The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. I'm Robert MacNeil in New York.

MR. LEHRER: And I'm Jim Lehrer in Washington. After our summary of the news this Christmas Eve, we have full coverage and analysis of the day's two major stories, the presidential pardon of former Defense Sec. Weinberger and five other Iran-contra figures, and President-elect Clinton's last round of cabinet and other top personnel charges. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: President Bush today granted a Christmas eve pardon to former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other people implicated in the Iran-contra affair. Mr. Bush called Weinberger "a true American patriot who had rendered long and extraordinary service to our country." Weinberger had been scheduled to go on trial January 5th on charges that he withheld personal notes from Congress detailing the Iran-contra affair. He had pleaded "not guilty" to the charges. This afternoon he spoke at his lawyer's office in Washington.

CASPAR WEINBERGER, Former Secretary of Defense: I am completely confident that I would have been acquitted in a real trial. I am very pleased, however, and very relieved that my family and I have been spared this terrible ordeal of a very long and unjustified trial. Because I have nothing to hide, I have asked that all of my notes relating to the Iran-contra matter be released to the public. And these are the same notes that I voluntarily sent to the Library of Congress and that I voluntarily made fully available to the independent counsel in 1990 and which they didn't even bother to review until 1991 even though they were told that they did contain Iran-contra material.

MR. MacNeil: In his pardon statement, Mr. Bush criticized the six-year effort of Iran-contra's special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. He said the prosecutions amounted to the criminalization of policy differences. Prosecutor Walsh responded today, saying the pardons undermined the principle that no man is above the law, and he questioned President Bush's role in the Iran-contra matter. He spoke in Oklahoma City.

LAWRENCE WALSH, Special Prosecutor: My office was informed only within the past two weeks on December 11, 1992, if President Bush had failed to produce to investigators his own highly relevant, contemporaneous notes despite repeated requests for such documents, the production of these notes is still ongoing and will lead to appropriate action. Some would have to be furnished to Weinberger. They could have led to President Bush being called as a witness in that case. In light of President Bush's own misconduct, we are gravely concerned by his decision to pardon others. He lied to Congress and obstructed official investigation.

MR. MacNeil: The other five people who received executive clemency today were former Assistant Sec. of State Elliott Abrams, three former CIA operatives, Dwayne Claridge, Ellen Fiers and Clair George, and former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. We'll have an interview with Lawrence Walsh and more on the story right after the News Summary. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: President-elect Clinton spoke about the pardons at a news conference in Little Rock this afternoon. He said he had not been consulted in advance by President Bush, and he offered this initial reaction.

PRESIDENT-ELECT CLINTON: I am concerned about any action which sends a signal that if you work for the government you're above the law, or that by not telling the truth to Congress under oath is somehow less serious than not telling the truth to some other body under oath. But I don't want to say more until I have a chance to study all of the statement of the President, who was covered and what the facts were. I just heard about it right before I got here.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. Clinton's real purpose at that news conference was to name the rest of his cabinet. He announced corporate lawyer Zoe Baird to be the first woman attorney general, former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt to be Secretary of the Interior, Mississippi Congressman Mike Espy to head the Agriculture Department, former Denver Mayor Frederico Pena for Transportation Secretary and campaign chairman Mickey Kantor as U.S. Trade Representative. He also named Arkansas health director Dr. Joycelyn Elders surgeon general, and John Gibbons, the head of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, to be White House science adviser. We will take a further look at them and the entire Clinton cabinet later in the program.

MR. MacNeil: A battalion of U.S. Marines secured the central Somali town of Bardera today. A separate Marine company is on its way with French troops to Oddur and is expected to arrive tomorrow. Both towns are major aid distribution centers that until now have been plagued by looting. James Furlong of Independent Television News reports.

MR. FURLONG: The armored vehicles of the U.S. Marines rumbled towards Bardera several hours ahead of schedule, but for the town's inhabitants not a moment too soon. The armed gangs that had terrorized the area had mostly moved out ahead of the Marines' arrival. A few were rounded up and questioned before being released, while mortars and anti-aircraft guns, evidence of the recent fierce fighting, were removed from the streets. But it wasn't mortars the Marines feared but land mines. Thousands were planted around Bardera by the retreating forces loyal to the ousted dictator Siad Bari. Meanwhile, near Baidoa another town brought to its knees by famine and fighting, U.S. Marines helped aid workers distribute food, but despite the armed presence, safety for most of these people exists only while there are Marines in sight.

RICHARD DICKSON, CARE: Instead of getting a whole sack, people have come in and which puts them in jeopardy of being robbed when they leave, we're giving -- we're splitting every sack, and we're putting 10 kilograms for every person.

MR. FURLONG: With Bardera now occupied by U.S. Marines, French forces will now undertake Operation Restore Hope's next objective. They'll secure the town of Oddur, 100 miles to the North.

MR. LEHRER: The 400 deported Palestinians stranded in Lebanon appealed for food and water today. Israel deported them a week ago on grounds they were Islamic militants. Lebanon has refused them entry and blocked shipments of humanitarian aid. The incident has threatened the Middle East peace process. Geoffrey Archer of Independent Television News reports.

MR. ARCHER: Conditions facing the deportees are becoming increasingly unpleasant. Damp and bitterly cold, there's no prospect of their isolation in southern Lebanon ending soon. The men are Muslim extremists, but today they appealed to the Christian world for help.

ABDUL AZIZ AL RANTISI, Deportee Spokesman: This misery where we do not have water, where we do not have even food or anything, I'm just calling upon all the Christians in the world on the eve of Christmas, starting with these beautiful words, saying to them all, Merry Christmas.

