The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight: Our summary of the news; then a Haiti update from Lydia Polgreen of the "New York Times"; perspective on Iraq's new constitution; a discussion of the rebellions against Martha Stewart and her corporate counterparts at the top; and a Richard Rodriguez essay on gay marriage.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The Iraq governing council signed an interim constitution today. Shiite members had refused to sign last Friday. But they did take part today; they still called for changes in the document. After the ceremonies, their leading cleric, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, issued a warning. He said: "This law places obstacles in the path of reaching a permanent constitution." We'll have more on this story later in the program. Haiti installed a new president today, but the old one said he was still in power. The former Chief Justice of the Haitian Supreme Court was sworn in at the national palace, under heavy security. He succeeds Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who fled an armed rebellion eight days ago. But today, Aristide insisted he remained the rightful leader of Haiti. He spoke from exile in the Central African Republic.

JEAN BERTRAND-ARISTIDE (translated): I am the democratically elected president and I remain so. I plead for the restoration of democracy.

JIM LEHRER: Yesterday, gunmen fired on anti-Aristide marchers in Port-au-Prince, killing at least six people; wounding more than 30. U.S. Marines shot and killed one attacker. Today, Aristide urged peaceful resistance to what he called the occupation of Haiti. But in Washington, State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher said the former president was not helping matters.

RICHARD BOUCHER: It needs to be pointed out again, as we have before, that Mr. Aristide resigned. He made a decision to resign for the best interests of his country, as he explained it to our representatives at the time, to prevent further bloodshed. If Mr. Aristide really wants to serve his country, he really has to, we think, legal his nation get on with the future and not try to stir up the past again.

JIM LEHRER: We'll have more on the situation in Haiti right after this News Summary. Hamas vowed today to take revenge for an Israeli attack that killed 14 Palestinians. The Sunday raid in Gaza wounded more than 80 others. Troops, helicopters and tanks battled with hundreds of armed Palestinians. There were no Israeli casualties. On Saturday, another six Palestinians were killed when they attacked a Gaza checkpoint. In Yemen today, the government announced the surrender of six suspects in the bombing of the U.S.S. "Cole." The Islamic militants had been under siege for a week in a remote mountainous area. The navy destroyer "Cole" was attacked in a Yemeni port in October of 2000. The suicide boat bombing killed 17 American sailors. President Bush accused his Democratic rival, John Kerry, of trying to gut U.S. Intelligence spending today. He criticized Kerry for a bill to take $1.5 billion from intelligence funding over five years. That was in 1995, two years after the first attack on the World Trade Center. The bill never came to a vote, but in Dallas today, Mr. Bush said it raised serious questions.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: This bill was so deeply irresponsible that they didn't have a single co-sponsor in the United States Senate. Once again Senator Kerry is trying to have it both ways. He's for good intelligence, yet he was willing to gut the intelligence services. And that is no way to lead a nation in a time of war.

JIM LEHRER: A Kerry spokesman dismissed the criticism. He said the senator had targeted waste in the intelligence budget. In West Palm Beach, Florida, Kerry again criticized the president over the 9/11 investigation. He said Mr. Bush was campaigning full steam, but resisted helping the investigators.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: If the president of the United States could find the time to go to a rodeo, he could find the time to do more than one hour in front of a commission that is investigating what happened to America's intelligence and why we are not stronger today. This president's been stonewalling the effort of our own country to know what happened. They even tried to cut it off.

JIM LEHRER: The Bush campaign called that "another inaccurate attack." On the gay marriage story today, authorities in Seattle and King County, Washington, refused to issue licenses to same-sex couples. But the mayor of Seattle ordered the city to recognize marriages by its gay employees if they're wed somewhere else. The mayor also called for a ban on discrimination against all gay married couples. That would force city contractors to recognize same- sex unions among their workers. The Federal Reserve approved the merger of Bank of America and Fleet Boston Financial today. It would create the nation's third largest bank, in a deal estimated at $47 billion. The merger already has gotten approval from other federal agencies. It still needs it from shareholders. On Wall Street today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 66 points to close at 10,529. The NASDAQ fell more than 38 points to close below 1009. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to a report from Haiti, the Iraq constitution, CEO comeuppance, and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

UPDATE - UNREST

JIM LEHRER: Our Haiti update. Ray Suarez talked earlier today to "New York Times" correspondent Lydia Polgreen in Port-au-Prince.

