The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight full coverage of the strike that's shutting down General Motors; a Tom Bearden report on logging in national forests, political commentary by Mark Shields & Paul Gigot, a conversation with Renzo Piano, the architect who won the Pritzker, and some Father's Day poetry from Robert Pinsky, the Poet Laureate of the United States. It all follows our summary of the news this Friday. % ? NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: Nearly 90 percent of General Motors' production was shut down today by a strike. President Clinton urged both sides to work it out. He said there was little the government could do to resolve the dispute. United Auto Workers' strikes at two Flint, Michigan plants caused the shutdowns in 23 others across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. A hundred and fourteen thousand workers are off the job. GM said nearly all new deliveries to dealers during the high sales period of spring and summer were halted. Talks resumed today but no progress was reported. Union spokesmen said the issue was moving jobs overseas. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. On Wall Street today the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 100 points at 8712.87. The Midwest cleaned up storm damage today as Florida fought to control more brush fires. From the Dakotas to Wisconsin tornadoes, high winds, and thunderstorms damaged dozens of homes and caused floods. Thousands were without power. Some two dozen people were injured in West Salem, Wisconsin, when a circus tent was ripped apart. In Florida a third of the state's counties battled wildfires. A thick haze of floating ash hung over Jacksonville. President Clinton pledged federal help. Eighty homes have been destroyed since Memorial Day. A sheriff's spokeswoman said an expected rain could bring wind and lightning, spreading the fires. President Clinton today denounced Republican plans for a new, smaller tobacco bill. The Senate killed a version of the legislation Wednesday night. Opponents said it had become too big. Mr. Clinton blamed Republicans for that at a meeting of White House economic advisers.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Every major amendment was sponsored by a member of the Republican majority. They got their major amendment. They all got on record voting for these amendments and voting for them, and then they turned around and kill the bill, which leads us to believe that they intended to kill the bill all along; they just wanted enough good votes to be able to try to convince the voters back home that they really didn't want to kill the bill; they just had to.

JIM LEHRER: House Speaker Gingrich said he was very disappointed by the president's remarks. He told a group of young visitors at the capitol that he would advance a bill that would focus on ways to discourage young people from smoking.

REP. NEWT GINGRICH, Speaker of the House: We believe there are steps we can take that are strong, decisive, and targeted to save their lives. And I would urge the president don't reject the young people of America on behalf of a political issue. Give us a chance to work together to get a targeted, effective, anti-teen smoking bill.

JIM LEHRER: He said he expected to have a bill drafted by next month. Overseas today a top Russian general said NATO military intervention in Kosovo without UN approval would touch off a new cold war. He spoke after the leader of Albanian Kosovars called for NATO action to prevent further attacks from Serb forces. On the Japan story today a top US official said in Tokyo he was optimistic Japan would act fast on reforming its financial system. Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said his talks with Japanese leaders went well. A Japanese newspaper reported Prime Minister Hashimoto was expected to slash corporate and income taxes to boost the economy. The US Wednesday bought $2 billion worth of yen to help lift Japan from its first recession in 20 years. The World Jewish Congress today rejected a $600 million settlement from Swiss banks. It said the offer was offensively low. The banks said they would not pay more to make good on accounts belonging to Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Their heirs and survivors insist the banks kept billions of dollars Jews deposited before and during World War II. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the General Motors strike, logging in national forests, Shields & Gigot, an award-winning architect, and some Father's Day poetry.% ? FOCUS - GM STRIKE

JIM LEHRER: Kwame Holman begins our look at the GM strike.

KWAME HOLMAN: In the pre-dawn hours today, the Lordstown, Ohio assembly plant became the 22nd General Motors facility to shut its doors. The initial strike against the world's largest auto-maker occurred 15 days ago. That's when 3400 United Auto Workers Union members walked away from their jobs making auto body parts at GM's metal stamping plant in Flint, Michigan. Seven days later, another 5800 UAW workers walked off the job at the Delphi parts plant also in Flint. The resulting parts shortages caused a ripple effect that now has idled 90 Percent of GM's facilities in North America. The main issue for the United Auto Workers is job security. Unlike in many strikes, the UAW in Flint has a current contract. The union says the workers -whose annual pay averages $69,000--struck over concern about the future.

SPOKESPERSON: This is a last resort. We are fighting for American jobs here.

SPOKESMAN: There's got to be a stand somewhere. They're shipping all the jobs out to the other countries. I can't understand it myself. They ship all the jobs out, then people aren't going to have-it don't make any sense.

KWAME HOLMAN: They worry jobs soon will be lost because of consolidation of some production and GM's use of outside contractors. Workers at the metal stamping plant say General Motors broke a 1995 commitment to spend $300 million to upgrade the facility. Wince the 1970's, GM has cut more than half the jobs at the metal stamping facility. Workers at the Delphi plant say their concern is over so-called out-sourcing. The union says GM may send as many as 2500 jobs out to nonunion plants in North America and abroad. The company responds changes are necessary because strict union work rules have made both Flint plants inefficient and uncompetitive. The shutdowns reportedly are costing GM some $500 million a week. GM dealers around the U.S. report shipments of new cars have slowed just as the big summer sale season gets underway. Currently more than 100,000 UAW workers from 23 factories-one of which closed this afternoon-are laid off without pay and are not eligible for strike benefits. Negotiations between General Motors and the UAW continued today in Flint as more factories around North America prepared to closed down on Monday.

