The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, the news of this Monday; then, three aftermath reports on the devastating earthquake in and around Kashmir; a conservative debate over putting Harriet Miers on the U.S. Supreme Court; a look at the coming of the first woman as chancellor of Germany; a Columbus Day conversation about what happened in 1491; and a Richard Rodriguez about desert fates.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: Pakistan struggled today to find survivors of Saturday's catastrophic earthquake. As many as 30,000 people were killed. More than two million others were left homeless. Most of the dead were in northern Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir. About 900 people died in India. The quake flattened remote villages and devastated cities. Rescuers struggled today to free victims still trapped beneath rubble. A Pakistani spokesman said many were children.

MAJ. GEN. SHAUKAT SULTAN, Government Spokesman: The adversely hit population are mainly the schools, because it was daytime when the schools were full of children, and it is that place where probably mass casualties might have occurred.

JIM LEHRER: Assistance poured in to Pakistan, including eight U.S. rescue helicopters from bases in nearby Afghanistan. The U.S. pledged up to $50 million in aid. In addition, Pakistan said it would accept aid from its longtime rival, India. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary.

In Central America today, officials in Guatemala said they'll abandon villages buried by mudslides and declare them mass graveyards. Torrential rains from Hurricane Stan triggered the slides last week. More than 650 people were killed; nearly 400 others were missing. The rain and flooding also killed more than 100 people in neighboring countries. New Hampshire was under a state of emergency today after the worst flooding there in 25 years. Heavy rain over the weekend forced scores of people from their homes. The governor called out 500 National Guard troops for assistance. At least ten people died in the flooding across the northeast.

Violence across Iraq killed another 18 people today with the constitutional referendum now just five days away. The worst was in Baghdad, outside the heavily fortified green zone. A suicide car bomber killed seven people, including an American solder.

Also today, Shiite and Kurdish leaders negotiated last-minute changes to the constitution. They hope to win Sunni support in Saturday's referendum.

For the first time, Germany will have a woman as chancellor. That word came today in a power-sharing deal. Conservative Angela Merkel will be the chancellor. She advocates market reforms and closer ties to the United States. She'll replace Gerhard Schroeder. But his liberal allies will hold key posts in the new cabinet. Last month's parliamentary elections yielded no clear winner. We'll have more on this later in the program.

In New Orleans today, three policemen pleaded "not guilty" to charges of battery. A videotape made Saturday night showed officers beating a 64- year-old man. He was accused of public intoxication and resisting arrest. One officer also shoved a producer with Associated Press Television News. Last night, a police department spokesman had this to say.

CAPT. MARLON DEFILLO, New Orleans Police Department: For the last several weeks this department has been working under a tremendous amount of stress. The stress level is very high. And I'm not trying to justify any police officer's actions that may not be acceptable. I will say that the vast majority of the men and women of this department, more than 2,000 employees, are hard working, dedicated men and women of this agency.

JIM LEHRER: Also today, the U.S. Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into the beating.

Police in New York City scaled back their presence in the subway system today. They'd been on high alert since Thursday over a possible terror threat. But the weekend passed peacefully, and today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called off the alert.

The Nobel Prize for economics went today to two men who work in game theory. American Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland shared the prize with Robert Aumann, an Israeli-American who lives in Jerusalem. Their work has been used to explain trade wars, arms control, and even the operations of organized crime. Today Schelling explained game theory in College Park, Maryland.

THOMAS SCHELLING: The theory of how people behave when everybody's behavior is in some way dependent on the behavior of others -- if you ever tried to maneuver in a traffic jam, you're always having to try to adapt yourself to what other drivers are doing, or convey an impression of what your intentions are by the way you drive.

JIM LEHRER: Americans have now won or shared the economics prize for six years running. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 53 points to close at 10,238. The NASDAQ fell 11 points to close just under 2079. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the Kashmir earthquake; the conservatives' Miers debate; the German chancellor; a 1491 conversation; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

FOCUS SHATTERED REGION

JIM LEHRER: It was the most devastating earthquake to hit South Asia in a century. We have three reports from Independent Television News correspondents, beginning with Mark Austin, who flew into Kashmir with a British rescue team.

MARK AUSTIN: With the British search and rescue team this afternoon we boarded a helicopter provided by the Argacon. This was a reconnaissance mission to remote areas, many still inaccessible by road and what we saw was simply staggering. In village after village, town after town, there is devastation on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.

But such pictures, dramatic as they are, disguise the real tragedy here. The quake struck at 8:53 AM; in every collapsed home was a family sitting down to breakfast, in every school children at their desks, in every hospital, patients waiting for the doctors' round -- all human life, and so much of it snatched away. The British rescuers surveyed all this with utter bewilderment.

Soon we put down in a town that was no more. Such was the destruction here. The rescuers set off to begin their work, but where do you begin in a place like this?

