The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Thursday, President Reagan signed a bill providing billions of dollars in drought relief for farmers, leading banks raised their prime lending rate to 10 percent, a major new study said aspirin plus a clot dissolving drug can save many heart attack victims. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: After the News Summary the story [Focus - Attacking Heart Attacks] of that new international study of heart attacks is told by Dr. Charles Hennekens, why farmers don't buy crop insurance [Focus - Crop Coverage] as seen by Congressman Dan Glickman, Farm Bureau Lobbyist Mary Kay Thatcher, and Crop Insurance Official John Marshall. Hodding Carter profiles political cartoonist Doug Marlette [Profile] and Robert MacNeil talks with British Actor John Cleese [Conversation - Cleese]. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: Pres. Reagan today signed the bill to give farmers and ranchers billions of dollars in compensation for drought losses. Payments of up to $100,000 will begin in 60 days and will cost a total of 3 to 5 billion dollars. At a Rose Garden signing, the President said the bill was the largest drug relief measure in history.

PRESIDENT REAGAN: According to this legislation, farmers who lost more than 35 percent of a crop will receive direct payments to help cover their losses, livestock producers who have suffered losses in feed production due to the drought will also receive relief. In all, hundreds of thousands of farmers and ranchers will benefit. The bill expresses a distinctly American tradition, that of lending a helping hand when misfortune strikes. This bill isn't as good as rain but it'll tide you over until normal weather and your own skills permit you to return to your accustomed role of being the most productive farmers in the world.

MR. MacNeil: After the President spoke, the Department of Agriculture released the latest crop forecast for this year. It predicted that the drought and scorching temperatures will reduce the corn crop by 37 percent, soybeans by 23 and wheat by 13 percent. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: A major new study on treating heart attacks was released today and the news is good. Seventeen thousand heart attack patients from 417 hospitals in 16 different countries were involved in the three year project. The principal conclusion, the use of aspirin and a drug called Streptokinase can drastically reduce heart attack deaths. A British doctor involved in the study told reporters in London, the death rate in London for patients in the first month after a heart attack could be cut in half. We'll have more on this right after the News Summary.

MR. MacNeil: Leading banks raised their prime lending rate 1/2 percentage point to 10 percent today, the highest rate in three years. The move came two days after the Federal Reserve Board raised the discount rate to 6.5 percent to reduce the risk of inflation. Since interest rates on many consumer credit items and loans are tied to the prime rate, today's increase was expected to lower consumer spending on items like cars, houses, and furnishings. The stock market, which has fallen recently, showed little reaction. The Dow Jones Average of 30 Industrial Stocks closed up 5 points at 2039.30. Overseas, the value of the U.S. dollar rose slightly.

MR. LEHRER: Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd spoke harshly today about President Reagan's position on Contra aid. He said Mr. Reagan's and the Republicans' failure to support $27 million in non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua destroyed whatever credibility they had. The measure passed last night on a straight 49 to 47 Democratic majority vote. Republicans opposed it because it does not provide military aid as well.

MR. MacNeil: In Angola, anti-government rebels claimed they had killed 50 soldiers in fighting after the cease-fire agreed between South Africa, Angola, and Cuba. Unita rebels, who do not accept the cease-fire, said they had killed 35 Angolan and 15 Cuban soldiers. The Marxist Angolan Government said it had killed 71 rebels in recent clashes. South African troops yesterday began a withdrawal due to be completed by September 1st. In South Korea, riot police and radical students clashed again today. Police ringed campuses in Seoul and six other cities to prevent marches by students demanding reunification and the opening of talks with North Korea. Five students were injured and 400 arrested.

MR. LEHRER: There was more violence in Burma today. The nation's military commander in Rangoon said Burma faces anarchy. At least 15 more people were reported killed today in clashes with police and army troops. The demonstrations are against the regime of President Sen Lu En. The official death toll since the rioting began four days ago stands at 95. But Reuters News Service says diplomats in Rangoon believe the toll may be as high as 1000. And that's it for the News Summary. Now it's on to the new heart attack report, crop insurance for farmers, the political art of Doug Marlette, and British Actor John Cleese. FOCUS - ATTACKING HEART ATTACKS

MR. MacNeil: First tonight, more good news for treating heart disease. As we reported, a new study shows that the clot dissolving drug Streptokinase and aspirin taken together after the onset of chest pains significantly reduces deaths among heart attack victims. British researchers who conducted the study estimate that tens of thousands of lives could potentially be saved by the treatment each year. The combination of drugs also reduces the likelihood of a second heart attack or stroke during hospitalization. These results of the largest heart attack treatment study ever conducted will be published in Saturday's British medical journal, "The Lancet". Dr. Charles Hennekens was the U.S. Coordinator of the so called Isis 2 Study. He's an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, and at the Harvard Medical School.

MR. MacNeil: Dr. Hennekens, we've known, in fact, you told us on this program last winter, aspirin helps; we've known that clot dissolving drugs dissolve clots. What is different and significant in this report?

DR. CHARLES HENNEKENS, Brigham And Women's Hospital: I think what this report shows is that these treatments when used together can markedly improve the survival experience of patients admitted to hospitals in the United States and in other countries where heart attacks are common. Specifically, each year in the U.S. about 500,000 patients are admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of heart attack and about 75,000 of them die during the first five weeks after admission. These data show, and I think quite strongly and convincingly, that the combination of the clot licing properties of Streptokinase and the anti-platelet properties of aspirin can cut that mortality figure almost in half, so in the U.S. alone, some tens of thousands of lives can be saved each year.

MR. MacNeil: Let's get into why this happens. A heart attack is caused usually because something breaks loose and causes a blockage, a clot forms, and it blocks the artery or one of the arteries into the heart and the heart can't get nourishment. This will dissolve those clots in time before the heart muscle is damaged, is that right?

