NUCLEAR
Fueling China's Growth
Tinge of Optimism Is Felt in Troubled Kashmir
Indian Army Orders Probe Into Red Fort Attack
A New Look at Russia
What They Read While Building the Bomb
NORAD Tracks Progress of Santa
Investigators Now Focusing on Lee's Ties to Taiwan
Bush must define U.S. military mission
The Chairman and the CEO
Summary of Bush's Opinions
Striking Strengths, Glaring Shortcomings

MILITARY
Toy Story: How Much Is That Nuclear Reactor in the Window?

OTHER
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Daily Energy Update
LAPD chief says case will go on

ACTIVISTS
Disabled Activists Slam Stadium Seating

-------- NUCLEAR

-------- china

Fueling China's Growth

New York Times
December 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/24/opinion/24SUN1.html

Oil has not figured prominently in the delicate relationship between the United States and China. But it soon will. China, the world's most populous nation with 1.3 billion people, will become one of the world's top oil importers in just a few years. This growing reliance on imported oil will further anchor China in the global economy and help shape its ties to the United States. Both nations should be thinking about how to manage this new reality and its strategic repercussions not only in East Asia, but also in places like the Middle East.

Though the issue is not yet much discussed, it is being closely studied by the Central Intelligence Agency, academics and oil industry analysts. As he devises a China policy, President-elect George W. Bush can draw on the research, some of which has been done by the public policy institute at Rice University named after former Secretary of State James Baker.

China's need for ever greater quantities of imported oil is driven by its torrid economic growth. In the next 20 years, China's gross domestic product is expected to quadruple, enhancing its people's living standards and partially closing the economic gap with the United States.

The underlying force behind China's growth - the great migration of its population to the cities and the creation of a middle class - is still in its nascent stages. There are, for instance, 10 motor vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants in China, compared with 30 in Egypt, 148 in Mexico, 552 in Japan and 770 in the United States.

A net exporter of oil until 1993, China now imports 1.2 million of the 4.5 million barrels it consumes a day. It is expected to import roughly 4 million barrels a day in 2010 and close to 7 million in 2020. The United States currently imports about 10 million a day. The Middle East is expected to supply more than three-quarters of China's oil imports by 2010. As this dependence grows, Beijing is likely to become a more active and influential actor in the Middle East.

This may well complicate the American role in the region. Beijing has been cultivating ties with oil- producing nations, including Iran and Iraq. China dislikes international economic sanctions, claiming that they represent unwarranted interference in the affairs of sovereign states. In recent years, Beijing has supplied Iran with ballistic missile technology and has taken an indulgent line toward Iraqi defiance of United Nations weapons inspectors.

But China's Middle East diplomacy has also grown more sophisticated than it was in the days of Mao Zedong, when Beijing's main allies were radical Palestinian terrorists. Now China maintains full diplomatic relations with Israel and seeks to purchase sophisticated Western military technologies from the Jewish state that it cannot buy directly from the United States or Europe.

China's strategic interests, like those of other major oil importers, will increasingly lie in maintaining political and military stability throughout the Middle East. For that reason, Beijing should not want to see Iran and Iraq develop unconventional weapons with which they could threaten Israel and other neighbors. Encouragingly, China recently promised the United States that it would no longer help Iran or any other country develop advanced missiles. In future years, China could even come to rely on American naval power to keep sea lanes open to ensure the uninterrupted flow of its economic life blood.

As China takes its place among the world's great powers, and attempts to integrate its economy into global markets, Beijing's need for foreign oil may have a moderating effect on Chinese behavior. That will require constructive thinking about China's future oil requirements by President Jiang Zemin and a willingness by the Chinese leadership to work alongside the United States in maintaining the free flow of oil around the globe. For a nation on the verge of becoming a full member of the World Trade Organization, that kind of attitudinal shift should be possible. Washington, for its part, should continue to encourage China's Communist leaders to see the two nations' growing economic interdependence as a source of stability and prosperity, not vulnerability.

-------- india / pakistan

Tinge of Optimism Is Felt in Troubled Kashmir

New York Times
December 24, 2000
By BARRY BEARAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/24/world/24KASH.html?pagewanted=all

NEW DELHI, Dec. 23 - India and Pakistan are not yet talking. They are merely talking about talking. And even if they talk, it is unclear if either has anything new to say.

