The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight Tom Bearden reports on the background and today's hearing about the crash of TWA Flight 800; Margaret Warner conducts conversation three about global warming; and David Gergen has a dialogue with Stephen Ambrose about the citizen soldiers of World War II. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday.NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The cause of the TWA 800 crash remains unknown, but it may have something to do with faulty wiring and flammable vapors in a fuel tank. That was the overview from the first day of public hearings on the crash today in Baltimore. Representatives of the federal government, the aviation industry, the pilots union, and the victims' families assembled in a large convention hall for the week-long hearings. Expert witnesses used computer-generated graphics, among other things, to illustrate the plane's disintegration. The Boeing 747 went down shortly after it left New York's Kennedy Airport for Paris in July 1996. All 230 people on board died. We'll have more on this story right after the News Summary. There was an airplane tragedy in Russia over the weekend. Rescue workers ended their search today for survivors in the Siberian City of Irkutsk. At least 57 people died Saturday when a military cargo plane slammed into an apartment building. Eight are still missing. Russian authorities said the plane's engines failed for reasons still unknown. Vice President Gore addressed the World Climate Summit in Kyoto, Japan, today. He said U.S. negotiators would show greater flexibility in their position on greenhouse gases. U.S. delegates want to cut fuel emissions back to 1990 levels over the next 15 years. European representatives want 1990 levels cut another 15 percent by the year 2010. Gore spoke to the conference during a 17-hour visit to Japan.

VICE PRESIDENT GORE: After talking with our negotiators this morning and after speaking on the telephone from here a short time ago with President Clinton, I am instructing our delegation right now to show increased negotiating flexibility if a comprehensive plan can be put in place, one with realistic targets and timetables, market mechanisms, and the meaningful participation of key developing countries.

JIM LEHRER: We'll have another in our conversation series on global warming later in the program. Representatives of 55 Muslim nations began a three-day Islamic summit in Tehran today. They included people from former combatants Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. It's the largest gathering of foreign leaders in Iran since its 1979 revolution. Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat is often criticized in Iran for making peace with Israel, but he was greeted today by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Back in this country today Attorney General Reno refused to honor a congressional subpoena for a memo she received from FBI Director Louie Freeh. It recommended she seek appointment of an independent counsel to investigate fund-raising calls by President Clinton and Vice President Gore. Reno and Freeh are scheduled to appear tomorrow before the House Committee that subpoenaed the memo. There was a House hearing today about whether the federal government should share in the proposed multi-billion dollar tobacco settlement. That deal was negotiated earlier this year by the states and tobacco companies. The head of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration said yes because taxpayer funds have treated sick smokers. She was asked what the President thought.

NANCY-ANN MIN DePARLE, Deputy Administrator, HCFA: I haven't talked to the President about this, but I think that he would think it was a shame if all we discussed was HCFA's recoupment. I think he thinks the larger issue of reaching an accommodation with the Congress on what the federal allocation of funds should be and the state allocation of funds is the most important thing. But, as I've said, under the current law, HCFA is required to seek reimbursement for what the taxpayers have paid on behalf of these states. And I think it is an important ingredient.

JIM LEHRER: But Indiana's attorney general, Jeffrey Modisset, said none of the money should go to the federal government.

JEFFREY MODISETT, Attorney General, Indiana: It was the states, not the Health & Human Services, that sued the tobacco companies. It was the states, not HCFA, that got big tobacco to back down, and it was the states, not federal negotiators, that forged this historic settlement. Some in the federal system have said that most, if not all, of the money, is to be used to fill federal coffers. State governments are incredulous to the notion that they have been spending their time and resources only to secure recovery for the federal government.

JIM LEHRER: Congress must still approve the settlement. It's expected to take it up next year. The U.S. Supreme Court today rejected an appeal from a female inmate on Death Row in Texas. It clears the way for the nation's second execution of a woman since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In another decision today the court allowed the release of college disciplinary records. Ohio's Miami University sought to protect them from the school newspaper, which wanted to track student crime on campus. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now, it's on to the TWA 800 crash, a global warming conversation, and a David Gergen dialogue. FOCUS - WHAT WENT WRONG?

JIM LEHRER: Tom Bearden has our TWA Flight 800 report.