RAY SUAREZ: Lydia Polgreen, welcome. The man who was designated the acting president of Haiti when president Aristide left has now been installed in power. How did that come about?

LYDIA POLGREEN: Well, this was a ceremony that seemed to be rather hastily arranged. It was on again/off again many times canceled, and today it was actually held. Mr. Alexander has said many times, well, the couple of times he's spoken publicly, that he's not a politician. And he seemed quite nervous up at the lectern reading his remarks. He gave about a 15-minute speech in which he called upon the Haitian people to unite to put aside their divisions, and said, "we are all the same boat. If the boat sinks, then we all sink together." He read from a piece of paper and did not look up once, so he's certainly feeling his way through being a politician.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, the official forms have been observed, the outside trappings. This man has been elevated to the presidency. Is he really in charge of anything?

LYDIA POLGREEN: It's difficult to say. There's a council of eminent Haitians that is meeting as we speak to discuss selecting a new prime minister. That's really going to be a key development. The prime minister who is in place now is the holdover, and a real Aristide stalwart. He has been roundly rejected by all of the political and military opponents of President Aristide. And I think there's general agreement that he has to go, and has to go soon for the government to get under way. In Haiti, the president is really supposed to be more of a figurehead, and the head of government is a prime minister. But, of course, under Mr. Aristide all the power was derived from the presidency.

RAY SUAREZ: Today United States forces conceded that they were responsible for one of the deaths in a series of dueling demonstrations in port-au- prince. What was their explanations?

LYDIA POLGREEN: Well, they say that they opened fire on a pair of gunmen who were actually firing on marines and on demonstrators. There were a total of, I believe, six people killed, one of them was this gunman that they were referring to. And there were four Haitians and one Spanish news... television journalist. It appears that the marines did open fire, but they say that they opened fire on a particular target, not on the crowd. And they say they don't believe that they're responsible for the at least two dozen injuries that were sustained by marchers.

RAY SUAREZ: Now that the foreign forces are in evidence in Haiti, are the score-settling murders continuing?

LYDIA POLGREEN: Outside of the capital they seem to be. It's a little unclear. There's not a lot of law and order out there. There is in cities like Gonaives, where I recently was over the weekend, you know, you've got basically young men who are gang members who are acting as police at the moment. They have no training in police; they certainly have no training in handling people's human rights and things like that, so it's quite a lawless situation. I did a story out of Petit Quois where there were clearly vengeance killings going on. I think that the foreign troops are trying to spread out and begin to... begin to deal with some of these areas of lawlessness, but it's going to take some time.

RAY SUAREZ: The former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has spoken to his countrymen, and urged them to resist the occupation of the country. Is the situation such that what the former president says from exile is going to change what happens on the ground in the country very much?

LYDIA POLGREEN: Well, you know, President Aristide still enjoys a very broad support here. He came from the slums, he is a... he has always been an advocate for Haiti's poor, and promised, as his campaign slogan said, "peace in the mind, peace in the valley." He failed to deliver on those promises. But today, there were hundreds of pro-Aristide demonstrators who swarmed in front of the national palace chanting "Aristide or death." You may not want him, but Aristide must come back." So there is very broad support. Exactly how much control he has over the armed militants who are loyal to him, and how much control he has over the politicians who remain here is unclear.

RAY SUAREZ: Also in that address, he repeated the allegation that he was kidnapped and forced from power. Is that story line still keeping tempers high on the ground in Haiti? Do people really care about the circumstances of his departure?