DR. HENNEKENS: I --

MR. MacNeil: Is that the --

DR. HENNEKENS: I think that's part of the explanation. I think certainly for those patients who come into the hospital within two to three hours of onset of chest pain during an evolving heart attack. The clot licing properties of Streptokinase surely will have a benefit.

MR. MacNeil: By licing you mean dissolving?

DR. HENNEKENS: Breaking up of the clot, will surely have a benefit on reducing their mortality. But this study also demonstrated that even patients who came into the hospital up to 24 hours after the onset of chest pain had a benefit from Streptokinase so this suggests to me that there may be mechanisms other than clog lices that are responsible for reducing mortality, especially in those patients who come in after a long duration of symptoms at the time they're treated. Ithink in addition the anti-platelet properties of aspirin by decreasing the tendency of the blood platelets to stick together certainly is playing a role in terms of benefiting these patients who were in this study.

MR. MacNeil: The drug Streptokinase, isn't there a debate whether it is more effective than another group of drugs known under the title TPA? Now does this test, is this test going to push the scales over definitively towards Streptokinase?

DR. HENNEKENS: No, I don't think it will. I think that at the moment we have conclusive data that Streptokinase will reduce mortality when administered to patients who have an evolving heart attack. I think we also have conclusive data that tissue plasmagin activator will reduce mortality in patients who are treated during the onset of a heart attack. I think what we don't yet know is which of the two agents has the better risk to benefit ratio and in fact, we're hoping with the collaboration of a large number of U.S. hospitals contributing to the 16 countries who comprise the Isis investigative team that we'll be able to answer that question over the next several years in a head to head comparison of Streptokinase versus tissue plasmagin activator.

MR. MacNeil: How can an individual use this information at home if he thinks he might be having a heart attack?

DR. HENNEKENS: Well I think this is a difficult question because there are several thousand heart attacks a day in the U.S. alone and certainly if a patient is having chest pain that is clearly of cardiac origin, then I think these data do indicate that aspirin therapy administered immediately will be of benefit to them. However, there are probably some tens to perhaps hundreds of thousands of people having chest pain every day that they think may be cardiac in origin but may be gastrointestinal and if that pain is related to excess acid production in the stomach or some reflex into the esophagus from the stomach then, in fact, the aspirin will not only do not good but might do harm. So I think it is not a clear cut answer that everyone who develops chest pain should take aspirin.

MR. MacNeil: But if somebody had chest pain that he knew from previous instruction or something was or had angina before and knew that this was a cause of it, what should he do?

DR. HENNEKENS: I think in any event with the early onset of symptoms of chest pain of cardiac origin one must get to the hospital as quickly as possible to get under care because most of the deaths occur early on, but I think that the data from this study are also suggesting that such patients would benefit from the immediate administration of low dose aspirin.

MR. MacNeil: I saw in the press conference today that you, or other doctors, I think it was you who said he should chew half an aspirin. Why half an aspirin?

DR. HENNEKENS: Well, I think that in the Isis study 160 milligrams a day were given for one month from the time the person entered the hospital and 160 milligrams is, in effect, half a commercially available aspirin tablet a day.

MR. MacNeil: Because a person in the panic and pain and everything of an oncoming heart attack -- I mean, it's hard enough to open an aspirin bottle nowadays with all the safety -- to break an aspirin in half -- I mean, is it really critical not to take the whole aspirin --

DR. HENNEKENS: Well, I don't think that's so critical --

MR. MacNeil: Or should the aspirin company start making smaller capsules?

DR. HENNEKENS: In another study we were involved in in the primary prevention of heart attacks with aspirin, we studied one commercially available tablet every other day and found a benefit on reducing risk of a first heart attack. I think that in basic research studies we find in the laboratory that as little as half a baby aspirin a day or 40 milligrams may be sufficient to inhibit platelet aggregation, but on the other hand, in the throes of a heart attack one wants to get a sufficient dose on board immediately to have that immediate impact and I think that the half an aspirin a day in the treatment of acute heart attack in some senses should be the lower bound so I think that there would be no problem from that perspective of having one commercially available tablet.

MR. MacNeil: Is the drug Streptokinase and others like it, TPA, only ever going to be available through injection by a doctor in a hospital or in a doctor's office, or is it ultimately going to be available in pills that somebody could have next to the aspirin in his medicine chest, like nitroglycerin pills and things?

DR. HENNEKENS: Well, I think that even at the present time though it's certainly optimal to administer these drugs in a hospital with health care professionals around to monitor the patients. I think we also have to acknowledge that sometimes people may be 50, 60 miles away from a health care facility and if they do have emergency medical services where this can be administered intravenously with paramedical professionals that there may be a decision to be made that might benefit such a patient with the onset of chest pain. I think that with regard to oral administration, this would require much further research to really develop an active agent that could be taken in that form that would be specific to lice clots.

MR. MacNeil: Dr. Hennekens, thank you very much for joining us.

DR. HENNEKENS: Thank you.

MR. MacNeil: Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the Newshour tonight, crop insurance, political cartoons and a conversation with John Cleese. FOCUS - CROP COVERAGE

MR. LEHRER: There were two Washington happenings today concerning the drought. The Agriculture Department released its crop forecast which shows the drought has crippled this year's production of corn and other commodities. The corn crop alone is off nearly 37 percent. And President Reagan signed into law the emergency aid bill that will provide $3.9 billion to farmers who had crops destroyed or damaged by the drought. The question these events raise is one of equity and of insurance. Most businesses in this country carry insurance against disasters comparable to a drought, but most farmers do not have crop insurance even though a federal insurance program is available for just that purpose. John Marshall is the manager of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. He is here with Mary Kay Thatcher, the Assistant Director of National Affairs for the American Farm Bureau Federation, an organization of 3.6 million farm families, and Congressman Dan Glickman, Democrat of Kansas, a member of the House Agriculture Committee. He joins us from Capitol Hill.