MR. ARCHER: The Beirut Government is still refusing food and water to be brought to the men from Lebanon, saying they're Israel's responsibility. The Red Cross has said it does hope to get permission soon from Israel to bring in relief supplies from the south. In Cairo today, Arab foreign ministers met to try to adopt a common policy over the expulsions. They're calling on the U.N. to get tougher with Israel but have not said they'll withdraw from the Middle East peace talks. PLO Leader Yasser Arafat joined the ministers and warned that Palestinians in the occupied territories would step up their protest at Israel's action. In the town of Bethlehem, there was a strike in protest of the expulsions. As Christmas ceremonies got underway, Israeli troops were on a high state of alert for trouble. In Gaza, the unrest continued. Israel hopes if it can keep a lid on the violence and stand firm, the world will eventually turn a blind eye to the expulsions issue as it has done in the past.

MR. LEHRER: And that's it for the News Summary this Christmas eve. Now it's on to the Iran-contra pardons and the Clinton cabinet. FOCUS - PARDONED

MR. MacNeil: First tonight, reaction to the Christmas eve bomb shell from President Bush pardoning Caspar Weinberger and five others for their roles in the Iran-contra affair. The statement said that whether what they did was right or wrong, those pardoned acted from patriotism and had already suffered disproportionately. The President said the tendency to criminalize policy differences was profoundly troubling, that the proper forum for such differences was the voting booth, not the courtroom. There were more criticisms of Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh by Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan's defense secretary, at a news conference.

CASPAR WEINBERGER, Former Secretary of Defense: Robert Jackson, who was attorney general under Franklin Roosevelt -- I go back quite a long ways -- and later became a justice of the Supreme Court -- said that the most dangerous power of the prosecutor is that he will pick people he thinks he should get. It's not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who's committed it. It's a question of picking the man and then searching the lawbooks at putting investigators to work to find some offense on him. It is a grotesque use of this really very dangerous power that marked the reign of Mr. Walsh. Even though the most significant charges of obstruction of Congress, lying to Congress, were thrown right out by the judge, the independent counsel continued to pursue me without any regard to the overwhelming evidence of my evidence and total lack of any criminal intent at any time. No effort and no amount of money was spared to try to convict me. The independent counsel attempted to explore every detail of my life in order to find something, anything at all, that would damage me without any basis in fact. As a matter of fact, he even asked my close friends and colleagues with whom I had worked for 20 years if I had a drinking or a drug problem, whereas it's widely known in Washington, I think, that I'm one of those politicians who doesn't drink. They expected and contacted those with whom I had policy differences in the hope of getting some kind of dirt as they did. They were unsuccessful, and what is worse, they actually harassed witnesses who they knew supported me. I've seen the first hand this way, this lawlessness, and this ridiculous of the independent counsel. It troubles me greatly that those who are not in a position -- and I have been very fortunate -- those who are not in a position to hire the most able counsel you can find and spend great amounts of time and effort and money to fight unwarranted charges will be forced to plead guilty to things that they have not done simply because they cannot afford and can't run the risk of being steam-rollered by a runaway prosecutor who has unlimited time, unlimited money, and is accountable to no one. It's a very strange American institution, an unlimited budget, unlimited tenure, and you don't have to report to anybody. This independent counsel did not even follow the established policies of the Department of Justice. The outrageous second indictment that he brought four days before the presidential election for political reasons was dismissed by the court on the ground that it was completely barred by the statute of limitations. Independent counsel had tried to use a tooling statute in an unprecedented way that had been on the books for over 50 years just to justify the second indictment that came down October 30th. But in those 50 years that the statute's been on the books, the Department of Justice has never tried to use it in a way that he did. The record of the independent counsel, Mr. Walsh, in this whole matter has been dismal, but he has been much more successful, doing great damage to innocent individuals and their families, and it's too bad that the forty or fifty million dollars that he spent in these political cases could not have been spent at prosecuting real criminals who committed real crimes, which caused real damage to many citizens.

REPORTER: Mr. Secretary, did you believe that anything would come out at the trial that would harm the reputation of President Bush?

CASPAR WEINBERGER: No, certainly not.

REPORTER: Why do you say that?

CASPAR WEINBERGER: Because I know that none of the evidence that they had had anything whatever to do with it. He attended some meetings, as I did, and I don't think anything that was there would have hurt him in any way. You had a question.

REPORTER: Sec. Weinberger, could you put into the clearest words possible what you think the motive of Mr. Walsh was.

CASPAR WEINBERGER: Well, I don't really know. You'll have to ask him. To the best of my knowledge, he seemed absolutely determined to get somebody, and I think that it really represents to my mind the dangers of combining this kind of investigatory responsibility with the prosecutorial responsibility. He seemed to feel that he was going to be measured and judged on the number of convictions he got that withstood appellate review, and I have to confess that I think that's a very, very wrong way of going about it. I thought he was appointed to try to find out what had happened, and I cooperated fully with him and gave him all these notes. It didn't seem to be what he had in mind at all. It seemed to be a very vindictive, malicious sort of set of actions, and for the life of me I don't know why because I'd never met him really.

MR. MacNeil: The special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, joins us now from Oklahoma City. Judge Walsh, thank you for joining us. That's quite a list of things that Caspar Weinberger accuses you of. Just a recap. He says you're vindictive, accuses you of lawlessness, harassment of friendly witnesses, grotesque use of dangerous powers. Do you want to respond to that?

JUDGE WALSH: Well, all I can say is that it shows that Mr. Weinberger lies as well in press interviews or media interviews as he does when he testifies before Congress.

