The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. Leading the news this Thanksgiving Day, several people were killed in ethnic riots in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. The South African Government said black leader Nelson Mandela now being treated for tuberculosis would not go back to prison. Americans observed Thanksgiving with parades, turkey, and football. We'll have details in our News Summary in a moment. After the News Summary, we look first at the new ethnic unrest in the Soviet Union. Soviet expert Donald Zagoria discusses the implications for Mikhail Gorbachev of the tensions in the Soviet regions. Then two views of one of the earth's last paradises, the Amazon Rain Forest. First, we have a documentary on the destruction in these forests that threatens the ecological balance of the whole world, then a conversation with Margaret Mee, a British artist who spent 30 years finding and recording the rare forests of the Amazone Forests. We close with another of this week's essays about the memory of John Kennedy.NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: There was a fresh outbreak of ethnic violence in Soviet Azerbaijan today with several people reported killed. Soviet Foreign Minister Spokesman Genardi Gerasimov called a news conference to make the first public Soviet statement on the most recent violence. He said mobs went on a rampage despite the presence of Soviet troops and tanks which were sent in to keep order after riots early this week. Hundreds of Armenians were reported to have fled the Azerbaijani republic for neighboring Armenia. The current troubles began in February when Armenia called for the annexation of Nagorno-Karabackh, a mostly Armenian enclave that's controlled by Azerbaijan. The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clayborn Pell, flew to Cuba today for talks with Fidel Castro. The Rhode Island Democrat said he would explore the possibility of a friendlier relationship between Cuba and the United States. Pell said the U.S. has embargoed, blockaded, and invaded Cuba, but the policies have not produced the desired result. The South African Government said today that the black nationalist leader, Nelson Mandela, will not go back to prison at the end of his current treatment for tuberculosis. Mandela, the leading symbol of black resistance to apartheid, has been in prison for 26 years for conspiring to wage a sabotage campaign against the government. This summer, he was transferred to a clinic. Today Justice Minister Kobi Koitzi said his health had improved and it will eventually no longer be necessary to care for him in a clinic. Koitzi said Mandela would then be transferred to suitable, comfortable, and secure accommodation. U.S. Evangelist Pat Robertson said South African President P.W. Botha had told him Mandela would be kept under guard, because the government feared someone might assassinate him. In other foreign news today, Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian woman and wounded at least nine others in clashes with Palestinians in the occupied territories. In Bonne, West Germany, the Associated Press reported that Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genture will try to negotiate the release of Western hostages in a visit to Iran this weekend. The 14 Western hostages held in Beirut include nine Americans. In Northern Ireland, a man and his granddaughter were killed in an IRA attempt to bomb a police station. A car bomb went off outside the unoccupied station in the village of Benburb, killing two civilians as they drove by in their own car. The dead were both Catholics. The IRA, acknowledging responsibility, called the deaths tragic. In the Atlantic off Nova Scotia, 27 crewmen were rescued from a Greek freighter that began taking on water in stormy seas. A Canadian army helicopter pulled the crewmen off the deck of the 375 foot vessel Catia and transferred them to another ship nearby. Although closed here for Thanksgiving, financial markets were open in other countries today and the dollar suffered another decline in Tokyo. Despite reported intervention by the Japanese Central Bank, the dollar closed at a new post war low of 121.15 yen. On this Thanksgiving Day, President Reagan spent his last Thanksgiving as President at his California ranch, while George Bush spent the day at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, taking time for a 20 minute jog near his house. Bush shared an early afternoon dinner with two longtime employees. There were huge parades in New York City, Philadelphia, and Detroit. And throughout he day and the country, charitable organizations offered thousands of free meals to the nation's poor and homeless. Two hundred homeless families were treated to lunch at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. The meal was sponsored by the restaurant and a national coalition of chefs and restaurateurs organized to fight hunger. In Salt Lake City, members of a women's peace group protested when the Defense Department refused to permit visiting Soviet scientists to have Thanksgiving dinner in a private home. The Soviets are members of a team inspecting nuclear test sites. A Defense Department spokesman said it was too difficult to guarantee their safety if they went to private homes. Rosemary Holt, President of Women Concerned About Nuclear War, said the rules thwart the development of better relations between our two countries. That's our News Summary. Now it's on to Soviet ethnic unrest, destroying the Amazon rain forests, but preserving some of their beauty, and remembering J.F.K. FOCUS - GORBACHEV'S CHALLENGE

