The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight an April 15th discussion on if and how to change our federal tax system: experts from last night's presidential town meeting on race and sports; two Pulitzer Prize winners, the Grand Forks North Dakota Herald and poet Charles Wright; plus an Anne Taylor Fleming essay on privacy. It all follows our summary of the news this Wednesday. NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: President Clinton promised federal job assistance for Alabama tornado victims today. He did so during a visit to Pratt City outside Birmingham, one of the hardest hit areas. Thirty-three people died, more than one hundred and sixty others were injured by a tornado that tore through the state last week. Mr. Clinton also announced a national effort to help rebuild churches destroyed. He said federal aid checks for families and businesses were on their way. He praised the victims' strength and courage.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: My friends, the road to recovery is long. Your grief and your pain are profound. It will take weeks, months, even years, to rebuild all that has been destroyed. But the process of restoration has begun because the most important thing you have--your spirit--was not destroyed. And we look forward to working with you all the way.

JIM LEHRER: The president flew to Alabama from Houston, where he participated in a town hall meeting on race last night. He was joined by sports figures in a discussion about race and athletics. Mr. Clinton said sports are leading the country toward a more harmonious society but there is still much work to do. It was broadcast live on cable television's ESPN. We'll have excerpts later in the program. On Angel Francisco Breard of Paraguay was executed last night in Virginia. The world court at the Hague, Netherlands, had asked the U.S. to spare his life. The government of Paraguay told the court Breard had been denied the right to seek legal assistance from his country in violation of international law. He was convicted of the 1992 murder and attempted rape of a Virginia woman. At the State Department Spokesman James Rubin explained the Department's position.

JAMES RUBIN, State Department Spokesman: We wanted to determine whether he had been prejudiced by the lack of counselor assistance, and, if so, we would respond appropriately. We did a painstaking review, showing that Mr. Breard had not been prejudiced. He spoke good English. He had a fair trial with good lawyers and the support of his family. This case does show, however, how important it is for federal, state, and local law enforcement officials in the United States to be aware of the U.S. obligation to notify foreign nationals of their right to counselor access. This right is of great importance to foreigners here, and it is of particular concern to the secretary for Americans overseas.

JIM LEHRER: Secretary of State Albright had asked the governor of Virginia for a stay of execution, which he rejected. In case you didn't know, this is April 15th, federal income tax day. U.S. post offices will be open late tonight for last-minute filers. Midnight is the deadline. Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rosotti used today to highlight his plans to make the agency more taxpayer-friendly. He told a House committee IRS agents will receive conflict resolution training to handle tax collection with more courtesy. We'll have more on taxes right after this News Summary. Women who get mammograms should be better prepared to get an incorrect result. That was a conclusion of a study published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. It said a woman who receives a mammogram every year for a decade runs a 50/50 chance of having a cancer false alarm. The researcher said patients should be warned of the likelihood so they are less frightened by follow-up procedures. In South Africa today former President P. W. Botha went on trial for refusing to appear before the country's Truth & Reconciliation Commission. It was created to examine human rights abuses committed under the old system of apartheid. We have more from Lindsey Hilsum of Independent Television News.

LINDSAY TAYLOR, ITN: P. W. Botha, the country's hard-line president for 11 years, had defied the commission and questioned its authority to call into account for events during the apartheid years. Right up until the last the commission chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had offered the 82-year-old Botha a deal, effectively a last chance to agree to give evidence and so avoid the contempt trial and possible two-year prison sentence. Last night an agreement was said to be close but by this morning a commission lawyer's verdict of Botha said it all.

LAWYER: He's blown it.

LINDSAY TAYLOR: For Archbishop Tutu, for whom the search for truth has always gone hand in hand with the quest for reconciliation, there was clear disappointment.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU, Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The commission in his view has done nothing but humiliate his people, as he says, and I don't think anything we have tried to say, to do, would move him from that particular position.

LINDSAY TAYLOR: With many Afrikaners and right wingers lining up behind P.W. Botha, he's come to symbolize the lingering racial tensions between the old and new South Africa.

JIM LEHRER: That report was by Lindsay Taylor not Lindsey Hilsum. In Northern Ireland today the Reverend Ian Paisley called on Protestants to reject the peace accord reached last Friday. Paisley is the head of the Democratic Unionist Party, which refused to participate in peace talks. He said the deal would lead to the end of Northern Ireland's 77-year union with Britain. The agreement will be submitted to a referendum May 22nd. It must be approved by a majority of the electorate, which is 55 percent pro-British Protestant. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to taxes, race and sports, two Pulitzer Prize winners for community service and good poetry, and an Anne Taylor Fleming essay. FOCUS - BREAKING THE CODE

JIM LEHRER: A very taxing story is first tonight. Kwame Holman begins.

