these promises.

ANSAR MUHAMMAD: Anytime you're gonna have some change it's gonna have to be from the heart. I mean, they're rebuilding. They're doing a lot of things, but these jobs are not long-term and once these little maybe you have, I don't know, an acre project completed which wasn't, doesn't last a long time, you're gonna be back in that same position, and people are putting money back into the community but in actuality, the prices have risen higher.

MELIK SPELLMAN: Dealing with the crisis in our community we know where the root of it lies and that is the financial part.

MR. KAYE: And there you don't see a change.

MELIK SPELLMAN: I don't see a change. I mean, instead of giving us these jobs with no longevity, give us partnership. If corporate America is in to building their companies, come and invest into our minds. The ones they say are young hoodlums, black gang bangers, don't look at my skin, look at my abilities.

MR. KAYE: Peter Ueberroth says corporate America has put in about a million dollars a day since the riots into this community.

MELIK SPELLMAN: Right. Into the pockets of the merchants and the special interest groups that they have to serve.

MR. KAYE: It's not getting to the people of the community.

MELIK SPELLMAN: The grassroots will never see it. The grassroots have to recycle their own money.

MR. KAYE: Ueberroth argues that in the long-term the Rebuild L.A. efforts will work, but first companies have to be convinced to do business in the inner city.

PETER UEBERROTH: Right now there's a red line around the inner cities in America. The red line says don't invest in here, don't insure in here, don't hire in here, don't do anything in here.

MR. KAYE: Recently Crusader Insurance Company offered a dramatic example of red lining when it notified 1200 South Los Angeles customers that it was cancelling their riot coverage.

CARY CHELDIN, Crusader Insurance: It's a bad thing to the people that are inside of that red line, that's true. On the other hand, it might be a necessary evil in order to maintain the availability of insurance to other people throughout other areas.

MR. KAYE: Peter Ueberroth says a business/government partnership must change the red line to a green line.

PETER UEBERROTH: The government needs to put a green line around there and say there's an incentive to invest in, there's an incentive to hire in, here's an incentive to train in here.

MR. KAYE: In the meantime, Los Angeles is holding its breath to the verdict in the second Rodney King beating trial. Deccion Mahdi and his friends rioted in the Crenshaw shopping center last April. He says some residents are preparing to do it all over again.

DECCION MAHDI: People are getting ready for the verdict that's supposed to be happening sometime next month, something like that. Once that happens, it's going to be another overflow. But for some reason I believe this one's gonna be a bit worse.

MR. KAYE: Why do you say that, because of people you know who are getting ready?

DECCION MAHDI: Yeah.

MR. KAYE: What are they doing, when you say they're getting ready?

DECCION MAHDI: They're getting ready to do what they done before.

MR. KAYE: But amid the grim despair in Los Angeles, it's also true that by late fall Dr. Faulkner may be practicing full-time dentistry again. After a year of searching for loans, the owners of the Crenshaw Shopping Center believe they have found financing for its reconstruction.

MR. MacNeil: And in an effort to calm fears of a second Los Angeles riot, yesterday Police Commissioner Willie Williams said 6500 officers will go on patrol when the King case goes to the jury. Another possible source of tension in Los Angeles eased today. A state judge postponed the trial of the three men accused of beating truck driver Reginald Denny until later this summer. FOCUS - NETWORKING

MR. LEHRER: Next, the superhighways of the future. The Clinton administration's technology initiative includes federal support for a nationwide network of information superhighways. It is a proposal with critics. Correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth reports.

MS. FARNSWORTH: The railroads which have tied America together for over a century were built with both public and private investment. But the telephone lines were different. Private companies put them up with almost no federal help. That other network Americans use, the interstate highways, was a public project, built and managed almost entirely with taxpayers' money.

VICE PRESIDENT GORE: If you're going to compete in the 21st century, we have to invest in a new kind of infrastructure.

MS. FARNSWORTH: In February, during a presidential visit to Silicon Graphics, Vice President Gore unveiled a new technology plan which promises federal money for information superhighways, a vast electronic network which eventually could deliver voice, video and computer data to every American home. The plan has supporters at places like Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley. Joel Birnbaum, director of Hewlett Packard Labs, says that although some pieces of the network are already in place, federal aid and coordination are still crucial.

JOEL BIRNBAUM, Hewlett Packard: What we don't have is a comprehensive system, and we're missing important parts of both the technology as well as the organization which can really champion this and push it through. I think that the President's initiative is a critical catalyst to make this happen.