MR. MacNeil: What about his --

JUDGE WALSH: Go ahead.

MR. MacNeil: No, you go ahead. You wanted to say --

JUDGE WALSH: I just wanted to say he was given every opportunity. I personally delayed the indictment against him for nearly two months to give him every opportunity to show any reason why his deliberate lie to our office and his deliberate lies to Congress should not be the subject of indictment. No one wanted to hurt a person with his career record, but the fact is he did lie. He took advantage of his office and his reputation to lie to Congress to protect his, the administration in which he served, and to cover up his knowledge of the Iran-contra sale. His notes disclosed that he was a real -- he was an actor, that he knew what was going on. He opposed it, but he carefully recorded the steps by which the transaction went forward. When Congress asked him if he had any notes, he said flatly, no, where he was sitting about four feet from his desk drawer which was full of those notebooks which were devastating contemporary notes showing exactly how the transaction unfolds, showing his opposition, showing President Reagan's deliberate intent to violate the Arms Export Control Act, and in such things as that, which showed that President Reagan had a strong feeling he was doing the right thing, was deliberately confronting Congress. He was deliberately defying a statute which Congress had enacted to prevent the sale of U.S. arms to terrorists or to those who supported terrorism.

MR. MacNeil: Is that what you're referring to in your statement when you say that if these Weinberger notes had been produced earlier -- or the failure to produce them earlier possibly forestalled a timely impeachment of President Reagan, would those be the grounds you were referring to?

JUDGE WALSH: Those would be the grounds. The President had head- on confrontation with Congress. His own counsel was concerned to have that become public, and the, the most valuable part of the notes show the November 1986 cover-up by high ranking Reagan appointees to prevent Congress learning that the President had deliberately defied the Arms Export Control Act on his view of what was constitutional, but it was a deliberate defiance of Congress, and Congress's remedy in a situation like that is to consider impeachment. It's unlikely that they would impeach him, but that was for them to decide. It wasn't to be hidden from them by Sec. Weinberger or anyone else by lying to them.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Weinberger says -- he repeated it in the clip we ran in the News Summary -- he says these notes were fully available to you in 1990, when he sent them to the Library of Congress, but you didn't review them for a year.

JUDGE WALSH: What he told us was he had no notes. That was his testimony to us. He filed those notes not with the classified information relating to Iran-contra but in an unclassified area where they didn't belong, and that's why they weren't discovered for a year. First of all, he denied that he had them. Then he hid them where they shouldn't be.

MR. MacNeil: So you think that was a deliberate act?

JUDGE WALSH: I think it was. I don't think there's any question about it.

MR. MacNeil: You say also in your statement today the absence of these notes radically altered the investigation. How?

JUDGE WALSH: Because the notes formed the basis for interrogation of others, but that interrogation took place almost five years after the events that the notes described, and, therefore, we were up against the statute of limitations, which is five years, and also it, it lent credibility to the professed statements of other members, other persons, that they couldn't remember. It's one thing to say I can't remember after one year, or after two years, but after five years, the credibility of that statement increases, or at least it's more difficult to prove the incredibility of that statement. And that is all due to Sec. Weinberger's withholding these notes from Congress in the first place and from the Office of Independent Counsel in the second.

MR. MacNeil: President Bush says in the pardon message today, "No impartial person has seriously suggested that my own role in this matter is legally questionable." Are you now suggesting it is?

JUDGE WALSH: I'm suggesting that he did -- he withheld from us notes. Whether -- how critical those notes are is yet to be developed, but there's no question that until December 11, 1992, President Bush withheld notes that should have been made available to Congress in the spring of 1987, and into my office at the same time.

MR. MacNeil: And you said in your statement those notes are highly relevant.

JUDGE WALSH: They are relevant. Yes, they're highly relevant. They deal with the same period, and they deal with other periods which, which have still been withheld from us. We still have all of his notes.

MR. MacNeil: Later you say, "In the light of President Bush's own misconduct." Is that what you're referring to?

JUDGE WALSH: That's what I'm referring to.

MR. MacNeil: And you say, "We're gravely concerned about his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations." What is the connection between the two here?

JUDGE WALSH: The connection is that he, he is pardoning a person who committed the same type of misconduct that he did. Now, as to Secretary -- as to Mr. Weinberger, we have carefully developed a case against him. I don't say that President Bush is in that position, but it's the same type of conduct that President Bush is trying to gloss over. His suggestion that lying to Congress is a political crime is, is rubbish. It's a phony statement. When you deal with Congress, when Congress acting through its committee and in a formal way requests the honest testimony of government officials, it's entitled to, to an honest statement. The official can either tell the truth, or he can claim executive privilege and take the consequences of refusing to answer, but he is not privileged to lie to Congress to cover up President Reagan or to cover up President Bush or to cover up himself or his friends.

MR. MacNeil: You say the production of Mr. Bush's notes "will lead to appropriate action." What are the alternatives for action open to you?

JUDGE WALSH: Well, those will be the natural -- the natural stream of activity that flows from the discovery of illegally withheld documents, and I don't think I should discuss them further at this time.

MR. MacNeil: Well, let me ask you though, is it remotely conceivable there could be a prosecution of President Bush?

JUDGE WALSH: I, I could not comment on that. He's the subject now of our investigation.

MR. MacNeil: Onto the wider point, the President calls profoundly troubling, as he calls it criminalizing of policy differences which should be settled in the voting booth, not the courtroom, what is your comment on that?