KWAME HOLMAN: The annual ritual of taxpayers rushing to file last minute returns is well underway. With the help of tax advisors or on their own, Americans will spend some six billion hours to meet today's midnight deadline for filing federal returns. They are trying to comply with a system a growing number of people inside and outside government say has become too complicated and burdensome. Individual tax rates begin at 15 percent and rise according to income to a top rate of 39.6 percent for the wealthiest Americans. But it's not that simple. The tax code contains hundreds of thousands of words laying out the rules for everything from deducting homeowners' mortgage interest to writing off a business's purchase of new equipment. All the complexity has prompted a growing number of calls from Congress to throw out the tax code altogether. Republican Congressmen Billy Tauzin and Dick Armey have been touring the country with dueling tax reform plans. Tauzin advocates a national sales tax to replace the income tax.

BILLY TAUZIN: Under our plan, there's no withholding of taxes from your paycheck. You get a big fat paycheck. You get more money to spend in the market place. Under our plan there is no hidden taxes.

KWAME HOLMAN: House Majority Leader Armey proposes a version of one of the most-discussed tax reform plans--a so-called flat tax.

REP. DICK ARMEY: And Armey flat tax, we say that we give you, if you are a family of four, as much as $33,800 that's exempt from taxation. Take care of your family first. Only after that, do you apply the 17 percent tax. There's no loopholes, no tax breaks, no social engineering.

KWAME HOLMAN: And on the Democratic side, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardthas proposed a 10 percent rate for most taxpayers but says he's open to any ideas that will overhaul the tax system.

REP. DICK GEPHARDT: The thing I like about what Mr. Armey is doing and Mr. Tauzin is that they agree that we need basic fundamental reform. I agree with that. I don't agree with their suggestions for how to do it, but we do agree on the need to do it and the desire to do it. And I would hope that through the next year we could have an ongoing national discussion of this issue because taxpayers and the citizens need to be involved in this discussion of what's at stake.

KWAME HOLMAN: However other voices, including President Clinton, warn against reformthat goes too far.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: We have to continue to be open to changes in the tax law and in the way the IRS operates and in all these systematic things that we have to continue to modernize. Of course we must, but we mustn't buy a pig in a poke. We have to continue to proceed with discipline. Scrapping the home mortgage deductions, scrapping other middle class tax cuts without presenting a clear alternative is simply reckless for the economy.

KWAME HOLMAN: But for now the 15-volume U.S. Tax Code, which has tripled in size in the last decade, is what today's tax filers have to work with.

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has more.

MARGARET WARNER: And for more on the possibilities and prospects of fundamental tax changes we're joined by Marvin Chirelstein, a tax law professor at Columbia University and author of "Federal Income Taxation," a widely used legal textbook. Denis Calabrese, chief strategist for Americans for Fair Taxation, a grassroots advocacy group that wants to replace the current income tax system. And Jeffrey Birnbaum, Washington bureau chief for Fortune Magazine. He is co-author of "Showdown at Guchi Gulch," the story of the last time Congress and the White House overhauled the tax code in 1986. Welcome all. Jeffrey Birnbaum, every year at this time--at tax time, every campaign year we hear politicians talking about changing the tax code. Why does our tax code look the way it does today?

JEFFREY BIRNBAUM, Fortune Magazine: Well, the modern tax code was begun in 1913, there was one briefly--most people don't realize it--back during the Civil War. Lincoln actually had one. But after the 16th Amendment was passed, 16th Amendment to the Constitution, allowing a tax on income in this country, from 1913 until now, the tax code has basically grown. It started as a 14-page law in 1913. It was a one-page form. And now the income tax code is over 9,000 pages long. The real break in this was World War II basically. It started out from 1913 to World War II basically was just a few hundred thousand of the richest Americans paid income taxes. And then World War II made it a mass tax. And the rates have gone up and down and they've been high as 94 percent. There have been several major tax cuts and through the years some very serious disagreement about the income tax have been very controversial. I think it reached a crescendo back in 1985 and 1986, which led to the largest rewrite of the modern tax code in history, the 1986 Tax Reform Act. And it reduced the number of tax rates that had once been quite large,just down to two, and reduced the amount of exemptions to the tax code. But I think in each case it's been--the tax code has been like a bush where it's been trimmed back to be trimmed back almost to the roots, and it was trimmed back in 1986. But, like a bush, it grows back.

MARGARET WARNER: With more branches.

JEFFREY BIRNBAUM: More branches everywhere. And I think that's, more or less, the history. You can trim it back, but it always grows back with special exemptions, more tax rates, and almost anything you do leads to that. At least, that's been the history of the income tax.

MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Calabrese, you'd like to buck that history. You really think the tax code needs radical restructuring. Why? What is fundamentally wrong with the current system?

DENIS CALABRESE, Americans for Fair Taxation: Well, the popular things to discuss that are wrong with it are things that Jeffrey was talking about. It's a tremendously complex tax code. Ironically, if you want to be honest and comply, it's almost impossible. There were 34 million civil penalties given out last year by the IRS. And if you want to cheat, it's easy. It's the worst of both worlds. Additionally, it punishes the things we try to encourage in this country, which are saving and investment, and people trying to improve their condition through building a nest egg. And we punish that with our tax code. What we need to do is we need to tax people on what they consume, what they take out of the economy, and not what they produce, or what they use to build the economy. So the foundation of this--and I like Jeffrey's analogy of a bush--we try to trim it back. It grows even more. What we need to do, as Congressman Bill Archer likes to say, is tear it out at its roots and start with a consumption-based tax.

