The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

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

MR. MAC NEIL: And I'm Robert MacNeil in New York. After tonight's News Summary, four Senators discuss whether any hope remains for health care reform. Mark Shields, Paul Gigot, plus Susan Page of Newsday look at the White House staff changes and the week's politics. Correspondent Spencer Michels reports on a genetically engineered tomato, and essayist Amei Wallach considers art in a changing city. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MAC NEIL: The Clinton administration announced a staff shake- up at the White House today, the third in 20 months. The most notable change is that 33-year-old White House Press Sec. Dee Dee Myers was given greater authority and access to the President. Last night, Myers met with Mr. Clinton amid reports that she was due to be replaced. Other changes include moving communication director Mark Gearan to a new post as head of strategic planning. White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta announced the moves this afternoon.

LEON PANETTA, White House Chief of Staff: There are really three fundamental goals that I have sought to achieve in this process. The first is to establish greater discipline within the White House. There were incidents that occurred that should not have occurred. Good judgment has not always been exercised. Secondly, there's a need for greater focus and for greater long-term planning. Now, the President, obviously, has an ambitious agenda for the American people. And much of it has been accomplished over these last two years. The White House needed to do a better job in terms of focusing on those key priorities and maintaining our focus. And we have begun to do that. And finally, there is a need for clear lines of authority, for those who operate within the White House, so that there is no question as to who is responsible for particular projects and particular responsibilities.

MR. MAC NEIL: Panetta also said decisions concerning pay and travel, as well as policy memos to the President, must go through him. We'll have more on the story after the News Summary. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Defense Sec. Perry and chairman of the Joint Chiefs Shalikashvili will go to Haiti tomorrow to check on U.S. troops there. President Clinton said today that some of the Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay will be repatriated beginning next week. He also said conditions in Haiti are getting better. He spoke during a ceremony at the Agriculture Department.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We're making good progress in our efforts in Haiti. Our troop conditions to the international coalition will soon be up to full strength, about 14,000 American servicemen and women. Among our men and women in Haiti are a thousand military police. They're making contact with police precincts, where they'll keep a close watch on the police to see that there is professional action there with restraint. In the coming weeks, they'll be joined and ultimately replaced by hundreds of international police monitors from all around the globe, now having over 26 countries participating in this effort.

MR. LEHRER: The President said U.S. forces have taken control of all heavy weapons from the Haitian military. Meanwhile, more troops arrived today, bringing the total American deployment to more than 10,000. Sec. of State Christopher said today the United States still wants Haiti's military leader, Raoul Cedras, to leave the country. Cedras has agreed to relinquish power but not to leave Haiti.

MR. MAC NEIL: A U.N. official said today that Bosnian Serbs had stepped up attacks on U.N. peacekeepers following yesterday's NATO air strike. That raid came after the Serbs fired at U.N. peacekeepers. We have more in this report narrated by David Symonds of Worldwide Television News.

DAVID SYMONDS: This is all that remains of the French tank targeted by Bosnian Serbs in the attack that wounded three peacekeepers and prompted the U.N. to call in NATO. U.N. forces were, in fact, fired at 15 times on Thursday, the greatest number of deliberate attacks on U.N. personnel in a single day. On the streets of Sarajevo, residents were relieved that NATO acted but many wanted a sterner, more decisive response, exactly the sentiments of Bosnia's deputy prime minister.

EJAP GANIC, Deputy Foreign Minister, Bosnia: Of course, it is a positive step forward, a positive step forward,however, the international community should act more serious. They should not trade with the Serbs one U.N. tank for another Serbian tank.

DAVID SYMONDS: For their part, the Bosnian Serbs are threatening to hit back, and the U.N. has reported yet more attacks on peacekeepers since this latest NATO strike. But the U.N., dug in and on guard around the capital, is warning Bosnian Serbs that any further serious strikes against it grounds troops will meet with swift retaliation.

MR. MAC NEIL: The United Nations Security Council today took up three resolutions on Bosnia. The first would ease sanctions against the belgrade government of neighboring Serbia. That would reward it for supporting an internationally-brokered peace plan and its embargo against the Bosnian Serbs. The other two would tighten sanctions against the Bosnian Serbs and condemn ethnic cleansing.

MR. LEHRER: Several hundred U.N. troops moved into Southeastern Rwanda today. They did so after reports that ethnic Hutus were being killed by the Tutsi-led government army. Half a million Rwandans were killed in the country's four-month civil war. The United States and North Korea held another round of nuclear talks today in Geneva. The North has refused to allow inspections at two key waste sites. The talks will resume tomorrow and are expected to last a week.

MR. MAC NEIL: Most of the evidence seized by police during a search at O.J. Simpson's house will be allowed at his trial for the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. That ruling was made today by Los Angeles Judge Lance Ito. The material includes videotapes, clothing, and a note written to Simpson by his ex-wife. Jury selection is set for Monday. Simpson has pleaded "not guilty" in both slayings.

MR. LEHRER: And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to one more look at health care reform, our weekly political analysis, a report on genetic tomatoes, and an Amei Wallach essay. FOCUS - CRITICAL CONDITION

MR. MAC NEIL: Health reform is our lead tonight. A year ago, President Clinton called on Congress to pass legislation guaranteeing health coverage for all Americans. Today all parties agreed that lofty goal is not attainable. By most accounts, there's little chance, if any, significant health reform legislation this year. But some are refusing to give up, and we have four Senators' views tonight on where it stands: Democrats Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota; Republicans David Durenberger from Minnesota and Bob Packwood from Oregon. Sen. Rockefeller, why didn't Sen. Mitchell throw in the towel today, as he was expected to do by some? Is there any hope, or just a reluctance on your side to admit defeat?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: There is hope, and there is the very real possibility of attacking very aggressively and doing something with the so-called mainstream compromise or the scaled down version of just covering pregnant women and 12 million American children who don't have health insurance. And as far as I'm concerned, health care is very much alive in the United States Senate. And it will remain so until the day that, you know, that we go out of session, as far as I'm concerned.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Durenberger, you're a member of the group that produced the so-called mainstream compromise. Do you still expect that to be put to a vote?