TOM BEARDEN: It's been one of the most baffling and controversial accidents in aviation history. TWA Flight 800--a Boeing 747--was torn apart when its center wing fuel tank exploded on July 17, 1996. No such in- flight failure had ever occurred in the history of commercial aviation. The wreckage of the shattered plane was dredged from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and reassembled. But the National Transportation Safety Board still doesn't know why the tank exploded, despite the largest and most expensive investigation ever. No physical evidence has ever been found that clearly points to a cause. Even so, last December, long before all the evidence had been fully explored, the NTSB issued a series of controversial recommendations aimed at improving fuel tank safety.

JIM HALL, Chairman, NTSB: It was the explosive nature of the vapors in the fuel tank that allowed the blast--whatever its origin--to bring down Flight 800. We believe that mechanisms exist that could, even in the short term, reduce the probability of a recurrence.

TOM BEARDEN: Behind the scenes experts have been arguing for months about fuel tanks--what the industry knew--or thought it knew--about what goes on inside one in flight. This is what a 747 center wing tank looks like when it's being built at the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington. It's a lot more than just a big aluminum tub. It's the size of a large livingroom, and is honeycombed with baffles, pipes, and supporting walls that divide it into chambers. It sits between the wings underneath the passenger cabin of a 747. A full fuel tank can't explode because there's no oxygen to support combustion. But as the fuel burns off, or when the tank hasn't been completely filled, the liquid fuel gives off vapors that mix with the air in the empty space. Engineers call that space the ullage; under the right conditions, the vapors can explode--if, and only if--there's something to set it off--no ignition source; no explosion. That's been the foundation of aircraft fuel tank design for nearly half a century. Richard Breuhaus is in charge of fuel safety programs at Boeing.

RICHARD BREUHAUS: The key in our design is to prevent the possibility of any occurrence of an ignition source inside the fuel tank. Again, we always operate under the assumption that the fuel-air mixture inside that tank could be flammable, and with that stated, we must make sure that there is no possibility that an ignition source would enter and ignite that flammable fuel-air mixture.

TOM BEARDEN: So designers have gone to extraordinary lengths to eliminate ignition sources. One of the most serious risks is from static electricity, which builds up in the fuel from simple friction as it flows through pipes and pumps, so fuel is pumped in gently and not allowed to spray inside the tank for the same reason. The pumps and valves that enter the tank from the outside all have grounding wires so static can't build up, and they're designed to automatically shut down if they overheat. The fuel probes, which measure the level of the tank, use voltages too low to make a spark big enough to cause an explosion. Higher voltage lines are isolated away from the tank. In all of modern airline history, only two fuel tanks have ever exploded without a clear cause. One was a Philippine airliner that blew up while sitting on the ground. The other was TWA 800. But Breuhaus still believes the design philosophy is sound.

RICHARD BREUHAUS: We have in excess of 200 million hours of operations on our airplanes in total. This is all models. We believe that the design approach is a very sound one. Having said that though, it's unescapable that we do have two unexplained accidents involving fuel tanks band because of that we are working very diligently both with the NTSB and FAA, as well as all of industry, to make sure that we have not overlooked anything.

TOM BEARDEN: That's why the board's recommendations were so controversial, precisely because they called the existing design philosophy into question.

JIM HALL: As you know at present the philosophy, the design philosophy, is to design the ignition sources out of the tanks.

TOM BEARDEN: Is that possible?

JIM HALL: Well, the record appears now that it is not possible.

TOM BEARDEN: But obviously something happened to Flight 800's fuel tank. And that set the NTSB to wondering if the aviation community really knew as much about fuel and fuel tanks as it thought it did. The board leased a 747 and fitted it out with instruments. They flew the same flight profile as TWA 800. They measured fuel temperatures after the plane had been sitting at a gate on a hot day and how much more heat the air conditioning equipment under the tank had contributed. They built scale models of the tank and set off small explosions inside to see how the blast propagates through the different compartments. Chairman Hall says the tests revealed that fuel behavior was more complex and variable than previously thought.

JIM HALL: The amount of information about the composition of Jet A fuel, at what point the vapors become explosive, what type of charge it takes, how much strength a particular charge it takes to ignite the vapors, what happens with that tank, you know, as it goes through the various altitudes, the vibrations, what effect that has on the fuel, whether there's mist or vapor, and all of this has been 16 months of my investigators' lives, trying to look at and understand this.