MS. FARNSWORTH: Many hi-tech firms like those that at a recent fiber optics trade show in San Jose stand to benefit from a federal government boost. But critics charge that the Clinton plan amounts to an industrial policy, a partnership between government and industry. Germany and Japan have benefited from this sort of partnership, but American conservatives like Martin Anderson oppose the idea. Anderson was domestic adviser to President Reagan.

MARTIN ANDERSON, Hoover Institution: I think it's kind of charming that in the year 1993 there are grown-up people that think that industrial policy is something that'll work, when we have had experience after experience that shows it simply does not work and will not work and cannot work. The sad part about it, the thing that makes it not amusing, is that it's going to be an enormous waste of the taxpayer's money.

MS. FARNSWORTH: To understand the information superhighways, let's begin at the beginning, like these first year computer students at Stanford. Most college students use computers. About 1/3 of all American homes have a computer, and most computers can be linked by networks which depend on telephone lines. But current networks can't keep up with the huge number of new computer users, or the explosion of computer technology. Peter Hankin is a consultant to the communications industry.

PETER HANKIN, Consultant: What you have now in a telephone network is essentially a low capacity line coming out of the back of a computer system. It's as if you had a tremendous reservoir of water and a very narrow pipe that comes out, and you want to send that water from one point to another.

MS. FARNSWORTH: The companies that you consult with here, the Silicon Valley companies, many of them have a reputation for being quirky Mavericks, small companies. Why do they want big federal aid?

PETER HANKIN: What happens now is that the technological problems that we're all facing are no longer able to be solved by single individual scientists riding off into the sunset to create a company and nail it down.

SPOKESMAN: And as Mr. Majimo will demonstrate --

MS. FARNSWORTH: Constructing a higher capacity system will involve a lot of new technology Hankin says. We saw some of it at the Fiber Optic Trade Show in San Jose.

SPOKESMAN: This is a piece of a fiber. What you see here is a little bigger than a hair.

MS. FARNSWORTH: The light in fibers like this can transmit thousands of times more information than the copper wires that are now bringing telephone service into our homes. But fiber optic technology is also twice as expensive, making it difficult for private companies to cover the costs of running fiber into people's homes.

PETER HANKIN: Their fear is that they won't get their money back in a time period that their shareholders will tolerate.

MS. FARNSWORTH: So it's a really huge project that is a long-term investment, sort of like the interstate highways?

PETER HANKIN: Yes. Yes. And it has, the argument here being that it has public good and a public good associated with it which the government should assist with.

MS. FARNSWORTH: At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco, the federal government has already paid for installing fiber optic cables to deal with the complex needs of defense-related research.

SPOKESMAN: And at this low resolution, you really don't see the - -

MS. FARNSWORTH: Scientists Jerry Potter and Dean Williams are part of a climatology study that uses highly complex computer modeling to predict rainfall patterns. They share data with colleagues at labs and universities across the country using a fiber optic research network funded by the Department of Energy. And a new even more sophisticated network is under construction with Department of Energy money. Paul Rupert is in charge of the project.

PAUL RUPERT, Lawrence Livermore Lab: We're developing a local area network that will be capable of putting a gigabit per second at every individual's desk on our campus.

MS. FARNSWORTH: And what's a gigabit per second?

PAUL RUPERT: Okay. A gigabit per second is a billion bits of information per second. A bit is the smallest piece of computer information you can have, and that's basically equivalent of a hundred novels per second.

MS. FARNSWORTH: This is the kind of superhighway the Clinton administration has in mind for the whole country. And Rupert is also involved in another project funded partly by private companies to extend the gigabit network throughout the bay area. This could be the first stretch of a national information superhighway.

SPOKESMAN: That's a NASA channel of some sort that's on --

MS. FARNSWORTH: So far it looks like the new communications network will be like the railroads a mix of public and private initiative and capital. But how much public? How much private? That's what's under debate. In a recent interview Vice President Gore told the National Journal that the federal government has no intention of owning or controlling a nationwide fiber network reaching into the home, but he said the network won't happen "unless the federal government gets us over the hump." At Cisco Systems in Palo Alto, there's a lot of interest in what "getting over the hump" means. Cisco builds switches and routers for computer networks. CEO John Morgridge welcomes some but not too much federal help.

JOHN MORGRIDGE, CEO, Cisco Corp.: They're trying to enable and cause things to happen, and I think government ought to do that. They shouldn't manage it, they shouldn't control it, and they shouldn't spend too much money.