SEN. DURENBERGER: I think it gets tougher with each day. But whether my expectation is that it's voted on in this session when George Mitchell and I are still around or in the next session when the three of my colleagues here are around, either way we're going to get health care reform in this country, and we're going to get some national -- at the national level. And I think the mainstream proposal is going to be the basis for that reform.

MR. MAC NEIL: I heard it say today that Sen. Chafee, the principal author of the -- or leader of your group, had sent that proposal to the printers to go to the floor, is that correct?

SEN. DURENBERGER: Yes. We'll be ready to introduce it the first of next week. We're ready now, but we're going to hold off till the first of next week.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Wellstone, from the position of someone who's in favor of -- was in favor of a single payer system, should these other Senators give up? Is it all over this session?

SEN. WELLSTONE: No, I don't think they should give up. Sen. Durenberger and I disagree about the mainstream proposal in some fundamental ways, but I don't think we should give up because we're talking about people's lives. I think all of us here hear the voices of people, see their faces, and we should do something concrete and positive. And we can go over the ways in which this has been hijacked and it's not going to be fundamental reform. Once upon a time, we talked about universal coverage and containing costs. That's not where it's heading right now. But we should do something for children. We should focus on home-based care. We should enable states to move forward. We should not give up. We shouldn't give up this session, and we shouldn't give up next session, and we should keep fighting, and we should keep legislating. That's what we're here for.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Packwood, a lot of your Republican colleagues are saying it is dead this time. Do you agree? Should these Senators just forget it and get on with other things?

SEN. PACKWOOD: I think it's dead. We're going to have to make a choice between a futile effort, I think, at health reform in these next two weeks before we adjourn in trying to pass the President's trade package, the GATT package. If we spend any time on health, the trade package is dead, and as between the two, it is more important that we do the trade package now than health.

MR. MAC NEIL: How do you feel about that, Sen. Rockefeller?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Well, you see, that's very easy for Mr. Packwood, for Sen. Packwood to say that, because, ultimately, whatever it would be that we would put forward in health care, Sen. Durenberger's proposal, what Sen. Wellstone and I are talking about in terms of pregnant women and children, a hundred thousand children in my state of West Virginia, Sen. Packwood will vote against. So it's an easier decision for him. He can talk about getting on to other subjects. But I still think we have a chance to do health care. I think we have a moral obligation to try our very, very most intensively to get what we can. I wanted universal coverage at the beginning. I never would have thought that I would have been to the point of saying let's just do pregnant women and children, but here we are. That's the only opportunity we have or maybe a little bit more than that, and I think we have a moral obligation just because of the people we represent who are hurting.

MR. MAC NEIL: Well, Sen. Rockefeller, Sen. Kennedy, a strong an advocate of comprehensive reform as you are, says that the Chafee bill, the so-called mainstream compromise bill, is a very impressive down payment. Would you -- if Sen. Chafee can get it to the floor for a vote, Sen. Mitchell agrees, would you support that on the grounds that Sen. Kennedy is?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: There's a lotin it that I could support; most of it I could support. Sen. Chafee and Sen. Mitchell have not reached final agreement on all of it. There are still some edges to be worked out, but there is tremendous support for children and pregnant women in that. There are no mandates. There are all the things that Bob Packwood, who has been for mandates all of his life, all the things that he has been critical of are really no longer in the mainstream group that David Durenberger has, has been working on. And I don't know why, therefore, we can't, on behalf of the American people, do something about either the mainstream compromise or pregnant women and children, some insurance reform, some long-term care, home-based. We still are going to be here for two or three more weeks. We have an obligation to do that, Robin. To me, it's very simple.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Wellstone, could you agree with Sen. Kennedy and Sen. Rockefeller that there are enough good things in the mainstream proposal, the Durenberger-Chafee proposal, to support it if it got to the floor for a vote?

SEN. WELLSTONE: I was just about to sound a cautionary note, Robin. I think we have to be very careful about what we do, and it has to be a step forward, not a step backward. I think when you squeeze Medicare and Medicaid, then you have cost shifting, the reimbursement isn't adequate for the private providers, then people from the private sector spend more. Then people who are younger who don't have the income drop out, leading to what actuaries call death spiral. I think it still has incentives for employers to drop people, and that's the last thing you want to see happen. You've got a tax on working and middle income people. You tax their benefits. People who have decent benefits right now will be very angry, and finally, you don't enable states to really go forward with their own plans. So I think it's flawed in lots of ways. Now, what, what makes me different from too many people here in the Senate who are sort of no to everything is I think we should move forward on some pieces that I mentioned earlier in the show. But right now, what we've got going on here is threats of filibuster, filibuster. Filibuster will introduce a thousand amendments, will bring this process to a grinding halt. That's going on on campaign finance reform right now. And I think it's profoundly cynical. I think we should do some positive things, but I don't think the mainstream proposal was it, but I'm quite willing to go forward with other concrete proposals that I think have a lot of support.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Durenberger, how many Republican votes do you and your colleague, Sen. Chafee, calculate you could get for this mainstream proposal?

SEN. DURENBERGER: I think there's a lot more Republican support for this bill than there may be votes. And Bob can speak for, for more of the Republicans at this stage than I can, because I've been concentrating so hard on getting this mainstream bill up. But I think the reality is, this is a -- you can tell from Paul's remarks, it's a pretty Republican bill at this stage. We've been doing health care reform, Bob and I, and Jay Rockefeller, for many, many years in the Senate Finance Committee. And this mainstream proposal is an outgrowth of that. We were doing it before Bill Clinton came to town. So the problem, I think, for everyone here, Democrats and Republicans alike, is we'd like to do it on our watch. We'd like to get it done in the next two weeks. We've been at this for 10 months or something like that.