JIM LEHRER: And to Elizabeth Farnsworth in San Francisco.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And for more on strike we're joined by Harley Shaiken, Professor of Labor & Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley. David Bradley, an auto industry analyst with the investment firm JP Morgan. And Don Gonyea, who covers labor in the auto industry for National Public Radio. Don, bring us up to date. What's the scene in Flint?

DON GONYEA, National Public Radio: Well, we have more plant closings today. We have talks continuing in Flint today, but there has been no sign of progress whatsoever in Flint. They have continued to meet every single day of this strike-these strikes, the first of which is now starting its third week, the other one a little over a week old. But, again, both sides say they would like to get this thing finished as soon as possible, but there is just no sign of any movement at all at the table, so it goes on, and we'll get more plant closings in the days ahead.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Don, there seems to be a lot of emotion associated with this strike. We read about workers comparing it to the 1937 forty-four-day-sit-down strike, the historic UAW strike. Is there as much emotion as there seems?

DON GONYEA: I have covered a lot of these strikes, and this one does seem to have more of an emotional edge to it than I've ever seen before. And I think a lot of that is because this is in Flint. Flint is where General Motors was founded. Flint is where this UAW was founded, where they won the right to organize back in 1936/1937, in the great sit-down strike. And it is also a town that the auto industry built but that has lost 30,000 auto jobs since the 1970's. More than half of the auto jobs in Flint have disappeared since the 1970's, and that happens to coincide with an increase in production by General Motors and other auto makers in places like Mexico. And when you talk to these workers on the picket line in Flint, they really feel like they're drawing a line in the sand here, that they're just trying to hold onto some job and send a message to the company that that's enough.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So why draw the line here? What's at stake? What is the issue that they're most concerned about? I'm sorry, Don. I'm asking Harley. I should have said.

DON GONYEA: Oh, I'm sorry, okay.

HARLEY SHAIKEN, University of California, Berkeley: Well, what we're looking at is a collision between the global economy and the birthplace of the UAW. For UAW workers there's tremendous passion and apprehension that's all tied up into this mix. What they're really concerned about is not whether GM competes, because the UAW workers, surprisingly, are as committed to making this a competitive corporation as GM, itself. What they're concerned about is how GM competes. There really are two routes that GM could take. One route, which will certainly improve the bottom line, is to close plants in Flint and move them to Mexico or Thailand or elsewhere, where workers earn sometimes less than $1 an hour. The other route would engage the workers in Flint in a more competitive GM and the bottom line would improve, but also what would be good for GM in this regard-to paraphrase a famous statement-would also benefit Flint. And that is the latter route that the UAW workers are taking a strong stand. And they feel it very passionately, that it's not simply $1 an hour; it's their future, and it's a past that's strongly remembered.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But just specifically, pick one issue and explain it.

HARLEY SHAIKEN: One of the things that the union is most concerned about and particularly in the Delphi East plant, which is one of the two struck plants where they make spark plugs, air filters, and other small parts, is the fact that the company really isn't so much interested in improving competitiveness in Flint as in outsourcing or shipping work to non-union suppliers, or even to Mexico. We've seen in the last decade an enormous rise in the number of auto jobs in Mexico. In fact, in the last four years in the auto assembly plants or maquiladoras near the border, 80,000 jobs have been added. GM is now the largest employer in Mexico, so it's that that workers so much fear in the Delphi East plant, and that resonates throughout Flint. In a city where 40,000 jobs have been lost in the last decade or so, there is enormous fear that what GM has in mind is a bottom line that improves not with Flint but at the expense of the community and at the expense of the economic pace in the U.S..

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: David Bradley, what's at stake for General Motors here?

DAVID BRADLEY, J.P. Morgan: Let me step back for a minute and just talk about the issue of export of jobs. From what-from my perspective I don't see export of jobs as really being an issue in the strike. The strike originated at the stamping plant in Flint, and stampings virtually are never made overseas and shipped back to the U.S.. It looks as if the Delphi East strike is really a sympathy strike supporting that strike. But it's really about its productivity and competitiveness. Because of that, Flint has been the hotbed of union radicalism for many, many years. Over the years many very arcane work rules have worked their way into the GM factories, making them extremely inefficient. Take for example the stamping plant at Flint. There are 3,000 workers-

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I'm going to interrupt you just one second. Explain what a stamping plant does.

DAVID BRADLEY: A stamping plant has large metal presses to stamp out sheet metal that goes on to form the body of a car, so that one press will make a hood, another press will make a door, and so forth. So returning to the point I was making, the stamping is never done overseas. It's always done contiguous to the plant in question, as close as possible to the plant in question. But what we have here is a plant with 3,000 workers doing the work that probably 1500 or maybe even 1200 workers could do. At the Ford plant down the road a similar size facility would be using 1500 workers. That's largely because of featherbedding and arcane work rules. We have a plant where workers on average work four hours a day and get paid for eight hours a day. And, remember, $44 an hour is the total low-end cost for the eight hours, so we're looking at $88 an hour if we consider they're only working four hours.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How do they work four hours a day and get paid for eight? How does that work?

