The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

Intro ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Leading the news this Monday, President Reagan said that the United States is willing to talk peace with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The price of the dollar continued to fall and Robert Dole officially announced his candidacy for President. We'll have the details in our News Summary in a moment. Robin? JIM LEHRER: After the News Summary we analyze the collapse of the Ginsburg Supreme Court nomination with political commentators David Gergen and Mark Shields and Nina Totenberg, the National Public Radio correspondent who broke the marijuana story. Then a profile and Newsmaker Interview with Presidential candidate Robert Dole. Kwame Holman ha a documentary report on the youth death sentence case the Supreme Court heard today and Roger Rosenblatt completes his set of special essays on the Soviet Union. News Summary MacNEIL: President Reagan said today the United States will be willing to open talks with Nicaragua's Sandinista government once it begins serious negotiations on a cease fire with the Contra rebels. The Reagan administration has had no substantive negotiations with the Sandinistas since 1984. President Reagan announced the change in policy in a speech to foreign ministers of the Organization of American States.

Pres. RONALD REAGAN: I welcome the designation of Cardinal Obando y Bravo as the mediator between the Sandinista regime and the Nicaraguan resistance. I have repeatedly said the struggle in Nicaragua is fundamentally a contest among Nicaraguans over their own future and that can only be resolved by negotiations between Nicaraguans. The indirect talks the Sandinistas have now agreed to are a way to start that process. Serious negotiations between the Sandinistas and the Freedom Fighters under the mediation of Cardinal Obando are under way. Secretary Schultz will be ready to meet jointly with the foreign ministers of all five Central American nations including the Sandinistas' representative. MacNEIL: : On Capitol Hill House Speaker Jim Wright welcomed President Reagan's announcement.

Rep. JIM WRIGHT: It's only a recognition of reality that our administrationgets aboard and becomes a party to what's happening. Perhaps they have been skeptical that the peace plan was going somewhere and now they've begun to realize it has real momentum. MacNEIL: The Sandinistas announced a new offensive against some 200 Contras in southeastern Nicaragua. The government said its month long unilateral cease fire had strengthened the Contras. Jim? LEHRER: Anthony Kennedy emerged today as President Reagan's most likely third choice for the Supreme Court. Kennedy is a Federal Appeals Court judge in California. The second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew Saturday after admitting he smoked marijuana as a student in the 60's and again as a law professor in the 1970's. Ginsburg's nomination followed the overwhelming rejection by the Senate of the first choice, Robert Bork. Fallout from the double debacles fell mostly from conservatives and mostly on the White House today. Here, for instance, is what Bork and Ginsburg backer Senator Orrin Hatch had to say about the President's staff.

Sen. ORRIN HATCH (R) Utah: There are gutless wonders down there who do not back the President when he needs it, who do not stand up the way they should and who undermine some of the things the President's trying to do. I believe that had Judge Ginsburg been permitted to stay, that Judge Ginsburg could have made it through the process, would have been a first rate legal mind on the court, would have added a great deal to the court and would have been all right. I think he wante to stay. He had the guts to stay. They did not have the guts to back him up. LEHRER: President Reagan also commented on the Ginsburg withdrawal today. He said he had stood by his nominee to the very end but Ginsburg chose to give up because of harrassment and the clamor that arose over his admission of marijuana use. There was no definitive word today on when the name of Kennedy or some other new nominee will be made public but most stories said it would be probably this week. MacNEIL: Stock prices fell again on Wall Street today with traders nervous about the resumption of computer program trading. That trading, in which large blocks of stock moved by prearranged computer settings, has been restricted since Black Monday three weeks ago, when some believe it contributed to the crash. Today the Dow Jones average, which tracks the value of 30 of the biggest industrial companies, closed down 59 points at 1900. 20. Also making investors nervous today was anxiety about further declines in the value of the dollar and the meeting of central bankers from the leading industrialized countries in Switzerland. The dollar reached another new post war low against the Japanese yen today, selling in Sydney, Australia at 134. 35. Analysts said markets here and overseas were nervous also about the slow progress in Washington on measures to cut the Federal deficit. Those negotiations between Congress and the White House entered their third week today. House Budget Committee Chairman William Gray said an agreement could be reached by the end of the week, but there was still significant work to be done to find an acceptable mix of spending reductions and revenue increases. LEHRER: Robert Dole is now an official candidate for President of the United States. The Republican Senate leader declared his candidacy in his home town of Russell, Kansas. He said the federal deficit is the single greatest threat to a prosperous America and he promised to tackle the problem without raising taxes. Also, in an obvious dig at frontrunner Vice President Bush, Dolesaid he had a record, not a resume. MacNEIL: Rain brought some relief but not enough to firemen battling forest fires in 14 southeastern states today. More than 9,000 fires have charred nearly 200,000 acres of woodland in the past 2 weeks, with West Virginia hardest hit. In Kentucky one volunteer died of a heart attack while battling a blaze, and in Tennessee at least eight perons have been arrested on arson charges. Smoke from the fires has produced a haze over many parts of the northeast and affected visibility as far north as Maine. LEHRER: The government made a deal today with one company to clean up 89 toxic waste sites in 14 different states. The Environmental Protection Agency negotiated the settlement with the Texas Eastern Gas Pipeline Company. The work will cost the company an estimated $400 million, the most ever for such a clean up effort. The agreement must now be filed and approved by a Federal district court in Houston. It followed an E. P. A. investigation which showed Texas Eastern dumped contaminated compressor lubricants into earthen pits along side its compressor stations. Texas Eastern did not deny responsibility for cleaning them up. MacNEIL: In Sri Lanka at least 32 persons were killed and more than 100 injured today when a bomb exploded in the capital of Colombo. State run television said intelligence sources believe it was the work of an outlawed Marxist group, the People's Liberation Front. In April 180 persons were killed when a car bomb