MR. MAC NEIL: But you could get some Republican votes you think?

SEN. DURENBERGER: Well, I'm saying I think we have a lot of Republican support for this. The issue is whether or not you're going to do health care reform and you're going to do GATT, and you're going to do a variety of things in the last two weeks. That's what I hear from Republicans who are willing to come back next year and do this kind of health care reform at a different pace than, that the two-week pace we're under right now.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Packwood, you and most Republicans would vote against this if it were put up for a vote, would you?

SEN. PACKWOOD: Listen, we're at this stage now where we're going to get a new bill, apparently, if they introduce it. We went through the President's bill. Then we went through Sen. Mitchell's bill one, Sen. Mitchell's bill two, Sen. Mitchell's bill three, and in every one of these bills we find clinkers that nobody knew existed. Now we're going to get a brand new bill again. And we're going to be asked to pass it in ten days, and we won't know what's in it, and we won't know what it costs, and that is not a responsible way to legislate. I don't think this is any longer we don't like the substance of the bill. We won't know what the substance of the bill is.

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Robin, that is hogwash. It's called quitting on the job. We have been through these issues so many times -- Sen. Packwood has -- he knows the issues cold -- we have been through them in many iterations. But the issues don't change. We can take the main compromise bill, maybe shape it, improve it in some ways, or we can take pregnant women and children. There's nothing about that that Sen. Packwood doesn't understand.

SEN. PACKWOOD: Robin. I'm not saying -- wait a minute -- I'm not saying the issue changed. I'm saying we opened a bill, as we did with Sen. Mitchell's bill, and we find a $10,000 per employee fine. How did that get in there? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. We're going to get a bill, and we won't know what's in it.

SEN. WELLSTONE: But Robin, the --

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Wellstone.

SEN. WELLSTONE: Just a slight disagreement with what David said earlier. You know, my critique of the mainstream proposal is not Democrat, Republican. It's an honesty policy critique which I think is thoughtful and important. But I have never, never said, I will filibuster this. See, what's going on is you have this whole filibuster crowd. They just want to block everything, and in all due respect to my colleague from Oregon, sometimes I think he harps on the complexity of everything to the point where that becomes the ultimate simplification. There's nothing complex about covering children and women that are expecting children. It's very simple.

MR. MAC NEIL: Let's make --

SEN. WELLSTONE: It's very straightforward.

MR. MAC NEIL: Let's make clear that what you and Sen. Rockefeller are talking about is a bill, if I'm right, introduced by Sen. Harkin, which would cover women, pregnant women and children immediately, is that the --

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: It would do that, but it would do somewhat more. It would do some modest insurance reform. It would do some long-term care, home-based. It would take self-employed people, allow them to either take a hundred percent or seventy-five percent of their health insurance premiums off of their federal taxes. It would do some simplification. I mean, it's the things, Robin, that everybody in the Senate in the great majority, in fact, actually does agree with.

MR. MAC NEIL: Well, Sen. Harkin said today, let's push this to a vote to force the Republicans to show that they're against -- even against helping children. Is that what your motive is?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: Not what my motive is but I think if we do, fact, bring this forward and try to do good for 12 million children in this country that don't have health insurance that there will be a vote, probably a cloture vote, trying to cut off the filibuster that Paul Wellstone has been talking about, and then the American people, in fact, would see who was for and who was against covering uninsured children.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Durenberger, how do you feel about that attempt?

SEN. DURENBERGER: Well, when in doubt, extend coverage. You know, bring in the mothers and the children. I don't think that's health care reform. We did that two years ago when Lloyd Bentsen was chairman of the Finance Committee. We did major extensions in coverage for women and children. Our bill does it. Most of the bills that you see do that. I don't think that's reform, and it's certainly not an answer to what Americans want by way of reform. It's part of an answer, but it's not "the" answer.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Packwood, how do you respond to Sen. Wellstone saying that all you want to do is filibuster?

SEN. PACKWOOD: You know, you referred to Sen. Harkin's bill. He hasn't got a bill. He hasn't introduced a bill. When somebody says what does it cost, he says, I think, $200 billion. He doesn't know what it costs. You bet. Am I willing to try to stop a bill that we've never seen, that comes onto our desk for the first time next week, that we don't know what it costs, and we'd be asked to vote for, a brand new program that's going to spend billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we don't know, you bet, I'll try to stop it, and that'll be my answer.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Wellstone.

SEN. WELLSTONE: [A] Sen. Harkin has priced that out, and we talked about raising the cigarette tax up to a dollar a pack. He also talks about what the home-based care increasing premium would be for high income senior citizens. It's straightforward. Nobody tries to finance anybody, and I think -- I think it would make a significant difference. David said it doesn't constitute major health care reform. I agree with him. But the focus on cost containment which challenged the prerogatives of a lot of really powerful folks to make huge contributions, by the way, to the Congress, those people did a pretty good job of getting cost containment off the table, and we haven't done universal coverage. But the fact that we can't do that now -- and I think that's outrageous that we're not doing it -- doesn't mean that we don't do some positive, concrete things for people.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Packwood, many in my profession, journalism, have detected what they describe as a note of glee among some Republicans for having successfully prevented health care reform in this session. How do you feel about that? I mean, do you agree that that's the right characterization, and do you -- are you proud of having blocked reform, if that's so?

SEN. PACKWOOD: Reform is in the eye of the beholder. Now, the Republicans think that we have a health reform bill, and we call it health reform. You could have passed in this Congress a bill that would have eliminated the right of insurance companies to prohibit giving you insurance if you had a preexisting illness. You could have passed portability so you can take it from job to job. You could have passed tort reform. You could have passed any number of things that would have gone through the Senate ninety to ten and through the Houseof Representatives four hundred to thirty-five. And that would have been reform. But because other people wanted to go further than that and further than the bulk of the Senate wanted to go, we got nothing. We could have compromised on a bill that would have been a good step forward.

