The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight, President Clinton leads the day of grieving about Oklahoma City and the Croatia plane crash, Kwame Holman reports; those and other major stories of the week as seen by Mark Shields & Paul Gigot; the new police beating case, in Southern California, Jeffrey Kaye reports; the dawning of the 21st century, David Gergen has a dialogue with author Robert Kaplan; and a Good Friday report on prayer as therapy by Richard Ostling of "Time" Magazine. It all follows our summary of the news this Friday.NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: President Clinton marked the one-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing today. He and Mrs. Clinton laid a wreath at the site where 168 people were killed by a terrorist bomb. They came to Oklahoma City today because they will be on a trip to South Korea, Japan, and Russia on April 19th, the actual anniversary day. Mr. Clinton also dedicated a memorial at a day care center and spoke to families of the bombing victims. We'll have a full report right after this News Summary. In Croatia today, all bodies were removed from the site of Wednesday's plane crash that killed Commerce Secretary Brown and 34 others. New video of the mountainside where the U.S. military jet crashed was released. The remains of the 33 Americans on board are expected back in the United States tomorrow. They will be met at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware by President Clinton and Vice President Gore. A U.S. military team is investigating the cause of the crash.

COL. MARK BRZOZOWSKI, U.S. Military Spokesman: The mission is to determine what happened. They're not in a blame-fixing game. They want to know what happened. So right now they're looking at the crash site, the--how the wreckage is disposed around the site. The bottom line is--find out what happened so that it doesn't happen again.

MR. LEHRER: A short ceremony is planned in Croatia Saturday before the remains are returned to the U.S.. In Washington, the State Department settled a race discrimination suit. It will pay $3.8 million to various complainants and issue 17 retroactive promotions. The lawsuit was filed 10 years ago by a group of black foreign service officers. A federal appeals court today upheld the government's gays in the military policy. The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, ruled the "don't ask, don't tell" mandate is legal. The judges said military policy is a matter for elected officials, not judges, to decide. In Montana today, a lawyer for the suspected unabomber waived his client's right to a bail hearing. That means former Math Professor Theodore Kazcynski will remain in county jail in Helena. He has been charged with possession of bomb components. Federal agents continued sifting through Kazcynski's small cabin for clues that could link him to the 18-year string of bombings. The Associated Press said two typewriters have been found. They are now being examined to see if they were used to type the unabomber's lengthy manifestos that were sent to major U.S. newspapers. In economic news today, the unemployment rate increased .1 percent in March to 5.6 percent. The Labor Department said the recent General Motors strike caused a sharp drop in manufacturing jobs. In Chechnya today, the war continued, despite Russian President Yeltsin's cease-fire declaration last weekend. We have more in this report from Ian Glover James of Independent Television News.

IAN GLOVER JAMES, ITN: Russian rockets and armor blast the Chechen village of Goiskoye nearly a week after Boris Yeltsin said is troops would pull out in the new peace plan. Instead, one of the bloodiest clashes of the Chechen war, 45 Russian soldiers dead or missing, a Sequoia 25 fighter bomber shot down, and Chechen fighters still holding out under massive Russian bombardment. This is Shelagskiy, the last village to shoot back at the Russians. Shelagskiy was flattened by Russian fire power. The civilian population fled, joining the million made homeless by this war, a war that's killed 30,000 people. For Boris Yeltsin, campaigning in Russia's central region, the war won't go away. In the crowd, awkward questions. A woman demanded when would the fighting end. Yeltsin said, "No, no one's dying there now. Military operations have stopped according to my plan. Haven't you seen it on television?". A poll just out shows a massive 62 percent want one thing above all from a presidential candidate, an end to the war in Chechnya.

MR. LEHRER: The Presidential elections will be held in Russian June 16th. In South Korea today, the government placed its troop on heightened alert. Yesterday, North Korea said it would give up its duty in the demilitarized zone between the two countries. In Washington, a State Department spokesman said armed North Korean soldiers had entered the joint security area of the DMZ. He said that was a violation of the 1953 armistice agreement signed at the end of the Korean War.

GLYN DAVIES, State Department Spokesman: We consider this to be an act that, umm, is not in keeping with the undertakings that the government of North Korea made about 40 years ago, and I would characterize it, I think, as a very negative act, and it's one that we would call on the North Koreans to, you know, to cut out. They should go back to the provisions that they've signed up to and start again to comport themselves as they should.

MR. LEHRER: In Tokyo today, Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto told reporters North Korea's announcement was very dangerous. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to a day of grieving, Shields & Gigot, the new police beating case in California, a Gergen dialogue, and the therapy of prayer. FOCUS - COMING TO TERMS

MR. LEHRER: For President Clinton and many others, this was a day of remembering those who died in Oklahoma City a year ago and on a Croatian mountainside two days ago. Kwame Holman has our extended report.

