The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MUDD: Good evening. I'm Roger Mudd in Washington.

MR. MacNeil: And I'm Robert MacNeil in New York. After the News Summary tonight, we hear the case for and against spending billions on the space station. Correspondent Elizabeth Brackett reports on how the testimony of children is weighed in alleged child abuse cases, and we close with an Anne Taylor Fleming essay. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: The Supreme Court today upheld the U.S. government policy of forcibly returning Haitian refugees intercepted at sea. By an eight to one margin, the Justices said federal immigration law did not require the Haitians first be given a political asylum hearing. About 37,000 Haitians fled the island nation following a September 1991 coup. U.S. Coast Guard ships began intercepting and returning refugees nine months later, virtually ending the exodus. President Clinton criticized the repatriation policy during the election campaign, but after he was in office, he said it was the best way to discourage people from taking the dangerous trip. Roger.

MR. MUDD: President Clinton today predicted the Senate Finance Committee's version of his budget plan would pass the full Senate this week. He said there was no viable alternative. Senate Republican Leader Robert Dole said over the weekend his party would offer two substitutes. Both would include fewer tax increases and more spending cuts. Treasury Sec. Lloyd Bentsen called Dole's statement interesting, but he expressed skepticism. He spoke in the White House briefing room.

LLOYD BENTSEN, Secretary of the Treasury: We're pleased to hear that. We'll look forward to seeing it, but we ask it to meet these targets, that they have $508 billion worth of cuts in that deficit and that they deal with specificity on that. If they're talking about something from Medicare and Medicaid, tell us exactly how those cuts will take place, just as this President has done, and then we'll see what happens. At the present time, the President's plan is the only plan that's out there. There is no alternative to it.

MR. MUDD: The Senate is due to begin debate on the budget Wednesday. Mr. Clinton also predicted today the Senate will ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement known as NAFTA. He spoke at the White House to a group of senior Mexican officials who are in Washington to discuss trade and other issues. Mr. Clinton said progress was being made in negotiations over such issues as labor and environmental standards in Mexico. He said side agreements on these matters should satisfy Senatorial reservations about NAFTA. General Motors announced today it will move as many as 1,000 assembly jobs from Mexico to Lansing, Michigan. The announcement was made after GM reached a tentative contract agreement with the United Auto Workers Union.

MR. MacNeil: The space shuttle Endeavor and its six-member crew lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this morning. Their main mission is to recover a European science satellite which has been orbiting for nearly a year. The eight-day flight also marks the debut of a privately owned laboratory known as Space Hab which is housed in the shuttle's cargo bay. The astronauts began conducting experiments there today. Two of the crew members plan a four hour space walk later in the flight.

MR. MUDD: Two car bombs killed seven people in Madrid today and injured at least twenty others. Police blamed the attack on a group of Bask separatists. We have more in this report by Robin White of Independent Television News.

ROBIN WHITE: The first bomb containing around 90 pounds of explosives was detonated under a fly over as a military truck was passing. Seven people were killed. Police said five of the dead were soldiers, including two lieutenant colonels. Seventeen more people, including two children, were injured. A second device then went off. Emergency services already hog pressed raced through the rush hour to a city avenue less than 600 yards away. The bomb had been placed in another part of the car, this time close to the American embassy. Police reported at least three serious casualties. Although no one has as yet owned up to the attacks, experts said all the signs pointed to the Bask separatist group ETA, which has carried out at least a dozen car bomb attacks in Madrid in the past ten years. Spain's acting prime minister, Filipi Gonzales, described the attacks as a terrifying crime, adding that they were a terrible insult to Spain's armed forces.

MR. MacNeil: European Community foreign ministers met with Bosnia's Muslim president in Denmark today and pressed him to accept a three-way division of Bosnia. President Izetbegovic has rejected the proposal by Serbs and Croats to split Bosnia among the three warring ethnic groups. He said it would sanction ethnic cleansing in his republic. EC officials backed the new plan as the best the Muslims could hope for given the collapse of a more equitable international peace plan. In Bosnia, there was more fighting. A three day old cease-fire was largely ignored in the central part of the republic where troops of the Muslim government clashed with Croats. U.N. officials said at least 12 people died in overnight shelling of one town in the region. There were also battles between Muslims and Serbs in the north of the republic for control of the strategic town.

MR. MUDD: That's our News Summary for tonight. Now it's on to the budget battle over the space station, testimony in child abuse cases, and lessons for teenagers. FOCUS - THE RIGHT STUFF?

MR. MacNeil: Our lead story tonight is a debate over America's future in space, specifically: Does the plan to build a manned space station add up to the right stuff scientifically and economically? On Wednesday, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to continue funding the space station in this time of tight budgets. We start with a backgrounder from Correspondent Kwame Holman.

PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: [1984] Tonight I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.

