The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

INTRO

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. Today's major stories are all in familiar categories. President Reagan and Walter Mondale exchanged more heat about Social Security, among other political things. Secretary of State Shultz talked peace in El Salvador in El Salvador. And Israel made a new offer on withdrawing its troops from Lebanon. Robin?

ROBERT MacNEIL: We have a number of special focus stories on the NewsHour tonight. With the help of critic Edwin Diamond, we examine the media fallout from Sunday's presidential debate. Reporter Don Oberdorfer on El Salvador: is peace about to break out? We interview Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres about the Lebanon troop pullout and Israel's economic crisis. And we close with a report from St. Louis on an exhibition of the paintings of Max Beckmann.

LEHRER: President Reagan had words aplenty today -- about Social Security, the big debate, the age issue and Walter Mondale. The first batch were delivered to reporters on the White House lawn, at a very mini, mininews conference.

REPORTER: Do you think the age issue is important the way they're building it up?

Pres. RONALD REAGAN: No, I don't. I think it kind of shows again the same kind of desperate reaching for something that they did before.

REPORTER: Mr. President, Tip O'Neill said you looked tired the other night at the end of the debate.How did you feel then, sir? What do you think of the Speaker's observation?

Pres. REAGAN: I wasn't -- no, I wasn't tired. And with regard to the age issue and everything, if I had as much makeup on as he did, I'd have looked younger, too.

REPORTER: You didn't have any makeup on?

Pres. REAGAN: No, I never did wear it. I didn't wear it when I was in pictures.

REPORTER: And you think you're going to win the next debate?

Pres. REAGAN: Well, let's see what happens. I think the truth is on my side.

REPORTER: Do you think you lost?

Pres. REAGAN: I think if someone would go at the transcript and look at the fact that, that at the figures and the facts that I gave, were true and were never rebutted in that debate, and that he kept repeating facts that I have rebutted because they were inaccurate -- and as a matter of fact, they had no basis in fact at all.

REPORTER: But, do you think it's a new ballgame for Mondale? He seems to have a new spirit. Patriotism?

Pres. REAGAN: Our figures are holding up very well.

REPORTER: Well, are we going to see a new Reagan campaign style now?

Pres. REAGAN: You get what you see. That's me.

LEHRER: Then he left for a day of campaigning in Michigan and more words there. Elizabeth Brackett reports on that part of the story.

ELIZABETH BRACKETT [voice-over]: The new-found age issue produced few changes in pace of style as Ronald Reagan campaigned in Michigan today. In three carefully organized campaign appearances before friendly audiences, the President appeared relaxed, smiling and rested. What was different was a sharpened verbal attack against Walter Mondale.

Pres. REAGAN: And my opponent, unable to shake loose from the failed policies of the past, still trapped in the mentality of tax and tax and spend and spend, believes in bigger and bigger government. And that's why he made raising taxes the centerpiece of his campaign, his first option in dealing with the problems of America.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: But while Reagan was out in front appearing tough and healthy, his personal physician, Dr. Daniel Ruge, was behind the scenes responding to a constant stream of questions on the President's age and health.

1st REPORTER: How would you pronounce his health, sir?

Dr. DANIEL RUGE, president's physician: Why, he's excellent.

2nd REPORTER: But he did get tired the other night after the debate.

Dr. RUGE: I did, too.

2nd REPORTER: Yeah, but do you think he should be standing for the next debate for 90 minutes?

Dr. RUGE: Well, he has to, doesn't he?

2nd REPORTER: I don't know.

1st REPORTER: Well, maybe you could ask for a chair, but I think politically that might not go over.

2nd REPORTER: You think he should ask for a chair?

Dr. RUGE: No.

3rd REPORTER: You did think he tired during the last half-hour?

Dr. RUGE: I think, sure, he was tired, everybody was tired.

3rd REPORTER: But compared to Mondale. Mondale didn't seem to be as tired.

Dr. RUGE: Oh, I don't know.

4th REPORTER: And has he lost any of his stamina over the four years?

Dr. RUGE: I don't know.

4th REPORTER: Well, who would know?

Dr. RUGE: Ask him. He would know that.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: And though White House aides insisted the age issue would not be a theme of today's campaign appearances, the President did not miss the chance to slip in a reference to age in a response to a high school student's question on drug and alcohol abuse.

Pres. REAGAN: Alcohol is just another form of drug, and all of them, there is -- there's just no place for them. You only get this piece of machinery once. Take care of it, really take care of it. And I'm prepared to tell you from personal experience, that there come a place down the road, when you'll really be happy that you did. Because I've been 39 years old now for about 30-odd, 31-odd years.

BRACKETT [voice-over]: Those bothered the least by the age question were the Reagan supporters who saw and heard the President in Michigan today.

[interviewing] How did you think he looked today?

MAN: I thought he looked fine.

BRACKETT: What do you think about the age question?

MAN: That doesn't affect me at all. I feel with his age comes a lot of knowledge.

WOMAN: At the speaker's table there was a man sitting next to him on his left that's about 18 years younger than he, and he looked just as young, and he spoke just as vibrant, and his ideas are right with -- up to date with the people.

BRACKETT: This three-stop day in the Detroit area is typical of a Reagan campaign swing. In contrast, Walter Mondale has been in five states in the last two days. But Reagan advisors believe the best way to counter the age question is to have a rested and vigorous President face the crowds and the cameras, and it is unlikely that the President's schedule will be increased.