JUDGE WALSH: I think that again is rubbish. This is not a policy question. Lying to Congress is not a policy question. There may be a difference of policy as to whether we aid the contras or whether we sell arms to terrorists. Those are policy questions, but Congress has made determinations on those policies, and as far as selling arms to terrorists are concerned, the President joins in that condemnation. But then to lie to Congress and say it didn't happen, that is not a political question. That's an outright lie. That's perjury.

MR. MacNeil: The President also said the proper target is the President, not his subordinates. What is your comment on that?

JUDGE WALSH: Well, the President has done his best today to make that clear, but I think that's a mis-statement. I think the President of the United States is entitled to a, an area of tolerance and almost immunity. The problems that he has are greater in scale, immensely greater, than any other government official, and if the President makes a policy decision and orders that it go forward, a prosecutor should be very slow before he picks at a President, but that does not protect the Secretary of Defense or the Secretary of State or anyone else who carries out a, a policy by illegal means or tries to cover up a policy by illegal means.

MR. MacNeil: In short --

JUDGE WALSH: Just a point --

MR. MacNeil: Excuse me.

JUDGE WALSH: I think there are places and it's well recognized in cases a subordinate may be criminally prosecuted even though the President, himself, must be protect so that he's not always looking over his shoulder for some possible prosecution. It goes way, way back to the concept that the king can do no wrong. I don't mean to apply that to the President of the United States, but there's a vestige of that policy remaining. I think the President is entitled to a greater degree of consideration than the Secretary of Defense, who is lying.

MR. MacNeil: In short, do you think this pardon is part of a continued cover-up of Mr. Bush, himself?

JUDGE WALSH: I think it's the last card in the cover-up. He's played the final card.

MR. MacNeil: Were you at all troubled, as some were, by the irony of prosecuting Mr. Weinberger, who was one of the two officials, George Shultz being the other, who opposed the policy in the first place?

JUDGE WALSH: I was tremendously troubled, and it delayed our action for, for several weeks, as I have indicated, as I personally went over the case myself to make sure that there was no alternative but to prosecute. No one took pleasure or really satisfaction in the, in subjecting a person of such a distinguished record to criminal prosecution, and particularly where he had opposed the policy that he was now illegally trying to conceal.

MR. MacNeil: Well, Judge Walsh, thank you very much for joining us.

JUDGE WALSH: Thank you, Mr. MacNeil.

MR. MacNeil: Now to a further look at today's pardon's. Tom Blanton is the executive director of the National Security Archive. It is a non-governmental research institute and library for de-classified United States documents. The archive has published several books on Iran-contra. Richard Perle was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. He's now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Starting with you Richard Perle, just first of all, what's your reaction to the pardons?

MR. PERLE: Well, I'm delighted that these pardons have been granted first to Cap Weinberger, who faced a long trial; secondly, for the other defendants, and even for Elliott Abrams, who was pushed by the special prosecutor to plead guilty to a misdemeanor in order to avoid burdening his family with the costs of defending himself, so with respectto all of these pardons, I think it's very much in the public interest, and it's the fair thing to do, given the extent to which this prosecution had become a malicious, menacing, intimidating, and really out of control operation, not so much by Walsh, who spent most of his time in Oklahoma, but by some young scalp hunters in Washington.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Blanton, what is your reaction to the pardon?

MR. BLANTON: I think that's a classic statement by Mr. Perle, claiming that the independent counsel was the one somehow who was out of control, when it was actually the government in which Mr. Perle served that was out of control during the 1980s, and we're barely catching up to what they did. One of the things that they did do, and Weinberger's notes show this and are the key new evidence that's come out of the independent counsel's investigation, is that Weinberger's opposition was so strong that he told President Reagan himself personally that "You're breaking a law, Mr. President, by shipping these arms to Iran."

MR. MacNeil: Is that in Mr. Weinberger's notes?

MR. BLANTON: That's in Mr. Weinberger's notes. Let me just read it to you. I brought the page with you today just to show you the level of detail that we now know that we didn't know five years ago, three years ago, or even a year ago. This is what Weinberger said in his own diary coming back from the White House. "I argued strongly that we have an embargo that makes arms sales to Iran illegal and the President couldn't violate it, and that washing transaction through Israel wouldn't make it legal. Shultz," -- that's the Secretary of State -- "Don Regan" -- chief of staff - - "agreed. The President said he could answer charges of illegality but he couldn't answer charge that 'big strong President Reagan passed up a chance to free hostages.'" That's the reason why the independent counsel is pushing so strongly on this. You have Cap Weinberger, a distinguished attorney with years of government service, says directly to the President who appointed him, "You're breaking the law, Mr. President." And the President says, "Hush! We can deal with that. We just get to get the hostages out." That shows you how out of control the government is, was then and we're just now finding out about it because people like Sec. Weinberger hid their notes for six long years.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Perle, come back on that.

MR. PERLE: Well, I think notes were hardly hidden. They were placed in unclassified files in the Library of Congress.

MR. BLANTON: Under seal, the public couldn't see them.

MR. PERLE: But the special prosecutor was given access to those files.

MR. BLANTON: Only last year.

MR. PERLE: Well, that's when they requested them.

MR. BLANTON: That's right, under threat of subpoena.

MR. PERLE: I think that we're trying the case now that the President has now pardoned. And of course Mr. Walsh kept referring to Sec. Weinberger lying, although that remains to be proved. It was never established, and certainly asserting it doesn't make it so, but I think the whole character of this prosecution -- look, of the convictions that were obtained, on appeal they were reversed. Weinberger was indicted on the eve of the election in what was clearly a politically motivated move, and that indictment was thrown out by the courts almost immediately. I think there's a clear pattern here, attempting to get at the President, which is what Mr. Blanton has just been attempting to do, that is President Reagan, by intimidating his subordinates. I don't think there's any doubt that Cap Weinberger wasoffered a deal. I've listened to Walsh talk about how serious Cap Weinberger's crimes are, were. But he offered to ignore all of those if he could plead guilty to a misdemeanor. This was a shabby prosecution from Day one.

