The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: Our summary of the news; then, John Burns of the New York Times with the latest from Baghdad; a look at the impacts of Saddam Hussein's first post-capture public performance; the weekly analysis of Mark Shields and David Brooks; and a tribute to the acting career of Marlon Brando.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: U.S. employers created more new jobs last month, but not enough to budge the unemployment rate. The Labor Department said today the overall rate stayed at 5.6 percent; 112,000 payroll jobs were added. That was less than half what analysts had predicted. And it was not enough to offset more than 300,000 people who returned to the job market looking for work. Today's report also scaled back the job gains for April and May by 35,000. President Bush welcomed the jobs numbers. At the White House, he told small business owners that his policies laid the groundwork for sustainable recovery.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We're strong. We're getting stronger. We're witnessing steady growth, steady growth, and that's important. We don't need boom or bust type growth. We want just steady, consistent growth so that our fellow citizens will be able to find a job.

JIM LEHRER: Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry challenged that take later in the day. At a rally in Minnesota, he said the administration still has a sorry record on the economy.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: More than a million Americans who were working three years ago have lost their jobs, including those in the iron range, Minnesota. And the new jobs that are finally being created are paying on average $9,000 less than the jobs that we're losing.

JIM LEHRER: The unemployment report did little to help Wall Street today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 51 points to close under 10,283. The NASDAQ fell nearly nine points to close at 2006. For the week, both the Dow and the NASDAQ were down about 1 percent. The U.N. Human Rights Commissioner called today for vigilance in the trial of Saddam Hussein. She said the world community must make sure the process meets high standards of justice. Separately, the New York Times reported Saddam has not provided much useful intelligence so far. It said he's revealed little about illegal weapons or links to al-Qaida. We'll have more on Saddam right after this News Summary. Another U.S. Marine was killed in Iraq today. A second marine died of wounds suffered yesterday. In all, more than 850 U.S. troops have died since the war began. Three-quarters were combat deaths. For the month of June, 42 Americans were killed. That was down from 80 in may and 135 in April. Also today, three U.S. soldiers were charged with manslaughter in the drowning death of an Iraqi prisoner. They allegedly forced him to jump off a bridge into the Tigris River. Iraqi insurgents freed two more Turkish hostages today after their company promised to stop working with the coalition. And a Pakistani driver was also released. He was kidnapped several days ago and at one point his captors threatened to behead him. Police across the United States will step up patrols and surveillance for the fourth of July weekend. The FBI issued a bulletin on Thursday. It said it's still receiving intelligence about a possible attack this summer or fall. There were no specific details, but the FBI Said: "We know the U.S. Homeland remains a top al-Qaida target." Despite the warning, the government is not raising the color-coded alert level. Marlon Brando has died. He suffered lung failure last night at a Los Angeles hospital. Brando's screen performances revolutionized American acting. His best-known roles included, Stanley Kowalski in "A Street Car Named Desire" in 1951 and small-time fighter Terry Malloy in "On the Waterfront" in 1954. He won the Oscar for best actor for that performance. He won again nearly 20 years later for playing the Mafia Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather in 1973. Marlon Brando was 80 years old. We'll look at his life and work at the end of the program. Between now and then: John Burns in Baghdad, the Saddam performance, and Shields and Brooks.

FOCUS - THE DAY AFTER

JIM LEHRER: Now to John Burns of the New York Times. Margaret Warner talked to him from Baghdad earlier this evening.

MARGARET WARNER: John Burns, welcome. It's been 24 hours now. Tell us, how is the Saddam Hussein hearing playing in Iraq?

JOHN BURNS: I think it's going to be a long time before we or the Iraqi people really know what to make of this. Their responses are very complicated. A society traumatized for 35 years, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead, and yet this colossus of a figure towering over them and suddenly reduced to a pitiable man in an ill- fitting, store-bought suit. What to make of it? An offense against their national pride in some respects? Yes. A catharsis? Yes. A measure of how far the country has to go to return to some semblance of normality? All of these things. You can find every response you want to out amongst ordinary Iraqis, but if you put the question very simply: Are they happy that the man is being brought to justice? The answer is, in my estimation, overwhelmingly yes.

MARGARET WARNER: What was the coverage and the commentary like? For instance, how was his defiance portrayed? As confidence or as just bluster and braggadocio, or both ways?

JOHN BURNS: It depends where you read, of course. Here there is a very broad press, attributed, in fact, to the freedoms that America brought here, and there are some that regard this as being a humiliation, who think it should have been an international war crimes trial. There are others-- and I think they're in the majority-- who acclaim what really was just a first small step on a very long process.

MARGARET WARNER: We're reading here that there were some demonstrations on both sides today: A pro-Saddam demonstration in Samara, a larger anti-Saddam demonstration in Baghdad. Is the government at all concerned that, in fact, just reviving his image and his figure, he's such a polarizing figure that it could inflame the insurgency or inflame tensions?

