The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, Ray Suarez talks to both sides about the prospects for success at the Camp David summit, Paul Solman tells the Internet hardware success story of Cisco systems, Terence Smith looks at the "New York Times'" remarkable series on race in America, and essayist Jim fisher praises the lessons from violin lessons. It all follows our summary of the news this Tuesday.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The Middle East peace summit began today at Camp David. President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Barak, and Palestinian leader Arafat gathered at the presidential retreat outside Washington. The President said success depended on principled compromise. He met separately with both sides before holding three-way talks. There's a September 13 deadline for reaching a final accord. And we'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. Bashar Assad was declared the new president of Syria today. He was the only candidate in Monday's referendum. Syrian officials announced today that he received 97% of the vote. He'll be inaugurated July 17 to succeed his father, Hafez Assad, who died June 10. Pentagon officials spelled out plans today to cut back on vaccinating soldiers against anthrax. Betty Ann Bowser reports.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The Pentagon started the vaccination program two years ago in an attempt to protect soldiers from a deadly bacteria called anthrax. At least ten nations are believed to have the deadly bacteria in their arsenals. The plan was to have all two and a half million active-duty and reserve personnel inoculated by 2003. But now the vaccine supply is running low, so only personnel deployed to the Middle East and South Korea will receive the series of shots. Major General Randy west briefed reporters today at the Pentagon.

MAJOR GENERAL RANDY WEST, Defense Department Adviser: What has been decided is that we want to preserve the rest of the vaccine that's available to be used in the high threat area, for people who are there now, are going to be going there soon. In that way we hope not to have to suspend or shut down the program.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The supply is low because of problems at the only company authorized to manufacture the vaccine. BioPort of Lansing, Michigan, was ordered by the food and drug administration to modernize or be shut down. The plant updated its facilities, but still hasn't passed FDA inspections, so no new vaccine has been approved. General West said it's time for the Pentagon to authorize a second manufacturing plant.

MAJOR GENERAL RANDY WEST: So we think that we need a long- range solution, and if we qualify a second source and they both are producing vaccine, that it provides price competition and it also gives us a safety net if one of them gets shut down.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The vaccination program has been under attack by a small but vocal group of people who claim the vaccine made them sick. Earlier this spring, a congressional committee recommended the program be completely halted until questions about it's safety and efficacy could be answered.

JIM LEHRER: There's a Senate hearing on the vaccination effort tomorrow, and a House hearing Thursday. In South Africa today at the international AIDS conference, U.S. Officials called for greater efforts to fight the disease in the developing world. The head of the White House AIDS office, Sandra Thurman, said "the United States cannot do it alone." The federal government is spending $200 million this year to stop the spread of aids worldwide. That's double last year's budget. The Environmental Protection Agency today imposed rulings to clean up lakes and streams over 15 years. It said that by 2002, the states must develop plans for cutting farm and industrial pollution in more than 20,000 bodies of water. They are now considered too dirty for fishing or swimming. The rules had been under consideration for four years. Congressional Republicans and some farm state Democrats oppose them as too costly. So did some business groups. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to: The Camp David summit begins; the story of Cisco; race in America; and a Jim Fisher essay.

FOCUS - PATH TO PEACE

JIM LEHRER: The Middle East summit, and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat was first on the scene for this latest Camp David summit. He arrived late last night at Andrews Air Force Base. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak came in early this morning, a day after barely surviving a no-confidence vote in Israel's parliament, the Knesset. Three right wing parties quit Barak's coalition government to protest possible concessions the prime minister might make to the Palestinians at Camp David. President Clinton invited the two leaders to come to his retreat in Maryland to make another attempt at resolving issues which have divided them for more than half a century.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The two leaders face profound and wrenching questions, and there can be no success without principled compromise. The road to peace, as always, is a two-way street. Both leaders feel the weight of history, but both, I believe, recognize this is a moment in history which they can seize. We have an opportunity to bring about a just and enduring end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That is the key to lasting peace in the entire Middle East. Of course, there is no guarantee of success, but not to try is to guarantee failure. In the process, they have passed the point of no return. The only way forward now is forward. Both sides must find a way to resolve competing claims, to give their children the gift of peace. It will take patience and creativity and courage, but Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have those qualities, or they would not have come this far.

RAY SUAREZ: The Palestinian and Israeli governments face unofficial deadlines for a framework agreement. President Clinton would like to broker a peace deal before his term of office ends in January. Yasser Arafat has threatened a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state for mid- September. Even without the calendar, the obstacles on the road to peace are huge. The most difficult issue is the City of Jerusalem. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. But Israelis don't want the city divided. Arafat wants the two million Palestinian refugees who have been barred from returning to Israel following Middle East wars to be given the right to come home. Israel rejects an unrestricted right of return. Other stumbling blocks include water rights in the Jordan River Valley, and control of the west bank. The Palestinians want the Israelis to withdraw from some West Bank and Gaza settlements, but Israelis want to stay there. This is the first Mideast summit at Camp David since 1978, when President Jimmy Carter brokered an agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. For President Clinton, a new Camp David accord would bring closure to a peace process he has stressed since his first year in office. Then, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Arafat signed the Oslo Accords which provided a timetable for the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. President Clinton met privately and separately with both Chairman Arafat and Prime Minister Barak today. Then all three met with their delegations for about a half hour this afternoon. As things are getting started, the public can't see the private tensions. The jocular tone before the cameras in the Maryland woods will inevitably give way to some of the most difficult negotiations in the public careers of all three men.