KWAME HOLMAN: This morning, just before leaving for Oklahoma City, the President and First Lady repeated a grim ritual from a year ago. They planted a dogwood tree on the South Lawn of the White House, this one in memory of Ron Brown, two dozen of his fellow federal workers, and the other Americans who perished Wednesday in Croatia.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Last year as we prepared to go to Oklahoma City, Hillary and I planted a dogwood tree here in honor of the public servants who lost their lives there, and this year, as we prepare to go back, almost a year later, we're planting sadly another tree in honor of Secretary Brown and all the public servants of the United States and the citizens who lost their lives in the plane crash. And we hope the prayers of the American people will be with them and their families at this difficult time. And we hope everyone will honor the contributions they made to the United States and the welfare of our people.

[BAGPIPES PLAYING "AMAZING GRACE"]

MR. HOLMAN: A few hours later, the President and Mrs. Clinton arrived in Oklahoma City to participate in events marking the first anniversary of the bombing that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and to honor the federal workers and others among the 168 who died there.

[BAGPIPES PLAYING "AMAZING GRACE"]

MR. HOLMAN: First, the Clintons were joined by children who survived the destruction of the Murrah Building day care center a year ago to lay a wreath at the now-cleared bomb site. Then they helped dedicate a new day care center.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Let me begin by noting that this is, after all, Good Friday. It is a day for those of us who are Christians that marks the passage from loss and despair to hope and redemption. And in a way, that is the lesson of this little walk we just took with these children and their parents from a place where we mourn lives cut so brutally short to this place where, thanks to you and all of those whom the lieutenant governor mentioned, we can truly celebrate new beginnings. I hope the lesson of the walk and this effort will comfort and inspire all of those here in Oklahoma City and especially those who are, as the governor said, still hurting, still searching, still working to put their lives back together. I know there's nothing that anyone can do to bring back the children whose lives were taken from us, nothing we can do to sweep away the frightening memoriesthat still linger and the children who survived, except to continue to work until they finally go away. But what you have done is to show our children that in the wake of evil goodness can surround them and lift them up. You have done a lot here already to prove that their lives are strong and powerful, like the tree behind me, which has now become famous around the country. Everybody wants to know why this tree stood up when the bomb went off. It lost its leaves and its bark, and it's still kind of ugly, but it survived, and it's going to bloom again. Why is it going to bloom again? Because its roots kept it strong and standing. The survivors and the spirit of this community are blooming again because your roots kept you strong and standing. Now we see it in this child care center that we're here to dedicate today. It's a testament really to the resilience of the human spirit, and the fierce devotion of the parents of this community and the larger community. I also want to thank those of you who have already mentioned in public and in private the tragedy our nation has endured this week with the loss of our Commerce Secretary and my dear friend, Ron Brown, and many other people, many of them quite young, who served our nation in the Commerce Department, in the United States Military, and the business executives who were on that trip. They lost their lives pursuing the very spirit that we are here to celebrate today. So as we remember those who perished here almost a year ago and we mourn those who died on that hard mountain so many thousands of miles from here, let us again thank God for the grace that has brought us to this point and enabled us to live with our sorrows and tragedies and to rebuild our lives. You know, the--the bagpipers over there were playing "Amazing Grace." I suppose it's the best known American hymn--at least the first verse. But as we remember those people in this community who are still grieving and still struggling, and we think of all the difficulties life presents for which we have no answer, I would like to close with a reference to the third verse of that magnificent hymn. "Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come. Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home." We pray God's grace today on those who lost so much a year ago and on the efforts of those of you who are working hard to build a better future to make something profoundly good come out of that tragedy. [applause]

MR. HOLMAN: The Clintons were in Oklahoma City two weeks ahead of the actually anniversary of the bombing because the President will be out of the country then. At a convention center ceremony, the Clintons spoke to families of the bombing victims.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: A few minutes ago, the President and I were present when a new child care center for the downtown area was dedicated. And I sat there on the platform looking at the destruction that still existed around me. And I could not help but think that just two weeks ago when I was privileged to visit with our troops in Bosnia, I flew over land that had been ravaged by hatred and violence and war, and I saw houses and buildings that bore the same marks of evil and the destruction that had been wrought. We don't know how well the people there will be able to overcome their own legacy of bitterness and hatred and violence. But we do know that here in Oklahoma City, the buildings may still stand half-destroyed, but the spirits are springing forth, and we know that the kind of love and faithfulness and reconciliation that you exhibit here toward one another is the most important gift we can give ourselves or our children.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: On this Good Friday, what you have done is demonstrated to a watching and often weary and cynical world that good can overcome evil; that love can outlast hate; that the light of human life can shine on through the most terrible darkness. And so I thank you for that, and I know that you could not have done it without your faith. On this Friday, I can't help noting that there is a wonderful verse in the Book of Matthew which says that a person who follows the word of God will be likened unto a wise man who built his house upon a rock, and the rains descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. Well, your building was blown down, and many lives were shattered, but today I saw again that the spirit of Oklahoma City fell not, for it is founded upon a rock. And I thank you for showing that to America. [applause] I would like to say a special word now to some of the people who were involved here a year ago. To the federal workers who survived the blast and are back on the job, we're glad and we support you. To those who are not yet back on the job, we will stand with you until the day you are able to work again. To those who lost their lives in the service of their country, trying to help America get through every day in the best possible way, we thank you, your families, beyond measure. You know, this Easter Sunday, all over the world, the over 1 1/2 billion people who are Christians will be able to bear witness to our faith, that the miracles of Jesus and the miracles of the human spirit in Oklahoma City only reflect the larger miracle of human nature; that there is something eternal within each of us; that we all have to die and that no bomb can blow away even from the littlest child that eternity which is within each of us. And I thought I would leave you with these words and our love and respect as we move toward Easter. The hymn goes, "Further along, we'll know all about it. Further along, we'll understand why. Rise up, my brothers, and walk in the sunshine. Further along, we'll understand why." God bless you, and God bless America. [applause] FOCUS - POLITICAL WRAP