MR. HOLMAN: That was in 1984. Today, nine years later, the long planned space station still is just a dream and a blueprint. The space station idea took shape in the wake of the triumph of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

ASTRONAUT: It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

MR. HOLMAN: The National Aeronautics & Space Administration wanted to build on that success with two projects, the shuttle, a reusable space vehicle to provide routine access to space, and the station, the permanent living space where astronauts could spend long periods in orbit, a place for long-term experiments and ultimately a staging base for manned missions to the planet. But without the urgency of Apollo, NASA had a hard time selling the program. Other budget priorities and the deficit loomed larger than they had in the '60s. In the last decade, Congress repeatedly has forced the agency to scale down the station to save money. The first detailed design was called the dual keel, the price tag $15 billion, twice the original budget. In 1987 came the base line design, the price now was down to 12 billion, but Congress said it still was too big and expensive, so another downsizing was ordered. In 1991, NASA came up with the revised base line, total price tag 16 billion to build, 30 billion to launch. Congress went along despite growing concerns about design problems, cost overruns, and mismanagement by NASA. When Bill Clinton took office, he did so as an avowed station supporter, but he didn't say what kind of station he'd support. A few weeks after he took office, President Clinton ordered yet another redesign aimed at cutting costs in half. Within months, NASA came up with three new versions. Option A, the smallest of the three, was a scaled down version of the original design. Option B also was scaled down but less so. Option C was a new design called "The Can," a 90 foot cylinder designed to mate with the shuttle and to be launched in one piece. Late last week, the President rejected The Can and chose a design closely resembling Options A and B, and he urged Congress not to abandon the station entirely.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The United States indisputably leads the world in space. It is an important area of science and technology. I think it would be a mistake after all the work we've done to scrap the space station. There is a $4 billion budget cut in my budget for the space station because we're going to redesign it and redesign the management of NASA we bought, and all these scientists will look at it to tell us exactly what ought to be done and exactly how the thing ought to be run, and we're going to have to make some changes.

MR. HOLMAN: The new design is smaller, simpler, and cheaper than the old one. It's designed to be fully functional around the turn of the century, and it can be expanded later if the money is there. The space station heads for its first test vote in the House this week where even station supporters are predicting its chances depend on how hard the President pushes for it.

MR. MacNeil: So, should Congress continue funding the space station? We'll debate the politics after hearing the case made by scientists. The case for is argued by the President's science adviser, adviser for science and technology, Dr. John Gibbons. Dr. Gibbons, thank you for joining us. The President said long-term economic strength depends on technological leadership. How does the space station maintain technological leadership?

DR. GIBBONS: The space station pulls our technology forward. It's a very challenging concept. Even the so-called "simplified design" pulls our technology into areas that, that will extend our limits and capabilities of materials and of how you actually assemble a very complex task. So it's going to be a good technology pull.

MR. MacNeil: Is the technology advance in the task of assembling, or is it in other things?

DR. GIBBONS: I think it's partly in assembling, but what we chose was a design that takes less assembly, considerably less assembly than the older design. In fact, the older design reports so much assembly in space with space walks that it has, it turns out it has a lot of risks associated with it. So we chose a simpler, lower cost station that still enables us to test out the technologies and then provide opportunities to do some very interesting science.

MR. MacNeil: What are -- well, let's talk about the very interesting science. What space science would the space station permit that unmanned projects that opponents of it argue would do - - would not do, I beg your pardon.

DR. GIBBONS: Sure. I believe the most important thing is that there are certain aspects of weightlessness which is the only really truly unique different environment when you get into earth orbit. But when you get into a weightless condition, there are a number of extended duration experiments not only with materials and the way materials form and the way things burn and the way fluids convect and conduct, but also the way living systems from people to bugs adjust and react to a weightless environment. Many of these take a great deal of care and extended time to work out the science, to understand what's going on. And it's, it's been carefully adjudged that if you want to do it properly, you have to do it over an extended period of time, and this takes the presence of people to make sure the thing works out right.

MR. MacNeil: The presidential statement, not the one we heard, but the one in print that was given out by the White House, stressed international cooperation. How important is that, and if you're going to cooperate internationally, how does that keep the U.S. lead in technology?

DR. GIBBONS: I think it's difficult to over stress, Robin, the importance of the international aspects of this project. We do have partners that we are committed with agreements for a number of years now. They're putting billions of dollars of effort into the project. In fact, this is probably the largest non-wartime joint venture in science and technology in human history, and I think it's an example of what together nations can do that separately they would find it very difficult to scrape up the resources to do. So I think that's a terribly important test of our ability and willingness to undertake long-term ventures with foreign partners and carry them to the end.

MR. MacNeil: One thing I didn't understand in the information put out by the White House, it said, and the President just repeated it, there would be a $4 billion cost saving, but it said the majority of that saving would come from scaling down, from management reform at NASA. What that sounds to me as a layman like is that the design won't cost, or the building, that piece of machinery won't cost that much, but you're going to fire a lot of people at NASA.

DR. GIBBONS: Well, let me pick up on that, because you raise a very important point. If you're going to redesign the space station andsuccessfully carry out its launch and utilization, you also have to redesign NASA. I don't think anyone disagrees with this point. And it came out very clearly in the study that was done by NASA and also by the overview of the independent, outside experts chaired by Charles Vest, the president of MIT. What we showed was that there are a lot of savings to be had in actually reorganizing the way NASA goes about its business and the way it works with its contractors. There will be some savings, significant savings, in the construction of the redesigned space station, and also very substantial savings in the annual operation and maintenance process, real savings that we think represent a very important trade-off between continuing this long-term investment and at the same time cutting our deficit, which is a very important part of the President's plan.