SIMON WATSON, Rapid UK: There's a lot of buildings collapsed, a lot of damage in the area, and we're just trying to get the right priorities now --

MARK AUSTIN: And just looking at it do, you think there are people still alive in some of these buildings?

SIMON WATSON: I think there's a chance that people can still be alive in these buildings, yes.

MARK AUSTIN: And some of the injured were soon clamoring to get on the helicopter, people desperate to get their children to hospital -- and others, for whom this airlift is the only hope. The air crew took everyone they could; others were told to wait for helicopters landing soon behind us. These were desperate scenes in a place full of desperate stories.

JIM LEHRER: Here are some of those desperate stories, from two towns near the epicenter of the quake. Bill Neely reports from one of them, in the frontier province west of Kashmir.

BILL NEELY: From a deep hole in what was a school comes a small body, a little girl, in her uniform. Nobody knows her name. But they take her away quickly because they have so many more to pull out -- hundreds.

There is a terrible reason why so many mothers are crying here. They have all lost their children -- some all of them. They sent them to school with kisses -- within an hour and in an instant whole classes were dead.

The mountainside overlooking the small town of Balakot is the source of their pain. The school that was here is gone. The fathers wait, but with little hope. 350 of their children are dead. They have no heavy lifting equipment. The bodies are trapped and not just bodies. The rescuers have heard voices.

DONG XU, Chinese Rescue Worker: People are definitely, some people are definitely alive there. There are five children alive there and asking for help under collapse.

BILL NEELY: Five children?

DONG XU: Yes, I believe it's primary schoolchildren.

BILL NEELY: And what are they saying?

DONG XU: They're asking for help.

BILL NEELY: So they dig very carefully. But more often than not, it is far, far too late. The whole town is in mourning, the bodies of its children, crisscrossing the streets where they once played, past the clock on the school wall, stopped at the very moment when their lives ended.

The very epicenter of the earthquake was underneath this town about six miles below this school. About half Balakot's children were killed; many are still buried beneath this debris; ten schools in all, nursery, primary, and secondary, perhaps 700 children dead, at least, but they're not really sure.

The luckier parents hold their living children tightly, but a generation has been lost here. So today with a final kiss, thousands left the destroyed town for a new life. So many passed the landslides, but going where? Most towns are stricken and half the roads are blocked. They clear a way through a tunnel to the nearest town which is 20 miles away, but when we reached it, we found more evidence of the strongest earthquake here in 100 years and more pain.

Here, a university collapsed; the students are laid out on the seats at their football pitch. Like the schoolchildren, hundreds had been indoors when nature taught its cruelest lesson. And here too the youngest suffered the most.

MAN: There's one public school -- 700 children, complete building go down.

SPOKEMAN: Thirty one students, they were in the class, out of thirty-one, ten were dead and the remaining twenty-one were badly injured, their legs and forelimbs also injured.

BILL NEELY: Your class?

SPOKESMAN: Yes, they're in my class.

BILL NEELY: The injured children and adults are brought onto the football pitch, and laid out near the dead. There are hundreds here and dozens more are coming every few minutes. The problem is there's not only no food, there is no water. And many of these people are simply being left here to die.

There seemed little hope for this man. Anchia's father checks her heartbeat, she's only six, but she's lost a leg. Shamila Rashid has lost her older and her younger sister. These people never had much. They're now reeling from the greatest disaster here for generations, they're looking for help, and for the generation that's been swept away, they are praying tonight.

JIM LEHRER: Now a report from John Irvine at another town right next to the epicenter.

JOHN IRVINE: Muzaffarabad lies at the bottom of a deep gorge; normally a thriving city, today this was a valley of death. Nearly every collapsed building smells of it, three days into this crisis, it's only bodies that are being pulled from the rubble here, not survivors.

This is what's left of the Medina market, a pedestrian area; it was the main shopping thorough fare in the city. Right now it's quite literally deathly quiet -- abandoned to the corpses.

Anyone who can leave the city is doing so. Those who have had to stay behind feel forgotten and let down by the authorities, for little in the way of aid or help has reached here.

MAN: This is my house, which has completely ruined, you see. My three brothers have died over there.

JOHN IRVINE: Having lost his brothers, he's desperate to recover their bodies.

MAN: There's no help from anywhere, from any side. Nobody is helping us. We are just helpless.

JOHN IRVINE: Most buildings here are two or three stories and a high portion of them were brought down by nature's violence. They are trying to extricate 30 bodies from the main bank. One survivor said the building came down in the blink of an eye.

SURVIVOR: Maybe two or three seconds, within two or three seconds.

JOHN IRVINE: It was that quick?

SURVIVOR: Yes.

JOHN IRVINE: You must feel very lucky to be alive.

SURVIVOR: I am thankful to God for giving me life again, and I am sorry because my colleagues died.

JOHN IRVINE: Help has been slow to reach Muzzafarabad because the road in is very difficult. And this is what can happen to those who try to rush it. These were the only army trucks we saw on our entire journey.