RAY SUAREZ: For more on the Mideast summit, we turn to Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council; and Yuli Tamir, Israel's minister of immigrant absorption. Let's begin with you, Ms. Tamir. What should Americans under or what should they know to help them understand why this is so hard?

YULI TAMIR: Well, I think this is a very difficult conflict between two peoples who have their own claim for justice and who wish to find a way to live together under very complicated circumstances. We've gone a very long way since the beginning of the conflict, but as we were told right now, there are certain very crucial issues now on the table and I admire Prime Minister Barak for being ready to come here and discuss those issues, knowing very well that those are very difficult issues to solve and nevertheless being very determined to try and solve them in order to secure the future of Israel and to bring about the gift of peace for the future generations.

RAY SUAREZ: Hanan Ashrawi, same question, how would you help explain this to an American audience?

HANAN ASHRAWI: Well, actually this conflict as everybody knows is one of the most complex conflict because it deals with the question of identity, of land, of territoriality of geography of history, of legitimacy, and therefore it has within it all the components of every conflict in history. And it's been ongoing certainly for a long time. It's the longest standing conflict. And, therefore, in attempting to achieve resolution one has to address all these issues that would bring about -- that brought about the conflict and that will bring, whose solution would bring about the end of the conflict. So we cannot take it lightly because people's lives are at stake, the future of the region is at stake. And to take the necessary steps to achieve peace has been a very difficult incremental process because we have to change the course of history from violence towards reconciliation to legitimize even just the discourse, the language of peace. So I would say one shouldn't underestimate the complexity, the difficulty and I would end by saying that it is not for the faint-hearted at all.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, just in the past few weeks, spokesmen for people who claim to be spokesmen from both sides have talked about an outbreak of violence if this isn't settled soon. Why have things reached such a critical point? We see it's seven years since that handshake in the Rose Garden with President Clinton. Why is 2,000 leaving everyone on the knife edge?

HANAN ASHRAWI: Well, it's beyond the symbolism of the date in the sense of the millennium and so on. The question is that the peace process that was launched almost ten years ago started with such high hopes, raised expectations, and yet with every subsequent agreement there has been a process of fragmentation, of prolongation, stalling and at the same time creating facts under ground that went against really the requirements of peace including settlements, including control, closure, siege, house demolitions, and so on, which ended up with Palestinians feeling that they are victims of a process having been victims of a conflict. So, life has not changed for the better on country. It became much worse for Palestinians on a daily basis, and at the same time we are in dangers of losing the constituency for peace in Palestine not -- for this peace process let's say -- not for peace as a whole. While I believe that the dialogue with the Israelis has in many ways diminished, and the constituency in Israel has not grown larger - I mean, Israel remains polarized on a almost 50/50 basis. We need to see more of, respect for the other side and the politics of inclusion as an equal partner, not as a result of distortions of occupation.

RAY SUAREZ: Yuli Tamir do you agree with the analysis?

YULI TAMIR: Only partly. I think one first of all should stress that the risk of eruption of violence comes own from the Palestinian side and we have been going through a long process of negotiation. That is true. But we are now I think coming to a point where we are really offering a realistic deal that could be an end to the conflict and I think that the risk of violence comes from the fact that it is very hard, especially on the Palestinian side, to come to grips with the fact that that kind of an agreement will demand a very painful compromise.

RAY SUAREZ: But when you say especially on the Palestinian side, both leaders say that they understand fully that they can't get everything they want in this negotiation. Would you say that is true for the people who stand behind these leaders?

YULI TAMIR: Well, I'm quite sure that that is true for the Israeli public. We know very well that in order to come to an agreement, we have to make a compromise, a very painful compromise for us -- as it is by the way very painful for the Palestinians. In this kind of a conflict where justice meets justice, I believe that there are only very painful compromises. The question is how strong a leader is to bring back home a painful compromise? And I think that Barak is a strong leader in that respect -- that he can bring back a painful compromise because people trust him, because people know that he is -- as we call him in Israel -- soldier number one; that he is a person that has the security interest of Israel in his mind and he is devoted to providing Israel with the best and secure future. The question is whether the Palestinians now when we are offering them a generous deal, whether they are ready to sign the deal and to look forward to a future of cooperation between the two peoples in the Middle East.