MR. BLANTON: I think what we have here is blaming the victim. You have Mr. Weinberger. You had Oliver North shredding his notes. You had Mr. Weinberger hiding his notes under seal in the Library of Congress where none of us, weren't subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the public couldn't see them, and when the independent counsel asked Mr. Weinberger, do you have any notes, did you take any notes, Cap Weinberger said, no, gee, I wish I did, it would have made writing my memoirs a lot easier. That's the key point here. What Weinberger was accused of was obstructing justice and lying, and I think that the cover-up of his notes --

MR. MacNeil: Gentlemen, instead of arguing the case, which we can't try here, although I'm sure you're both totally qualified to do it, it is, what is the effect, in your view, Mr. Blanton, of this pardon today? What message does it send?

MR. BLANTON: I think it's a sad day for government accountability. I think that most of the people of America will sit back, look at this, and say, ah ha, this is the way Washington insiders work; you keep your mouth shut, you hide your notes, you go along with the President, and the President will take care of you. It's a very different kind of system than the one which the United States, I think, aspires to. The key to this whole Weinberger situation was, what's a future Secretary of State going to do when the President of the United States wants to do something illegal? And the Secretary knows better. You've got several choices in that situation. You can say, Mr. President, it's illegal, and I'm going to resign, or your Secretary of Defense. You control those weapons. You can unilaterally stop those deals from going forward. Weinberger didn't do either of those options. Instead, he sat back and anytime anybody came around he hid his notes. I think that sounds the wrong message to the next Secretary of State and to all people in the national security bureaucracy.

MR. MacNeil: Richard Perle, what message does it sound, the pardon?

MR. PERLE: Well, for one thing, the questions of legality and illegality in these complicated policy matters are debatable. And Cap may have held one view; others may have held different views, so it's not dispositive. I think one of the things this pardon will do is help prevent a situation that I think we were headed for, which is one in which people simply won't keep any notes, they won't keep any records. They will operate -- they will put Blanton out of business, because without archives he's going to be looking for a job. This is what happened in the McCarthy period. Nobody kept any records. This business of criminalizing policy judgments, particularly complicated policy judgments, can only have the effect of paralysis and eventually the destruction of any significant paper trail of the decision making process.

MR. MacNeil: You heard Judge Walsh say just now that that wasn't the issue, that it wasn't the policy judgments that were being criminalized, but, but covering them up and lying to Congress.

MR. PERLE: They were looking for any basis on which they could get a prosecution. I'm quite sure Cap is right when he says that they were out interviewing everybody who he had fought with on policy matters, looking for something on them. It had that tenor, this prosecution. It went beyond reason.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Blanton, what do you make of the revelation that Mr. Bush has been withholding notes?

MR. BLANTON: It fits into a certain scary pattern that every year of this scandal we have a new bunch of evidence, a new bunch of information that we didn't know the previous year. I used to say the problem with Iran-contra was we were spoiled by Watergate. Watergate was sort of Shakespeare high drama, whereas, Iran-contra is much more like Samuel Beckett, a modernist play where characters wander on and off the stage, new information comes out. I think what happened today is a player back stage just turned off the lights, and we're sitting here in the dark.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Perle, Judge Walsh said this is the last card in the cover-up, this pardon.

MR. PERLE: Well, I hope it's the last card in the activities of the special prosecutor's office, which it was not renewed by the Congress because they had come to regard it, as I think most Americans regard it, as an exercise in unfairness and intimidation.

MR. MacNeil: What do you make of -- I should have asked you the other question first -- what I just asked Mr. Blanton -- the statement by Judge Walsh that Mr. Bush until two weeks ago was himself withholding notes, and they still have not got them all.

MR. PERLE: Well, I don't know whether there are notes that were possessed by the President that are relevant to this. The whole issue here was an issue of intent. Was there an intent to conceal information? If Cap Weinberger had wanted to hide notes, he'd have destroyed them. That would have been the easiest thing to do. He had every opportunity to do it. And so on the question of intent, there was never a very strong case, and I don't know what the issue is with respect to the President, but it seems to me that Mr. Walsh, and perhaps understandably, is very angry with the President at the moment, and it looks as though he's lashing out. We heard nothing about this in terms of that.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Blanton, why does this issue remain important? Clearly, the public is bored with it. The polls all show that years ago they stopped being very interested in it. Why not, as Mr. Bush describes in his pardon statement, why not bring in the healing power of the pardon and sweep it away and sweep the bitterness away?

MR. BLANTON: I think you're wrong about that, Robin, I have to say in terms of what Americans really believe about this scandal. In fact, one of the most surprising developments in 1992 when George Bush ran for President attacking Bill Clinton for trust is the polls actually showed that more people believe Clinton on the draft dodging issue than believed Bush, saying he was out of the loop on Iran-contra, and those were paired up in the public's mind. I think, in fact, if you just look at the Ross Perot phenomenon, there is a widespread belief among most Americans that Washington is out of control, that the government's now on our side, and that so much of this is taking place back stage and in secret. I think the lesson from these pardons will only exacerbate that feeling of alienation from Washington.

MR. MacNeil: Mr. Perle, I believe you, you would sympathize with the President and his desire to sweep the bitterness away with the pardon?