LEHRER: In an effort to further defuse the issue, the White House released details of a medical exam the President took last May. The White House said the exam showed the President was in A-1 health. Meanwhile, members of the House of Representatives were debating Mr. Reagan's age and his performance in Sunday's debate. Some Republicans were particularly upset by an article in today's Washington Post which quoted Congressman Tony Coelho, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Rep. JERRY LEWIS, (R) California: When Coelho was asked if the President acted doddering, he said -- he's said to have replied, "Well, he didn't quite drool." Tony, that's going a bit far. I must say that you and I have talked often about how good the President looks. It seems to me that we ought to draw some lines here that are reasonable. The age issue is not an issue with this President.

Rep. TONY COELHO, (D) California: Would the gentleman yield? I'm intrigued with your question. The question from the reporter was, "Do you think that the President was old and doddering and drooling?" And I rose to the defense of the President; I said he wasn't drooling.

Rep. LEWIS: Tony, you show an awful lot of class when you get to the edges. Frankly, our friendship will continue, but you've drawn the line in my mind. I hope you'll back off.

Rep. ROBERT WALKER, (R) Pennsylvania: Mr. Speaker, we've come to expect the kind of vicious personal attacks launched by Congressman Coelho and the other Democratic Party leaders yesterday and here today. What I think the American people need to understand is why the Democrats engage in this kind of gutter politics. Personal attacks and spreading fear messages are the Democrats' way of trying to dismiss the real issues of this campaign year.

Rep. JOHN LaFALCE, (D) New York: It wasn't a political party, it wasn't a United States Congressman, that made age an issue. It's important to realize that it was President Reagan's performance Sunday evening in the joint appearance that made age the issue. A good many individuals said after viewing that performance, "Either President Reagan is incompetent to be president of the United States for the next four years, or he is incapacitated so that he can't and shouldn't be president of the United States for the next four years." Now, those are presently an issue: his competency and his capacity.

MacNEIL: Walter Mondale said today that President Reagan under campaign pressure continued to be "born again" on issue after issue. Addressing one of the largest rallies of his campaign, Mondale told a crowd of some 15,000 in Pittsburgh that he had called the President's bluff yesterday on Social Security. Today he extended the challenge to Medicare. The Democratic candidate also had answers for some Reagan jibes.

Vice Pres. WALTER MONDALE, Democratic presidential candidate: This morning the President said the problem in the debate was makeup. That's the same answer Nixon gave when he debated Kennedy. But, Mr. President, the problem isn't makeup on the face, it's the makeup on those answers that gave you a problem. Yesterday he said he wants to arm-wrestle me. Well, we had a little brain wrestle on Sunday night, didn't we? And in the next debate a week from Sunday, when we debate foreign policy, he'll find that the issue that worries Americans is not arms wrestling, but the need for arms control.

Yesterday, after I called his bluff, the President said he wouldn't cut Social Security for anyone. Well, does he think we've forgotten? This is exactly the same pledge he made four weeks before the 1980 election. Today, Mr. President, I demand, the American people demand, tell us right now before the election whether you're going to continue to go after Medicare, undermine the support for seniors, or whether you will pledge to support that program. Let's hear it.

MacNEIL: Back in Washington, Mr. Reagan also had further comments on Social Security.At that informal news conference on the White House lawn, the President said his promise yesterday not to cut the benefits of future recipients was consistent with his position all along.

Pres. REAGAN: I've said over and over again, we're never going to take away from those people who are dependent on Social Security, now or in the future. I am terribly concerned that this demagoguery about Social Security is frightening senior citizens, and there's just no fairness and no rightness at all in leaving these people uncertain as to what their situation is going to be when they have particularly no place else to turn but Social Security. And we're not going to let them down, and I've been saying that since before I was President. The Debate: As the Media See It

MacNEIL: Before Sunday's presidential debate in Louisville, many political experts said the real impact on public opinion wouldn't be known for several days, until the public had had a chance to digest the results and hear journalistic analyses. And since media coverage, for better or worse, can play such an important role in shaping public opinion, we decided to sample the media fallout from the debate. Most of the nation's newspapers were on deadline right after the debate, so many Monday headlines were rather noncommittal, like these. But by Tuesday, things had changed. For instance, Monday's main headline in Long Island's Newsday said "Round One: The '84 Debates." But Tuesday's front page read. "Debate Unsettling to Reagan Camp."

Walter Mondale also did very well in many newspaper editorials, most of which began appearing yesterday. For instance, the Orlando, Florida, Sentinel wrote, "The presidential race could have ended Sunday night if underdog Walter Mondale had fit his wimpy image, and Ronald Reagan had seemed his usual presidential self. Instead, the debate turned out to be the best thing of this political season. If voters were listening as well as watching, the next four weeks will be a two-way race, not a runaway." The Wichita, Kansas, Eagle Beacon agreed, saying Mondale ". . . showed a command of the facts that made him seem indeed presidential. President Reagan seemed to be struggling . . ." The Burlington, Vermont, Free Press saw the debate as a "clear victory for the challenger." And the Denver Post in an editorial headlined "Mondale Edged Reagan wrote, ". . . Mondale showed flashes of wit and passion . . . while the President looked defensive and distracted, if not outright confused." And even the newspaper in Sunday's host city was tough on the President. The editorial headline of the Louisville Courier Journal said, "Mondale put on surprisingly good show, while an uneasy Reagan bent the facts." Jim?