TOM BEARDEN: So the board made several recommendations designed to reduce the flammability of fuel tanks. They said the airlines ought to use cooler fuel because it gives off fewer vapors and because it takes a bigger spark to set off cooler fumes. The NTSB also suggested filling the center tank before takeoff to reduce the empty space. And the board asked the industry to take a look at a system used on some military aircraft to render fuel tanks non-explosive. They're called inerting systems. On the Air Force's C-17 transport, for example, onboard systems extract non-flammable nitrogen from the atmosphere. Then it's pumped into the fuel tanks as they become empty. It displaces the oxygen and removes the possibility of an explosion. The industry reacted to all of these proposals with considerable rancor. United Parcel Service called them extreme and premature. British Aerospace criticized the board for "confusion and lack of understanding." Northwest Airlines said the recommendations would actually have a negative effect on safety. Michael Rioux is senior vice president for operations and safety at the Air Transport Association, the airline industry's major trade organization.

MICHAEL RIOUX, Air Transport Association: We don't know what the cause of the accident is, so why are we making recommendations on a solution set that may not solve the problem because we don't know what caused the problem to begin with. That's my concern. And I think the system has got to get back on track a little bit in that regard.

TOM BEARDEN: Rioux says the board's recommendations don't make a lot of sense. Cool fuel, for example. He says there's no way to chill fuel at any airport in the world, and that the tanks would still contain explosive vapors throughout the majority of the flight even if the fuel was chilled to zero degrees.

MICHAEL RIOUX: You always have some exposure either in cruise, climb, or descent, of being in the explosive fuel-air mixture ullage, and there's no--not one of those recommendations eliminates exposure at all.

TOM BEARDEN: As for inerting systems, the industry says they break down far too often to be used in commercial operations. Chairman Hall says the industry has been absolutely sure of things before and has later been proven wrong.

JIM HALL: At the beginning of this there were some experts that did not think that the tank was explosive, that it was impossible for it to explode; where there was this assumption that a lot was known, and once we got into it, that was not the case.

TOM BEARDEN: Last week the FAA responded to the board's recommendation, almost a year after they were issued. The agency said it had concluded improvements can be made that will greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the possibility of fuel tank explosions. But it did not say what those improvements were. Some of the board's recommendations were rejected; others were referred to a committee that will report back to the FAA in six months. These behind-the-scenes arguments about fuel tanks are now becoming public. Chairman Hall formally opened five days of public hearings on the crash of TWA 800 this morning in Baltimore.

JIM HALL: Good morning. I'd like to bring to order the National Transportation Safety Board public hearing. On July 17, 1996, a Boeing 747-131, operated by Trans World Airlines as Flight 800 to Paris, exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean about 14 minutes after takeoff from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. All 230 persons aboard lost their lives. While the shock of this event has slowly abated, the horror has not. The National Transportation Safety Board launched the largest investigation in its history. Indeed, it is the largest investigation of a transportation accident in our nation's history. The FBI has recently suspended its criminal investigation of the crash, and we are here in furtherance of the NTSB search-- not only for the cause of this accident but, even more importantly, for ways to make sure a tragedy such as TWA 800 never occurs again. In the nine months of the recovery effort there were 677 surface--dives and 3667 scuba dives, resulting in 1773 hours of bottom time for the divers. I hope all of you all can think with me and visualize the brave men and women who made those dives under those conditions to recover the loved ones and the wreckage. We all owe them a debt of gratitude. Fully 94 feet of the 747's fuselage was rebuilt, including the center wing tank, the heaviest structural part of that airplane. The reconstruction and detail lab work enabled our investigators to determine the sequence of events from the initial fuel explosion to the ultimate destruction of Flight 800. I would like to say a word to the family members of the victims, who are here with us today, or those who are watching the proceedings on C-Span. While all of us have felt enormous sympathy for your grief for many months, none of us can claim to know what you have gone through since the night of July 17, 1996. We can, however, make sure that we dedicate all possible resources to finding out what happened that night and doing what we can to assure it doesn't happen again.