LYDIA POLGREEN: That President Aristide was kidnapped is an article of faith among his most... among his most loyal supporters. They believe this wholeheartedly. The opponents of Mr. Aristide of course say this is hogwash, they say he left because he had to leave, because his presidency was no longer tenable. But it certainly is a story that fascinates the Haitian people at the moment, just how Mr. Aristide left the country because I think everybody, whichever side they were on, were stunned with the swiftness with which it had happened.

RAY SUAREZ: The widespread destruction of property that we saw over the past two weeks, is that continuing, or has some kind of calm and order on the streets at least begun to prevail so they can preserve what they've got until somebody is in charge?

LYDIA POLGREEN: Yes and no. There has been ongoing looting. Today I was at the... today I was at the industrial park where there are many businesses, and there was looting going on there, there were skirmishes between policemen, there was some gunfire back and forth. There's a great deal of simply opportunistic looting. This is not organized. These are just very poor people who are taking this opportunity to grab whatever they can. And it's going on. The peacekeepers here, the peacekeeping troops here say that they cannot act as Haiti's police. They're here to reinforce Haiti's police force, and that securing lives is more support than securing property. But I think as time goes on it's going to become more and more important that property is protected.

RAY SUAREZ: Lydia Polgreen of the "New York Times," thanks a lot.

LYDIA POLGREEN: Thank you.

FOCUS - STEP FORWARD

JIM LEHRER: Now, Iraq's new constitution, and to Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL: Prominent Iraqis and U.S. Officials gathered in Baghdad today to watch members of Iraq's governing council sign the country's new interim constitution. The temporary document lays the foundations for Iraq's transition to democracy. It includes: A bill of rights; the establishment of two official languages, Arabic and Kurdish; and it names Islam as the country's official religion. It also reserves 25 percent of the seats in the transitional assembly for women. The new charter takes effect after the U.S. legal occupation ends June 30, and stays in place until a permanent constitution is written and approved at the end of 2005. A member of the governing council hailed the day's events.

AHMAD CHALABI: I say that this is a great day for Iraq, it's a great day for the region, it's a great day for Arabs, and a great day for Muslims.

GWEN IFILL: In Washington, Secretary of State Powell also endorsed the document.

COLIN POWELL: Read what it says about the interim government that will be created in just a few months' time. Read what it says, and you will see what vision the Iraqi people will have for themselves. And let there be no doubt in anyone's mind that it is a bright future. The road ahead may be difficult, may be long, but it won't be as difficult or as long as the road that was behind.

GWEN IFILL: The process was almost sidetracked on more than one occasion. Last week, devastating bomb attacks targeted Shiite shrines in Baghdad and Karbala. At least 181 people died, making it the bloodiest week in Iraq since the war ended. Then a formal signing ceremony scheduled for last Friday was delayed after five Shiite members refused to sign the document. The main sticking point: Power sharing among the dominant Shiites and the minority Sunnis and Kurds. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, apparently gave Shiite members of thecouncil the go- ahead to sign on to the document over the weekend, but he was still critical of the new law today, saying in a web site posting: "Any law prepared for the transitional period will not have legitimacy until it is approved by the elected national assembly."

GWEN IFILL: Sistani's objections to the new law exposed some of the hurdles along the way to democracy in Iraq.

Joining us to walk us through the cause and the likely effect of the interim constitution are: Feisal Istrabadi, who is just back from Iraq where he was one of the principal drafters of the law-- he serves as a senior advisor to governing council member Adnan Pachachi; and Juan Cole, professor of middle east history at the University of Michigan-- he recently authored "sacred space and holy war" about Shia Islam. Mr. Istrabadi, what would you say is the significance of this new document?

FEISAL ISTRABADI: Well, I think the significance is that the people of Iraq are taking charge of their future. This is the first step towards the assertion, reassertion of the sovereignty of the people of Iraq, which has been usurped for at least 35 years by a tyrannical and brutal regime. It is the first step that Iraq takes in over a dozen years to attempt to reintegrate itself into the family of nations. And it is, I think, a day that -- in which the first steps towards ending at least the formal occupation of Iraq by the coalition forces begins. It's a significant day, I believe, in Iraq's history.

