The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

RAY SUAREZ: Good evening. I'm Ray Suarez. Jim Lehrer is off tonight. On the NewsHour tonight, a summary of the news, the latest on the terrorist attack in Kenya, Internet search engine Google, analysis of the week's news with Shields and Brooks, and a conversation with David Rockefeller about his memoirs.

NEWS SUMMARY

RAY SUAREZ: Police in Kenya today were holding 12 people for questioning in connection with yesterday's attacks targeting Israelis. The bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Kikambala killed three Israelis and ten Kenyans. Dozens of other people were injured. The killings came minutes after a failed missile attack on an Israeli passenger jet in Mombasa. Today, several hundred Israelis, including the dead and some injured, were flown home. Israeli and U.S. experts have joined the investigation. We'll have more on this story in a moment. The U.S. Government warned airports today that portable rock ed launchers like the ones used in Kenya could be used against their planes in this country. Officials from the national transportation Security Administration alerted airports to the missile attacks and said they have implemented measures to counter the attack weeks ago. North Korea came under increased pressure today to abandon its nuclear weapons program. The UN Nuclear Monitoring Agency adopted a resolution urging the North Koreans to open their country to inspectors to prove there is no nuclear threat. Pyongyang admitted having a nuclear weapons program last month and has kept inspectors out since 1994. North Korea has until March to respond to the request. The holiday shopping season got under way today. Economics correspondent Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston has our report.

PAUL SOLMAN: And they're off! Early, early this morning, there was the usual jostling for position at this St. Louis Wal-Mart, this Circuit City in Chicago. In the retail trade, after all, this is "Black Friday," the day retailers supposedly break out of the red each year and go into the black and start making money. But at the Pentagon City Mall in Virginia today, the mood seemed a bit too dark; and from a shopping point of view, greater Washington, at least, has been pretty much a grey area all week.

MAN: I'm surprised by the lack of people. We're here kind of early. We thought it would be packed.

WOMAN: I've noticed that people are spending less and that they have less money, and that they're very worried.

PAUL SOLMAN: Of course, unemployment is up, the economy has been down, and in the past few years, more and more shoppers have held off until late December. So it may not be a matter of stingy Santas, but savvy ones, waiting for the last-minute discounts to save money. Trying to counter that strategy, stores have been moving up their sales, attracting the likes of Patrice and Eugene Sheppard.

MAN: I was looking at the paper, and I want to catch some good sales before thanksgiving.

WOMAN: And he saw the perfect sofa that I wanted.

PAUL SOLMAN: Spend just $50 at Macys, and they'll throw in a TV for $15 bucks. Sweaters at sears are half-price today. And tomorrow at J.C. Penney, everything is 20% to 60% off. But despite the early sales, the National Retail Federation expects consumers to spend only $290 billion this season, a relatively weak 4% jump over last year; and nothing happened today to change that estimate.

RAY SUAREZ: United Airlines' stock plummeted today, losing nearly a quarter of its value. Yesterday the Mechanics Union rejected pay cuts that are a key element of the beleaguered company's multibillion-dollar recovery plan. Without a union deal, the nation's second largest airline faces a possible bankruptcy filing as early as Monday, but a union representative said talks will continue.

RONNIE STEVENSON: We wished it passed, but it didn't, and we will go on from there. We will continue to work and United will continue to fly and we will hopefully get something worked out and hammered out before any bankruptcy filing happens.

RAY SUAREZ: Even if forced into a bankruptcy filing united, an employee owned company, has said it would continue to operate its normal flight schedule. Massachusetts is on its own against Microsoft. Of the nine states that filed an antitrust suit against the software giant, Massachusetts is the only one so far to appeal the recent settlement with the federal government. Seven states dropped their appeals today. West Virginia says it will decide on Monday what to do. And in other market news, in a shortened day of trading on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 36 points at 8896, and the NASDAQ was down nine points at 1478. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the terrorist attacks in east Africa, the Google search engine, news analysis with Shields and Brooks, and David Rockefeller looks back at his life.

FOCUS TERROR IN KENYA

RAY SUAREZ: The double terror attack in the African nation of Kenya, on the ground and in the air. We start with two reports from Independent Television News, the first by correspondent Tim Ewart in Mombasa.

TIM EWART: At the Paradise Hotel today, investigators were still picking through the rubble and fires were still burning more than 24 hours after the attack. Kenya's president, Daniel Arap Moi, inspected the damage and called it an outrage. He offered cash to the families of Kenyan victims and his sympathies to the Israelis.

PRESIDENT DANIEL ARAP MOI, Kenya: I must send my condolences to those who lost their loved ones.

TIM EWART: This amateur video captured the scene in the hotel lobby moments before the bombers struck.

SPOKESMAN: Welcome to Africa.