MARGARET WARNER: And, Professor Chirelstein, I know you disagree, but make the case for the current tax system.

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN, Columbia Law School: Well, one case to be made is that the system is immensely successful in collecting revenues. We collect a trillion, three hundred billion dollars a year through the administration of our tax laws, and that's done largely by voluntary compliance with those laws. And I think anyone would regard that as an immense achievement. Now, as to complexity, the code is too complex, too long. No one would deny that. But the reason for complexity is that Congress tries to do so much with the Internal Revenue Code beside raising taxes. The consequence of that is that the Internal Revenue Service is administering dozens and dozens and dozens of different programs for which the tax code is used as a vehicle.

MARGARET WARNER: Like what?

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN: Well, for example, the home mortgage interest deduction. We provide--the tax code provides a subsidy to homeowners because we think home ownership is a valid national goal. It's the Internal Revenue system that is the vehicle for that subsidy. Yet another simple example, we want to subsidize charities because we think charities do good things. Again, the Internal Revenue Code is the vehicle for the charitable subsidy, and the Internal Revenue Service is left to administer it. If all of the various programs that Congress supports--many of which are valid and desirable-- were stripped out of the income tax, it would be quite a simple system, so my point to you is that it isn't the nature of the income tax that leads to such complexity, but the immense quantity of special programs for which the income tax is being used.

MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Calabrese, what do you think should be the objective, if Congress were to get serious about really overhauling the tax code, what's the ultimate objective, other than collecting revenue? I mean, is it fairness? Is it efficiency? What should it be?

DENIS CALABRESE: Well, I think both those are laudable goals: fairness and efficiency. We studied this for quite a few years among the American public and with tax experts. I will tell you what the American public wants. They want a fair tax code. If Congress wants to subsidize or encourage a specific activity, they need to do it honestly, and that is appropriate the money and vote the money for it.

MARGARET WARNER: You're talking about the activities that Professor Chirelstein just mentioned.

DENIS CALABRESE: And many others. Anything that Congress wants to support, the honest way is to do it visibly, is to appropriate money for that and let everybody see it. The tax code hides--and the professor is right--many things that Congress wants to do it rewards its friends and punishes enemies through the tax code. The American public is pretty straightforward in what they want. The government needs to raise money. That's fine. The best way to do that is to let you take home your whole paycheck so you eliminate the federal income tax, the corporate tax, the gift and estate tax, capital gains, no more withholding from the paycheck, you take home your whole paycheck because you earned it, and then if you save it or invest it, you're not taxed on it. If you go out and spend your money, then you're taxed by the federal government. That is a fair system. That is a loophole-less system, and it also can succeed in raising the requisite amount of revenue for the government.

JEFFREY BIRNBAUM: I wanted to make just a couple of points. One is that--what was just described as a national retail sales tax, which is one of the alternatives out there. Another is a single rate or near single rate--a flat tax that would continue to tax income, rather than just consumption. It's another alternative that's out there. Both of these alternatives-- in fact, all of the tax overhaul ideas that are out there have a problem with them, politically speaking, and that is--there is a war between simplicity and fairness. I'm sort of taking off on the professor's notion, that is, you could have a very, very simple tax like the retail sales tax or a single rate flat income tax but you would eliminate the kinds of exceptions and subsidies that a lot of people do consider fair, like the mortgage interest deduction, the charitable deduction, the deduction for state and local taxes. That was a very big issue back in the 1986 tax reform bill. The reason for the complexity is not simply that the tax code is used to conduct all sorts of social programs and economic programs but giving things that the American people as voters ask their representatives to give them. And so the fairer, that is the more of these things that people want and consider fair and important, the more they get, the more difficult it is to also have a simple tax.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor, would you agree with that, the fairness is sort of in the eye of the beholder?

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN: Well, I think there's an aspect of fairness that hasn't really been mentioned, and that's the distribution of the tax burden. If we have a retail--national retail sales tax, or the sort of flat tax, which means a wage tax, that Congressman Armey proposes, the distribution of the tax burden in this country would change very dramatically. Lower income people under a national retail sales tax, lower income people would paya higher rate of tax as a percentage of their income, and that would continue to be true up to income levels of about $75,000.

MARGARET WARNER: And is that because--

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN: And at that point--

MARGARET WARNER: Excuse me just for interrupting for a minute--is that because people at the lower income basically have to spend almost everything they earn--

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN: Of course, that's exactly--

MARGARET WARNER: --and the--

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN: That's exactly why. At the $75,000 level, it turns around and the rate of tax decreases and continues to go down the richer you get, the larger your income. At a plausible rate of sales tax the highest 1 percent in this country would save taxes relative to their present burden of about $80,000 a year on average. Someone has got to pick those taxes up if the plan is to be revenue neutral and the persons who would pick it up, of course, are persons much farther down the income scale. If that strikes you as fair, I will be astonished.