But there is a rare sense of optimism in the region, if only because the dispute over Kashmir has been so stubbornly bad that any good news is extraordinary news.

"Flowers may not bloom tomorrow but there has certainly been a fine start," said Mahmood Ali Durrani, a retired major general in the Pakistani Army. "Both sides now realize that they have lost 50 years to this argument and it's time to move on."

Who realizes what is a matter for speculation, and there are those who believe each is simply looking for a new way to hoodwink the other.

But on Wednesday, in an apparently hopeful tit for tat, India said it would extend its unilateral cease-fire in Kashmir for another month. Hours later, Pakistan announced a partial withdrawal of its forces on the de facto border that divides the embattled Himalayan territory they have both claimed since 1947.

Underlying both decisions is the fact that the people in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir are utterly exhausted by bombs and kidnappings and assassinations. They have been living in the midst of a separatist rebellion since 1989.

India has tried to put down this insurrection with overwhelming force. But more than a dozen militant groups continue the guerrilla war, all with help from Pakistan.

The groups are not all alike. Some are primarily Kashmiri, and they are more attuned to the people's fatigue with the fighting. In July, one of such organizations, the Hizbul Mujahedeen, even declared a cease fire, though it was short-lived.

"The Indian government is trying to isolate the more extreme elements of the militancy," said Amitabh Mattoo, a Kashmiri scholar specializing in Indian security issues. India is making a distinction between the essentially-Kashmiri groups, who are responding to the overwhelming sentiment against violence, and those groups that come from the outside."

The outsiders are mostly Pakistanis off on a jihad, trying to wrest a largely Muslim territory from a largely Hindu country. Their goal is not independence for Kashmir but rather the inclusion of Kashmir in a pan-Islamic state.

On Friday night, gunmen from one of those organizations, Lashkar-e- Taiba, attacked Red Fort, in the heart of India's capital, killing three people.

It was a daring act done by a group that openly operates and raises money inside Pakistan. If the military government in Islamabad is withdrawing troops from Kashmir on one hand and encouraging terrorism throughout India on the other, any talks between the two nations are unlikely to get beyond the usual cross tirades.

On Nov. 19, when India first announced its own cease-fire, most of the militant groups publicly scoffed at the gesture. But some then clearly decided to cut back on guerrilla attacks, enough so that India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, said he was heartened by the response.

In announcing a continuation of the cease-fire, Mr. Vajpayee also said that firing by Pakistani forces at the de facto border had declined. He said India would initiate "exploratory steps" toward restoring talks with Pakistan, discussions dormant for nearly two years.

Pakistan's military government has been asking for such talks, though now that the idea has been raised by both sides there are the inevitable questions about what the conversation will be about and who will be sitting at the table.

On Thursday night, Pakistan's chief executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, told newspaper editors that India is insincere "as it is not talking of the settlement of the Kashmir issue; rather it wants to end tension."

India now seems interested in talking to both the Kashmiri militants and the Pakistanis, though not at the same time. India's leaders consider the Kashmiris to be Indian citizens. They will not allow their own people to be a third party in peace talks with a foreign country.

Besides, the voice of the Kashmiri people is a deeply fractured one. An alliance of anti-India political organizations, called the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, is deeply split between those who favor independence and those who would prefer to be a part of Pakistan. Last week, when the group's executive committee met to come up with a united position on the cease-fire, fisticuffs broke out afterward between rival cliques.

For its part, Pakistan would be agreeable to two-way or three-way talks. But for half a century, Pakistan, like India, has claimed that all of Kashmir belongs within its boundaries. It has fought two of its three wars with India over that very issue.

Now, Pakistan finds itself in a precarious place: in a nuclear arms race with its arch enemy, its Constitution in abeyance after a military coup and its economy on the brink of bankruptcy.

If the time has truly come for more talking, what will Pakistan's military rulers say?

"Most people have concluded long ago that Pakistan's Kashmir policy has been hurting Pakistan and Kashmir more than India," said Michael Krepon, a Washington-based expert on the region. "Is it so outlandish to think that this might also be realized by the army leadership? I don't know. I've been pessimistic in recent years, but now, like the Kashmiris, I'm beginning to allow myself hope."

---

Indian Army Orders Probe Into Red Fort Attack

Reuters
December 24, 2000 Filed at 10:59 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-india-a.html

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India is to conduct two separate inquiries into a guerrilla attack on an army camp in Delhi's Red Fort in which three people died, an army spokesman said Sunday.