exploded at Colombo's main bus depot. That blast was blamed on Tamil's separatists. In Northern Ireland the outlawed Irish Republican Army admitted today it planted the bomb that killed 11 civilians at a memorial service in Inniskillin. The I. R. A. claimed the remote control bomb was set off by a British army high frequency scanning device and said security forces, not civilians, were the intended target. Besides the dead, more than 60 other people were injured by the blast. That's the News Summary. Now it's on to the Ginsburg aftermath, Dole for President, the death sentence for youths, and Rosenblatt on the Soviet Union. Still Searching MacNEIL: The reverberations are still being felt today from Judge Douglas Ginsburg's decision this weekend to pull his name from consideration for the Supreme Court vacancy. We look first tonight at the political and social aftermath of his withdrawal. Joining us to sort through the fallout are two veteran political observer. David Gergen is the editor of U. S. News & World Report and formerly the director of communications at the Reagan White Houes. And in Los Angeles is Mark Shields, political columnist for the Washington Post. David Gergen, what really did Ginsburg in? What does President Reagan mean by harrassment from outside? Who pulled the plug? DAVID GERGEN, U. S. ws & World Report:Ne The conservatives pulled the plug on this one. He was not done in by the outside. He was not done in by the press. The fact was he did not have a great deal of support from the conservatives from the beginning. They didn't know him very well. He was not very well experienced. They did think he was one of them so they were willing to go with him. Once the news started coming in and they began to have doubts about his lifestyle -- they began to question whether in fact he would uphold the social agenda they believe in so deeply and they started backing away. The White House pulled the plug finally when it thought it could not get the votes to confirm and said let's move on swiftly because we will not get another chance unless we move on now. MacNEIL: How do you square between President Reagan saying today that he stood with Ginsburg through the end, Secretary of Education Bennett saying that he called Ginsburg recommending withdrawal with Mr. Reagan's, if not opposition, at least tacit approval and Orrin Hatch saying the gutless wonders did him in. I mean, how do you sort through all of that? GERGEN: Well, it's part of the kabuki dance we go through here in this city periodically when everyone's got a bit of a story that's a cover. The fact is that Bill Bennett would not have called Mr. Ginsburg and urge him to get out of the race did he not think he was doing it with the President's tacit approval. The President at the same time can feel -- probably in his own mind he's convinced himself well, he was above the fray -- and he was just waving the guy on and he wasn't stopping him. I can't explain Orrin Hatch. I believe if Mr. Hatch looks at it he will find it was the conservatives, in the Congress, his own colleagues who were the one who said this man should not go forward and were saying let's stop this charade while we have a chance. MacNEIL: Mark Shields in Los Angeles. What do you think did Ginsburg in? MARK SHIELDS, n Post:Washingto I think a couple of things did Ginsburg in, Robin. First of all, Ginsburg's greatest virtue was that nobody knew him. Therefore, anything we did learn about him became more important and I think that was true. One of the sort of overlooked elements in this whole thing is that the Senate Judiciary Committee, especially the Democrats in that committee, were hands off. I mean they didn't do the usual Democratic response which is to form the circular firing squad. They just let the Republicans have a civil war in a leper colony, particularly the conservatives and that's exactly what they did. David Gergen is absolutely right. If you read the record for the couple of weeks preceding, after Ginsburg's nomination and before his withdrawal, the nicest things that were said about him was said about him by conservatives, who all of a sudden then were hanging out on a limb when they found out that his lifestyle was not that which they had recommended to their own constituents and upon which they had run and that became a source of political and potential political embarrassment. MacNEIL: Before we move on to the marijuana question which is obviously in the front here, David Gergen, Senator Hatch also said today it's time for Ronald Reagan to take charge of the White House. Now what is going on in the White House with all these stories of it being Baker versus Meese and everything else. How do you read that? I mean, it's unusual for a White House supporter, a Reagan supporter like Orrin Hatch to say anything like that. Mr. GERGEN: It is indeed. I think what we're really seeing now is that the fights that are going on within the administration we've seen from the beginning between the pragmatists or the moderates and the conservatives. Ed Meese had his difference with Jim Baker after all in the beginning of this administration. But what's really happening as we come down the home stretch is splintering is starting to occur not only within the administration but within conservative ranks. People are now starting to look to the future. They're looking to different life boats and they're looking at different candidates for the future so the thing is beginning to come apart. It's -- I think it's understandable why Senator Hatch would say the President needs to get into thisand pull this together because otherwise, it will fall apart. It will disintegrate from within and that's one of the real dangers now facing this Presidency. MacNEIL: With relevance to other issues than the Supreme Court. Mr. GERGEN: With clear relevance to other domestic issues and I think it makes it harder to conduct serious foreign policy if you're sixes and sevens on your domestic side. MacNEIL: How do you see it from your more democratic vantage point, Mark Shields? Mr. SHIELDS: Well I think the administration is in trouble. One of the more interesting developments politically is that Ronald Reagan, who really did transform the Republican Party into his image and likeness and he made it a conservative political movement, doesn't have a true spiritual heir who's in the front rank of candidates for 1988 and I think that's a source of frustration. I mean, George Bush has been as he describes himself the co pilot but he doesn't feel the same feels, he doesn't dance to the same tunes that the right and conservative wing of the Republican Party does and they're not completely comfortable with him. Bob Dole announced today and proclaimed that the deficit was the overriding issue in the campaign. I mean that sounded like an opposition candidate rather than one who had been a leader in the Senate and I think that's a source of frustration. I think the whole thing, the running out of the timetable, the sands sifting through the glass all contribute. MacNEIL: Okay. Let's come back to the Ginsburg nomination. David Gergen, would he have been confirmed if the news had not broken that he had smoked marijuana? Mr. GERGEN: No, I don't think he would have been. The doubts were building up