TIM EWART: As the hotel was engulfed in flames and smoke, terrified tourists fled down to the beach for safety. Today, a detonator was found in the rubble. Investigators here will soon finish sifting through what's left of the Paradise Hotel and its Israeli owners will have to decide whether it's worth rebuilding. The Kenyans, meanwhile, are left to contemplate the long-term damage that may have been done to their vital tourist industry. But the Israelis won't return any time soon. The last survivors from the Paradise Hotel have now flown home. The Kenyans left behind are mourning their nine dead. Kadzo Masha lost her daughter Kafeda, one of the local dancers killed at the hotel. She said, "I don't understand. I've never even heard of Israel." Kafeda's friends remembered her with a dance called the catcher. It is performed here at funerals.

GARY GIBBON: Kenyan police say they've detained 12 individuals in connection with yesterday's attacks. Authorities say two of those detained are said to have addresses in the United States. The car bomb attack on the Paradise Hotel left 16 dead: Ten Kenyans, three Israelis and three suicide bombers. The Israeli dead and some of the wounded from the hotel bombing have been arriving back in Israel. The Israeli prime minister said the spilling of Israeli blood would be avenged. The car bomb matched the tactics of the Bali bombing, but the failed airport attack suggested a new departure for al-Qaida and its sympathizers. Ever since the U.S. Discovered al-Qaida training videos instructing supporters in how to fire shoulder-held missiles, Washington's been fearing an attack on a civilian airliner. Early this month, the U.S. Government briefed U.S. Airline bosses that such an attack could happen within the United States. The abandoned missile launcher found by Mombasa airport has been identified as a Soviet- built Strella, an updated version of the SAM-7 missile. Some military experts think those firing the missile may have lacked proper training.

DOUG RICHARDSON: It may have been in the hands of users who weren't fully trained. They're not easy things to operate. The layman sort of imagines that you just put this thing on your shoulder, press the button and away it goes. It's not really like that. Yes, you put the thing up on your shoulder, and you say, "Right, I'm going to try and engage a target." You switch the thing on. Now you've energized it. It's consuming coolant, it's consuming electrical power. It's use it or lose it.

GARY GIBBON: The Strella missile can hit targets up to around three miles away, well beyond the security perimeter of any airport. It was designed to hit targets at an altitude of up to 10,000 feet, but most Strellas are past their sell-by date and their targeting ability is unreliable. The heat-seeking sensors often are no longer working, and that may be what saved the passengers taking off yesterday morning for Tel Aviv.

RAY SUAREZ: For more, we go to Bruce Hoffman, the editor-in- chief of the scholarly journal "Studies in Conflict and terrorism" and director of the Washington office of RAND, a research corporation; and George Ayittey, professor of economics at American University -- he is from Ghana.

Bruce Hoffman, had this long been anticipated, an attack on a commercial jet using a surface-to-air missile?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Yes, absolutely. Indeed, over the past 20 years or so -- 20 plus years in fact -- there have been a series of attacks mounted by both terrorists and guerrilla groups, often with success.

RAY SUAREZ: Against commercial?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Commercial and military, yes.

RAY SUAREZ: How come this-- given that these missiles are apparently not all that uncommon, why did it take so long for us to see an attack like the one launched yesterday?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: As we just heard, although I think there is a common misconception that these things are fire type of weapons and don't require a very large skill base, in point of fact, soldiers in established military train repeatedly on simulators before they' even get to fire a missile. They're actually quite difficult to use; they weigh about 16 pounds, their battery is very short so you've got to engage the target very quickly. So you have to know what you're doing. And I think that's really the main reason why terrorists haven't used them for more often. For terrorists to guarantee success is very important. This weapon isn't necessarily a reliable one.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, when you talk about the need for training, are we talking about weeks, months? How long would it take someone who joins up with an irregular outfit like a terrorist group, to gain enough expertise to use a weapon/

BRUCE HOFFMAN: I should especially if they've had prior military training, perhaps not long. After all, in the conflict in Afghanistan against the Red Army, the Mujahaddin used Stingers, a better class than the weapons fired yesterday at the Israeli aircraft, and they achieved about a 79% kill rate.

RAY SUAREZ: How do these weapons, which are produced mostly for national militaries, often by companies that are owned by the government, how do they find their way out into the black market for arms?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Unfortunately very easily. More than 50 countries throughout the world manufacture their own version of the Stinger or the Stinger class surface-to-air missile. When you think that nearly a third of the word's countries manufacture them, virtually every country in the world's arsenal has it, has this type of weapon. On the black market, they can go for upwards of fifty to eighty thousand dollars, especially these older SAM 7's or Strelas, probable for a lot less, so unfortunately, especially with the end of the Cold War, with the arms market being flooded with surplus equipment, perhaps less effective or competent ones are out there, but there's certainly I think a sufficient supply.