MR. LEHRER: Now some end-of-the-week thoughts from Shields & Gigot, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, "Wall Street Journal" columnist Paul Gigot. Mark, what we just saw, that is a function of a President of the United States in this world today, is it not, to be the healer at times--Oklahoma City, Croatia, all of that?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: It certainly is, Jim. It's part of the job description you don't see in the civics books.

MR. LEHRER: It goes with the television age, does it not?

MR. SHIELDS: It does go with the television age. It was said of Democrats who ran against Ronald Reagan, that they were running to be head of the government. And Reagan always aced them by running to be leader of the nation, and that is part of being leader of the nation. It's somebody who speaks to and for the nation at times when one voice must be heard, and one voice is able to be that instrument of comforting people, and, uh, I was thinking Bill Clinton, uh, you know, is the first Democrat who, who's run for national offices who's really comfortable in that. You could say I guess maybe President Carter, but he's, he's very comfortable. He's not at all self-conscious in, in speaking of religion or faith or God or eternity.

MR. LEHRER: Paul.

PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: His religious training really in--a the Southern Baptist, serves him well in this role because he can call upon the universality of religious principle, which he does so very well at events like this.

MR. LEHRER: Without offending people who may not agree with his particular religion. It's a very hard game.

MR. GIGOT: That's right. It's not a sectarian thing at all.

MR. LEHRER: Right. Thank you.

MR. GIGOT: It's more of a bigger C. S. Lewis sense of, of religion's universality. This particular President, I think, also has, has a real gift, a gift of empathy. He can connect with audiences in a way that most other politicians I've seen simply cannot. Sometimes he goes too far in sort of, I feel your pain, but in events where you have a genuine sense of national distress, I think he's risen to the occasion every time.

MR. GIGOT: Yeah. Ron Brown, what about the political side, the government side of Ron Brown, Mark, what is that legacy?

MR. SHIELDS: Well, Jim, you think of Ron Brown and you think of a smile. I mean, it was a face that was always in smile, and there was about Ron Brown an optimistic can-do attitude that used to be associated at one time with American liberals before they became sort of the crepe hangers and the mourners and all the rest of it. And Ron Brown was that kind of guy. He wanted to do things. He took over the Democratic Party after 1988. In 1988, the Democrats--

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Set the scene for what it was like.

MR. SHIELDS: What happened was in 1988, the Democrats had just blown a 16 point lead to George Bush. George Bush won on a big agenda: The Boston Harbor, the Pledge of Allegiance, and Willie Horton. Okay, he wins the presidency. The Democrats at that point are convinced they are destined never to win the White House and always to win the Congress, a destiny that was short- lived, but--in both cases, but Ron Brown took over the party then and I'm telling you, there was despair and despondency, which was compounded by the fact that in 1991, George Bush won the first clear cut American military victory since 1945 in the Persian Gulf and his personal popularity went to 91 percent. At that point, the Democrats were ready to concede.

MR. LEHRER: And nobody would run again.

MR. SHIELDS: Nobody would run. I mean, Dick Gephardt said he wasn't going to run in '92, wanted to wait till '96 and run against Dan Quayle. Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Bradley, Al Gore, they all decided they wanted to spend more time with their family, and the Democrats had a list of candidates in 1992 that looked to a lot of people like a roster of vice presidential possibilities, freshman senators and small state governors, and former office holders, and Ron Brown, first of all, with Paul Telly, his political director, who was a genius and who died too young himself in 1992, convinced, they convinced themselves and they convinced every Democrat who listened that they could win, that they could win, that in ashes of the Dukakis defeat, with outlines of a victory, North, West, and the upper Midwest and all the rest of it, and they made that case over and over again. He leaned on Mario Cuomo to make a decision- -Ron Brown, his former student in law school at St. John's--he had studied under Mario Cuomo--he said, you'd better decide.

MR. GIGOT: And it still took a while.