MR. MacNeil: If Congress should kill the space station, does that kill NASA too?

DR. GIBBONS: I think if Congress kills space station, we have to think about what happens following that. Certainly the future of the shuttle is in question, and also I think the whole question of humans in space, the so-called "manned space flight program," does come to question, and I'm not sure how well we've as a nation thought through whether that's the road we choose to take. It may be that we hand it off to some other nation, a multi-national consortium, but I believe it's a very important thing for us to think about. If we walk away from station, we not only walk away from a lot of present activity in areas of our country already impacted by defense conversion, at the same time we hand that leadership over to someone else.

MR. MacNeil: Well, Dr. Gibbons, thank you for joining us.

DR. GIBBONS: Thank you. Nice to be with you.

MR. MacNeil: For a different perspective on the scientific value, we're joined now by Robert Park. He's a physicist at the University of Maryland and a representative of the American Physical Society, the nation's principal organization of physicists. Dr. Park, thank you for joining us. What do you think of the case for the space station first of all on technological leadership grounds?

DR. PARK: Well, in terms of technological leadership, of course, we had a space station 20 years ago, and we abandoned it because we couldn't think of anything to do with it.

MR. MacNeil: What was that called, the space station?

DR. PARK: That was the Sky Lab.

MR. MacNeil: Sky Lab, right.

DR. PARK: Now at the present time, in fact, the Japanese have no space station and economically they're eating our lunch. The Soviets had a space station for five years. It's still occupied by the Russians, and they've gone belly up. I mean, you just can't defend it on economic grounds. And our position is that you can't defend it on scientific grounds.

MR. MacNeil: Well, let's stick to technological ones for a moment. I'll come to scientific in a moment, but just on the technological ones, you heard what Dr. Gibbons said, that it would stretch us technologically, it would push us further because of the problems and the challenges it involved.

DR. PARK: Well, I think the evidence is, doesn't support that. In fact, the manned space program relies on proven technology. When you put men into space, you insist that you use technology that's proven. You don't use new technology. There's nothing in the space station that will be as sophisticated as an $80 point and shoot camera.

MR. MacNeil: I don't follow you in that. What do you mean? Do you mean to say that the new little cameras that everybody uses have more advanced technology in them that the space station would?

DR. PARK: They really do. The space station technology is really a proven, an old technology, so it's not a new technology at all.

MR. MacNeil: So building --

DR. PARK: You face some new problems in assembly, this sort of thing, but not really in technologies that have any market value.

MR. MacNeil: On grounds -- let's turn to science now. You heard what Dr. Gibbons said about the science it will produce, the state of weightlessness and which can't be replicated elsewhere.

DR. PARK: Well, it is true that that is a, a unique environment. We do replicate that environment for brief periods of time elsewhere in drop towers and in specially designed aircraft. You can create weightless conditions for a few minutes. We can create weightlessness, of course, with the shuttle, and the shuttle can stay aloft for days at a time. But, in fact, the optimism that existed ten or twenty years ago for weightlessness has simply not been borne out. We have so far not found anything that we can do in a weightless environment that we can't do terrestrially. The last hope for this was the growth of crystals in space, that somehow molecular crystals might grow better in space than they would on earth. But, in fact, that hasn't been borne out either. If they grow differently at all in space, there is likely to be worse as better.

MR. MacNeil: Would equivalent money spent elsewhere produce better space science, more exciting or valuable space science?

DR. PARK: Oh, I absolutely think so. For example, in the expenditures on the space station up till now, and we've spent a great deal of money without any hardware to how for it, but in those expenditures, each year they have cut back on programs like the earth observing system, a system that is critically important I think not only to this nation but to the world. We need to be able to look back at the earth from space to really understand what's happening to the earth's environment as a result of man's activity. And the earth observing system is designed to do that. But it, in fact, has been short funded now for several years in a row in order to make money available for the space station. It's I think a misplaced priority.

MR. MacNeil: How valuable is the international cooperation aspect of this? You heard Dr. Gibbons on that.

DR. PARK: Well, in fact, scientists in other countries are as, as unenthusiastic about the space station as they are in this country. In fact, the presidents of physical societies, physicists in Europe, Germany, Canada, Japan, all of our space station partners have signed a joint statement in which they say that the space station is just not justified. Now, an interesting aspect of this, of course, is the possibility of cooperation with the Soviet Union. Surely, if the space station has any function, it is a geopolitical function, and, and that possibility does exist, but we still don't know in the information that we have gotten from the administration so far what sort of an orbit they plan to put the space station in. And that's quite critical. For the Russians to be able to access the space station with their spacecraft, it has to be put into a, a rather different orbit than we usually put it in, a much larger angle of declination with respect to the earth, and, and we don't yet know if the administration is going to push for that, for that orbit. There are many people in NASA who do not want to go into that orbit, and the reason they don't want to go into it is that they know that once the Russians can access the space station, people may choose to, to use Russian vehicles to supply it rather than the space shuttle. The space shuttle is just so hideously expensive that any way to avoid it is a good idea.