JOHN BURNS: No, I don't think the government is concerned. I think the government feels, this government, in any event, that the issue is a very clear one. The head of this government, Iyad al-Allawi, himself survived an assassination attempt in London by Saddam. The man I sat next to at the trial yesterday, Mr. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security advisor, complained through the afternoon as he watched Saddam of the back pains he still suffers since he was dragged from the operating table in Baghdad, where he was a surgeon in 1979, and hanged from the ceiling of one of the torture chambers. These people, the interim government people-- and they're drawn from a fairly wide cross- section of Iraqi society-- are pretty clear in their minds of who Saddam was, that he was an enemy of the Iraqi people, an enemy of everything they want to achieve, and that they feel that by putting his record squarely in front of Iraqi people-- who in the main are going to be surprised, we feel, at the extent of what they learn-- can only be of benefit to the cause, if you will, I won't say of democratic government, but of a government that can truly represent the people of Iraq.

MARGARET WARNER: And why was it one of the very first public, if not the first big public official act that this new interim government took in this first week of the hand-over?

JOHN BURNS: Well, I think you have to understand the congruence of two things here. The occupation is deeply unpopular. There's no question about that, and part of that is America's fault. It's been badly handled in many respects. But Iraqis, for all that they've existed as a modern nation state for less than a century, have a deep sense of national pride. So they wanted the occupation to end. They want to own their own country again and they want to own the prosecution of Saddam Hussein. So this government wanted to make a symbolic step in doing that. What we were seeing yesterday was, in my mind, emblematic of that.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, we heard Saddam Hussein try to portray this court as just a puppet of the occupation. How was the court portrayed in the media there? As an independent Iraqi court or as simply a creature of the American occupation?

JOHN BURNS: Well, again, it depends where you read. In my judgment, the more responsible Iraqi newspapers see it much as we do, as a complex venture financed by the United States, underpinned by American legal experts, headed by an Iraqi judge. It's a hybrid. It's an uncomfortable hybrid in many respects, operating under Iraqi criminal law and international humanitarian law. So the reviews have been mixed. But if I can speak personally, having been in that court and having sat for five hours watching Saddam Hussein and these other men being passed through, I would say that the proceedings were as just and as fair as I have seen in any court, and it's certainly far too soon to condemn it, in my mind, in a kind of an intellectually lazy way, as victors' justice. There were two groups of people at that trial yesterday. There was Saddam Hussein, we know his story: "I'm the president of Iraq." He rejected all as an American- puppeteered adventure. The other 11 were very different. These men were in the main, meek and accepting and very, very relieved, as I judged it, when they were read their rights, rights which would have been unimaginable under them: Right to counsel, right to silence, right to have a counsel provided by the state if they couldn't afford it. And one of them, and if I recall correctly, it was Chemical Ali-- Ali al-Majid, the man responsible, so the indictments say, for the chemical poisoning of the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, in which 5,000 people died and many other, by the way, poison gas attacks, too-- he said after his rights had been read to him, "these are excellent." And he wasn't the only one, by any means, who said this. I think they came into that courtroom frightened, fearful... fearful that they might be treated, after all, as they had treated others. And the fright and the fear could be seen in the welling up of tears in the eyes, in the response to the reading of Article 406 of the Iraqi criminal code, which provides for the death penalty, but also relief when they began to get the idea that they may actually get a fair trial.

MARGARET WARNER: And finally, John, just your personal impressions. You were one of only three western reporters in that courtroom -- your impressions of Saddam Hussein?

JOHN BURNS: My impression was, and I think it's something that Rebecca West, for example, would have recognized from her experiences at Nuremburg in 1946 and '47. Our colleagues who covered the war crimes trials in the Hague would see, is the smallness of these men, the ordinariness of them when they had their power stripped away from them, their uniforms, their berets, their pistols at the hip. They seemed pitiable to me. They seemed, to be honest with you, the sort of men that if you sit beside them at a bus stop in the rain, you wouldn't be able to remember. And you ask yourself looking at them-- and in this, I include Mr. Hussein-- how could these ordinary people, these utterly banal people, have risen to such extremes of power? How could they have visited such a disaster on their own people?

MARGARET WARNER: So his power, his charisma, that so many Iraqis saw, didn't come through to you?

JOHN BURNS: No. I mean, I think... I think you would had to have seen the whole of his performance yesterday to make that sort of a judgment. I think the television images people saw were mainly ofthe admonishment and the bluster-- "I am the president of Iraq." There was a lot else that didn't get so much play: The fearfulness, the nervousness, the anxiety, the disorientation, the confusion of this man, who was a colossus in the minds of his people. It's very hard for people who have not been here to understand the trauma he inflicted on Iraqis, trauma which will be many, many years in the lifting. And he did... he, too, seemed to me to be a pitiable soul in many respects. We can say of him, I think on the basis of yesterday's performance, that if any one of them is going to fight back, seriously fight back at the trial, it's likely to be him.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. John Burns, thank you very much. It's great to have you again.