DAVID BRADLEY: Well, I think the union has a negotiated a deal whereby the number of hits per hour that the presses make or hits per minute is only five when it's actually-the press can run at ten. So then they speed the press up to ten, and they finish early and get to go home. That's essentially the story at Flint. General Motors, because of it's relatively uncompetitive on costs, compared to the other auto makers, needs to do something to fix its cost structure. It's going to start in places like this Flint plant that are working at only half of the rate they ought to be working, and it's trying to get the workers there to agree to a change in work rules that will allow them to speed up the line and allow-make people put in an eight-hour day. Because of the resistance there, certainly there will be some job losses at the end of the day, and it's unfortunate, but we're not talking about jobs going to Mexico here.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Don Gonyea, it must be very important to GM. What are you hearing from managers there? I mean, this is costing them a huge amount of money per week.

DON GONYEA: It is, indeed, costing them a lot of money, and one of the interesting things about this strike is typically in negotiations you hear practically nothing. It's almost impossible to get anything out of either side during the negotiations to find out what they're talking about--what the issues are on the table, what kind of progress they're making. This time both sides are being very vocal and especially vocal has been the company, which is really unusual. They have really kind of launched a PR offensive of sorts, laying out the kind of costs that they have in Flint, talking about how important it is that they get these costs in line if the company is going to be able to remain competitive long-term. They want to get some of these work rule changes. The union has said that the company has reneged on a promise to invest $300 million in the stamping plant there to modernize it and enable it to be more productive. But the company has come right back and said they have invested about $120 million of that into the plant, but it is really crazy to do any more than that until they get some of these-some of these work rule things that they're concerned about addressed. So that's kind of how it's been playing out so far.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So Harley Shaiken, you already mentioned globalization, but both sides are really driven by the huge changes in the global economy here, aren't they?

HARLEY SHAIKEN: Both sides are certainly being buffeted by these changes in the global economy. And I think it's important to put these work rule issues in a broader perspective. First, GM's major problem has not been its work rules; it's been the fact that it hemorrhaged market share from about 40 percent in the mid 80's to around 30 percent today. That's not an issue of work rules. It wasn't work rules that made people fail to buy the Chevy Impala or the Olds Achieva. It was the quality of the product, or the character of the product. Blaming work rules is a little bit like saying there were problems with work rules in the engine room of the "Titanic." It may have been a problem, but it didn't determine the direction or the speed of the ship. Second, it-not only is this an issue but GM has made a recovery in the last several years. It made $7 billion last year, made $27 billion since 1993. When it comes to the specific work rules under discussion on these plants it's not that they're unimportant, but they have to be put in this larger context. Here, though, in the stamping plant are the numbers David raised, I think are largely fictitious. This isn't a plant that's overstaffed by a factor of two. Even GM has been talking about one or two hundred jobs. But the work rules in question were labor standards that were determined by the company and that the union then accepted. But-

DAVID BRADLEY: I have to interject there and say-

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Mr. Bradley, just let Mr. Shaiken finish real quickly, and I'll come right to you.

HARLEY SHAIKEN: And then what we're looking at on all the new press lines that would go into this particular facility-and we're talking really the real issues are one part of the stamping plant, an area called the cradle, a lot of welding, as well as stamping-on all the press lines that would go in there, the new investment, the union is committed to no quotas for what's going on here, so this quota or work standard issue only affects part of the plant, and it only affects the part that doesn't involve the new technology. But I really emphasize, it isn't these work rules; it's the larger context. The union has shown a willingness to change all kinds of work rules where they have felt commitment was there. And in the global economy, if they feel changing workrules simply leads to the movement of jobs to Mexico, you're not going to see that forthcoming.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Okay. Mr. Bradley.

DAVID BRADLEY: Elizabeth, I think that Harley's right in the sense that this is not the workers' fault originally. It's not their fault that GM designed cars the public didn't want and the market share went from 50 percent to 30 percent over 30 years. And GM management certainly bears a lot of blame on that front. Unfortunately, though, we have met with a situation where we have workers-a company with 50 percent market share, and it only has 30-so there has to be some downsizing of the work force, and that's been going on. But let me give you a few statistics to put the stamping in context. General Motors employs 30,000 people in stamping. Ford, a company of fairly comparable size, with similar amount of stamping, employs 12,000 people. So we really have a big disconnect between the number of people they need in stamping and the number they have. And that's really the problem and the challenge. It's not to move jobs to Mexico, because there simply aren't 30,000 stamping jobs. The issue is: How do you get a company to be efficient again after a long period of inefficiency? General Motors is striving very hard from a very inefficient starting point to become efficient again. They're in five years into a ten-year plan. You have to figure out how to deal with those 15,000 extra workers. They do have a program in place that guarantees workers effectively jobs for life, these contracts. So any worker who loses a job gets transferred to another plant or gets on layoff with 95 percent of his pay. So it's not really an issue of taking away people's livelihoods; it's an issue of managing attrition, because there's ten or twelve thousand people that retire every year, and they can manage that attrition if they can get the work rule changes. I think that's what the issue is all about; it's competitiveness for General Motors.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: All right. Well, thank you all very much for being with us.% ? FOCUS - ROADBLOCK

JIM LEHRER: The latest fight over logging in the national forests. Tom Bearden reports.