GWEN IFILL: Professor Cole, Mr. Istrabadi talked about the first steps. Are they big enough steps as far as you can see?

JUAN COLE: Well, this is a basic law that will govern the interim period, the transitional perfect to an elected parliament. But an elected parliament next year must in essence renegotiate many of the prime points in this document, and those negotiations are likely to be extremely difficult and controversial to provoke a great deal of trouble. This document has put off many of the most essential disputes until the future.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Istrabadi, let's start with the Bill of Rights, then we'll get back to the parts that Professor Cole says are missing. To an America ear and an American eye, we see the guarantees which are included in this document as fairly ordinary. But are there things that we just outlined that are included in the Bill of Rights significant in this context?

FEISAL ISTRABADI: Well, they are significant outside these shores. Whether they are ordinary or not in the United States, obviously is debatable. There are certain things that this Bill of Rights does which the United States Bill of Rights does not necessarily do. For instance there is a provision, I think it's Article 22, which allows citizens whose rights have been abused in fact to march into court, to enforce their rights against officials show have denied them their rights under the Bill of Rights. That is something which is not contained in the United States Bill of Rights. And in fact is a statutory right in this country. It is in the Bill of Rights in the transitional administrative law, which is commonly being called the interim constitution. In addition to that it is a fairly liberal Bill of Rights, which on the other hand does not attempt to divorce itself from the cultural and social milieu in Iraq. I think it's a significant document for the region.

GWEN IFILL: How about, Professor Cole, how about the part of the new law which declares Islam the official religion. Is that leaning toward theocracy?

JUAN COLE: Well, no, I don't think that the provision that Islam is the religion of state is necessarily theocratic. After all, Anglicanism is the religion of state in the United Kingdom. But the troubling part of that passage really is a provision that no law may be passed by the national parliament which is contrary to the Islamic legal code. Well, the Islamic legal code can be interpreted in many different ways. But if you had authorities who were more fundamentalist in power, they could actually use that provision to attempt to circumscribe many of the liberties specified elsewhere in the document.

GWEN IFILL: Actually, Professor Cole, I'll be with you in a moment, Mr. Istrabadi, Professor Cole, you mentioned something about the fact that more conservative elements can control - can exert control in this way, yet it seems that most of the control that's been exerted so far about whether this got signed or not was by a theocrat, I guess, by Ayatollah Sistani. His statement over the weekend, at least his suggestion that it was okay to sign this constitution and his statement today that he didn't think this would be enough, how do you interpret that?

JUAN COLE: Well, Sistani believes that there are provisions in this interim constitution we are illegitimate. One of the main problems he has is with a provision that would allow any three provinces, and this especially refers to the primarily Kurdish provinces, to veto the permanent constitution that will be worked out next year if it's voted against by two thirds majority in each of those provinces. Since many provinces are lightly populated, a provision that any three provinces out of the eighteen could reject the permanent constitution seems to Sistani to be anti-democratic, to allow a small minority to hold the entire country hostage. So that was his concern, and he has allowed the process to go forward and has instructed people loyal to him to sign this document. But he has made it clear that he has severe problems with this provision, and I think he's going to agitate to try to get it changed in some way, even though the document itself specifies that it can't be amended until a new constitution is prepared.

GWEN IFILL: Mr. Istrabadi, you helped to draft this constitution, this interim document. Is it a weak point?

FEISAL ISTRABADI: Well, certainly the document is not flawless, and there were compromises which were made in order to get an agreement on the document. I want to emphasize that this document was passed without a single dissenting vote, that there was a genuine effort on the part of the governing council, which was successful, to engender a consensus about this document article by article. No huge compromise was made, as was the case say with the American Constitution where the founders of the American Constitution compromised say on the issue of slavery. Those kinds of compromises on principle were avoided in this document, political compromises were necessary, and no one walked away with 100 percent what was they wanted. On the issue of Islam, and this is something that has to be pointed out unfortunately the media hasn't quite gotten right what the document says about Islam. What I believe its Article 7 says is that there cannot be laws which contra convenient the settled principles of Islam upon which there is universal consensus, nor any laws which contravene the principles of democracy, nor any laws which violate Chapter 2 of the document which has to, which is the Bill of Rights. Now the Arabic for the Islamic principles is - (speaking Arabic) -- that is to say on which there is universal consensus. This is notthe, the document does not say that Islamic law cannot be contravened. It is the Islamic principles upon which there is university consensus. That's a very different thing.