This is quite extraordinary. This is the main road between Islamabad and Muzzafarabad which is the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and in the heart of the earthquake zone, there is virtually nobody else on this highway.

It's difficult but aid convoys may be able to get here tomorrow, waiting for them are a grieving and desperate people spending another night outdoors.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the conservative divides over Harriet Miers, Germany's new chancellor; a 1491 conversation; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

FOCUS FAMILY FEUD

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has our pro-con Miers debate.

MARGARET WARNER: The conservative furor over the nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court began almost immediately. And it hasn't let up.

GARY BAUER: She sounds to me a lot like another swing vote, which was the last thing we were expecting a conservative president to give us.

MARGARET WARNER: Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol who has called on President Bush to withdraw the nomination wrote: He has put up an unknown and undistinguished figure for an opening that conservatives worked for a generation to see filled with a jurist of high distinction'

Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post: If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the President of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke…'

The anger within the president's party has forced him to defend Miers several times this past week, most recently in his radio address on Saturday.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Harriet Miers will be the type of judge I said I would nominate a good conservative judge.

MARGARET WARNER: The White House also has rallied some prominent conservatives to speak up on Miers' behalf.

SPOKESMAN: I think this woman is a woman of enormous accomplishment.

MARGARET WARNER: But even that effort has generated controversy. One member of that circle, conservative activist James Dobson, told his radio listeners last week that his conversations with presidential advisor Karl Rove convinced him Miers opposes abortion.

DR. JAMES DOBSON: When you know some of the things that I know, that I probably shouldn't know, you will understand why I have said with fear and trepidation that I believe that Harriet Miers will be a good justice.'

MARGARET WARNER: That upset Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, who will oversee the confirmation hearings.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER: And if there are backroom deals and if there is something which bears upon a precondition as to how a nominee is going to vote, I think that's a matter that ought to be known by the Judiciary Committee and the American people.

MARGARET WARNER: The Washington Times reported today that 27 Republican senators, roughly half the caucus, have either expressed doubts about Miers' nomination or said they'll withhold judgment until the hearings.

MARGARET WARNER: And to join the debate now, we go to Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice -- his organization of one and a half million members is mobilizing a national campaign to ensure that Miers is confirmed; and David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush, now a contributing editor at the National Review, he's written online columns sharply criticizing the Miers nomination.

Welcome to you both.

David Frum, have you been one of the most outspoken conservative voices against this nomination. Why?

DAVID FRUM: Stakes are so enormous in this seat. This is something as Bill Kristol said the conservatives have worked for, for a long time, but we don't just want to put a voting machine there. We want to give the country our best. That's what we owe. Republicans owe the country their best, just as Democrats do. There are so many excellent people, men and women the president could have chosen and he chose someone who just isn't good enough.

MARGARET WARNER: Just isn't good enough, Jay Sekulow, we're hearing that a lot from many conservatives. What's your response?

JAY SEKULOW: Well, I think, number one, and I think it's important here, this is an important vote and important seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. I litigate there, I know.

But let me say this, you know -- I think people are underestimating, I have a lot of respect for David, I consider him a friend and I respect his opinions. But on this one, I think the president decided to select someone who he knew, because he knows what tends to happen when justices go on the Supreme Court of the United States.

He wanted someone that he knew that he knew their philosophy and knew it well. This is not a situation -- some have drawn an analogy to the situation with Justice Souter, but there the first President Bush had never met David Souter until he walked into his office that day.

Here the president has known intimately Harriet Miers for ten years; she has served in a very sensitive position, both now as White House counsel and previously, and he knows her; he knows how she thinks and he also knows her judicial philosophy.

And I think we should not underestimate for a moment that this is a very smart woman and the president is fully aware that much of his legacy is vested in the Supreme Court of United States. So this did not catch the White House by surprise.

David, in fact, called this back in July. I thought that Harriet was a likely nominee back about a month ago, and I'm not surprised at all that this was the selection.

MARGARET WARNER: Two questions for you, David Frum. First of all, when you say she isn't good enough, what do you mean?

DAVID FRUM: I mean she has been a lawyer for more than three decades. In that time she has never found it necessary to express herself on any of the great issues of the day. Those of us who worked with her in the White House saw a person of considerable ability, in certain areas, but not someone who thought deeply or hard about legal issues. And that's not what she was known for.

She was known for her attention to detail and to process but not for her having thought hard about these issues. I appreciate Jay's kind words. But I think in many ways his answers reveal why this has become such an explosive issue inside the Republican Party.

Part of what isn't good enough is for the president to say, although there are lots of conservatives of incredible distinction who have written and published, where the world can know what they think, I have a secret, I know something and nobody else does. And I'm going to go with my personal knowledge.

Republicans have been disappointed with that kind of knowledge often before, and although they trust and support this president, he is asking too much.

MARGARET WARNER: Jay Sekulow --

JAY SEKULOW: There's a bit of a difference here though, and that is the president has been very clear. I remember talking when he was Gov. Bush and running for the Republican nomination the first time, that the president -- and this was in a conversation I had with him -- talked about the importance of the judiciary.