RAY SUAREZ: The attack on the ground was a more low-tech and all too familiar affair, a car bomb. But the use of this two-pronged attack a car bomb on the ground just about at the same time that the attack on the jetliner, does that tell you anything about what kind group is at work?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Well, it has a group that is able to do more than one thing at one time, which is actually quite interesting because in the history of terrorism, there are many groups that have those aspirations, but very few of them have been able to especially pull off spectacular attacks, suicide attack, which tragically has become more prosaic and common now, but then the more innovative attack such as using a surface-to-air missile against a commercial aircraft.

RAY SUAREZ: And has Kenya been staging area, the target for these kinds of activities very often?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Well, certainly, in 1998, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi was bombed. There has been that kind of activity in that part of the world; in fact just in September an al-Qaida operative from Yemen was apprehended trying to enter Kenya on false with false documentation. So it is clear, I think, that as the shoe pinches very tightly for terrorist in other corners of the world, particularly in the Middle East, Europe, North America and South Asia, that they'll look for what they interpret as more benign, more accessible, softer operational environments.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Ayittey, in your view, why was Kenya an easy place to do this?

GEORGE AYITTEY: Well, Ray, let me say that this is the third time such an attack has occurred in Kenya. The first one was 24 in November 1979 when the Norfolk Hotel was blown up by Islamic fundamentalist groups in retaliation against Kenya for allowing the Israelis to use Kenya as a staging area to rescue hostages in Entebbe, Uganda. And the second was as Bruce argued in August 1998 when the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, and this particular occurrence, but you see, what it says is that the level of security in Kenya has been very, very lax, and it has been a lot easier for terrorist organizations to penetrate. As a matter of fact, this is very, very disturbing and it is very dangerous because we are talking about the penetration of very highly sophisticated shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missiles in an African country and it has the potential to destabilize the East African region. The reason why I'm saying this is because Kenya is a country which has been a bastion of stability in that particular region, it's surrounded by countries which have been torn by civil war; Sudan, for example, and also Somalia and we also have Rwanda and Burundi. So it is a development and also strictly from the African point of view, it constitutes a rape of African hospitality, because see we are talking about some kind of religious imperialism in that particular region, because lest people forget, a good percentage in Islam are not indigenous to Africa, and there has been a clash between the Israelis and Arabs. A lot of Africans are very enraged and outraged by this particular incident because--

RAY SUAREZ: But in the particular case of Kenya, hadn't there been an indigenous Islamic presence for centuries along the coast?

GEORGE AYITTEY: Oh, yes, there have been.

RAY SUAREZ: Haven't Christians and Muslims lived side by side in Kenya?

GEORGE AYITTEY: Oh, yes, they have lived side by side, but at the same time, many Africans recognize that both Christianity and Islam are foreign religions and it is not something which should be imposed upon Africans by force, as has been happening and as is happening in Sudan, in Mauritania, in fact, where blacks are still being enslaved by Arabs. So the way most Africans look at this is slightly different from the western perspective. And that is why I use the term abuse of African hospitality because Africans have always welcomed Arabs in the eastern part of East Africa, and the Arabs, as far as black Africans are concerned, we are no different from the Europeans. We're colonizers; we're enslavers; whereas, the Europeans were running the West African slave trade, the Arabs were running the East African slave trade. More than two million -- twenty million Africans were shipped out of East Africa to Arabia. And also et me point out that in August of 1998, after the bombing, twin bombings of the U.S. Embassies, there was no Arab aid to Kenya, for example, though the U.S. aid that was provided was somewhat criticized as being inadequate no other Arab country condemned the attack or even provided humanitarian assistance to the victims.

RAY SUAREZ: Is Kenya capable of sealing its borders against its more unstable neighbors? I know there have been refugee crises in the past where as things got worse in neighbors, a lot of those people floated into Kenya. Is that something that threatens the future health of the nation?

GEORGE AYITTEY: It would. And there are two factors here: African borders are very, very porous, and it is so easy to sort of ooze one's way through these borders. And that's one of the reasons why we have a lot of Somalia refugees in Kenya; the second is that Kenya's security is all geared up to protect the ruling regime. And as a matter of fact,there's far more tighter security right and protection, tighter security and clamped down against dissidents within the country and opposition figures than there are in protecting the borders against foreign infiltrators. But another complicating factor is that we are hoping that the Kenyan government doesn't use us a pretext to clamp down on opposition because there are national elections in December. And it is something in terms of security. We feel that the government who has been in power for more than 22 years and it's a government which most Africans consider to have been a failure. You know, it's corrupt and autocratic and President Moi has been there for more than 22 years. The security situation in Kenya, both Kenya and Tanzania have been very, very lax. Although after the August 1998 bombing, they promised and did step up security.

RAY SUAREZ: Does this mean, Bruce Hoffman, that those intelligence agencies, national militaries that are trying to track the growth and spread of terrorism now have to look well down the East Coast of Africa when taking a look at the world and looking at possible hot spots and threats?