JOHN BURNS: Thank you, Margaret.

FOCUS - HOW IT PLAYED

JIM LEHRER: More reaction to the Saddam appearance now and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: How did the wider Arab and Muslim world use Saddam Hussein's day in court? For that, we're joined by Said Arikat, Washington bureau chief for the Palestinian newspaper Al Quds; Samer Shehata, a visiting assistant professor of Middle East politics at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University; and Retired . Army Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former Middle East intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Well, after Said Arikat Saddam Hussein was so long out of view, this was the first vision that people have gotten of him since his capture. Did it capture people's imagination and attention?

SAID ARIKAT: Absolutely. I think it also captured a great deal of unsaid anticipation.

RAY SUAREZ: Explain.

SAID ARIKAT: Because, on the one hand, of course, you have Iraqi people who have been brutalized by Saddam for decades, for a very, very long time, and that wanted to see him, they wanted to see justice meted out to him; they wanted to see him face a day in court. On the other hand, they had a great deal of supporters in Iraq. They feel that this occupation was launched unjustly, that the invasion was launched unjustly as we have seen in some of the demonstrations and so on. So there was anxiety and anticipation on both sides of the aisle. In the Arab world it also played differently. That's in Iraq. But let's say in Jordan or Palestine or Syria or in Egypt, indeed, it played entirely different, where the Iraqi leader or the ex-Iraqi president was perceived to have been put in prison unjustly as a result of an invasion of Iraq. They feel there is no way on earth that Saddam Hussein will receive a sort of a fair trial in Iraq. They look at the differences. They say that on the one hand we look at Slobodan Milosevic who was accorded all legal tools at his hand to defend himself at the Hague while Saddam Hussein is being tried in Iraq for allegedly the same kind of war crimes. So they see in essence some, double standards, especially in places like Egypt or Jordan.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor Shehata, did you see the same mixed reaction even in places where they didn't regard Saddam as a hero in the Arab world?

SAMER SHEHATA: Yes, I did see that. I didn't see anyone really in the major publications, the press or on television, defend Saddam Hussein. But we did see yesterday and today some serious questions and criticisms raised about the whole process, about the legality of the courts, about the U.S. running things as it were, the absence of lawyers with Saddam Hussein there, some talk about this judge and so on. So there were those kinds of criticisms leveled at the whole process, I think. And I think there was some ambivalence, really. Arabs, you know, had mixed feelings about seeing this man who was the president of Iraq being tried this way by Americans, as it were, in a way. I think many people were really kind of unhappy with that, even to there wasn't so much sympathy to Saddam.

RAY SUAREZ: Tried by Americans? Pat Lang, we heard John Burns call this an uncomfortable hybrid. There is the appearance of the American hand even though the judge was Iraqi, the security guards were Iraqi and so on and so on?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: I think most Americans really believe that this is a trial run by the Iraqi interim government and that we are playing a very minimum role. But as these gentlemen say, from what I've been told in the last 24 hours, there aren't a whole lot of people in the Arab world who would accept that. They belief is, in fact, that the interim government is in some way a surrogate for us, and this could not be separated from the former occupation of Iraq. And what you see here is you see the real problem with this proceeding, and I think it is quite likely that this man will receive a reasonably fair trial, but he is probably very guilty and he is probably going to be convict and he'll be punished quite severely. And unfortunately it's not going to be believed in the Arab world, that that was a procedure in which he got the kind of defense that we claim that everybody ought to get.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, we've caught a glimpse of how he may handle himself in the dock. What did you make of that --

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: Well, I would have to say -- I've lived in the Arab world for a long time -- and I would say he won the first round there yesterday. In fact he dominated the situation. In the Arab world, people respect strength. They respect that kind of presence, the kind of grandeur of the gestures of the way he acted with the judge. They will respect his defiance toward what they see as the dominating western powers. And they will respect the fact that he is unwilling to bow down. They will respect that a lot while at the same time being glad that he is gone and quite willing to see that he is punished, most of them.

RAY SUAREZ: Professor, do you agree with that?

SAMER SHEHATA: I think that's correct and in fact we did see that comment that Saddam had won the first round, as it were. He was able to defend himself, although I think he was quite polite really and somewhat deferential towards the judge. He questioned the legality of the proceedings. He refused to sign at the very end as opposed to the others who did sign and said he wanted to wait until his lawyers were there. And, of course, he did defend his actions and that was, of course, unconscionable but nevertheless, he certainly didn't succumb to this proceeding at all.