HANAN ASHRAWI: Well, first of all, I think the real threats of violence came from people like chief of staff in Israel. I mean, he threatened to use tanks and Cobra fighter planes and so on against the Palestinian people. And, of course, there are military maneuvers and so on, and the stockpiling of weapons. I mean, I really don't want to get into this who threatens violence. We are emerging from a long period of either dispossession and exile for the Palestinians where more than half the Palestinian people are refugees still stateless, still at the mercy of most countries and the other half or less than half lived under occupation for decades. So, it's not the question of offering the Palestinians a generous deal. We made historical compromise because we accepted only 22% of historical Palestine in accordance with 242. In 1947, Israel got -- with the partition plan, 56% of historical Palestine -- 1948 it conquered 22% -- in 1967 the remaining 22%. Now we are being told if they will generously give us parts of the remaining 22%, we should be very grateful. I have a problem with this kind of mentality and I'm sorry, Yuli, I know you very well and I have tremendous respect for you as a friend and a woman. But I really think that this attitude, this language that the Israelis are unilaterally finding out, you know, what they want, what is in their interests and then telling the other side from a position of patronage which is a as a result of course naturally of years of occupation and unaccountable control, that we will give you out of the generosity of our heart a certain percentage of the remaining part of your land and you should be grateful. And it has become take it or leave it. No, peacemaking is not unilateral, and it is not dictated by power. And it cannot incorporate injustice and it cannot incorporate illegality. Now, having really changed the whole region by accepting 242 and by the way by giving Israeli legitimacy in the region, by accepting a two-state solution, then it seems to me the historical import, significance of this position should be understood and the mentality of dictates and patronizing, condescension, which is a result of the mentality of occupation, has to be replaced with a mentality of recognition that the Palestinians have equal rights, and they should be not just neighbors, but that we should forge new paradigms, new sets of relationships, new concepts of each other and get rid of the old concepts.

YULI TAMIR: I am surprised that Hanan -- if I may call you Hanan - because we are good friends -- talks about unilateral attempts to sort of impose a solution. We are here in a summit talking together. I mean, Prime Minister Barak and Yasser Arafat are sitting together and trying to find the most suitable compromise for all of us in the region. So there is no unilateral attempt to impose a solution. There is an attempt to realistically assess what could be done right now and push forward. some sort of a solution which I think we might not be ideal for you nor for us. You know, many people in Israel want the greater Israel; many people in Palestine want a greater Palestine. Neither side, neither side of extremism will win. I think the people that will win are the pragmatics, those who know that they have to make a compromise and always a compromise is made together -- not unilaterally.

RAY SUAREZ: What kind of moves on the part of the Palestinians, what kind of signs from the Palestinians would create the kind of security in Israel among Israelis, that would make them more confident about giving the higher percentage of the occupied, rather than the lower percentage of the range in these lands that we're talking about?

YULI TAMIR: Well, I think that the major issue is that really is of trust and security for the future of Israel. You know, we are also a country of refugees, a country of people coming bearing in mind a very harsh history. And I think the people of Israel want to enter an era where they can live in peace and they know that they have security for them and their children and their grandchildren after them which is probably true also for the Palestinians - therefore, what we want now in this summit to achieve is to find from the Palestinians exactly what are their plans, what is the kind of agreement that they are ready to sign on. We don't want any more abstract declarations about this. We want to get down to business. I think this is why Prime Minister Barak came here. He wants here to know exactly whether we could sign a peace agreement in the foreseeable future. We don't want to leave this conflict for the generations ahead.

RAY SUAREZ: Is the menu too long of things that have to be gotten through for there to be some kind of agreement sooner, rather than later?

HANAN ASHRAWI: Well, I think it's very complex and difficult. It's not such a long menu. I think the approach to security as a result -- as an outcome of military control and military means is absolutely the wrong approach. The only way you can have security is if you solve the causes of the conflict. You have a genuine peace. You replace relationships of conflict, hostility, replaced with relationships of mutual benefit and cooperation. And, to do that, you have to go through the process. We have to start with first of all the recognition of guilt and culpability and of course, a recognition of the tremendous historical tragedy that the Palestinians suffered in 47 and '48 -- the loss of their land, the loss of their continuity, development, the dispersal, dispossession, occupation, exile. This has to be recognized -- then we move from that and we do that to set the record state straight. And then we move from there in order to solve the causes of the conflict -- denial of Palestinian national rights and for statehood; denial of territorial continuity for Palestinian statehood. We cannot say, okay, the Israelis created an illegal reality with all the settlements that fragment the West Bank and Gaza, that create Israel territory and apartheid -- and therefore, let's design an artificial peace process that accommodates settlers and settlements -- because that is going to be a source of conflict. And we want peace that would produce security, human security for everybody -- not just for one side. And we don't want a partial peace that will backfire and explode in our faces. Another thing is the issue of Jerusalem. I mean, one side cannot unilaterally control Jerusalem and possess it exclusively. It has to be shared. It has to be two capitals for two states -- and, of course, in accordance with 242 and the refugees have to be recognized; their rights have to be safeguarded in accordance with international law and UN Resolution 194, which means they have equal rights like all over refugees in the world.