DENIS CALABRESE: Let me respond to that because that's the regressivity argument. Although some sales taxes have that problem, if you study, for instance, the fair tax, you can build a tax, the fair tax, for instance, that is as progressive as the current system. The way you do that is this: You repeal the payroll tax, which is the most regressive feature of our current tax system, which helps the lowest income group the most. Second of all, you allow them not to pay taxes on essential goods and services. So anybody up to the poverty level, let's say family of four, $15,000, pays no sales tax, and third of all, you strip out all the hidden taxes in the products they're paying right now. When that lower-income person goes to the store and buys a good or a service, there are income taxes hidden within that product, the corporate tax, the payroll tax for those employees who made it, and compliance costs. When you take all that out, when you give 'em a rebate, and when you repeal the payroll tax, you can make a tax that is a national retail sales tax that is progressive as the current system. It can be done. It is not mutually exclusive to have fairness and simplicity in our tax code.

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN: Well, I have to say, if I may, that I don't think any economic study I now of bears that out. But in any event, we've got--

DENIS CALABRESE: We've got a few we'll show you.

MARVIN CHIRELSTEIN: If you substituted a retail sales tax for our income tax, corporate income tax, payroll tax, you would set that retail sales tax at a level that would be unadministerable. It would be around 30 percent if it's to be revenue neutral, and the system, itself, would break down very speedily.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let me get Jeff Birnbaum in for a final comment. Is there any prospect in this political year or in this Congress for having any kind of radical tax overhaul?

JEFFREY BIRNBAUM: Probably not in this current millennium, I think I should point out. The next one is possible. To add a little political reality to this, I believe that most of the politicians who are talking about a major overhaul, though sincere, I think they mostly want to talk about it and not enact it because tax reform in any of its guises--and we've talked about several here--is a very potent political issue because people dislike and distrust the current income tax so much. And they don't want it changed before they can get voters to attract voters to vote in favor of someone who does want to change the current system. So nothing in this year, nothing next year. My guess is thatthe only chance of a major tax overhaul of any of the kinds we're talking about will not even be possible until at least the year 2001, after the next presidential election, and then only if both the White House and the Congress are in the hands of the same political party. It's actually a better chance if it's in the Republicans' because they're campaigning so hard on the issue.

MARGARET WARNER: Well, great, thank you very much. We have to end it there.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the race dialogue on sports, the newspaper in Grand Forks, the new Pulitzer poet, and an Anne Taylor Fleming essay. FOCUS - TALKING ABOUT RACE

JIM LEHRER: Last night in Houston, President Clinton attended a town meeting that focused on sports and race. A panel of prominent sports figures joined the president for the more than 90-minute event moderated by ESPN Anchor Bob Ley. Here are some excerpts.

BOB LEY, ESPN: Thank you, Mr. President, for being here. We deeply appreciate it. I know your race initiative has been underway for seven or eight months. There are problems in this country, issues in this country. As we talk tonight race and sports, what can this dialogue bring to the nation at large, for there are bigger issues than simply those in sports?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I'd like to say a couple of things I think we can achieve. First of all, America, rightly or wrongly, is a sports crazy country, and we often see games as a metaphor or a symbol of what we are as a people. So I think by dealing with both the positive things which have happened in terms of opportunity for people of all races, and people getting together and working together, and the continuing challenges in athletics, I think just by doing that we learn more about the rest of the country and what needs to be done.

BOB LEY: Well, John Thompson, several times in the last few years --'89 you walked off over issues with the NCAA; '94 there was nearly a boycott by the Black Coaches Association. Is it still an issue, though, in sports where you have to almost verge on civil disobedience '90s style to bring attention to these issues?

JOHN THOMPSON, Georgetown University, Head Basketball Coach Since 1972: I don't know whether you have to do a civil disobedience, but I think you've got to create a consciousness of the fact that there's still a lot of people who are able to participate in the cotton field who is not able to be the foreman or not able to be the boss, or not able to have that opportunity. And that's what I think you try to do. You've got to be able to talk about it sensibly without people becoming so sensitive to it and acting as if it doesn't exist. Several kids who are able to play at universities in this country who wouldn't even be considered for a job, I mean, that's a fact. It's a sensitive subject; it doesn't mean that you're ready to become hostile, but you cannot close your eyes and act as if this doesn't exist. And I think that that's very important for us to discuss it, and that's why you need to be commended for having this type of a show, so we can discuss it intelligently.

BOB LEY: Well, why is it so sensitive?

JOHN THOMPSON: Why is it so sensitive -- it's very sensitive because of the very fact that, first of all, a lot of folks want to act as if it doesn't exist. It's obvious by the fact that, you know, if you look in our society today at the number of kids who participate particularly in basketball, which is the area that I'm in--if you look at the number of athletic directors that are in this country, if you look at the number ofbasketball coaches that are in this country, it's amazing to me how a person can be so competent as a player, so incompetent, and his knowledge leaves him once he graduates from a university. And that same university does not select him to participate at any level. You know, and I think that becomes sensitive when you discuss that with folks. It shouldn't be sensitive. You should be able to openly sit down, and you should be able to talk about it. But it's a fact.