MR. MAC NEIL: But, Sen. Durenberger, isn't that what the mainstream bill is largely?

SEN. DURENBERGER: Ours is a combination of reform in setting national rules for market activity that's changing all over America right now but giving it a cohesiveness so that everybody can understand what it's all about, plus doing a lot of the reforms that Sen. Packwood talked about, plus extending coverage. Our coverage and, I think, the CBO, not a Harkin estimate, but a CBO estimate told us our bill, without spending more than 45 cents on a cigarette tax, and that was all the tax that we raised, got to 94 percent coverage, which is better than you get with mandatory auto insurance coverage in a lot of states. So we combined both the equity side, the expansion of coverage, and the cost containment side in our bill.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Rockefeller, what's your reading of how the voters are going to take this, this year, in this mid-term election, the failure to pass any significant health care reform?

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: What the voters will understand very clearly and wherein they will be absolutely correct is that, that the four of us up here will continue to have this little card, this Blue Cross-Blue Shield, a choice of twenty-five to thirty-five health care plans where we pay $104 a month, and the taxpayers pay the rest, but that some on this panel would deny the American people the health care which we take for granted and which the American people pay for us to have. I cannot think of a greater or more cruel irony in which to end this session of Congress than to have people blocking health care reform so not for the purpose of but with the result that we keep what the American people give us in the way of first class health care reform, and we deny because of our cowardice, I would -- or politics, them to have something at least that good.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Packwood, how are you going to explain that to voters?

SEN. PACKWOOD: Let's make this deal then, Sen. Rockefeller and I. Let's have this election be a referendum on health care. And if the Republicans pick up seats in the Congress, we were right, and Sen. Rockefeller and the others will say, okay, that was the debate, that was the battle, that was the issue, the Republicans won it in the election, we'll go along with them next year in what they suggest. That's fair enough, and let's have that debate in the election.

MR. MAC NEIL: Sen. Wellstone, how would you feel about that?

SEN. WELLSTONE: Well, No. 1, I think what's going on right now, unfortunately, extends beyond health care. And I think my colleagues are an exception to this, so it's not aimed at them. I think it's a profoundly cynical strategy. Right now we have campaign finance reform. By the way, what's happened to health care is the best case for campaign finance reform I know. The amount of money that's poured into here is, it's just awful. It's like paying the referees of a football game a lot of money before they ref the game. The opposing teams give them the money, which people feel confident about the outcome. And so what's happening right now is everything is being blocked, bring the whole process to a grinding halt, make sure that nothing passes, whether it be health care or other issues, and then go out to the public and fan the flames of discontent, saying people, government can't do anything. It is profoundly cynical.

MR. MAC NEIL: Is that what's happening, Sen. Durenberger, finally?

SEN. DURENBERGER: No. I think this, this kind of scapegoating, blaming problems on, on money, on contributors, on all this sort of thing is hardly the measure for success in health care reform or anything else. The only thing that's going to get us the reform we need is some leadership. And we have failed here in Washington to reach the American people on this issue. I think -- I think that's the heart of the problem.

MR. MAC NEIL: Well, Senators, all four, thank you very much for joining us. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, political analysis, genetic tomatoes, and city art. FOCUS - POLITICAL WRAP

MR. LEHRER: Now, some White House and other politics. Chief of Staff Leon Panetta announced several staff changes today. The major news in them was who is not leaving, Press Sec. Dee Dee Myers. Despite rumors to the contrary, she's not only keeping her job, she'll have a higher rank and greater access to President Clinton. We get some analysis now of this and other things of this week. It comes from our team of Shields and Gigot plus one, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot, plus Susan Page, White House correspondent for New York Newsday. Susan, what happened on Dee Dee Myers?

MS. PAGE: Well, last night, senior White House officials told me and other reporters that Dee Dee Myers was going to be offered a different job in the White House and that Mike McCurry, the State Department spokesman, was going to come to the White House to do the press secretary's duties, brief the press, deal with the President, set communications strategy.

MR. LEHRER: And be the public person, right?

MS. PAGE: That's right. This morning, that was off, and it was off because Dee Dee Myers went to President Clinton last night and made this argument. She said she has never been given a fair shot at doing the job of press secretary, that she hadn't been given the tools she needed, she didn't have the status of an assistant to the President, she didn't have the nice office that goes with a White House press secretary's job traditionally, she didn't have enough access to the President and to the top policy making meetings, and the President agreed with her, apparently, and overturned the decision or the recommendation of Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff, and now she has those things that she's asked for, and in her -- and a chance to have the tools to do the job that she's had the title for for the past 20 months.

MR. LEHRER: Now, I, I heard today that this meeting with the President was very emotional. Had you heard that as well?

MS. PAGE: An emotional meeting. These are two people who have a long relationship with each other. She's been with Clinton through some tough times, something I think that she noted with him. There was another argument that was made on Dee Dee Myers' behalf, and that was if Leon Panetta pushed her out basically of this top job, the White House Press Secretary's job, he was going to end up with a restructured White House staff that had no women in the inner circle of top advisers, the only woman who would continue to have President Clinton's ear would be his wife, Hillary Clinton.

MR. LEHRER: What about Alice Rivlin and Laura Tyson --

MS. PAGE: Donna Shalala?

MR. LEHRER: -- Donna Shalala -- Laura Tyson?

MS. PAGE: Yes. There are other women in top jobs in the administration. Thereare other women in the cabinet, but when you get into tough decisions in the White House, what does the President do? He goes to the Oval Office and gets a half dozen of the people who are closest to him around him, and that's where the really tough decisions are made. That was going to be a group that was all white men. That is an argument that also worked in Dee Dee Myers' favor.

MR. LEHRER: And her argument was, as you say, she was saying she was not in that room --

MS. PAGE: Yes.

MR. LEHRER: -- up till now. Now she will be in that room.