RAY SUAREZ: Dr. Ashrawi, Ms. Tamir, thank you both.

FOCUS - CISCO SYSTEMS - MASTER OF THE INTERNET

JIM LEHRER: Now, plumbing the Internet: Our business correspondent, Paul Solman, of WGBH-Boston reports on the rapid rise of an Internet giant.

ANNOUNCER: Virtually all Internet traffic travels across the systems of one company, Cisco Systems.

PAUL SOLMAN: Cisco Systems, the company that wants to be synonymous with the Internet -- and is, at the moment, one of the world's fastest-growing businesses ever, gushing profits at a dizzying pace. CEO John Chambers:

JOHN CHAMBERS, CEO, Cisco Systems: We are at the very heart of this new economy, and we're the company that not only is synonymous with the Internet in most people's minds, but we also are the most advanced users of the Internet in the world. We're a company that has the chance to be the most influential and perhaps powerful company in history.

PAUL SOLMAN: But how can a company that most of us have never bought anything from already be, according to the stock market, one of the world's most valuable firms? And could Cisco really become the most dominant firm in history? We'll get to those questions in a bit. But to start, how exactly, or even approximately, does Cisco Systems make money? Plain-talking senior VP Kevin Denuccio spoke our language.

KEVIN DENUCCIO, Senior Vice President: We're kind of the plumbers of the Internet, and we call it plumbing because we have these wires and cables, and we call them pipes.

PAUL SOLMAN: The crucial Cisco product turns out to be a key component of the Internet plumbing system, a router.

KEVIN DENUCCIO: The router is what makes the Internet work. It is the intelligence behind the Internet.

PAUL SOLMAN: In this room, they run much of Cisco's Internet system. There's a server, a powerful computer on which several of Cisco's corporate web sites reside. There are wires and optical fiber over which digital signals travel within the company, and to and from the outside world, over the Internet. And last, but to Cisco certainly not least, a router, a device that routes the digital signals on the Internet to their eventual destinations. Say you want to visit the NewsHour website, for instance.

PAUL SOLMAN: So now I typed in that I want to go to pbs.Org/NewsHour, loyal employee that I am. So what is... what happens now?

KEVIN DENUCCIO: So once you're connected to network, this is the intelligent device that works almost like a post office. It understands where you're trying to get to and where that is, and what's the easiest way to get you there, and it actually directs your question, your request, to a server, some computer on the network that's hosting pbs.Org. So every... nearly every communication on the Internet goes through a Cisco router, because it has to find its way around the globe.

PAUL SOLMAN: In short, the Internet is just the vast network of wires, fibers, and the rest that hook all the world's computers to each other, and there are tens of thousands of routers, large and small, directing the traffic among them. Big routers are bought by Internet service providers like AOL, telephone companies, corporations, universities-- all large Internet users. These routers cost $100,000 or more apiece. As Internet use mushrooms, so does the demand for them. And the technology is progressing so rapidly, routers need to be replaced every 18 months. So the market is gigantic, it's exploding, and Cisco controls it. But Cisco is not just that, as Marthin Debeer demonstrated to us.

MARTHIN DEBEER, Marketing Director: So, Paul, I'm here with the new Cisco IP phone. This is actually the phone that I use every day on my desk.

PAUL SOLMAN: This new Cisco product is an IP, or Internet Protocol, telephone, which you can plug into your company's Internet cable and use for all your phone calls, plus lots of other information: Your schedule, the cafeteria menu...

MARTHIN DEBEER: Or even the Cisco stock price.

PAUL SOLMAN: Can we get the Cisco stock price?

MARTHIN DEBEER: Yes, absolutely. Let's see where it closed today. In fact, the market just closed.

PAUL SOLMAN: So Cisco is up more than 4%.

MARTHIN DEBEER: Yeah, that's what it looks like.

PAUL SOLMAN: So I take it you have some Cisco stock?

MARTHIN DEBEER: I have a few shares.

PAUL SOLMAN: But the real selling point is that once it's programmed with his phone number, Marthin Debeer can connect this handset to the Cisco Internet system anywhere in the building, or the world.

MARTHIN DEBEER: Okay, so I'm off.

PAUL SOLMAN: Okay, well, have a good trip.

PAUL SOLMAN: Say Cisco's Germany office, to which Marthin Debeer now pretended to go, to showcase the advantages of a truly mobile phone. And taking a cue from the ubiquitous white boards that Cisco uses to explain things, we sketched our own impromptu diagram of the Internet and how Cisco's phone connects to it. So say I want to call Marthin in Germany. I take out my cell phone and I send the signal to a local cell tower somewhere, which sends the signal right here to the Cisco campus. So let's say it's sent on an open line to a router, one of those computers that Cisco makes, in Kansas City, which sends it to a router in Bangor, Maine, then down to New York City, say, and then across the big pond, the Atlantic Ocean, over to London, and then to Cisco in Germany. Now Marthin, meanwhile, has plugged in his phone, so he's connected not only to Cisco Germany, but to the entire Cisco network. So now I'm going to call him... (Phone rings)

MARTHIN DEBEER: This is Marthin.