BRUCE HOFFMAN: Yes, I think so, as if there were any further proof needed to be provided, certainly we are in a global war against terrorism. Al-Qaida, we know, has had operational cells in at least 60 countries throughout the world. I think as we attack them, as we make it more difficult for them to operate in their traditional stomping grounds, they're obviously going to find and seek out places where they see a more benign, a more convivial operational environment.

RAY SUAREZ: There is a large Islamic community across Western Africa, East Africa.

GEORGE AYITTEY: Yes.

RAY SUAREZ: Are these places now that are radicalizing?

GEORGE AYITTEY: Yes. You know, you look at what recently happened in Nigeria, for example, the beauty pageant being cancelled; and it is somewhat of an irony brutal irony that Africans should be killing themselves over foreign relations. And even in neighboring Ivory Coast, for example, the country is also on the verge of there's now renewed fighting on the Ivory Coast; the country's split between the Muslim North and the Christian South, so a lot of Africans have viewed these developments and they're very dangerous and it can destabilize. That's why I use the term religious imperialism in Africa.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Ayittey, Mr. Hoffman, thank you both.

FOCUS ENGINE THAT COULD

RAY SUAREZ: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the success story of Google.com, shields and brooks, and a conversation with David Rockefeller. Spencer Michels has the Google story.

SPENCER MICHELS: There is a free lunch, and it's at Google headquarters in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco. Every noon, the employees who run the Google Internet search engine eat for free, the meal dished up by the former chef for the Grateful Dead. Despite the demise of hundreds of Internet-based firms, the dot-com culture lives on here at the Googleplex, a tribute to its search engine's success. Search engines are amazing, so much faster for research than anything before. You bring one up-- for example, Google-- onto your computer screen, and then you simply type in a subject you want to learn about-- say, the story of the opera "Carmen." In less than half a second, Google searches through millions, or billions, of web sites and presents you with a list. Then you can open up any of the listed items and see if it answers your questions. If you don't find what you want, you can go further down the list and click on one of the other items. Without the search engine, most of this material would be virtually impossible to find. A search engine is not really an engine, but a complex of computers, thousands of them in many locations, using specially developed software, which has gathered and indexed some three billion web pages. A search begins at a user's computer, then on to Google's search engine. The search program matches words in the query to the same words found in Google's index that the engine has complied. The results are ranked for relevance and sent back to the user. The Google search engine has become the most frequently used tool to look things up on the worldwide web. Most of these Stanford students were using it even though they have a wide choice.

STUDENT: Most of my friends and everybody I know has moved onto Google. I've also moved onto Google, and I find it more effective.

SPENCER MICHELS: Search engines were invented in the early 1990s, and thousands have been developed. In the Presidio of San Francisco, the Internet archives has tracked their history and improvements. The early examples were limited in what they could find, awkward in how they looked, and unreliable in the way they ranked results on the screen. According to Brewster Kahle, the digital librarian, Alta Vista scored a breakthrough in 1995.

BREWSTER KAHLE, Internet Archives: I find that the real mind bender, the thing that really changed things, was Alta Vista, when they came out with a search engine that said "let's do it all; let's go and make an index of everything," and that changed the whole idea of the web.

SPENCER MICHELS: Now, seven years later, Kahle is a fan of Google, one of a new breed of search engines.

BREWSTER KAHLE: The biggest difference is there's so much more in them. And they've stayed good at finding you good stuff, which has been amazing, that you could go from finding the right ten pages out of 30 million, which was a big leap in 1995, 1996, to now finding the right ten pages out of one billion. That's nontrivial.

KWAME HOLMAN: In the mid-'90s, Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergay Brin, in their 20s, became intrigued by search engines. At the time, Yahoo was very popular and was expanding its services, still providing searches, but emphasizing other features like email and online shopping and music. It had become what's called a portal, and portals were all the rage. Page and Brin saw an opening and began doing intense research that soon led them to found Google. The name comes from the mathematical term googol, which means one followed by 100 zeros.

SERGEY BRIN, Google Co-Founder: What we discovered as we kept working on Google, which initially was called Backrub, but from about '95 to '98, when we finally launched the company, those companies, they all had Yahoo envy, and they all shifted from working on search, and they all tried to become portals, which left search technology pretty stagnant, like there wasn't really much development in the commercial world, which is why Larry and I continued to develop it as a research project.

SPENCER MICHELS: They scrounged as many computers as they could, and they built a search engine designed to work fast and to find information the searcher wanted.

LARRY PAGE, Google Co-Founder: You know, we told our professors and our friends, "you know, we have a search engine up on the web. You know, why don't you try it out?" And then, you'd see the hard disc drives going and the... you know, the computers would be making a lot of noise, and you'd see a, you know, a search like every second coming in. And, you know, that's when I think it started to get really exciting.

SPENCER MICHELS: Today, Google considers it a failure if results take more than half a second.