MS. PAGE: That's correct. Well, they say she'll be in that room. Sometimes those promises are made and not delivered. That remains to be seen. Now, Dee Dee Myers is a winner in this scenario. Today I think she clearly emerged as someone who has enhanced stature and another chance at a great job, a very difficult job but a great job. There is also a loser. The loser is Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff. He came in 10 weeks ago and said that he had been given full authority to make whatever changes were necessary. And he mentioned from that first day his desire to make changes in the communications jobs. President Clinton did not allow him to do this. That means there are new questions about the true authority that he has as chief of staff, and there's something else. He came out into the White House briefing room this afternoon. Now Leon Panetta, as Mark Shields and you know, is one of this town's straight shooters, one of the candid, forthcoming people that you could really count on to tell you what was really going on. He didn't do that this afternoon. That briefing this afternoon where he, in effect, tried to deny some of the stories that we had all heard --

MR. LEHRER: The story you just told.

MS. PAGE: That's right -- I think has cost him credibility among the people that he continues to need to deal with in the White House Press Corps.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Do you agree, Mark, he's been hurt?

MR. SHIELDS: I agree. When Leon came in, and Susan's absolutely right, on the 28th of June, he said, I'm in charge, I'm in full charge, and Jim Baker is my model, the chief of staff under Ronald Reagan, I have the ability to hire and fire, to make changes in personnel and in policy. And today, we learned that that was not the case. Jim --

MR. LEHRER: Does it matter?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, it's been handled terribly from the beginning. From that very first day there was speculation about Dee Dee Myers surviving, about Mark Gearan, the communications director, surviving, and for 10 weeks, those people, both of whom, regardless of what you think about their performance at the White House and, I mean, you can get an argument either way on that, they are people of demonstrated loyalty, of enormous fortitude in supporting Bill Clinton, and they were left slowly to twist and painfully and publicly in the wind.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Paul, what do you make of this? Is this a serious thing, or this strictly beltway stuff and we shouldn't worry about it?

MR. GIGOT: Well, I think it is mostly beltway stuff. To the extent that it's beyond the beltway --

MR. LEHRER: By the way, you're in Denver tonight. I didn't say that -- speaking of being outside the beltway tonight -- go ahead, sorry.

MR. GIGOT: Yeah. That's a city where we have a great deal of perspective on what goes on back there.

MR. LEHRER: Right. Go ahead.

MR. GIGOT: I think it is internal politics but once again it makes the White House look bad in a way that it can't get its story straight, it can't get organized, and that's going to hurt it. And one other thing, one way in which it might be a little more significant, and that is the whole preoccupation with the communications side of the White House, the sense you get from these fixes is that the problem is communications. It sounds a lot like what the Bush administration used to say in its third and fourth year. But the problem is -- the communications -- is what is communicating, and I don't think we're getting at that problem and fixing that.

MR. LEHRER: So in a nutshell, they didn't fix anything today. That's what you're saying. They had a lot of commotion, handled it poorly, and still didn't get anything as a net result, is that what you're -- am I reading you right?

MR. GIGOT: You are reading me right, Jim. I don't see how this is going to change anything at all, except perhaps undermine Leon Panetta, who is the best news this White House has had in the last two or three months.

MR. LEHRER: Susan.

MS. PAGE: I think there is one thing that this restructuring achieved, and that is Leon Panetta's goal in this was to reduce the number of voices that Bill Clinton hears. You know, Leon Panetta, I'm told, believes that the problem is not that Bill Clinton doesn't listen to enough people. It's that he listens to too many people. And one of the things that Panetta has done with this restructuring is reduce the status of a lot of people, limit their ability to walk into the Oval Office and talk to the President.

MR. LEHRER: That's George Stephanopoulos and Bruce Lindsey.

MS. PAGE: Two very senior officials took cuts in status in this organization. George Stephanopoulos became an executive assistant to Panetta, and Bruce Lindsey, who is perhaps the person personally closest to Clinton, has agreed to become a deputy White House counsel. In addition, Panetta's taking control of the paper flow into the Oval Office. He thinks that Clinton is kind of pulled one way and another by listening to all these voices. He's trying to impose some controls over that. In that way, this restructuring may turn out to be significant.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Mark, let's move -- let's talk about Haiti. What has Haiti done for the President?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, to read the polls not that much. It hasn't given his the bump that Presidents usually get at times like this. But I think, Jim, it's hard to look at Haiti and not to come to the conclusion that a lot of people in this town and maybe even this commentator at times have been wrong about Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton has had the label pinned on him, and he's deserved it at times, as a guy who would do anything to avoid a confrontation, who was extremely political in his decisions, and all his moves. And there's no way you can look at what he did in Haiti, where he did it without political cover of Congress, without popular support in the country, putting his presidency at risk. He risked becoming, in my judgment, a lame duck President the last two years.

MR. LEHRER: That serious?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, just think about this.

MR. LEHRER: Okay.

MR. SHIELDS: Military invasions are -- successful military invasions are no guarantee of reelection to the White House, as George Bush learned recently and painfully. A failed military invasion is an absolute lock that you, the President who's ordered it, will be out tin cupping, raising money for a presidential library about to built somewhere in East Overshoe. I mean, you're gone. You're not going to be reelected. And, I mean, Bill Clinton - -

MR. LEHRER: And he must have known that, you're saying, had to have known that.

MR. SHIELDS: Bill Clinton did this. I mean, he obviously acted out of conviction, belief, whatever, that, you know, you had to take another look at the guy and say, hey, geez, he was willing to do that. And I think in that sense he deserves a second look.

MR. LEHRER: Are you going to give him a second look, Paul? Are you and the rest of America going to give him a second look?

MR. GIGOT: Second, third, fourth. The ironic thing about this last week has been that the President who's getting the most credit from the public is President Carter, because I think there's a sense that he saved President Clinton in a way from himself. He saved the policy that might have headed into something the public didn't want and might not have worked, namely an invasion, and the public's response to that is relief, but it's still not enthusiasm. I mean, people are relieved that we didn't have Americans being shot at, but they're not very excited that we're still occupying the country and are going to have a fairly troubled few weeks ahead.