TOM BEARDEN: The board heard testimony from the Navy on the hundreds of divers who labored to recover the wreckage, ending in extensive dredging of the ocean bottom.

JIM HALL: In your opinion, do you have any idea how much of the wreckage was recovered and brought to the hangar at Calverton?

MC CORD: My own guess off the top of my head is probably a good 98 percent, over 98 percent of the aircraft was recovered and most of it by a majority of that 97/98 percent by the divers.

TOM BEARDEN: John Clark, an expert in studying flight recorders and radar for the NTSB, presented his findings from his investigation over the last 17 months. He showed the board a series of animations that demonstrated how the plane split apart and fell to the sea.

JIM HALL: What do the various colors signify?

JOHN CLARK: The green line is the aft section of the airplane. It includes the wings, the engines, and the aft section. The yellow line is that 70 foot forward section that separated, and the red lines are the several parts of various sizes and weights from in and around the center wing tank.

TOM BEARDEN: Clark then showed an ocean view animation giving a detailed, actual time demonstration as to how his team concluded the plane exploded and fell to the water.

JOHN CLARK: At eight minutes and thirty-one seconds you will see the center wing tank explosion; the forward fuselage will separate a few seconds later; and the remainder of the airplane will climb and turn left. It will reach a peak altitude of about 15,000 feet 20 seconds later and start a descending turn to the right with increasing bank angle. The flight will transition into a steep accelerating descent. Just before water contact you'll see a big fire ball as the left wing starts to break away from the fuselage. Mr. Chairman, we believe we have accurately defined the motion of the airplane, and we've correlated all of the data. We see no evidence of any unusual events, and we also know that many parts separated immediately at the time of that first explosion.

TOM BEARDEN: He then showed a chart demonstrating how the flight and voice recorders stopped working.

JOHN CLARK: The total time from side to side represents about 2.2 seconds. A loud noise appears here, and it is the last signature picked up by the cockpit area microphone. It is present for about 1/10 of a second, and ends when the CVR quits at 8:31 and 12.5 seconds. We believe this signature is the result of the exploding center wing tank.

TOM BEARDEN: Chairman Hall opened up the discussion for questions from the other parties to the investigation, including the Airline Pilots Association.

SPOKESMAN: Could you also discuss for me why the nose section reaches the ground so much later than the aft section, and could you discuss a little bit the parameters that went into that equation.

JOHN CLARK: Well, there's a difference in the weight of each section and the drag, or the size of the shapes. For example, the nose section is relatively light, with a large frontal area. And it would be similar to putting your hand out of a car window and feeling a lot of pressure. The aft section of the fuselage with the engines and the tanks and the fuel is more dense, if you will, and once it started down and the nose pointed down would pick up speed much more rapidly.

TOM BEARDEN: The board also heard testimony from Richard Bott, a Navy expert on missile damage, who stated flatly there was no evidence of either a bomb or a missile impact on the 747.

RICHARD BOTT: It's very easy to determine if that happened or not simply by finding a single piece of wreckage with high velocity impact damage on it. There was none found in Calverton, despite over 95 percent of the aircraft being recovered. There are no places on that aircraft, no places of missing structure that are large enough to contain enough damage that have not been recovered. In other words, there's no large areas of missing structure on the aircraft that could contain all the damage from the warhead. There's small pieces missing from random places throughout the structure, none large enough to be the central location of a missile impact. So that--the possibility that a missile with a live warhead impacting that aircraft is--is--is conclusive evidence that it did not occur.

TOM BEARDEN: NTSB aircraft expert Jim Wilde said every piece of the wreckage was examined minutely.

JIM WILDE: I can safely say that this is some of the most examined metal there is anywhere in the world, especially between the nose section and the aft section, literally every inch, every quarter inch of the fracture in the fuselage skin, in the frames, in the stringers, in the center fuel tank, in the wing center section, every inch of that structure has been examined in great detail.

TOM BEARDEN: Late this afternoon the board heard testimony on the forensic evidence revealed by the examination of the victims. Medical experts said they too could find no evidence of an explosion based on the lack of any pattern to the injuries sustained by the passengers. Medical consultant Dr. Dennis Shanahan said most of the victims were probably killed instantly.