MR. LEHRER: Ms. Thatcher, why don't farmers buy crop insurance?

MARY KAY THATCHER, American Farm Bureau Federation: Well, I think there's primarily three reasons. First of all, we think there's a question of it not being available on all commodities in all counties and one of the big pieces of interest in the drought legislation that was signed was to try to mandate farmers to buy crop insurance if you were going to get drought insurance, and the problem with that is that it simply is not available. You may not have it available to one farmer in one county, but in the county next to that it's not available, so you're forcing one farmer to buy something that another farmer doesn't have available to him.

MR. LEHRER: The the drought aid bill that the President signed today did have some of that in there, does it not, requiring farmers to buy crop insurance for next year, is that right?

MS. THATCHER: That's correct. If you --

MR. LEHRER: So they won't be coming back if there's another drought? That's the idea.

MS. THATCHER: That's the idea, but that's really been the idea that Congress has been proposing since the early 1980's was to improve the crop insurance program enough that Congress would not have to come back and provide these disaster relief bills and so far we really don't see that happening. In fact, we see a precedent being set that Congress is always going to be there in years like this when there is a very severe disaster.

MR. LEHRER: So as a practical matter if you're a farmer and you know that Congress is going to bail you out, why buy insurance?

MS. THATCHER: That's one of the major reasons they're not buying it right now.

MR. LEHRER: And another one is you're saying that the program is not available to farmers on all crops?

MS. THATCHER: Certainly the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation is making progress in making it available in more counties and on more crops but we simply aren't there yet. And until that happens and we have more of the universal concept available, we don't think the crop insurance program is going to be a good alternative for disaster relief bills.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Marshall, why don't you improve your program?

JOHN MARSHALL, FCIC: Well, I think we are improving the program, and if you look at the progress we've made since the new legislation passed in 1980, we've come a long way in a very short time. There are two aspects to this issue. There's the supply side and the demand side, and on the supply side, we have increased - -

MR. LEHRER: Supply side, you mean supply of insurance?

MR. MARSHALL: Supply of insurance. The number of crops we insure, the number of counties that it's offered in, and since 1980, we have greatly expanded. Back in 1980, we insured only fifteen or twenty crops and today we insure about fifty.

MR. LEHRER: You insure corn and soybeans and wheat, the big ones?

MR. MARSHALL: All of the big ones that are the eight main line ASCS program crops, plus a number of --

MR. LEHRER: What's an ASCS main line crop?

MR. MARSHALL: Okay. Those are the crops, the major crops that are the farm program crops.

MR. LEHRER: Agriculture commodity under the Agriculture --

MR. MARSHALL: Agricultural Stabilization & Conservation Service, wheat, the feed grains, tobacco.

MR. LEHRER: I was going to act like I knew what I was talking about. Go ahead.

MR. MARSHALL: I thought you did. That's all right.

MR. LEHRER: No. But the major, what percentage of the crops that are grown in this country are not now covered by your program?

MR. MARSHALL: Well, we estimate that we cover about 20 percent, 20 to 25 percent of the potential insurable acres.

MR. LEHRER: That's not very many, is it?

MR. MARSHALL: Well, we think we can do better, but then again we think we've come a long way since 1980. Back in 1980, we only offered programs in 26 states. Today we offer it in 50 states. We celebrated the corporation's fiftieth anniversary this year offering over fifty crops in fifty states. We added macadamia nuts in Hawaii this year. We went from 4600 county programs in 1980 to over 19,000 in 1988, and we've about doubled the insured acreage. By a lot of indicators we've come a long way. But we do have a ways to go yet.

MR. LEHRER: I don't understand the problem. I mean, if you have an insurance program, I mean, if somebody will sell car insurance, you can sell it to anybody, anywhere in the country. What's the problem? Why don't you just come up with a national program that all farmers participate, all crops participate, tomorrow?

MR. MARSHALL: Well, there's one difference there in the example with car insurance. You can't get a loan on a car unless you have car insurance. The banks require it for their loans. But you know, there are a number of reasons why farmers aren't buying it.

MR. LEHRER: My question is not why they're not buying it, but why aren't you providing it? I mean, why can't you set up a program that -- I don't understand why it's taken eight years. I'm probably not hearing something I should be.

MR. MARSHALL: Look at it this way. In 1980, we offered programs, crop programs in 4600 counties. We're over 19,000 today. That's a big expansion. Now it takes a while.

MR. LEHRER: What is the hindrance to expanding the program? Why does it take so long to go to expand it to every county?

MR. MARSHALL: There's a lot of research and development that goes into introducing a new crop, actuarial work. We have to build a base of experience upon which to base our actuarial rates, and that takes time.

MR. LEHRER: Meaning, if you're going to insure tomatoes, then you've got to know what the performance of tomatoes has been over the last five, ten, twenty years, is that what you mean by an actuarial record?

MR. MARSHALL: That's right. We have to know what the characteristics of a county are, a county, a particular area's history in developing a crop, in producing a crop, we have to get down to individual farm information to soundly and sufficiently manage the program actuarialy.

MR. LEHRER: Congressman Glickman, do you think every farmer in this country should be required to have crop insurance no matter what the crop is?