MR. SHIELDS: It took a while. [laughter in room] No, but it was interesting because--as long as Cuomo wasn't in the race, it froze activists, it froze contributors, you know, gee, we're waiting for Mario, waiting for Mario, and I got to tell you, hewanted the process to be quick and conclusive and bloody, and he was accused of favoring Bill Clinton in the Spring of 1992, and maybe he did. He wanted a convention in his own city, like every national chairman does. He was from--a kid in New York. He'd brought it back in in New York. It wasn't like the '68 convention that left Hubert Humphrey 16 points behind Richard Nixon, '72 where George McGovern accepted his nomination at 3 o'clock in the morning, which was great for Guam, not much for Cleveland, you know, and all these other devices--and he got it. I mean, I'd say that Ron Brown was as personally responsible as anybody for the Democrats winning in 1992.

MR. LEHRER: Does that make sense to you?

MR. GIGOT: I would say there's an even more remarkable aspect to the story Mark tells, and that is when Ron Brown came out and ran for the Democratic Party chairmanship in 1989, umm, he came from the left wing of the Democratic Party. I mean, he had, he had shepherded Jesse Jackson's campaign in 1998--1988.

MR. LEHRER: And was his convention manager in 1988.

MR. GIGOT: That's right, which a lot of Democrats thought was very divisive and contributed to Michael Dukakis's defeat in 1988. And I remember talking to a lot of Democrats from the moderate wing at that time saying this is a disaster, I mean, Ron Brown will send all the wrong messages from the left wing of the party, he's a Jesse Jackson pal, it's going to be terrible, and what Ron Brown did is he proved 'em wrong. He proved that he could, he could appeal to all the elements of the party. He didn't--he wasn't a divisive force. Instead, he was a unifier and a healer, and I think that owes a lot to his skills as a politician and to his pragmatic instincts, to his understanding that politics is about your principles, but it's also about winning. And he brought that kind of skill to politics, and, you know, we drive politics nowadays a lot. We say it's dirty, it's not about things, but at its best, it really is about the things that we believe. I think that Ron Brown's legacy is to demonstrate that you can mix it up and you can play tough, but you can still, you know, play honestly and make a difference.

MR. LEHRER: Well, what was the skill he brought to that? How was he--I asked this the other night, the day he died, of Vernon Jordan and Bill Gray, the question of how could he move from being a Jesse Jackson supporter to what he did, but that was just--you're saying that was just part of him, and he--

MR. GIGOT: I think it flowed from his character. Vernon Jordan- -I saw that--it was interesting--he said it derived, or somebody said it derived from the fact that he'd grown up in Harlem, and then had been educated at some small--

MR. LEHRER: Middlebury in Vermont. Yeah.

MR. GIGOT: He had a background in both camps.

MR. SHIELDS: He was very comfortable with himself, and Ron Brown didn't--

MR. LEHRER: That was always--

MR. SHIELDS: He didn't walk into a room and say am I the black Ron Brown in a white crowd, or do I have to be the black Ron Brown with the soul brothers? I mean, it wasn't that about him. He had a comfort level with himself.

MR. LEHRER: And he was comfortable everywhere he went.

MR. SHIELDS: He really was, and he was not--I don't want to say he was a plaster saint. He wasn't. I mean, there were things he did. He was under investigation at the time of his death. I think he was, he was probably overly eager to do business in China with the kleenex and Q-tip crowds who wanted to sell anything, forget slave labor, but in the mission in which he died, Jim, I mean, I mean, they weren't bidding for seats on that one. That was one that was real. That was talking about making a major change, about keeping a fragile democracy. He told a wonderful story about himself, did Ron Brown. He'd been one of the few cabinet officers in current years who'd been in the Army, had been four years in the United States Army, and--

MR. LEHRER: As an officer.

MR. SHIELDS: As an officer and as a second lieutenant, he packed up his wife and his family belongings, he was stationed down just outside of Norfolk, and he came down--this is 1963--and here is a Middlebury College graduate, a second lieutenant in the United States Army, and he pulls into a drive-in restaurant--one of those ones where the waitress comes over puts the tray on, and the waitress came over and said, I'm sorry, I can't serve you. This is the first time he'd ever been South. And he said, please, and she said, I can't serve you; I can give it to you in a cardboard box and you can take it over across in that empty lot and eat it there, but you can't eat it there. In his lifetime, the next year was the Public Accommodations Act of--the 1964 Civil Rights Act--in his lifetime he went from that to being not a black Secretary of Commerce but a Secretary of Commerce who happened to be black. I mean, this is a man of enormous self-esteem. He didn't say, I want to do the human services, I mean, the traditional sort of black cabinet positions.

MR. LEHRER: He wanted to be Secretary of State.

MR. SHIELDS: He wanted to be Secretary of State, and he settled for Secretary of Commerce.

MR. GIGOT: He did transcend his race in that respect, and I think that that is a significant achievement, as Mark says. Now, he was not a, a plaster saint. He was not a saint. He ran close to the edge. He played hard ball. He played rough and tumble with Republicans, and, and public service served him well too. He did very well, but, you know, here's somebody who got into the arena and said politics can be a noble exercise and I can get things done and serve my, serve my principles.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Quickly, the Judge Baer case, it's the other major development this week, is that going to be an issue in this campaign, the issue of judicial appointments, Paul, a big issue, do you think?