BOB LEY: Well, Jackie, let me ask you, in East St. Louis, so involved with the kids, and also on the flip side now, the business world--where do you think it's easier to talk about it, among kids--among suits?

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE, 3-Time Olympic Gold Medalist: Well, personally, I think having the dialogue, it starts there, but we can talk and we can talk, but people need to listen, and people need to do something about it. And for me, even working with kids, we talk about diversity, a melting pot, you're hearing from great players, coaches, owners, and you're talking about also that setting an example--and you wonder why kids don't want to be in administration or administrator, or why they don't strive to want to be a major league owner, or an NBA owner--because they don't see that. But then yet and still we come together and we talk about this race initiative. It's subtle racism, it's hidden racism. There's hidden agendas, and there's things that we as people have to deal with. But also we as people have to be listening and want to deal with it, and not just brush things under the table and say, oh, well, when the next person comes along--because it's going to be the next person, the next person after that. [Applause]

BOB LEY: Okay. Well, we are talking about it tonight.

JIM BROWN, Former Professional Football Player: No one up here has made an important point about economics. We have-- [applause]--we have athletes and coaches that are black that are making millions of dollars. You have not brought that subject up. You have not said to them, why don't you hire black lawyers, agents and managers? [applause] Those black lawyers, agents and managers would be handling those investment dollars. Right now the black investment dollars go into other neighborhoods. [applause] We stood up and we talk about one more black coach. One more black coach is a symbolic situation. Those investment dollars are the way to rebuild communities, show people that we can have racial unity, and that we understand the principles of economics. So I'd like to see someone address that and get away from these simplistic stereotypes, because I don't particularly care about what anybody thinks about me. [applause] I want to get--

BOB LEY: Go ahead, sir.

KEYSHAWN JOHNSON, Professional Football Player: I have an African-American attorney. [laughter among audience] But I didn't hire him because he was African-American, I gave him the opportunity for the application, to fill it out, to inquire, but I wanted to know if he could handle the job. I interviewed many whites, all across the board, some of the top agents in the business--as well as my investment financial people happen to be black. But they fit the mold of things that I want to do. I want to get back into my community, put the dollars in industry. [applause] So those are the things that I do.

JOHN THOMPSON: But let me caution you about that statement. It pulls at me and it also hurts me because I am also very sympathetic with what has occurred in our society, and I am very sensitive to the fact of what Jim is saying and what she is saying. But, you know, how far do you go? Do I pick a black dentist, do I pick a black lawyer, do I pick a black--you know, society has caused that. I didn't cause that. Society made us racial--I hate to use the word "racist" because we all get very nervous when people start talking about racism. But society has made us racial. But you have to constantly be in that struggle of being able to deal with that. That's the struggle that society has caused, and that's why these kinds of conversations are extremely important. The racial composition of my team--whites will come to you and say, because my team is predominantly black that you're a racist. Well, I'm an Uncle Tom to blacks; I'm a racist -- [laughter]--and, you know, and I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to tell you something. I don't give a damn what either side says. [laughter and applause.]

BOB LEY: You want to win, right? You want to win.

BOB LEY: Let me ask the President, if I could, sir: Do you think athletes have a special responsibility to have a social conscience to act, to be involved in the communities?

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I think if you have a special gift, if God gave you something that other people don't normally have, and no matter how hard they work they can't get there, then you owe more back. That's what I believe.

JIM BROWN: We have the resources to create any industry that we want to if we come together and use the same principles. That is the way it goes. [Applause.]

BOB LEY: Go ahead.

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE: But also, you could talk about creating those resources, but you've got to deal with the individual. Do I want to do that? You've got to take it to each one of those individuals you're talking about and building that base.

JIM BROWN: No doubt about it. You don't have--

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE: If you don't want to do that--you can't force them to do it. I understand how--

JIM BROWN: We all have a choice.

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE: Yes, we have a choice, and that choice is not for us to do that.

JIM BROWN: And so does that man, and so does that man.

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE: Right, that's true.

JIM BROWN: That's my only point.

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE: But when you're talking about blacks building that capital, and those people that capital, if they don't want to put that capital in there, we can't force them as human beings. We can't do that.

JIM BROWN: Does that go for whites, too?

JACKIE JOYNER-KERSEE: That goes for whites, too. But they will go and they do that. They would do that. But you can't criticize one if they don't want to do it. If I made all this money and I want my money invested here, I have a right to do that. That is my choice. That's why we live in America, because we have choice. [applause]

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I hope that everybody who's in an athletic program also learns good life skills to make good choices, good decisions. We didn't talk much about that tonight, but I think that's important--that the lessons learned from athletics carry over into good citizenship,including attitudes about people of different races. If that happens, we're going to be a lot better of. [applause]

JIM LEHRER: The program was part of a special advisory commission on race the president set up. He asked it to prepare a report on race relations in America by the end of the year. FOCUS - PULITZER WINNERS

JIM LEHRER: Now, two Pulitzer Prize winners. First, the Grand Forks North Dakota Herald. It was awarded the Public Service prize yesterday for its coverage of the Red River floods that devastated the town a year ago. Fred DeSam Lazaro of KTCA-St. Paul Minneapolis told the newspaper story in a report then, and here's a second look.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The headline in yesterday's Grand Forks Herald was both descriptive of the city and a triumph for its newspaper. Its building was gutted, along with nearly 120 years of history recorded in its archives. By surviving to record perhaps the most devastating event in Grand Forks history, the Herald preserved for its residents the one remaining link to their abandoned community, according to editor Mike Jacobs.