Guerrillas of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group have claimed responsibility for Friday night's unprecedented gun attack in the heart of Delhi, where about 1,000 soldiers have a garrison inside the 17th-century Mughal fort.

``There is a court of inquiry and a probe,'' the spokesman said. ``The joint probe will be by the Delhi police and the army.''

The private television channel Star News said the search for the militants had shifted from the capital to the neighboring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

The spokesman said the internal court of inquiry was aimed at identifying weaknesses in the army's own security.

``We should know where we have made a mistake,'' he said.

Two gunmen opened fire inside the fort, on the edge of Delhi's old town, before shattering light bulbs and fleeing in the darkness. They killed a soldier, an army barber and a civilian worker for the army.

The raid came two days after Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee extended by one month a cease-fire in fighting with Kashmiri militants in an effort to revive peace talks.

SEPARATISTS ASSESS CEASEFIRE

While Lashkar-e-Taiba has rejected the cease-fire, other separatist groups are cautiously assessing New Delhi's attempts to end an 11-year-old rebellion in the Himalayan region.

In Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba's spokesman told Reuters on Saturday that the group planned more attacks.

Indian officials, who held an emergency meeting Saturday, said the raid would not affect the cease-fire, under which Indian forces act in self-defense but do not carry out search or combat operations against guerrillas.

The president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the federal coalition government, said the attack was an act of desperation to derail the peace process.

The attack showed that ``terrorists are terrorized by the prospects of peace in Jammu and Kashmir,'' Press Trust of India (PTI) quoted BJP chief Bangaru Laxman as saying in Indore.

``India is not going to yield to such terror tactics.''

Dozens of militant groups have been fighting Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir, the mainly Hindu but politically secular nation's only Muslim majority state.

Federal Home (Interior) Minister Lal Krishna Advani said India would include militant groups in peace talks if they shunned violence.

``Dialogue with our people in Kashmir would naturally have to include all sections, and if militant outfits like the Hizbul Mujahideen are prepared to lay down their arms and become part of the dialogue, they are also welcome,'' Star News quoted Advani as saying.

HOPES OF PEACE WITH PAKISTAN

The Kashmir cease-fire, which was announced in November to coincide with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and has now been extended to the end of January, has revived hopes of a resumption of peace talks between India and Pakistan.

Pakistan has responded to the cease-fire by announcing a partial pull-back of its troops from the frontier dividing the two nuclear-capable rivals in the mountainous region.

BJP's rightwing ally Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) said it was not against a resumption of talks with Pakistan if it stopped cross-border terrorism.

``Now that the level of violence has come down along the borders, this has opened avenues with resuming dialogue with Pakistan...but they must first agree to our conditions,'' RSS spokesman M.G. Vaidiya told reporters in Jammu.

Pakistan rejects Indian charges that it arms militants and backs Islamic mercenaries in the disputed region, but admits giving the separatists political support.

More than 30,000 people have died in the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since independence from Britain in 1947.

-------- russia

WEEK IN REVIEW
A New Look at Russia

New York Times
December 24, 2000
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/24/weekinreview/24PERL.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON - VLADIMIR V. PUTIN, the Russian president, has found little to talk to the Clinton administration about of late. And so there he was this month, circling the United States with visits to Cuba and Canada and seeming to say: Please take notice, Russia is still a power.

Mr. Putin is said to be eager to come to Washington to meet President-elect George W. Bush in the spring. If he does, he may find the new Bush administration taking notice of his country in an entirely new - but perhaps unwelcome - way.

That was the clear implication in the two key choices Mr. Bush made public last week of officials to lead his foreign policy - Gen. Colin L. Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser.

"The watchword for the Bush administration will be pragmatism," said Thomas E. Graham, Jr., an expert on Russia at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who, having served in the American embassy in Moscow, has studied the Bush policy as it has emerged for a year. "Gone will be the romanticism of the early Clinton years and the pretense of the later years."

In the 1990's, Russia was treated as the 500-pound gorilla of foreign policy problems - a country whose nuclear arsenal, strategic position and imploding economy made its success or failure of immense interest to the United States, even though Washington ultimately had little real control over events there.

Now comes the Bush team, with plans to signal different treatment. Speaking bluntly, Ms. Rice said in the fall, Russia is now a challenge not because of the might it once had as the center of the Soviet Union but because it is a "declining power."