GWEN IFILL: Let me ask you both about one other big cloud, potentially hacking over this, and that's the unpredictability of the security situation. We saw last week, Mr. Istrabadi, what happened in Karbala, what happened in Baghdad, and I wonder if you are concerned in any way that the kinds of unpredictable events such as bombing, such as suicide bombings, attacks on holy days, could take this entire, this entire effort to democratize Iraq off path?

FEISAL ISTRABADI: It can. The security situation is the fundamental problem in Iraq. If it continues to deteriorate, it will at some point be very easy for a demagogue to take advantage of the situation, and I fear that frankly. On the other hand, I am also buoyed by the knowledge that that is an obvious attempt, the terrorist attacks which have been occurring in Iraq of late, particularly those in -- are clearly designed to draw, to create wedges between Iraq's Shiite and Sunni populations and I'm very pleased to see that those attempts thus far have failed, I pray their continue to fail.

GWEN IFILL: Professor Cole?

JUAN COLE: I think that this is an important document; it's significant in many ways, it guarantees the Iraqi public many rights, but as you say, the political situation goes beyond what are words written on paper. The issue of Kurdish autonomy or the degree to which the Kurds will retain a certain amount of autonomy from Baghdad still has not been worked out. This document simply recognizes the status quo and puts off the negotiations about that until next year. We had in January riots in Kirkuk, a northern city, over the possibility that it might be joined to the Kurdish provinces, that hasn't been resolved. The issue of what is a consensus about an Islamic principle is to some degree subjective, and where a very large number of delegates to the parliament to be elected from fundamentalist parties, that would affect appointments to the judiciary, so you might have more of a, fundamentalist judges making a decision about what Islamic law is, and of course people tend to think that their opinion is what is agreed upon. So with regard to separation of religion and state, with regard to provincial autonomy, with regard to, and then the security problems are enormous -- North Central Iraq seems to be very unstable. The reports I get from journalists on the ground talk about waves of assassinations, kidnappings, insecurity, people are afraid to go out at night. And you can't have a democracy in those circumstances.

GWEN IFILL: Prof. Cole, and Feisal Istrabadi, thank you both very much.

FOCUS - TOUGH AT THE TOP

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight: Rough times at the top; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.

JIM LEHRER: Now, rough times for corporate executives, and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: Last Friday Martha Stewart became the latest celebrity corporate executive to fall, and her case found guilty for lying to prosecutors over a personal stock trade. Other once high flying CEO's are facing criminal prosecution for defrauding their companies and shareholders, and profiting personally from it. Enron's Jeffrey Skilling, WorldCom's Bernard Ebbers indicted this month, and Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, currently on trial. In yet another casualty, Disney's long-time CEO, Michael Eisner, no criminal case here, but shareholders furious over his high salary and shrinking stock values, revolted last week, stripping him of his role as chairman. Why is this happening to so many celebrity CEO's? To answer that we turn to: Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of executive programs at the Yale School of Management; Lawrence White, professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University; and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Welcome to you all. These cases are all obviously quite different. But Mr. Sonnenfeld, is there some underlying thread here that helps us understand why so many celebrity CEO's are finding themselves in trouble?