MIKE JACOBS, Editor: Our people are scattered everywhere, and there's no--there's nothing tangible about Grand Forks anymore, except the Herald. So in a weird sort of way Grand Forks is now the Herald. It's the tangible part of Grand Forks. And we just really feel like it's important--it's a great mission to keep that part of the community alive and vital while we go through this incredible, searing pain. Many people are depending on us, I think, to sort of represent the community while it's in the diaspora.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The Herald is depending on the facilities of the Pioneer Press, a corporate sibling 200 miles to the South in St. Paul. The nerve center--the newsroom--has moved about 10 miles West to the Manvel North Dakota Public School in what normally serves as the seventh grade classroom. What's close is the deadline to get stories to St. Paul. The usual deadline--11 PM--is now advanced five hours. That puts even more pressure on reporters and editors dealing with the last-minute rush, plus the late-breaking story yesterday of one more community in potential danger.

MIKE JACOBS: [talking to staff] Can we get somebody to make a quick phone to Deep River Falls? Apparently the lake is leaking, and they're sandbagging the town. There's a dam above Deep River Falls. So we need to get somebody to call--the Hennington county sheriff. Suzie's going to do it.

SUE ELLYN SCALETTA, Reporter: [on phone] Hi. This is Sue Ellyn Scaletta with the Grand Forks Herald. We've had a report that you got a--the lake is leaking, and something is coming under the dam, and you're sandbagging, is that right?

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Copy editor Dale Stensgaard came to Scaletta's assistance. He tried first to buy her more time from St. Paul, where the paper was being laid out for the presses.

DALE STENSGAARD, Copy Editor: We're supposed to have our stories to you in seven minutes, but how much time do they have to paginate and do a quick update, if they have to? All right. Well, I'm going to call AP. You know, if that reservoir overflows, you just have to have it.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: As Scaletta rushed to complete her story, Stensgaard alerted the wire service to keep abreast of any developments.

[STAFF DISCUSSING ARTICLE]

SPOKESMAN: We have a crib sheet for--

SUE ELLYN SCALETTA: Do you want to put a headline on there?

SPOKESMAN: Yeah. We'll do that.

SUE ELLYN SCALETTA: Do you have the name of the dam?

SPOKESMAN: No, we don't. It probably doesn't have a name.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Finally the story was ready to go to St. Paul, about 20 minutes after Editor Jacobs passed along his tip.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: How much time do you have?

MIKE JACOBS: Minus 15 seconds. It should be there at 6 o'clock, but most of the stories are there. We're just sending the last ones up now.

SPOKESMAN: Chris is entering the last story now.

SPOKESMAN: Incredible. Incredible

SPOKESMAN: We've got to start writing and editing earlier.

MIKE JACOBS: We're going to have a meeting. Last night my biggest priority was to get everybody eight hours of sleep. I saw you in the middle of the night, and it wasn't a pretty sight.

NEWS PERSON: No. I felt awful.

MIKE JACOBS: We did it again under really--[applause from staff]--under really what I thought today were the most trying circumstances.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The adrenalin rush wore off quickly as Editor Jacobs discussed various logistical concerns--finding a printing plant that's closer by, how to coexist with schoolchildren when they return, payroll time cards. The list got under Jacobs' skin by the time it reached a persistent staff request for more cell phones.

MIKE JACOBS: Quit bugging me about the telephones! You know, you're driving me to distraction with these logistical questions when all I really want to be doing is putting out a newspaper. You know, we're trying our best to solve the logistical problems. I can't--

STAFF MEMBER: We're asking questions, Mike.

MIKE JACOBS: This is the only question any of you have asked me today. Can I have a cell phone? Yes, God damn it; when I get 'em, I'll give you one. I get the first one.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Fatigue was clearly taking its toll. Moving and publishing a newspaper from scratch, covering a 500-year flood, and never far from consciousness, nagging worries and regrets.

MIKE JACOBS: And when I think about what I wish I'd taken with me--I mean, it's a very long list, but the thing that's worst about it probably is the personal things that editors at the Herald have done over the years. You know, my predecessors did a day book in Grand Forks history that I was trying to keep up. It can't be replaced. Ryan Bawkn, who is our sports editor, was writing a book, and he had given me the proofs--not the proofs but the printout--and they were in my briefcase. I was going to take them home with me. They were in his pile of books. They're both in the building--I mean, that's all gone. So the past and the potential, I mean, we each mourn--we mourn for different things.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: You haven't started to think about what happens at home either, I suspect, most of you?