MR. MacNeil: We begin tonight with a story becoming increasingly familiar, ethnic unrest in the Soviet Union. The latest outbreak of trouble in the Soviet Republics has come between ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis who live in neighboring republics in the Southern part of the nation. In Azerbaijan, mobs killed three soldiers and injured more than 120 people. Armenians reportedly are fleeing. The Soviet Foreign Ministry said tanks and troops have been sent in to three Azerbaijani towns to keep order. We'll be talking with Soviet specialist Donald Zagoria about the implications of the latest violence in a moment, but first some background. The current trouble began with this demonstration in February. Five hundred thousand Armenians held the peaceful rally to demand the annexation of a part of Azerbaijan that's populated mostly by Armenians. The Azerbaijanis responded with violence. This mob as shown on Soviet TV went on a rampage through the Armenian town Sunagiat in Azerbaijan, killing at least 30 people. Soviet troops were sent in to restore order. Azerbaijan is predominantly Shia Moslem and Armenia is predominantly Christian. The major dispute is over a piece of territory called Nagorno- Karabakh. It is located inside Azerbaijan, but the Armenians say they should control it, because it is 75 percent Armenian. The Soviet Government took up the issue and July and rejected Armenian demands to annex Nagorno-Karabakh or give it autonomy. The Soviet media have been giving the story considerable publicity, but this week's violence up to today has not been reported in the Soviet press or television. Now to some analysis. It comes from Donald Zagoria, a Professor of International Relations at Hunter College of the City University of New York, and a Fellow at the Harriman Institute of Advanced Soviet Studies at Columbia University. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Zagoria.

MR. ZAGORIA: Thank you.

MR. MacNeil: What are the options for Gorbachev in dealing now with this Armenian/Azerbaijani situation? They've tried the sort of legal government route and rejected the Armenian demands. Now they've sent in tanks and troops, but there are still ruts. What can he do?

DONALD ZAGORIA, City University of New York: Well, I think the first thing to say is this issue has been going on, as you said in your introduction, for nine months or so, so it's obviously got a very serious dilemma here. I think there are three basic options. The first option would be to go along with the demands and to return this area to Armenia. The second option would be to give this area autonomy under the Russian republic, which would be a kind of middle-of-the-road solution, and the third option is what he has been trying to do for the past nine months, to improve the economic situation, make cultural concessions, and just to try to say to the Armenians that we're going to try to improve your lot, but we're not going to make any changes in territories. The problem with the first two options is that they're opposed by most of the people in authority at the center and in many of the other republics because they fear that if they do move the region to Armenia or even to the RSFSR, this could set in motion demand for territorial readjustments all over the Soviet Union. And we're talking after all about a country in which there are Armenians living in Georgia, there are Kosnoks and Uzbaks living in Turk Menistan, so the very nature of the situation is such that if here were to concede the demand, this could set in motion other demands on the part of other nationalities, minority nationalities living in republics that they don't share cultural affinities with.

MR. MacNeil: So even though there is this particular religious split here, Christian/Moslem split, this situation is not unique, but more part of a pattern throughout the Soviet Union?

MR. ZAGORIA: We're talking about a country in which 50 percent of the population are non-Russians. And in almost every town, every oblast, every republic, there are Russians and non-Russians, and there are more than 100 different nationalities. They're all living alongside of each other. That's not to say that this particular pattern is replicated all over. I think there are at least two different patterns. One is this intra-ethnic tension between non-Russian nationalities living side by side. Another and probably more serious pattern is simply a minority nationality in its own republic that wants greater autonomy, such as in the Baltics or in Kazakstan, or elsewhere, where they simply want greater autonomy from Russian domination and Russian control.

MR. MacNeil: Considering all the problems Gorbachev faces, where on the scale of the serious things that are problems for him, does this regional ethnic autonomy pressure fit would you say? How serious is it?

MR. ZAGORIA: I think this is one of the most serious problems facing Perestroika and reform. This, together with the food problem, together with the potential for working class unrest, all fused together, now being exploited by opponents of reform within the leadership who are saying, you see, Glasnost leads to chaos and anarchy, this is a very very troublesome mix. Gorbachev and his associates are committed, it should be said, to a fairly radical devolution of authority to the republic.

MR. MacNeil: Which of course is encouraging in a way?

MR. ZAGORIA: Which of course is -- it's necessary to get away from the pattern of Stalinist repression for 50 years or so. But by devolving power and authority in the interest of unleashing energy for Perestroika, he is also encouraging the more radical nationalist elements to move in directions that are incompatible with his own goals and desires.