As president, I mean, let's be realistic -- this is a president that has appointed great judges to the courts of appeals and the district courts. He appointed John Roberts as chief justice. And I suspect that the president, who spent a lot of time with Harriet Miers, knows that she's in that same mold, and, again, I don't think anybody should be selling this woman short; she's very bright, she's served in sensitive positions and I think she is going to serve the country well.

MARGARET WARNER: But you think well, let me ask you - do you think that someone who is going on the Supreme Court should have a demonstrated background in constitutional law, either an interest in it or some kind of work experience in it whether as an appellate lawyer or as a judge?

JAY SEKULOW: Well, look, I have argued 12 cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, been involved in 18. Harriet Miers has served as the White House counsel, she is familiar with the Constitution; she deals with it every single day.

I don't think you have to be a sitting judge in order to be a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States. In fact, what the president said and I think correctly so, he was talking about this when the nomination for Justice O'Connor the first time was going to be John Roberts, but he talked about going outside of the bench. And that's not unprecedented in Supreme Court history. In fact, it's happened more times than not, that they've had nominees come in outside of the bench.

And I think that's a perspective quite frankly as someone that litigates at the Supreme Court of the United States regularly, that's a perspective that's lacking right now. And I think, as Justice Scalia said this morning, having a different perspective could be a good thing.

MARGARET WARNER: You're shaking your head.

DAVID FRUM: Nobody is suggesting that have you to have been an appellate judge in order to be on the Supreme Court; that would be a silly thing to suggest; no one is suggesting that.

What they are say is that this must be an outstanding person. Jay is very much in a minority here among in the conservative legal community. We both know a lot of people in that community, in the federal society.

I have to tell you the response in Washington among conservative jurists is nearly unanimously ranging from disappointment to dismay. But I just, to get a sense of this, I invite people to consider, think of the most famous conservative names in the law that can you think of. Have you heard from any of them the past week?

When John Roberts was nominated, they were all over TV saying this is a great man. They're staying home. Now they also argued cases in front of the Supreme Court, so they can't be too outspoken. They have dealings with the White House, but they are not there. And the reason they are not there is because they think this nomination is, they are really disappointed and some of them are very angry.

We've heard from Robert Bork, there are many others who be like to be as outspoken and can't be.

MARGARET WARNER: Why do you think, Jay Sekulow, there is this degree of unhappiness, there is this furor within the conservative movement, including among the conservative legal community?

JAY SEKULOW: I think part of it is there was an anticipation that this was going to be through this nomination the great debate. That did not happen actually when John Roberts was nominated and later confirmed. They didn't have this great constitutional debate.

MARGARET WARNER: You mean a debate over real conservative legal principles?

JAY SEKULOW: Yeah, and where we stand on the conservative legal issues of the day, or the legal issues of the day from a conservative perspective.

And I think people were anticipating that if a known conservative, in the sense of Mike Luttig, as an example, Sam Alito, some of the others -- Priscilla Owen, were nominated, that the battle over the confirmation would have produced an education process. Look, there's nothing wrong with the education process and I don't think there's anything wrong with a tough confirmation battle, but I suspect that Harriet Miers is going to have just that.

Believe me, groups on the left are already mobilizing against her because of positions and statements that she's made years ago. But, look, at the end of the day, here's where I think it is and I think this is a legitimate concern that David and others are bringing forward: People don't know Harriet Miers. David does because he worked with her, but a lot of others do not.

I think when people get to see -- I've worked with her over the last seven months now, almost a year and I will tell you, I've been impressed with what I've seen, I've seen her under fire, I've been very impressed. I think she has no doubt in my mind she has the same judicial philosophy as the president, which is the same judicial philosophy as John Roberts. She's not a Supreme Court advocate, but, again, I don't think that's the disqualifier from serving on the court.

MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Sekulow, let me ask you a quick question and then I want to get back to David Frum. But have you received any private assurances about how she feels say about abortion or any other issue?

JAY SEKULOW: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. Absolutely not. I have been involved in this process from an outside consultant standpoint, as an outside lawyer helping the White House as much as anybody has, and I will tell you today that I have not received nor do I know of how she's going to vote in a particular case on a particular issue, or how she views a particular cultural issue.

What I do know is exactly what the president knows and made it very clear that she does have a conservative judicial philosophy; that she understands her role is not to create social policy

MARGARET WARNER: Okay.

JAY SEKULOW: -- that the role of the judiciary is limited.

MARGARET WARNER: And you're saying working with her all these years, you never saw that?

DAVID FRUM: No. Conservatives didn't want a great debate; they wanted a great justice and they know they haven't got one and although this is going to be a much tougher confirmation battle than any of those people whom Jay named would face and the left may be organizing to oppose her, but I promise you, the right is not going to organize to support her. Nobody supports this nomination.

There are people who accept it, as the president's due and with deference to him; nobody thinks it's a good idea.