TOM BEARDEN: Timber is the economic heart and soul of Cascade, Idaho. People have been turning trees into lumber around here for nearly a century. But now they're desperately afraid that the government is deliberately trying to put them out of business. Later this summer the US Forest Service plans to stop building new roads in presently road-less areas of the national forests. Without those roads, loggers say they won't be able to harvest timber in those areas. Many people in Cascade think the moratorium is really just the beginning of a process that will eventually lock up the national forests and deprive them of the steady supply of timber they depend on to make a living. So recently they shut their town down in a symbolic 18-minute protest, saying that's what will happen to the town permanently if the 18-month moratorium is implemented.

REP. HELEN CHENOWETH, (R), Ohio: I would have crawled up here on my hands and knees on cracked glass to be with you, because this is-(cheers)-

TOM BEARDEN: Many of the state's political leaders were there to show their support, including Rep. Helen Chenoweth.

REP. HELEN CHENOWETH: And last night I saw a Forest Service spokesman come on the air and say, they just need to understand that all we're doing is asking for a time-out for 18 months for us to get our plan together. And I thought to myself, how many paychecks have you lost because you had to face being out of work? They don't.

TOM BEARDEN: But the Forest Service says the moratorium provides a badly needed chance to re-evaluate the entire road network. The agency says it has more existing roads than it has money to repair them. Some are eroding due to lack of maintenance, spilling sediment into streams, and killing fish. Other thoroughfares need upgrading to keep up with ever larger crowds of visitors who flock to the forest for recreation. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck says the moratorium will give the agency time to assess all of that.

MIKE DOMBECK, US Forest Service Chief: When you have 373,000 miles of roads of which 60 percent were unable to maintain to a level of standard the standards that they were designed for both environmental and safety problems, it's just time to step back and reassess the issue.

TOM BEARDEN: Dombeck says the moratorium doesn't mean holding any permitted activity in the road-less areas; it just gives the agency a chance to balance competing needs.

MIKE DOMBECK: What are the needs? What are the demands? Where are people wanting to go camping, hunting, fishing? What are the local needs of the people that live within the national forests? And then develop a policy based upon the best science to meet those needs.

TOM BEARDEN: But Jack Lamb, who runs the town's sawmill, thinks there's another agenda.

JACK LAMB, Boise-Cascade Sawmill: I really do not believe that the road-less moratorium is about taking an 18-month time-out to figure something out. I mean, I can't take an 18-month time-out here to figure something out in this sawmill. The guy that owns the restaurant downtown can't take an 18-month time-out to figure that out. I don't think we needed 18 months time-out, and I think what we have going on is another mechanism by which we'll take the whole nother big chunk of land, scatter it all over the place, and incorporate that into wilderness area. And I don't think that's the way to manage the forest.

TOM BEARDEN: Wilderness designation removes land from being logged and prohibits all motorized recreational uses. Environmentalists say protecting these areas is vital to preserving 300-year-old trees and rare wildlife habitats. Almost 8 percent of Idaho is already designated as wilderness, and Cascade is afraid the moratorium is an excuse to add millions of acres to that total. Without timber to cut, the sawmill would be forced to close. But that's where the best paying jobs in town are. Rancher and County Commissioner Phil Davis says if the mill shuts down, the town would never be able to replace the lost tax revenues. Currently that's about $2 million a year.

PHIL DAVIS, County Commissioner: That is about what our property tax is in this county. So basically, we would have to try and double the property taxes to make up for-if we supplied the same services that we're supplying today. That can't be done.

TOM BEARDEN: Those services include funding for schools. Many in Cascade worry the schools will suffer severe cutbacks if the timber-related revenue is reduced. It's a fear that Idaho Senator Larry Craig says other small towns share.

SEN. LARRY CRAIG, (R), Idaho: I've visited with all 12 county superintendents of schools in the last month, and some of them are really considering four-day weeks, so there could be a lot of kids that won't go to school next year, at least for the full school program, and a lot of moms and dads that won't be able to bring food home to the table.

JOHN McCARTHY, Idaho Conservation League: I think that people in Cascade have a real set of problems. I don't diminish their problems. I don't dismiss their problems.

TOM BEARDEN: John McCarthy is the executive director of the Idaho Conservation League. He says the timber era has passed and that change is inevitable.

JOHN McCARTHY: Wilderness is Idaho's future, and the next century what Idaho is going to be known for us microchips and wilderness. Idaho's biggest employer is microchips. It's not in agriculture; it's not in timber; it's not in mining. And the town will certainly change. The town would change. Their kids will come down to Boise and make 20 to 30 dollars an hour doing electronic chips.

TOM BEARDEN: And McCarthy says Cascade will be able to thrive on a growing tourist business. Last year alone tourism increased 7 percent in Idaho and brought $2 billion into the state, but Cascade residents argue that tourism industry jobs will never generate the kind of salaries that the timber industry does.

PHIL DAVIS: The down side to strictly tourism is the jobs do not pay as much. Also, the services that we have to provide, that the county has to provide, the hospital, the jail, the prosecutor, these kind of things are all-the more tourism you have, the more services you have to supply. And they don't have the tax base to pick up what it takes to supply them. So when those people come to visit us, sometimes it's a net loss to us.