MR. MacNeil: So how much does this movement threaten his own authority and position?

MR. ZAGORIA: Well, I think Gorbachev is in quite a strong position. In recent months, he has moved very decisively to demote several of his opponents in the leadership, to get rid of several of them, to replace people in the Central Committee, to take control of the army, and the Secretary of the Party, but his power is not unlimited so that if everything goes wrong, if the economy doesn't turn up, if the nationality situation gets worse, if the workers go on strike, if Poland rises up, if all of these things come to a head and soon, then even Gorbachev's power will not be able to resist those conservatives who say this is a hair brain schemer like Kruschev and we'd better get rid of him.

MR. MacNeil: But how can he clamp down -- just to take the Armenian/Azerbaijani situation, suppose he decides the correct option is the traditional option of clamping down, saying no, and get back to your places and do your work and behave. How far can he do that without undermining his own reforms, the very things you've been describing, openness and more discussion and more democracy and so on?

MR. ZAGORIA: Well, I think one option that may probably come under an increasing discussion is making this an autonomous region within the RFR -- the Russian Federal Republic -- so that it's neither part of Azerbaijan nor Armenia. This, in fact, was a proposal made by some Soviet authorities at recent high level party meetings. Maybe they will do something like that.

MR. MacNeil: Well, Mr. Zagoria, thank you very much for joining us.

MR. ZAGORIA: Thank you. FOCUS - PARADISE LOST

MR. MacNeil: We are devoting most of tonight's program to a look at what's happening in one of the most beautiful regions on earth, the Amazon River Basin in Brazil. The Amazon supports some of the few remaining rain forests on earth, but they are being destroyed at a rapid pace. Many scientists believe that that will eventually have serious consequences for the rest of the world. Right now, however, the destruction of the forests is causing problems for the people of Brazil, as Allen Abel of the CBC Journal Program learned during a recent visit. His report begins in the City of Belem.

ALLEN ABEL, CBC Journal: Dawn at Belem, Brazil, where the Amazon meets the Atlantic. For more than 300 years there's been a market here, the bounty of the largest river system in the world brought forth by conquerors and colonists, a seemingly endless supply, but a few blocks away in the Belem opera house a cry of warning, a cry for Amazonia. SINGING ABOUT AMAZONIA

MR. ABEL: For just across the harbor, beyond man's narrow foothold flows the great river and along its banks and tributaries, the great forests, the great mystery, Amazonia, the treasure chest of man's dreams and his nightmares. This is the Amazonia Floresta, the Rain Forest, the jungle. Nearly 500 years ago, Spanish and Portugese explorers hacked their way through this wilderness, searching for Eldorado, the City of Gold, they didn't find it, but their dream endured. Today this forest is a prisoner, trapped between those who say it would harm the world to tear it down, and those who say it would bankrupt Brazil to leave it standing. While the debate continues, the forest perishes day by day and tree by tree. Once the forest stretched unbroken from the Atlantic to the Andes. But today it's under attack, and so are tropical forests around the world in Central Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, vanishing at the rate of an acre a second. One-third of the world's rain forests have already been obliterated, and half of what remains is Brazil's. To many Brazilians, it's a national bank vault waiting to be opened, and that's bad news for the forest. Two years ago, this was virgin forest. Now it's the reservoir of a hydroelectric project called Balbena, a cornerstone of the Brazilian Government's plans to develop Amazonia, and in place of the trees, a grove of transmission towers. So the water levvel rises, the forest is flooded and dies and company men head out in boats to rescue a few of the victims, like the three toed sloth. Thousands of animals drown, but this one is lucky. He may end up in a zoo. And in the sky, it's not a thunderhead, it's a cloud of smoke. The Amazonia Floresta is being logged, flooded, strip mined, but more than anything else, it is being burned for pasture and farmland. Until the 1960's, Amazonia was a virtually undisturbed domain, remote from the major cities of Brazilin distance and in mind. Its only lines of communication were the channels and tributaries of the world's longest river. But then the national capital was moved to Brasilia, on the fringe of the forest, and the nation turned inward. Roads were built, a trans-Amazonian highway, and that brought settlers, gold miners, ranchers, and devastation, devastation so vast it's visible even from space. In a satellite photo, the dark area is a national park, but it's surrounded by gray plumes of smoke. The rest of Amazonia is on fire, and even Brazilian scientists like Dr. Alberto Setzer of the Space Research Center in San Paulo are shocked by these new findings.