MARGARET WARNER: Son it's one thing for you all to send out blogs and make statements and write columns now, before the hearings start, but are you, do you think that we're going to see a real effort by conservatives to try to defeat this nomination from the right?

DAVID FRUM: I think we will see a lot of quiet opposition. I think what we'll also see is if there is any trouble at that hearing, there is no one to help this nominee up, because people do not think it's a good idea.

JAY SEKULOW: I will tell you --

MARGARET WARNER: Jay Sekulow, can you just wait let him finish --

DAVID FRUM: Let me, I'll be quick to let Jay have the last word if he wants. But our e-mails at conservative talk shows, at National Review Online were we have 400,000 daily readers -- are running massively against this. My own mail is five to one against. I just think that's the way the conservative community feels.

MARGARET WARNER: And Jay Sekulow, briefly do you think this could be sunk from the right?

JAY SEKULOW: No, I don't think. So I think what you'll see is some are going to be a opposed as they are; others are going to wait and see when she performs, as I know she will, at the confirmation hearings, people are going to see a side of Harriet Miers they haven't seen, it's going to be impressive and I think come the end of November when the Supreme Court is back, she'll be there replacing Justice O'Connor.

MARGARET WARNER: Okay, Jay Sekulow, David Frum, thank you both.

FOCUS NEW LEADER

JIM LEHRER: And speaking of politics and coalitions, Germany has a new leader. Ray Suarez has our story.

RAY SUAREZ: Confirming she'll become Germany's first female chancellor, Angela Merkel was typically short on emotion and businesslike.

ANGELA MERKEL (Translated): I do feel good today, but a lot of work lies ahead of us. I want to take the choice the voters made and make the best for our country out of it.

RAY SUAREZ: Merkel's party had been expected to sweep last month's elections; she campaigned on a platform of market-oriented economic reform. But her Christian Democrats, known as the CDU, garnered only 35.2 percent of the vote. Chancellor Schroeder and the Social Democrats, or SPD, took 34.3 percent. CDU emerged with only a three-seat lead in the 614-seat Bundestag or Lower House of Parliament.

After three weeks of negotiations, Merkel's party made a power-sharing deal with the Social Democrats. Schroeder is expected to leave politics after seven years in office.

The two parties made what they call a grand coalition, and Merkel reportedly had to bargain away several key cabinet posts, such as foreign and finance minister, to the Social Democrats.

Today she said the two parties were obliged to be successful.

ANGELA MERKEL (Translated): We all know that there's no realistic alternative to reforms for Germany, and that is evident. The politics of the grand coalition needs to ensure that jobs are being created again.

RAY SUAREZ: 51-year-old Merkel, daughter of a Lutheran pastor, grew up in Communist East Germany and was a scientist, uninvolved in politics until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. She joined the Christian Democrats.

ANGELA MERKEL (Translated): If I'm a political product then I'm an East German product, a politician of the reunited Germany with roots in the East, and I'm proud of this.

RAY SUAREZ: Her rapid rise was pushed by her mentor, then Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Merkel served in two of his cabinets as minister for women and youth, and then as minister for the environment. As a Protestant from the East, Merkel broke the leadership mold in the CDU, a party traditionally dominated by Roman Catholic men. She became party leader in 2000.

Twice married with no children, Merkel's closely guarded private life is in stark contrast to that of Gerhard Schroeder whose four marriages have fueled lots of publicity. The coalition plan must be ratified by the members of both parties, and both houses of Germany's parliament, and the new government is supposed to be totally formed by Nov. 12.

For more about Germany's incoming chancellor and the challenges she faces, we turn to Dorothee Heisenberg, Associate Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She's a native of Hamburg, Germany and now a U.S. citizen; and Jane Kramer, European correspondent for the New Yorker. She profiled Angela Merkel in the magazine's Sept. 19 edition.

Professor, the election was weeks ago. Why did it take so long for a chancellor to emerge from the process?

DOROTHEE HEISENBERG: Well, really there were two factors, one was you couldn't prejudge what the Dresden voters who had a late election were going to say it would have been hard to make a formal coalition before that, given how close

RAY SUAREZ: -- the one last seat to be decided.

DOROTHEE HEISENBERG: That's right. And more importantly, the distribution was so close that most people felt that it was going to have to be a coalition between the two major parties in Germany, the CDU and the SPD, and that took a long time to iron out.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, there are some other smaller parties, which if either of the two bigs had decided to make an alliance with, they probably could have governed alone, right?

DOROTHEE HEISENBERG: That's correct. And what really skewed this election from a traditional perspective was the fact that the newly established Links Party which had broken off from the SPD, everyone had said they were not going to make a coalition with, and so therefore Schroeder wasn't able to govern as he might have if that party hadn't broken away or if anybody had said they would make a coalition with that party.

RAY SUAREZ: So the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party win the election, get more votes than any other party. Why did they have to give up such powerful cabinet positions in order to form this coalition with a defeated Social Democratic Party?