TOM BEARDEN: Aside from the economic arguments that Cascade residents make against the moratorium, they also argue that ultimately the new policy will be bad for the forests. They point to massive forest fires like this one as evidence the forest must be carefully managed to be healthy. Over the past decade huge fires have swept across the state. They've been intensely hot fires, because there was a lot of underbrush or fuel on the ground as a result of a century of fire suppression efforts by the Forest Service. The fires were so hot that all the trees were destroyed, and in some places the ground was literally sterilized. Loggers advocate thinning the forest by harvesting timber to avoid those devastating fires. But thinning costs money. The moratorium on new roads would force thinning to be carried out by helicopter, a much more expensive proposition. Boise National Forest Supervisor David Rittenhouse explains.

DAVID RITTENHOUSE, Boise National Forest Supervisor: It's pretty easy to do this and thin these smaller diameter trees when you're right next to the road, but when you get farther back, and you have to deal with helicopter logging, the cost and the economic viability of the project becomes a little bit tougher to deal with. How we're going to provide these treatments is a big challenge that we still have ahead of us to sort out.

JOHN McCARTHY: I say instead of subsidizing logging, let's subsidize land protection; let's subsidize land treatment; let's go ahead and give the forest what it needs, not give the timber corporations what they demand, which is what we've done for the last twenty/thirty years. And, where has that gotten us?

TOM BEARDEN: In the end, Republican Senator Craig says the moratorium isn't about science or timber health or the preservation or loss of jobs or lifestyle. He says it's about politics.

SEN. LARRY CRAIG: I sat down six months ago with Mike Dombeck and said, you know, Mike, let's work this problem out on a bipartisan basis. This administration refused. They wanted to time it for the '98 elections. This is a very loud political statement on their part and a very damaging action for the state and other public land states.

TOM BEARDEN: Officials at the Forest Service deny the moratorium is about politics. They say it's about bringing back a balance to these public lands of many uses.

MIKE DOMBECK: The timber harvest shouldn't be dominant. It should be on an equal plane with recreation concerns, with wildlife concerns, hunting, fishing, protecting our cultural heritage. And if we work within that philosophical framework of working within the limits of the land, everybody benefits. And that's what the American public is asking us to do. The reason that we've been involved in some of the level of controversy that we have is because that shift is occurring and change is occurring. And change is always difficult to deal with.

TOM BEARDEN: Meanwhile, the Idaho congressional delegation promises to take a hard look at the Forest Service's budget when it comes before Congress later this summer, about the same time the moratorium takes effect.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, Shields & Gigot, an award-winning architect, and some Father's Day poetry.% ? FOCUS - POLITICAL WRAP

JIM LEHRER: Shields & Gigot, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot.

JIM LEHRER: Mark, the tobacco bill vote in the Senate, who won, who lost?

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, right now I'd have to say that the biggest loser was the president because the president was looking very eagerly, and understandably, for a second term accomplishment. He wanted a settlement, more than-and wanted legislation probably more than congressional Democrats did who were happy to have the issue going in the fall, and more than congressional Republicans did obviously.

JIM LEHRER: Paul, do you think the president is the biggest loser?

PAUL GIGOT: I do, Jim. I think that it shows how weak-how much weaker his position is now than it was even a year ago. You have to have two things to really get Congress to do something that's hard. You have to be able to intimidate your opponents, and the Republicans don't feel intimidated right now by Bill Clinton. The other thing you have to do is you have to be able to rein in your friends. You have to be able to say look, in order to get this passed, don't go too far, we want to be able to work something out, and he couldn't do that either, because a lot of the Democrats raised this from $368 billion when it was the deal with the attorneys general to $516 billion. And that was a bridge too far. It was overreaching.

JIM LEHRER: But, Mark, the-

MARK SHIELDS: Just to slug this out with Paul-we did agree on who the loser was. This bill came out-

JIM LEHRER: That's the end of all of that.

MARK SHIELDS: That's right. I want harmony to end.

PAUL GIGOT: Let me tell you, that's a relief.

MARK SHIELDS: This bill came out of the committee nineteen to one.

JIM LEHRER: The Commerce Committee.

MARK SHIELDS: This had the support of Conrad Burns of Montana. This had the support of Spence Abraham of Michigan-Bill Frist of Tennessee, Sam Brownback of Kansas. These are not flame-throwing liberals. These are all card-carrying conservatives. Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas voted for this bill. I mean, so this bill came out. It was not something that, oh, my gosh, these liberals just changed it overnight. This was the legislation and John McCain was right. It had 70 votes for it coming out, probably in the Senate coming out, and there was a $40 million campaign conducted against it. Make no mistake about it.

JIM LEHRER: By the tobacco companies.

MARK SHIELDS: By the tobacco companies. And with the absence of anything on the other side, any countervailing argument being made, it did prevail.

JIM LEHRER: So you believe the tobacco industry bought this victory?

MARK SHIELDS: I think the tobacco industry has basically-used to split it-it was an investment company politically. It used to go half and half. It now goes five to one to Republicans, as Republicans took over the Congress, and there's no question. Four and a half million dollars in 1997, all time record for the industry, they gave politically, and I think there's no question that this became important to them to stop it.

JIM LEHRER: Paul, that charge has been made in many editorials today as well, that this was essentially something that the tobacco industry went out and bought from the Republicans. Does that make sense to you?