ALBERTO SETZER, Brazilian Scientist: Each dot here corresponds to a large forest burning in the Amazon Basin, and you can count them by the thousands, in some cases up to 7,000 fires on a single day. It's a matter of maybe 15 more years until most of the forest is gone.

MR. ABEL: Fifteen years before the world's greatest rain forest is reduced to a few national parks, a landscape of ashes, a skeletal grove of dead Brazil nut trees. Fifteen years for the world's scientists to assess what will be lost when the forest disappears.

DR. MARK PLOTKIN: This is a sacra tea palm, used as an arrow poison in some parts of the Amazon, but it's never been looked at to see what kind of medicine it might produce.

MR. ABEL: Dr. Mark Plotkin is an American botanist specializing in the medicinal use of tropical plants, the source of one out of every twelve prescriptions filled in North America. He says that 99 percent of these plants have never been analyzed.

DR. MARK PLOTKIN, World Wildlife Fund: Now Brazil has more species of plants than any other country on earth so you can see the potential of what's out there waiting to be found. If we don't find the cure for AIDS in the laboratory, we need to look in the forest. Where are all the superstar drugs against cancer in the last decade? They haven't come out of the laboratory. People are now focusing more on the forest to find new and useful things. I'm not writing off the laboratory, but I sure don't want to write off the forest.

MR. ABEL: And as the smoke rises, there is another problem, the release of vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. That means more carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect, possibly a drastic warming of the earth's climate.

SCIENTIST: Now the amount of CO2 produced by the forest is very significant in terms of worldwide production. We all know that the CO2 concentration is rising in a worldwide basis and burnings will contribute to a significant part of that. Brazil's role in the CO2 emission problem could reach up to 20 percent of the world contributions.

MR. ABEL: But while the scientists worry, the forests burn, one patch at a time. Valmir Bishpul Dos Santus is a peasant from the coast, an illegal squatter, a pusaru. He didn't come to Amazonia to worsen the greenhouse effect. He came for a better life.

VALMIR BISHPUL DOS SANTUS, Squatter: [Speaking through Translator] I was told that Amazonia was very rich and so was the land. In the area where we were before, the soil is not good, so we stayed four years and it did not work out. We left.

MR. ABEL: They fled the slums and barren lives of Brazil's urban poor. Compared to the squalor of a wretched shanty town, Amazonia is not a wildnerness, not a frontier, it's a dream, and if the farmland is not good at their first stop, the pusarus move on, slashing and burning as they go. And as the network of roads expands across Amazonia, truckloads of pusarus are flooding in, thousands and thousands of the landless. And so are cattle ranchers. They're not peasants seeking a small plt and subsistence. They're businessmen chasing profits, men like Nelson Ruiz Albano.

NELSON RUIZ ALBANO, Rancher: [Speaking through Translator] Look, it was just a jungle. I cut it down, burned it, and created a pasture.

MR. ABEL: For a couple of years after the burnings, cattle do well, but then the nutrients in the fragile soil are washed away by the tropical rains. Fodder won't grow, the cattle waste away, and the rancher has to burn another pasture and then another. To scientists like Alberto Setzer, the final result is disaster. The great forests become a wasteland.

ALBERTO SETZER, Brazilian Scientist: The soils over large portions of the Amazon Basin is not good. It's a very thin soil, so there is the danger that if you remove all the nutrients of the soil, the land may become very bad for any good use.

MR. ABEL: And for land owners like Nelson Ruiz Alabano and his 50,000 hectors there's more bad news. As soon as ranchers clear a patch of forest, squatters move in, organized squatters, concerned more with hunger than with legal title. And the result is often conflict, pusarus against ranchers, first with slogans, and then with guns. A civil war between Brazilians who want small tracts of land to live on and Brazilians who want to exploit huge estates, but one thing is clear, no matter who wins this war, the forest will lose. And there is one more endangered species. Afternoon in the heart of Amazonia, a hundred killometers and a thousand years from the nearest Brazilian town, the Cayapo Indians celebrate the harvest of maniach root, their staple food. But in their song of plenty, a note of anguish. Fifty years ago, these Cayapo had never been contacted by outsiders. But as the women of A Ucray Village prepare the maniach for baking and eating, as they decorate each other for the feast, as the young boys fish in the Rio Fresco, as their ancestors have for centuries, a few among them like their young chief Payacan understand that this way of life is under siege.