rapidly. There were other aspects to this candidacy that were bothering people. From a conservative standpoint, the fact that he'd marched against the wars, his wife's involvement with abortion. But more than anything else, what was troubling people was the lack of experience. This candidacy would have survived the marijuana charge had he had deep experience and deep roots in the law. He did not. It was not enough to command the repect and be a rallying point for either Republicans or for conservative Democrats. MacNEIL: What part did the pot thing, the marijuana thing, play, Mark Sheilds, in your view? Mr. SHIELDS: Well, I think it played a serious part. I mean, up until Saturday night the Attorney General had not been denying the credit for having triumphed in the internal struggle over who was going to be the nominee. Ginsburg was his guy. Kennedy was Howard Baker's guy and Ed Meese won. Of course on Saturday night we learned that Ed Meese hadn't won. That hadn't been the case at all which I guess vindicates the old line about success having many fathers and failure being an orphan but as it turns out, once the pot charge was out, this is a man who could not it turns out be hired as an assistant U. S. attorney in Dubuque because that's part of the test and part of the interrogation that all future employees of the Justice Department get under the stewardship of Attorney General Meese. So that on top of the fact that Mrs. Reagan had certainly made an anti drug crusade her central public issue contributed to a most embarrassing political situation which had all the hallmarks of hypocrisy, which is the most deadly of all political sins. MacNEIL: Okay, gentlemen. We'll come back. Jim? LEHRER: There have been questions raised about how the ''Ginsburg smoked marijuana'' stories came to light in the first place. We talk now with a person who knows better than anybody. She is Nina Totenberg, Supreme Court correspondent for National Public Radio. It was her inquiry that led to Ginsburg's original statement admitting his marijuana use. How did you get on to the story? NINA TOTENBERG, Nationa Radio:Public Well, like any reporter with an investigative story, I'm not going to tell you but I will tell you this. I didn't get a tip in the sense that nobody called me up and said ''Hey, you ought to look into,'' and I didn't go out looking for the question of pot use. Somebody when I was probing for information inadvertently let slip information that led me to this conclusion and then I started looking for verification when I went up to Harvard last week, but really I knew -- LEHRER: Did you go up there -- did you go to Harvard specifically to check out the pot story? Ms. TOTENBERG: No. I knew from the day he was nominated that this was not just a probability but a reality if my sources were correct but I went to Harvard to find out who Doug Ginsburg was. LEHRER: You knew what was a probability -- Ms. TOTENBERG: That he had smoked marijuana. LEHRER: From the day he was nominated. Ms. TOTENBERG: From the day he was nominated. As I said, when I was probing for information that day, somebody let something slip that was very clearly a reference to that and I thought that this was likely, given his age and his background. But when I went up to Harvard, we didn't didn't know anything about Doug Ginsburg. He was a 41 year old zero and I went up there because he spent most of his adult life at Harvard teaching and that was where to find out about him and also, in passing, to check out the pot story. LEHRER: Did you have trouble confirming the pot story? Ms. TOTENBERG: None. LEHRER: Everybody just talked about it openly? Ms. TOTENBERG: Without much difficulty as long as their names wouldn't be used, since some people -- that meant some people were either participants or observer of illegal activity. LEHRER: Were these people -- how would you characterize these people? Enemies of Ginsburg? Friends? Ms. TOTENBERG: No. Friends. In fact the one person who's on the record is, quote, his best friend, Hal Scott, who's professor at Harvard Law School who said on television interviews that he was at a party where Ginsburg smoked marijuana and that he didn't like the looks of it and that he, Scott, left. LEHRER: Did the people, when they told you this and they said yes, Nina, yes, Miss Totenberg, I was present when the would be Supreme Court Justice smoked marijuana, did they have a kind of heavy -- I don't know -- was there any kind of emotion involved in this or was it just kind of routine? Ms. TOTENBERG: I think most of them were surprised that I was interested and said, oh you're not going to do anything with that. Why would you be interested in that? And of course, increasingly I came to each of the witnesses that I interviewed with more and more information so it was more and more difficult for them to just say no. LEHRER: Let me ask you the same question that they asked you. Were you surprised that you were interested in this? Did you know you had a big story, that this man had in fact smoked pot? Ms. TOTENBERG: You know, yes and no. If I had had my druthers, I would not have done a drug story per se. I would have put this story in a story about Doug Ginsburg at Harvard along with people's views about his ideas and his -- LEHRER: Just slipped it in somewhere? Ms. TOTENBERG: I wouldn't have slipped it in. It would have been a prominent part of the story. It would have shown how his lifestyle contrasted with his academic views in some ways. But I didn't get my druthers. We put in an inquiry at the Justice Department and the story started to leak like a sieve. LEHRER: When did you call the Justice Department. Do you remember what time of day? Ms. TOTENBERG: I don't know exactly because I didn't do it. I had my office do it. It was early in the day. LEHRER: Early in the day and then later that day, how many? A couple or 3 hours later? Ms. TOTENBERG: More than that. LEHRER: More than that. Ginsburg issued the statement. Ms. TOTENBERG: And when I got off the plane from Cambridge, my office concluded that we would not keep this story as an exclusive if we sat on it for another 24 hours and that we should go on the air with it and moments before we went on the air, he issued a statement admitting his marijuana use. LEHRER: When you did that story that night, did you have in the back of your head or any feeling at all that this was the end of Douglas Ginsburg as a nominee of the Supreme Court? Ms. TOTENBERG: I think I did because of the excitement in town that was clearly there when I came back into town and we had so many press inquiries about -- LEHRER: -- the bands and everybody met you at the airport -- TOTENBRG: Well, when you walk into the office and there are three phone calls from major news organizations saying, ''Should I listen to you tonight, Nina,'' you get the idea that you're about to do something. And we said on the air that night that this was an extremely difficult generational problem for somebody of his age but I think even then I pointed out that it was likely to be his supporters who would ditch him over this, not his ideological opponents. LEHRER: You haven't any second thoughts about the story, do you? Ms. TOTENBERG: No, I really don't. Our job is to present information, not to censor it and we're