PAUL GIGOT: I don't think-it doesn't make sense to me. You can't deny that $40 million worth of ads had an impact. There's no question about that. But they also had an impact because they played to a receptive audience. The Wall Street Journal/NBC Poll that came out in April, before the ad campaign started, showed that 70 percent of the public thought that the main purpose of this bill was additional tax revenue. Only 20 percent thought it was about teen smoking, and when you get a bill that it's $516 billion ostensibly aimed at teen smoking, it defies reality that it needs to be that big, that it's not about something else, and it's not about financing the trial lawyers who wanted a big stake in the settlement. It's not about creating what Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican and no conservative called a "rump budget," which meant that it was financing things that they couldn't pass in the rest of the budget because they didn't have the money. It was an extra bill, so it played into a lot of public cynicism about Washington.

JIM LEHRER: Now, Paul, the president and today again and many Democratic leaders yesterday really hammered the Republicans, and they say they're going to go to the voters with this, laying this-wrap this around Republicans' neck because they're encouraging teen smoking. Is that going to work?

PAUL GIGOT: I don't think it'll work unless the Republicans decide they're going to lie down and not fight out. If the president frames this issue like that, then it will work in some Republican-some swing districts in the suburbs. But my feeling is the Republicans would have been worse off to pass this bill; they would have-they would have been down on record as supporting a tax increase on smokers, who disproportionately are lower and middle class, and they would have been alienating a lot of their base. I think if they fight back and they make this an issue of a big spending government bill, and, look, we're prepared to pass something, a narrow bill. I think this thing will be basically a wash in November.

JIM LEHRER: A wash in November?

MARK SHIELDS: No, it won't be a wash in November. I mean, the Republicans already are saying we're going to pass a teen smoking bill, we're going to go after those 15-year-old teen smokers, and we're going to get 'em. Now we're not going to let the tobacco companies totally off the hook; it's not going to cost them a nickel, so I think the issue was drawn-I think this is where the president has the upper hand. He's got the bully pulpit. He can frame the issue, and I think the Republicans are going to be back peddling on this issue, quite frankly, Jim. I don't think it's an issue that has captured the nation. I think Paul is right, in the early polling that the Wall Street Journal showed, but I think if it becomes, oh, we're going to go after them, we're going to get this kid behind the school and lock 'em up, becomes a Republican plan, these users, and just ignore the fact, Jim, we have millions of pages now on the Internet now as a direct result of the Minnesota settlement that Attorney General Skip Humphrey won against the tobacco companies in Minnesota. I'd be scared stiff if I were a Republican coming in of revelations about the disclosures that companies did know that nicotine was addictive, that they did have campaigns to reharvest and recruit new smokers. Boy, I'd be a little nervous going into October with that kind of information floating around.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Change the subject. The flap over Steven Brill's Press Gate article in the new-in his new magazine, what do you make of Ken Starr talking to Brill in the first place, Paul?

PAUL GIGOT: It's beyond me. I mean, he seems to have this notion, Ken Starr does, that if he just sits down with his critics, one to one, head to head, he can somehow win them over. Whenever he has that impulse, he ought to just sit down, take a Valium, and get over it. I mean, he just-his political judgment and his public relations judgment is just awful! Now, that said, I don't think that Steve Brill in the actual piece proved his case that somehow Starr is breaking the law by leaking. And, in fact, two days later, after this story came out, the story had shifted away from Starr toward Steve Brill and his tactics and the truth or reality of his piece.

JIM LEHRER: Is this an important story?

MARK SHIELDS: It's an interesting story, rather than important story, Jim. I think that Ken Starr's reservoir of public confidence and credibility had already been pretty seriously depleted. He didn't need this story this past week, but make no mistake, that Steve Brill, the editor of this new magazine, who persuaded him to sit down for the interview, also had to back peddle and apologize and explain a $2,000 contribution to the Clinton-Gore campaign that he had made, which certainly compromised his own journalistic credentials and apparent objectivity. It was a dream week for Steve Brill. He's got Ken Starr writing three rebuttals, and keeping the story-this is the first issue of his magazine, remember-he's got Newsweek rebutting him, the Washington Post, NBC, the Wall Street Journal. I mean, it's made. It's now everybody in America who reads a newspaper is aware that there's a new magazine out, and there's probably a second edition coming.

JIM LEHRER: Well, Paul, back to the point, I mean, Brill's point was that the press have been lapdogs-I think that's the word that was used, in fact-lapdog to Starr and had been irresponsible in reporting this story. Has that case been made?

PAUL GIGOT: I slogged through the tens of thousands of words of that piece and I didn't find it very persuasive. I mean, what he found was kind of that there's gambling going on in Casablanca. I mean, you know, prosecutors talk to reporters. Amazing-who would have believed that? I mean, Lawrence Walsh came out-the Iran-Contra prosecutor-a couple of months ago and said well, sure, I had to talk to the press. Now, leaking 6E-that is grand jury testimony-is illegal and shouldn't be done. But I don't think Brill made that case in that article. And, in fact, he's got himself in a fight with about a half dozen reporters who say he misquoted me or he got the facts wrong, and in the case of my newspaper we made a mistake in this coverage early on, but Brill didn't get our story right, and he's had to retract part of that story.

JIM LEHRER: Yes. How do you read the impact this might have on the press, Mark, or any at all?

MARK SHIELDS: We don't like criticism. I mean, I don't know, Jim. We're very sensitive, maybe even a little thin-skinned when it comes to it, and the howls from the press. I think it would have been a more interesting story, quite frankly, if it had been on the press coverage. I think there's no question that we in the press collectively were guilty of a rush to judgment on this story. We overran the story. The Lewinsky-Clinton story.