LARRY PAGE: Your search gets sent out to hundreds or thousands of computers, and they all work on it, you know, for a short amount of time, a tenth of a second. And then they send back all their information, and the computers put it all back together and send it back to you. And so you may have literally used thousands of computers, you know, during a fraction of a second to produce the answer to your query.

SPENCER MICHELS: Search engines and the Internet have become so important in research that officials at the University of California at Berkeley decided to reconfigure their library studies school, emphasizing computer information systems. Avi Rappaport lectures there and is an independent search consultant.

AVI RAPPAPORT: As far as I'm concerned, the search aspect is just... it is... it's what libraries have been hoping for all this time, to find ways of getting information; to not make it an elite thing where only certainly small groups of people had access but anybody with a computer, anybody who can go to the library and use a public computer.

SPENCER MICHELS: The order or rank in which search results are listed has always been crucial, since many people look only at the first few. Previously, many search engines ranked sites by counting how often a word was mentioned on it. Page and Brin changed that. They based their ranking system partly on how important or popular the sites were, how often other web sites linked or connected to them.

SERGEY BRIN: What does one page say about another page? And what do other pages say about that one? And kind of reputation building around the whole web, translated into mathematics. On top of that, after we launched Google, we built a whole array of other technologies. And the combination of those together creates the search that you see today.

SPENCER MICHELS: Google's page-ranking system gets high marks from many users. But some, including the founder of the site Google Watch, say Google's system is tyrannical, favoring established websites and discriminating against new sites, which are not yet linked. Google responds that good sites quickly rise to the top. The company is also criticized for keeping records of what individual computers search for, information that could be used to target advertising or to invade someone's privacy.

AVI RAPPAPORT: They can track a lot of things, it's true, and if they were not ethical, there could be a real privacy issue.

SERGEY BRIN: We have a privacy policy which explicitly prohibits us from ever, say, selling that information or something like that. And we also try to keep it under pretty strict lock and key.

SPENCER MICHELS: Google, which so far is a privately owned company, has expanded its employment from its two founders just four years ago to about 500 now. These temp workers are being trained in how to place ads on the website. The ads, which tie in with the subject being searched for and are clearly identified as sponsored links, have helped make Google profitable for seven quarters in a row. The ads plus fees the company charges other sites, like Yahoo, to use its technology result in annual sales of about $100 million, and growing at 100% a year.

SPOKESMAN: These down here are answers from search results.

SPENCER MICHELS: That success is the envy of other search engines like "Ask Jeeves," one of the first to allow people to write real questions. Instead of "opera 'Carmen' story", you ask, "what is the story of the opera 'Carmen'?" Ask Jeeves is just now becoming profitable, according to Skip Battle, the new CEO.

SKIP BATTLE, CEO, "Ask Jeeves:" We were a troubled dot-com company. Our stock has gone way down. It's part of the reason I was brought in to run the company. And yeah, we were... we were slowly, slowly dying.

SPENCER MICHELS: The problem, Battle says, was old technology that couldn't handle the volume at a time when Google was pressing forward and more people were using the Net.

SKIP BATTLE: Google has set the standard for search. They're part of the reason as many people search as do search. And they set a standard of excellence that we'll meet or exceed.

SPENCER MICHELS: To do that, Ask Jeeves bought a new search engine developed at Rutgers called Teoma, which it now uses. Teoma technology is similar to Google's, with added emphasis on web sites that are definitive in specific areas. Experts, like Professor Marti Hearst at Berkeley, say the public is fickle and could quickly turn to other search engines.

MARTI HEARST, University of California, Berkeley: It's very easy to switch, unlike say, switching operating systems. If there was a really interesting feature at another web site that wasn't offered by Google, I could see a fair number of people switching, and then it's a matter of word of mouth.

SPENCER MICHELS: But Google is not resting on its laurels. Its engineers and its founders are looking for what they call the ultimate search engine.

LARRY PAGE: And, actually, the ultimate search engine, which would understand, you know, exactly what you wanted when you typed in a query, and it would give you the exact right thing back, in computer science we call that artificial intelligence. That means it would be smart, and we're a long ways from having smart computers.

SPENCER MICHELS: Sergay Brin thinks the ultimate search engine would be something like the computer named Hal in the movie "2001: A space odyssey".

SERGEY BRIN: Hal could... had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalize it. Now, hopefully, it would never... it would never have a bug like Hal did where he killed the occupants of the space ship. But that's what we're striving for, and I think we've made it a part of the way there.

SPENCER MICHELS: Today, Google handles more than 150 million searches a day. These are some of them displayed in the lobby. And its computers continually crawl, at the speed of light, through three billion web documents. It has recently launched a news search service that displays up- to-date articles from 4,000 sources as part of Google's effort to keep ahead of the increased competition it is starting to get.