PAYACAN, Cayapo Chief: [Through Translator] The condition of the forest right now is very bad. There is much devastation and it's getting closer. We can see lots of smoke, lots of fires burning in the forest. The condition of the forest is bad, very threatened, very threatened.

MR. ABEL: Today only the old men like Payacan's father, Sikhadie, can recall an untouched forest, a forest that these children will never know.

SIKHADIE, Cayapo Indian: [Through Translator] All over this region nothing but trees when I was a child, clean rivers, plenty of fish. I never saw the fires, the smoke. Forest today is threatened. This is a problem that was brought here very recently by the white man. It is his smoke, his smoke.

MR. ABEL: When Europeans first came to the Amazon, there were 5 million Indians living in these forests. Now there are fewer than 200,000, tribes like the Cayapo of Aukray Village. Once a large group of white settlers moved on to Cayapo land, the warriors painted themselves, picked up war clubs, and killed 20 of those whites. That didn't happen 400 years ago. That was in 1980.

PAYACAN, Cayapo Chief: [Through Translator] My father remembers how to fight. If the white man comes close, the Cayapo still keeps its tradition. If the white man gets close, we can fight as our fathers did before. The white man will kill us, but we will also kill the white man.

MR. ABEL: Yet, the younger generation understands that this is a war the Indian cannot win.

CAYAPO INDIAN: [Through Translator] I don't think we can stay here, because if we stay here, the white man will come.

MR. ABEL: Five hundred killometers from his village on stage at the magnificent Tatru in the Port City of Belem, Payacan pleads for his tribe, for his race, for his forest.

PAYACAN: [Through Translator] We have to act, because you whites are getitng near to us.

MR. ABEL: The audience is responsive. It's a gathering mostly of foreign scientists who study tropical forests. For many, the interest is academic. But for Payacan and his warriors, the issue is fundamental. Destroy the forest and you destroy the Indian. But for the Brazilian Government, it's no so simple. The country owes the world's largest foreign debt, 120 billion U.S. dollars, and increasingly, it sees Amazonia as an unopened bank vault, its last chance at prosperity.

VIOLETA DELORERU, Brazilian Government Adviser: [Through Translator] The whole world is really concerned about the Amazon, but there is no concern for the Brazilian foreign debt. And the two things are very much interconnected.

MR. ABEL: Violeta Deloreru is a government adviser in Belem.

VIOLETA DELORERU: [Through Translator] It is a naive position to imagine that a country with so many debts like Brazil will put the ecology question ahead of the economic question.

MR. ABEL: The price of Brazil's development is rapid destruction, but Violeta Deloreru awaits the final accounting.

VIOLETA DELORERU: [Through Translator] I think it's terrible and in a way I think that our generation, the generation holding public office today, one day will have to account for this. And I don't know how it will be possible to account for this to the future generations, because we let it happen.

MR. ABEL: In the political history of Amazonia, no man has wielded more power than Gilbert Mestrino, as a state governor, as a federal official. Throughout his long career, Mestrino has worked toward one goal, to exploit the riches of Amazonia, whatever the price.

GILBERT MESTRINO, Brazilian Politician: [Through Translator] My dream would be to look at this enormous empty land and find man, work and the rational use of all these resources. I come from a Christian background, but Christ taught us that man should take from nature what sustains him, everything that sustains him. Therefore, I just cannot accept the preaching that man can die but the tree cannot, so that if one day the world has to be destroyed, the last to be destroyed should be man.

MR. ABEL: And if geologists say the soil of Amazonia is infertile and barren, men like Mestrino say you dig deeper. And so Brazil digs. At Carajas, named for an extinct tribe of Indians, they're strip mining the world's largest deposit of high quality of iron core and selling it mostly to Europe and Japan at bargain prices. Carajas represents the Brazilian Government's official dream of Amazonia and as company engineer Alceo Mendez Dos Santos explains, this is the dream that will prevail.

ALCEO MENDEZ DOS SANTOS, Engineer: We want to explore the good lands of Amazonia for farming, because our people need food. We want to explore Amazonia mineral resources, because our people need the profits that will come from this exploration to increase their standards of life, and we want to get out of the condition of third world country.