JEFFREY SONNENFIELD: Well, the ones who started out as reformers, such assay Michael Eisner who is a great maverick and self made people like Martha Stewart, what you find often in literature, and Joseph Campbell's great anthropological studies show this mono myth of the hero that people who start out as dragon slayers often, if they're not careful, by the end of their career they can start to resemble the very dragons they replace; the heroes become villains. That's part of a saga that's often preventable. But in this case we've also seen some really heightened tensions. I mean, Michael Eisner as you pointed out did nothing illegally, he is not a thief, but he did have late career problems and a certain insularity and hubris - humility set in, a disconnectedness with Martha, of course - Martha Stewart - is part of her problem. But it's a shame to mention either of these in the same breath as the others thaw led off with -- with the actual folks who plundered their firms like Dennis Kozlowski, allegedly of course, and Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers. These people, it's conducted massive fraud, and we're seeing now a lot of heightened prosecution of these people on the heels of course making this a campaign issue. I don't think either party wants this to linger on and we would like to see this cleared up quickly, and it probably took a while to get the facts together, to get CFO's enough pressure to turn on their CEO's.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor White what would you add to that in terms of why so much is happening now, how much of this is a blow back from the excesses of the 90s?

LAWRENCE WHITE: Well, there's no question that what we're basically seeing is the fallout from the excesses of the late 90s. But it takes a while. First the prosecutors have to do their research, is there enough basis for a case to be brought. They finally bring the indictment. Then there are depositions, there's discovery, documents get exchanged, and then finally a trial happens. It takes is a long time, government prosecutors are careful men and women, it just takes a while, but now we're seeing the results of their careful efforts.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Kanter though, was the behavior much worse than in the past, or is there just less tolerance for it, in the culture, or whether it's the public or prosecutors or directors?

ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: We have certainly had other periods in American history where there have been corporate abuses and abuses by CEO's. A hundred years ago we developed anti-trust law because companies were abusing their power. There have been other periods, in the 1980s for example, there was a great outcry against excessive CEO compensation, because it wasn't clear how much value they were adding, and now we have even more excessive CEO compensation than we did in the 1980s. So there have been other periods of history, but I think what's different now is that it is in reaction to the excesses of the 1990s, no doubt about it, when shareholders were content as long as companies were making money, and they weren't going to ask too many questions. Now we have activated shareholders, we have angry employees, we have regulators who see that they can make their own careers by going after some of these abuses. And our moral sensibilities are different. I think they're a little bit different after 9/11, but they are certainly different in terms of the newer generations who want to see companies act in the interest of all of the stakeholders of society and not just be instruments for personal wealth on the part of the CEO.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me get Professor White back in here. Professor White, what about that point about, we saw the companies that have been exposed are the ones that failed, I mean, they crashed dramatically, Enron, WorldCom. If the 90's were still going on, if these companies were still returning huge profits or apparently profits to the shareholders, would anyone have been the wiser?

LAWRENCE WHITE: Well, I think you have a good point here. It is the peeking of the boom and then the fallen stock prices that led, as Professor Kanter just indicated, led a lot of people to start asking tougher questions. If the trajectory continues to be up, it's easier for people to go along, they're getting a long pretty well. But things go sour, and people start asking a lot more questions. And there were things going wrong. And unfortunately a lot of people think, well, that's now in the past, I fear we still have serious problems of corporate governance, just the fact that we've got CEO's going out, making merger proposals and the very next day their own share prices fall, tell you something. Their owners are suffering from their excess else even today so, I think we continue to have a problem, and we've got to get CEO's to start realizing they're supposed to be running their companies on behalf of their owners, the shareholders, and unfortunately even today there are too many guys who are out there conveniently forgetting that.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Sonnenfeld, let's also return to this idea of them as celebrities, because all of these figures at least in the business press were celebrities, much touted, much feted and in the case of Eisner and Martha Stewart, even in the popular press as well. Is this a fairly new phenomenon, the celebrity of CEO or rather the CEO as celebrity?