MR. PERLE: Yes. I frankly didn't expect that he would do that, because he will come in for a lot of criticism for it, but it's Christmas eve and it was the right thing to do.

MR. MacNeil: Richard Perle, Tom Blanton, thank you.

MR. BLANTON: Thank you very much. FOCUS - WHO'S WHO

MR. LEHRER: This was last calls day for the Clinton cabinet, and they went to insurance executive Zoe Baird, to be the first woman attorney general, former Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt to be Secretary of the Interior, Mississippi Congressman Mike Espy to be Secretary of Agriculture, and former Denver Mayor Frederico Pena to be Secretary of Transportation, and also former Clinton campaign chairman Mickey Kantor was announced as U.S. Trade Representative. The appointees and the President-elect talked to reporters in Little Rock this afternoon.

ZOE BAIRD, Attorney General-Designate: If confirmed by the Senate, I will do everything within my power to be sure that this Department will be firm in its prosecution of crime, will be guided by the rule of law, and will be committed to the principles and deliberate advancement of civil rights, environmental protection, and economic fairness. And I pledge to promote the highest standards of excellence and integrity within the Department. My first job as a practicing lawyer within the Justice Department -- and I've never forgotten how proud I felt each day as I went to work knowing that my only mission was to do my best for my country -- again, that mission will guide me.

BRUCE BABBITT, Interior Secretary-Designate: I think for someone who grew up in a small town in Arizona, who is to the very core a westerner that Interior is the highest summit of public service. Bill Clinton and Al Gore during this campaign again and again promised that we can have jobs and a good environment, that sustainable growth is possible, the kind of growth that will allow us to use those resources, while at the same time preserving the resource base and the natural environment for the future, for the use of our children and for the generations yet to come. But I pledge my best efforts to work with them to deliver on that promise.

JOHN KING, Associated Press: Can you show that your philosophy on how you think the process works, what you expect of them, and what you are looking forward as you put together the whole team? You know, do you give the orders and it goes out to them, or how do you want them to work with you?

PRESIDENT-ELECT CLINTON: Well, I expect that we will work together in a more team work oriented fashion perhaps than any previous administration. I expect we'll do a lot of work with each other, rather than just isolated in our little boxes on the organizational chart. And I say that among other things because there are so many issues that cut across the lines that the government is organized along. So what I want -- what I want to do is to have, as you know, a national security group, an economic policy group, domestic policy group, and a cabinet that works together as a whole, as well as in these groups in a team work fashion, and what I've thought about all along the way is how all these people would relate to one another, not just what their individual strengths are, although they are very impressive, but whether they would be able to fit into the economic team and the domestic policy team, the foreign policy team, and I feel very good about that.

MR. LEHRER: Now some perspectives on today's crop as well as the others who will serve in the highest positions of the Clinton administration. The perspectives are those of Stuart Taylor of American Lawyer magazine, Washington columnist Elizabeth Drew and Republican political consultant John Sears. Stuart, first on Zoe Baird to be attorney general, tell us about her.

MR. TAYLOR: I think she's a very strong pick. She's a 40-year- old woman. That's on the young side for attorney general but it's only two years younger than the incumbent, William Barr, one year younger than he was when he was appointed. She's had an incredibly rich experience in government and the private sector in the brief lifetime. She was in the Carter Justice Department in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is sort of the brain trust of the Justice Department.

MR. LEHRER: They deal mostly with civil, but do some criminal work as well.

MR. TAYLOR: That's right. They were across the range of constitutional and major policy issues. In that capacity, she made a big impression while crossing swords with Lloyd Cutler, who was Jimmy Carter's White House counsel. He brought her into his office for the last few months of the Carter administration, and then she went to a big Washington law firm, Washington office of a Los Angeles law firm, where she got to know Warren Christopher, among others. I think she knew him before, and went from there to be an in-house lawyer at General Electric, and high rank and now I believe the first woman to serve as general counsel of a major, one of the largest companies, Aetna Life & Casualty Company, and so she has a mix of public sector experience, private sector experience, management experience. It's -- she's got -- I don't think anybody will lay a glove on her for being young, inexperienced, and too callow to be attorney general.

MR. LEHRER: How did she come to the attention of Bill Clinton?

MR. TAYLOR: Partly through Warren Christopher, I expect, and Lloyd Cutler. She's -- the one thing she's been very good at is making an impression on prominent people, prominent Democrats, and apparently in the recent months she's become a friend of, of the President-elect and of Hillary Clinton, in part through campaign activities. I believe she was at the, at the summit.

MR. LEHRER: Elizabeth, the conventional wisdom from the very beginning, the stated published conventional wisdom from the very beginning has been that Bill Clinton decided at the very beginning he wanted a woman attorney general. Does that turn out to be the case, the only decision that had to be made was which woman?

MS. DREW: I don't know that we'll ever really know when he and Mrs. Clinton decided they wanted a woman attorney general. Part of the problem is he got so on the defensive with the interest groups who were demanding that he not name enough women, and they said, there'll be a woman attorney general, it somewhat takes away from the appointment. As Stuart said, she has very good credentials, and she starts out a lot better than many previous attorneys general, but because he appeared to be responding to the interest groups, not just women, but Hispanics and so on, it was not the best way to do it.

MR. LEHRER: Stuart, what are you picking up through the legal community? Did the transition people look at anybody from any other gender?

MR. TAYLOR: As far as I know --

MR. LEHRER: There only being one other one.

MR. TAYLOR: -- it was, I mean, no white males will be considered, and if we can't find a female, maybe we'll look to a black male, but, yeah, I think they were rather open about that, and that's going to be hung around their necks by critics who think they're just captive of the interest groups.