talking about illegal activities. Some people think it was trivial illegal activities. Other people do not, but I can't go around deciding that an aspect of a nominee's life that I know about is something only I should know about. LEHRER: Thank you. Robin? MacNEIL: Mark Shields, how do you look on this? This is a year in which the private lives of candidates for public office have become a great deal more public and I mean, are we moving into a new area? Is this an appropriate area for press inquiry? You mentioned it was news of his lifestyle, as you put it, that came out. How do you look at this? Mr. SHIELDS: Well, I think there's a big difference between political candidates and judicial nominees. There really isn't a book on judicial nominees. As far as presidential candidates are concerned, the American people don't want a goody two shoes, a social virgin, if you would, in the Presidency. They understand they want a man of character. They want a man free of addictions, of chemical dependency, whatever. But they don't want a President who is unworldly. They want one who can deal. They know it's sort of a treacherous political domestic scene, certainly even more so internationally and they want a President who can do that, so I think it has less of an impact in a presidential candidate than it would in a judicial nominee. MacNEIL: Do you think it's an appropriate area of inquiry for a nominee to the Supreme Court, David Gergen? Mr. GERGEN: Of course, particularly when the adminstration's putting forward as a law and order candidate. He's been a law professor and in violation of some laws. I don't think -- I want to go back again to one point which I think is quite important. The social significance of this in terms of marijuana. I don't think that this case establishes that marijuana is now a disqualification for public office whether it be on the court or in the Senate or in the Presidency. I think we're going to find a lot of folks who are running for those offices or are nominees for those offices in the future who have used marijuana and I think they'll be either voted for and voted into office and also be confirmed. The true social significance of this case, if I might say, is the administration has now probably lost the opportunity to place a social conservative on the court who could reverse the decisions like Roe v. Wade. This may be what really comes out of this, that the next nominee is not going to be as committed to some of the social issues as the administration would like and we may not see the kind of reversals that the administration would like. MacNEIL: And not because Mr. Ginsburg smoked marijuana but because he had failed to reveal that to the F. B. I. or to the Justice Department or other people in advance? Is that -- Mr. GERGEN: Two things. One, he lacked the experience which hurt him badly from the beginning and secondly, as they began to look into his background at the White House, they discovered there were things there he did not disclose when they asked him whether there might have been any embarrassments in his background and they lost confidence in him as a person. They didn't know what else might be coming. MacNEIL: Let's go back to, David Gergen, to Mark Shields point a moment ago. Two Democratic Presidential candidates since the Ginsburg marijuana information came out have said -- Gore and Babbitt both said they smoked marijuana. Do you agree that in the case of a presidential candidate that the American public is not looking for what Mark Shields calls a ''social virgin?'' Mr. GERGEN: I'm not sure I'd choose exactly those words but I think I certainly agree with the concept. They do want someone who's tough, someone who's been around the track and understands the world and also can associate with some of their own concerns. After all, the -- when you look at the generation from which Mr. Ginsburg comes, well over half say they've smoked marijuana. To have someone say no, no, that's just awful, it's beneath contempt, you're just not associating with the real world so I think that people are looking for someone who is tough and I think that it's not going to hurt Mr. Babbitt or Senator Gore. It may cost Gore some votes in the South but so far, there's hasn't been anything like the firestorm over this. There was over Ginsburg and in Ginsburg case, took off. That fuse was already burning before this story hit. Nina's story, a terrific story from a journalistic standpoint, helped to push it along the way. MacNEIL: Mark Shields, is there going to be political mileage, given the generational nature of the electorate this year and the fact that polls show that people of the generation that was in its late teens and 20's in the 60's and 70's, that something like 62% have smoked some marijuana -- is it going to be a political plus or a political negative for a candidate to say, ''I did'' or a candidate to say, ''I did not?'' Mr. SHIELDS: Well, I would say this, Robert. Anybody who's thinking about running for President in 1992 -- the old way of doing these things was to get them out in your state wide race, that I double parked outside an orphanage on Christmas Eve or I was overborrowed on my library books and then to win a campaign having confessed up to your drinking problem, whatever. Several Senator did that in years earlier. What -- the problem is when something like this comes out in a Presidential race and I think we're going to see -- David is absolutely right. We do want toughness in our leaders, a certaan wiliness and worldliness and I think that we'll probably see Senator Paul Simon in a number of days acknowledging that he in fact did rip the tag off a mattress in violation of Federal law. MacNEIL: Nina, one of your colleagues in Washington, Tom Wicker, former reporter, now a columnist for the New York Times, worries today in the paper that the press risks much in its eagerness to hold public figures to these, what he calls, this new standard of moralism. Do you feel at all uneasy about that, yourself? Ms. TOTENBERG: I really don't feel like the moralist. I think other people have to draw the moral conclusions if there are any, and there is a difference, I suppose, between running first of all for President and for the chief court in the land, the highest court in the land and secondly, what we were talking about with Judge Ginsburg was conduct that was only seven or eight years ago and even with Senator Gore who is younger than Judge Ginsburg, we're talking about conduct 15 years ago and I do think the time warp does make a difference. I just -- you know, reporters -- I repeat -- reporters -- I just don't feel like our job is to be censors and I understand Tom Wicker's concerns but then where do we stop? MacNEIL: We stop right here, as a matter of fact? Nina Totenberg, thank you. David Gergen. Mark Shields. Thank you. Newsmaker Interview/Robert Dole LEHRER: Senator Robert Dole of Kansas is next. The Senate Minority Leader officially declared for President today in his home town of Russell, Kansas. He became the sixth candidate in the GOP nomination race and the last to declare. For a NewsHour custom, we have a Newsmaker Interview with the freshly announced candidate, which follows this brief reminder of how Robert Dole got to this point in his life.