MR. MacNeil: What would you advise Congress to do this week on the space station?

DR. PARK: I would advise them to vote it down.

MR. MacNeil: Well --

DR. PARK: If it serves no useful function, it is not a bargain at any price.

MR. MacNeil: Well, Dr. Park, thank you for joining us.

DR. PARK: Thank you.

MR. MacNeil: Now, let's see how two Congressmen see the project they will vote to kill or sustain this week. Jim Bacchus of Florida supports the space station. Congressman Tim Roemer of Indiana opposes it. Both are Democrats. Congressman Bacchus, as a supporter, did you hear anything in this argument that changed your mind?

REP. BACCHUS: Not at all. I believe that the space station is the centerpiece of the space program. I believe that killing the space station would, in fact, kill the space program. Without a space station there is no ongoing mission for the space shuttle. Without the space shuttle, there is no manned space program, and without a manned space program, despite what some scientists would like to believe, I don't believe there would be any space program at all.

MR. MacNeil: Congressman Roemer, did you hear anything, for instance, from the White House science adviser that made you change your opposition?

REP. ROEMER: Well, with all due respect to Jack, actually I'm even more convinced that we should terminate this space station for a number of reasons. First of all, as I grew up in the 1960s and as a supporter of NASA and was excited by Kennedy's efforts, successful efforts to get us on the moon, he challenged Americans to dream big and plan precisely. This space station is neither one of those. In terms of NASA's mission, we are cutting back on some very good projects within NASA that are returning us good, scientific data. Secondly, we face huge budget deficits, over $300 billion this year, and we have to make some tough choices along those lines. Thirdly, we need to be able to look at NASA's future. We have to be able to define for NASA what will we be doing in the future with a manned space program, which I support, how do we begin to reform and change NASA to get away from an average cost overrun of 76 percent? And lastly, I think many Americans want to see us reform and change NASA to get back to those glory years where for every dollar invested we return $7. We spun off new technology. We were the leader in the world of science, and this space station is none of those things.

MR. MacNeil: Congressman Bacchus, what would be the consequence of this, of killing the space station? What would it be to NASA and et cetera?

REP. BACCHUS: The space station is, as was pointed out earlier, an international scientific joint venture. We're in business now with the Japanese, the Canadians, and the Europeans. They have spent $4 billion on this already. We spent about $9 billion. If we were to abandon them by abandoning the space station venture, then they would pursue agreements that they already have with the Russians. They financed the building of this, of what the Russians called Meir II, which is essentially our space station.

MR. MacNeil: And why would that be bad?

REP. BACCHUS: Well, that would be bad because we wouldn't be a party of it. I'm someone who supports involving the Russians as junior partners with us in the ongoing joint venture as the President has proposed. In fact, I believe that with his decision last week, President Clinton has probably saved both the space station and the space program. he has shown us how we can bring the deficit down by improving management, reforming NASA, saving on operating and management costs while still building a space station that's really worth building.

MR. MacNeil: Before, before you go on to other consequences, let me just pick up on that with Congressman Roemer here. What about that? If you abandoned the space station, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Europeans are going to go off and join the Russians and the U.S. is going to be left out?

REP. ROEMER: I don't think we're necessarily left out by that scenario, Robin. First of all, you don't come to an agreement that involves maybe $150 billion for a space station because we want to please our international partners or because the Japanese have spent two or three billion dollars, therefore, that justifies us spending another, you know, a hundred and twenty billion dollars on this project. Secondly, we have MOUs.

MR. MacNeil: Where do you get 120 billion? I mean --

REP. ROEMER: The 120 billion is roughly from the General Accounting office study that says that after we built Space Station Freedom which would cost about $40 billion to build, then the operation and maintenance cost, what we've spent on this project, total cost of a fifteen or twenty year period of this space station would be about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty billion dollars.

MR. MacNeil: Is that right?

REP. ROEMER: That's a conservative estimate.

MR. MacNeil: Is that right, Congressman Bacchus, that the cost of operating it would have cost a lot more than building it?

REP. BACCHUS: I'm afraid that Congressman Roemer and the GAO are counting everything under the moon and Mars, including Warner Van Braun's toothbrush, in calculating those costs. It's fair in calculating the costs of the station to calculate the development costs, the construction costs, and the marginal costs of operating the shuttle. And by that reckoning, we're going to spend an additional $16.5 billion on producing the space station. But, for example, this morning, NASA launched Endeavor on a science mission that has absolutely nothing to do with the space station. The GAO would have counted the cost of that mission in calculating its cost. It creates, it includes the historical cost of developing the space shuttle 20 years ago, the operating costs of maintaining space centers. By that reckoning the Pentagon budget today for fighter planes should include the costs of developing B-17 bombers in World War II.

MR. MacNeil: But wouldn't the shuttle be, wouldn't this be a program partly to keep the shuttle alive, because that's how the astronauts would get up and down from the space station?