MIKE JACOBS: Well, Suzanne and I have agreed that it's only stuff. I mean, it's stuff that I really like, it's stuff that I paid a lot of money for. It's stuff that I've collected all my life. I mean, I had one of the--one of the finest collections of North Dakota books in existence. I worked assiduously for 40 years, 35 years to collect it. I've been collecting rare bird books. I have books that are irreplaceable, and I miss them.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For most staffers here the intense routine, the cramped quarters all provided distraction from the immense personal cost everyone here must pay.

SUE ELLYN SCALETTA: You watch the coverage on TV, and you watch the footage, and you watch--go by my house--go down Boyd Drive so you can see what your house is doing--but at the same time you don't really want to know. It's not something--you can't handle all of it at once, so emotionally you just sort of put yourself on "hold" and get out and get the story, even though you're part of the story in a sense.

MIKE JACOBS: It's an unimaginable event. I mean, this has not ever happened, and, you know, we had all the science, we had all the predictions, we had all the elevation maps, you know. We were out there. We literally wore ourselves out. I mean, I still hurt from sandbagging. You know, we wore ourselves out, and we knew we were going to win because we've always won before. And it just didn't occur to us that the river has that kind of power.

JIM LEHRER: A second Pulitzer winner and to Elizabeth Farnsworth in San Francisco.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Charles Wright and his collection of verse, "Black Zodiac," won the prize for poetry this year. Wright is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of 11 other poetry books, as well as works of criticism and translation. He was born in Tennessee educated at Davidson College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Rome. He has won many prizes, including the American Book Award in poetry, which went to "Black Zodiac" earlier this year. Thank you for being with us and congratulations.

CHARLES WRIGHT, Pulitzer Prize, Poetry: Thank you very much, Elizabeth. Nice to be here.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Please tell us about "Black Zodiac." The book begins in the spring and ends in cold December, but something tells me these poems weren't all written in one year.

CHARLES WRIGHT: No. It was about, oh, two, two and a half years, and the seasons were something of a background for the poems which came out of my daily life about the daily life of a person trying to come to terms with how things passed, where they come from, where they go, and various luminations on that sort of thing.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Why the name "Black Zodiac?" I read the poems, and I wasn't sure.

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, that's fairly complicated because it has to do with the overall trajectory of a large group of poems that I've been doing over the last 27 years. Basically, it means that the end result of all one's strivings in my case is going to be as far as only as one can see, that one cannot go past the Zodiac, cannot go past the stars, that one is forever here, and that's okay. But one sometimes wonders that perhaps it might be nice to be elsewhere sometimes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So many of the poems are about time. And you've said that the key subject of poetry is the clock. What do you mean by that?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, I said that once. That was one line in a poem that I think that the true subject of all poems is a clock, I think, because time is what--time is the great destroyer. Time is what feeds us and takes it away at the same time. Time is what starts us and time is what ends us. We live in time. We would like to live outside of time. But we can't, of course. And so the clock is what we all write about. Our lives are all about the clock. It starts at 12, and it ends at 12.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: As you said, the poems are about what you see around you. Many are in your own backyard, it seemed to me. Is that what you like to write about?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, that's where I find myself sitting a lot of the times, and all my poems basically are about the metaphysics of the quotidian, the daily life, as I said earlier, and I'm very attuned to what I look at, and landscape is something that's quite ravishing to me and is seductive. And I'm always looking at and thinking about how the exterior landscape reflects the interior and vice versa. And almost all my poems begin with something I've seen, something observed as opposed to some idea I have for a poem.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Would you read a poem for us, please?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Sure. I want--these are all pretty long poems in "Black Zodiac." But I'll read a section of a longer poem. The poem is called "Disjecta Membra," which means "Scattered Parts," and it's the last poem in the book, which is balanced by the first poem in the book, "Apologia Pro Vita Sula," that's the Explanation of Life. And these books--the whole collection--this is one small section of Part One of a three-part poem: "Death's still the secret of life, the garden reminds us, or vice versa. It's complicated. Unlike the weed surge and blossom surge of early fall, unlike the insect husks and the spider's tracery, crickets and rogue crows gearing up for afternoon sing-a-long, the cottontail hides out in the open, hunts under the apple tree between the guillotine of sunlight and guillotine of shade beyond my neighbor's hedge. The blades rise, and the blades fall, but rabbit sits tight, smart one. Sit tight and hold on. Sit tight. Hold on."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I love that. "Death's still the secret of life, the garden reminds us, or vice versa," I was intrigued by that. What would vice versa be?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, that life is still the secret of death, I suppose.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And the bunny in the face of these implacable forces, you say, "Hold on." It's sort of what you do yourself, right?

