The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

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

MS. WARNER: And I'm Margaret Warner in New York. After our summary of the news this Wednesday, we have a Newsmaker interview with Secretary of State Christopher on Haiti, a progress report on reinventing government, a second look at the search for a breast cancer gene, and a farewell to the lost baseball season. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: President Clinton said again today it was time for the military leaders of Haiti to go. He accused them of human rights abuses and said there were no other alternatives left but military intervention. But he said the leaders could still lead on their own. Other administration officials said today U.S. troops will be in Haiti very soon. A second aircraft carrier sailed for Haiti. The USS Eisenhower left Norfolk, Virginia, with nearly 2,000 U.S. troops aboard. The U.S.S. America left yesterday. Another 15 warships are already on patrol near Haiti. Deputy Sec. of State Strobe Talbott said a U.S.-led multinational force will take control in Haiti even if its military rulers do leave voluntarily. He said that will be necessary to prevent violence and disorder. At the White House, Press Sec. Dee Dee Myers talked about President Clinton's speech to the nation tomorrow night.

DEE DEE MYERS, White House Spokeswoman: The goal of his speech is essentially threefold: First is to explain to the American people our interest in Haiti; second is to describe the expanding coalition of nations and to explain the U.N. mission which is limited in purpose and time; and finally, it's to send a clear and unambiguous message to the military leaders in Haiti that we will act if we must and the time is getting very, very short for them to leave on their own.

MR. LEHRER: Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole said today he did not think the President would be able to make the case for U.S. intervention and Haiti policy was the subject of a Senate debate this afternoon.

SEN. DAN COATS, [R] Indiana: Mr. President, I doubt that one American in a hundred, if not one in a thousand, can explain what the justification is for an invasion of Haiti. Mr. Aristide is not the kind of individual the United States should be putting its credibility behind and installing by force into a nation which does not want him back and which does not believe he can lead that country to democracy.

SEN. JEFF BINGAMAN, [D] New Mexico:It is an unwise course to risk American lives for so tenuous a national interest. I hope Congress will be given the opportunity to express its will on this invasion before it occurs, and I hope the President and his national security team will have the courage to change course.

SEN. CHRISTOPHER DODD, [D] Connecticut: Ultimately, the only permanent solution is a political solution in Haiti that is responsive to the Haitian people. That is what President Aristide represents, and that's why I happened to believe it's so important that we make every effort to try and seek his return.

MR. LEHRER: We'll talk to Sec. of State Christopher about Haiti right after this News Summary. Margaret.

MS. WARNER: Researchers have isolated one gene that causes hereditary breast cancer and discovered the existence of a second. The breakthrough means a test may be available within one year to help determine a woman's risk for developing the inherited form of the disease. Hereditary breast cancer accounts for only about 5 percent of all breast cancers, but identifying the 600,000 women at risk could help save their lives. One of the three teams involved in the research is based at the National Institutes of Health in Washington. This afternoon, Dr. Harold Varmus, director of NIH, spoke at a news conference.

DR. HAROLD VARMUS, Director, National Institutes of Health: This discovery brings us one step closer to devising a test that will be useful in making prognostic statements about the risk to any individual of developing breast cancer. Those tests would first be applied to women who have a strong family history, later perhaps to the general population. At present, the findings do not bear on diagnosis of cancer in someone who has a positive mammogram, they do not bear upon therapeutic strategies. Ultimately, they might, but at this point, they do not.

MS. WARNER: We'll have more on this story later in the program. Agriculture Sec. Mike Espy announced a plan today to tighten meat and poultry inspection. If the plan is approved by Congress, the meat and poultry industry would have to actually test their products for bacterial contamination rather than rely on the current system of visual inspection.

MR. LEHRER: This was the first anniversary of President Clinton's reinventing government initiative. Vice President Gore heads the program, which is designed to cut the federal work force and make government run more efficiently. Mr. Clinton marked the occasion by cutting through a red tape on the White House lawn and by naming some of the program's accomplishments.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Since I became President, the size of the federal work force has been reduced by 71,000 positions. The savings already enacted by Congress or undertaken by the Executive Branch will amount to $47 billion in this budget cycle, and we're on the way to saving $108 billion.

MR. LEHRER: We'll have more on this story later in the program. Primary elections were held yesterday in nine states and the District of Columbia. Among them, Republican Minnesota's Republican Governor Arne Carlson beat conservative challenger Allen Quist by an almost two to one margin and former Washington, D.C. Mayor, Marion Barry, defeated two other Democratic candidates. His victory comes almost four years after serving a prison sentence for drug possession.

MS. WARNER: The rest of the 1994 baseball season was cancelled today. The word came from acting Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig after he consulted with team owners. The players had been on strike since August 12th. This will be the first baseball season without a World Series since 1904. We'll have more on this story later in the program. In economic news, the Federal Reserve said today that economic activity continued to expand over the summer. The report comes from the so-called "Beige Book," which reflects surveys done by the Fed's regional bank, and the Commerce Department reported today that retail sales rose .8 percent in August. Sales of automobiles and other big ticket items sparked the advance.

MR. LEHRER: That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to Sec. of State Christopher, reinventing government, the breast cancer gene, and the end of the baseball season. NEWSMAKER

MR. LEHRER: We go first tonight to a Newsmaker interview with Sec. of State Warren Christopher and to the subject of Haiti. Mr. Secretary, welcome.

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Good evening, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Is it correct to say tonight that a U.S.-led military intervention in Haiti is a certainty?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Jim, there will be U.S. military people in Haiti, that's a certainty, but the circumstances under which they enter there is still, I think, an alternative. That is to say, if the de facto leaders, if the military leaders in Haiti, will leave as they ought to do, then we'll enter in a permissive environment. That's a much different circumstance. If they don't leave, we'll enter in a more difficult environment.