MR. GIGOT: I think it's going to be a very big one because-- here's why--I mean, this election is not only going to be about electing a President and electing a Congress, it's also going to be about who controls that third branch of government, the Judiciary. If you look at all of the major appeals courts, most of them, and you look at the Supreme Court, they're really right now tilted very close to ideological balance right on the edge between Democratic judges and Republican judges, and the gulf and the perception of the duties between the Democrats and the Republicans or conservatives and liberals on judging the limits of judging are very wide now in this country. There's a real polarization there. So I think you're going to see Bob Dole certainly try to make this an issue.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. You have two seconds to say yes or no to that?

MR. SHIELDS: No. No. It's a political issue is what it is. Crime has been a big Republican issue for a long time. Bill Clinton is next to invulnerable on crime for Republicans. He's a Southerner. He's not an Eastern elite guy. He doesn't come out of Madison or Berkeley or Cambridge. He's a Southern guy who flew back from New Hampshire to pull the switch on the chair. He pro capital punishment, and I'll tell you, Jim, I mean, they can't lay a glove on him, and Paul's own poll shows that he has an edge on crime, so they're going to do the judges--fine.

MR. LEHRER: Okay. Thank you both very much. FOCUS - INCIDENT REPORT

MR. LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the California beating story, a David Gergen dialogue, and a power of prayer. Jeffrey Kaye of KCET-Los Angeles has the California story.

[Protesters Shouting]

JEFFREY KAYE: Once again, Southern Californians are deeply divided in the wake of a videotaped police beating.

PROTESTERS SHOUTING: Justice for all! Justice for all!

MR. KAYE: All sides have weighed in loudly.

GLEEN SPENCER, Voice of Citizens Together: They ignored the police. Not only that, we understand they threw things at the police.

GREGORY MORENO, Mexican American Bar Association: The police officers don't respect, they have no reverence for Hispanic life.

SPOKESPERSON: It is no wonder people are saying they got what they deserve.

MR. KAYE: Monday's incident, reminiscent of the Rodney King beating five years ago, followed a high-speed police pursuit. According to police, a pick-up truck carrying illegal immigrants came across the border evading a checkpoint and later led Riverside County sheriff's deputies on an 80-mile chase. When the truck pulled over, passengers scattered. Videotape shot by local television stations showed deputies beating a man and a woman with night sticks. Another man claims to have been beaten off-camera. The tape shows the woman was pulled by her hair. Her head was slammed into the hood. She was thrown to the ground and kicked. Other deputies chased down the fleeing passengers. In all, 19 were taken into custody and turned over to Immigration officials. The story has received prominent attention in the Spanish language media, and it became an international incident when the Mexican government officially protested what it considered a human rights violation of its citizens.

JOSE ANGEL PESCADOR, Consul General, Mexico: We are also going to demand permanently the full respect of human rights and the dignity of Mexicans who arrive to this country with or without documents, and most important, we are going to pursue this according to the laws of this country, of our country, but specifically in accordance to the international law.

MR. KAYE: The two deputies involved in the beating have been suspended with pay, pending an investigation. Riverside County Sheriff's Department Spokesman Sgt. Mark Lohman said the tape appears to show improper behavior.

SGT. MARK LOHMAN, Riverside County Sheriff's Dept.: When we originally saw the video, we were, we were very concerned about it. And the sheriff yesterday said that it was apparent it was excessive force. Now when we're talking about the video, we're just talking about one aspect of the investigation, which we can't, you know, make a total judgment on the incident just based on one part, being the video. We need to put many other things into place, statements from the officers, statements from witnesses, statements from officers who were also at the scene, in conjunction with that videotape, before we can make a final determination.

MR. KAYE: A police union official said too many are judging the suspended deputies before the full facts are in. Daniel Swift, president of the Riverside Sheriffs' Association, said the deputies' actions might have been justified.

DEPUTY DANIEL SWIFT, Riverside Sheriffs' Association: My understanding and according to the news reports are these people were deliberately trying to ram other vehicles on a freeway at high speeds, multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon. One car was side-swiped. They were throwing objects out of their vehicle at the sheriff's deputies, at the other cars, endangering everybody on the freeway. I'm sure you drive on the freeway. What's it like to hit an object at sixty-five, seventy miles an hour? You know, a lot of people don't survive that kind of impact. And yet, these people are doing that all in an effort to evade lawful arrest.

MR. KAYE: Had the officers in question been hit by any objects or their vehicle hit by any objects from the truck?

DEPUTY DANIEL SWIFT: I don't know.

MR. KAYE: The videotapes show only the end of the chase and don't indicate whether the passengers threw anything at the sheriffs. The pictures do show that somehow the camper's shell became detached during the pursuit. The Mexican nationals were released Wednesday. Yesterday at a press conference at the Mexican consulate, those who spoke denied throwing anything at police officers.

MAN: Oh, no.

MR. KAYE: The men said they came here only to work. Lawyers for two of the men who say they were beaten have filed a claim for more than $10 million. The woman who was struck, Alicia Sotero Vasquez, said she feared for her life. After being released from detention, she was hospitalized.