LEHRER [voice :over] Robert Dole is 64 years old. He has been in national politics for 26 years. He grew up in Russell, Kansas, a small prairie town, the oldest son in a family of 4 children. His father supported the family by buying eggs and cream from local farmers and shipping them to market. After two years of college, Dole enlisted in the U. S. Army. In 1945 the young Second Lieutenant was leading an attack against an enemy position in Italy when he was wounded and nearly died. He was hospitalized for 39 months and lost functional use of his right arm. Dole then returned home, got a law degree and was recruited by the Republican Party. He was elected to the state legislature and later served as a county prosecutor. In 1961, he was elected to Congress. He served four terms in the U. S. House and was elected to the Senate in 1968. In 1971, President Nixon chose him to chair the Republican Party. In 1976, Gerald Ford needed a conservative to balance his Presidential ticket and he too chose Dole. GERALD FORD: I am really thrilled with the opportunity of having Bob Dole as my running mate.

LEHRER: Dole's brand of hard hitting rhetoric draw criticism, particularly in his debate with Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Walter Mondale. ROBERT DOLE: I figured it up, the other day. If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, there'd be about 1. 6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit. WALTER MONDALE: I think Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight.

LEHRER: Dole now jokes, ''I was supposed to go for the jugular and I did. My own. '' In 1980, a subdued Dole took another stab at a Presidential race. DOLE: I am announcing today, in fact this very moment, that I shall seek my party's nomination for the office of President of the United States.

LEHRER: Dole lost, but the Ronald Reagan landslide gave the Republicans control of the Senate and Robert Dole the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. In 1984, he was elected Majority Leader of the Senate. He says his proudest achievement was passage of the Gramm Rudman Hollings Deficit Reduction Plan. Dole has also been a strong supporter of the Nicaraguan Contras. In September he went to Managua and took on President Daniel Ortega in a lively debate. DOLE: You want to talk about [inaudible]

LEHRER: His 1988 Presidential campaign has been in gear unofficially for some time. He got two major boosts when his wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, resigned as Secretary of Transportation to campaign full time for her husband and when Secretary of Labor William Brock resigned to run the Dole campaign. Today's announcement made it all official. I spoke with Senator Dole last Friday. Senator Dole, welcome. DOLE: Thank you, Jim. LEHRER: Why are you the man to be the next President of the United States? DOLE: Well, because I think after careful consideration looking at myself, I think I can make a difference for a lot of people, for our country, for our government and that's really why you run. If you can't make a difference, then you're not going to do a very good job. LEHRER: Have you always wanted to be President of the United States? DOLE: No, in fact I never even knew anything about politics until I got out of the Army and World War II and both sides were sort of bidding on me to become a Republican and Democrat so the answer -- I guess I thought about Presidential politics maybe in the 70's and maybe after being on the ticket in '76, you sort of get carried away with yourself to think the next step is an easy one, but I would -- I haven't lost much sleep over the past several years saying, you know, how do I get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. LEHRER: But don't you have to want it very badly to go through what you and the others go through to be a candidate? DOLE: I think you have to have the drive, but you shouldn't be driven. You shouldn't be so obsessed with becoming President or anything else, whatever you may do that you sort of lose your perspective and I mean, a lot of people may be consumed by ambition, or just have to have it, the next step, its power. That would be for all the wrong reasons. I think you have to have the drive. You've got to have the energy and you've got to be able to articulate what you would do if you were elected but I think that's the only way to go after it. LEHRER: You don't have to have it? DOLE: Oh, I'd like to have it. But if it doesn't happen, I'm going to trust the judgement of the voters if they decide it ought to be someone else. I may not agree with them. I don't like to lose elections. I only lost one in a long time and that was when I was on the ticket with someone else. LEHRER: Your critics, and there are a few, say that -- DOLE: One or two. LEHRER: Say that your major drawback right now is that you don't have a theme. You don't have a goal. There not a Robert Dole America out there that you talk about. Is that a good rap or a bad rap? DOLE: I think it's -- I don't know if it's a rap but I think it's something that I have to focus on. I mean I talk about opportunity for young people, for farmers, for black Americans, whatever. Talk about security in our homes, our jobs, our country. I mean, to me those are themes and I like to believe that my life and my voting record and being tested in a number of ways are sort of -- answer the vision question that Bob Dole's America would be for more opportunity, more sensitivity, concern for the economy, the taxes, the whole bit. So I feel comfortable with what Bob Dole would do but I need to make other people feel that way. They want to know, you know, I might get elected. So they have a right to know. Where would Bob Dole take me? And I think it's all back to what I said at the outset. Will Bob Dole make a difference to my children, my farm, my business, whatever it is and I think I'm in a better position to do that than any other candidate. LEHRER: Why? DOLE: I think my background, the way I -- where I was born, how I was raised, the fact that I was tested after World War II in rather difficult times. I've been -- I'm an issues person. I can work with Congress. I can work with my Democratic and Republican colleagues. I'm a known quantity. I'm not crazy. I'm not going to swing one way or the other and get anyone in trouble or go off the deep end somewhere. And I do believe that the word insider is not a good word, but I do believe the American people as opposed to '76, '80 and '84 are now looking for a leader, for a leader in either party who understands how the government works and can make it produce and maybe it's