MR. LEHRER: So it's still not too late for Gen. Cedras and his folks to call somebody and say, okay, we got the message, we're out of here?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: That's absolutely right. We hope they'll do that. That's the right thing for them to do in their own interest as well as in the interest of Haiti.

MR. LEHRER: Are we in direct contact with Gen. Cedras and his people?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, let me just say that a President has got a lot of options on that. We are going to leave no stoned unturned and give them an opportunity to make that decision, which is the right decision for them.

MR. LEHRER: Have we offered him any incentives other than threats to leave, in other words, monetary, free state passage somewhere, a great place in France, anything like that to get him out of there?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Jim, I've been saying and others have been saying in the government that if they decide to leave, we'll help them with the arrangements. The modality shouldn't be a problem, but what it takes is their decision to leave. I hope they'll make that within the very next few days.

MR. LEHRER: As we sit here tonight, at this moment, Mr. Secretary, are there any indications at all that Cedras is seriously considering leaving anytime soon?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: We don't have any such indications yet.

MR. LEHRER: Are there ongoing talks aimed at finding out for sure? I don't mean to keep belaboring the point.

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: I don't want to get into detail on that, but let me just repeat that we're going to explore every option, every alternative. The President has a number of different ways of approaching that, and they will not fail to leave because of the failure of communication. Now if they want to communicate with us, we'll be available to them, and we're taking some special steps in that regard.

MR. LEHRER: Special steps are being taken?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Yes, sir.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Let's assume that for discussion purposes that those special steps do not lead to Cedras and his people leaving. What kind of reception, what is the expectation of the reception that the U.S. troops will leave if it's a hostile situation?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, we are going to put in an overwhelming force, and I think the Haitian people will soon understand, i.e., the army and the police will soon understand that they're overwhelmed by that, and I would not expect any long period of fighting. But we're going to be prepared. Our military doesn't want to do this thing in a halfway measure, and we're not taking anything for granted. I would expect though that over the next few days after there is an intervention, the Haitian people would recognize that the American soldiers are coming there in order to enable them to restore democracy that they elected in 1990. And I would think the Americans will be well received.

MR. LEHRER: Is that a hope, or is that based on some information that we have about the state of mind of the Haitian people?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, I can say this. As you know, President Aristide was elected by more than 2/3 of the voters in 1990, and I haven't talked to anybody who knows Haiti who does not think that he would be reelected by that same margin if he were to run again. And so he's still very popular there, and I think that means that after we get through the first few days and after a secure environment can be established, that the American troops, the American official will be well received there.

MR. LEHRER: Well, back to the first few days. The figure I have read is that there are about 7,000 armed Haitian army troops. Is that right, or is it more than that?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: No. It's about that. And the state of their armament is really quite uncertain. They're not a very formidable fighting force, although I do want to say this, Jim. Whenever American soldiers go into a situation like that, there are always risks. We're as prudent as we can possibly be. We minimize those risks in every way that we can, but when American soldiers go into a hostile situation, it's always a matter of concern, and that's why it's such a big decision for the President. So they will go in there. We hope it'll be an environment that's not hostile very long, but we'll be prepared.

MR. LEHRER: And -- but there is the expectation that some of those 7,000 armed Haitians are going to shoot at the Americans when they come, correct?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, there is that possibility. I'm not sure there will be any prolonged opposition from them. They're not very well trained. They don't have a lot of -- you know, have a lot of weapons. They have relatively, you know, they maybe have one airplane and one or two helicopters, whether they're operational or not, we don't know; really, none of the kind of heavy weaponry that would take to stand off the American troops. So I don't think it'll be a prolonged struggle. At the same time, we don't want to minimize it. We're ready.

MR. LEHRER: Are there going to be steps taken to give the armed Haitian troops an opportunity to lay down their arms ahead of time? I mean, in other words, are the U.S. troops going to go over the heads of Cedras and the military leaders and try to get them to, to essentially give up ahead of time?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Of course, they'll do that when they get in there. They'll give them that opportunity as they move in, as they move into Haiti. On the other hand, let me stress that we're not going to take anything for granted. We're not going to take risks with our soldiers. We're going to make sure that we protect ourselves as well as we can. But if they want to give up, if they want to give up at the division level, if they want to give up at the company level, whatever level they want to give up at we'll welcome that.

MR. LEHRER: In our News Summary just now, you saw the same thing everybody else just saw, clippings from, a clip from the floor debate in the Senate that is beginning on Haiti.

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Yes.

MR. LEHRER: What is the administration's position on that tonight on whether or not the Congress of the United States will be asked or should be asked to either go to both thumbs up or thumbs down on this Haiti intervention?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, we intend to consult with them very closely, as we have been over the last several days. But I also think it's important that we protect the President's right to take his action under the Constitution as commander in chief of the military forces and to order them into Haiti if that's the decision he reaches. It's very important that the President be able to do that on his constitutional authority. But we will consult very closely, and we would welcome a resolution of support but we don't intend to ask for it.

MR. LEHRER: Although, you'd have no objection if the Congress undertakes a resolution and has a vote on it, right, is that what you're saying?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, we have, we have no basis. They will do whatever they expect to do. But the President still retains the constitutional authority, and he will retain that authority to act. And one of my duties as Secretary of State I think is to protect that presidential prerogative. There are many instances in which the President has to act very quickly, wouldn't be able to wait for congressional authorization, and that isn't just something to be applied in a given incident, or instance. That's a principle that we'll have to sustain.