For starters, Russia policy is likely to be folded back into the European bureau at the State Department, a move that would suggest that Russia is not going to get all the special attention it had in the last eight years. Instead, Ms. Rice has said that America needs to re-cement relations with its allies in Europe and Asia. Mr. Bush promptly acted on that premise by dropping by to see a visiting President Jacques Chirac at the French Embassy here Monday night.

"They will seek relations with Russia that are a combination of cooperation, competition and indifference - similar to relations the United States enjoys with most countries around the world," Mr. Graham said.

Ms. Rice has been Mr. Bush's tutor in foreign affairs, and now she will run the Russia policy from a desk just down the corridor from the Oval Office.

But Mr. Bush will also have a powerful and experienced secretary of state, General Powell, and that leaves a question of how the two will mesh their ideas, and how the Russians will react to them.

In his first statement as secretary of state designate, General Powell set a firm tone, saying that Russia would not be a strategic partner, an approach the Clinton administration used in the early going with its favorite Russian leader, Boris N. Yeltsin. General Powell, like Ms. Rice in the past year, spoke unambiguously about forging ahead with national missile defense, a clear-cut Bush foreign policy goal.

If missile defense is, indeed, the first issue to come up in relations with Russia next year, it is highly likely to enrage many Russian leaders, Mr. Putin among them. After Mr. Clinton failed to persuade Mr. Putin to agree to an amendment to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and thus to allow deployment of a limited missile defense, the two leaders had little to talk about on the four occasions when they met face to face.

The Bush notion for national missile defense, as outlined by the governor in a speech last spring, calls for abrogation of the ABM treaty, a prospect that Russia and the European allies have fiercely opposed. Whether Ms. Rice and General Powell want to tear up the treaty right away is not clear. But they are intent on forging a new strategic concept with Moscow, and Ms. Rice has hinted she knows this is likely to introduce a new animus.

"Whether or not the Russians are fully ready to accept ballistic missile defense as a part of that strategic concept, I can't judge," she said in the fall.

Ms. Rice has chosen as her deputy at the security council Stephen J. Hadley, an assistant secretary of defense in the administration of Mr. Bush's father and a big promoter of national missile defense. Mr. Hadley is also an active member of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, a group that is aggressively seeking to bring into the alliance more nations that were part of the Soviet empire, a goal Moscow detests.

The Bush approach to Russia will focus much less than the Clinton team did on what the Russians are doing at home. Ms. Rice, whose basic expertise is in the Soviet system and its security arrangements, believes that the Clinton administration spent too much time and money trying to transform Russia into a Western look-alike democracy and market economy.

It was good news, she said in her fall speech, that Mr. Putin had stopped making frequent calls for international financial assistance and had placed more emphasis on tax reform that would allow entrepreneurship to develop. "If we can rebalance the agenda with the Russians to one that deals more with the security challenges that we both face, I think we will have both a more realistic and a more fruitful relationship with Russia," she said.

Is this the kind of music Mr. Putin wants to hear? During the campaign, Russian officials suggested they preferred Mr. Bush to Mr. Gore for the next four years.

They suggested they liked the sound of hard power as opposed to the soft power of coddling Russia into imitating Western models of democracy and capitalism.

Indeed, on a Russian Web site that reflects the government point of view, a commentator wrote last week under the headline "Condoleezza Rice upholds Putin's policy" that Ms. Rice was their kind of hard- headed Russia expert. This was so, the writer said, because she would refuse to spoon-feed the "infant" with I.M.F. "baby food."

But given the content of the hard power agenda, a departing Clinton Russia expert asked: "I wonder if the Russians will like the meat and potatoes when they eat it."

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

What They Read While Building the Bomb

December 24, 2000 (SF Chronicle)
by David Kirby
Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/12/24/RV7820.DTL

THE NUCLEAR MUSE Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs
By John Canaday University of Wisconsin; 310 pages; $22.95

In April 1932, 35 of the world's top physicists, among them Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and P.A.M. Dirac, met at Niels Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen for their annual conference on quantum mechanics. In just a few years, the world's powers would begin the war that would end with a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. It seems eerily prescient that some of the younger conferees took several days away from discussing protons and neutrons to rewrite Goethe's "Faust," with their best-known colleagues appearing as the play's main characters.