DOROTHEE HEISENBERG: Well, again, they couldn't, I guess they could have made a minority government, but it would have been very ad hoc, and it's not something that would have been possible -- I think you needed to have this grand coalition so you would be able to pass legislation and move forward into, you know, not having the opposition of all of the parties, of all of the other remaining parties.

It's very hard to be a minority party, and as you said they only had 35 percent of the vote, so it would have been very difficult to just govern on their own.

RAY SUAREZ: Jane Kramer, a lot of firsts here, the first chancellor from the old East Germany, the first woman chancellor of the unified Germany. What kind of politician is Angela Merkel?

JANE KRAMER: Well, Angela Merkel to me is very much a product of her East German roots and her gender. She's quite suspicious of anyone not close to her. She grew up in the Communist East; that has left a mark in the way she plays politics. She is guarded' she plays close to the chest. She takes no prisoners; she is directed toward a goal, and she is highly suspicious of deals that can be betrayed, friends who could seek to supplant her.

She's to me quite a product of the East. And also as a woman I think she played very shrewdly her rivals within her own party's perceptions of what her womanly virtues were. She was patient while they destroyed each other's candidacy. She was discreet; she fought her battles behind closed doors.

She was an immensely good and tidy housekeeper; they thought she was going to clean up the party; in fact she swept them away. She had no nostalgia for the old guard of the party.

And eventually they have come around, though it's quite evident that they are looking to eventually supplant her unless she turns out indeed to be what her publicity says of German Margaret Thatcher, it's quite unclear whether she has that endurance and whether she has that force.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, now, Jane Kramer, that the political season is over and it seems to be setting in to government, is what rank and file Germans see every day on television, in the way their politics are run, is Angela Merkel going to be a big departure from Gerhard Schroeder?

JANE KRAMER: I actually think the grand coalition is going to smooth many differences in the public perception. I think Gerhard Schroeder was clearly one of the reasons he called a new election and an early election when there is some chance that he could have weathered the course. Some of his reforms were kicking in and he might have stood a better chance in a year.

He was badly sabotaged by his own left wing, and Angela Merkel has been to some extent anyway sabotaged or at least unsupported by her own right wing.

In a way, a centrist left-right government, center left/center right, could stop in the best of all possible political scenes -- could stop the blackmail of extreme left and extreme right.

Germans also feared that this might in fact come to pass. So this is the big question: Will this group be able to operate because they can form a center, thereby withstanding pressures from the left and right, or will they be undone by the left and right -- by the radical reformers on the right and the radical anti-reformers on the left?

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Professor, this campaign as I understand it, was run heavily on domestic issues, but for people in the rest of the world looking from outside at Germany, for instance the United States, where there's been some testy relationships, is this is going to be a different German government to do business with?

DOROTHEE HEISENBERG: I do not foresee that. I think on many ways Angela Merkel is a new face to show up in Washington and so she can smooth over some of the feelings that were due to the Iraq War and some of the other things. But I think in general I do not expect a large difference in policy, foreign policy. And I think Americans should be happy if the Germans can get their economic house in order, because that would certainly provide better economy and better relations with the United States.

But on foreign policy issues I would not expect large differences between the Merkel government and the Schroeder governments that came before.

RAY SUAREZ: So the line on Angela Merkel during the summer that she was much more pro American than Gerhard Schroeder, there's not much to that in your view?

DOROTHEE HEISENBERG: Well, it's difficult to be overtly pro-American because a substantial proportion of Germans isn't feeling that friendly at the moment. And so it would be an unnecessary limb to climb out on for her. I think she, you know, will certainly be cordial, but I wouldn't expect massively different policy or new overtures with the Bush administration at least.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, you're from the New Yorker Magazine; did she have much to say to you that would indicate a different view toward the United States?

JANE KRAMER: A little bit, but I think mainly rhetorically. I think that just as Justice Schroeder, for instance, made no mention within Germany of the particular things that Germany was doing to not help but in some way aid America's war in Iraq, Angela Merkel makes very little mention in Germany of her hopes for rapprochement with the United States.

This is something we hear in foreign talks of hers. We heard it when she sent her foreign policy advisor to Washington to see the secretary of state and also to see George Bush. We heard it when she met with Tony Blair. The repercussions of this have not been felt inside Germany, and I don't think many people expect her. I think they expect an opening, but they don't expect considerable policy changes just impossible in the climate of Germany right now.

I think a lot will depend on who the foreign minister is also. I think I should add that the foreign ministry in German politics almost always goes to the coalition partner, and so it's not surprising that, and this is also the -- becomes the vice chancellor. So it's not surprising to me that the Social Democrats got that post -- some of the others perhaps, but that post was expected.

I think the influence of the foreign policy advisors on Merkel will be quite telling and it's very hard to see who is going to be ascendant there, her main advisor and only recent bitter rival, Mr. Scheibler, is very pro, a very strong relationship with the Americans now and even within this Bush moment. Certainly an SPD foreign minister will not be so enthusiastic about that. So it's a really wait and see game.