MR. LEHRER: Well, Mr. Secretary, a lot of people raise the question, my goodness, we've gone to the United Nations and had a debate and had a vote there, or this thing has been out publicly, known for weeks now, months, that the U.S. was contemplating a military intervention in Haiti. Why -- this is not a surprise thing. Why has Congress not been asked to take -- to go -- to vote up or down?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, Jim, you know, Congress has taken various actions with respect to Haiti. An effort was made to restrain the President's options here, his authorization, and that was turned back by a very substantial vote. In another bill, Congress has laid down a series of tests for when the President might indicate that he should go in. So it isn't that Congress hasn't addressed it, they simply haven't addressed it in the way that you mentioned. They have not in any way restrained the President's power.

MR. LEHRER: Let's, for discussion purposes, let's assume for a moment that there is a vote in the House and/or Senate, and the majority says, no, Mr. President, please, they wouldn't -- it would be a non-binding resolution, but it asked the President not to intervene militarily in Haiti. Would that stop it?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Jim, of course, the President would make that decision, but my recommendation would be to him that he feels that there are -- if he feels there are important U.S. interests to protect, that he should go ahead and indicate those interests by acting. In short, I think the importance of presidential prerogative here is very significant for the United States and very significant for the Executive Branch over the long run.

MR. LEHRER: More important than having the support of the Congress of the United States for such a military intervention?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: I think it's more important to establish and maintain the principle of presidential authority and power. You know, you look back in our history, and there's been a long discussion of this. And very rarely does Congress give advance authorization. In the instances that are most comparable to this in recent times, Grenada and Panama, there was no advance authorization sought or obtained from Congress. But let me broaden this, if I might, Jim, and say to you -- and I think Congress needs to understand, and we need to communicate to the American people what the interests are here in this situation. I think when they do that -- when the President has an opportunity to do that tomorrow night, the American people will understand better than they do at the present time. This is a situation with a lot of history. Haiti held an election in 1990, the first time in 200 years they've had an open and free election. Now, that was a very important moment, but nine months after that, the military authorities overthrew this democratically-elected government. At that time, President Bush was in office, and he said that that overthrow was an exceptional threat to our national security, our foreign policy, and our economy. That's a direct quote from what President Bush said at that time. He went on to say that if we didn't confront that, if we didn't confront that overthrow at that time, then the anti-democratic forces throughout the hemisphere might be emboldened to do the same thing again in the future. Sec. Baker at that time went to the OAS and he said to the OAS, this coup must not and will not succeed. Now, that's very strong talk, but it's the same kind of thing we say and feel now. And the reason we do is because there are very important American interests. We've exhausted the other alternatives as to how to get this military group out.

MR. LEHRER: What is the overwhelming American interest?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Well, there are three that appeal to me most, and I think most understandable to the American people. First is our interest in the preservation of democracy in this hemisphere. We have a very favorable situation now in which all but two countries in the hemisphere are democratic.

MR. LEHRER: One being Cuba, the other one being Haiti.

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: We want to maintain that kind of a record, but if we fail to defend democracy in this particular instance, I think there's a very great risk that other military groups within the hemisphere may be emboldened to overthrow democratic governments. Democracy is very fragile, especially new ones. So the preservation of democracy is a major interest. Second, there is a very large humanitarian interest. You know, the American people want to do good in these situations, and I think that's a deep-seated American interest. We have been helping the Haitian people. We've been feeding almost a million of them on a daily basis, but the military leaders have been interrupting that feeding program, denying gasoline for purposes of vehicles to take the food to the people of Haiti. Part of that humanitarian interest is a human rights record on the part of the Haitian leaders that's the worst in the hemisphere. And it is getting worse. In the last few weeks and months, there's a new set of atrocities that are almost unbelievable. Now, this ties into the third reason why we have a very strong interest in Haiti, and that is, the issue of migration. Because of their human rights record, because of their abysmal humanitarian treatment of their own people, people have been trying to flee Haiti, and they've been coming to the United States in large numbers and creating severe problems not only here but throughout the region. Now, that's a very destabilizing fact within our region. And I think that is a third very powerful reason why we have to remove this military dictatorship and restore the democracy in Haiti.

MR. LEHRER: All the reporting that I have read about Congress says that the majority of the Congress, including Democrats, do not see it that way, that these are overriding interests in the United States. And the polls, in just a new one, the New York Times poll, 66 percent of the American people don't think military intervention is justified either. Do you believe that once the President says what you just said but says it to everybody tomorrow night on national television, that this will turn these things around, turn Congress around, turn the public around, and they will support this, and if they don't, is the President going to move anyhow?

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: You know, persuasion comes little by little. The President is certainly one of the most skillful at that I think by common consent. I think that will begin to move the American people and move the Congress. What I would say, Jim, is that the President does have to act in this situation. If he reaches the conclusion that American interests require him to act, then I feel confident that the members of the Congress and the American people will get behind this effort, will get behind our troops. I met long hours last night with eight rather senior Senators, and we talked this through. Not all of them were in agreement, but I think there was a common sense that if the President concluded that he had to do this, the nation would unify, and I would urge, again, that we calibrate what we say having in mind its effect on Gen. Cedras and Col. Francois, to remember that if we show unity here, they're much more likely to leave and to enable our troops to go into a non-hostile environment. That will be very important.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Mr. Secretary, thank you very much.

SEC. CHRISTOPHER: Thank you, Jim. A pleasure to be here.

MS. WARNER: Still to come, reinventing government, the breast cancer gene, and the end of the baseball season. FOCUS - A BETTER WAY?