MR. ABEL: For workers at Carajas, the dream has already come true. In the middle of the jungle, in a location as remote from the rest of Brazil as the village of Aukray, the mining company has erected first world suburbia. The residents here are the new settlers of the Amazon, transferred from the southern cities to the heart of darkness, with a 50 percent hardship bonus thrown in. They have their shopping malls, their health clinics for innoculation against tropical diseases, and this is just the first phase of one of the largest industrial projects in the world, Grande Carajas, a complex of mines, smelters, railways and cities that will occupy a swath of rain forest as big as France and England combined. So is this what Amazonia is to become, a zoo here, a park there? To the planners, the engineers, the answer is yes, and the rest of the world should not be surprised.

ALCEO MEENDEZ DOS SANTOS: Yes. What do you U.S. doing now, what is Europe doing now, what is Canada doing now? Have some national parks for preservation and the rest of the country is under development and nobody is worrying aboumt that.

MR. ABEL: And so begins the cry of Amazonia at the opera house in Belem.

SINGING AT OPERA HOUSE IN BELEM ABOUT AMAZONIA

MR. ABEL: For 500 years, outsiders have brought their dreams to Amazonia, visions of wealth, nightmares of savages and serpents. A hundred years ago, a rubber boom brought prosperity for a while. Now only a few relics remain, like this wonderful City of Belem. Today Brazil is turning again to the great river, to the great forest, and the world is waiting to hear Amazonia's reply.

MR. MacNeil: Now for a very different perspective of the Amazon Basin, we turn to an extraordinary Englishwoman named Margaret Mee. At 80 years old, Margaret Mee is of an age when most of us have long since retired, but not her. For the past 30 years, Mrs. Mee has devoted her life to traveling up the Amazon River and its various tributaries. Usually she heads up river in a small boat by herself, with just a local pilot for companionship, occasionally with a friend or two. Mrs. Mee is not simply a traveler and explorer of new places. She is a painter who is creating a unique record of the rare species of flowers of the Amazon Basin before they disappear under the onslaught of man. Her work has been compared to some of the masters at painting from nature. A collection of those paintings and her diaries called "In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forest", has just been published by Non-Such Expeditions. I talked to her earlier this week when she visited New York.

MR. MacNeil: Mrs. Mee, how did you become interested in the Amazon? What got you itnerested in the Amazon flowers?

MARGARET MEE, Artist: Well, when I arrived in Brazil, I was very keen to go up tot he Amazon, but it was for some years I had to wait, because my sister was very seriously ill in San Paulo, and I had to stay there. Then I went up to Pera, which is really Amazon, part of the Amazon, and started painting the plants there. I had seen wonderful plants on the Acero De Mas, as we call it, the Atlantic Forest, of which, you wouldn't believe it, less than 5 percent is left. At one time, it stretched all the way from South Brazil, all along the coast, to the Northeast Baia, now there's 5 percent left. In the days when I was there, it was much more, and I found magnificent flowers there, but when I went to Pera, I became completely, well, I fell completely in love with the flora of Amazonis.

MR. MacNeil: And you, you felt you had to go deeper and deeper to get more and more things that couldn't be seen anywhere else, was that it?

MRS. MEE: That's right, and I found some new plants there too which inspired me to carry on, look for others, and to record them.

MR. MacNeil: Were you looking for plants to discover that had never been found before, or was your intention to record plants that might soon be wiped out by civilization?

MRS. MEE: Both.

MR. MacNeil: Both.

MRS. MEE: For one thing, those which had never been discovered before will probably be wiped out first, of course, because they're rare and as you know, there are just these echo systems in Amazonis, where a certain plant can be found and perhaps it can be found nowhere else in the Amazon.

MR. MacNeil: What is it about the kind of flower in the Amazon Forests that attracts you, the artist, that you don't find in exotic flowers elsewhere?

MRS. MEE: Well, for one thing, they're extraordinarily aggressive, some of them. The bromalia, that's the pineapple family, have great thorns. In fact, they're extremely difficult to collect, as you can imagine. They have hosts of creatures living in them, including scorpions, poisonous spiders, ants, well, almost -- and even snakes in some cases. But of course, there are the others which are so beautiful, delicate color, orchids, for instance, the catlai vealacia, and the blue orchid, acacalus siana, which is absolutely a dream.

MR. MacNeil: Did it ever occur to you that it was a slightly unusual occupation for a delicately built lady to be going into the jungles of the Amazon, often either unaccompanied or very little accompanied among the Indian tribes and the wild fauna?

MRS. MEE: Well, I don't know. I'm not really so delicate perhaps as I look, if I do look delicate. But I have a great deal of resistance.

MR. MacNeil: I've read about some of the things that you've gone through with insects and snakes and the Indian tribes and some white people.