So we learn in "The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs," a brilliant study of the interplay between literature and physics. John Canaday writes that the young physicists had turned to the story about a man who attained supernatural powers by selling his soul to the devil to acquire "the metaphorical tools with which both to explore and to contain the disruptions involved in this dramatic leap in their search for a deep knowledge of nature."

The participants in the 1932 conference turned to this one play to explain their early work. The scientists who developed the first working atomic bomb at Los Alamos in 1943 would need a virtual library to accomplish a similar purpose. In memoirs, letters, speeches and conversations with one another, they referred to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and Shakespeare's "The Tempest," the Old Testament and the teachings of the Buddha, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World," the writings of Thucydides as well as those of Lewis Carroll.

Perhaps the best-known use of metaphor to describe atomic power is Robert Oppenheimer's borrowing from the 2,000-year-old Bhagavad Gita just seconds after the first nuclear explosion in the New Mexico desert. Quoting the many-armed Vishnu, Oppenheimer said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

In examining the many reactions to Oppenheimer's statement, Canaday notes that no commentator has ever regretted that the scientist didn't describe the blast literally, or that he preferred an ancient metaphor to "his own" words. The image of a god of destruction who leaps full-blown from nowhere to fill our familiar sky said more about the terror about to be unleashed on the world than any account relying on mere physical description could.

Canaday also explains how Oppenheimer, the scientist responsible for overseeing construction of the first atomic bomb, had in mind the John Donne sonnet that begins "Batter my heart, three-personed God" when he called the first atomic bomb trial the Trinity test.

Just as Freud turned to Greek tragedy to name the Oedipus complex, so the Los Alamos scientists peered into dusty volumes in order to understand the blinding terrors of the atomic age. In both cases, the investigators suspected that someone had encapsulated their half-formulated discoveries centuries earlier not with scientific formulas but with metaphors. As different as psychoanalysis and physics are, the principle is the same: In order to understand the future, you must first know the past.

In a graceful metaphor, Canaday points out that while literature makes it possible to think about science, science on the magnitude of nuclear fission returns the favor. By creating weapons so powerful that no sane nation would use them, scientists have ensured that atomic bombs will almost always be "fictions," that is, symbols of a terrible reality rather than reality itself.

Unfortunately, the metaphor holds only as long as superpowers such as the United States and Russia, or some rogue nation, never check out a volume from their nuclear libraries, setting off a catastrophe of unchartable dimensions. If that happens, it'll be time to reach for the old books again, assuming there'll be books left to reach for and someone to do the reaching.

---------

NORAD Tracks Progress of Santa

Associated Press
December 24, 2000 Filed at 11:25 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-NORAD-Santa-Tracking.html
http://news.excite.com/news/ap/001224/23/ent-norad-santa-tracking

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- A general at the North American Aerospace Defense Command and several staff members continued the NORAD tradition of tracking the progress of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve -- and fielding questions from curious youngsters.

About 120 off-duty staff and their families volunteered Sunday to answer the thousands of questions, ranging from ``When is Santa getting to my house?'' to ``Is Santa lactose intolerant?'' said NORAD spokesman Maj. Jamie Robertson.

One common question: ``Does Santa exist?''

``Santa is very much alive in the hearts of parents and children around the world,'' comes the reply from the volunteers, Robertson said.

NORAD's Web site had logged 70 million hits and 2,300 e-mail messages from 32 countries by 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Last year, it had 52 million hits in less than 24 hours.

One youngster from Bernd-Hozminden, Germany, wrote:

``Dear Norad. My first and only thought by watching your pictures was that your NORAD may only find Santa Clauses on the radar and no bombs and other bad things.''

To which Maj. Barry Venable replied: ``Dear Max. We feel the same way you do! Thanks for the note. Merry Christmas.''

Another youngster, identified as Brittany, 11, from Rochester, N.Y., wrote:

``Hello NORAD. Is it true that Santa is lactose intolerant. That's what every movie says, and if it's true please let me know before I go to the store.''

Venable replied: ``To the best of our knowledge, Santa is not lactose intolerant. An idea to get around the whole milk question might be to leave him a glass of water instead.''

The joint U.S. and Canadian operation that monitors manmade objects in space and events around the world that could signal a nuclear missile attack continued its normal vigilance from deep inside Cheyenne Mountain. Some personnel coming off their shifts stayed to help with the Santa-tracking.

``We have a very serious mission, so come Dec. 24, it's nice to do this,'' Robertson said.