RAY SUAREZ: Said Arikat, for years it has been said of Saddam Hussein that he aspired to leadership in the Arab world.

SAID ARIKAT: Right.

RAY SUAREZ: Is this - oddly -- a chance for him to speak in that way, using the public portions of this trial to speak to an audience far beyond the borders of his own country?

SAID ARIKAT: Absolutely. I think he wants to speak to the larger audience, and if yesterday was any example, I think we have seen him do that to a certain extent. First of all, he came in with his beard. He was appealing to the broader Muslim world. He emphasized that I'm the president of Iraq, talking to the Iraqi people, saying that this is a legitimate government, I'm still the president. He was saying, where is my lawyer --appealing to the larger and wider international community. Where is my lawyer-- unlike Slobodan Milosevic, or others and so. And finally he was saying that he was reaching out to insurgency saying that you must go on, you must fight on and so on. So Saddam Hussein will take every opportunity to reach out to the Arab world, to show that he is still the defiant one, but he really is the victim of this great power that went and invaded Iraq unjustly based on false evidence.

RAY SUAREZ: Perhaps a little bit less talked about, Pat Lang, but maybe there as well, is the idea that in many places in the region, the vision of a former president sitting surrounded by guards coming into court with shackles on is likely to send an electric charge through a society that only can dream of something like that.

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: Well, I think that's absolutely true. And when you see this man humiliated in this way, and in the Arab world, the idea of personal humiliation has a lot more punch than it does in the ordinary run of American society. To see that and to know that this is the former symbol of one of the nations of the region - or the countries in the region will be a very strong thing for an awful lot of people who are running other countries, that's right, and in addition to that, there are a number of people in the media yesterday who to my surprise kept saying this is the first Arab dictator to be put on trial. Well, I mean, how is that going to be read in various other places? Am I number two, am I number three? This is going to be a profoundly disturbing thing. His defense is going to be that he acted in the interest of the state, that he was fulfilling his duty as the sovereign president of Iraq.

RAY SUAREZ: So, over time, Professor, is there a potential that there will be a split view between the rank and file citizen of countries and the leadership cadres in these same countries?

SAMER SHEHATA: Well, we've already seen people - leadership roles in the Arab world - the Egyptian foreign minister, for example, really deflect the question about the trial. He doesn't really want to talk about that. He wants to talk about Iraq's future and so on, but I do think that most people in the Arab world, even those who have no sympathy to Saddam Hussein, are going to be critical about this whole process -- about the legality of it being administered or set up - established by the coalition provision authority. The first thing that the interim government did was to overrule Paul Bremer's suspension of the death penalty, as it were. So there are these kinds of, I think, legitimate questions, actually. There are concerns by the lawyers who are going to represent Saddam Hussein about their safety. There have already been threats made in Iraq about -- towards them and apparently the American and Iraqi officials and security forces don't want to provide their security. So these are all very, very serious issues. If there is to be due process and a procedural system of justice in Iraq, this really has to be a little bit better than it has been so far.

RAY SUAREZ: A trial, Said Arakat that's not only fair but needs to be seen to be fair?

SAID ARIKAT: Well, you see, this a quandary for the United States and for Iraq. On the one hand they want to show that there is transparency, that Iraq has really made sort of a leap forward toward democracy and the judicial process is so elemental to democracy and so on. But on the other hand, that will also get Saddam a forum, a big forum, a big podium where he reach out to the Arab world and he could show himself and so on. And the beginning of this trial also shows a great deal of awkwardness. You have a young judge. You have Paul Bremer saying that if the Iraqis got hold of him, they would cut him up to pieces and so on. We had the same kind of threats made allegedly against the

lawyers of Saddam Hussein made by none other than the justice minister Hassan in Iraq and so on, so there is a great deal of confusion that still surrounds this trial. And I think although it's really baby steps toward that process, we can look for a long and tedious and tenuous process as this trial goes on.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Patrick Lang, if it is long and tedious, does the attention grow or diminish over time in Cairo - in Tunis - in Fez?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: I think that if this is televised in the way this was yesterday and he is allowed to speak in this way with the kind of representation that he had, making appeals to Arab dignitaries, this trial will rival in Arab world, the kind of attention that the O.J. Simpson trial got in the United States.

RAY SUAREZ: The Arabic O.J., Professor?

SAMER SHEHATA: Well, people -- unlike the O.J. trial or the other trial, the Laci Peterson trial, we know what the outcome of this trial is from day one. We know that Saddam is going to be convicted of every single charge against him and that he is going to be executed at the end of the day. But what's so fascinating and I think what it seems the Americans stopped from occurring yesterday was Saddam's defense. What is he going to say; what secrets is he going to reveal, who is he going to implicate while this trial goes on? He had very good relations with the United States in the 1980s. So that's what is fascinating and mesmerizing about it. But we do know the outcome from day one.