DR. DENNIS SHANAHAN: We believe that all these individuals were almost immediately incapacitated. Whether they're dead or not, it is highly unlikely they were conscious or aware. And so that was the determination we had made. But now the reason for doing that was to try to find areas of the cabin that might have been less damaged, and, if less damaged, it gives us some information as to what the sequence of break-up was and the severity of that particular break-up.

TOM BEARDEN: The board may not conclude its work for still another year, and even then the cause of the accident may never be completely resolved. Even so, Chairman Hall says the lack of a definitive finding is no reason for the board not to call for changes.

JIM HALL: But irrespective of finding that an ignition source and being able to point to it, I think we will be able to point to safety advances that have begun and will continue to make the entire fleet much safer against the very rare fuel-air explosion that we have seen in the past.

TOM BEARDEN: The hearings on the crash of TWA 800 are scheduled to continue through Friday.

JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight a global warming conversation and a David Gergen dialogue. CONVERSATION - CLEARING THE AIR

JIM LEHRER: Now, the third in our series of conversations about global warming. Again, Margaret Warner is in charge.

MARGARET WARNER: Last week, we heard opposing views on the science of global warming. Tonight, we turn to the geopolitics of the debate. A major stumbling block at the Kyoto global warming conference is a rift between the United States and its European allies, with the European Union wanting more ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Vice President Al Gore made an appearance at the Kyoto conference today to try to break the impasse. Here with us now is Amb. Hugo Paemen, head of the European Commission Delegation to the United States. Welcome, Mr. Ambassador. Explain for us the major difference between the U.S. and the European views and what to do about global warming.

HUGO PAEMEN, Ambassador, European Union: Well, the difference at this conference is that we would like to do more. We would like to have significant reductions of these emissions. And we want to go back to what we had committed ourselves to in 1992, where we said that our goal at that time was to reduce the emissions to the level of '90 in the year 2000. Now, we would--

MARGARET WARNER: The year 1990 in the year 2000.

HUGO PAEMEN: That's right, yes. And now we would do something more. We would in the year 2010 at least have a reduction of 15 percent because we haven't lived up to the commitments of Rio, the conference, in 1992. We think that if theevidence of the scientific community is right, and we have more and more indications that they are right, there's a difference between how much it will be and so on, but clearly the overall assessment is that the phenomenon is there. If that's true, I think we have to be serious about it. And we should go into serious reductions, and our feeling is that the population is ready to do this. It is in Europe, and from what I read in the opinion polls here in the United States, public opinion is ready to do it in the United States.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, is there really--and if there is, explain what the difference is between the U.S. and European view--that is, the Europeans would like to reduce 15 percent below the 1990 levels.

HUGO PAEMEN: That's right.

MARGARET WARNER: The U.S. is saying roll back to the 1990 levels. In the big scheme of things that doesn't sound like a lot.

HUGO PAEMEN: Well, that's 15 percent. That's quite a lot. And the essential thing is that we have to go into a process where we reduce compared to what it was before.

MARGARET WARNER: But, as you know, the United States is saying because of our faster economic growth, frankly compared to Europe, for us to even roll back to 1990 levels would amount--we heard Vice President Gore say it--it would amount to essentially a 33 percent reduction--that is not really a weak position at all.

HUGO PAEMEN: Well, that is true. It is because that between 1992 and now the emissions have grown quite considerably in the United States. So that's why a major effort for the United States is necessary, we think. But there is another consideration. We hear every day reports that the United States economy is going so well. And in fact, the European economy is not bad either. If we don't do it now, now that we can do it, now that our economy is in good shape, we'll not do it in five or ten years from now, and perhaps our economy will not allow it. And when the situation will have deteriorated perhaps, there is a second element. We are the developed countries. We are technologically advanced. We can show the way. We can concentrate on how technologically you can do to reduce the emissions, so we should show the way to the rest of the world. And then it can become good business. If we have the technology, we can sell it to the rest of the world. So it's not only good for the climate, for the health of our children and our grandchildren, I think it's good business also.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me ask you about one other point of contention between the U.S. and the Europeans on this. The U.S. administration says you will also have an advantage because 1990 is the benchmark here. That was the year, for instance, that Germany had just absorbed East Germany with all those polluting factories. A lot of those have been shut down so that you had a sort of, I think, carbon dioxide emissions were cut 50 percent in East Germany; that you had sort of this advantage of having it artificially inflated, and now it's gone down. How do you react to that?