MR. LEHRER: What about Mark's risk, do you buy that?

MR. GIGOT: Well, I buy the one point, that this demonstrates that Bill Clinton is willing to stick by something that is unpopular. I think he's going to get credit for that. But he's sticking by something that the public doesn't want him to do or is very wary about him doing. He's not sure that this is in our national interest. He hasn't sold them on that case, no matter how many speeches he's given. They haven't bought it, and they're very worried what's going to happen as 15,000 troops are on the ground now. I think the risks for the President politically are all on the down side. He's not going to get much support at all, much bounce at all if this goes perfectly.

MR. SHIELDS: Many of the people criticizing the President -- I certainly exempt Paul from this group -- have not opposed any U.S. military action, with the sole exception of the Union's returning the fire on Fort Sumter in 1861. I mean, these are people that have always loved military action. And I think if you look at it that Bill Clinton in this case made the correct perception that the country was in favor of stopping the killing, stopping the torture, restoring democracy. The argument was about the means, whether it was, in fact, worth -- and we certainly wanted to avoid Americans shooting Haitians, Haitians shooting Americans. If, in fact, miraculously we have a chance to restore democracy, to stop the flood of refugees from Haiti to the United States, to stop that killing and that torture without killing, I think that's a major achievement.

MR. LEHRER: Susan, the people at the White House, do they feel they're getting a rough deal with the public and the press over Haiti? Do they think they deserve more credit than they're getting?

MS. PAGE: Yes. They definitely think they deserve more credit. There was some consternation at the polls that showed that 70 percent of the people gave President Carter credit and only 15 percent President Clinton credit for avoiding bloodshed. This is just a kind of more general theme you hear at the White House, that President Clinton has achievements in a number of areas they say that he doesn't get enough credit for, and that he takes too much flak for the things he does.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Paul, let's move quickly to the primary season just ended, and there are a couple of bad news results for the Democrats. What does this mean? What does it look to you at this point? What is November going to look like, do you think?

MR. GIGOT: Well, this isn't bad news for Democrats, Jim. This is astonishing. I mean, it looks like this is going to be if things continue as they are the worst Democratic year since 1980 and maybe as far back as 1946, when the Republicans won in the off year Truman administration, took both Houses of Congress. The anti-incumbent tidal wave is great, but it seemed particularly aimed at Democrats. I mean, Tom Foley, who's the Speaker of the House -- he's not some freshman from Palukaville -- he's got 30 years' seniority -- he's got -- that's the sort of politics that used to work. And, instead, it's being turned against him, issues like term limits, issues like gun control. There's a real sense that the institution it seems the public has, that the institutions in Washington aren't working, and it seems like it's going to be a tidal wave against the people running those institutions, and that's the Democrats.

MR. LEHRER: And, of course, the other big -- the big result was Mike Synar, Democrat of Oklahoma, lost against an unknown, under- financed unknown in a primary run-off, and he's been there a long time, very much associated with the Democratic leadership.

MR. SHIELDS: Mike Synar was probably the closest thing to Don Quixote in the House of Representatives, I mean, from just looking at the national Democratic perspective, and this is a guy on any issue would take it on, would never play, gee, I can't do this one because of the district folks, no question.

MR. LEHRER: He never ducked any of 'em.

MR. SHIELDS: Never ducked any of 'em, never flinched. I mean, sometimes you felt that he was looking for 'em, kind of sticking his jaw, looking for a fight, but whether it was taking on the mining interest, taking on the ranchers on grazing, taking on tobacco, taking on the Rifle Association on assault weapons, there wasn't a single one where he ever flinched or backed down, and there's no question -- I mean, he lost to somebody who spent $19,000, a 71-year-old retired teacher, principal.

MR. LEHRER: Synar points out that all those special interests spent a lot of money in addition to what he spent.

MR. SHIELDS: Spending thousands of dollars -- a lot of independent expenditures against him. But what it's going to do is it's going to send beyond this one loss, which is a considerable loss to the Democrats in the House, this was a very important player, it sends a message, it sends a little tremor through any legislative body that, geez, you know, Synar got beat, you know, he took a lot of chances, he took too many chances, you know, maybe you ought to be a little more careful, maybe you ought to just be worried about finding grandma's Social Security check and doing that, looking at that small business loan, instead of getting too many issues out there, and I think that that's a message that's going to be unhelpful.

MR. LEHRER: But I noticed, quickly, Susan, that Synar said, look, this was not a referendum on President Clinton, this was a referendum on Mike Synar. They must have loved that over there.

MS. PAGE: He said that but the most effective ad against Synar was one of Bill Clinton's face morphing, being transformed into Mike Synar's face, and some people that's what really did him in that election.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Susan, gentlemen, thank you. FOCUS - BIGGER & BETTER?

MR. MAC NEIL: Next tonight, tomatoes with staying power. Just as the traditional fresh tomato season wanes, a new kind of tomato is starting to appear on some supermarket shelves. It signals a new era in the growing and marketing of fruits and vegetables. Correspondent Spencer Michels reports from San Francisco.

MR. MICHELS: These juicy, ripe, genetically-engineered tomatoes have been given a place of honor at a Davis, California grocery store. A lot is riding on their success. Millions of dollars have been invested and spent on research to produce better tasting vine- ripened tomatoes that will stay fresh until they reach the salad bowl. They're called flavor savers, marketed under the MacGregor's label by a Davis-based bio-technology company. For now, only a few stores carry them, and they cost more than double most other tomatoes.

BURT GEE, Grocery Store Owner: It has a better flavor than any tomato around, and for that purpose, people pay for the flavor.

DEMONSTRATOR: This is garbage.

MR. MICHELS: Small groups of demonstrators from the pure food campaign protested the introduction of the flavor saver in Chicago and Davis last May. They say that altered foods could prove dangerous. Such concerns are dismissed by 80-year-old Charles Rick, one of the world's most respected tomato scientists.