RAY SUAREZ: Guests, thank you all.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight: Shields and Brooks, and remembering Brando.

FOCUS - SHIELDS & BROOKS

JIM LEHRER: Shields and Brooks are, in fact, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

David, what was your reaction to seeing Saddam Hussein yesterday?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, John Burns talked about the complicated emotional reactions that Iraqis have. My reaction is simple. There was one of the worst mass murderers of our lifetime, he's sitting before a young judge and the judge is reading his rights. I thought it was pretty fantastic. I read a piece by Mark Boden in the Atlantic a couple of months ago about what it was like to approach Saddam in the old days, how you had to get undressed, disinfected, waves of security. Now the guy is just sitting there on the dock. I just think it's fantastic. My reaction is uncomplicated.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. Is your reaction uncomplicated, too?

MARK SHIELDS: Mine certainly was uncomplicated, Jim. I think it's - you have to say it's a real political plus for the Bush administration. There has been no good Datelines out of Iraq for them for months. This was a good one. I mean, the longer and the more the focus, the spotlight is on Saddam Hussein rather than the U.S. operation in Iraq, the better it is for President Bush.

JIM LEHRER: How did you feel, you as you watched him yesterday? Did you have a reaction? Did you feel good, did you feel bad? Did you feel - you know --

MARK SHIELDS: I was curious. You know, I was curious about him. I was more interested, quite frankly, in how the Iraqis felt and, you know, their mixture. My feelings really have no bearing upon it and I agree with David that he is an evil despotic tyrant if justice can be visited upon him, you know, then good, and especially by this fledgling government. But the mixture of humiliation, anger, you know, vengeance that the people of Iraq expressed and experienced according to John Burns and other observers, it is fascinating to me.

JIM LEHRER: Let's go back to earlier in the week, David, the handover of power, end quote, to the Iraqi interim government. How did you think that went and the whole thing?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I thought this was also good for the administration. I spoke with a bunch of the people in the administration. In the past year, I haven't seen them feeling so cautiously optimistic, let's put it that way. One administration told me the odds are now three to one, he thought that things were going to work out. And I think that's because the political success has been significant. We now have a legitimate popular government of Iraq by an Iraqi who is well respected, who is effective and tough. We now see the clerics rallying against the insurgency, Sistani saying it is sinful to cooperate with the insurgents, that he bans this sort of cooperation, so we now see a really pretty effective political transition. Militarily we still have huge problems with the insurgency, and there's no clue we know what to do about that. But the political transition and the hunger for democracy and the process toward democracy seems to me going pretty well. And the administration deserves some credit for naming that June 30 deadline and then sticking with it through thick and thin, as many people told them to push it back.

JIM LEHRER: Not everybody but a lot of people did say, hey, as long as the security situation is so bad, why are you hanging in there, and they the not budge.

DAVID BROOKS: No. This was part of something called the November 15 Agreement, and when that came out, when they said June 30, I went back and read the press from that time. Everybody was saying this is Karl Rove; he just wants an exit strategy so we don't have to fight if the election with 130,000 troops there. But, in reality, as administration people will say, this was not an exit strategy. This was the only way to stay there. You needed some sense of legitimacy to the Iraqi government in order to keep the troops there, to keep fighting the insurgency, and keep the rebuilding going. So they were insistent on that, and I think they were consistent and it has paid off at least in the political world.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree it has paid off in the political world, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, I think the political decision has been made by the American people -- every measurement of public opinion, American people think - they're out of there - they're psychologically and emotional out of there. I mean, they wanted the turn over; they wanted it in spite of the fact that they don't believe the Iraqis can do it, that they can't handle it. Less than a third of Americans believe that the Iraqis are up to running their own government and making a go of it and then asked if it really dissolves into chaos, should the U.S. go back and a total 12 percent think the Americans ought to return, so I don't think there's any question that it was reflecting public opinion in this country. We have lost enthusiasm, zeal, whatever support the president had for his Iraqi policy, the presence of American occupation in Iraq; that is dissolved and this is a recognition, an acknowledgment of that reality.

DAVID BROOKS: The same poll that showed a majority opposing the war showed 53-40 they want to stay there, which is why John Kerry and George Bush think we can't get out because the majority have to say there.

MARK SHIELDS: Asked how you feel about them, whether they're going to make it, we've already made the decision we are out of there. David, nobody is going to run in 2004 -- George Bush did very well in 2002 on a pre-war footing for this country. Let's go into Iraq. Let's get tough. The other side is not enough tough. He will not be echoing that same tune in the fall of 2004.

JIM LEHRER: What can they say? What can Bush and Kerry say?