MS. WARNER: Now, reinventing government. That's the term the administration uses to describe its one-year-old effort to streamline government. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has more. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The President's point man on the government's streamlining effort, Vice President Al Gore, declared a victory today, and his boss, the President, agreed. But there are those who say the government is still broke and so far this program hasn't fixed it. We hear two views on the plan now from Donald Kettl, who is with the Lafollette Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. He recently evaluated the reform effort, and Elaine Kamarck, Vice President Gore's senior policy adviser. Thank you both for joining. Ms. Kamarck, why is the White House so happy about the plan at this juncture, which is about a quarter of the way into its five-year goal, and how far has it gone in meeting President Gore's promise to make government do more for less?

MS. KAMARCK: We think we've made a good, solid first year's start, and as the President and the Vice President said today, this progress report -- that's what we delivered today -- is the first of many installments, because, after all, really fixing the government, making a government that works better and costs less, is going to take a lot more than a year. But in the first year, there are 71,000 fewer employees in the federal government now than there were when President Clinton took office. We are far along on the goal of saving the $108 billion over five years that we promised last year when we put out the report, and many agencies are starting to streamline the way they do business and focus their organization not on red tape and not on bureaucracy, but on the citizens that they're supposed to serve.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right now, 71,000 fewer employees, the goal was what --

MS. KAMARCK: The original goal was 252,000, and Congress raised it to 272,900.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: And the 71,000 fewer employees that now work in government are gone how?

MS. KAMARCK: Some through attrition, but last year --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You just didn't fill the jobs --

MS. KAMARCK: Just didn't fill the jobs. There have been some layoffs. And last year, for the first time, Congress passed, and the President signed, a bill giving buyout authority to the federal government. So in the month of March alone there were 15,000 buyouts offered and accepted by employees in the federal government. And those jobs were eliminated. We expect at the beginning of the next fiscal year more buyouts will be offered. And, of course, as people in the private sector know, buyouts are one mechanism for reducing your work force and also minimizing the pain and disruption to the people that used to work for you.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: In reaching your goal, is that the principle message that you'll be using, buyouts and attrition?

MS. KAMARCK: Yeah. We're hoping that we can do most of this with buyouts and attrition, although there are some places where the mission of the agency is changing dramatically, where their budgets have been cut, because, remember, budget pressure also is pushing this downsizing of the government, that President Clinton passed a very tight, five-year budget goal last summer, and those goals are now kicking in, so everybody is having to streamline, cut back on the work force, and figure out how to do better with less.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You mentioned customer service. I mean, can you give me some brief specific examples of how customer service has improved after something has been reinvented in the government?

MS. KAMARCK: Well, today we heard froma small businessman in San Antonio, Texas, who had been a recipient of the Small Business Administration's low doc loan. That was a loan that as a couple of years ago was a hundred pages just to get an under $50,000 loan.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Forms that he had to fill out.

MS. KAMARCK: Over a hundred pages of forms. And, in fact, he told us when his brother-in-law first suggested he go to SBA for some short-term help, he said, oh, you're crazy, that's the government, they'll take forever, but, in fact, the Small Business Administration has re-engineered that process. The form is now two pages. He got his loan in 48 hours and could pay his employees and expand his small business. So that's what we mean by really serving customers.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What about the famous example of the ashtray that President -- Vice President Gore used to walk around talking about how difficult it was just to get a replacement for an ashtray, I mean, how's the procurement?

MS. KAMARCK: The ashtray's gone, okay, just to make it a simple story.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Because nobody's smoking anymore, is that the reason?

MS. KAMARCK: Nobody's smoking anymore, but so is government floor wax and government specifications for bug spray and all the other silly things that the government procurement system generated over the years between the Defense Department and the General Services Administration, and a new piece of procurement legislation that is now pending in Congress. We have achieved, I think, in a year a really big step forward in transforming the way the government does its buying and having the government just do common sense buying.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. That sounds very impressive. Prof. Kettl, is the administration justified in patting itself on the back for the steps it has taken so far?

PROF. KETTL: I don't think there's any doubt that with the progress the administration has made in the last year that they deserve an enormous amount of credit for a couple of things, for getting management issues back on the middle of the agenda in a way that no administration has succeeded in doing in decades certainly and in making some important movements, especially of the sort that Elaine was talking about in terms of customer service. Those are very real and terribly important. That's, after all, why we pay taxes to try to get government to work that way. But the problem is how we make that stick for the long haul. And the big concern that some of us who have looked at this effort have is that some of the short-term efforts to try to shrink the size of the federal government may very well produce some big, long range problems in trying to make customer service, procurement reform, and all the other positive things really stick.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Give us an example that I can understand.

PROF. KETTL: Well, one of the problems is, for example, if we're going to cut 71,000 people, what strategies should we use to try to cut them? Air traffic control at O'Hare Airport is probably not the place to start. There are other places where we certainly, though, have far too many layers, too many bureaucrats, too many checkers of checkers. But the risk is that if you target your actions according to, first, people who decide to leave voluntarily, and, second, those who are willing to take a buyout, the people who leave may not be the people that you want to have leave. They may be people --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Excuse me.

PROF. KETTL: I'm sorry.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Go ahead.

PROF. KETTL: They may be the people who in many ways have the easiest time finding a job someplace else, and, therefore, are the people the government might be able to afford to lose the least.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. What about that, Ms. Kamarck? Who are these -- well, not all 71,000 -- but what about his main point?