REP. DAN GLICKMAN, [D] Kansas: I think farmers who get federal farm benefits like deficiency payments from the government or federal disaster payments ought to be requires to buy crop insurance. I think that farmers who don't participate in farm programs ought not to be required to buy it, but it seems to me that if you're going to get benefits from the federal government, you ought to be required to mitigate your losses by buying insurance like you would on a car or a house. Now we've made a start in this drought bill. We have said that if a farmer suffers at least a 65 percent loss as a result of this disaster, he will be required, if he takes the disaster benefits, he'll be required to buy that crop insurance for next crop year. That is a good first step to get us to the goal and its goal may be a few years out, but the goal of requiring farmers who get federal farm benefits to buy federal crop insurance.

MR. LEHRER: What do you say, what is your comment on Mr. Marshall's explanation as to why all farmers -- you said, what is it, 25 percent of the acreage in the country now is eligible for crop insurance. Congressman, what's the problem as you see it?

REP. GLICKMAN: There have been several problems. No. 1 is that the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation has not been managed well at all. The General Accounting Office has published studies about potential mismanagement, even potential fraud in the past. Now the current management is doing a better job and Mr. Marshall should be commended for that. That's been one problem. The premiums have been too high vis-a-vis the benefits that the farmer would get back; certainly in certain parts of this country that's been the case. But the big problem has been there has been no reason for farmers to buy crop insurance. For the most part they know that if there is a disaster, Uncle Sam will come in and pretty much take care of them. And as a good and compassionate country, I think that's something that we ought to do, but if farmers knew that in order to get benefits from the taxpayers of this country they had to at least mitigate their losses by buying crop insurance like for example a homeowner has to if he wants to get a mortgage from his bank, or for example if you want to build a house on a federal flood plain, you have to get federal flood insurance in order to get the benefits from the federal government. If you knew you had to have that insurance as a precondition to getting federal farm payments, I venture to say that an overwhelming majority of farmers would have crop insurance.

MR. LEHRER: Is he right, Ms. Thatcher?

MS. THATCHER: I think he's right and I think the Congressman hit the nail on the head when he said the farmers have a perception that in a severe disaster like this the government will come in and bail them out. And when you look at a small disaster where maybe you're going to only lose 10 percent of your crop a year, then crop insurance isn't a good management tool, because you could lose that 10 percent of your production for about the same cost as you can buy the premiums on the crop insurance. I would say the problem we would have with immediately mandating the kind of tying together that the Congressman is talking about is that we don't feel the crop insurance program is a good, workable program yet. A lot of good changes have been made, but we think we're two or three years away from tying the farmer's actual production history, rather than using a county average yield so that you're going to draw in the good producers into the program, so we think it's too soon to link those two programs together.

MR. LEHRER: If you were John Marshall and you were running the program, what would you do to change it? What does he need to do to get this thing going well?

MS. THATCHER: Well, I think one of the things is we need to have a little less bureaucracy associated with the program.

MR. LEHRER: Give me an example of some bad bureaucracy.

MS. THATCHER: To give you an example, I can show you a document that I brought here that's 99 pages in length from a wheat and barley producer in Montana that he had to fill out 99 pages of documentation to at least --

MR. LEHRER: How many acres?

MS. THATCHER: It's a good sized farm. I can't tell you the exact number of acres, but we're talking about a lot of documentation simply to get a policy, not to file for the claim, but to get the policy. So we're concerned that if we mandate crop insurance right now and you throw in another three or four or five hundred thousand farmers into an already overburdened federal crop insurance program, you're going to hurt the people who are already in there and using the program and you may drive them from the program through poorer service because they have too much to do.

MR. LEHRER: You have a lot of work to do, Mr. Marshall. You concede that I guess, right?

MR. MARSHALL: We have quite a bit of work to do.

MR. LEHRER: Why in the world would you have a farmer fill out this kind of form just to get a little insurance policy on his farm?

MR. MARSHALL: Well, it's --

MR. LEHRER: I mean, if youwanted to insure an office building worth millions and millions of dollars, you could do that with about what, 1/3 of this, couldn't you?

MR. MARSHALL: I think Mary Kay took a page out of Ronald Reagan's book from the budget presentation in the State of the Union. I think what we have here is a large farm that consists of many units and in response to make our program fine tuned to the needs of a farmer, we have divided up our coverage on the basis of units, certain fields or subdivisions of a farm, and we require a page for each of those and that looks to me like --

MR. LEHRER: I don't mean to harass you about this document that I haven't looked at either, but do you concede that you've got some bureaucracy problems, you've got to solve those? Is that part of the problem?

MR. MARSHALL: Let's separate the two. We have administrative problems. Congressman Glickman pointed out the GAO problems and they're real and we're attacking them, we're getting at them. But those problems are administrative and they're separate from the issues of how good our product is and why or why not the farmer is buying it.

MR. LEHRER: Congressman.

REP. GLICKMAN: May I just make a couple of comments. No. 1 is while there are some bureaucracy problems, I don't want to use that as an excuse for not getting the program fully usable by most farmers in the country and the way you do that is to set a goal by requiring at some point in the future those farmers who participate in programs and get the benefits from the federal treasury to have the crop insurance. And I think that it is not terribly useful to just talk about the bureaucracy alone without trying to figure out how you can get actuarialy these premiums down and get better benefits, and the way you do that is to get more people in the program. It's kind of a chicken and egg type of situation. Do you wait until the bureaucracy is down before you put people in the program? I think what you've got to do is let the world know and the insurance industry know and producers know that at some point, three, four, five years down the road, if folks want to participate in federal farm programs, they're going to have to get the federal crop insurance bought and I guarantee you the rates will then come down.

MR. LEHRER: Has that message gotten over to the farmers of this country, Ms. Thatcher?