LEHRER: But Walter Mondale did not score a complete sweep in the nation's newspapers. The conservative Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader gave a mixed reading. "The winner? Mondale, in terms of aggressive debating style and general demeanor. Reagan, if you're looking for substance in terms of the issues that are of most concern to the electorate." And the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, "Reagan remains the favorite, not because he performed well Sunday, but because he din't commit any catastrophic blunders." Two of the most influential and damaging articles to Mr. Reagan came yesterday, and they came from unexpected sources. The op ed page of the generally liberal Washington Post carried a stinging column by conservative columnist George Will, which strongly criticized Mr. Reagan's Sunday performance. Perhaps even more damaging, however, was a front page article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, the nation's largest daily paper, which stated, "New Questions in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Whowing His Age? Reagan Debate Performance Invites Open Speculation On His Ability to Serve."

The progression of the debate story on the television news programs rolled almost the same way. Although the network newscasts talked earlier of a Mondale win, on Monday night the verdict appeared to be in.

PETER JENNINGS [ABC News World News Tonight, October 8]: Good evening. So what do you do after a presidential debate? You debate who's won. All across the country today people have had an opinion on who won the first presidential debate of the season. Various news agencies have taken polls, and we'll have the results of ours. They all give it to Walter Mondale by varying degrees.

DAN RATHER [CBS Evening News, October 8]: Good evening. This is the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather reporting. Showdown day plus one. First impressions, though not necessarily last or lasting, say it was Walter Mondale's night. A CBS News/New York Times poll overnight, even some of President Reagan own advisors, give Mondale the nod in last night's candidate forum.

LEHRER: By last night, the story on our program and others centered on the age question, many of them triggered and fed by the Wall Street Journal piece.

Mr. JENNINGS [October 9]: Good evening. In the presidential campaign today, the battle was about old age. Mr. Reagan and Mr. Mondale were fighting about what's going to happen to Social Security benefits, and for the first time in a very open way, the President's age has been a subject for debate.

JIM LEHRER [NewsHour, October 9]: And the issue that many thought would never get raised was on the front page today. Said The Wall Street Journal in its lead story, "The President's rambling responses and occasional apparent confusion injected an unpredictable new element into the race." Said Democratic campaign official Tony Coelho on the front page of the Los Angeles Times: "He looked old and acted old, and he is old."

LEHRER: On NBC, John Chancellor had this comment last night: "Now that the President has stumbled, every columnist, cartoonist, editorial writer and commentator is going to produce something about the flaws in the Republican campaign." Chancellor went on in his NBC commentary to quote from The Wall Street Journal article that first raised the questions about Mr. Reagan's age. Robin?

MacNEIL: One media critic has been monitoring press coverage of this debate as he has in past presidential debates. He's Edwin Diamond, who heads the Press Study Group at MIT in Boston, and teaches journalism at New York University. Mr. Diamond has used the debate coverage as an exercise for both groups of his students. What does your survey show how the media have played this debate?

EDWIN DIAMOND: Well, we did the same thing as you did, looked at newspapers and looked at television coverage. And what we see is a decline in the tentativeness curve, so to speak. Right after the election -- right after the debate, excuse me, fairly noncommittal, and then by Monday night, beginning to report the poll results, and by Tuesday night, obviously clearly declaring a winner. Why? I think journalists, the press institution, can never get too out in front of its audience, and especially with the perception of the press as being liberal or being anti-Reagan. So the press did not want to get out in front, it seemed to me, on this story and it waited until the people spoke, and then began reporting that story.

MacNEIL: How do you explain the impression, if you agree with it, that we got from looking at this survey that as the week has gone on, the sort of sense that Mondale won has got firmer and firmer?

Mr. DIAMOND: Well, again, I think it's the press as a reactive system rather than an active system. The poll results came in, the people who watched the debate pronounced their decision, and the press felt more emboldened to report this and not feel that their flank -- their left flank, so to speak -- would be exposed to any criticism of being unfair to Mr. Reagan, because the public was speaking.

MacNEIL: And then as more and more people agree, do they feel further emboldened to make it even --

Mr. DIAMOND: Right. It gets to be an echo chamber, and each --

MacNEIL: Then it becomes a consensus.

Mr. DIAMOND: Well, the evening newscasts, the people that produce the evening newscasts have read the morning papers, that report this evidence of the public agreeing on the Reagan defeat. Then they put that on the evening news. The people who put out the next morning's papers are watching the evening newscasts, and it's a reinforcementsystem.

MacNEIL: Are there sort of opinion leaders who are necessary in this thing, that the press feels more confident in following, once they have uttered?

Mr. DIAMOND: I think that's a good question. I would say, George Will in a way has been a kind of a key figure. Known as a -- first of all, he's thoughtful, and secondly, he's conservative and he's known as a Reagan supporter. And the fact that you highlighted his -- also, he's honest, I think, and he calls them the way he sees them; unlike a White House aide who will put the best face on it. But I think the real opinion leader in this case was not an individual or a group or the media, but the public. Ninety million, 80-90 million people saw that debate. Now, you and other reporters, the news media, have been talking about the issue of age for a long time. It's not a new issue.

MacNEIL: We haven't. We haven't.