PAUL SOLMAN: And there he is. So we were beginning to get the picture: Not only does Cisco have a lock on the plumbing of the Internet, it sells new ways to use that plumbing. CEO John Chambers thinks that as the Internet goes, so goes Cisco, and to him that means nowhere but up.

JOHN CHAMBERS: There will be no business but e-business in the future.

PAUL SOLMAN: No business that isn't e- business?

JOHN CHAMBERS: Absolutely. I think people are just beginning to grasp the power. Even the best business minds around the world only in the last year began to understand the tremendous impact this is going to have on their companies, and very often it's the most successful companies or most successful individuals who tend to be slow in catching it. It's the ones who are more paranoid, if you will, or the ones that are struggling that often adjust the quickest.

PAUL SOLMAN: Indeed, Cisco has adjusted quickly, expanding into new areas by using its highly priced stock to buy up new technologies, promising competitors.

DAN GILLMOR, San Jose Mercury News: And watching Cisco run around like Pac Man swallowing up other companies that might be useful to them, you get the sense of somebody who's moving as quickly as possible not to get left behind.

PAUL SOLMAN: Dan Gillmor covers Cisco for the "San Jose Mercury-News."

DAN GILLMOR: They want to sell you stuff that works that they can sell you, and they'll buy anything and develop anything it takes to do that.

PAUL SOLMAN: If this sounds like the Microsoft monopoly, well, Cisco has been accused of monopolizing the router market. But thus far no one has challenged its tactics, and, as a result, Cisco has continued to grow exponentially, building and building to house both new hires and those who come via acquisitions. But while the pay and stock options are generous, the digs are modest; the perks, humble. Everyone here flies coach. The CEO's office is about the size of a NewsHour correspondent's. Cisco has plenty to feel smug about.

JOHN CHAMBERS: Yet we know we could be an also-ran in two years if we don't execute properly.

PAUL SOLMAN: Chambers equates Internet years with dog years.

JOHN CHAMBERS: One calendar year is seven years in a dog's le; it's seven years in the Internet's life. So changes that took place in our daily living or perhaps in business over decades will now occur in one to two years.

PAUL SOLMAN: A case in point: The price of phone. Three years ago, Chambers shocked the industry by predicting it would drop to zero.

SPOKESMAN: Could you hear my voice coming through the speakerphone?

PAUL SOLMAN: If Chambers is right, phone companies will soon be forced to send our voice signals over the basically free Internet, where Cisco now reigns supreme, a point they were making to customers when we visited. But will the cost of voice communication really drop to nothing?

JOHN CHAMBERS: It's now pretty well accepted it will, and our price of long distance calls, for example in America, are going down from 20 cents to 15 to ten to five... it's on its way to two, and it won't be very long before your cable company comes to you and offers you pretty much free voice connections to get your data transport. But over time, people will give away the data connections to attach you to their entertainment.

PAUL SOLMAN: But given such rapid change, how does a company stay profitable?

JOHN CHAMBERS: You'd better be on to your next product-- your differentiation, your competition will follow-- commoditization. Your next product: Competition will follow, commoditization. What Cisco does either with our products or how we use the Internet for productivity reasons, we're always one to two waves ahead of everyone else.

PAUL SOLMAN: One of Chambers' key objectives is to get Cisco to do almost all of its business over the Internet. Sue Bostrom gave us a look, starting with expense reports.

SUE BOSTROM, Senior Vice President: I submit it electronically, and I'm paid directly into my checking account for the incidentals in about 48 hours, and my AMEX corporate card is paid directly.

PAUL SOLMAN: So you mean, unlike, for example, my own wallet... we're doing this spontaneously.

SUE BOSTROM: Right.

PAUL SOLMAN: Here we have all these different expense items that I've got here.

SUE BOSTROM: You would input those electronically into our line travel expense system, and you'd mail those paper receipts into corporate.

PAUL SOLMAN: Oh, I would have to mail them.

SUE BOSTROM: You'd mail the receipts in so that when they did an audit, they'd have those receipts available. So it allows us to have one and a half auditors auditing expense reports for 20,000 employees.

PAUL SOLMAN: A mere six people to run its entire benefits department. Cisco says it saved $50 million alone by putting its health benefits online. And then there are the customers.

SUE BOSTROM: I'll put in my phone number here.

PAUL SOLMAN: If Sue Bostrom is a customer, say, contacting Cisco online for help...

SUE BOSTROM: And I'll hit "call me." (Phone ringing)

SUE BOSTROM: Sue Bostrom.

ELECTRONIC VOICE: Call will be answered by...

PAUL SOLMAN: The point is Cisco is learning how to do business online, and then selling its know-how and plumbing, to other firms-- just another way to keep the company ahead of the wave; its stock price ahead of the pack. But that brings us back to "the" overwhelming question, at least for investors: Can the company really be worth the Himalayan heights at which its stock haws been selling the past year-- between 100 and 200 times its annual earnings? CEO John Chambers says the numbers speak for themselves.