CHARLES WRIGHT: That's what we all do, of course. What we try to.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: A review in the Richmond Times Dispatch last year called you a "steadfastly Southern poet." Are you?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, I was born in the South. I'm not quite sure what they mean. I might--I don't know that the Indianapolis paper would say the same thing. But I feel myself Southern, yes. I'm not sure I'm in the Southern literary tradition, which is much more of a narrative tradition than my poems show. My poems tend to be more accretional and juxtapositional, as opposed to telling, telling stories. The story line runs underneath the surface of the poem most of the time in my work, as opposed to overtly say.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: When did you first tart writing poetry?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Actually I started writing quite late. I was 23, and I was in the army in Verona, Italy, and I went out to a place called Lake Garder and to the Sierra Leone Peninsula and read a poem there that was about sitting at the Sierra Leone Peninsula and looking out over Lake Garder, and I said, well, this is pretty nice, maybe I could do this. There's not really a story here. It's just a description of a landscape. Of course, it was much more than that, and I thought it sounded pretty good. I didn't know at the time that it sounded good because it was written in iambic pentameter verse. But ever since I read that poem, I've been trying to write them.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Some say you write as a painter paints, that you see this landscape and you suffuse it with light, or you remove light from it. Do you see it that way?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, as I say, I'm very acted upon by what I see, and I think my poems are visual, and they are oral, and their sound patterns are important to me, and the visuality of them is very important to me. And I tend to try to layer the poems together to do accretional lines the way a good painter would do layers of paint. That's true. I guess I'm a closet painter, but I can't paint, and so I'm stuck with what I have, which is language.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Mr. Wright, what do you find in your teaching and in your travels when you're reading poetry? What do you find about the state of poetry and its audience?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, the audience seems to be getting bigger all the time. I'm not sure if that's a result of the--of it being taught more often and more intensely and in colleges, I think, probably it is, but I also think that it's a kind of refuge from the hullabaloo of everything that's going on. And there's a certain side of everyone that he likes to expose himself to from time to time, some of us more often than others. But everybody has it, and everybody does it, and poetry is our last refuge often.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You got the Pulitzer. What does it mean to you? Poetry can be rather lonely and even with its new popularity most poetry books don't sell in great numbers. Does the Pulitzer help that loneliness?

CHARLES WRIGHT: Oh, nothing helps loneliness. I mean- -you either feed off of it, or it feeds off you. And one tries to feed off of it. I don't--you don't write poetry to sell books. You write poetry because you either have to, or it's been given to you to do so. Every time I sell a book I'm always happy and surprised.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, thank you, Mr. Wright, and congratulations again.

CHARLES WRIGHT: Well, thank you, Elizabeth. Very nice to have been here. ESSAY - PRIVATE LIVES

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, essayist Anne Taylor Fleming considers the loss of privacy in our lives.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: No question, a lot of Americans are feeling fairly prosperous. The economy continues to be good. Crime continues to be down, and except for those of us who've been El Ninoized, there's a general sense of well-being. And no doubt, that sense is affecting the tolerance for the president at the moment. People sense that what he did or didn't do, his private life is his own business. In poll after poll Americans seemed to be saying that, seemed to be maintaining their private life, even a presidential private life, is, indeed, private. Privacy, what a bedrock notion that is to all of us, so fundamental to how we think of ourselves and what it means to be part of a democracy, where no one can invade your home in the dark of night, a sense that there is a private space that allows us to raise our children the way we wish, pray to whom we wish, love whom we wish. Ironically, the word "privacy" doesn't even appear in the Constitution. But scratch an American, any of us regular, old law-abiding citizens, and you'll inevitably find a deep faith in the notion of privacy and a sense that it's eroding for all of us. On any given day in any of our lives there are all kinds of reminders of just how publicly accessible our lives have become. Switch on a computer and voila, there are you, your very own face on some web page you didn't even know existed. That's sort of flattering but a little spooky, nonetheless, because you know it's just the tip of iceberg. Within the data banks computers everywhere, your life history is for the getting. Your marital history, credit history, shopping history, it's all encoded, and there's not a thing you can do about it. And we love these things. They're our new intimate companions, our time savers and time wasters. But they are ready to yield up our vital stats to whomever should want them, a lawyer, IRS investigator, or just an eager-to-score marketer. Add to that the surveillance cameras that now stare down at us from on high. We are being watched now, recorded, in stores, on streets, even sometimes now in private homes, where anxious parents are actually installing their own surveillance equipment so as to monitor the behavior of their nannies. We sympathize, but it's weird. Add to that, of course, the TV cameras, which now also seem to be everywhere, reporters and cameras staking out courthouses and offices and homes, not to mention the tabloidians on celebrity hunts.

WOMAN: I have Tom Crews--

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: There's a general sense that it's all too much, too much hype, too much invasion, too little respect for that ever so fine line between what is legitimately private and what is legitimately public. Of course, we are not the innocents here. We buy the tabloids and the tell-all books. We bare our souls in highbrow memoirs and on low-brow talk shows. We have sabotaged in many ways our own privacy for gain and/or for safety, or expediency. Nobody would suggest what's going on in Washington isn't legally and morally complex and won't play itself out eventually. But in the meantime we're all reckoning with the idea of privacy, of what it is and what it isn't in our own life and how to preserve what's left of it. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Wednesday, President Clinton promised federal job assistance for Alabama tornado victims during his visit at Birmingham. U.S. post offices remained open for last-minute federal income tax filers trying to make the midnight deadline, and a new medical study said women who get yearly mammograms have a 50/50 chance of having a false cancer scare during a ten-year period. We'll see you on-line and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.