CHARLES RICK, Plant Geneticist: There's almost total assurance of safety for the introduction of these new types. Before it's introduced, there's a lot of testing that's done.

MR. MICHELS: Although he grew up with time honored cross breeding techniques, Rick has no objection to using genetic engineering as a shortcut. For more than half a century, Rick has been on the lookout worldwide for better tomatoes. Retired from the University of California at Davis, he still cultivates and studies a huge variety of tomato plants and their close relatives that he has gathered and photographed mostly in South American mountains and jungles and the Galapagos Islands. He has crisscrossed the Andes, searching for wild tomatoes somebody might want to breed with the domestic plan.

CHARLES RICK: It's the only place where we found the wild relatives of the tomato. It's an area of tremendous ecological diversity, all kinds of habitats, drought, excessive moisture, bugs, and diseases.

MR. MICHELS: Tomatoes that can withstand those conditions don't always taste so good. Yet, for decades, plant breeders have been using Charlie Rick's wild seeds to breed color, texture, disease resistance, and flavor into cultivated tomatoes. He says by traditional methods, that process may take 10 years. Genetic engineers shortens it considerably. In private and university laboratories across the country, splicing plant genes has become common. This lab at Davis is supported by the federal government, the university, and by industry, which sees large, potential profits from improving fruits and vegetables, especially the bland- tasting tomatoes found in most markets. Martina McGloughlin directs the biotechnology program at Davis.

MARTINA McGLOUGHLIN, University of California, Davis: If you let a tomato vine ripen and then you try to ship it to the point of sale, you're going to get a very squished looking tomato at the other end which is very susceptible to disease. The alternative is to keep it green, you take it to the point of sale, you gas it with a gas called ethylene, which is -- ethylene is like the mother of all hormones, it specifically is a gas that switches on a lot of mechanisms in plants -- and you get turn on of the red color. But you didn't allow that tomato to stay on the vine to build up the sugars and build up the flavors, so what you're eating is a red- colored green tomato.

MR. MICHELS: To remedy that problem, the developer of the flavor saver tomato, Calgene, is using genetic engineering. It is reversing one tomato gene, a technique which slows down the rotting process.

MARTIN McGLOUGHLIN: The tomato will still get rotten but it'll take about two weeks longer than it would normally. So now you can allow the tomato to ripen on the vine to build up the sugars, build up the flavor, pick it when it's nice and ripe and full of flavor and sugars and ship it, and it will stay firm. It won't get squashed, and it won't be susceptible to diseases.

MR. MICHELS: Calgene was the first company to get FDA approval to grow and sell its genetically-altered foods. But other companies are poised for production as well. Roger Salquist is the chief executive officer of Calgene, which engineered the flavor saver.

ROGER SALQUIST, CEO, Calgene: This is a very early model. We still basically knock the socks off all the competition but every planting season we have better varieties coming down the stream. So we are selling better taste, better taste, better taste. That's what we're selling.

MR. MICHELS: Despite Calgene's enthusiasm and the okay from the FDA and the Agriculture Department, some academics still consider genetically-altered plants unnatural. Bill Liebhardt is director of sustainable agriculture at UC Davis and shops at the market where the flavor savers are sold. Sustainable agriculture preaches that farm produce should be grown with fewer pesticides and more natural processing, not with spliced genes.

BILL LIEBHARDT, University of California, Davis: We are going to create exotic or monster plants that will have the ability to do things that they never would in nature.

MR. MICHELS: Liebhardt fears some plants could become weed-like and spread.

BILL LIEBHARDT: We're going into uncharted waters with these things. It's -- my sense is the questions that these people are asking is: Can we do it, and will it make money? And that's about as deep as the thinking is in this.

ROGER SALQUIST: Most of those concerns and most of those arguments are nonsense. They're the same people who would suggest that you could grow cotton and some of these other crops with no pesticides which you absolutely can't, and they're the same people that they always are continually saying there's a problem, yet never have demonstrated a problem, whereas, the people who are developing the technology have spent 15 years now demonstrating with voluminous data that there are problems in these areas.

MR. MICHELS: Calgene and other companies, including Monsanto, are genetically engineering plants like cotton so they won't die when sprayed with herbicides to control nearby weeds. That has led to another dispute.

BILL LIEBHARDT: 57 percent of the work being done by biotech companies relates herbicide-tolerant plants. So what they're doing is perpetuating this intensive chemical agriculture which society says we don't want to go in this direction.

ROGER SALQUIST: That is clearly the stupidest statement out there yet. What we're is using biotechnology to reduce the use of pesticides in total and to use more environmentally adaptable pesticides.

MR. MICHELS: Calgene is using genetic engineering to turn this plant, rapeseed, into a biological factory, where the seeds will produce a valuable substance used in making cosmetics. Developing such technology has been expensive and hasn't yet produced any profits.

SANO SHIMODA, Biotech Industry Analyst: Investors would tell you they've been very disappointed. Investors do not believe this technology is real.

MR. MICHELS: Sano Shimoda is a California investment analyst who specializes in biotechnology stocks which have not performed well. But he believes the stocks and the products have a bright future.

SANO SHIMODA: I think that the genetically-engineered tomato which Calgene has commercially introduced in the marketplace and other competitors will be bringing new products will be a very significant commercial success. And I think this will be sort of a flagship product that people will say, gee, is there really something missing, there is something to this technology, and it could create significant revenues and do very well for the companies.

SPOKESMAN: It's got a little -- it's got some genes in it from the wild species from Charlie Rick's collection.

MR. MICHELS: The executives at DNA Plant Technology, or DNAP, an Oakland-based competitor of Calgene, are also betting America is ripe for a revolution in fruits and vegetables. They are picking and selling traditionally bred vine-ripened tomatoes with longer shelf life, and they are readying a genetically-altered variety to go head-to-head with flavor saver. In addition, they've developed several other plants, including a new watermelon, says vice president and biotechnologist David Evans.