Mr. DIAMOND: Well, I mean, reporters have brought up whether Reagan has been kept -- the phrase used, "his handlers," you know, and that Reagan makes only a few appearances a day. That's at least been brought out in the other newscasts.

MacNEIL: Now, I'll you in fact, we've debated in our internal editorial meetings whether we should -- whether the age issue was a genuine issue in this campaign, and until Monday or so of this week, we didn't think it had surfaced as an issue, so we never mentioned it.

Mr. DIAMOND: Well, reporters have kept hinting at the fact that he's under wraps, kept under wraps, not too many events each day. I think we agree on that. Now, so it's not a new issue. Reagan's only two days older today than he was on Sunday. What happened was that 80 or 90 million people who are not media experts watching and reading 10 newspapers like you, and your staff, or watching four newscasts at once like your hydra-headed staff -- but people who've just begun to dial in on the presidential campaign, really. They have other concerns. Sending kids back to school, coming back from vacation, they dialed in on Sunday and they saw this, their leader, looking visibly tired and maybe a little confused. So if you ask who the opinion leader in this matter is, it was the people who voted and told the pollsters that they thought Mondale had won.

MacNEIL: Let me ask you about another phenomenon. Television is able nowadays, as it does in sports coverage, to instantly replay -- and then replay many times in news programs and things -- highlights, and they've done that in this debate, as they did in others. What is the effect of replaying moments like that, and which moments in this debate do you think the nation is going to remember?

Mr. DIAMOND: It's reinforcement, and we've saw -- we've studied, my colleagues and I have studied, the '76 debates and the '80 debates. And in '76 it was Gerald Ford liberating Poland from Eastern European rule -- which may have gone by a lot of people, but the press kept replaying that tape and pointing that out, and you could see Ford drop in the polls. I mean, instantly after the debate, Ford seemed to be doing very well in the polls, but with the press talking about the Eastern European gaffe, repeating the mistake, he began dropping. In '80, it was -- what do people remember? Reagan saying "There you go again" to Jimmy Carter, and Jimmy Carter revealing that he discussed nuclear nonproliferation with Amy. So those bits, or bytes, as you call them, get replayed over and over again and they become fixed in the mind, reinforcement. You know, when you walk out of -- as a teacher, you tell students, after you read a book or see a play, discuss it, because that will fix the events in your mind. Well, the same thing, what television and the newspapers do, is fix the event in their mind. And what bytes will be played about from Sunday. Mondale turning it around, right?

MacNEIL: This is very interesting, because, a lot of people praise the debate because it's an opportunity for many millions of Americans -- 80 million, it's estimated in this case -- to watch and judge for themselves, the first opportunity to see the two candidates side by side for 90 minutes. Is that more what causes the electoral impact, or the impact on public opinion; or this reinforcement process you're describing in the media? Which has the greater impact on how people feel in the end about that?

Mr. DIAMOND: That's a very good question. I think, you know, the shorthand about the medium being the message, or the media being the message, I don't think so. I think that the message is the message. A reality occurred on Sunday night that 80 million people saw, unfiltered and uninterpreted by anybody else. They saw something happening on that screen. Now, Mondale seemed to look better than they thought he would, as some of the editorials pointed out; Reagan seemed to look more tired and more confused than they thought he would. So there was a reality. Now, the press is picking up in its reinforced -- in its reactive reinforcement system, it's picking that up and echoing it and re-echoing it, and fixing those new images. Now whether this will have anything to do with, you know, what happens on Election Day --

MacNEIL: Now, how do you feel, I mean, you're a journalist, but you're also detached in a way -- you're an academic, you're a media critic -- how do you feel about this process? Is this a healthy process, do things about it give you anxiety, what?

Mr. DIAMOND: I don't want to sound like Little Mary Sunshine, but I think, you know, when 80 or 90 million people are allowed to make their own judgments, to see things relatively unfiltered. You know, in the political ads, we get the 30 seconds, the candidate is controlled by his media managers; on the newscasts, the commercial newscasts, we get the 30 or 45 seconds of the candidate as controlled by the producers of the news. At least in the debate -- we know they're not really debates, but in these parallel news conferences, we do get the candidates for 90 minutes, and fairly close to election day, when I maintain, and all the voting data that I have looked at shows a lot of Americans have not dialed into the campaign until now. So this is in a way the beginning of the campaign for many people. And that's good, I think.

MacNEIL: Well, Edwin Diamond, thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Tonight's 30-second report on Congress and its continuing stalemate over money features a line from Senator Warren Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire. He said today, "We're engaged in a very interesting game of Chicken, and we're all looking like turkeys." Senate negotiators want to kill funding for water projects, the House doesn't; the House wants funding cut for anti-Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua, but the Senate doesn't. It's all part of negotiations over the stalled omnibus spending bill. The government meanwhile continues to operate on temporary funding bills, the latest of which expires tomorrow night. If a compromise on the other is reached and passed, Congress could adjourn for the year tomorrow night. Stay tuned. Robin?

MacNEIL: Still to come on tonight's NewsHour: reporter Don Oberdorfer on the significance of the pending peace talks in El Salvador; an interview with Israel's new prime minister Shimon Peres; and a look at a special art exhibition in St. Louis, the paintings of Max Beckmann.

[Video postcard -- San Francisco] El Salvador: Peace at Hand?