JEFFREY SONNENFIELD: Actually. At different times in history of any culture they turn to where the greatest uncertainty is and create heroes. Society and the individual conspire together to anoint somebody as a hero; in times of great battles we a anoint warriors, other times states men, frontiersmen, whatever -- scientists. In this case the turn of the last century, the turn of this century we got very excited about seeing all the dislocations in the workplace and the emerging technologies and we look for people to be the institutionalization of all this change, to make it easy to understand. These symbols became a reality of some extent and often their egos got away with them, a certain heroic aura. Nobody ever called Alexander III of Macedonia Alexander the Great until he created that whole false lineage to Odysseus and Achilles. They start to believe it. A special challenge here though is that you have people that some of them were the new economy type movement fell, and we had the serial acquirers of the old economy, they were buying piles up of businesses. But we also had a problem of people that kind of lost their way, and they were very different from the scandals that Roosevelt talked about, and she's absolutely right historically. But at the turn of the last century and the 1930s, these were people who abused privilege, they were often the Aristocrats who took advantage of their position in society. What's so sad right now is this is the American dream turned into a nightmare. Each of these people as heroes embody the self made person, from Martha Stewart to Dennis Kozlowski, of course the son of a New Jersey transit cop, and Ken Lay the son of a part-time Baptist preacher, part-time tractor salesman, Bernie Ebbers was a former high school basketball coach and bar room bouncer. These great strivers somehow went a stray, and that is -- damaging the American psych he like the is so sad.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Kanter, I notice that last fall, the directors of MBNA, the big credit card company, basically forced out their CEO, for his lavish spending, he bought everything, from corporate jets to buying Andrew Wyeth paintings. Are corporate CEO's under greater scrutiny today as a rule, from the directors or shareholders?

ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: Absolutely. I mean, CEO's are operating in the spotlight, people are looking at their personal behavior, their personal life, and I think that's true for top executives in general, because they don't operate alone and often what they're doing is done by other people in their company. And this is not simply a matter of waking up, suddenly waking up. The media which had created the cult of the celebrity CEO, Fortune Magazine had turned into People Magazine putting their pictures on the cover, the media is now after everybody. And it's getting harder and harder for CEO's to hide things the way they once did. And practices that at once been common among big corporations so suddenly not acceptable to the boards of directors, and I think that's going to be a long-term secular trend between the pressure of the press, the pressure of professions, themselves under scrutiny because they've colluded accounting, law, et cetera, and also the Internet. Go to sites like www.Corp. Www.Corp.Watch.Org and look at all the information about companies that's just been selected, some of it rumors, but all of it has to be responded to.

MARGARET WARNER: And, Prof. White, what about disgruntled shareholders such as in the Disney case, is that an anomaly, or are shareholders who have frequently felt complete powerless, are they asserting them service more across the board?

LAWRENCE WHITE: Certainly. I think the Disney case is a good example, and the separation of the CEO from the chairman of the board, probably helped a little bit. But Professor Kanter is right, there is more scrutiny, and we're not going to see wild parties. We're not going to see the great creation of those special subsidiaries, that sort of thing is, I think, history. Or at least I hope it's history. But it still worries me -

MARGARET WARNER: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

LAWRENCE WHITE: What still worries me is the fact that the media did build up this cult of a personality, now there's more scrutiny, but still these guys go out, they make offers to buy other companies, they are bad offers, they're bad for their companies, and yet they keep on doing it. And that's what really, to me, is very, very troubling. I'm not convinced that we really have our corporate governance problems hype us.

MARGARET WARNER: Prof. Sonnenfeld, finally on that last point and we only have a minute left, this weekend, Warren Buffet, who is considered the great guru of allthese matters, said to him the acid test of whether corporate reform is really going in CEO pay, and he said to date the results aren't encouraging. What's your view of that?

JEFFREY SONNENFIELD: It is very discouraging, and this ties in with what Lawrence was just saying about we still have many tests of reform yet to be proven. Compensation is still runaway, we still are seeing companies with falling share prices and soaring compensation budget packages, and you wonder why and this notion of a restricted pool. When I became professor in 1980 up at Harvard, only 4 or 5 percent of our major CEO's were recruited from the outside. Now it roughly 40 percent because they believe there's a savior, a messiah on the outside, with a hunted down or a restricted pool as a result. That's a major problem. We also have a problem in that a lot of people still are not being prosecuted. And the frauds on Wall Street which the settlement over the Enron fraud with a number of major financial institutions, nobody was charged. $1.4 billion - we all paid for it. Major scandal at Xerox, nobody pays for it except again the shareholders fully indemnified the executives. And this continues, Jack Grubman walks the streets of Salomon Smith Barney as a free man with a modest fine, and you wonder are we seeing a turn here.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Sonnenfeld, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but we are out of time. But professors all three, thank you.