REP. BACCHUS: The shuttle will remain alive. In the absence of a space station there will be some -- I don't think Mr. Roemer will be among them, but there will be some who will try to kill the space shuttle. I will oppose them. But in the end what we will see is that we will need to depend more on the space shuttle over the next 20 years. It has a long life ahead of it, and probably we would see investments in trying to improve and extend the duration of the shuttle. We wouldn't be able to do with the shuttle what we'll be able to do with the space station. For example, in some of our medical experiments that depend on growing protein crystals in a weightless environment, we can accomplish a lot in a couple of weeks; we could extend the life of a shuttle for a month or so and do more; but we couldn't begin to do the work that we'll be able to do on the space station Freedom.

MR. MacNeil: Congressman Roemer, what about that the benefit of this program, of justifying all the expense up till now in extending the life of the shuttle?

REP. ROEMER: Well, I, I think first of all that the benefits either in science or technology do not turn into justifications for building the space station. First of all, as a couple of the scientists were talking about before, we're not going to see new technology emerge from this. This is going to be off the shelf, 1970s technology in assembling this. Secondly, they are very much downplaying the science coming out of this. Jack Gibbons readily admits that it's not going to help us understand the environment on earth. It is not going to help us repair broken satellites. It's not going to be a stepping stone to the moon or Mars. All those things have been shelved. Now what it can maybe do is help us understand in life sciences the effect of muscle tearing away from the bone. If that is the justification in life sciences for this, we have people on earth dying of cancer, breast cancer problems, AIDS, a host of things where we are spending a total each year of $6.9 billion at our National Institute of Health. Now, I don't think that those kinds of things justify the huge expenditure up in space for a very nebulous space station given what it could return in terms of technology and science, and we need to sit back and define where NASA can go to return it to glory days of the Apollo 11 program.

MR. LEHRER: Let's just keep that little piece of it separate and come back to it. Just, you're being challenged, Congressman Bacchus, on the scientific and technological benefits of this. You heard what Congressman Roemer said.

REP. BACCHUS: Well, we're having a hearing tomorrow on the space committee. Both Tim and I will be there. We're going to hear from some scientists, from some physicians who will talk to us about the potential of using the space station for life sciences and microgravity research that will help us in determining the causes of osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, of diabetes, of AIDS. We've already done some work on those issues. On the shuttle, a longer duration of a permanently orbiting vehicle will give us the opportunity to do things with protein crystals and developing new kinds of drugs that we cannot do on the shuttle even if we extend its life. I think, of course, that we need to focus on what Dr. Gibbons said, which is that the space station is not just science. It's also technology. We will be developing our technology infrastructure as a nation beyond what we have in the past. For every $1 we've ever invested in space, we generated $7 in additional Gross National Product.

MR. MacNeil: Excuse me interrupting you. Did you hear Dr. Parks say a moment ago, the physicist from the University of Maryland, that there is more advanced technology in a small point and shoot camera than there will be in the space station because to put humans into space you have to rely on proven known technology?

REP. BACCHUS: I'm afraid that the good doctor is hoping that if we kill the space station, there will be more money for research by scientists such as him on some of the other science projects. I support more money for both big and small science projects, but just as it's been true that no bucks, no Buck Rogers, I think he needs to understand that in the Congress it's going to be true that we won't have any bucks at all if we don't have any Buck Rogers. We need a balanced space program, one that invests in both man and unmanned space flight. We have constantly, constantly underestimated the technological benefits that have been derived from investments in space. Communications satellites, microelectronics, portable insulin pumps, heart rate monitors, on and on and on we could go, and things that have come out of the space program that were never anticipated that the same will be true of the space station.

MR. MacNeil: Isn't that true, Congressman Roemer?

REP. ROEMER: Well, I would say, Robin, that to listen to some of the proponents of the space station that every panacea for every disease is out there we will cure everything, and we will allow the Phoenix Sons to win the NBA championship all over again.

REP. BACCHUS: I'm a Bulls fan.

REP. ROEMER: The space station, the space station cannot do all these things. The space station has been cut back from Ronald Reagan's 1984 dream of eight missions to maybe one and a half. It has gone from eight billion dollars to roughly thirty or thirty- five billion dollars. Now President Clinton -- and I applaud the President for recognizing that he has some difficulties within NASA, particularly with the space station, but you cannot focus on the space station to cure some debit problems within NASA.

MR. MacNeil: Okay.

REP. ROEMER: We should start with some smaller science projects to fix the problems.

MR. MacNeil: Let me -- to conclude, let me ask you both a practical question. Congressman Bacchus, some might argue that representing what's called the space coast, your district in Florida, this is essentially a jobs program for you, and you couldn't vote any other way on it.

REP. BACCHUS: Well, I would argue that in the past couple of months I have voted even though I have two air force bases and a navy base in my district to cut defense spending drastically. I would point out that I am in a district that is among the top ten in the country in terms of Social Security recipients, and I have voted to tax upper income Social Security recipients even more. I have No. 1 out of 435 districts in terms of military retirees, and I have voted to cut their COLAS. There are hard choices to be made. I have made those choices. Mr. Roemer hasn't made those particular hard choices, although he's made some others. But that doesn't mean we should make the wrong choice. And the wrong choice would be to kill the space station, because killing the space station would kill the space program, and it would set America back a generation in terms of space and technology.