MS. THATCHER: I think it has and I guess where we would disagree with the Congressman on that is that you have to sell the federal crop insurance program. It's a lot better if we can sell it via improvements in it than if we force it down a farmer's throat and I think we view the crop insurance program as a management tool. It's a management tool just like irrigating or diversifying your farm is a management tool, and you would use all those kinds of things and there are some farmers in this country who are more than able to self-insure themselves and, therefore, will never really require it. Maybe they'll irrigate, maybe they'll diversify so that even if one crop suffers a loss, in most normal years you wouldn't.

MR. LEHRER: But the Congressman is talking about a philosophical question which is Mrs. and Mrs. Farmer of this nation, if you're going to get aid like the President signed today, drought aid, you are going to have to participate in an insurance program. That's coming. It's a little bit in this bill that just passed and he says in four or five years, it's going to be a must. Is that message --

MS. THATCHER: It may be coming. I would say that you could probably go to the country right now and ask farmers if they got that perception from this disaster relief bill and the small crop insurance provision that was put in, and you'd get an overwhelming no.

MR. LEHRER: Now why don't they hear that? Why don't they hear that, Congressman?

REP. GLICKMAN: Well, I think that most people see that as long as the federal government keeps providing the disaster relief unencumbered, without any kind of requirements, then farmers will feel that that will always come in the future. You know, I agree that we've got problems in this system. And were not yet at the point where we want to mandate it across the board, but from a philosophical point of view, I think we need to move towards that goal and the more we move towards that goal, the better this program will be administered and the more farmers will accept it.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Congressman, Mr. Marshall, Ms. Thatcher, thank you all three very much. PROFILE

MR. MacNeil: Next the artist's pen as political instrument. An election year brings out the best in political cartoonists who through wit and sarcasm point out the worst in political candidates. One man nationally regarded for his skill to skewer is Doug Marlette of The Atlanta Constitution. Our special correspondent Hodding Carter visited Marlette in Atlanta, just before the Democrats descended for their convention.

HODDING CARTER: Doug Marlette arrives at the office at 6 AM every morning to get a jump on the day's news. Today's headlines are the principal source of his artistic inspiration for tomorrow's cartoon. In his 16 years, skewering the famous as an editorial cartoonist, he has mad readers laugh and cry and shout and ponder. He has been called acerbic, witty, incisive, and occasionally by the politicians he caricatures vicious. This year the Pulitzer Prize Committee called him the best. The morning we visited him the news wire had carried a story in which George Bush accused Michael Dukakis of lacking foreign policy experience. It's the kind of story that makes Marlette's morning.

DOUG MARLETTE, The Atlanta Constitution: When people make it easy, when he said, "Dukakis has no experience in foreign policy", you immediately think about his experience with foreign policy and that's the lead. So it's an easy lead when you have people like in the Reagan Administration who are vivid, vivid cartoons already, it's not much work, you know. I usually have to work harder than that, but George Bush is a walking cartoon so it makes my job easier. My job is to find the ironies or to see the ironies and they're all around you and when anyone is seeking power or running the country, there are always going to be contradictions to the ideals and so it's with anybody, Democrat, Republican, you can find cartoon material.

MR. CARTER: What is the cartoon for you? What is the function, to ask you that old question?

MR. MARLETTE: What I like in cartoons, what I like to do, is to express my way of seeing things with humor and emotion. I like cartoons that are simple and direct and get at some essence in a situation or in a politician that move me, that make me feel something, cartoons that -- you know, I like cartoons that kind of knock you back over the breakfast table.

HODDING CARTER: In Atlanta, Doug Marlette has been kicking over his share of the breakfast tables for a little over a year. At this point, his national following is considerably larger than his local one thanks to syndication in over 125 newspapers and 4 paperback collections of his most acid political cartoons. He built a national reputation in his 15 years as a controversial cartoonist, lampooning the rich, the powerful, and the notorious for the Charlotte North Carolina Observer, which is why Editor- in-Chief Bill Kovach lured him away to Atlanta.

MR. CARTER: Any second thoughts after you hired him?

BILL KOVACH, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: There are mornings when I realize that his great strength in some cases is his arrested adolescence and I would have edited the cartoon differently, sure. Not second thoughts that he's here, no, but little twinges.

MR. CARTER: So that some mornings you come up spewing your coffee up, seeing something for the first time when it's on the layout?

BILL KOVACH: Many times, many times, most of the time I see it the same way the reader does at the breakfast table. I try not - - unless I'm called in on the process -- I try not to look at the editorial page during the day as I will news pages.

MR. CARTER: Did you come into the Anne Frank cartoon?

BILL KOVACH: Yes. I was in New York at the time. It was a telephone conversation.

MR. CARTER: Israeli soldiers storming Anne Frank's garret. The image caused an uproar at the paper even before it appeared in print, but Kovach, the new editor, backed his new cartoonist, and they ran into a storm of controversy.

BILL KOVACH: That one was probably the most difficult. I'm still not sure I made the right call but I would do it again. I understand the depth of feeling on that symbol, but I also understood the depth of feeling on the part of people who thought that the Israeli Government's behavior had to be called into serious and sufficient question. A cartoon does that in a way nothing else can. There is a strong immediate emotional reaction to a cartoon. You can discuss it on the telephone, you see it in print, and it's a little more compelling. It hits you. And when I saw you, I had quick second thoughts about the decision, but as I say, I'd do it again.

MR. CARTER: Kovach weathered a local outburst of protest over another Marlette cartoon last year. Allegations of drug use were made against Georgia State Senator Julian Bond. And this Marlette cartoon was condemned as racist by some Atlanta blacks. Kovach says he cleared the cartoon in advance without realizing how some people would see it.

BILL KOVACH: It's an oriental image in my mind, because the first time I saw those or I guess recognition was an oriental image. I never related that or saw that as a black/white image.

MR. CARTER: Monkeys?