MS. KAMARCK: We're very sensitive to Dr. Kettl's main point, and we've tried very hard to make this downsizing effort different from all previous efforts. The way I usually explain it is there's a smart way and a dumb way to cut the government. Most people prefer the dumb way, because that's just easier.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Which is --

MS. KAMARCK: Which is you just take every department, no matter who it is, and you just take 12 percent out of everybody. And the problem -- and I think Dr. Kettl brings it up -- is that you can end up cutting air traffic controllers. Well, we don't want to do that. What we are trying to require the agencies to do is look carefully at how they do their business, re-engineer, to use the term that a lot of companies use, and try to take out the unnecessary functions, the layers of bureaucracy, the layers of checkers, and really look at their organization from the point of what's their mission and how do they best serve the customer. And if somebody in that organization's job is not contributing to that bottom line of serving the customer, then I think you've got to question whether or not that job needs doing.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You've looked at this extensively. Does that answer your concern, Dr. Kettl?

PROF. KETTL: I think that's exactly the right way to go about doing it. But the problem is that at this point 71,000 federal employees have been cut. That's somewhere, a little bit more than a quarter of the way towards the administration's goal. But the fact is I think that the planning that Elaine is talking about has been lagging far behind the cuts that are being made. The idea was that the plans were to drive the cuts, and what's been happening so far is exactly the reverse. The agencies are now struggling to try to catch up and put some of these plans together to try to in the process figure out some smarter way of doing things.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Your larger point in that regard, though, is that they got so caught up in the employment short-term thing that they have not attended to systems, is that not right, in reforming systems?

PROF. KETTL: I think that's right. We need to re-engineer. We need to transform the federal government drastically, there's no doubt about that. But the reality is that if you look at the numbers -- if you look at where the administration's produced its savings, so far, all but $1 billion of the savings the administration can claim out of this effort has come through downsizing the federal work force. And to the degree to which this is presented as an effort to save money, it's got to be driven by an effort to try to downsize, and if you're interested in getting results fast, then you've got to try to cut fast. And the problem is that the logic, the short-term political logic -- and, if you will, the campaign logic to try to charge ahead quickly runs against the effort to try to do the more long range, more long lasting kinds of efforts and improvement that I think really lie at the core of the Vice President's effort.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Are you nodding in assent?

MS. KAMARCK: Well, I'm saying that I understand the concern, but the fact is that we don't have that kind of luxury in the real world, that, in fact, you have to do all of these things at the same time. And the reason is that we have a very, very tight budgetary situation in the coming years. So we are asking the government to really perform. We're asking them to take fundamental looks at their organizations. We're asking them to cut the fat, and we're asking them to downsize fairly rapidly.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Excuse me.

MS. KAMARCK: I guess my point is it's just a luxury that we don't have time for.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But how do you avoid downsizing and making the government worse?

MS. KAMARCK: Well, one principle is by focusing on your customers. Okay. That's why we talk so much about customer service. We don't want downsizing among front-line government employees. We don't want downsizing that makes lines longer at customs. We don't want the downsizing that makes the phone wait longer when you call the Social Security office. The downsizing is clearly focused in last year's report and this year's report at layers of unnecessary bureaucracy.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Mr. Kettl, I mean, so many administrations come into office promising reform, not any different from this one necessarily, and without much success. Do you have -- your criticisms notwithstanding -- hope and belief that this process can work, I mean, can government really be permanently cut?

PROF. KETTL: Oh, I think it can. I don't think there's any doubt about it, and I think the administration's asking exactly the right questions. The lesson that we have from the real world though is if you're going to ask the questions intelligently, you've got to answer them very carefully. There's a very interesting study that the Wyatt Company did looking at private sector downsizing. And the lesson that they came up with was this, that many, many companies in the last decade have tried to downsize. The lesson has been that those companies that haven't thought carefully about how to go about it have in many cases made their performance worse in the long run. I think that's the risk we have to try to avoid.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right.

PROF. KETTL: If the administration's interested in trying to shoot for performance in the long run, it's got to find some way of tying its goals of improved customer service and trying to figure out ways of making front line workers work better with the idea of downsizing the bureaucracy, because the problem is this in a nutshell, that if you tell people to go out, take lots of risks to try to do things to put themselves out on the line to improve customer service for citizens, but at the same time say that there's a chance your jobs may be cut, it's very hard to ask people to put that together.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Well, I think we're going to have to leave it there, but this has a five-year life span, so I'm sure we'll be hearing more about it during that interim, Prof. Kettl, and Ms. Kamarck. Thank you very much for joining us. SECOND LOOK - FOCUS - DETECTIVE STORY

MR. LEHRER: Now isolating a gene that causes some forms of breast cancer. It's a finding that will have a major impact on women with family histories of breast cancer. Last year, our Medical Correspondent Fred De Sam Lazaro reported on some of the research which laid the foundation for today's discovery. Here again is that report.

MR. LAZARO: Knowing the genetic basis of a disease allows doctors to go beyond early diagnosis to actually predict a disease with near certainty before it occurs. Nowhere are those benefits are expected to be more immediate and widespread than with breast cancer. Scientists expect it will be the next major disease for which a gene mutation is identified. Some families involved as research subjects have gotten a fore taste of how life will change when that happens. For example, Janet and Susan, who belong to a family hard hit by breast cancer. They insisted on anonymity for this interview, worried that genetic information about them might hurt their ability to buy insurance.

WOMAN: The thing is that we really don't even know what insurance companies would do with this information. We've been told not -- that we shouldn't let this information out.

MR. LAZARO: The idea that some breast cancer can be an inherited genetic disease seemed improbable when Dr. Mary-Claire King began testing it 20 years ago. The disease is widespread and triggered by many environmental and dietary factors, making it difficult to track down any genetic predisposition. But as a self-described radical feminist, Dr. King insisted, driven as much by political zeal as scientific intuition.