time we need a compact with Congres. The executive and Congress ought to come together, less confrontation. Maybe it's something else, but I know a little about government and I've got a lot of common sense. LEHRER: Let's talk about a big specific, the budget deficit. You're involved in these discussions now with member of the House and other members of the Senate and the White House and you talked about leadership. What's wrong? Why can't there be a meeting of the minds thus far? DOLE: I really -- I think there are a lot of good people, Democrats and Republicans in these discussions but there's too much concern in all these meetings about what about my committee, what about my members on the Appropriations or the Budget or some other committee. We haven't gotten the message yet. We've got a serious problem. The world changed a couple of weeks ago and we're still fighting last year's battles or the same battles and the President's been moving in cautiously. We're -- you know, we don't move very quickly in this town. I just hope we don't wait so long that we're ignored as a factor and I mean by that both the Congress and the Preident. LEHRER: Is it possible that there could be a no meeting of the minds end result? DOLE: Well, we'll have had 10 or 11 days of it by the time this is aired and that's a long time. That's -- I don't know how many hours of meetings and I think it could happen but we're a long way from any agreement. LEHRER: : What kind of message is this sending to the American people do you think? To be all sitting around and coming out, shaking your heads and saying, well, we're going to come back again tomorrow. DOLE: Well, we keep coming outsaying oh, we've made progress. We know that's not true, but compared to yesterday maybe we did make progress. We met again and we're still -- it's still bipartisan but we haven't taken a one show of hands on anything, as far as the size of the package, whether it's one year or two years. Now maybe it'll suddenly break through. Maybe there's a magic date the Democrats and Republicans are waiting for. Maybe it's going to be the 12th of November. That would be a good guess. Maybe it's going to be the 16th or 17th. I think we're going to have to wait 'til we get into that last week before the axe falls on what we call ''sequester'' before we get any real action. LEHRER: ''Sequester'' meaning that's when across the boards -- yeah, the automatic 23 billion -- DOLE: And nobody wants that to happen. It's a big, big cut in defense, big, big cut in social programs and we're trying to find a way to avoid that, but we don't just want to avoid sequester. We want a package of such significance -- and it ought to be multi yeared, at least two years, that we send a strong signal around the world and Wall Street. LEHRER: Have you said inside that room, what you just said? DOLE: Oh yes. LEHRER: Does anybody care? DOLE: I've passed out surveys showing consumers, a third of the American consumers are already spending less for entertainment, less for automobiles, whatever it might be. They're going to plan to spend less. This is the L. A. Times Mirror survey. The Christmas season has started. The initial reports -- well, it's pretty good but the American people are fearful because it's going to have an effect on our economy. Just because it happened on Wall Street doesn't mean that it's not going to have an impact in Wichita or Des Moines or Salt Lake City. LEHRER: To another specific. What's your position now on the intermediate range nuclear missile deal that the United States and the Soviet Union are about to sign? DOLE: Well, I want to be supportive but I think, as I tried to explain to Secretary Schultz, that we have a constructive role to play in the Senate. Just because he may be convinced -- he's spent hours on it dealing with the principals, Shevardnadze, Gorbachev. We haven't had that opportunity. We want to study the treaty, have members of our staffs study the treaty, read the fine print, check verification. We may add some, what we call, reservations in the Senate and I know Secretary Shultz doesn't care much for the process but that's how it's always worked and he's going to have to live with it. LEHRER: There's no chance, is there, that the Senate would turn this treaty down, is there? DOLE: I don't -- it would be too early to speculate but if we find -- you know, that there is some opposition to it -- and if we find something with verification or that there's a violation of the Soviets, what do we do? We're not able to convince our colleagues that we have some enforcement provisions, it could lose but I doubt it. I think in the final analysis, I want to be for it. I want to carry the ball for the President as Republican leader. But the President understands that we have a right to read it, study it, analyze it. The executive branch has had all this time and I don't think we ought to be out there cheerleading for it until we know precisely what's in it. LEHRER: Moving to the possibility of your being the next President of the United States, how would you deal with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union? DOLE: Well, I would like to sort of annualize meetings, not summit meetings. I think the word summit sometimes destroys the possibility of getting together. But there ought to be some agreement right up front that we're going to sit down and talk about our problems. And Gorbachev is not going to go away, as far as I know. He's got some problems but I think he's quite secure and whoever is the next President's going to have an opportunity and a challenge to deal with Mr. Gorbachev, to see if glasnost is for real, to see if we can improve our relationships and regional differences and all the other problems, whether it's Latvia or Soviet Armenia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua. I think we have to talk to each other and through the State Department but also with the principals and I'd be prepared to make that a priority. LEHRER: You'd make it a priority -- do you also believe that you have any special qualifications to do this? In other words, do you think you could deal with the Soviet Union and Gorbachev better than the other candidates in the 1988 race? DOLE: Well, I would think that I could at least do as well as any other candidate. Al Haig, for example, has probably had more real experience than any of us. The Vice President's probably visited more countries but primarily as an observer, not making any policy. I've had meetings with 30 heads of state in this office in the last two years, so I don't need to travel around the world. They drop in here when