BILL KOVACH: Right.

MR. CARTER: Yes.

BILL KOVACH: It just, you know, it didn't occur. But we got a considerable reaction to that.

MR. CARTER: As racist?

BILL KOVACH: As racist.

MR. CARTER: Because of the image of --

BILL KOVACH: As racist.

MR. CARTER: But not all of Atlanta's black leaders took exception to Marlette's portrayal. Mayor Andrew Young thinks a tough watchdog like Marlette can actually be good for black leadership.

ANDREW YOUNG, Mayor, Atlanta: Well, let me say any politician in his right man who likes any cartoonist is a masochist. I mean, cartoonists are ruthless on politicians. I must say that he's been very kind to me so far. I think we've got to get over our racial sensitivity and I think one of the things that's fairly wholesome about Atlanta is that if you're cutting it both ways, you ought to be able to laugh at some aspects of the racial contradictions in our midst.

MR. CARTER: Do you think you're a missionary with your cartoons? Do you want other people to feel that emotion just that strongly?

DOUG MARLETTE: I don't know how strong that is in me. You want to do effective work and that's one of the barometers I guess if you're communicating. But it's hard for me to know when you do this kind of work what is going to affect other people. I can only know what's going to affect me, what pleases me, what amuses me, what stuns me.

MR. CARTER: Marlette's Pulitzer is the first for the Constitution in over 20 years, though it was shares with the Charlotte Observer. He has won the Robert F. Kennedy award for his drawings about issues affecting the poor, and he's the only cartoonist ever accepted as a Nieman fellow in journalism at Harvard University.

DOUG MARLETTE: The kinds of cartoons I like, what I do, shades really more towards art than journalism, one of the things. You know, journalism is about responsibility, even handedness, fairness, facts, and cartoons are really more about subjectivity, not objectivity, personal vision in the way of seeing things, and being unfair really, the best cartoons do not say on the other hand -- you can't do that in a cartoon, and it's really much more about the emotional feel of things, the intuition.

BILL KOVACH, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: A number of issues are not adequately treated in the news columns. There's no way to do it without editorializing and I don't believe in editorializing in the news columns. There's something deep inside us that's touched by a picture, especially a drawn picture, more than a photograph, the clean lines point your soul to the point that's being made in the hands of an artist like Doug.

MR. CARTER: The first half of Doug Marlette's day in Atlanta ends around 1 o'clock each afternoon. His other life, that of a comic strip artist, begins when he arrives back home. In his basement studio, he spends the rest of the day working on his nationally syndicated daily strip Cudzu, which has also been turned into several paperback collections. Its a comic look at Southern life, complete with a television evangelist named the Reverend Will Be Done. The Marlettes' son, Jackson, was born just before the family moved to Atlanta. He consistently provides material for what his father sees as a basically adolescent art form.

DOUG MARLETTE: The editors, editorial page editors, editorial writers, tend to be more comfortable with the civilization of words, where they can say on the other hand, they can be less direct and they can, you know, there are charitable ways of putting it. You can be fair and even handed or other people would say you can be weasel wordy or trying to avoid taking a position. Editors tend to be like the parents of the 50's to rock'n roll, they feel uncomfortable with it. I talk about cartoons as kind of visual rock'n roll. Cartoons are more primitive. It's about pictures. It communicates. Pictures came before words in the history of the species. In the history of the individual, we dream before we talk. And, therefore, there's a power to it and a primitive kind of power. Like they used to say rock'n roll is jungle music. I mean, cartoons are kind of jungle art. It gets to you. It gets under your skin, upsets you if it's done right. CONVERSATION - CLEESE

MR. MacNeil: Finally tonight we have a conversation with the British comic actor and writer, John Cleese. We talked earlier this week when Cleese when visiting New York. First a look at some of his work. Cleese first gained fame in the 70's as a member of the British comedy team Monty Python's Flying Circus. The group's sketches poked fun at every possible British social convention and Cleese was an unpredictable presence, whether he was playing the head of the ministry of silly walks or a customer complaining to a pet shop owner about his newly purchased parrot. [Scene at pet shop]

MR. MacNeil: In the television series "Faulty Towers", Cleese created the character of the inept and rude hotel manager Basil Faulty. [Scene from "Faulty Towers"]

MR. MacNeil: Cleese brings much of the same humor to the work of Video Arts, a company he founded to make management training films. He writes and acts in these training films, often demonstrating how not to do the job. [Training clip film]

MR. MacNeil: Cleese is currently starring in the movie "A Fish Called Wanda", a film comedy about four back-stabbing jewel thieves. Cleese, who also wrote the film, plays a British barrister who is seduced by one of the thieves, Jamie Lee Curtis, who happens to be American. [Scene from "A Fish Called Wanda"]

MR. MacNeil: John Cleese, that sounded more like a heartfelt cry than a gag line, is it really?

JOHN CLEESE: Oh, yes. I mean, when I first wrote the part of Archie, it was funny, we had a read through eight months before we started to shoot the movie and mine was the part that didn't work and the others very much encouraged me to write it more naturalistically which is something I had never done. But I found it very interesting and surprisingly easy to put into Archie's mouth some of my feelings about being English and what I say in that speech is more or less what I used to have to explain to my first American wife, Connie Booth. When she used to say to me, why don't English people ask me questions at dinner parties, I ask them about them, and I explained, you have to make the area safe and send a signal that there's no possibility of embarrassment, then they will ask you the question.

MR. MacNeil: To be an Englishman or to be this Englishman, John Cleese, how much do you think what you feel about it is just yourself and how much --

MR. CLEESE: I think I'm more aware of it than a lot of English people are and that's I think of what Sommerset Maughn said which is in order to understand your own country, it's necessary to live for quite a long time in another one, and I think because I spent 2 1/2 years here in America, I'm more aware of the English personality, at least the middle class personality, than I would be if I'd spent all my time in England, because I see it contrasted with the American personality.