ALICIA SOTERO VASQUEZ: [speaking through interpreter] They beat me worse than an animal. I didn't run, nothing. They took me by the hair. I didn't insult them. I didn't say anything to them.

[Music in Background]

MR. KAYE: Many Latino activists have complained that the beatings are part of a pattern of abuse by police officials.

MOISES ESCALANTE, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights: Community is mad. Community is tired of this situation. We been having so many situations like this happen. People were beat up because they looked immigrant.

MR. KAYE: But Latino activists were not the only ones to insist the incident showed a disturbing pattern. The episode has fueled California's continuing debate over illegal immigration, and groups that say the U.S. should better control its borders, attempted to shift the focus from the sheriff's deputies to the illegal immigrants.

BARBARA COE, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights: These people are common criminals and any effort to portray them as victims or harmless or pitiful after they took actions that jeopardized the very lives of innocent people is unconscionable.

MR. KAYE: The 19 Mexican nationals will be allowed to remain the country for a long as six months as state and federal investigations into the incident continue. DIALOGUE

MR. LEHRER: Now, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Robert Kaplan, contributing editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," author of The Ends of the Earth: The Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century.

DAVID GERGEN, U.S. News & World Report. Mr. Kaplan, you left the United States in 1993 and began making a series of journeys through the Third World, starting at West Africa, and then going across the tropical belt. Now you've come back and put that into a very large book called The Ends of the Earth. I'm curious. Much of what you write about sounds like a trip through the Inferno by Dante. Was that your impression on many occasions?

ROBERT KAPLAN, Author: I deliberately picked out the most difficult trouble spots in the world, because that is where 95 out of every 100 births are occurring. All the new babies in the world are not being born in places like Japan or Scarsdale or Singapore. They're being born in poor African countries, in, in subcontinental India, and in the poorest parts of our own societies. And though much of the world our kind of people are going through a communications revolution, I spent months traveling through a large swath of the Earth where I've entered cities where there was no electricity. You can go to seven photocopy machines, eight or nine, and you won't find one that will be working, where you'll turn on the water taps and nothing will come out but kind of a death rattle and a hissing sound. Umm, it's like one part of the world is going in one direction, but a large swath of humanity is going in another. And overpopulation, disease pandemics, rising crime, cultural dysfunction, are going to make it--are going to make so many parts of the world, or let's put it this way, a critical mass of the Third World so far behind that they won't be able to catch up.

MR. GERGEN: Mm-hmm. I was very struck by some of the numbers you had in your book about the industrialized world. I think many of us don't appreciate sometimes that after the Second World War, the industrialized world, the United States, Europe, and the rest of the industrialized world, represented 40 percent of the world's population. We're now down to 20 percent of the world's population, and it's still dropping.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Yes. While the middle class expands in places like India, the poor and the subproletariat are expanding at even faster rate. Umm, it's like the veneer of civilization, of functional society, is getting thinner and thinner and thinner.

MR. GERGEN: After the Russian Revolution in 1917, another traveler, the journalist Lincoln Steffens--

ROBERT KAPLAN: Yes.

MR. GERGEN: --went to the Soviet Union, and when he came back, Bernie Baruch asked him what did he see, and Steffens said, "I have been over into the future, and it works." You, in effect, have been over into the future, and you said it doesn't work.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Yes. In a sense. The long-range future may be fine, but the next few decades are going to be the most tumultuous in human history, and that is because humanity is economically developing at a faster rate than ever before. This is where the optimists are right, but the optimists do not think historically, because the faster development occurs, development is always uneven, cruel, painful, and violent. So development always brings political upheaval in its wake.

MR. GERGEN: But you seem to be saying it's not the process of development that's a negative driver, the two negative drivers are world population growth, the explosion in world population, and in its wake, the deforestation, the devastation that's occurring in the environments of so many of these Third World countries, those are the two, the population and the environment.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Well, I want to be more specific about population.

MR. GERGEN: Right.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Because that's a controversial area, but it's certainly true that in the upper end of the population growth spectrum when you've got places like Pakistan and Sierra Leone and Rwanda who are doubling their populations every thirty years on top of an already-depleted rain forest and whatever, on top of already weak infrastructures, without institutional tradition, it's bad. It's bad. All the places where we've seen the worst internecine violence in the past two decades, Ethiopia, Tadzhikistan, Nicaragua, Yemen, are all places who have had high population growth rates for the fifteen or twenty years before these revolutions occurred.

MR. GERGEN: Drawing from your book, it's--you seem to suggest that a place like West Africa, which has only a very thin civili- -tradition, I mean, there are many good traditions in West Africa- -

ROBERT KAPLAN: Yeah.