DAVID EVANS, Biotechnologist: Consumers were getting a little tired of buying 30 pound watermelons and having those occupy your entire refrigerator and having to throw half the watermelon away two weeks later. So what we found was that there was a lot of interest in a small, if you will, single serving type watermelon, sweet, seedless, nice red flesh, very good flavor. We believe we can totally eliminate the seeds by using genetic engineering.

MR. MICHELS: The rewards could be great. Fruits and vegetables are a $60 billion a year business in the U.S. To sell those products, the companies will try to develop brand name loyalty for fresh produce in a business where there is very little currently. DNAP sells Fresh World Farms produce just as Calgene uses MacGregor's on its tomatoes.

JOYCE GOLDSTEIN, Restaurant, Owner/Chef: MacGregor, it's supposed to sound like Farmer MacGregor in the garden and Peter Rabbit. I love that name.

MR. MICHELS: But Joyce Goldstein doesn't love the genetically- engineered tomatoes. She is owner and chef at the fashionable Square One Restaurant in San Francisco, where they serve vine- ripened organic tomatoes.

JOYCE GOLDSTEIN: What I'm opposed to really is the idea of mono crops in agribusiness. I'm also opposed to the idea of giving up the notion of season. I mean, there is a reason that things come into bloom at a certain time of year when their flavor is at the best. Who told Americans that they had to have tomatoes 365 days a year? They claim that the flavor is better than the average supermarket tomato that you buy in December, which we know tastes like old socks. Okay. It is better than that, but compared to one of these tomatoes, they have no acid, they have no fullness of flavor at all, it's like not the real thing.

MR. MICHELS: Green tomatoes.

JOYCE GOLDSTEIN: Mm hmm. I mean, cut into one of the golden ones too, 'cause you'll see these --

MR. MICHELS: That's great.

JOYCE GOLDSTEIN: All right. Now taste this one, because this has a very different flavor. I'm going to give you a whole bunch. I'm not opposed to science, okay. I think science is a great thing. But I am opposed to disrupting the flow of seasons of looking forward to taste.

ROGER SALQUIST: That's nonsense. I mean, if she can only grew 'em in her backyard two months, that's her problem. We can grow 'em 12 months out of the year, and we can deliver them to people that want a good-tasting tomato in January. If she wants to go 10 months of the year without serving tomato salad, that's her problem.

MR. MICHELS: Goldstein and others who have problems with genetically-altered foods may be bucking a trend. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it has on hand 955 applications and notifications for field tests of genetically-engineered produce, an indication of big changes ahead in what we eat and how it's grown. ESSAY - CREATIVE TIMES

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight, essayist Amei Wallach, art critic for New York Newsday, talks about art in a changing neighborhood.

AMEI WALLACH: In Egypt, in Africa, in medieval Europe, art had a purpose to serve, as urgent as life and death, as explicit as ritual. Since then, the struggle has been between those who believe art's place is a more rarified one, above the hurly burly, the disappointments and contradictions of real life, and those who propose that art and life have a great deal to say to one another. If you believe that art and life are meant for each other, you want to put art someplace where people go, where they can develop a beautiful relationship or a healing one. Mostly though, people just don't notice what's always there. And so in recent years, as art has gotten increasingly entangled with the most gritty social and political issues of life, those who are interested in public art for public places have been trying to match artists are at home with the ephemeral with spaces that are temporarily in need of something more meaningful than a face-lift. Two decades ago an organization named Creative Time invented a way for artists of the obstreperous stamp and real estate developers to use each other. Before this historic building became headquarters for New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission, it was a deserted police station, awaiting transformation. Enter artists to make statements out of empty jail cells. Artists were there to remind us what housing means to the forgotten, while a derelict slice of Hudson River waterfront envisioned reclamation as Battery Park City. Times Square has for far too many decades been New York's landmark eyesore, the commuters streaming from the Port Authority bus terminal to Grand Central Station, the uptowners, downtowners, and out-of-towners shopped for illicit pleasures here, and crime has moved right in to take advantage as regularly as the fall of the ball on New Year's Eve, it seems. A partnership of the New York State Urban Development Corporation and real estate entrepreneurs would concoct a utopian scheme to transform the neighborhood. They never happened. For a time, the latest plan actually looked as though it might work. In anticipation, a $240 million condemnation program emptied out most of the theaters, the porn shops, the fast food chains that had animated the street life along the key 42nd Street block. And then, two years ago, New York's persistent real estate depression and office glut put all plans on "hold." Calling Creative Time. This summer, for the second year in a row, art has taken up squatters' rights in storefronts, on billboards, and on street corners, where Ned Smythe's "History Lesson" recasts the icons of the past as reminders of our condition in the present tense. There's even poetry on theater marquees, courtesy of the haiku society of America. Kids actually stop into the triage project to work with photographers, writers, and activists to document the crisis in their neighborhood and their lives. The fact is, though, the people walking down the street in Times Square are accustomed to averting their eyes. Art hasa hard time competing with life when you don't expect to find it. It makes demands. It self-selects the people who are willing to make a little room for it. Even Nam June Paik's recycled TV's have to compete with street life. But those who pause take away something to ponder or chuckle over or let lie there lightly and teach them to await the next unexpected encounter. A few weeks ago, Time Square's hopeful developers came up with $20 million to renovate 30 of the abandoned stores. So next year, the artist will be gone, and Times Square won't look nearly so funky anymore. But something will have been lost: astonishment and challenge and a taste of the ineffable. Next year we'll know what to expect. I'm Amei Wallach. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, White House staff changes were announced, but White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers will keep her job. And President Clinton said the mission in Haiti was making progress and will soon be at full strength of about 14,000 troops. Good night, Robin.

MR. MAC NEIL: Good night, Jim. That's the NewsHour for tonight. We'll see you again on Monday night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.