MR. LEHRER: I want to come back to that general issue in a moment, but tell us about Bruce Babbitt. He's probably the best known publicly, Elizabeth, of today's nominees, former governor of Arizona. What else do we need to know about him?

MS. DREW: Well, he is well known because he ran for president, for the nomination, in 1988. He didn't get terribly far but people liked him for his humor and his relative candor as politicians go. He's a very strong pick, and during this week when there was so much shuffling around and near panic, a lot of the environmentalists got very worried that they were not going to put Bruce Babbitt in that slot but in order to have a Hispanic, they would put Congressman Richardson in, who is not as highly regarded.

MR. LEHRER: From New Mexico?

MS. DREW: From New Mexico, a member of the House. So when they got back to Babbitt, who is very popular, and his wife, by the way, is an attorney, Heady Babbitt, and is close to Hillary Clinton, people breathed a great sigh of relief. I think he'll be a very popular cabinet member.

MR. LEHRER: What do you think of Bruce Babbitt, John?

MR. SEARS: Well, he was in my college graduating class, so I know him very well, and I think he's probably a good pick. I think the exercise has been a very good political exercise. Mr. Clinton has seemingly done what he promised to do in terms of bringing minorities and special interests of the sort that the Democrats would honor into the cabinet. The whole question is whether this will all work or not when everybody gets together in the cabinet.

MR. LEHRER: We're going to come back to that. Let's go through Mike Espy, Congressman from Mississippi, to be Secretary of Agriculture. He's been in the House since 1986. What else should we know about him, Elizabeth?

MS. DREW: Well, he's the first black Congressman from this district, the Delta District.

MR. LEHRER: One of the poorest areas in the country.

MS. DREW: One of the poorest areas in the country. He and his family were not so poor, his very distinguished father and grandfather. House members say that he's smart, he's tough. It was sort of checked around that other agricultural interests would find him acceptable and that they would, and a key thing was that he stood up to Jesse Jackson on Bill Clinton's behalf throughout the campaign, and that took some guts and some doing, and obviously brought on some gratitude from Clinton.

MR. LEHRER: Now he's from, John, from the moderate wing of the, of the Democratic Party, the Democratic leadership group that Bill Clinton, Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, and others come out of. That's important, is it not?

MR. SEARS: Oh, I think so, but you know it's fine to be moderate until you get into a cabinet job or you get to be President. Then you have to do something. And so --

MR. LEHRER: Moderate isn't something?

MR. SEARS: No, it really isn't. You know, when you're in the administration you have to lead, and you can be a moderate, because perhaps you don't know any better, or because you don't really know what answers you should have to some questions until you get into a position in the executive branch where you have to lead.

MS. DREW: I think Espy -- excuse me -- I thought Espy made it quite clear today that he knows the Agriculture Department needs a shaking up. I think others have seen this.

MR. SEARS: That's good.

MS. DREW: And haven't been able to do it, but he said it's way out of control. There are fewer farmers and more bureaucrats all the time, so he might have quite a strong hand over there.

MR. SEARS: I hope he keeps that opinion.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Frederico Pena, former mayor of Denver, to be Secretary of Transportation, now the advanced word on that was that William Daley, the brother of the major of Chicago, was going to get that job, and then suddenly, Frederico Pena, who was running the transition office on transportation for the Clinton thing was named. Any, any, any back room on that, Elizabeth?

MS. DREW: Well, the unfortunate thing when names get out and they're supposed to be named and then they're not, it sets loose all sorts of speculation as to why not? No speculation I think is worth propagating at this point.

MR. LEHRER: There's been some really devastating work done on Sen. Wirth in particular.

MS. DREW: Well, exactly.

MR. LEHRER: Unfortunate things were said on our show the other night that were grossly unfair to him, and it's all been in the press, it's terrible -- we'll get to that in a minute but go ahead.

MS. DREW: That's back to the process again.

MR. LEHRER: Right.

MS. DREW: Yes. They clearly weren't thinking of him at first because they've kind of had this working assumption that the people who led these transition clusters into the agencies would not then be picked. But clearly they were working on the mix and they ran into a number of problems and behold, there is Mr. Pena. I checked with some Coloradans today who have a very high opinion of him. They say he was a good mayor. He was especially involved in transportation projects, as it turns out. Environmentalists also rate him high, so it looks like he's a pretty good pick even if they went through a bit of a messy business to get to him.

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. Mickey Kantor, John Sears, the Clinton campaign chairman picked today to be Trade Representative, what does that say about what Clinton thinks about trade policy, if anything?

MR. SEARS: Well, I hope it says something good for that. You know, I and most Republicans are great believers in free trade, and I hope this means something for that. I would say in the process though that I think, you know, those of us who live in a small community that we call Washington here are always looking for indications about, you know, what the President will have to live with. This President seems to be able to be pushed around a little bit by interests and by what people think. And that's a very bad thing for people down here in Washington.

MR. LEHRER: Meaning that he apparently was all over the lot in picking these people?

MR. SEARS: Yeah. Some of his first choices, as you were just indicating, were perfectly good people in some ways. He was able to get argued out of, and he also bent to other pressures. Richard Nixon once told me, he says, you know, when you ask people for advice, you'd better be willing to take some of it, or else you're going to pay for it.

MR. LEHRER: And you think he got caught in that, Elizabeth Drew?

MS. DREW: Oh, there's no question about it.

MR. LEHRER: He being Clinton not Nixon.