MARK SHIELDS: It is a problem for George Bush because he identified him as the war president. Any day, Peter Hart says, the pollster for the Wall Street Journal, the NBC News pollster - on this show - put it very well -- he said any day between Aug. 15 and Oct. 15 that Iraq is in the headlines of the American papers on the front page is a bad day for this administration. And I think that's absolutely true because any day it's on the front page it's going to be bad news from Iraq. We had two Marines killed, Jim - you just announced that at the beginning. If that continues, I don't care how many city council meetings there are or how many library boards have a quorum. That's really going to be a determining factor in this election.

DAVID BROOKS: I do think it's the most important issue in the election. I just don't think the American people want to get out, which is why George Bush wants 130,000 troops and John Kerry wants 150,000; he wants more troops there because I think they've both decided we're in there, we'll see it through; let's try to establish some legitimate government there and see what happens throughout the Middle East. So, you know, right now to me it's nip and tuck. You get a split majority saying, if you ask the question, was it worth it to go to war, you now get a slight majority saying no. If you ask, was it right to go to war, a slight majority say yes. So I think that shows it's about 50-50. I do agree with Mark that this is the issue - the election. If there is a large majority saying it wasn't worth it in November, Bush will lose. But if there's political progress, if they're campaigning in Iraq, if the insurgency is somehow quelled slightly -

JIM LEHRER: And fewer U.S. casualties -

DAVID BROOKS: -- which there already has been. Actually an interesting question is, suppose U.S. casualties come down, as they have significantly, but Iraqi casualties have gone up, how do the American people respond to that, which is a likely scenario, and that's the tough one.

JIM LEHRER: Mark, another presidential election issue of course is jobs. And today there are new numbers out that I reported in the News Summary at the top. Where does that issue stand with compared to what we've just been talking about, the war and how we got in and why we got in and how things might stand in November?

MARK SHIELDS: This is a big election issue, Jim. It's about war and peace, and prosperity and not prosperity in this country. It won't be in the election as many on the right would like it to be about God, gays or guns. This is a big issue election. People know what they're talking about. This is not good news for the administration. They expected a quarter of a million --

JIM LEHRER: 115,000 new jobs, the expectation had been 250,000.

MARK SHIELDS: That's right. Here's the reality. I mean, David says it's good news. I think it was good news. Saddam was good news, the administration turnover was not as good news but quite frankly is selling the wrong message in the economy. He is saying how great things are today. The problem is voters are really worried about tomorrow. I mean you ask voters right now, do you feel middle class is getting squeezed on health care and college tuition and gasoline prices. 1.2 million jobs gone, are you worried about this, the jobs going overseas? And Jim, you get an overwhelming response choosing that statement refer preferring it by the 4-1 margin. That's their anxiety. Bush is saying how good things are now. He is worried about the future. He is saying how great things are today and I think it's a problem for the president.

JIM LEHRER: A problem for the president?

DAVID BROOKS: I don't know. I think this election, the clich was 9/11 changed everything well actually it did. This is a foreign policy election. When was the last time we had one of those? Maybe 1960s? '68 perhaps. I think it is unusual. How do you predict it? How does it go? 72 is some sense a Republican president - with an unpopular war - he happened to win. In some sense I think that the best way to predict how people are going to vote on issues if you ask them on issues, it's do you think it's worth going to Iraq, that's the number one issue; the economy is way down there. I think values are above that. Talk about God, does this person share your values is sort of a vague but important question.

JIM LEHRER: Why do you think the economy is so far down?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think there are a lot of reasons. It was down in 2000. Gore inherited a pretty good economic record. I happen to think the electorate is moving towards value issues and has been for 20 years and values issues and foreign policy in some sense, a values issue, have just taken precedence over bread and butter issues. I think that's an effective, more educated electorate who tend to vote on values more than working class people. I think it's just a shift what the two parties stand for. Quite often it's values that differentiate people.

JIM LEHRER: Is it possible they no longer hold the president responsible?

DAVID BROOKS: I think there's a lot to that and certainly a lot of truth to that.

JIM LEHRER: Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: I disagree on what people think is important, David. And we are going to have a test on it. I mean, the Republicans are going to bring up the constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage, going to have a Senate vote on it. You know, it gets a couple of edges and it picks up a point here, but it's not going to determine this election. Jim, what I find fascinating from the conservative side is Bill Clinton had eight years of uninterrupted economic prosperity in this country, really a remarkable record. When you ask him what happened, they say he was living off the policies of Ronald Reagan. George Bush had a miserable first three years. No president can really do anything about the economy. We're in a natural business cycle. Now it is obviously proof that George Bush is working. I exempt you from most conservatives.

DAVID BROOKS: I resent that. (laughter)

JIM LEHRER: Do you personally believe that -- professionally believe that a president can affect the jobless rate?

DAVID BROOKS: I don't believe I know and I know that a president has marginal effect. Some people say the Bush tax created 150,000 jobs out of 1 million that have been created. You know, if you look at the economic growth rate over the past 30 years, you can't tell who is president. It sort of varies a little.