JIM LEHRER: Some people are still doing that.

MARK SHIELDS: Some people are still doing it, and we had, you know, major network shows are discussing whom Al Gore is going to choose as his vice president when he becomes president less than a week after the revelations. The America people basically pulled the press back and said, no, before we have this hanging we'd like to have a trial.

JIM LEHRER: They didn't need Steve Brill to tell them that, though?

MARK SHIELDS: No.

JIM LEHRER: The public didn't, right. Okay, gentlemen, thank you both.% ? CONVERSATION - MASTER BUILDER

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has the story of an award-winning architect.

MARGARET WARNER: The Pritzker Prize, now in its 20th year, is architecture's most prestigious honor. Pritzker laureates are chosen from the ranks of living architects worldwide. They receive a bronze medallion, $100,000 from the Hyatt Foundation, and a place in history with the likes of Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, and Robert Venturi. This year's Pritzker winner is an Italian, Renzo Piano.

SPOKESMAN: We're delighted to present you the Pritzker Architecture Prize of 1998.

MARGARET WARNER: He received the prize at a White House dinner Wednesday night. Piano is best known for futuristic buildings whose structural and technical elements are often an integral part of the artistic design. In announcing the award the Pritzker jury said: "Renzo Piano's architecture reflects that rare melding of art, architecture, and engineering in a truly remarkable synthesis. Piano was born 60 years ago in Genoa, Italy, into a family of builders. His grandfather, father, and uncles were contractors. And his brother became one too. Piano first attracted notice in 1971, when he was just 33. He and another architect, Richard Rogers, won an international competition to design the Pompidou in Paris, an art and cultural museum also known as the Beaubourg. When completed in 1977, the Pompidou Center generated controversy but proved immensely popular with the public. It also generated plenty of new commissions for the young architect. In the two decades since then he's completed some 33 major structures, most of them commercial or public buildings. They include: the Menil Collection Museum in Houston, Texas; Italy's San Nicola Soccer Stadium in Bari; and the Columbus International Exposition in Genoa; the Kansai Air Terminal in Osaka, Japan; the Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel, Switzerland; and this year a cultural center in New Caledonia.

MARGARET WARNER: Renzo Piano joins us now. Welcome, Mr. Piano. Congratulations.

RENZO PIANO, Architect: Thank you.

MARGARET WARNER: Why did you become an architect?

RENZO PIANO: You know, when you grow up in a family of builders, you don't worry about what you do when you be big. You know, it's like growing up in a family of acrobats in the circus; you don't-you know what you will be. And the day I went to see my father to say I wanted to become an architect, he was a bit surprised, because for him being a builder is much more than being just an architect. He was very angry, and I never thought I could do something else.

MARGARET WARNER: Is there a Renzo Piano style at this point? Is there a signature that if someone came upon a building, didn't know it was yours, they'd look at it, and they'd say, that looks like a Piano?

RENZO PIANO: I think so, but, you know, let's put it this way. I don't like the idea that the first preparation when you start to design your building has to put your label. I think this is not fair. It's not fair to the building or to the people, to the client, because every building tells a different story. So the building is more important than you as an architect. For example, I love working with very light elements. I love transparency. I love natural light. So when the building's finished, you recognize those elements in some way. But I think style may be actually very limiting something, you know, because you may end-instead of understanding the need of people--you may end by imposing your style, and this is bad. This is not very fair.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, we thought we'd look at a couple of specific works of yours and talk a little bit more about your work. And I think we have a slide that we're going to put up, the first one, which is the Pompidou Center in Paris, which, as you know, but to our viewers, was completed in 1977. Now, you entered a competition for this, and you were a very young man at the time. What were you trying to achieve?

RENZO PIANO: I did that competition in 1971, together with Richard Rogers, who is one of my best friends, and we are still great friends, and we were very young. I was 33 years. Richard was 36, I guess. We were bad boys. We were really bad boys. And what we wanted to do was mainly to be disobedient to-institution-and build in the middle of Paris. At that time Paris was full of institutions building very, very severe, austere, made of stone-we-we wanted to break that sensation of intimidating building. And we wanted to create actually totally different emotion, that is, the one of creating curiosity. Curiosity is much better emotion than intimidation.

MARGARET WARNER: So is that why you took all these machinery elements like ventilation and so on and made them design elements?

RENZO PIANO: As usual, in architecture there is never one reason why you do this or that way. One reason for taking the machine out was, in fact, create that effect of a factory, but also there was another very important practical reason. By doing this we-we were making free the platform from fixed elements. And, you know, when you are 33 and you are asked to make a building for culture, that may last three or four hundred years, that is what people told us, I mean, you are in great trouble. You don't even understand what culture is about. How can you understand what culture will be in 200 years? So the idea was to create a few piazzas, one above the other, and to take all the fixed elements like lifts, elevators, air conditioning, all out from the platform, so that the building is actually made by five platforms, one above the other, totally flexible, and this actually did work very well.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, it's been very, very popular with tourists and visitors, but as I know you know it's also been criticized for kind of standing apart from the neighborhood.