MS. FARNSWORTH: T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor in San Jose, is opposed to any federal meddling in the new network.

T.J. RODGERS, CEO, Cypress Semiconductor: The tragedy is we're taking money from people and companies and those people and companies could use it much better themselves.

MS. FARNSWORTH: What do you mean taking money from people and companies?

T.J. RODGERS: He's raising the corporate income tax. When he raises my income tax and Cypress Semiconductor by a million dollars a year, there will be 10 Ph.D.'s who won't be working on the real electronic data highway and a million dollars in Washington going into some program.

MS. FARNSWORTH: There are other issues at stake here too. Stanford Computer Science Professor Eric Roberts says the question of access to the new information network needs to be addressed.

ERIC ROBERTS, Stanford University: We need to have a broadly- based social policy that ensures access to this emerging national information structure to all sectors of the society. It's easy enough to provide technically, and as I say, it's just a question of whether we decide to do it. I believe that with Clinton, with Gore and with their longstanding interest in this area, and particularly Vice President Gore, that there's a good chance that we will do the right thing. We will only do the right thing, however, I believe, if people who are concerned about those issues are drawn into the process.

MS. FARNSWORTH: The specifics of the communications superhighways are still vague. A White House task force yet to be named will plan government policy and suggest areas of government industry cooperation. That task force is likely to change the way Americans communicate in the 21st century. ESSAY - THRILLER!

MR. MacNeil: Finally tonight essayist Anne Taylor Fleming explains why she is a Michael Jackson fan.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Michael Jackson is suddenly everywhere, starring front and center at the Clinton inaugural, strutting around during the Super Bowl at half time, offering up breathy confessionals of child abuse to Oprah, even a somewhat moving, if mawkish indictment of his show business childhood at the Grammy Awards, a shy, sly mega star going public at last, some people said because his new album had not exactly taken off, at least not enough to justify Sony's billion dollar investment in him. As for me, I haven't missed a word or a note or a move. I can't help myself. Even though I have found myself cringing from time to time, Michael Jackson gets to me. He always has, at least since he's been out on his own. I was not much interested in him when he was young, a near baby anchoring the Jackson Five, trilling about salvation. He seemed sweet and fuzzy and high voiced but nothing to get excited about. Only later, when he got out from under the family and started doing his own things did my leftover teen-age soul take notice.

[JACKSON SINGING]

MS. FLEMING: I loved the breakthrough the videos. I loved them from the minute I saw them, his slip sliding away, his staccato bumps and grinds, his hand gestures, alternately fay and aggressive. Here in this slight frame was the new age Fred Astaire, whimsical and fluid, yet full of street smart poses and angles, an urban urchin with wings on his feet.

[JACKSON SINGING]

MS. FLEMING: I must confess that his singing has always seemed secondary to me, the leftover fire boy trying to rhapsodize about romance. It doesn't ring right. It's like Madonna trying to be soft and Monroe-like. If either of the two is the logical heir to Marilyn Monroe, it is clearly Michael Jackson, who is the more bruised and authentically vulnerable of the two, certainly more so than his hard-edged, female analog. Not to say that he doesn't play the image game right along with Madonna. He doesn't leave a single metaphor untouched. Not only is he black and white, male and female, but also young and old, hip and square, the crotch- grabbing, self-appointed guardian angel of the world's children. He scrambles all the categories and has left Madonna in the image making dust.

[JACKSON SINGING]

MS. FLEMING: Perhaps there is something a little pathetic about that behavior, the feeling that the person has fallen between the cracks of his own personas, so that all that is left is the latest image. John Bradshaw's wounded child within come to life, ready to burble to any captive audience, preferably one of 90 million, the number that watched him with Oprah, about that traumatic, non- existent childhood. It's the danger, of course, of living your life in public. One does brace one's self for how he'll age, for how many more transformations of body and soul he'll subject us to, subject himself to. In the meantime and forever, at least for me, there's the indelible memory of movement, uniquely his. I turn off the music and let the video run to see if my heart still takes notice. It does. In that moment all the rest of it is beside the point, all the interviews and manipulations and all the garbage of having an endlessly analyzed mega buck career in modern America. There are only the steps and the sweetly weird boy/man doing is moonwalk in silence. That's good enough for me. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday, prosecutors moved to dismiss federal charges in the BCCI banking case against Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. They said they wanted to avoid interfering in the state trial of Altman now underway in New York, and President Clinton signed legislation creating a federal commission to study the troubled US airline industry. Good night, Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Good night, Jim. That's the NewsHour for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.