they're in town. So I think I'm competent. I would have good staff. I think I understand the basic Soviet American problems. We deal a lot with Soviet trade. We deal with some of the other concerns that they have, that we have and I feel fully qualified to deal with Mr. Gorbachev and I hope that I have that opportunity. LEHRER: Back to your political race. The Vice President is now considered the front runner. Looking at your situation, what have you got to do to overcome? DOLE: I've got to beat him. But I don't mean -- I've got to beat him in some of the early states. I mean, he's in a good position and so am I. I think it's a two person race. I said that in Kansas City recently and somebody said yes, you and Elizabeth. Well, I may not be -- I hope -- I hope they were right. But the Vice President's had -- I think I'm clearly the -- in second place and in the early states like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Minnesota, I need to do well and in my view doing well is winning some of those, not just finishing second because then I'm going to be second forever. LEHRER: Well, good luck to you. DOLE: Thank you. LEHRER: Thank you for being with us today. DOLE: Thank you. Executing Juveniles MacNEIL: We turn next to the question of juveniles and capital punishment. This morning the Supreme Court heard the case the case of William Wayne Thompson who is on Oklahoma's death row for a murder he committed when he was 15. The Court has to decide whether it is constitutional to execute Thompson and other who committed crimes as minors. The decision could affect the fate of 31 young inmates on death row in 14 states. We have this background report from Kwame Holman in Oklahoma where today's case originates and where another youth waits on death row. KWAME HOLMAN: Sean Sellers has been on death row in an Oklahome state prison for a year. He is 18. At 15 he shot and killed a clerk in a convenience store in Oklahoma City. Six months later he shot his parents to death as they slept. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to die. Sellers says he is remorseful about what he did but that he was out of control. SEAN SELLERS: We were living in Colorado and I -- everything was kind of going right for me and then we moved and it just kind of stripped me away from everything that I held as valuable. I got into satanism and that somehow filled that void and as the deeper and deeper I got into satanism, the more I really started messing my mind up and at the time I did what I did, I was having blackouts. I was doing drugs. I was just really messed up and I didn't even realize what I had done until months and months later. DAVID LEE, Oklahoma Asst. Attorney General: This is the kind of claims you hear from murderers of all ages. It's not confined to just younger murderers that make that claim.

HOLMAN: David Lee heads the criminal division for the Oklahoma Attorney General. DAVID LEE: At what point did he start feeling remorseful? I mean, he committed -- he murdered three people and there was two separate incidents. I mean, did he become remorseful after the first set of murders? Of course not, he went ahead and murdered -- committed another. There are a number of cases from a number of jurisdictions in America where young murderers have done some absolutely horrible, cruel, vicious things. HOLMAN: In the early morning hours of January 23rd, 1983, 15 year old Wayne Thompson and three other men reportedly began beating Thompson's former brother in law. According to court records, they later shot their victim to death and slashed his body before throwing it into this river, 40 miles outside of Oklahoma City. Prosecutors said the brutality of the crime called for the death penalty. A jury sentencd the three men and the 15 year old Thompson, who was tried as an adult, to die by legal injection. Wayne Thompson is now on the same death row as Sean Sellers. They are the only inmates on Oklahoma's death row who committed their crimes as juveniles. In his appeal today before the Supreme Court, Thompson's lawyers said the death penalty for juveniles is a violation of their rights because it is cruel and unusual punishment. If the Court agrees, it could set a minimum age at which executions may be carried out or require the states to do so. Such a decision could change the fates of Sellers, Thompson and 29 others on death rows who committed their crimes as juveniles. Thompson's sister, Vickie Williams, says no one should die for crimes committed while so young. She says when her brother Wayne killed her ex husband, the teenager was confused and angry. She paints a picture of forced drug abuse and beatings of herself and Wayne by her ex husband. VICKIE WILLIAMS: Charles would beat him up. [incoherent] with him and he tried to sexually abuse Wayne. The night that it happened, they was all -- Wayne had been (unintelligible) all day long and I know from experience with my husband that that stuff takes you into a completely different world so he was on that plus he was drinking, taking valiums and God knows what else and you put a person in that state of mind that has a gun in their hand and that hates somebody that has done something to you and your family all them years, something's got to give. Mr. LEE: Twelve people who sat on the jury took these things into consideration and they'll make a decision that the death penalty was appropriate. HOLMAN: The history of executions for crimes committed by juveniles dates back to colonial times. The youngest in this century was George Stinney, a 14 year old black boy who died in the electric chair in 1944 for the rapes and murder of two white girls. More recently, the highly publicized electrocution of James Terry Roach. He was 17 and according to his lawyers, mentally retarded when he killed two other teenagers in South Carolina. The total, 281, executed for crimes committed as juveniles. WAYNE THOMPSON: My folks, I can see them up here but I don't get to give them no hug or anything. I miss that a lot, not being able to hug my mom. HOLMAN: Historically, prosecutors have maintained that applying the death penalty to those who commit crimes as minors, deters other young criminals. The state of Oklahoma says that's one argument for executing Wayne Thompson. David Lee of the Attorney General's office says the Court would send the wrong message if it ruled that lawbreakers could not be executed for crimes committed when they were minors. Mr. LEE: It would be, I think, inappropriate for the United States Supreme Court as a matter of constitutional law to set a fixed chronological age that, regardless of the circumstances of