JOHN CHAMBERS: We return about 20% at the current time, after taxes, of our revenues. Our current run rate is over $16 billion. We've been the fastest-growing, most-profitable company ever in history. The analysts are estimating that we'll grow at 30% to 50% per year, and maintaining perhaps the best profits in history in the computer industry.

PAUL SOLMAN: Well, of course, that sounds pretty good. On the other hand, if Cisco grew at 30% to 50% for, say, the next decade, it would have sales of between $250 billion and $1 trillion, a sizable percentage of the entire U.S. economy at that point. In the final analysis, then, can the company keep growing for anything like ten human years-- 70 Internet years by John Chambers' reckoning? Well, say the faithful, Cisco will forever teach itself new tricks and remain top dog for years to come. To the skeptics, however, any hopes of becoming a trillion- dollar company, even ten years hence, is simply, to beat the dog metaphor to death, barking up the wrong tree.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, race in America, and a Jim Fisher essay.

FOCUS - RACE IN AMERICA

JIM LEHRER: Today a national "New York Times" poll indicates that black and white people have starkly different views of the problems facing blacks in America. The poll is part of a special "Times" series. Media Correspondent Terence Smith reports.

TERENCE SMITH: For the last several weeks the "New York Times" has been giving one of the oldest stories in America front-page treatment. Race, specifically how race is lived in America, is the subject of an extraordinary, six-week-long series focused largely on the everyday lives of little-known individuals. More than 20 "Times" correspondents and photographers have spent up to a year reporting from schools, playing fields, churches, movie sets, and other locations to depict life as it is actually lived by different races in America. The series, which is not pegged to any specific news event, is to culminate in a special edition of the "New York Times" Sunday Magazine on July 16th. To supplement the print stories the Times opened up its web site for dialogue, offering both reporters' journals and interviews with readers. So far, several thousand people have posted responses. Even the youngest readers are invited by the "Times's" Learning Network to have their say. Lesson plans, puzzles, and discussion guides will be available on-line well into the next school year.

TERENCE SMITH: Joining us now to add to the discussion are "New York Times" executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, who oversaw the series and is himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning author; "Times" reporter Dana Canedy, who left her financial business beat to focus on race relations in the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom and edit part of the race series; former "Times" journalist Roger Wilkins, who now teaches the history of race and law at George Mason University; he's a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, an author, and a former member of the Pulitzer Prize Board; journalist Keith Woods, who leads the Poynter Institute Seminars on coverage of race relations; he was a contributor to an award-winning, seven-month long New Orleans Times Picayune series on race seven years ago; and Dartmouth College Professor Mary Childers, who is the author of a forthcoming book on welfare and a member of the board of ISM, a national diversity project to generate classroom discussion about racism, classicism, and sexism. Welcome to all of you.

TERENCE SMITH: Joe Lelyveld, tell me, since this was such a major commitment of your paper's resources, why you decided to do this series, why now, and why this approach?

JOSEPH LELYVELD: We had a general feeling that race was receding as an issue in American public life. You can see in the current campaign - not many candidates want to talk about it a lot, at least since Bill Bradley got benched. And the - it probably has something to do with the full employment economy, maybe the welfare reform, maybe the judicial lines that have been drawn on affirmative action. Now, why this approach? The logic of our thinking led us to the conclusion that the only way to look at what was really happening in race relations and come up with something new was to look at actual race relations. The sense of ours that things were changing drove it to some degree, and so we wanted to get down where - especially in the workplace but in other settings - get down and see what was really going on and discover stories, tell stories. These aren't just meant to be discussions of a problem, but stories in the lives of people who don't have spin masters, who aren't practiced in speaking to the press, and who would be courageous and gracious enough to allow us into their lives.

TERENCE SMITH: Dana Canedy, tell me about that process of reporting, this sort of anecdotal approach, getting people to open up.

DANA CANEDY: Well, I think that so often when racism is written about or viewed on television, it is because of some explosive event, a high profile police profiling case or a shooting, and lots of times average folks don't recognize themselves in those stories, and so what we set out to do was to find ways literally that people were living with race, how they were either figuring out for themselves or not. And so that required going deep, not just doing what appeared to be the obvious story after a month of reporting, but going back and peeling the onion, as we kept saying, they really get to the heart of it, and it took several months to do that. What seemed perhaps like the obvious story in the beginning, in the end wasn't the story a lot of times, and these were everyday people who graciously opened themselves up to us.

TERENCE SMITH: Mary Childers, as someone who has studied racism, what have you taken away from this series so far?