LEHRER: The major foreign affairs story continued to be El Salvador, the coming peace talks between President Duarte and the leaders of the anti-government leftist guerrillas. Duarte asked the guerrilla leaders to meet him Monday in the mountain town of La Palma.Yesterday they accepted the invitation. Today Secretary of State Shultz stopped in El Salvador for a meeting with Duarte. Some perspective now on this possible breakthrough in the five-year El Salvador civil war from Don Oberdorfer, diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post, and a frequent guest on this program.

Don, as you just heard, I used the term "possible breakthrough." What would you use?

DON OBERDORFER: Well, I think if they have the meeting, it will be a breakthrough. That doesn't mean that peace is breaking out in El Salvador, but it will mean that for the first time there are meetings between the rebels and the government, and I think that would be extremely important.

LEHRER: All right. Let's go back to the beginning, and then we'll come to what the conclusions might be. Was this in fact Duarte's idea? Is this all done on his own initiative, or what do you know about that?

Mr. OBERDORFER: What I understand, and what makes sense to me, is that Duarte is a man who has been much more amenable to negotiations than the previous administrators of El Salvador. He knows many of these people; you know, he was in political alliance with some of the people who now are in the rebels. Ever since he was elected, the real question has been when is he going to open some kind of a talk with the rebel forces, or try to do that? Up to now he has said, "It's not the time for it, we have to assure the security of the country first." And most people reached the conclusion that he would not do it until sometime next year. He has had discussions on this point, quite a bit of them with United States representatives, the State Department, the embassy down there in San Salvador. And last week he decided to go ahead and do it now, that is to say, now, on next Monday.

LEHRER: Any particular reason why now?

Mr. OBERDORFER: Well, there are two or three theories about it.October 15th happens to be the anniversary of the coup in El Salvador with -- the reformist coup of 1979, which is important in the country. It is believed that October the 15th may be a day when a rebel offensive starts, it has been expected that there will be an offensive sometime soon. There are two or three other things, by the way, that are going on in that Central America on October 15th. Duarte wanted to make a speech at the United Nations and have some news in it. Daniel Ortega had just been up there a week ago and made his speech, with a lot of heavy publicity, at the United Nations. And whatever the process was, he decided that this would be a good time for a dramatic move. He cleared it with his military people as we understand, as I think he said on this program --

LEHRER: Yeah, yeah.

Mr. OBERDORFER: And he went ahead and made the proposal, and the rebels immediately accepted.

LEHRER: And he told Robin in the interview that Robin did with him on Monday that he didn't tell anybody at the State Department he was necessarily going to do it.

Mr. OBERDORFER: Well, I believe they knew on Saturday. He might not have personally, maybe he kept himself in that way, but somebody at the U.S. embassy, in the U.S. government, I understand knew on Saturday.

LEHRER: Okay. The other side. The guerrillas accepted the invitation; what's the reasoning there? What motivated them?

Mr. OBERDORFER: Well, they have been consistently calling for negotiations over many, many months, and they have been taxing the governmental authorities in El Salvador with failure to negotiate. So for them, if it is a practical thing to do for them to come to this town, which is, I understand, in territory which is more controlled by the rebels than it usually is by the government, it's not a big surprise I think that they have accepted. Something that's really interesting about this is that right now an area of the world, Central America, which has been almost fixed for months and months; you could hardly see anything happening there that was different. Suddenly --

LEHRER: All kind of grim down the line, too.

Mr. OBERDORFER: Yes. Suddenly just about every ball is in the air, diplomatically. This one is, the meeting in El Salvador between Duarte and the rebels, if it comes off and as of today it seems likely to come off; the Contadora peace process of the various states in Central America have drawn up a treaty, and Monday is the final deadline for comments to be given on that treaty by the Central American countries.

LEHRER: The key element there of course being Nicaragua.

Mr. OBERDORFER: That's right; Nicaragua, as you remember, several weeks ago suddenly said they would accept the treaty. The United States then began to have second thoughts about the whole thing, and sort of backed away.

LEHRER: But, it it still, as you said, the ball is still there.

Mr. OBERDORFER: That's right, and there's going to be a meeting toward the end of next week in Honduras, it seems, to discuss this, what do we do about this big treaty? Daniel Ortega went to the United Nations; he announced that on October 15th, the United States was going to invade Nicaragua.

LEHRER: Ortega, of course, being the leader of the junta, the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua.

Mr. OBERDORFER: Yes. And right now, on Capitol Hill, as you've just said, they are deciding the fate, at least for the time being, of the U.S. support for the contras, the anti-government rebels fighting in Nicaragua.

LEHRER: Is there a neat ribbon you could put around all of this, Don?

Mr. OBERDORFER: There isn't any neat ribbon, at least that I know about, but it does seem that we're in a period of great movement. How much real motion is going -- how much real movement is going to come out of this -- there's a lot of effervescence, as one of the officials said to me today.How far this is going to get anybody, who can tell; but instead of being a region where everything has been kind of set in concrete, all of a sudden there are all kinds of moves taking place, and of course at a time when it's just a month before the American elections and -- the one element I haven't mentioned, that's very much a live one -- a month before the Nicaraguan election. Willy Brandt is going down to Nicaragua on Friday of this week to make one more effort to try to get an accord between the Nicaraguan government and Arturo Cruz, so that the real opposition can participate.

LEHRER: Well, a very interesting time. Thank you very much, Don. Robin?