the case, regardless of how mature or sophisticated this individual was, he or she could not receive the death penalty. HARRY F. TEPKER, Wayne Thompson's Attorney: Execution of juveniles is already so freakishly rare, I find it difficult to believe that there is any serious deterrent effect from the mere prospect of the death penalty involved in such cases as this. HOLMAN: Harry F. Tepker, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, has volunteered to represent Wayne Thompson before the Supreme Court. Mr. TEPKER: I think the message ought to be that youth bears on the fundamental justice of the death penalty. Juveniles, children, adolescents simply don't have the characteristics which we associate with supreme responsibility, and that supreme responsibility is necessary to the justice of the death penalty. There are still many ways for this society to articulate its opposition, its intolerance of juvenile murderers. Adult punishment, life imprisonment, life imprisonment without parole. HOLMAN: Some experts say young people who commit serious crimes are more likely than adults to be rehabilitated successfully and eventually released. Ms. WILLIAMS: What Wayne wants out of life is not very much. You know, he -- all he talks about it fishing, you know, going down the river and staying and fishing and that's not very much. Mr. LEE: They also have a history of hurting people. I mean, I think it's nice to think that about somebody, that they're just some ordinary kid who'd rather be down at the fishing hole like Huck Finn but this person cruelly murdered another person. He's had eight previous contacts with law enforcement officials, four of which involved violence to persons and this is not somebody who just had one contact with the law who -- or who stole a car. We're talking about somebody who brutally murdered somebody else. MacNEIL: The Supreme Court is expected to hand down an opinion in the Thompson case some time early next year. What Is To Be Done? LEHRER: The Russians celebrated the 70th anniversary of their Bolshevik Revolution over the weekend. They did so with a parade in Moscow's Red Square featuring the usual array of modern military hardware, a tribute to Russian sacrifices in World War II and a remembrance of the 1917 revolution. We finish tonight with Roger Rosenblatt's final essay about the Soviet Union 70 years later. It's called ''What Is To Be Done?'' The photographs are from the book A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union which was published recently by CollinsPublishers. ROGER ROSENBLATT: The subway stations of Tashkent. How shall a mortal describe their magnificence? One built high with fluted columns like the temple to an Eqyptian god. One dedicated to an Oozbek poet and his work. One to space exploration and the cosmonauts. All of them bright and clean and palatial and safe. Drag a citizens of Tashkent onto the New York IRT at midnight and he would scream blue murder. Tell him about the Bernard Goetz case and he would not believe his ears. America, too wild and free versus the controlled and beautiful subways of Tashkent. Which would you choose? Which would the world choose? Or, as Lenin put the question in an early revolutionary treatise, what is to be done? The difference between the world's two powers are very great, very deep. Nice to talk about people being the same all over, but except for basic biological evidence, people are not the same all over. Americans and Russians all smile, love their children, wash their ears, dance, quarrel, kiss. But the schisms between them reach down into history, race, experience, and up into modern political philosophies that stand erect as each other's most terrible nightmare. A country bursting at the seams with a freedom that can be fearful, or a country whose wild forces are internalized, creating a state where fear come from the center, not from the parts. What is to be done? Communism is a beautiful fairy tale, a girl told me in Leningrad. So is capitalism, I agreed. We each preferred our own. The choice comes down to a fundamental question. Which form of government allows one to be most human, since being human is a complexity involving both being free and being controlled, involving self interest and concern for others. If I were to tell the girl in Leningrad why I choose my fairy tale, it is because I believe that between the two forms of government, capitalism has the better chance for people to realize themselves as human, that freedom is the side to err on, though my national shadows still fall on the homeless, the uneducated, the poor and the neglected, all of which make it difficult to prove the fairy tale you favor. Still, we are what we are. If it is true that millions the world over, including many Soviets, would like to be Americans, it is not true that the mass of Soviet citizens would be pounding at our doors if only they could. Whether we like it or not, Russians have something to believe in, too. Not the subway stations of Tashkent, nor certainly the secret police and the capacity for sudden fear the state creates, but in a theory of equality and the eradication of dire poverty that sounds awfully good on paper, if only the paper were not held by a fist. They like it here, perhaps because of the tension within the state, because of the secret freedom it gives them as a people. Oddly, the state may free them to retain their soul. For us, our soul is our government. We take responsibility for it which is why we hate and love it so volubly. We accept the subways of New York and the noise and the motley riot as a natural consequence of rights we invented and preserve. We would not exchange our fairy tale for theirs, nor would most of them for ours. That is a fact, and that is the basis of our future together. We stare at each other, face at face across the continents and time zones, recognizing and unrecognizing creatures apparently like ourselves. What is to be done? To live as safely as possible together and to trust that eventually human goodness and rationality will prevail, making us wiser than we both are now and showing us exactly what is to be done. Recap MacNEIL: Again the main points in the news today. President Reagan said the U. S. would be willing to talk to the Sandinistas when they start serious cease fire negotiations with the Contras. Stock prices fell again on Wall Street as the dollar declined overseas. Senator Robert Dole officially declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Goodnight, Jim. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. We'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night. r