SHIELDS & BROOKS

RAY SUAREZ: That brings us to the analysis of Shields and Brooks, and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: And with me are syndicated columnist Mark Shields and David Brooks of the "Weekly Standard." None of us would be here but for Google, I think.

MARK SHIELDS: You're right.

MARGARET WARNER: None of us would know what we know. Mark, this week the president named Henry Kissinger to head this new independent commission into the pre-9/11 intelligence failures. Do you think he was the right man for the job?

MARK SHIELDS: Margaret, you could have told me that Winona Ryder, the actress with the Velcro fingers was named as the new store security chief or Dracula was in charge of the blood bank I could not believe that Henry Kissinger, man who is the champion of secrecy, privacy, disdain for the public's right to know, by an administration that is praised for moral clarity, a man who had total disdain for human rights and any consideration for foreign policy is put in charge of a congressionally mandated commission to look for the governmental lapses that led up to present to prior September 11. I think it shows how reluctant George W. Bush was for this commission. He was pressured into it, quite frankly, by the families of the victims. This was a way of, I think, frustrating the congressional intent.

MARGARET WARNER: David.

DAVID BROOKS: I think my take is superficially different but fundamentally the same. Politically it was a brilliant move because he is well connected with the great and the good and well received by Democrats and republicans, he's friendly with John McCain. He has the star quality that helped the families sort of appreciate his role. But politically, I sort of agree that I don't expect big things from it. He said during the interviews that he was going to follow the truth regardless of the consequences. Henry Kissinger is Mr. Consequences. Since he was seven, he has been thinking eight consequences down the road. So is he really going to ask the question that makes the Saudi-U.S. relationship uncomfortable; is really going to ask the questions that will make the CIA fundamentally uncomfortable? Is he really going to ask the questions that make either party fundamentally uncomfortable? This report, I figure it will be 18 months. It will come out one month before the Democratic and Republican political conventions for 2004. It is going to be a political document. And Kissinger is a political figure. I'm skeptical they're going to ask the big, broad questions.

MARGARET WARNER: Why do you think Kissinger rose to the top of the list? The families had a list. And he wasn't on it.

MARK SHIELDS: They did. Warren Rudman certainly and Gary Hart, two former senators if anything, had been the champions of the-- the Paul Reveres of alarming America about the terrorist threat and what we had to do about it, one Republican and one Democrat. I think David put his finger on it. Margaret, the president didn't want the commission. He was on record he did not want it. Henry Kissinger-- I just can't think of a worse choice. I mean I don't argue with the man's intelligence. But Margaret, let's not forget this man's record -- I mean the architect of secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos. It was a secret not to the Cambodians and Laotians who were being bombed; it was a secret to the Americans in whose name those bombs were being dropped and who were paying for the bombs. All the way through, when Richard Nixon came to office with Henry Kissinger as his principle advisor, 30,610 Americans had died in Vietnam. He had a secret plan to end the war. Six and a half years later, okay after peace with honor, 58,202 Americans dead and North Vietnamese tanks and troops in Saigon. So I mean all the way through-- every effort and at every point he frustrated the public's right to know, he frustrated the Congress from doing its constitutionally mandated duty. He did it with charm, he did it with intelligence. He prevented a Democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile from taking office, all in the dark and now in the shadows.

DAVID BROOKS: Now I sort of am walking away from Mark's position. I have forgiven him, if one can for 1971 and 1973. I haven't forgiven him for detente, but the issue to me is future and the present. I don't doubt his intelligence, like Mark, and I think he will do a very good job at certain things. If you are talking about how the FBI and CIA interact on bureaucratic basis, he will do a great job.

MARGARET WARNER: He has been a major consumer of intelligence and knows how it works.

DAVID BROOKS: From the small questions, if you just want to reorganize this from a small basis, smooth things out, help the bureaucracy function better, he is a perfect choice. If you want to ask-- to me was a moment for paradigm shifting. A commission is not a policy making body. It's something to make us think fundamentally different about U.S. Relations. The U.S. Intelligence committee, relations with Saudi Arabia, there I think he will fall down. I don't go as far as Mark. I think the commission will have several important uses. They will be tinkering here and there. They won't be the big questions that, to me, September 11 really demands.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, Mark similar criticism was made at least by the "New York times" editorial page of George Mitchell, a related criticism, whom the Democrats named as the vice chairman, saying he, too, let me find the words -- essentially not a man who has rocked the boat. Not made a career out of it. This is a similar choice?

MARK SHIELDS: I don't think it is. Henry Kissinger, a man who dedicated his life to secrecy. His clients have to take a vow of secrecy. We don't know even know who they are. That's one of the criticisms the times had about him. Conflicts abound here. George Mitchell has a law firm, and has represented the tobacco companies. He has had some major economic interests. I'm not questioning that. But George Mitchell's offenses rise to a level of double parking outside an orphanage on Christmas Eve compared to Henry Kissinger's. I mean George Mitchell is a person of enormous political skill, great interest elect. I think the Democratic Party let history record did one smart thing in the fall of 2002, unfortunately it was after the election of November 5, they picked George Mitchell as the vice chairman. He is a person of great intellect, of enormous skill, of iron will. He will not be cowed by Kissinger, nor will he be disarmed by Kissinger's charm as the Washington press corps has been for generations.