JIM LEHRER: Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: I obviously disagree. I think the president... it isn't the president's simply his economic policy. Do you want to talk about what created the possible superiority of this country. How about the G.I. Bill, it took Americans... less than 9 percentof Americans had even set foot on a college campus, and you tripled that in a generation because of government policy, because of a president's initiative and leadership; that changed the economy of America; it changed the future of America.

JIM LEHRER: Quickly, do you have a opinion about the vice president's use of a bad word for Sen. Leahy?

DAVID BROOKS: When I was at the Chicago City Council if you had taken that bad word of the vocabulary, we would have a silent city council floor, so I don't care, I don't care about it.

JIM LEHRER: Do you care?

MARK SHIELDS: I do care. I care because of the people who have come to his defense. We now learn that regardless of how objectionable, how profane an administration is going to change the tone in Washington, you can find the most righteous conservative commentators say look, it was just like road rage. I mean, the poor guy; he's under enormous pressure, and Pat Leahy, one of the most mild manner members of the Senate turnouts out to be an absolute tiger who provokes these kinds of outbursts and even even-tempered Dick Cheney -

JIM LEHRER: David.

DAVID BROOKS: I can sense it. He is going to say it off the air.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you both very much.

JIM LEHRER: The passing of Marlon Brando. We begin with short clips from three of his greatest movie performances: An ex-prizefighter in "On the Waterfront," Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire," and, finally, as "The Godfather."

ACTOR: "On the Waterfront" - 1954) How much do you weigh, son? You weighed 168 pounds. You were beautiful. You could have been another Billy Tom. A skunk we got you for a manager brought you along too fast.

BRANDO AS EX-PRIZEFIGHTER: ("On the Waterfront") It wasn't him, Charlie. It was you. Remember that night in the garden, you came down to my dressing room and said kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson. Do you remember that? This ain't your night. My night -- I could have taken Wilson apart. So what happened? He gets the title shot outdoor of the ballpark and I get a one way ticket to Palukaville. You was my brother, Charlie. You should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me a little bit so I wouldn't have had to take the dives for the short end money.

ACTOR: I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.

BRANDO: You don't understand. Could I have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody -- instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it. It was you, Charlie.

BRANDO ("A Streetcar Named Desire" - 1951: Hey, Stella!

ACTOR: You quit that howling down there and go to bed.

BRANDO: -- down here --

ACTOR: You shut up. You're going to get the law on you.

BRANDO: Stella!

ACTOR: Call her can back -- she ain't going to come. I hope they haul you in and...

BRANDO: Get Stella down here.

BRANDO: Hey, Stella! Hey, Stella!

ACTOR: I wouldn't mix in it. ...

BRANDO (The Godfather" - 1972): Let's be frank here. You never wanted my friendship. You were afraid to be in my bed.

ACTOR: I didn't want to get into trouble.

BRANDO: I understand. You found paradise in America. Had a good trade, made a good living. Police protected you and there were courts of law. You didn't need a friend like me. But now you come to me and you say Don Corleone, give me justice. But you don't ask for respect, you don't offer friendship. You don't even think to call me godfather. Instead, you come into my house the day my daughter is to be married and you ask me for money.

ACTOR: I ask you for justice.

BRANDO: That is not justice. Your daughter is still alive.

ACTOR: She suffers. How much shall I pay you?

BRANDO: -- what have I done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you had come to me in friendship, your daughter wouldn't be suffering this very day. And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then he would become my enemy. And then they would fear you.

JIM LEHRER: Arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown takes it from there.

JEFFREY BROWN: Laurence Olivier, who knew something about his craft, said that Marlon Brando acted with an instinctual understanding that not even the greatest technical performers could possibly match. Jack Nicholson said more simply, "With my generation, it was always Marlon Brando, and always will be Brando."

Joining me to talk about the actor and the man is Richard Schickel, film critic for Time Magazine and author of a biography of Brando, called A Life in Our Times.

Mr. Schickel, welcome. What qualities most define Brando's acting for you?

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Let me give you another quote from Olivier. He said, you know, "Theater doesn't have room for geniuses," and... by which he meant that theater, in the end, and movies, come down to craft and technology and technique. And I do think Marlon Brando was a genius, by which I mean what he did is inexplicable to outsiders, what he did when he was at his best. And I think, as is so often the case with geniuses, it makes a lot of trouble for the person possessing the genius.