MR. MacNeil: Let me ask you, Mr. Roemer, the jobs question the other way around, because it isn't your district that would be, would be gored this time. Wouldn't canning the space station put thousands more highly skilled aerospace workers on the unemployment roles when those are already crowded with people who have been shoved out by defense cutbacks?

REP. ROEMER: First of all, let me say that I don't think that this is any way a parochial interest to Jim. I think Jim is genuinely concerned about a balanced space program and one by which we continue to lead the world in new discoveries and going into new frontiers. That's absolutely what I want. That's what I learned when I was a ten year old going through the 1960s. But how, what we need to get back on that, Robin, and not lose jobs is to invest in programs that are going to get public support, that are not going to continue to see huge cost overruns of a billion dollars just this year, like the space station has. One of my amendments to kill the advance solid rocket motor program in committee put 50 percent of the $1.5 billion toward other good small science programs and 50 percent toward the budget deficit.

MR. MacNeil: Okay. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we have to leave it there. Just very quickly, is it a tight vote?

REP. ROEMER: It's an extremely tight vote.

MR. MacNeil: Do you agree with that, Congressman Bacchus?

REP. BACCHUS: I do, but I believe that President Clinton's endorsement is moving the momentum our way --

MR. MacNeil: Okay.

REP. BACCHUS: -- and I think we'll squeak through.

MR. MacNeil: All right.

REP. ROEMER: And I would say that the freshman class of change and reform will help us here.

MR. MacNeil: Really must go. Thank you both for joining us. left, police officers showed up at her front door.

KELLY MICHAELS: I think about 7 o'clock in the morning, 7, 7:30, a group of policemen had come to my door and said that we are investigating the allegation of child abuse, which totally, I was totally shocked and horrified. No charges have been filed, we just want to talk to you. So I was shaking. I remember crying, saying this is the most horrible thing I've heard. There's no charges being filed, we just want to talk to you. I spent the day at the police station with these fellows. I took a lie detector test for them and passed it.

MS. BRACKETT: But a month later, charges were filed. At first, only three little boys were involved, but as investigators for the state interviewed more children at Wee Care, the number of charges escalated.

MOTHER: He explained to me what she had said. It was things I had never heard before. She explained how Kelly played Jingle Bells in the nude at the piano. She explained to him how Kelly had taken silverware and put it on the floor and had the children disrobe and pile one on top of the other.

MS. BRACKETT: When did you believe or begin to believe that all this may have happened?

MOTHER: I believed it immediately. My child had never experienced anything like it. In my knowledge, she had never experienced anything that could have caused her to relate these incidents, unless she had actually lived it.

MS. BRACKETT: By November, Kelly Michaels had been arrested, charged with 235 counts of child molestation against 38 children. She was in jail when her attorney first read the charges to her.

KELLY MICHAELS: She began reading the most bizarre things I have ever heard in my entire life. She began reading first and second degree sexual assault with a knife, fork, a spoon, nude pile-ups. And I, I remember dropping to my knees, and I started to sob. I couldn't even speak. It was the most disgusting and bizarre things I had ever heard. I couldn't, I said, I can't go in that courtroom, I can't go in that courtroom in public, being accused of these things.

MS. BRACKETT: More and more child care experts are beginning to believe that this kind of testimony from children may not always be credible, but at the time these charges seemed to be a part of a growing national hysteria about child abuse. In California, Virginia McMartin and her son had been accused of molesting hundreds of children at their day care center. In 1988, after a 33 month trial, the McMartins were acquitted. In 1983, in Jordan, Minnesota, a baby sitter was accused of molesting several children. A year later, 25 adults were charged with practicing ritualized satanic sex abuse. All were acquitted. In Chicago, in 1987, charges against day care operator Sandy Fabiano escalated from one family's charges to charges from ten families. Fabiano too was acquitted. Her attorney, Stephen Komie, has represented many clients accused of child sex abuse in the institutional setting. He says, as in many cases, the reasons for the rapid escalation of charges in the Fabiano case were clear.

STEPHEN KOMIE, Lawyer: The existence of telephonic communications between parents and the day care center so that you could follow the phone records out of patient one or the first child's home into the homes of the other people, and that's how the mothers communicated with each other and the matter just kept building and building into hysteria.

MS. BRACKETT: Kelly Michaels remembered what it was like to be the focal point of that kind of hysteria.

KELLY MICHAELS: It was taking a life of its own. It was snowballing. There was media attention. The, the community was panicking and become very frightened, paranoid, and being sucked into the process, and there was nothing I could do but endure it and hold onto who I was.

MS. BRACKETT: You know what the allegations are, that parents began trading stories and the stories began to get more and more outlandish?