NORAD's predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command, began the tradition of tracking Santa Claus in 1955 after children who saw a misprinted Santa hot line number in the newspaper started calling NORAD with questions.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

-------- new mexico

Investigators Now Focusing on Lee's Ties to Taiwan

Washington Post
Sunday, December 24, 2000; Page A03
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42002-2000Dec22?language=printer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20001224/t000122586.html
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=wenholee24&date=20001224

Former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee has told the FBI that he was a paid consultant in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a Taiwanese businessman who later helped arrange for him to spend four weeks at Taiwan's leading military research center, according to sources close to the investigation.

That same businessman also paid for Lee's air travel to Taiwan in December 1998, when Lee made a second, shorter visit to the military research center, the Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology (CSIST), the sources said.

The disclosure of the consulting arrangement with and travel assistance from the unnamed businessman - a resident alien who has since returned to Taiwan - has prompted the FBI to review Lee's links to his country of birth and, in particular, his ties to Chung Shan. The institute 25 miles southwest of Taipei, Taiwan's capital, allegedly was involved in past efforts by Taiwan to develop nuclear weapons.

Lee has told investigators that while at Chung Shan for four weeks in April and May 1998, he gave talks and "consulted on matters related to unclassified computer codes" for which he received "a modest fee of less than $5,000," according to a person familiar with the case.

Lee did not report the payment from Chung Shan to officials at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1998, as lab rules required, according to government sources.

Lee made the disclosures during 10 days of closed-door questioning under oath by the FBI. He cooperated in the questioning, which ended on Dec. 12, as part of a plea bargain reached in September.

In return for pleading guilty to a single felony count of mishandling classified information, he was released from jail after nine months in solitary confinement. He was also given immunity from further prosecution, as long as he tells the truth.

Lee initially had been targeted in 1996 by FBI agents and Energy Department investigators looking into alleged espionage by the People's Republic of China. The focus then was on two trips he took to Beijing and meetings he held with Chinese nuclear scientists.

Now, however, the government is exploring the possibility that Lee may have accumulated a virtual library of nuclear weapons secrets from computers at Los Alamos with the intention of assisting Taiwan, which has long feared an invasion or missile attack from the communist mainland.

Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen who worked at Los Alamos from 1979 through 1999, has never been charged with espionage and adamantly denies passing classified information to any foreign government.

His attorney, Mark Holscher, said there was nothing improper about Lee's trips to Taiwan, where Lee's two sisters live and which he has visited roughly a dozen times over the past 25 years, according to recently compiled government records.

Before his visits to Chung Shan, Holscher said, "Dr. Lee received laboratory approval and clearance to go to Taiwan for unclassified speech and consulting."

Holscher also expressed frustration with what he views as unscrupulous leaks aimed at tarring his client. He noted that the FBI questioning is supposed to be confidential.

"It is perplexing and deeply concerning to us that anonymous government sources are inaccurately describing approved, unclassified visits," he said.

Senior Clinton administration officials, including FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, have said the goal of the questioning is to determine why Lee downloaded the equivalent of 400,000 pages of nuclear data from computers at Los Alamos to pocket-sized tapes and to find out exactly what became of those tapes.

Sources previously disclosed that Lee told the FBI he threw the tapes into a trash bin at the national laboratory in New Mexico in January 1999. FBI agents then dug through tons of garbage in the Los Alamos County landfill. They failed to t urn up any of the Lee tapes, although they did find others from the lab.

Officials said last week that they may renew the search of the landfill. Up to now, they said, the government has no physical evidence to prove or disprove Lee's account.

Lee celebrated his 61st birthday, and his freedom, at a party this weekend paid for by 500 friends and supporters in California's Silicon Valley. His supporters contend that he was unfairly singled out for investigation by the FBI and the Energy Department because of his ethnicity. Although nuclear secrets allegedly obtained by China could have come from any of hundreds of defense plants or government offices, they say, overzealous investigators focused exclusively on Los Alamos and Lee.

While acknowledging serious mistakes in the investigation and prosecution of Lee, government officials and FBI counterintelligence agents still do not believe they have gotten to the bottom of the matter.

As information continues to emerge, both sides in this long and bitter struggle tend to see each new bit of evidence as confirming their prior view of Lee as either a victim of government persecution or a national security threat.

One significant change, however, is the FBI's interest in Taiwan.