DR. MARY-CLAIRE KING, Geneticist: All of breast cancer is caused by changes in genes. There are some women for whom those changes in genes are inherited. Almost everybody was very skeptical about it, so was I, and I persisted with this problem, because it's an enormously important problem for women.

MR. LAZARO: King began the task of hunting down a single culprit gene from among the 100,000 in the human genome. These pieces of DNA protein lie on 23 pairs of chromosomes, and they account for all aspects of life. Similarly, all cancers are caused when a gene is defective or mutated, something that can be triggered either by heredity or by environmental factors.

SPOKESPERSON: Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at forty-six.

MR. LAZARO: Dr. King's lab examines DNA samples from several generations and hundreds of families, trying to track down any pattern peculiar to those members who got the cancer. This would point to an inherited defect. Yet, none was evident.

DR. MARY-CLAIRE KING: Many of them, of course, are families in which several women have had breast cancer coincidentally, because breast cancer is so common. So we decided to focus on families where many women had had breast cancer very young.

SPOKESPERSON: She had breast cancer first at 29, then again at 39.

MR. LAZARO: Breast cancer usually strikes women in their 50s, so through her research, King was intrigued by the younger, pre- menopausal patients. Although they make up only about 5 to 10 percent of all her subjects, it was in this group that King's lab got its breakthrough. These women had a distinct marker on their 17th chromosome, a genetic road sign indicating that a gene responsible for breast cancer was nearby. The marker was not present in family members who did not get breast cancer.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, Geneticist: I remember hearing about that result at a genetics meeting in Cincinnati in 1989, and it was really quite electrifying.

MR. LAZARO: Michigan geneticist Dr. Francis Collins himself became famous in 1989 for discovering the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. He says finding the breast cancer marker was a daunting task.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: The scale of the problem is similar to trying to find a single burned out light bulb in a closet in somebody's basement, somewhere in the U.S., without having any clue what state to look in, much less what town or what house. You could say that putting the genome chromosome 17 was like getting in the right state, say well, okay, it's in the state of Vermont. Finding that it was close to this marker that she identified narrowed it down to perhaps 10 percent of that chromosome, so saying you're in the right county.

MR. LAZARO: Collins joined forces with King and with several other laboratories also in pursuit, they predict the actual breast cancer gene will be found by the end of 1993. Identifying the so- called "breast cancer gene" will give doctors the ability to screen women who are at risk. A straightforward DNA test will tell if a woman has the mutation. If she does, there's an 85 percent chance she'll get breast cancer before menopause.

DR. BARBARA WEBER, Oncologist: You're basically sort of sitting in front of somebody with a crystal ball saying, we know what's going to happen to you.

MR. LAZARO: Michigan Oncologist Dr. Barbara Weber enjoys that diagnostic prowess already with some of her patients who are studied in Dr. Collins' lab next door. Because these families' DNA has been studied so extensively, doctors are already able to diagnose the presence of the breast cancer gene in research families.

SUSAN: And you feel like it's a science fiction movie or something. I mean, you just don't feel like it's real, what they're telling you.

MR. LAZARO: Susan was certain it was just a matter of time before she would get the breast cancer that hit her mother, two cousins, and two sisters. She decided late last year to have her breasts removed as a precaution.

SUSAN: When my second sister developed breast cancer, I just, I just felt like this clock was ticking, and, and I was going to have cancer anytime. I was just hoping I could get in and have my breasts taken off before I developed cancer.

MR. LAZARO: But ten days before her surgery, Susan accompanied her ailing sister, Janet, to a visit with oncologist Dr. Weber. She told Weber of her plans for the preventative surgery.

DR. BARBARA WEBER: We had actually just finished studying that branch of the family, and I knew with reasonable certainty that she was unlikely to be a carrier of this gene mutation.

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: We looked at the data. It was clear that this young woman had not inherited the "at risk" part of chromosome 17, therefore, her risk of getting breast cancer was no greater than the general population. And yet, she was about to undergo this very aggressive procedure. And, therefore, still without having designed much of a protocol of how we were going to do this, we felt obligated to share that information with her.

SUSAN: It was unbelievable. I wanted to believe it, but part of me thought it was too good to be true.

JANET: Susan looked at me, and I looked at her, and we just started crying right then. It was like finally something was going right.

MR. LAZARO: Young women like Janet and Susan who are in the high risk group will clearly benefit soonest from the discovery of the breast cancer gene. They account for only 5 to 10 percent of all breast cancers, yet, doctors say studying the gene will offer new insights into the other 90 percent.

DOCTOR: This was not noticeable at all on self-examination.

MR. LAZARO: Doctors suspect the gene is also altered if non- inherited breast cancer strikes. Catching these changes right when they occur at this molecular level means a much earlier diagnosis.

DR. MARY-CLAIRE KING: If you have a mammogram now and it's a very good mammogram, you can pick up a breast tumor when it's maybe this big [gesturing], as big as my little finger. We would like to be able to back up the cell division stage at which we can pick up that lump so that we can pick it up way before you could see it as a physical entity on a mammogram, and could go in, remove those lesions with the simplest possible surgery, and the woman goes on about her life.

MR. LAZARO: King cautions that any such breakthroughs will take years of studying the breast cancer gene. More immediately, doctors expect a bee line for tests that would screen for the inherited breast cancer.

DR. BARBARA WEBER: We estimate that there's probably more than 1/2 million women in the United States that carry this gene mutation and many many more than that that are going to want to be tested to see if they carry the gene mutation.