JEFFREY BROWN: In your biography I know that you placed Brando in the context of the generation of actors right after War World II. Tell us how he helped define that era.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Well, there had been in America since the Stanislawksy Company had come here in the '20s, a passionate desire among actors to break out of the well- spoken English pip-pip kind of mode, and get into something much more behaviorally truthful. It was in the group theater, it was in the actor's studio. And they were always looking for a champion. And here comes this gorgeous hunk who had all that ability to, you know, look at behavior and emulate it, and bring it to his performances. And he became their leader, except he didn't want to be anybody's leader. He just wanted to be an actor. And I think that was the most basic conflict he got into. He really didn't want to be an articulate proponent of some acting style. He just wanted to act.

JEFFREY BROWN: Of course, he was regularly, as you say, held up as a method actor. What...?

RICHARD SCHICKEL: I never thought he was. He didn't really think he was.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, tell us what that means, though, and why you don't think...

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Well, a method actor is an actor who, you know, delves deep into himself. They had a technique called "effective memory" that was... you know, you would remember something from your life and bring it to your performance. Brando was not like that. He was an observer. He was a guy who liked to hang out, literally, in phone booths when he was a young actor and watch the passing parade, imitate behavior, imitate language, and all that stuff. And his great discoverer, Elia Kazan, the director, was also of that school. So when they started doing "Streetcar," I mean, that was like two wonderful affectionate forces coming together to do this behavioral acting. I don't think Brando ever, with one exception, of "Last Tango in Paris," I don't think he ever delved into deep autobiography. I mean, he could observe his own behavior and emulate it if he needed it for a role, but I never felt...and Stella Adler, who was his first and really only teacher, she never thought he was truly a method guy. It's kind of a mistake to put him into that character. The effect, though, was the same. It was if he were a method guy because he was such a genius at behavioral emulation.

JEFFREY BROWN: You've mentioned this conflict he had, love-hate with acting. Tell me more what you mean by that.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Well, you know, he was kind of like a juvenile delinquent when he came to New York. You know, he's a feckless kid. Nobody knew what to do with him. He'd get fired from military school. And he comes to visit his sister Jocelyn, who is an actress, and suddenly he sees acting, and it's something he can focus on and something he is really good at, which is something he hadn't been before in life. And he became a truly devoted actor in that decade or so, from the middle of War World II until into the '50s. But what happened then was movies, which he became committed to, became something different. They weren't little, nice black-and-white movies where a man could, you know, really make a character. They became cinemascope and historical, romantic claptrap, really. And he was kind of lost and cut off. And I think that was the beginning of his disaffection from acting. He, of course, never liked celebrity behavior or the celebrity life. But I think he could have lived with that if he could have found consistently the kind of roles that he wanted most to do. Instead, he is doing "Desiree" or "Teahouse of the August Moon," or what have you. The adjustment he tried to make was to be a character guy-- you know, all kinds of make-up and accents and weird clothes, and stuff like that. He was trying to hide in plain sight and not be a conventional leading man, you know, playing in his own face and his own voice. But that only intermittently worked out for him. So, you know, by the end of his career, he was... by the middle of his career he was openly contemptuous of acting: It's not a serious thing, it was childlike, it was not something a serious human being who cared about the planet and the people thereon could take seriously. And that was his tragedy.

JEFFREY BROWN: Brando the man was larger than life just as on the screen.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Literally. ( Laughs )

JEFFREY BROWN: The physical size, the love affair, the political causes, and on and on. Tell us about him as a man.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: You know, it's funny. I don't think anybody can tell you anything about Brando the man. I mean, I think he was always a man looking for something outside of himself to attach his psychological energy and his passions and his intellect and all of that stuff to. And the only thing he ever really found for a decade or so was acting. All the rest of it is kind of this weird groping. You know, there's the island in Tahiti, there's thousands, he said in his autobiography, thousands of women. There's intermittent passionate and commitment to causes like that of the American Indian or the black civil rights movement, all of which he was completely sincere about, but couldn't really sustain himself with. So, you know, looking at his life, I say, "oh, if you had only just said, 'okay, acting is what I can do.' It's not a bad thing to do. In fact it's a good thing to do." Good acting is useful to us. We learn things from it about ourselves, and our world, and all that stuff. If only if he could have kept focused, he could have been the greatest actor of the century.

JEFFREY BROWN: Let me ask you for a brief final comment on his legacy, the influence he'll have on acting.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: I think, first of all, he did influence Nicholson's generation and subsequent generations. I mean, they... he gave them permission to be the kind of actors they were. And I think if you look at "Streetcar," or if you look at, notably, "On the Waterfront," those are performances that we will look at as long as we're looking at film. I mean, I think they are great performances. And I honor him for those, and I wish there had been more.

JEFFREY BROWN: Richard Schickel, thank you very much for joining us.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Thank you.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the other major developments of the day. The U.S. economy added more jobs in June, but not as many as expected. The unemployment rate stayed at 5.6 percent. And two U.S. Marines were killed in Iraq. A reminder, that Washington Week can be seen on most PBS stations later this evening. We'll see you online and again here Monday evening. Have a nice holiday weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.