Although for four years the FBI concentrated on Lee's possible connections with mainland Chinese scientists, he has had much tighter familial and professional bonds with Taiwan.

In 1984, after he was recorded by the FBI talking on the phone with a fellow Taiwanese American scientist under investigation for espionage, Lee admitted to the bureau he had delivered to Taiwanese representatives in Washington documents about U.S. nuclear reactors that were unclassified but not for distribution to foreign officials.

He also told the FBI that in the early 1980s, Taiwanese government representatives called him asking questions about nuclear problems. The FBI never passed that information to Los Alamos security officials, although "it would have raised flags about him and perhaps cost him his [security] clearance," said Edward J. Curran, the recently retired head of counterintelligence at the Energy Department.

The Taiwanese government, which is friendly to the United States and works hard to maintain supporters in Congress, denies that it is trying to develop nuclear weapons or that it engages in espionage in America.

James Lilley, a former U.S. representative in Taiwan as well as CIA station chief and ambassador in China, said he did not believe that the Taiwanese government "as a policy" would try to steal U.S. nuclear secrets. "But I don't rule out some guy on their side doing it," he said.

In 1969, about five years after mainland China's first nuclear test, Taiwan made its first known attempt to acquire the ability to reprocess nuclear fuel into weapons material. The United States intervened to foil that effort. But the rapprochement between Washington and Beijing under President Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s spurred Taiwan to try again to acquire plutonium, according to Andrew Mack, an Australian expert on Taiwan's nuclear program.

In 1976, under U.S. pressure, Taiwan agreed to stop reprocessing spent fuel from a Canadian-supplied research reactor. Then, in 1982, Taiwan sought to acquire reprocessing technology from France; the United States intervened again.

Six years later, Col. Chang Hsien-Yi, who had been deputy director of the nuclear energy laboratory at the Chung Shan Institute and an asset for the CIA, was secreted out of Taiwan. Once in the United States, he disclosed that Taiwan had secretly been building a plutonium separation facility. U.S. officials pressed Taiwan to close it down.

Mack has said it would be difficult for Taiwan to build a nuclear weapon in secret today because its facilities are inspected by the International Atomic Energy Administration. But some U.S. experts believe Taiwan might use the ability to build nuclear weapons as leverage to obtain other weapons from the United States, such as early-warning systems, submarines or destroyers.

In July 1995, right after China test-fired missiles into nearby waters, Taiwan's then-President Lee Teng-hui told the country's national assembly: "We should restudy the question [of nuclear weapons] from a long-term point of view. . . . Everyone knows we had the plan before."

A few days later, Lee responded to pressure from the United States and said that although his country "has the ability to develop nuclear weapons," it would not do so.

Chung Shan, which has 11,000 employees, is Taiwan's equivalent of Los Alamos, a laboratory that works on many types of weapons. "With its ultimate goals of achieving self-reliance on national defense, CSIST is committed to the pursuit of the state-of-the-art technologies and to the development of next-generation weapon systems in close cooperation with industry, government, academic and research communities," says Lt. Gen. Chen Yu-wu, Chung Shan's president, in the institute's brochure.

In his recent questioning by the FBI, Lee said Los Alamos officials approved his month-long stay at Chung Shan in April and May 1998. The lab, however, did not inform the Energy Department's counterintelligence office. "We never had a chance to cover what he may have done," one investigator said.

On his return from the Taiwanese institute, Lee mentioned at a security debriefing that the trip was paid for by a friend who owned a company that had connections with Chung Shan. But he did not disclose that he had received a consulting fee from Chung Shan itself, the sources said.

In December 1998, Lee again traveled to Taiwan, mostly on personal business: He was taking back a nephew who had developed a drug problem in Los Angeles, according to sources close to the case. The Taiwanese businessman again paid for the tickets, and Lee made a quick stop at Chung Shan, where he spoke at a luncheon, the sources said.

Not long after his return, he was given a polygraph exam as part of the FBI's espionage investigation. Because the FBI was focused on China, he was never asked questions about Taiwan during this "lie detector" test.

Although the name of the businessman has not been made public, part of the connection is known. Lee filed reports at Los Alamos in 1989 and 1990 saying he was consulting for a company called Intelligent Systems Integration Inc., which had an office in Albuquerque. Intelligent Systems listed itself as a "foreign corporation" when it registered in the late 1980s in New Mexico and California. Records indicate it surrendered its U.S. registration in January 1990.