MR. LAZARO: In Janet and Susan's family, every one over 18 has been screened and told of their status. Because Susan does not have the mutation, her 10 year old daughter is assured she doesn't either.

SUSAN: She was very concerned about developing. She did not want to develop, so it was a big relief for her, that she doesn't have that concern.

MR. LAZARO: Janet's 18 year old daughter, however, learned she does carry the genetic mutation, meaning she'll likely get breast cancer and also ovarian cancer, which often hits in families genetically predisposed to breast cancer.

JANET: I know she, she felt a sense of loss. My, of course, first reaction was of tremendous feeling of guilt and anger. I figured it was worse knowing that she had the gene than it was for me to know that I had cancer, myself.

MR. LAZARO: Still, Janet admits the information allows her daughter some time to plan, which she, herself, did not have.

JANET: I can see her saying, I'm going to have my children before I'm 25 because I want to breast feed them, I'm going to, mm, have them because I don't want to have ovarian surgery and not be able to have any children. So it, it does kind of make you feel that you've got to hurry up and, and do all these things so that you can enjoy your life like everyone has the opportunity to do. I feel very fortunate that she has the information, that she's not going to have to be faced with breast cancer, hopefully that she will have a surgery before anything happens.

MR. LAZARO: Such preventative steps are likely the best patients can expect for some years. More immediately, doctors expect a beeline for tests that would screen for the inherited breast cancer.

DR. BARBARA WEBER, Oncologist: We estimate that there's probably more than 1/2 million women in the United States that carry this gene mutation and many, many more than that that are going to want to be tested to see if they carry the gene mutation.

MR. LEHRER: To repeat, approximately 5 percent of all breast cancer is inherited through a defect in the gene identified today. Scientists are working to develop a test, a laboratory test within a year, that could identify the estimated 600,000 women believed at risk from it. FOCUS - STRIKE OUT!

MS. WARNER: Going, going, gone. That's the final word on baseball fans' hopes for a World Series this year. This afternoon, acting Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig abandoned efforts to resolve the month-old players strike and cancelled the rest of the season. We have two writers here tonight to talk about why this happened and what it means to the future of baseball. Roger Angell writes for the New Yorker Magazine. He's written several books on baseball. And Paul Witteman is senior correspondent for Time Magazine. Well, Mr. Angell, the first baseball season in 90 years with on World Series. Whose fault is this?

MR. ANGELL: Well, I've been thinking about this all day, and the image I have in my mind is that the car has just gone on the cliff. You don't know what's going to happen. It's in mid air, and the owners have locked the doorsand thrown away the keys. And I blame them, I really do.

MS. WARNER: Mr. Witteman, do you agree?

MR. WITTEMAN: I think Roger's assessment is correct. I think they have been planning for this strike. They want to break the union, and if it will take the next season to do that, they will go for it.

MS. WARNER: Now, if you're going to explain to someone who wasn't a baseball fan, what we're losing here by not seeing the season through to the end, what would you tell them? What does it matter if we get to a World Series or not?

MR. ANGELL: Well, I think that baseball, of all sports, baseball is the only sport that's continuous. It's every day through the summer, from April to October, every single day. And there's an enormous accumulation of games and events and statistics and highlights. And of all the sports, this needs a resolution. Fans who come aboard late -- and there many fans who sort of half pay attention to baseball -- they want to know in the end what baseball is really like, and it comes down to the World Series which everyone remembers from their childhood. It sums up -- all the multiplications and additions come out to one final on the World Series. And it has all kinds of overtones. It's sort of a national event, unlike other sports events.

MR. WITTEMAN: I think that's right. I think that baseball has taken some steps to help destroy that fabric that has bound the American fan to the sport. This year's expanded play-offs with the Texas Rangers perhaps might have gotten in with a losing record. I think tends to dilute and diminish that, that feel for baseball that most of us have.

MS. WARNER: And this was something the owners had decided to do for television ratings or something, right?

MR. WITTEMAN: Money, all about money, I think.

MS. WARNER: So how -- go ahead. You were going to say --

MR. ANGELL: Well, I think they also decided to do it because they wanted to keep more interest, have more winners. Television thrives on winners. Everything is going to be a championship, so if you have another layer, another tier of play-offs, there are more events in the end that can be plugged and presented as something of a larger importance, when, in fact, they are less important than just one round of play-offs, and then the World Series.

MS. WARNER: Now, have the fans responded to this breakdown which has been coming for the last month?

MR. WITTEMAN: I think that the initial response has been anger with both sides, and that has subtly shifted to anger with the owners for seeming to be the agent that brought this about. And I think that many fans are disgusted and probably will swear right now on their baseball encyclopedia that they will not come back and watch Major League Baseball again. I think that many of them will change their minds. But I'm not sure what the long-term impact is going to be.

MS. WARNER: The polls, polling done did suggest that even people who call themselves baseball fans, a good half of them said, well, they didn't miss it that much. How do you explain that?

MR. ANGELL: Well, I wonder who they interviewed, because I think the pollsters go in the street, and they ask the first man who comes down the street, are you a baseball fan, and he says, sure I am. And he probably hasn't been to a game in 15 years. So I'm a little -- I suspect those figures a little bit. But I think that baseball has lost a lot in the last 15 years or so because of these labor stoppages which happen again and again, and the fans put up with it, and they come back a little more cynical. They say, yes, it's a business, but they're being deprived of something that is immensely important to them. And I'm not talking about the sentimental field of dreams sort of thing at all but the institution of the World Series is, is -- and the institution of baseball really is a wonderful insiders' club. And if you belong to baseball, you are at one with millions of other Americans, and this has -- this has been diluted. It's gone the way of our politics in our cities to some extent. I think I've always known that baseball was a business, but I don't think that the owners ended up taking very good care of it.