RAY SUAREZ: Jane Kramer, Professor Heisenberg, thank you both.

JANE KRAMER: Thank you, Ray.

DOROTHEE HEISENBERG: Thank you.

CONVERSATION

JIM LEHRER: Now, a Columbus Day Holiday conversation with the author of a new book, and to Jeffrey Brown.

JEFFREY BROWN: What were the Americas like when Columbus first arrived in 1492? A provocative new book pulls together research from the last several decades and suggested much of what we think we know about that history is wrong. The book is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.' Its author is Charles Mann, a science writer for Science Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly.

Welcome to you.

CHARLES MANN: Glad to be here.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, is this about rewriting history? Define it for us.

CHARLES MANN: Well, basically when I went to high school, like most Americans, I learned that Indians walked across the Bering Straits 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most par in small scattered bands and that when Columbus landed the -- it had so little impact on the environment that the whole hemisphere was for all intents and purposes a vast wilderness.

And one way to summarize what the new research is saying is that all of these are wrong. Indians were here far longer than previously believed, they're in much, much greater numbers than previously believed, and they had far more environmental impact than previously believed.

JEFFREY BROWN: And you also write that not only did you learn this in high school, which was around when I was in high school, but your son did too.

CHARLES MANN: Right, and that was part of the impetus for writing the book, because at that point I had been reporting on this for Science and the Atlantic Monthly from time to time, and I knew that this was now decades out of date. And I sort of thought, well, somebody should write a book.

JEFFREY BROWN: So the portrait of the Americas before Columbus came, a more sophisticated, I think you used the word busy place.

CHARLES MANN: Yes. A crowded place with lots and lots of people, and the population estimates when I was going to school were that the entire population of the Americas north of the Rio Grande was something on the order of 900,000 people and then there were a few million more people south of the Rio Grande.

And now a conservative estimate would be twenty to forty million, and I've seen estimates of up to 200 million. So if you do this kind of crude split the difference kind of thing, you end up with eighty to one hundred million, which was roughly the population of Europe at the time.

JEFFREY BROWN: And living in some very large cities?

CHARLES MANN: Yes. For instance, the capital of the Aztec empire was a city of a quarter million which in the 16th Century is a big, big place; it was bigger than any of the cities in Spain, for example, that the Conquistadors came from.

JEFFREY BROWN: And the technology much greater, or more sophisticated than we ever thought about.

CHARLES MANN: Yeah. There was a vastly different kind of technology. There are many examples of this, probably my favorite is that when the Spanish, when the Spaniards came to Peru, they had suspension bridges, these things are held up by fabric, and they wrote, many of them wrote back to their superiors in Spain that they had these incredible bridges that had nothing underneath them holding but, but they're still somehow safe to walk across, because those principles weren't know. And there's many, many examples of this kind of thing.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you mention this notion that our idea of the Americas as mostly wilderness is wrong. So this was a place that was worked, covered, what did it actually look like?

CHARLES MANN: Well, imagine if you were going to fly from the Americas from say Boston all the way down to what you would have seen along the coast were almost solidly lined with agricultural villages, some quite large -- fields going many miles into the interior, and then after that the forest, which was shaped and managed by burning to keep the underbrush down and to make the new growth good for -- to attract game animals. And that was pretty much all the way through the whole East Coast.

Then in the Southeast you had thousands -- at least 10,000 probably many more -- of these sort of mound cities, centered around large earthen mounds. Then you went to Central Mexico, which was at the time Columbus landed probably the most populace place on Earth, with this enormous, rapidly expanding Aztec empire, as it's called; goes then down to South America and you had the Andes, where you had the Inca state, which is an enormous place; it was probably the largest state in the world at the time; it extended from a distance roughly equivalent from Stockholm to Cairo; and then the Amazon, which you think of it as a giant primeval forest was in fact home to very large states up and down this enormous river.

JEFFREY BROWN: So to the enormous question then of what happened to the land, what happened to the people, you talk about an epidemic that you call the worst demographic disaster in history.

CHARLES MANN: Well, it's actually a series of epidemics. What happened was that by historical quirk, there are hardly any large domestic land mammals in the Americas, and so the Indians didn't have many domesticated animals. They had dogs and llamas up in the Andes, and when people live in close proximity to animals, the way the Europeans did with their farm animals, animal diseases can what's called jump the species barrier and become human diseases.

And thus you have bovine rinderpest becoming measles; you have smallpox developing from horse pox or camel pox, depending which geneticist you talk to, bird flu, of course, becoming human flu.

And none of this took place in the Americas, and lots of it took place in Europe, so Europeans came over to the Americas and they brought inadvertently all these diseases with them to populations that not only didn't have diseases of their own, but also basically didn't have any of those kind of epidemic diseases and so didn't have any of the kind of cultural defenses against -- they didn't know about quarantine because if you don't ever have a plague, you don't need to know about quarantine.