MRS. MEE: Yes. Well, the Indian tribes, I have no fear of the Indians, in fact, I've found them lovable, hospital, friendly people. I have had some pretty horrid adventures with white adventurers, the garamperos, the gold diggers.

MR. MacNeil: Describe some of those adventures, what happened.

MRS. MEE: Well, I was once in an Indian village, Tucano Indians, in Curi Curi, on the river, Curi Curi Ari, which is a tributary of the Rio Negro, the high reaches of the Rio Negro, and there I was collecting plants and painting, and one morning, the Indians had gone off in their canoes for their, to their plantations to work and they wouldn't be back till evening. And I heard an outboard motor poppling up the river, and in a few minutes, there were seven rough looking fellows coming up the path towards my hut. It was quite a long way from the so called port, which was a fallen tree, as far as I remember. They came and the big garampero who was leading them said, "Fancy finding a woman like you here. Where's your husband?" So, of course, I told the truth, because better tell the truth to roughians. And I said, "In San Paulo."

MR. MacNeil: Which is a thousand miles away or so.

MRS. MEE: Yes. Then he asked me what I've got for them. Whiskey? No. Puchasa -- that's the very intoxicating drink of Brazil -- no. I've come up here to work. Oh, alcohol? Yes, I have, but only for my cooking. Oh, what else have you got for us? I said, nothing. Oh, he said, but we'll be back again. So I thought, oh, my God, this is awful now. So I went into my hut, hid everything I had of value, and then loaded my revolver, which was a six barrel revolver, and thought, now they've gone, I must go into the forests, perhaps, which is the best thing to do? I peaked through the palia, the straw of the walls, and there I saw, there were three of them circling around my hut. SoI thought this is no good, sat down on box, tucked my revolver underneath ready, and started to read a book, upsidedown I noticed, waiting. In about half an hour, I saw a shadow in the doorway. The big garampero was back and drunk. He comes in, but I stick my revolver into his stomach, and that gave him a shock, I can tell you. He backed out and I followed him. By this time, my fear was going, and there's an old Indian outside. He said, "Be careful, he's very drunk. I'll take him up the river." So this fellow said, "Didn't be unfriendly, shake hands." And then he sprang and tried to disarm me, but the old Indian pushed him off. They went. About half an hour later, the Indians came back, paddled back with reinforcements, one huge Indian bigger than I've ever seen, and I started to tell the story. They knew everything. After this, I was treated like a queen.

MR. MacNeil: So how many trips have you made up the Amazon, deep into the Amazon?

MRS. MEE: I've made 15, the last one in May to find the cactus which opens at night and fades forever at dawn.

MR. MacNeil: The so called "moon flower"?

MRS. MEE: That's right.

MR. MacNeil: How long had you been looking for that?

MRS. MEE: Since 1965.

MR. MacNeil: How did you know it existed?

MRS. MEE: Well, because I've seen it from time to time, never in flower, until May.

MR. MacNeil: Tell me about the feelings on finally finding one this last time at night coming into bloom so that you could witness that.

MRS. MEE: Well, I felt thrilled. I had to climb on top of the boat and with all my sketching materials and that and sit down in front of the bud, waiting for it to open. And it moved as it opened, you could see it opening. This was thrilling. And as it opened, a wonderful perfume came out to attract the moth, of course, it's a hawk moth, which pollenates it. There was a full moon looking through the branches of the tree, magnificent, and all the time the sound of the night birds.

MR. MacNeil: Aren't you worried about getting bitten by whatever poisonous insects or snakes or creatures there may be in the forest like that?

MRS. MEE: The insects are a nuisance, but I don't fear the birds and animals at all really. It's the semi-civilized human that I fear much more.

MR. MacNeil: I see.

MRS. MEE: They are the danger.

MR. MacNeil: Are you going back again?

MRS. MEE: Yes, definitely. I shall go back perhaps in the spring, next spring, I hope. That would be May, of course.

MR. MacNeil: What will be your goal this next trip?

MRS. MEE: Well, I have so many -- [technical difficulty] -- about the Amazon. I want to go to the Rio Japura, but I also want to repeat this trip into Anavilianis, which is a wonderful area for plants and not destroyed, as it's a reserve. I'm rather frightened to go far afield, not frightened for my life or anything like that, oh no, but what I shall see, the horrible destruction which I have already seen on the Rio Negro. It was almost unrecognizable, a tragedy, that glorious river where I used to moor my boat to a great tree, eswatsia, coming into flower, to any great tree up there. I almost knew the trees as friends, individually. Not one of them is left. The mechanical saw has been up first, charcoal burners have burned the trees for charcoal to supply industry. They're using a tremendous number of the forest trees for charcoal burning to run industry. It's a very much cheaper way apparently than other means.