MS. WARNER: But do you think, Mr. Witteman, that the fans are just unrealistic about what professional baseball is all about, or do you think this feeling Mr. Angell is describing comes from something that is really real or was real, that these players played for the love of the game and --

MR. WITTEMAN: I'm not so sure. I think that some of the players played for the love of money. Others enjoyed the game. But I think that it is part of many people's psyche, the sport of baseball. I know when I was growing up, I idolized Duke Schneider, who was the center fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and you know, I will always come out on the short end of arguments with my friends who are supporters of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. And it became part of my life. It was an important part of my fantasy life. And it was an important part of my everyday existence. And I think that that is part of what made baseball and has made baseball so important to America.

MS. WARNER: David Halberstam, who's another -- like yourself -- who's another writer and baseball fan said, and he was referring to the players and owners, he said, "These people have damaged the game for the next quarter century." Is this true?

MR. ANGELL: Well, that's a long time. I think considerable damage has been done. We're really in unknown territory now. We don't know what's going to happen. We've never been in the post season with the structure of baseball stopped dead the way it is. And if the owners can get an official labor impasse to clear they can now impose a salary cut which I think will mean that the strike will still be going on in the spring, and you'll see players picketing ball parks. But it is just as tough on the owners as it is on the players. They have no idea what they're going to do now, what kind of a team they're going to put out there next spring, AA players representing major leagues. How can they have television contracts? The losses are immense, and they're just beginning. This is incalculable, the damage. And I'm not talking now in terms of -- in psychic terms -- but in very real terms, of dollars. I think that the owners very quickly are going to find that the value of their franchises, which has been going up higher and higher, is vastly reduced, because nobody knows what's coming next. It's -- we're in darkness, and it's very depressing for everybody.

MS. WARNER: Do you agree?

MR. WITTEMAN: I think the union has, you know, a card it can play to try to get these negotiations off the dime. They can call for binding arbitration, and the owners can reject that call. On the other hand, the owners seeing that the two sides are so far apart could say sure, but then both the future of both sides' immovable positions is then in the hands of a third party. But I don't think -- I asked Don Fehr today --

MS. WARNER: The players' negotiator.

MR. ANGELL: The players' negotiator -- whether he would seek binding arbitration, and he was quite evasive about that.

MS. WARNER: I mean, do you two gentlemen think that baseball could actually sort of fade out as a major professional sport in this country? There was a recent poll. ESPN, the sports network, polled high school juniors, junior high and senior high students about what's your favorite professional game, sport game, and baseball was a distant third. Do you think it's fading out?

MR. ANGELL: It's gone through this before. I started writing about baseball in the early 60's, and I can remember the first time I went touring with a baseball book of mine. Everywhere I went, people said, why are you writing about this old sport that's on the verge of extinction, just old men and boys pay attention, and this is long before the amazing boom that baseball has enjoyed the last 10 years or so. Attendance is way up. I think baseball will never have the place in our attention and our national, in our heart of hearts that it once did when it was the only game in town. But I don't care if it's a national pastime or not. It's a game like no other, and I think it is extremely resilient, but what form it takes in the future is very hard to say. The real damage that's being done is in what fans feel about baseball inside, individually, not about the grand old game, but about baseball right now, their feeling they have for their teams and for particular stars. There's a whole new generation of wonderful young stars just coming up. And I think that there's an excellent chance that baseball could have gone into an upswing again and caught the attention of young people as well as old if this is properly promoted and presented, but everything has stopped now. And we've lost those players now for another year, and we'll have to start all over again. And it may not be, may never come back and be quite the same. I don't think the game is really indestructible. It's hard to say.

MS. WARNER: Do you think the game is indestructible?

MR. WITTEMAN: The game is not indestructible, but, as Roger said, sports popularity, the popularity of sports goes in cycles. The National Basketball Association, professional basketball is now at a peak. It's done very well for itself, but with the retirement of Michael Jordan, it seems to be a little less popular. The National Hockey League and professional hockey seems to be on the upswing, and there are parabolas of popularity that all these sports and baseball will come back. I think David Halberstam is overstating the case.

MS. WARNER: And if it didn't, I mean, what -- and maybe this is too cosmic a way of looking at it -- but what as a country would we lose if baseball really, really sort of faded from our consciousness?

MR. WITTEMAN: Well, we'd lose Roger's poetry. I find that so incomprehensible a possibility that I can't think of an answer.

MS. WARNER: So you agree then that the players and owners seem to feel that if they start playing again the fans will come?

MR. WITTEMAN: Yes, but the question is in what numbers, and I don't think we can predict that.

MS. WARNER: What do you think?

MR. WITTEMAN: I think it all depends on what happens to winter. We just don't know what's coming next. I think this could be a lot of bad feeling. I think that it's possible the players' association will begin to unravel. I think there are owners out there who really want to see the union broken once and for all. I think that the damage is, is really -- since we've been here, we don't know how to measure it. I think in some form baseball will revive, but it might be a matter of years before our present view of the orderly structure of baseball comes back again.

MS. WARNER: Well, gentlemen, thank you both very much. That's all the time we have. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the other major story of the day, in addition to baseball was the increasing certainty of a U.S.-led military intervention in Haiti. Tonight on the NewsHour, Sec. of State Christopher said the United States had three goals: the preservation of democracy in this hemisphere, a call for human rights abuses in Haiti, and an end to conditions which cause Haitians to migrate to the United States. Good night, Margaret.

MS. WARNER: Good night, Jim. That's the NewsHour for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night. I'm Margaret Warner. Good night.