HUGO PAEMEN: Well, I think we should go beyond that. It is now at a time to come to an agreement because this conference has to be a success. It would be a shame if it was not. And we should not go into this conference by trying to get out of it by doing the least effort. It's quite amazing how now apparently people are negotiating down the effort, instead of negotiating up. The problem is on the other side, and we should try how we can solve the problems, and not by ratcheting down the efforts we do, by, rather, increasing our efforts. So let's forget about who did what in the year 1992. Let's try to do the best effort possible. And I hope this will be done this week in Kyoto.

MARGARET WARNER: When you talked about ratcheting down, were you referring to the U.S. proposal for letting different countries have different levels?

HUGO PAEMEN: No. I was thinking of the quite interesting phenomenon that this is a conference to do away or at least to reduce--let's hope substantially--emissions. And now everybody is trying to get the best deal in the sense of doing the least effort possible. This is quite amazing.

MARGARET WARNER: Explain to our viewers why political leaders in Europe are able to make these kinds of promises about reducing emissions--let me ask it this way--can they do it without triggering the kind of backlash that, in fact, you do still see in this country from industry, from labor, from even many political conservatives? Is the political climate an acceptance of this just greater in Europe?

HUGO PAEMEN: Probably, yes. I think that also the pressure of the special interest groups is perhaps not as well organized in Europe as it is here.

MARGARET WARNER: And other reasons why the pressure might be less in Europe, or why there may be a more receptive political climate?

HUGO PAEMEN: Well, perhaps that the environment education in Europe has made more progress than in the United States. In other areas you have more advances, you know. You accept, for instance, much better biotechnology in your day to day life, which Europe is these days very reluctant to, but it happens, yes, I think that on this global warming issue perhaps Europe has a little advance there. But we have to come together.

MARGARET WARNER: Would you say Europeans have a different attitude about energy use, energy consumption, than Americans? I'm just talking now not about the political leadership, but just everyday people.

HUGO PAEMEN: I think so. I think so also we have, as you may probably know, we have higher taxes on energy. That's acceptable in Europe. It's, I think, still very difficult in the United States to introduce a tax on energy. I think we were--we are more vulnerable in terms of energy use. I think probably there is more awareness in Europe, yes, that energy is very expensive; it's a very rare resource; and we have to be careful about it.

MARGARET WARNER: Now how did you interpret what Vice President Gore said today at Kyoto when he talked about--he basically promised greater negotiating flexibility on the part of the U.S..

HUGO PAEMEN: Well, we welcomed it very much, and I think that everybody has now to show some flexibility, because, as I said, this conference cannot be a failure. So by the end of this week we have to come together in one way or another. We very much hope that United States will be in a position to reduce at least a little bit from the 1990 level and probably we will have to be a little bit less ambitious, or perhaps do it ourselves, without asking from the others to do exactly the same effort for the reasons you mentioned. Perhaps the situation is somewhat different in Europe, and again, we should not ratchet down but ratchet up.

MARGARET WARNER: And what if there is no deal?

HUGO PAEMEN: Oh, there will be a deal; I'm absolutely sure. And, again, as the President said, this is only a beginning. In any case global warming is to be with us for quite a while. It's not this conference that is going to save the situation, so the effort will have to continue.

MARGARET WARNER: And finally, how do the Europeans feel about the U.S. insistence that the poorer developing countries also have to make some sort of commitment here?

HUGO PAEMEN: Well, I think it is a good idea, and it is fair and normal that we ask the developing countries to be on board, but, on the other hand, we are the great polluters--the United States in the first instance but also we in Europe. And these days, as I said, our economy allows it to do it. Our technology allows it to do it. The developing countries, probably it's true, in the year 2010, 2015, will be--probably if they go on as they do now--the great polluters, but it's probably not fair to say, well, because of the fact that you will be a big polluter, you have to do an effort today. Let's first do the effort ourselves.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, thank you, Mr. Ambassador, very much.

HUGO PAEMEN: You're welcome. DIALOGUE

JIM LEHRER: Now, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, engages historian Steven Ambrose, author of Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army and the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge, to the Surrender of Germany.