MARY CHILDERS: I think it's unusual and the degree to which it gets people to be honest about how they think about race. One of the things that it manages to do is to stay with people over an extended period of time so that you don't hear them only when they're in an encounter that involves confrontation, and you don't hear them when they're only involved in polite conversation. You hear them adjusting to situations, making decisions about what to react to, changing their minds; and that's an unusual glimpse into the - sort of this inner life of race consciousness in this country. Because we live in a still-segregated world, the truth is that many white people don't have the slightest idea how many highly accomplished African Americans find themselves on an almost daily basis having to figure out what happened, do I cut someone slack, am I overreacting? That's an unusual kind of exposure that happens. People were frank in ways that they often are not when you sit them down to talk in a classroom or in a workshop. The same thing is true to the degree to which black people get to hear white people be serious and forthcoming about their own history, the racism in their own family, their own doubts about how much they want to adjust to changes in black politics. It's an unusually honest glimpse, I think.

TERENCE SMITH: Keith Woods, journalistically looking at this approach, did you find it valid, did you feel that it broke new ground?

KEITH WOODS: Well, I think that it broke new ground in several ways, particularly for a newspaper the size of the "New York Times," because by focusing on individuals, as the series does, and by focusing on the depth of people's lives, rather than trying to focus on a breadth of this problem, we were able to give people an opportunity to find themselves reflected both in the people who are like them, the people who look like them in this story, and also find themselves in the refracted light of people who are not like them so that a white person who is reading this series may read a story about black people at Southern University talking about a white football player, and if they're listening closely, may hear themselves in the same way as black people who are reading the story about the church in Atlanta may find themselves hearing some of the their own prejudices and their own biases reflected in the people who they're listening to in that story. So the story has offered us an opportunity to see things in a very different way. It also demonstrates that, when reporters wait, when reporters instead of taking the first answer from people on issues of race, wait and patiently ask questions, in this case they stayed around a while, but we don't necessarily have to spend a year with people to get this kind of information, if we assume that it's there in the first place and don't accept the first answers that we get.

TERENCE SMITH: Roger Wilkins, do you think the stories get to the heart of how race affects life in America?

ROGER WILKINS: The problem of race in this country is so deep and so close to the center of American culture and so close to the psyches of so many people that it's going to take massive undertakings by a range of American institutions to wipe out what remains, and what remains is a pretty killing for lots of human beings. So the "Times" devoting, being preeminent in the filed and devoting these resources to this issue is just extraordinary. I would congratulate Joe and Arthur Saltzberger, jr., and all their editors for what they have done. Having said that, if I ran my hand across the grainy surface of race relations in this country, I think I would feel something somewhat different than what I have read.

TERENCE SMITH: How so?

ROGER WILKINS: Much of what I read has been very good. I think that people are more bemused and puzzled than I find them to be in daily life. For example, the black columnist at the "Beacon Journal" who lost his column was kind of mellow about it, and I don't know any columnists who... white or black, male or female...

TERENCE SMITH: Me included.

ROGER WILKINS: Me included. If my column would have been taken from me, I would have gone nuts.

TERENCE SMITH: All right. Joe Lelyveld, what about that? There is the question of the intensity, and there are some of the issues, maybe you and Dana can both answer, about the black/white focus, about the focus mostly on men.

JOSEPH LELYVELD: Well, we worried a lot about that, and we asked ourselves many questions about it all the way through, but in the end, we thought it was beyond our possibilities to make this thing demographically pristine and accurate. And we also felt, I think, strongly that at the heart of race relations in America is the still unfinished history of the consequences of human slavery and the black/white relationship. But it's not a perfect or complete portrait. We would love it to be, but it's not. We did our best in that direction, but our real effort was to go to deep into... as deep as we could go into the hearts and minds of people.

TERENCE SMITH: Well, we should turn to Dana of the question of not only the columnist but also the question of, how do you know when you have gotten to the truth.

DANA CANEDY: I think after spending nine months or a year with someone you just know. You use your journalistic instincts and you know. Beyond that, I would say that the comment about the intensity is very interesting, because I think sometimes what people respond to when they think about whether the stories got as deep as they want, is whether the reactions of the folks in the stories mirror their own. There is no one way to think about race.

TERENCE SMITH: All right. Let Roger come back to that.

ROGER WILKINS: Dana, I take your point on that, but another place where the intensity really didn't seem to work for me is the white drill sergeant who felt overwhelmed by the four black drill sergeants. He was more bemused and befuddled and gently disappointed then enraged at the reversal of fortune.

DANA CANEDY: I guess I don't understand why that's so surprising. I think that another white drill sergeant may have been enraged. This one happened not to be. And, again, I think it goes back to the point that in reading these stories, in conversations I have had with family and friends and colleagues and so forth, I think people do look... gauge, I think, how deeply or how sincere our characters were with their own internal reactions, and that's my belief on that.

TERENCE SMITH: Go ahead, Joe.

JOSEPH LELYVELD: I think a lot of these characters are surprising in that and other ways, and that just gives you a sense of the different ways race plays out in America. And perhaps if we were doing this as a play or a short story or novel or a parable, we would be able to shape it a little differently to make it more true to our own sense of it. But having fixed on these individuals in each case, we have a certain duty to be loyal to their story.