MR. MacNeil: Have you figured out what it is that's different in the two personalities that makes Americans find some things funny and the British find some things funny, what those differences are?

MR. CLEESE: Well, I think that they have the same sense of humor. I seem to be in a minority when I say that. I think the problem is that our cultures are so different, we have the assumption that they're similar, but they're enormously differently in so many different ways. I mean, the American culture is a very extroverted culture. The English culture is a very introverted culture. A lot of things follow from that, so that where we can understand each other's culture, I think we laugh at the same things. In England, of course, we see so much of the American culture on our television, our national networks at peak hour, that we have a very good understanding I think, I mean, even if we see it in terms of Dallas and Dynasty as well as Miami Vice and Kojak, as well as Taxie or Hill Street Blues or Cheers. We're having all this pushed at us the whole time. We get a sense of the American culture and therefore we can understand your jokes better, but on the whole, it's only the PBS audience that has a similar exposure to English programs and comedy and therefore, has the same kind of appreciation of the English culture, so the problem incidentally with selling "A Fish Called Wanda" was to try to get beyond the audience that understands the English culture because they watch PBS.

MR. MacNeil: You have written a lot and talked a lot about anger as an ingredient of humor. Is it British anger, or is it Cleese anger?

MR. CLEESE: It's both I think because I think the British middle class culture is enormously based on repression of emotion and embarrassment of emotion and particularly embarrassment about anger, so that that's built into the culture, but I think also from my early childhood, I had a difficulty with anger or expressing anger which I think was then kind of reinforced by the lower middle class culture that I grew up in. And I've also, just incidentally to add to that, always noticed that I become hysterical with laughter at total non-communication, the scenes with Basil and Manuel for example, Faulty Towers, or even when anybody is trying to understand what the major says in Faulty Towers. These are things that reduce me absolutely to pulp. And it's those two things, anger and lack of communication, that have amused me most over the years and I'm beginning to see that they're both very much to do with my very very early childhood.

MR. MacNeil: It's been widely noted in interviews you've given and in articles about you that you had extensive therapy to help you understand your own feelings better. Has it helped --

MR. CLEESE: That's a slightly pompous way of putting it. I mean, I was in trouble in my first marriage when that was going wrong. Connie was very, being American, was perfectly open and interested in the idea of therapy and I went along for sort of 3 1/2 years with this guy, Robin Skinner, yes.

MR. MacNeil: What I was wondering is from the point of view of an artist, if anger and the other emotions were some of what were fueling your art, what has it done to your art to understand it better and see it?

MR. CLEESE: I know that Robin Skinner thinks that if you --

MR. MacNeil: He is the psychotherapist or analyst with whom you've jointly written a book, a couple of books.

MR. CLEESE: Absolutely right. We're writing the second at the moment. He was my therapist. I got to know him a year after I came out of therapy and then we've been very close friends ever since. He thinks that if you come from a family where the father has one view of the world and the mother has another view of the world, then the children have to kind of reconcile these two conflicting views, that if that is done in a positive way where people try and take this and wrestle with it, that often leads to creative, and I have a feeling that once you have the seeds of creativity then you can actually deal with the neurosis, perhaps through psychotherapy, or maybe through just getting older and getting more mellow, without losing the essential creativity. And I think that by dealing with a neurosis in fact you release yourself to do things that you couldn't earlier have done and in "A Fish Called Wanda" I play these relatively tender scenes with Jamie Lee Curtis. I don't think that I could have done those five or ten years ago because I would have been too defended to have been that open on the screen, so I think it releases creativity or releases the creativity that you always have to expand into new areas.

MR. MacNeil: That's interesting. You said in an interview a couple of years ago with London Weekend Television, "My life is infinitely more important than my work." Did you mean that seriously?

MR. CLEESE: Yes, I did.

MR. MacNeil: How does it show?

MR. CLEESE: I think it shows because the choices that I make in terms of work for example, have much more to do with or entirely to do with whether I think it will be an interesting experience or not. I mean when Larry Kasdon rang me up and said, do you want to come and be in a western, I sort of jumped up and down because it's such an extraordinary thing to be asked to do and I was able to spend three weeks learning to write western style. That to me is a much more interesting and rich experience than if somebody said come to Hollywood and spend 14 weeks making a comedy because I have done that. And somebody's offered me a script this week and it's a purely action movie, you know, it's all people being blown up and being bisected by shells. Well, I've never done that --

MR. MacNeil: This is John Cleese's Rambo?

MR. CLEESE: It's in that kind of area. I mean, I'm not playing a major part I hasten to add, but I'm much more intrigued by that because I mean we're only on the planet a short time and I think the main delight is to stay interested. If people think in terms of building their career, I think it's stultifying.

MR. MacNeil: Well, what produced that? Was it the fact that you're very successful in the other part of your business and you've made a lot of money and you don't have to scramble as hard, is that part of it?

MR. CLEESE: That's certainly part of it. The Video Arts training films have given me a base which means that on the whole I can do what I want to do which is marvelous, but there were a couple of moments in my life for example when I felt that we were repeating ourselves on Monty Python, that we were just permutating and combining old ideas and weren't doing anything new. I wanted to get out of Python then, and I quite consciously knew that I would take a salary cut, you know, or would earn less money for at least a year when I left Python, and I did, and I think there's always been a bit of me that's been prepared to take that kind of risk in order to stay interested. I have some particularly strange thing. I get bored and when I get bored, I get very dissatisfied and that's maybe what the well spring is. I think boredom is, funnily enough, is an odd source of creativity, a very strong one.