DAVID GERGEN: Steve, in recent years this country has twice celebrated the heroics of the men who took the beaches at Normandy in 1944, and appropriate celebrations. But now you come along and say that there's a fascinating story about what happened after D-Day in the 11 months until the Germans surrendered.

STEPHEN AMBROSE, Author, Citizen Soldiers: Well, we got ashore on D-Day, and that was the big thing. It was a very tenuous hold, however, on the beachhead, and now the job was to expand it. It went very slowly because we had not recognized how tough those hedgerows are going to be to clear out of Germans.

DAVID GERGEN: What was a hedgerow?

STEPHEN AMBROSE: A hedgerow is a mound of earth about six feet wide and four to six feet high, with trees and brambles and rosebushes, and et cetera, growing up, and it's impenetrable. And it encloses little, tiny fields. Now, each one of those little fields is a fortress, and the Germans were in the corners of the field with their machine guns dug in, and they had dug tunnels through the dirt at the base of the hedgerow to site their panzer fausts, their anti-tank rockets, and so--and the Americans had had no preparation for this. We hadn't seen the hedgerows in an intelligence sense and hadn't done any training of men on how to fight there, so everything had to be improvised--the use of tanks. Those tanks would get into the hedgerow country and drive up a hedgerow and expose their belly like this, and the German with a panzer faust over there would boom into that unarmored belly, and there goes that Sherman tanks. The solution to this problem came from a kid who had been a mechanic in Boston before the war. Joe Cullen was his name. He was a sergeant in one of the armor divisions. He said, Let's take steel rails and weld them to the front of that tank, and they'll dig into that hedgerow, and it won't go belly up, and then those big Chrysler engines are powerful enough that it can go right through the hedgerow, and then at that point they can start turning the cannon on the corners where the Germans are with their machine guns, and they can start spraying the hedgerow with their 50 cals. And you can work your way forward in that way. Now, Rommel didn't have a suggestion box outside his office door. It's not the way the Germans fight a war. Bradley did. Cullen had that idea on a Monday. By Tuesday afternoon it had gotten to Bradley, and by Wednesday morning they were putting those steel rails onto the tanks, and it worked. So that kind of improvisation finally got us through the hedgerows. And at the end of July, the German line broke on the far right at Saint Lo. They did trap most of the German army in Normandy. A lot of individuals got out, but the Germans were now disorganized; they had lost their unit cohesion; and they left their equipment behind. And so now from mid August on there was no opposition left in France. The battle of France was over. The Germans were in full retreat back Eastward, with the allies coming as close behind them as they could.

DAVID GERGEN: But they stopped them at the Siegfried Line.

STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, then two things happened. The Germans got back to a prepared defensive position, the Siegfried Line, all kind of fortifications. Hitler loved poured concrete. He thought poured concrete could stop anything. So they got back into prepared positions, and they pulled off what they called the miracle of the West, the German army did, in getting itself reorganized, in coming back together, and getting units to take positions in the line. The other thing that happened was that we ran out of gas, literally. The tanks were getting less and less--the lines stretched out from the channel coast, and as more and more Americans in Britain came on to the continent, the supply situations became critical. So we ran out of gas just at the point that the Germans got behind their fortifications. And now a stalemate ensued. In fact, Hitler was gather reserves and reinforcements, and drawing them from the Eastern front over to the Western front, and preparing for the last great German offensive of the 20th century. And now the Battle of the Bulge was underway. In the first few days of the Battle of the Bulge the American Army, which had become very cocky--it was full of hubris--and thought of itself as the best army in the world, and had the best intelligence in the world, had been badly fooled, and had been attacked where the men were spread out far too wide, because nobody thought there would be an offensive in the Ardennes. And the result was we lost two divisions on the first two days, big losses, and the result was there were breakthroughs, and the result was there German tanks on the loose, behind the front lines. And the result was a humiliation for American generals. And the result was a lot of GI's went into POW camps, and a lot of them got killed. So Hitler launched this attack with great initial success, and something close to panic set in on the allied side. But the real story of the Bulge is the one that captures everybody's imagination is Bastogne and the 101st Airborne being surrounded there, and rightly so, but it's a bigger story than that. It's an American lieutenant with a platoon over here, and an American corporal with a squad over here saying, I ain't gonna retreat no more. We're going to stand and fight here. And they held up German columns all across the front and threw the German timetable completely out of kilter, and eventually some clear weather arrived, and with clear weather trucks could move on the road, planes could fly and hit at the Germans, and it was done, and the Germans were hurled back from the Battle of the Bulge, so that by January of 1945, the end of January, the lines were back to where they had been in September. Then they get to the Rhine River in March of 1945, the greatest river in Europe, and it looked like it was going to be a very, very tough proposition to get across this river and any bridgehead over it was going to be pure gold. An American lieutenant named Carl Timmerman spotted the biggest bridge over the Rhine River. It was a railroad bridge--the Ludendorff Bridge-- and Timmerman saw it, and without hesitating, he took a squad that was a really wonderfully American squad. There was a Polish sergeant and an Irish corporal and a couple of Germans and an Indian in it, and--American. And Karl Timmerman, a German, of course, German-American, saw that bridge, and he said, "Let's go." And he led his men across that bridge in one of the greatest actions of the Second World War, machine gun fire cutting everywhere. They knew the bridge was scheduled to be blown up; they expected it to be blown in their faces. What apparently happened, David, was a stray bullet cut the wire leading out to the demolition charges. Timmerman got across, took the bridge. Now we were over the Rhine, and then it was the time for the exploitation and rolling across Germany till we met with the Red Army at the Elbe River in April of 1945. Whew!