MOTHER: Oh, yes, and we're hysterical, and we're like the witch hunters back in Salem, and we're like some, some McCarthy era investigators out there trying to get Kelly? We know it happened not because we met with an investigator or we talked to a prosecutor. We know it happened, because we lived with these children. I mean, we had children acting out the sex act at birthday parties. We had children sticking toothbrushes or trying to stick toothbrushes up their sibling's private parts.

MS. BRACKETT: Child advocates like Cecilia Zelkin says she worries that the concern over the hysteria seen in the Michaels case and others may create an atmosphere where children's testimony is not given credibility when it should be.

CECILIA ZELKIN, Child Advocate: My experience has been that children do not reveal sex abuse easily. You know, it's not something that they just say overnight, you know. Very often it's something that's evolved, or something's triggered where they feel they are comfortable enough to report it to someone. It's just not easy to talk about. I think when children do raise an allegation, it's serious and has to be investigated.

MS. BRACKETT: In the Michaels case the children testified through the use of closed circuit television. One of the reasons the conviction was reversed was because the appeals court and the New Jersey Supreme Court said this denied Michaels the right to face her accusers. The courts also said prosecutors could not rely on experts' description of the child sex abuse syndrome to prove that the children had been abused. When Michaels' conviction was reversed, she had served five years of her forty-seven year sentence.

KELLY MICHAELS: Very relieved. I just thank God that it's almost over. I am innocent, and I stand by the record that bears that out.

MS. BRACKETT: Just as it had been during the trial, the children's testimony was a key factor in the appellate court decision. The three judge panel focused on the children's suggestibility, the basic question: Could the children be believed, or was their testimony tainted because investigators had asked them leading questions during the interview process? Michaels had always contended that the children had come up with the outrageous charges because the investigators had planted the ideas in their heads and then badgered them into agreeing. Stephen Ceci, psychologist and researcher at Cornell University, has published over a hundred studies on the suggestibility of children. He says his research has found that children, particularly those under five, can be very suggestible.

STEPHEN CECI, Research Psychologist: Our research shows that when an interviewer has a hunch and single-mindedly pursues that hunch, ignoring all data that are inconsistent with it, there is a real risk there that they will over time get the child not just to assent to what they're saying but to embellish it and to elaborate it and give highly plausible accounts that happen to be false.

MS. BRACKETT: This four year old girl was part of a Ceci research project on suggestibility.

STEPHEN CECI: This child was in a condition where, first of all, she was told that there's a man named Sandstone who's very clumsy, everything he touches he breaks. She was told this repeatedly for a month. Then one day this man Sandstone actually visited her day care. He spent two minutes in a room, didn't touch anything, didn't break anything. Then for three months after that visit, she was repeatedly interviewed in a very suggestive manner.

WOMAN: [interviewing child] The doll broke, the dolly, really? Well, why did that happen?

CHILD: Because he was throwing it up and down.

WOMAN: Oh, he was.

CHILD: Yes.

WOMAN: Oh, really?

CHILD: Then he got a book and he throwed it up, then one of the pages ripped off.

WOMAN: Really? How did he rip the page?

CHILD: From throwing it up.

MS. BRACKETT: So you do you think this child believes what she's saying?

STEPHEN CECI: Much of what she's telling you I definitely think she believes. If you look, she rolls her eyes at the appropriate time. She says, and then he did it to another dolly.

MS. BRACKETT: So what's happened to her memory of this, something that never happened?

STEPHEN CECI: It's been usurped. By those repeated, relentless, single-mindedly erroneous leading questions over three months, they have rewritten part of this child's biography.

MS. BRACKETT: And in the cases that you've seen from the transcripts of the Kelly Michaels case, for instance --

STEPHEN CECI: Worse, much worse.

MS. BRACKETT: The interviewing was worse?

STEPHEN CECI: Oh, much worse.

MS. BRACKETT: More suggestible?

STEPHEN CECI: Much, much more.

MS. BRACKETT: How, for example?

STEPHEN CECI: Oh, geez, do you remember what Kelly did with the spoon and the peanut butter? No. Oh, yes, you do, you remember. No, I don't. No, I don't. You do too, you remember. The kid's crying. No, I don't. Oh, your friends already told me. Don't you want to help us keep Kelly in jail? Do you want me to have to tell your friends you finked out on them? I mean, these are coercive, vigilante interviews.

MS. BRACKETT: So you think --

STEPHEN CECI: Worse than anything I as a researcher would consider ethically permissible to design.

MS. BRACKETT: Researcher and psychologist Gail Goodman agrees that children's testimony can be influenced by suggestive interviewing, but her research has shown that when the questions deal specifically with sexual abuse, children are less suggestible than previously thought.

GAIL GOODMAN, Research Psychologist: Our research shows that when you actually suggest to children that possibly they've been abused when they haven't been that children can at times be remarkably resistant to false suggestions in regard to abuse.

MS. BRACKETT: This research subject was never abused and despite leading questions, she would not change her story.

WOMAN: [interviewing child] Did he kiss you?

LITTLE GIRL: [Shaking head]

WOMAN: No? Did he kiss the other girl?

LITTLE GIRL: No!

WOMAN: No. Did he ask you to put on a costume?