MR. MacNeil: Because it drives you to do new things?

MR. CLEESE: Yes, because it forces you out of old patterns the whole time.

MR. MacNeil: You have many layers of fans in this country, as you know, just to make a gesture to each layer, and I'm in all layers myself I must confess. For the Monty Python fans, is all that over completely? I mean, I read that you're driven up the wall when people ask you to do the silly walks. Are you sick of that and you --

MR. CLEESE: I'm only sick of the silly walks because I did it 17 years ago and if I tried to do it now I'd pull a muscle, and in any case, it's only funny because of the context that was created. People think it's the movements that are funny. It's not. It's the context in which I do them that makes it funny. I think that inevitably one gets more interested in making things that last 110 or 120 minutes than things that last 3 minutes, and I could quote Peter Cook to you or Woody Allen or almost any of the Pythons. It's an inevitable progress towards the bigger work, it becomes more interesting. For that reason, I think it's unlikely that we'll get together in the Python grouping again because actually it's a great group for sketch comedy. It's not so good for something to do with story, but the great thing is that we will continue to crop up in each other's movies just as Michael Paydon appears in "Fish Called Wanda", I'm just about to do a couple of days on Terry Jones' film, Michael and I were in Terry Gilliam's "Time Band", Eric's just done Terry Gilliam's latest film, so we turn up in pairs and trios and we have lunch together. But I don't think it's a good idea for us to work together.

MR. MacNeil: What about Faulty Towers, have you any desire to make any more of those?

MR. CLEESE: No, because Connie and I, Connie being my first American wife, we wrote that together, one series in '75, one series in '79, after we were divorced, which confused everyone because we always got on well when we were working together, and we both thought we'd done it, that to have gone back to it would be to start doing something where the juice had already been squeezed out of it, the audience would be too familiar, the characters, they would start anticipating things, and there was no way that we could do a third series that wouldn't be in some way anti-climactic because probably simply stemmed from the fact that we felt we couldn't do it, so we just said enough.

MR. MacNeil: I read or you said in an interview that I saw that you spent up to six weeks on a script, a half hour script for that series, which is extremely unusual. Now what gave you the luxury of that amount of time? Did you just take it and insist on it, or was somebody very generous with the amount of money?

MR. CLEESE: No, no, absolutely not.

MR. MacNeil: How do you carve out that kind of time for what would be regarded in the industry as a mere half hour of comedy script?

MR. CLEESE: Absolutely, and nobody has ever taken that long to write a half hour. Well, I've been fortunate enough always to have a sort of crude commercial streak and I realized early on that the only way in England, and I'm being quite serious, to make any large quantities of money to give yourself that sort of freedom was to get involved in advertising, particularly in television adverts, so I cultivated that very carefully, said no to the first 30 scripts I was offered till I got a good one, and was able to get enough money out of television advertising, you know, ludicrous sums for short periods of work, to enable me then to take 43 weeks to write, to write and perform a series for 40, for which I think the BBC paid me something in the order of 10,000 pounds, which is not a great deal of money to earn over a period of 43 weeks, so it a kind of swings and balances thing. But seriously I've always had one enormous advantage.

MR. MacNeil: You bought that freedom, in other words?

MR. CLEESE: Yes, I bought it.

MR. MacNeil: I mean, you paid for it yourself?

MR. CLEESE: That's right. I did one thing to finance the other activity just as setting up "Fish Called Wanda" cost me about 100,000 pounds of my own money, which I was able to put up before we ever went to a studio, which was a way of maintaining artistic control, so that when we went to MGM, we said there's a script, there's the director, there's the cast. Now to be in that position to give them something to which they either say yes or no but not we'll do it if you change X and put Y in, to get to that position required the sort of money that I've been earning from commercials and Video Arts so that I can present them with a package.

MR. MacNeil: I just wonder whether -- come back to the boredom point for a moment -- whether doing something different all of the time is essential to being original, because a lot of people seem to do very well and are certainly very successful continuing to do something very much the same all the time. I mean, you could pejoratively call it formula or you could just say they go on doing what the audience wants. Do you despise that --

MR. CLEESE: No. I think it has to do with temperament. In fact, I'm not entirely happy with that streak in my personality that gets bored so easily. I wish I didn't. But I think it's to do with temperament and I think in an odd way an easy label is introversion/extroversion. The extroverts of the world who love the applause, the attention, and the general recognition will continue to do the same thing if they get that. The introverts are more interested in doing something that satisfies themselves inside and so they keep moving inside and developing themselves. So I think you will always find them dropping series, for example, before the general public have actually got bored with it.

MR. MacNeil: You've said, "I've been bored most of my life."

MR. CLEESE: Yeah, I have.

MR. MacNeil: Are you bored now?

MR. CLEESE: No, not at the moment.

MR. MacNeil: I didn't mean this instant. I meant at this stage in your life.

MR. CLEESE: I have to say having done six weeks of publicity, it's lovely to do an interview where I'm not saying the same things that I've been saying for 5 3/4 weeks, but no, I find now that I'm in a very fortunate position, that I seem to be able to do interesting things and I seem to be a little bit freer because perhaps of the therapy from the compulsion to work and the opportunity of sitting back and being able to think a little bit is something that seems very enticing for the next few months.

MR. MacNeil: Well, John Cleese, thank you for joining us and good luck.

MR. CLEESE: Thank you. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Thursday, President Reagan signed into law a $3.9 billion drought aid package for farmers, major banks raised their prime lending rate to 10 percent, and a new study has shown the use of aspirin and a clot dissolving drug can save the lives of many heart attack victims. Good night, Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Good night, Jim. That's the Newshour tonight and we will be back tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.