And so these diseases when they came just swept through the Americas.

JEFFREY BROWN: And decimated a huge proportion of the population.

CHARLES MANN: Right. It was just a horrendous catastrophe, like nothing before or after it. Half of the world's population died.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you're synthesizing here the work of scientists over the last decade

CHARLES MANN: Yes, and I'm being a reporter, I'm trying to tell you this is what from doing the reporting I believe to be the consensus view of the current generation of archeological, anthropological, geographical and so on scientists.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right. But much of it, we should say, remains controversial.

CHARLES MANN: Absolutely. This is the kind of field that there's always arguments about what it.

What I would say is not controversial, I don't think anybody disbelieves that there were epidemics; the question would be whether they killed 75 percent of the population, 99 percent of the population.

JEFFREY BROWN: And exactly what the population was at the time?

CHARLES MANN: Yes, exactly. The idea that the Americas were a populace place, they were full of these busy diverse cultures, I don't think anybody argues with that; it's just the exact dimensions of the increase that we're talking about, and the fact that these horrible epidemics happened, again, I don't think this is controversial; this is, you know, how horrible is the question, rather than that they existed.

JEFFREY BROWN: So Columbus Day 2005, it's 513 years since Columbus arrived. Do you see some of this information starting to get down into the high school textbooks that sort of caused you to write this in the first place?

CHARLES MANN: Not yet. But I have to say that while I've been, you know, touring for this book and trying to promote it, a number of high school teachers have come to me and said this is really interesting, I want to teach this to my classes, you know, what materials can you give me, and so forth, so I think slowly this is disseminating, maybe my grandkids will actually do better with this than my children did.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Charles Mann; the book is 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.' Thanks a lot.

ESSAY DESERT FAITH

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, Richard Rodriguez speaks of what divides and unites some religions.

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: We are far enough now into the century of religious frenzy that we barely letter attend to the mad man's post any more after the explosion in London or Bali, before the blood dries, a web page proclaims vengeance against the Zionist crusaders.

For centuries, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, worshiping the same dessert God, these brother religions have been divided against by another, divided even among themselves.

It is not news tonight that ancient hatreds persist. But consider also this. Sitting together last March, these holy men, a Muslim cleric, the orthodox archbishop, the Latin patriarch, the chief Sephardic rabbi, the chief Ashkenazi rabbi, united in opposing a gay parade in Jerusalem.

Even as lethal differences separate the three desert religions this is a time also of strange new alliances, two against one, or three against the secular state.

Even while some main line Protestant churches consider divestments from companies that profit from Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, no church Protestants become Zionists. For some, support of Israel fulfills an apocalyptic expectation, but such a main stay of Israeli tourism have Evangelicals become, a grateful Sharon government may lease to a protest tab group the site on the Galilee where Christ dispensed the Beatitudes.

So unprecedented is our religious age of divisions and alliances, we lack the proper lexicon. We speak of fundamentalism when we describe the new Christian super churches in America's suburbs, but a church like Lakewood in Houston, the largest super church in the country, is exactly the opposite of fundamentalists. It has exchanged theological precision for when everyone is welcome, feel uplifted, Christianity.

For centuries, wars were fought among Christians over points of theology. Now there is reunion, perhaps in resistance to the rise of Islam, or to secularism. Increasingly in America, one hears people name themselves simply Christian.

Outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Florida, gathered Roman Catholics, alongside Low Church Protestants. In another time, highly communal Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism's stress on Christ's personal call were as different as the we' and the I.'

From Vienna, Cardinal Schonborn, voices skepticism about Darwinism. Catholicism long ago rejected a literalist reading of Genesis, but now as right-wing Protestants challenge evolution in the U.S. classroom and President Bush proposes teaching the theory of intelligent design alongside Darwin, the Viennese cardinal suggests that evolution is mere ideology, not science.

In the Middle East, fatal differences between the Shia and the Sunni may end up destroying Iraq. In America, a fear of Islam leads many non-Muslims to see Islam as the monolith next door. Yet in a recent poll, a majority of Americans indicated an aberration of Islam. One senses envy among many Americans, envy of the Muslims' freedom to worship in the public square, in ancient desert cities.

From the U.S. Air Force Academy comes news that coaches and administrators and students, the very people responsible for protecting our freedom to believe or not, have busily been proclaiming America a Christian nation.

As it has become fashionable for Americans to speak of their religious lives publicly, I confess mine. I go to Catholic Mass every Sunday. I am, you could say, a Christian.

But ever since Sept. 11, when havoc descended in the name of the desert God, I find my easiest companionship with the agnostic and the atheist. I'm Richard Rodriguez.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of this day: Pakistan struggled to find survivors of a catastrophic earthquake that killed as many as 30,000 people and conservative Angela Merkel was set to become Germany's first female chancellor in a power-sharing deal.

JIM LEHRER: And 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 eight more.

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