ESSAY - AMERICAN FAMILY

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, essayist Richard Rodriguez offers his thoughts about gay marriage.

GROUP SINGING ON STREET: Freedom is coming freedom is coming...

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: In the current noisy debate over homosexual marriage, who has bothered to notice that homosexuals are already forming families-- which is the point of marriage-- and that homosexuals are taking their place within the American family. That term "American family," I grant you, is paradoxical. Americans are notorious failures when it comes to marriage and family. I have always thought our high rate of divorce stems from our individuality -- our lust for the "I" that leads us to romanticize cowboys and to raise children to leave home. Putting the cart before the horse, Americans courts have already given lesbians and gays the right to adopt and to raise their own blood children. Now state courts, and soon, no doubt, the Supreme Court, will decide whether gay men and women have the right to say "I do" in the first place. President Bush has lately announced his support of a constitutional amendment that would restrict the word "marriage" to the union of one man and one woman. Perhaps the states will offer homosexual couples a consolation prize, albeit a term of no sacramental connotation-- civil unions, which is all many people wanted in the first place. But a few weeks ago, I saw them at city hall in San Francisco-- homosexual couples lined up around the block, thousands of them, waiting for a word on a certificate: "Marriage." They wanted to be recognized by the community as promising fidelity to one another. The mood of those days was like nothing I had ever seen in gay America. What began as a rebellious political gesture had turned earnest. By contrast, in the gay day parades of summer, every sort of eccentricity and irony and non-conformity is accepted in the defiant celebration of one's right to proceed as "I." The energy of the gay political movement of the last 50 years has been driven by the "I", as at the Stonewall riots in 1969-- my right to define my own privacy. At the city hall marriages, one was struck by an absence of the gaudy or of camp. There were some wedding dresses, champagne bottles, sure. And there was throughout, a mood of joyful determination to be acknowledged as couples by the civic family. It all had the logic and the simplicity and the shazam of a scene from the "Wizard of Oz"; Mayor Newsom as the wizard somewhere over the rainbow, indeed. A generation ago, thousands, perhaps millions of girls, boys, women, men, came out to their families. It was one of the defining narratives of the '60s, and the narrative continues.

GROUP SINGING IN CHURCH: Holy, holy, holy...

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Mothers and fathers who are members of religious communities that fiercely emphasize the bond of family tell me that their church's teaching on the importance of family ultimately makes it impossible for them to reject their own sons and daughters. America already sees gay children within some of our most prominent political families, right and left, regardless of what papa's party says about gays or gay marriage. And regardless of what churchmen may opine, I and, more importantly, my partner have been asked by my family to be godparents to my nieces and nephews many times over. When I saw the couples at city hall waiting, often with their children, I realized that for pragmatic reasons-- schooling, hospital emergency rooms, medical insurance-- America is going to have to acknowledge the notion of gay unions if only for the sake of the children. But I also saw your uncle there at city hall; your niece, your cousin, your accountant, your clergyman, members of our American family-- he and he; she and she. People who have internalized a huge burden of loneliness in their lives suddenly stepped forward in the light of day to announce themselves publicly. Each said "I do," searching in America for "we." I'm Richard Rodriguez.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major developments of this day: The Iraq governing council signed an interim constitution. Shiite members took part, but they called again for changes in the document. The former chief justice of Haiti was installed as president. But from exile, Jean-Bertrand Aristide insisted he was still the rightful president. He also called for peaceful resistance. On Sunday, gunmen killed six anti-Aristide marchers in Port-au-Prince. And President Bush accused Democrat John Kerry of trying to gut intelligence spending in the 1990s. In turn, Kerry charged the president had resisted the 9/11 investigation. We'll see you online, and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.

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The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Monday, March 8, 2004