MR. GERGEN: But it's nowhere near the kind of tradition say that existed in Persia, which is now modern Iran.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Mmm, Persia actually is one of the most optimistic parts of this book. Our, our problems with Iran are ephemeral. They're problems of the moment. Persia's been a state for 2500 years. It has a deep, rich cultural tradition. Persia was very-- the Moa's regime has done less damage to Persian culture than Communists have done to the cultures of the former Soviet Union and, and to the cultures of--the culture of China. If a Martian were to go down and walk through Persia and ask people about Americans, about Jews, about a lot of things, and then do the same thing in Egypt, the Martian would think that Persia was a place where we had better diplomatic relations. Iranians now are in the post-anti-American phase. They've been through it all. They're among--you find some of the most wisest public attitudes in the Near East and Iran, these days. It's just, the regime is in an ossified Chernenko state, and sooner or later, it's going to collapse.

MR. GERGEN: Why should Americans care about this?

ROBERT KAPLAN: All right. We should care for our own naked self- interest. AIDS is a product of the cycle of poverty, deforestation, migration, and other pathologies of subsaharan Africa which found its way to white middle class suburbs in an interconnected world, where there are no borders. There are more viruses in the wake of AIDS. As governments collapse and as even as weak democratic regimes try to take over in these places, they're perfect petri dishes for the rise of organized crime networks, which are another threat to us. Disease also--and strictly from an economist's point of view, our market in the future is the Third World. If the Third World doesn't make it as a middle class place, or at least a large part of the Third World, we're not going to be able to grow with 3 percent growth rates into the future.

MR. GERGEN: The question arises what we can do. Once we understand this and it does matter to us, what can we do about it? Your argument in your book is not much.

ROBERT KAPLAN: No. Elites, whether the UN or the U.S. Government, cannot engineer reality from above. Generally speaking we are not going to be able to pivotally affect the future of subsaharan Africa, but just because we can't solve problems everywhere doesn't mean we can't be engaged in a few select places here and there that also track with our self-interest, so that we can justify it in terms of Congress and the public, and, therefore, keep platforms of connections inside these places between our cultures and theirs.

MR. GERGEN: And you would help on the population front and on the environmental front?

ROBERT KAPLAN: Population control, women's literacy programs are some of the cheapest, yet most effective, ways to combat cultural dysfunction both in the middle run and in the short run. Rwanda's a place where women have been giving birth on the average of eight times over their adult lifetime. This has been going on for decades. If those women had been giving birth two or three times, instead of eight, imagine how much different Rwandan society would have been, how different social relations would have been, and given that politics is merely an exp--a macro expression of social relations, the politics would have evolved differently.

MR. GERGEN: Well, we'll look forwardto your next visit there in your report. Thank you.

ROBERT KAPLAN: Thank you. FINALLY - DIVINE THERAPY

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight, this Good Friday evening, a look at some powers of prayer. "Time" Magazine's religion reporter, Richard Ostling, reports.

RICHARD OSTLING: [Church Bells Ringing] Nestled in a valley only a 30-minute drive but worlds away from the bustling ski resort of Aspen, Colorado, is St. Benedict's Monastery. On a recent Friday, twenty lay Christians joined a dozen of the Trappist monks for a morning Mass. The visitors were attending an intensive 10- day spiritual retreat, much of it spent in silence. These monks open their doors to retreats like this throughout the year. Though once attended by few, it's estimated that this year, 1.2 million Americans will go on retreats at Catholic centers across the country. Father Thomas Keating, a national leader of what's known as the contemplative movement, thinks over-stressed Americans have a deep need for solitude.

FR. THOMAS KEATING, Trappist Monk: A certain amount of silence is almost like food and bread and drink. It's part of human life. It's a place in which one reflects on, on the day and sips through one's motivation and lays aside that which is harmful to others and to oneself, and, and above all, put it this way, silence is God's first language. So to know God, we need to learn how to be silent.

MR. OSTLING: Those attending the Colorado retreat are among the growing numbers who follow a practice known as centering prayer. It was developed by Keating and fellow monks in the 1970's at a time when many sought a deeper spiritual life through meditation in Eastern religion. The monks wanted to offer a Christian alternative, making their tradition of contemplation available to lay Christians in everyday life. In this method, a person sits in silence and focuses on a sacred word that expresses an intention to be in the presence of God, a form of prayer beyond words, thoughts, and emotions. Keating recommends 20-minute sessions, twice a day.

FR. THOMAS KEATING: Centering prayer is a consenting--and that's all it is--to what is, that is to say to the existence of God within us and love, and so one is moving towards that presence of love at the deepest level of one's being and leaves behind the ordinary psychological self and the events of the day and also our emotional reactions to what is happening. If you think of prayer as just words or songs, it's very limited. Prayer is primarily, in essence, a relationship.

CAROL WEBER: And I tasted a peacefulness within myself that I certainly could not have imagined and yet I experienced it. I tasted it.

MR. OSTLING: Carol Weber, a long-time Catholic, is attending her third intensive retreat at St. Benedict's. A month after she returned to Minnesota from an earlier retreat, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

CAROL WEBER: My reaction to it surprised me in that I had a sense of joy and peace inside. Now, if someone would have asked me how would you respond if you had cancer, I would, I would think I would have had a lot more emotional turmoil and, and fear, but that really wasn't the case. I had a sense of, of joy, and I told my friends and I told my family, you know, this may change, and I don't know what will happen tomorrow down the road, but right now, I do feel peace and a sense of being carried, cared for.