MacNEIL: President Reagan forwarded to Congress late today a report saying that the Soviet Union has shown "selective disregard" for arms control agreements over the past 25 years. The report said about half of the arms control agreements had been breached by open violations, probable violations, or circumventions. The report, covering the years 1958-83, was prepared by the bipartisan General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament at the request of conservatives in Congress. They contend that the Soviets have violated existing arms treaties. In forwarding the report, the President placed himself at arm's length from it by saying the administration had not reviewed it first.

Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres said today that Israeli troops in Lebanon could withdraw within six to nine months if the security of Israel's northern border could be secured by the right forces. Peres wound up his talks with the Reagan administration about ways of meeting Israel's economic crisis. Peres, the head of a government of national unity formed last month, flew to New York, where he also met with the Democratic presidential contender Walter Mondale. We have an extended interview with Shimon Peres coming up; but before that, a profile of the man who's become prime minister at a singularly difficult time in his country's history.

SHIMON PERES, Israeli Prime Minister: Ach dut leu mit.

YITZHAK SHAMIR: L'chaim!

MacNEIL [voice-over]: To life. With that traditional Hebrew toast, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir promised to live together in an unusual political marriage. It's a power sharing national unity government between the Labor Party and the conservative Likud bloc. Israel's political and economic ills, resistant to easy solutions, generated a hard-fought but inconclusive election. Both Labor and Likud won nearly equal numbers in the Knesset, but after weeks of deadlock, talks and more talks, a deal was struck, and Shimon Peres achieved a lifelong ambition.

Peres had been waiting in the wings for years. His ambitions had first been thwarted by a bitter personal feud with his longtime rival, Yitzak Rabin, Labor's last prime minister, and then by the tenure of the Likud coalition and former prime minister Menachem Begin.

For nearly four decades in government, Peres was a familiar figure on the political scene. If he's not one of Israel's founding fathers, he is one of its founding sons. Recruited from a kibbutz in his early 20s, he procured arms for the Jewish resistance. After independence, he became a protege of the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who sent him to the United States to get more weapons for a new nation beset by hostile neighbors. After three years, Ben-Gurion brought him home and installed him as director-general of the defense ministry. Peres was only 29 years old.

Peres has spent most of his career in and out of defense. He's credited with master-minding Israel's military and technological industries, pushing the development of new weapons, aircraft and the construction of a nuclear reactor.In 1959, Peres the technocrat became Peres the politician.Ben-Gurion helped his rising star win a seat in the Knesset, and Peres served in successive Labor governments.

For Golda Meir he held a variety of cabinet posts, including transportation and information minister. Peres was defense minister under the next prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, when Israel conducted its daring raid on Entebbe to free hijacked Israeli airline passengers in 1976. He rejoiced in its success and led prayers for a woman killed in the rescue. Peres was a key player in the shuttle diplomacy of Henry Kissinger that led to the disengagement of the Israeli and Egyptian forces after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Even out of office, as the opposition leader in the Knesset, he helped advance the new peaceful relationship with Egypt, meeting with Mubarak, the man who would succeed Sadat. After he turned over the defense ministry to the Likud's new minister, Ezer Weizman, Peres turned to rebuilding a Labor Party shattered by scandal and electoral rejection. He carefully established his own power base by politicking the old-fashioned way, remembering a name, recognizing a face, showing up for weddings and bar mitzvahs. Critics said Peres was shopworn; he ran against Begin in 1981 and lost. He's earned the fervent opposition of those who advocate absorbing the captured Arab land on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But Peres campaigned on economic issues in 1984; and won enough votes to edge the Labor Party and himself back into government.

Peres came to the U.S. looking for long-term solutions to Israel's economic crisis. Israel's inflation rate is over 400% a year, and climbing; there's a big trade deficit, a huge foreign debt, stagnant productivity; and there's the politically and financially draining cost of keeping military forces in Lebanon and building settlements on the West Bank. Yesterday President Reagan offered cooperation to help Israel solve these problems, but put off until next year any move to increase U.S. aid to Israel above the present $2.6 billion a year. This afternoon I spoke to the Prime Minister at his hotel in New York. Peres Talks About the Future

MacNEIL: Mr. Prime Minister, are you disappointed that the Reagan administration did not give you an explicit promise or offer of more aid right now?

SHIMON PERES, Israeli Prime Minister: No. I didn't ask for. I came actually with two points in my mind. One is the long range economic recovery of Israel, the restructuring of our economy from the traditional industrial economy into the more modern, science-based, high-tech economy.And I have asked for an American participation in it and I got a positive response. Then I presented our military needs for the coming four years; I didn't expect to get an immediate answer, but by and large the reaction was very encouraging as far as I am concerned.

MacNEIL: Given the economic crisis in Israel, what did you get from the Reagan administration that you can show to foreign bankers who are not willing very much to lend Israel more money at present?

Prime Min. PERES: The President in his declaration has shown a support for the moves we have taken in Israel and the trials that we can overcome, the crisis, and he has also promised support in case we shall need it, in the way of [unintelligible], or what you call a standby. And the administration on its own initiative has decided to advance an important part of the economic aid ahead of time, an amount of $1.2 billion.

MacNEIL: That is normally paid quarterly, will be paid in one lump.

Prime Min. PERES: Right, exactly so. I didn't ask for more.

MacNEIL: I see. Did the administration say that if you carry your belt-tightening, your austerity plan, further, then they will offer more U.S. aid, military or economic aid?