DAVID GERGEN: [laughing] This is a remarkable story. What did you learn about the American character in this story of warfare from D-Day on?

STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, you know, the fathers of the young men who fought World War II had fought World War I, and they had a feeling that people of our age have about the young; they're not as tough anymore. They couldn't do what we did. And that was very much the feeling in 1940, '41, '42. And it was certainly Hitler's feeling. Now, you take these young Americans, 1943, they graduated high school; 1944, they graduated high school; 18 and 19 year olds--drafted, given insufficient and inadequate training, not well clothed for the rigors of what they were going to face, sent into the line as individual replacements, in a foxhole in Belgium. Now a foxhole in Belgium in the winter of 1944/45 meant down to 10 below in the Fahrenheit scale at night, about 40 degrees in the daytime. That meant that your foxhole was alternating between three and four feet of water and ice. It meant your--the boots they had were all leather, so the boots froze at night on them. They did not have adequate overcoats. They didn't have adequate sleeping bags. They weren't getting any hot food, and it was dark starting at about 4:15 in the afternoon, and it didn't get light again until about 8:30 in the morning. And they had to stay up all night, and they couldn't move around, couldn't exercise, couldn't smoke a cigarette, couldn't eat anything, had to be watching always for Germans coming on.

DAVID GERGEN: So they--

STEPHEN AMBROSE: Now, how did they do this?

DAVID GERGEN: How did they do it?

STEPHEN AMBROSE: How did they do this? The strongest motivating factor was their buddies, the unit cohesion, the guys that they had trained with, gone overseas with, fought with. And what was unacceptable to the GI in that foxhole was letting his buddies down. Now, they went into this combat with this fear--that they were going to be afraid. Every combat veteran I've ever interviewed tells me his biggest fear on going into combat was that--that I'm going to be afraid. What every one of them found out was I'm afraid. Fear is inevitable. It's the natural reaction. The point is you've got to learn to control that fear and work with that fear and conquer that fear and act. And these guys were able to do it. And in the end, for me, the GI of World War II was a child of democracy, who had grown up knowing the difference between right and wrong. And, you know, I had a lot of them tell me, Steve, I was 19 years old, I was 20 years old, I had my life ahead of me, I didn't want to live in a world in which Hitler ruled Europe and was threatening the United States; I knew that if I were going to have a good life, we had to win this war, and I had to do my part to see to it. They knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed.

DAVID GERGEN: Stephen Ambrose, fascinating story, fascinating men. Thank you very much.

STEPHEN AMBROSE: Thank you. RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this Monday, public hearings on the TWA Flight 800 crash began in Baltimore, with the focus on explosive fuel vapors and faulty wiring; Vice President Gore told the Global Warming Summit the United States would be more flexible in reaching a curb on greenhouse gases; and the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution of a female inmate on Death Row in Texas. We'll see you on-line and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.