MR. OSTLING: For those like Weber who follow the practice, centering prayer is not just for retreats. It's a daily discipline. Denver lawyer John Congdon leaves his downtown office at lunchtime each day to meditate in a nearby chapel. He says the discipline helps him let life unfold, rather than trying to control people and events.

JOHN CONGDON: It opens one to the understanding of the importance of, of loving God totally and trying to consent to God's will in one's life, however that unfolds. But it also, it also leads one to understand the importance of loving all other people unconditionally. I think this is the only reason we're here is to learn how to do this.

MR. OSTLING: Centering prayer involves what Keating calls divine therapy. He says the deep rest allows the person to let go of painful emotional experiences, even from early childhood, a process similar to psychotherapy, only in centering prayer, Keating says, it's the experience of God's love that brings about the inner healing.

FR. THOMAS KEATING: It's a moment of union with God, with the ultimate existence, by experiences within you and loving you and affirming you and accepting you and knowing all about you and still loving you. It is this experience that changes one's idea of life and its meaning, and moves one to see life as a service of others, not just as, as an opportunity for one more grandiose ego trip after another.

MR. OSTLING: Carol Weber says centering prayer has helped free her from painful childhood experiences and what she felt was an inordinate need to be loved and noticed by others.

CAROL WEBER: I like to be liked by people. I like to have recognition for things, and I've been going through a time of letting go of all of those ambitions, letting go of, of the need to be recognized and the need to be esteemed for anything.

MR. OSTLING: Pat Johnson, who runs the retreat program at St. Benedict's, says the release of painful memories is sometimes emotionally charged.

PAT JOHNSON, Retreat Coordinator: In an intensive situation like this, sometimes it comes erupting out like you hit an oil well, and in those times, umm, the staff has to be ready to help the person get through that and to see that this is absolutely normal, and, umm, better out than in. Sometimes, you know, we just hold a person and don't say a word, and basically we're there to let 'em know that they're really not crazy.

MR. OSTLING: Although some see a potential danger in these crises, Johnson says her staff is able to handle most situations, and professional counselors are kept on call. Others criticize meditation, saying the practitioners become too preoccupied with themselves and not others. A retreatant put this concern to Keating during the retreat.

WOMAN: Is there a safeguard against developing an indifference towards social justice or towards action in the world?

FR. THOMAS KEATING: On the contrary, true detachment makes one more concerned about what--the injustice of the world and it also gives one the courage, the strength, and the stamina to deal with difficult ministries.

MR. OSTLING: The strongest criticisms from conservatives within the Catholic Church. One program which ran on the Eternal Word Catholic Cable Network accused centering prayer of being too close to Hinduism. Father Mitchell Pacwa of the University of Dallas, who experimented with various forms of Eastern meditation, is a commentator on the Eternal Word Network. He raised another concern with producer Kate Olsen.

FR. MITCHELL PACWA, University of Dallas: The technique is still one where you put the intellect on "hold." You know, you dismiss all thoughts, you know, hold on to no thoughts, react to no thoughts, retain no thoughts. These are some of his phrases. And why? The rational mind is one of the characteristic gifts of what it means to be a human being. And I don't see Christ ever saying, you know, stop thinking, stop using reason, clear your mind. He never taught that.

MR. OSTLING: But Keating says he's simply recovering a tradition of prayer practiced by the early Church which hasn't been visible at the parish level for centuries.

FR. THOMAS KEATING: And it's drawn right out of gospel, as Jesus said that you got into the closet when you want to pray and be quiet and talk to your heavenly Father in secret and He'll reward you in secret, but God not in a thought, not in a feeling, not in an experience, but God as he is in himself. And since we don't know what that is, it's God as mystery.

MR. OSTLING: Keating insists his method is different from Hindu meditation which uses a mantra to quiet the mind and doesn't involve prayer to a personal God.

CAROL WEBER: [speaking to group] Centering prayer is not made to take the place of other prayer in your life.

MR. OSTLING: The movement is expanding in Catholic parishes across the country. Carol Weber presented it to a large turnout at her home church in Staples, Minnesota. And centering prayer is moving well beyond Catholic boundaries. Keating recently addressed hundreds of people from many denominations attending a day-long retreat at an Episcopal church in Denver.

FR. THOMAS KEATING: The babe has risen, the most sensational event of all time. What does it mean to you? What could it mean to you? What will it mean to you on Easter Sunday?

MR. OSTLING: The Ecumenical group then joined him for a period of centering prayer in the sanctuary. For those who take up the rigors of a daily spiritual practice, the experience of silence, once confined to monasteries, is quietly making a mark on their lives. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Friday, President Clinton marked the one-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. He and Mrs. Clinton laid a wreath at the site where 168 people were killed by a terrorist bomb. In Croatia, all bodies were removed from the site of Wednesday's plane crash that killed Commerce Secretary Brown and thirty-four others. The remains will be returned to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware tomorrow. We'll see you on Monday night. Have a nice weekend. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.