LITTLE GIRL: Yes, a clown costume.

WOMAN: Ah. Did he ask the other girl to put on a costume?

LITTLE GIRL: No. She just had to listen.

WOMAN: Oh. He took your clothes off, didn't he?

LITTLE GIRL: No.

WOMAN: No?

LITTLE GIRL: No. I kept my clothes on.

WOMAN: Oh.

MS. BRACKETT: Ceci believes children are more suggestible than Goodman does even about possible sex abuse, though Ceci stresses that there is no sure scientific way to know if a child is telling the truth.

STEPHEN CECI: There is no Pinocchio test. There is nothing in the scientific or therapeutic literature that anyone ought to use to tell you that this particular child has got it right or has got it wrong.

MS. BRACKETT: And that is the problem juries face in trying to determine whether children are telling the truth when they testify in court. In the Michaels case, the appellate court has called for a special hearing to decide if suggestive questioning tainted the children's testimony before the state can decide whether or not to retry the case. Michaels sees this as a sign that the pendulum may be swinging away from an earlier emphasis on always believing children to a greater understanding of defendants' rights.

KELLY MICHAELS: This I believe. There are people out there who are falsely accused who are truly innocent. I believe that they, oh, my God, I can just encourage them to hold on, but some sanity seems to be returning on the issue which will help everyone. We're not -- there's no idea to protect child abusers, absolutely not. It's a horrible crime. But this is also a horrible crime, an innocent person has spent eight years fighting for her life.

MS. BRACKETT: But child advocates worry that this swing in the pendulum could have a chilling effect on the years of work that has been done to encourage children to report and testify about child abuse. The stakes remain high on both sides. ESSAY - POWER PLAY

MR. MacNeil: Finally tonight essayist Anne Taylor Fleming has some thoughts on what's expected of young women today.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Not a day goes by, it seems, without another story about what young American men are doing to young American women, not just any man, but our national heroes, our naval pilots and our high school star athletes. On a recent day the New York Times carried details from the Pentagon's report on the Tailhook Convention of 1991, three tawdry days during which naval pilots groped and fondled their female colleagues, making them run through gauntlets and forcing them to drink out of a large phallic symbol and worse. Further down the same page was the story of the three New Jersey boys, the golden boy jocks of Glenridge High being sentenced for raping a retarded school mate with a baseball bat and a broom. They got 15 years but can serve as little as 22 months. Meanwhile, they are out on bail pending appeals that could go on for years. And just before these two stories, there was the one about another bunch of star high school athletes in Lakewood, California, the so-called "Spur Posse," intimidating girls into having sex and then keeping score of their conquests, swaggering unrepentant through the talk show circuit in the aftermath. None of this certainly is about sex. It's about doing demeaning things to women, about some strange intersection between male heroism as defined by the culture and male rage as if the one were leveraged on the other. During their spree a number of the naval men sported T-shirts that read "Women are property," the perfect logo for a culture that seems to have turned sexual liberation on its head, a culture and a Tailhook tail spin. Of course, the entertainment industry has been only too eager to play its part. We have rap lyrics to make a so called liberated woman wince with rage and sorrow, stuff about bitches and holes. From Hollywood, we have a spate of new movies about men giving away their wives or girlfriends to other men for money and in which not a single woman has the guts to stand up and say, hey, wait a minute, you can't give me away, I am not your property. When I saw one of these movies recently, "Indecent Proposal," I was stunned by the reaction of the young girls in the audience. Love hungry and teary-eyed, they saw it as the ultimate romance in which marital love triumphs after the wife sleeps with another man for money but wanders home to hubby in the end. This is love? Increasingly, I fret over these young girls. How can they possibly know how to behave, what the rules are, where to turn, where not to, when the cultural signals to them, including the magazines aimed at them, are all about being sexy. The message to young women today is simple: It's your right and more, your obligation to be the teeny bopper provocateurs in the male imagination. I watched on TV as one of the teenage girls in the Spur Posse place talked of their ordeal, sweet, naive girls with tears in their eyes and braces on their eyes who said they willingly submitted to sex in order to be popular only to find themselves sneered at as sluts afterwards. I wanted to hug these girls and shake them all at the same time. But I also wanted to make an example of them. I want other young girls to get it, to understand that none of this is about sex and sweetness and love, all the things they deserve. It's about being violated, no less than the women running that gauntlet of navy fly boys or that retarded girl in the basement of high school jocks or all those Hollywood heroines being bartered away for big bucks. Women are not property. Unfortunately, those T-shirts said it all, and I feel for the young women trying to find their way in this time and this place. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. RECAP

MR. MUDD: Again, the major stories of this Monday, the Supreme Court upheld the U.S. government policy of forcibly returning Haitian refugees intercepted at sea. President Clinton predicted the full Senate will pass its budget plan this week, and the space shuttle Endeavor lifted off to an eight day mission to retrieve a European satellite. Good night, Robin.

MR. MacNeil: Good night, Roger. That's the NewsHour for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night and talk about the Clinton economic plan with former Senators Paul Tsongas and Warren Rudman. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.