MARGARET WARNER: Do you think he is a paradigm shift?

DAVID BROOKS: There are really two mentalities at work here: There are practitioners and paradigm shifters. The practitioners are people who know how the town works, know how to get things done and Mitchell like Kissinger is one of them. The paradigm shifters think fundamentally about how to confront the situation, George F. Kennan in the Cold War. To me this was an opportunity for somebody outside, maybe academic with practical knowledge, not one of the great and the good.

MARGARET WARNER: Before we go, one thing we didn't discuss after the elections was where it left the Democratic presidential field for 2004. Now we have a chance. Your thoughts.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think the 2002 elections have fundamentally shifted the mood of the Democratic Party. Basically from Clinton up through Daschle-Gephardt the Democrats were told if you run on full bore liberalism, you example to lose. So don't offer people the red meat of liberalism, a little salad. They ran on the salad. Dick Morris triangulated salad. They lost with salad. Let's go back to red meat. I'll have a 32 ounce liberal steak and he'll have one. We'll have one for the table. We'll run on what we believe in.

MARGARET WARNER: Who has the advantage?

DAVID BROOKS: So that helps Al Gore. He has the angry, I'm going to have a steak and I don't care about the consequence. If you are running like John Edwards has been and he was my pick as the likely nominee before the election, you just don't have the fervor, you don't have the passion which matches the Democratic Party's passion right now. I mentioned last week I thought Gore has gone off the deep end, well he has gone off the deep end the way a lot of people in the party have gone off the deep end and I think it leads to 43 percent in the fall but the fervor is what gore has. Right now I would bet on him.

MARK SHIELDS: I don't know how far al gore has gone off the deep end. David cited as his of se payer national health insurance at a time when more and more Americans don't have health insurance and more people are without health insurance and the numbers go up to double digits every year.

MARGARET WARNER: But the field.

MARK SHIELDS: The field I think will be smaller as a consequence. George W. Bush now looks stronger, looks more formidable. The reason that we're doing this two years in advance is that it takes two years to run for president. To run 12-- a dozen campaigns simultaneously across the country, to staff them, to recruit the people, to raise the money, to familiarize yourself with the issues, requires that time. That's why in two years before the 1992 election, when candidates looked at it, George Bush the first was at 91 approval in the polls. One by one, Democrats said I won't make the race. Dick Gephardt didn't who had run well in 1988. I think someone like John Edwards up for reelection in 2004 -- he said he has one chance to bite the apple. So he has to look at it and say do I want to give up my political career? That's a tough question right now. I would remind any of them that a day is a week in politics and a week is an eternity in politics. What looks unbeatable today could be terribly vulnerable in the fall of 2004.

DAVID BROOKS: This war situation changes the whole thing. Suppose there is another major attack. Suppose in 2004 Saddam Hussein is still sitting there in Baghdad making weapons. George W. doesn't look so invulnerable anymore. The whole issue is security. You cannot win the presidency if your party is 39 points down on who do you trust to team keep the country safe.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, there is one candidate who is running on that issue, and that's John Kerry.

DAVID BROOKS: He runs a very intelligent campaign, giving substantive speeches on energy policy not only on security, to me personally, John Kerry fails what I call the Joshua test.

MARGARET WARNER: What test?

DAVID BROOKS: My 11-year-old boy, I used to take him to Sunday talk shows sit in the green room and engage the 11-year-old boy. Some of them were just fantastic at it; John Kerry is awkward at it. If you can't engage an 11-year-old boy, there is something missing in engaging the American electorate.

MARK SHIELDS: I think John Kerry, there is a changed job description. Whoever would have thought in the fall of 2000 that commander in chief was going to be an element? Here's Al Gore, the only American presidential nominee ever to win the uniform of this country in Vietnam. It didn't matter in 200 the running against Bush who had missed half his National Guard meetings as a veteran in the battle of Amarillo but in the 2002 right now, it looks like being commander in chief is going to be important. All of a sudden John Kerry's credentials and authentic credentials as a war hero, decorated veteran of Vietnam have a cache and relevance he wouldn't have had earlier. This is John Kerry's time. He has to run. It's the same with Dick Gephardt. Mo Udall one said the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid. I think that's understood, Dick Gephardt, this is his last chance to run for the White House, and he will

MARGARET WARNER: Thank you both.

CONVERSATION

RAY SUAREZ: Finally tonight, a conversation about a new book, and to Terence Smith.