Prime Min. PERES: No conditions were put before me, but I have had a very attentive audience on our plans, and when it recover the Israeli economy for Israeli reasons, not for American reasons.

The national unity government is relatively a very young government. They are in existence only three weeks. In the first two weeks we took already very drastic steps to overcome the crisis; we shall continue to do so. And we were telling our American counterparts what we are telling our people, that we have to pass through a difficult period of time, maybe half a year, maybe a year, but eventually we can manage the crisis and emerge by far stronger than we ever used to be before.

MacNEIL: Economists not only here but in Israel are saying that unless you carry your austerity program further than you have already -- more than a $1 billion budget cut -- unless you end or reduce the indexing of wages to the rate of inflation, that the sickness will not be cured. Do you agree with that?

Prime Min. PERES: Yes.

MacNEIL: Or there can't be more austerity?

Prime Min. PERES: No, I agree with their reasoning; I don't agree with their consequences, with the results. We can easily cut additional $1 billion from our national budget, we can do it in five minutes. But the result will be reducing the effectiveness of the Israeli strengths. Israel is a fighting democracy; out of the $11 billion which is our operational budget, half of it goes for the maintenance of our armed forces. Now, we pose the same problem before our American friends: what do you want us to be, stronger economically and weaker militarily, or to maintain our military and for that reason our political effectiveness, at the cost of an economic strength? And nobody suggested that we shall cut our military effort.

MacNEIL: Isn't the economic crisis for the first time in your country's short history a greater risk -- put the country at greater risk than the threat from your Arab neighbors? In other words, doesn't the immediate economic crisis outreach the defense situation?

Prime Min. PERES: You are right, but the difference is that when it comes to the threat we are facing from the Arab side, we don't have a partner to deal with; but when it comes to the economic issue, we do have a partner, out own people.

MacNEIL: Your own people.

Prime Min. PERES: And we shall try and we shall overcome the crisis, I don't have the slightest doubt about it.

MacNEIL: Politically, some people in your country have raised the fear that the austerity program will weigh so heavily on working people, whose tendency in recent years has been to support the right wing in Israeli politics, that the act of restoring the economy will make accommodations with your Arab neighbors more difficult, because it will increase support for the parties that oppose that.

Prime Min. PERES: Well, you know, my own mentor was David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel. And one of the lessons he has taught me was that all experts are experts for things that happened. You can rarely find in life an expert that can tell you what will happen. The fact is, in my judgment, that if the Israeli people will see a serious Arab partner who is ready to make peace, the support for it will grow immediately. You know, the same thing --

MacNEIL: Including among your Likud partner -- coalition partners?

Prime Min. PERES: Undoubtedly. The same was with the Egyptians. If you would have a public poll before Sadat came to Jerusalem, and you would ask the people and surely the Likud people, would you give back the whole of Sinai, the answer would be No. Then when Sadat came to Jerusalem, he offered peace, the reaction of the Israeli people including the Likud members was pleasantly surprising.

MacNEIL: Do you believe that the recent reestablishment of diplomatic relations by King Hussein of Jordan with Egypt presages a move towards you by Jordan?

Prime Min. PERES: No, not necessarily so. But we support and we favor the Jordanian move, because they actually establish diplomatic relations with an Arab country which has a peace treaty with Israel, and an Arab capital where you have an Israeli embassy with the Israeli flag hoisted. So we think it's a right move, an encouraging move; it doesn't mean that tomorrow morning we are going to have a peace treaty with the Jordanians. I am afraid the Jordanians are not as yet ready. Though we shall never stop to offer them, to begin a serious negotiation without prior conditions and they have the full right to make their proposals whether we like it or not, we shall sit seriously with them around the very same table and try to look for a solution.

MacNEIL: Your Labor Party did not approve of the policy as far as the Begin government went and the Shamir government, of establishing settlements on the West Bank. How much is that policy going to be changed as the result of the sort of compromise between you and Likud that is the national unity government?

Prime Min. PERES: I think there is going to be a change; party we took the view which in our judgment is reasonable, advocated by the Likud, namely not to dismantle any existing settlement. By the way, in the Reagan plan, the results are equally against dismantle existing settlements. But then both parties have agreed that when it will come to the implantation of new settlements, you must have a majority in the cabinet, and the cabinet, which is composed of equal forces, in other words, they must have our consent in order to build new settlements.

MacNEIL: You've been saying here in the United States, you told ABC last night, that you were confident that your troops could be out of Lebanon within nine months. What are the conditions for those troops getting out within nine months?

Prime Min. PERES: I said in between six to nine months, after the cabinet will decide, and I expect the cabinet to decide in a matter of a few weeks, so it doesn't change really very much the timing. It is not a matter of conditions, but we have to deploy or to reach an agreement about the deployment of the major forces in Lebanon in way that there will not be a repetition of the danger to the security of the northern part of Galilee. We are talking about four different military forces: the Israeli, and we are ready to withdraw; the UNIFIL, the United Nations forces; the Lebanese army; and the Syrian army on the Lebanese soil. What we would like to see, in order to secure our country, we don't want to mix in the politics of Lebanon, that in the immediate region which is bordering Israel, the local Lebanese forces which exist already will remain.

MacNEIL: The General Lahad force, which you trained, which is Israeli-trained.

Prime Min. PERES: Yes, exactly so.