RENZO PIANO: From one point of view I agree. The Marie--is that neighborhood there--is an old neighborhood, but this spaceship landing from somewhere in the middle of Marie is exactly what medieval cathedral has been long time ago. They are a spaceship. And in every city you have always some element, monuments normally, that are out of scale. If they have an important job to do, that makes sense, and the Centre Pompidou has an important job to do. It has been visited by 150 million persons in 20 years. So it's a very important job.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let's turn now to the Menil Collection Museum in Houston, which was completed really 10 years later in 1987, another museum but so different, at least to the untutored eye looks different, very serene, very subtle. Was that your intention? What were you trying to do there?

RENZO PIANO: You may feel a bit funny what they're saying, but the Menil Collection Museum in Houston is in a sense also provocation like Beauborg was in Paris, except that in Paris it was a city full of memory, too much memory. In Houston, Texas, that is a city with very little memory you can say. I mean, we got built up, the opposite, the secularity of a museum, and, of course, the Menil was the right client for that. She was extremely bright, extremely subtle, and intelligent.

MARGARET WARNER: This was the woman with the great art collection.

RENZO PIANO: Yes. Dominique De Menil was the collector, and she died at the beginning of this year. And then in some way the Menil Collection, quite a building, it was quite a provocation, but it was a sacred place, almost a temple, for contemplation of art, where you almost feel like taking off your shoes and getting gently inside. And so, you know, every kind of building has a different story and is in different place, and you cannot consider coherence to make the building equal. I mean, coherence is to be able to understand the situation and to make a good interpretation.

MARGARET WARNER: And you created an interesting way of letting in the light with these what they call leaves on the roof.

RENZO PIANO: Yes, yes.

MARGARET WARNER: Can you explain that in a way we could understand.

RENZO PIANO: Well, it's very easy. I mean, we call those elements of concrete, very tiny piece of concrete, and we call leaves because like the leaves of a tree they make impossible to the sun to get in directly, and you cannot, of course, have the sun directly on the painting. So by doing those forms that are like that and so the sun bunch all time twice before coming in, we were able to avoid direct sun, and, of course, to cut down the infrared rays and light. And this was just a system for aiding natural light inside. It's not the only one, but, of course, we did use the shape of those leaves from inside to create a sense of the space, because it's not true that a good museum is totally neutral. If you make a museum like a white box and you put a piece of art inside, you kill the piece of art. A museum should be not neutral, totally neutral, must have a character.

MARGARET WARNER: Finally, tell us briefly about one of your current projects, the Putzdamer Platz in Berlin. You're doing a reconstruction of this area that was divided by the Berlin Wall. What are you aiming for there?

RENZO PIANO: Just simply-and this is very, very big challenge, to bring back the center of the city there. You know, that part of Berlin was destroyed by the war. It was the center of Berlin when Berlin was the center of Europe. Then the war destroyed that piazza, and the war made the rest. Actually, even the Berliner wanted to forget about the war, so they actually razed down all the main buildings. So when we started that job-in '89 the wall went down-in '92 we won a competition, we started the job. It was a desert, a total desert, just ghosts going around. So the only memory of the past were ghosts. And this is extremely difficult, but in reality all the city is waiting for the center of the city to go back there, right there.

MARGARET WARNER: And finally, for you personally, what does it mean and what will it mean to you to have won the Pritzker Prize?

RENZO PIANO: You know, it's even a bit amusing, because you feel a bit funny, because being the architect of the year is a bit like being the top of the year or I'll say the best of the month or-and you wonder what happens next year. You wonder if the architect expires like a product. So it's a bit funny in some way. But I'm just joking, because, of course, it's a great honor.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, thanks, Mr. Piano. Thanks for being with us and congratulations.

RENZO PIANO: Thank you.% ? FINALLY - POEM FOR DAD

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, some poetry for Sunday, which is Father's Day, from NewsHour contributor Robert Pinsky, who is a father and the poet laureate of the United States.

ROBERT PINSKY, Poet Laureate: Here's a poem by Robert Hayden: "Those Winter Sundays": Sundays too my father got up early/And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,/then with cracked hands that ached/from labor in the weekday weather made/banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him./I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking./When the rooms were warm, he'd call,/and slowly I would rise and dress,/fearing the chronic angers of that house,/Speaking indifferently to him,/who had driven out the cold/and polished my good shoes as well./What did I know, what did I knowof love's austere and lonely offices?

ROBERT PINSKY: And here in the 17th century Richard Corbet to his son, Vincent Corbet: "What I shall leave thee none can tell, but all shall say I wish thee well, I wish then, Vin, before all wealth, both bodily and ghostly health. Not too much wealth, nor wit come to thee, so much of either may undo thee. I wish thee learning not for show, enough for to instruct and know-not such as gentlemen require to prate at the table or at fire. I wish thee all thy mother's graces, thy father's fortunes and his places. I wish thee friend and one at court not to build on but support, to keep thee not in doing many oppressions but from suffering any. I wish thee peace in all thy ways, nor lazy, nor contentious days, and when thy soul and body part, as innocent as now thou art."% ? RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, nearly 90 percent of General Motors' production was shut down by a strike. President Clinton urged both sides to work it out. The Midwest cleaned up storm damage as Florida fought to control more brush fires, and a top Russian general said NATO military intervention in Kosovo without UN approval would touch off a new cold war. We'll see you on-line and again here Monday evening. Have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.