TERENCE SMITH: The book is "Memoirs." The author is David Rockefeller who was born in 1915 to great wealth and privilege. He is the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil; the youngest son of John D. Junior and Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller. The former chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Chase Bank. This is the first ever autobiography of the Rockefeller. It's a story filled with opportunity, obligation and achievement. David Rockefeller, welcome.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: Happy to be here.

TERENCE SMITH: The Rockefeller family is a famously private family. It story has been told but not by its members. You've decided to tell the story yourself. Why?

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: I thought it would be of interest to other members of the family and perhaps descendants, but hopefully broader realm of people as well. I have to admit another factor is the fact that Kay Graham was a good friend of mine and she was writing her memoirs which came out and were a great success about the time I was thinking of these. It the so well, I thought would I see what I could do.

TERENCE SMITH: There's a theme through the book that you wrote that says that being a Rockefeller is obviously, gives one great privilege and opportunity, but that that's not all -- that there is also, from your grandfather and your father, a sense of obligation and duty. Tell me about that.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: I think we were brought up both in what was said but more importantly what was done by members of the family, to feel that we were exceptionally fortunate in having resources and opportunities that many people don't and that with opportunity goes responsibility.

TERENCE SMITH: Despite the advantages the boyhood that you describe in this book sounds rather solitary. You were the youngest, after all, of the siblings.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: Solitary in the sense that to a certain degree, I think was a little bit isolated. I had friends from school who would come out to the country weekends and I certainly didn't feel unhappily so, but I had tutors. But I think I probably did not have the kind of youth that the average American boy has growing up in New York City.

TERENCE SMITH: You write that you and your brothers cooperated on many things, including, of course, the establishment of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, but that there were also tensions, especially when it came to some of the issues of how to deal with the family fortune. Did that fortune make those relationships more difficult?

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: I don't think that was really the problem. I think that there were just some issues on which we had different perspectives. Our lives and what we did with our lives why quite different, and of course in the case of Winthrop and Nelson, they both went into politics. Winthrop was governor of Arkansas and Nelson of New York. That was quite different from the life of a banker or, in the case of John, largely a life of a philanthropist and Lawrence was involved in venture capital, so we had different interests.

TERENCE SMITH: Philanthropy was, for all of you, sort of a common pursuit. This was something handed down from grandfather to father to brothers.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: I think that's true. It's one way of expressing, in ourlives, our sense of obligation; namely, giving away money or spending time in doing things to help others.

TERENCE SMITH: Talk about your brother Nelson for a moment who of course went on not only to be governor of New York but Vice President. There's a line in the book in which you write that the two most expensive things a Rockefeller can do is run for public office or get a divorce.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: Well, running for public office, I think, you just read the newspapers and you know how much it costs to get elected to almost anything, so that was certainly obvious. Nelson did get a divorce from his first wife and I think it was expensive financially but also in other ways. I was disappointed, upset. I liked his first wife very much and was sorry to see them get separated. And I think it's fair to say that for a period of a few years that we saw less of one another and the warmth of the relationship did disappear to a degree.

TERENCE SMITH: You also write about some tensions that weren't unique to your family but existed between you and your wife and your children over issues like Vietnam and politics and the role of capitalism and that sort of thing that your daughter Abbey at one point briefly joined the Socialist Workers Party. Tell me about that relationship.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: Well, they were brought up during the '60s and early '70s when the Vietnam War was on and when most young people were very strongly against it. And our children shared that view. And I wasn't enthusiastic about it, but I felt that there was a justification for doing what we did there, and that we had to pursue the matter to its conclusion, so that there were tensions which, as I say, were typical not particularly of our family especially, but of difference in age groups at that period of time.

TERENCE SMITH: Was it painful at times?

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: There were a few rather sharp exchanges but I really wouldn't say that it caused any great rift in the family.

TERENCE SMITH: You also of course had this long career with the Chase Bank.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: 35 years.

TERENCE SMITH: As its chairman and CEO. And in the course of that, you traveled and visited over 100 world leaders. Were there some among them that impressed you more than others?

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: Yes, there certainly were. Anwar Sadat was one that I thought was quite remarkable in doing what he did and taking a country that had been quite isolated and had lots of problems and then going to Israel and reestablished relations with them. It was a pretty remarkable thing to have done.

TERENCE SMITH: You also mention in here an encounter with Saddam Hussein in Iraq in Baghdad. Was there anything in that meeting some 20 years ago that would have led you to believe that he would be playing the role he is today?

DAVID ROCKEFELLER: I don't think so, but in the light of what's happened, it certainly makes it all the more interesting. I did it, actually, at the request of Henry Kissinger, who was then Secretary of State. I was going anyway to that part of the world, and Chase had business with the leading commercial bank in Iraq. So I was going for that. And he asked me if I would also go to see him to say that he would like to establish closer touch with the regime. He felt that it was important that our two countries communicated more effectively. I did see him and he was pretty cold. He said the only way we could