MR. MacNeil: What do you have yet to accomplish that you feel you haven't done? You've created a very large and significant record now of these flowers and your work has been compared with many of the great painters of flowers in the past. What have you yet to do? What leaves you unsatisfied?

MRS. MEE: Well, I have written up my diaries. They're in this book, of course. And I have done, as you say, quite a collection of Amazon plants, but there are still so many, so many to be recorded, and this has to be done before they're destroyed if it's humanly possible. Well, I shall need another six lives, which won't be granted, to do really enough to satisfy me.

MR. MacNeil: Well, Mrs. Mee, thank you so much for joining us. ESSAY - J.F.K.

MR. MacNeil: We close tonight with the fourth in our week long series of essays marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For tonight's thoughts, we turn to New York News Day Art Critic Amei Wallach.

AMEI WALLACH: There's a story about the first Lord Rotshchild. Once a friend asked him for a loan of $10,000 and Rothschild said he didn't have the cash just then, but tell you what, I'll walk arm in arm with you across the floor of the exchange and then your credit will be worth a good deal more than $10,000. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the art magazines remembered that. They said, Kennedy walked arm in arm with the artists of his time. Robert Frost read at his inauguration. Pavlov Kasals performed at his parties. Fine art and real antiques transformed the White House. The National Endowment for the arts was a gleam in his eye. Because of it, we now have art museums in Texas, sculpture along Ohio highways, and dance companies in Georgia. But there was another way in which he infected the visual art of his time, and that had to do with style, cool, they called it, distant, irreverent, ironic and clever. Cool had to do with appointing your kid brother, Robert, Attorney General, and then quipping under attack, "I can't see that it's wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law." Pop art, the style that burst upon the scene during the Kennedy Presidency, was cool. The dream that pop art dreamed was all American. It was the celebration of an America that didn't take her or itself too seriously. It was about having it all and kidding it too, and anybody could get the joke and laugh along all the way to the bank. It was the very opposite of the abstract expressionism of the 50's that it replaced. Abstract expressionism was hot, impassioned, heroic. It was about breaking old rules and dreaming utopian dreams. But pop art was the weather map of a new climate in the land. There was forecast and premonition in the disaster paintings that Andy Warhol was making in the year of Kennedy's death. When the death came, Andy celebrated the survivors. Jackie, at the funeral as she appeared that weekend, we all stayed glued to our television sets, Jackie as queen of death again and again and again. Elain DeKuney had been painting the President's portrait with an expressionist hand, but she said, "The assassin dropped my brush." Robert Raushenberg went on anyway, celebrating Kennedy in a photo montage of his administration, and Nam Jun Pike gave a performance in which a robot strutted across the stage, waving its arm and playing a recording of Kennedy's inaugural address. But the deaths wouldn't stop, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, the Richard Speck mass murders, Milai. Coolness was hardly the appropriate response to so much death. What was then? Pop artists went angry and political. Clace Oldenberg fashioned a bloody fire hydrant. Rosequist painted his room sized F-111, an airplane spreading destruction while a little girl smiled. Rauschenberg put all the anger and all the deaths together into one collage. The minimalists simply opted out. Anger went into hiding. Their art, they said, was about paint, about materials, what you see is what you see, no more, no less. Styles proliferated in aggression and alarm, conceptualism, hyper realism, formalism, expressionism, sight art, op art, meo geo and commercialism kept pace. The more art, the bigger the market. After a while, cynicism set in. That had always been the danger in the cool style as a style. With no hot utopian dream to fall back on, it could all quickly crumble into cynicism and helplessness. Far roo much of the art that's being made 25 years after Kennedy's death is about cynicism and about helplessness. That's what post modernism really means. Artists, like everyone else, feel empty, impotent to do anything to the world they find, except to reflect it back, piecemeal, with distance, irony and irreverance. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again the main points in today's news, at least three people were reported killed in fresh ethnic riots in Soviet Azerbaijan despite the presence of Soviet troops and tanks. The South African Government said that black leader Nelson Mandela will not be sent back to prison when his current treatment for tuberculosis is over. That's the Newshour tonight. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, and we'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.