TERENCE SMITH: All right, Mary Childers, Joe Lelyveld made a point; I wondered what you think of it. He said he thought discussion of race had largely subsided in America, that it was in a quiet period. Do you agree with that, and if so, why?

MARY CHILDERS: I don't agree with that, at least in the circles that I travel in. People talk about race all the time. One of things that's so gratifying about the "New York Times" series is that the "Times" is focusing on race at a time when the nation is not focused on the one big crisis. I think it's helpful for us to take account of the fact that even if politicians are ignoring race, people are either trying to live together or resenting being forced to be living together. People have conflict in the workplace. People are watching intermarriage with either glee or despair at what's happening to their own culture. Race is very much a topic that's being talked about and sorted all the time in most of the neighborhoods I know, across class lines.

DANA CANEDY: I agree with you at some level that race is being discussed. I think it's easier to talk about it, and it's being discussed more in comfortable settings where people are with people they trust. What is much harder, and I found this on reporting on journalists who initially were quite concerned about having their names used and so forth, was talking across racial lines. I think, as you say, there are people discussing race, but not often do you hear a black person in a newsroom, for example, out and out say, I think your column is for "crybaby white boys." Those kind of crass statements, regardless of what you think of them, don't often come up -- I think as least in terms of mixed company or in the workplace and so forth, and I think it took months of getting to know these people before they were willing to sort of get at their true feelings.

TERENCE SMITH: Let's hear from Keith Woods. Journalistically again, this approach, do you suspect it will have at all a contagious effect with other papers?

KEITH WOODS: Let me say first off that I think one of the things that the "Times" staff has learned, one of the things that staffs have learned whenever they try and tackle this issue is that, in fact, they are just like the people that they're reporting on. We often like to think that we're something different when we go out to talk about race relations with people, but we are in fact just as reticent, we are just as fearful, we have all the same hang-ups talking both within our groups and across race as anyone else does. One of the values then of this series is that for the reader, you get the opportunity to see what it sounds like to try out some ideas out loud in public on... in national media. For journalists, you get an opportunity to see what's possible, what kinds of great stories there are out there, to be told if you simply take the time and assume that it's there and assume again that the first answer may not be the full truth.

TERENCE SMITH: All right. Let me thank all five of you very much.

ESSAY - A JOYFUL NOISE

Finally tonight, essayist Jim Fisher of the Kansas City Star considers the lessons of a violin lesson.

JIM FISHER: Remember Jack Benny playing "Love in Bloom" on the radio? Fingernails on a chalk board. For relief, try the old Carnegie Library here in Ottawa, Kansas. Listen: Vivaldi, Mozart, and Dvorak-- stringed music that's clean, pure, joyful. No simplistic resonances, no squeals nor squeaks, just kids, four-year-olds to teenagers-- kids who kids play violins, violas, and cellos with an expertise that astounds. Look at the faces and it's easy to understand why the music soars. What's here are disciples of the Suzuki method of instruction, created by a Japanese named Shinichi Suzuki. He figured if a child could vocalize two or three thousand words by age three, plus develop the manual dexterity to master chopsticks, surely he or she could play a stringed instrument by imitating music they heard over and over. He was right. In 34 countries, 300,000 kids now learn using the Suzuki method. Here in Ottawa, the method is so big that during three weeks in June-- wheat harvest and hay- hauling time for many here-- Suzuki's legacy has turned this usually bucolic community into a focal point of lessons, recitals, classes on music theory, composing, and performances by nationally known guest artists. Ottawa's transmutation into a place where the classics -- Bach, Tabor, and John Williams -- waft over downtown can largely be laid at the feet of this energetic, 57- year-old woman named Alice Joy Lewis. She evokes enthusiasm from the children and devotion from their parents.

ALICE JOY LEWIS: Wild applause. (Applause)

JIM FISHER: Want to see a teacher? Just watch.

ALICE JOY LEWIS: More, more, more. Yeah --

JIM FISHER: But look past Lewis and her students. What do you see? Parents. When Suzuki, dead two years ago at age 99, laid out his methods, parental involvement was a seminal building block. The kids practice, the parents encourage; the kids play, the parents applaud; the kids perform, and the parents, no matter what it takes, are there. (Applause) A little thing, but in this time in which media has somehow morphed children into fearsome beings on the nightly news or morning front pages, ones who drive by with guns blazing, who as six-year-olds shoot other six-year-olds, and who will be remembered for massacring part of a Colorado school just a year ago, isn't that little thing most of what it takes? Parents. Kids. Look past the instruments. Shut out the music for an instant. Look at the eyes of parents and children. The answer's there. It's been there all along. (Applause)

SPOKESPERSON: Good job.

JIM FISHER: I'm Jim Fisher.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Tuesday. The Middle East peace summit began at Camp David. Bashar Assad was declared the new president of Syria. And Pentagon officials spelled out plans to cut back on vaccinating soldiers against anthrax. It's because they're running out of the vaccine. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.