MacNEIL: And which the Syrians want disbanded.

Prime Min. PERES: Yes. The advantage of the Lahad forces stems from the fact that they were mobilized from the local population and we feel that the people living in the southern part of Lebanon are as interested in having a peaceful relations with Israel for their own safety and for our security.

MacNEIL: So if Syria won't agree to leave that force in place, you don't get out, is that it?

Prime Min. PERES: No, we don't need the Syrian permission, they remain where they are. The Syrians are not the bosses of Lebanon, and they cannot dictate to the Lebanese or to us what to do. There is a different story about the Syrian army -- I said there are four difference forces. When it comes to the Syrians, we would like to be sure that in the wake of our withdrawal, the Syrian troops will not expand deeper in Lebanon or to the south, closer to our frontier. This is a legitimate condition and we shall insist on it.

MacNEIL: A final question. You've seen the President, you're seeing Mr. Mondale this afternoon. Does it matter to Israel who is elected President of the United States?

Prime Min. PERES: Even if it matters, you don't expect me to say so during the campaign. But may I say with a great deal of appreciation that Israel is not a partisan issue in the politics of the United States. It so happened that we did enjoy the support of practically all parties. I think that President Reagan is extremely friendly to Israel, very friendly; and Mr. Mondale was friendly when he was Vice President in office. He is a friend; he's my personal friend, and I didn't come here to take part in your own elections.

MacNEIL: Prime Minister, thank you.

Prime Min. PERES: You're welcome. Portrait of an Artist

LEHRER: Finally tonight, a story from St. Louis. It's about Max Backmann -- Beckmann, let me try that again, Max Beckmann, an expressionist painter who lived in St. Louis for awhile after moving from his native Germany. The St. Louis Museum with another in Munich has put together an exhibition of Beckmann's work to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. From St. Louis, Mary McDermott of public station KETC, reports.

MARY McDERMOTT, KETC St. Louis [voice-over]: In the Max Beckmann retrospective we are given the chance to see the development of an artist through troubled times. Museum director James Burke shares his insight into this fascinating and sometimes disturbing collection.

JAMES BURKE, director, St. Louis Art Museum: Well, the trouble with Beckmann is that he doesn't fit into all the molds, because he changes so many times. I mean, each one of those years he reflects very much the conditions of the world that are going on around him. So a lot of people like to think he was a German expressionist, but he doesn't quite fit into that. And he didn't want to be identified with those people; he thought of himself as more of a realist, confronting the things that were happening in society and the things that were happening in himself.

McDERMOTT: What can you tell us about Max Beckmann's life?

Mr. BURKE: Well, he had quite a checkered life. He was born in Leipzig, he went to art school in Weimar; he got an enormous amount of recognition at a very early age. During World War I he was called up to the army and served as a medical orderly, and he suffered great psychological damage from a year in the war. He was totally changed person. In the '20s he became even more different and even more successful painter; he became a professor of painting at the Frankfurt Act School. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, he was kicked out of his job, not because he was Jewish, but because his ideas were considered by the Nazis to be degenerate. He went into hiding, he lived in Berlin for several years, and then in 1937, he moved to Holland and he lived out the war years in Amsterdam.In 1947, Beckmann came to the United States to take a position as a professor of painting at Washington University in St. Louis, where he stayed for two years, and then he was offered a job in Brooklyn and moved there for the last year of his life, dying in New York in 1950.

In the show you see some portraits which are very intimate and very personal. You see some still lifes which are very small; there are lots of beautiful drawings which tend to be very small. And there are paintings like this one which tend to be very large, almost museum-sized pictures, if you will, in which the subjects are not terribly clear. Beckmann always resisted describing these paintings; he didn't want you to know exactly what he had in mind, he wanted you to think out the picture, study it out, decide. So the show has quite an nice range of subjects, and we see in Beckmann's art those things which are very personal, we also see things which are very large and formal.

There hasn't been an artist since Rembrandt who did self-portraits so often as Beckmann did. In fact the first picture we see when we come into the show is a self-portrait, done when he was in his early 20s, and all through his life Beckmann did his own image. And I kind of find self-portraits interesting, because you know, there's the danger of being very vain in them, but there is the interesting thing that you can let them reflect your state of mind and the things that are happening to you. So here's one which is a little bit glum and serious, but there are other pictures where he sees himself with a hunting horn; another picture, the last one, standing in the studio smoking a cigarette as if looking away at a painting; and some other paintings at various other times of his life.

I think people will see what a rich and perplexing artist Beckmann was. I think you'll see a sense of the terrific active manner of painting that he enjoyed, which is very much being revived these days now that artists are interested in expressionist painting once again. And surely Beckmann is the hero of all of that. I think that people will see a reflection of the turbulent times of the 20th century, and I think they'll see a great, really even heroic individual in his own life reflected through the self-portraits when you go through a show like this.

LEHRER: That report by Mary McDermott of public station KETC St. Louis. The Beckmann retrospective leaves St. Louis November 4th for California, where it will be at the Los Angeles County Museum until February of next year.

Again the major stories of this day. Secretary of State Shultz in El Salvador blessed President Duarte's peace initiative with the leftist guerrillas.

Israeli Prime Minister Peres made a new offer to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon.

And of course there were more slings and arrows between Walter Mondale and President Reagan; today's crop mostly about Social Security and Medicare.

Good night, Robin.

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