MS. DREW: He being Clinton. But one more word about Mickey Kantor. He's a very longtime friend of the Clintons, something like 18 years. It started with his knowing Hillary through legal services work. He was the chairman of the campaign, as we all know, picked up his family, moved to Little Rock, and -- but there were personality problems, there were some fallings out, and he got pushed aside when it came time to decide who was going to head the transition. Then he, he ran this economic summit meeting, and very well from the Clintons' point of view, showed some real political acumen, and there were some questions whether he was going to get any job at all. They couldn't put him in the White House, because the former campaign people with whom he had the falling out are likely to be there. But I think Clinton would have looked very bad, indeed, if he had not given Mickey some sort of job. Can I go to John's point now?

MR. LEHRER: Yeah. ButI was just going to say he also, Kantor also got in the line, and of course, at the process just like because he was left kind of hanging in the wind out there, and everybody was picking on him. The people in the campaign who didn't like him kept leaking things, and the press kept accommodating those leakers, and the same thing happened.

MR. SEARS: I think it's good though because when I was very young --

MR. LEHRER: Good?

MR. SEARS: -- the campaign manager used to get to be the postmaster general.

MR. LEHRER: I see.

MR. SEARS: And now he's the special trade negotiator.

MR. LEHRER: Elizabeth, yes.

MS. DREW: Well, I completely agree with John that there's been a very, very unfortunate aspect of this whole process and the one for which I think Clinton is going to pay. In other words, he probably ended up with a pretty good group, and we'll get to that later, but there's no question that he looked --

MR. LEHRER: We're to it now.

MS. DREW: -- we're to it now -- that he looked like he could be pushed around by the interest groups. And what is so baffling about this is that this is a man who ran a very smart and sometimes brilliant campaign, part of which was to show that he was not a captive of the Democratic interest groups. Well, maybe time ran out on that. You know, the interest groups had behaved, and now they were going to get theirs, but he -- in sending the signal -- push me and I'll do something -- that signal went to "K" Street where all the lobbyists are. That signal went to Capitol Hill, and it doesn't start him off as strongly as he was before this.

MR. LEHRER: John, do you agree?

MR. SEARS: No, I certainly agree. You know, we run these elections, and it's a fine democratic experience. But when you come here to Washington, the first thing you have to be able to show is that you know what you want to do and you can't be pushed around, and to a small degree, and it's only a small degree, nothing that he can't recover from, the new President has proven he can be pushed around.

MR. LEHRER: And, Stuart, it goes back to the point that Elizabeth made in talking about Zoe Baird at the very beginning. Because this whole thing you had -- somebody said today it was a little bit like he picked, he, Clinton, picked a cabinet with a class picture in mind, that he had to have, the faces all had to be right more than anything else, all the assembly. Zoe Baird, Zoe Baird's very legitimate credentials get kind of lost in the class picture, do they not?

MR. TAYLOR: That's right. It sort of stigmatizes well, people can say, well, he was looking for a woman and he just found whatever woman he could find, whereas, it would be hard to find anyone in her age group at least who would be a stronger candidate for attorney general than she was. But I think -- excuse me --

MR. LEHRER: No, no, go ahead.

MR. TAYLOR: By being so public about it, I mean, part of the problem here is leaks in what they say, and the President-elect is saying, I'm going to have a cabinet that looks like America by sort of laying -- and then you say --

MR. LEHRER: Key word being "looks."

MR. TAYLOR: Right. And when you say we're only going to have a woman for attorney general and then when you say, well, we have so and so who's a front-runner for this Department, but, whoops, we'd better drop him because we need a couple of more Hispanics or something like that, that's part of what's created the really unfortunate appearance.

MS. DREW: I think if he hadn't talked about it, Jim, and just done it, it would have been a lot better. We also got a whiff of something else about Clinton, and some of us have been watching for a while, maybe a little indecisiveness. Now, it's okay if you take your time in making big decisions and you make good decisions, but at some point you have to make decisions. I have a feeling if he hadn't given himself the Christmas eve cutoff he probably still wouldn't have settled it.

MR. LEHRER: John, the looks of this cabinet aside, the class picture thing, how do they just stack up as people to run various departments and run the Government of the United States?

MR. SEARS: Oh, I think individually they stack up very well, but again whether this will work or not will depend upon what they get from the President. When you have a cabinet, when you're President, you must give the cabinet direction. They must know what you think. They must be willing to follow that, and add to it their own advice, that's true, but follow that. Now, I think what we're all wondering here is whether there's something here to follow.

MR. LEHRER: Some people have suggested, Elizabeth, that Bill Clinton really intends that you go through this list when we could. In most of these areas, he intends to be the real secretary in some of these areas, education being one, and there are several others that come to mind, is that correct?

MS. DREW: Well, I think it's right. He's done a lot of reading about the presidency and has been -- somebody said Bill Clinton learns better from other people's mistakes than any politician there is, so they particularly made a study of the Tartar period. This is all designed for a strong presidency, and I think a sense that he and his wife have that they can kind of run everything, they tried to run the campaign while they were in it. I think he's going to find out he can have a strong presidency and a strong White House staff but he can't run everything.

MR. LEHRER: All right. We'll leave it there. Elizabeth, John, Stuart, thank you very much. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again, the other major stories of this Christmas eve, President Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five other officials indicated in the Iran-contra Affair. On the NewsHour tonight, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh said the pardon was the final card in an Iran-contra cover-up. He also said President Bush had withheld his own notes of Iran- contra meetings, and there was more violence in the occupied territories over Israel's expulsion of 400 suspected Palestinian militants. Good night and Merry Christmas, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Same to you, Robert. Have a nice holiday evening and day tomorrow, you all. And we'll see you here tonight with a discussion of the problems of children in the United States and around the world. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.