Investigators are still puzzling over an incident in May 1998, when Lee used a computer at Chung Shan to try to gain remote access to the classified computer system at Los Alamos. When that access was denied, Lee used his password to get into his personal, unsecured computer files, according to court testimony earlier this year.

In his recent questioning, Lee told the FBI that there were some classified files in the directory he accessed from Chung Shan. But he said he extracted only unclassified data.

At Lee's bail hearing earlier this year, an FBI agent testified that Lee's entry into his computer directory from Chung Shan left an electronic trail that could have allowed a computer expert to steal his password and gain access to all his files.

The final step in the government's inquiry, under the terms of Lee's plea agreement, is for him to take another polygraph exam "sometime after Christmas," according to a government source. Unless the government can prove to a judge's satisfaction that Lee has broken the agreement by lying, he cannot be prosecuted again.

Staff writer Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

-------- us nuc politics

Bush must define U.S. military mission

Denver Rocky Mountain News
December 24, 2000
By Holger Jensen News International Editor
hjens@aol.com
http://insidedenver.com/jensen/1224holge.shtml

Having made military readiness a campaign issue, President-elect Bush will have to reconcile his promises to build a missile defense shield and increase military spending while at the same time delivering a $1.6 trillion tax cut.

But what should we be ready for?

Missile attacks by rogue states? Chemical and biological terrorism? Cyberwarfare? Small brushfire wars in distant parts of the world that require rapid intervention and lengthy peacekeeping? Or the Pentagon's current strategy of being able to fight two major theater wars almost simultaneously, such as in the Persian Gulf and the Korean Peninsula?

Military and intelligence experts say all of the above except, perhaps, for two major wars.

According to the National Intelligence Council, war is the least of our worries. The United States will remain the world's dominant military power over the next 15 years, it says, discouraging foes from taking us on in conventional conflicts. Instead they will resort to more lethal terrorism and attacks on our computer networks.

"U.S. opponents - state and such non-state actors as drug lords, terrorists and foreign insurgents - will not want to engage the U.S. military on its terms," said the council's report issued Dec 17. But "terrorist tactics will become increasingly sophisticated and designed to achieve mass casualties. We expect the trend toward greater lethality in terrorist attacks to continue."

"Global Trends 2015" is a collaborative effort by the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA and State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and experts from private think tanks and academic institutions. It took 15 months to compile and, although it looks far ahead, may require some national security decisions as soon as the Bush administration takes over.

"The most immediate threat is from weapons of mass destruction," said NIC Chairman John Gannon. "There's a growing threat from the small adversary or the non-state actor or the terrorist group in terms of using chemical, biological or radiological weapons. They are probably more likely to actually use these weapons than organized states."

The NIC report foresees the establishment of a Palestinian state in "a cold peace" with Israel and regime changes in Iran, Cuba and North Korea. Hence, those states "may decrease or even cease their support (of terrorism) by 2015," it said. But they will be replaced by "more diverse, free-wheeling, transnational networks enabled by information technology."

Of the world's other two great powers, said the report, China will increase its global influence while Russia will decline.

China will have the world's largest army, still not fully modernized by 2015. It will also deploy more nuclear missiles pointed at the United States and hundreds of shorter-range ballistic and cruise missiles for use in regional conflicts. But most experts believe China will avoid conflict in Asia to promote stable economic growth and ensure internal stability.

Still, the NIC report acknowledged that "estimates of China beyond five years are fraught with unknowables," just as "the quality of Russian governance is an open question as is whether it will be able to make the transition in a manner that preserves rather than upsets regional stability."

Although South Korea's leaders say unification with the North is still 50 years away, the report said "a unified Korea with a significant U.S. military presence may become a regional military power." Without unification, regional stability is still clouded since North Korea may be capable of deploying "a few to several" intercontinental ballistic missiles within five years.

Iran could test an intercontinental ballistic missile as early as next year, it said, and Iraq could test one capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States before 2015.

Bush has vowed to go ahead with developing a national missile defense system, expected to cost at least $60 billion, over the objections of Russia, China and many of our European allies. He also promises to be tough on terrorists, saying there will be "consequences" for attacks on Americans or U.S. interests abroad.

However, neither sanctions nor missile strikes have persuaded Afghanistan to surrender Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, suspected of masterminding the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and this year's suicide bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 American sailors and crippled one of our most advanced destroyers while it was refueling in Yemen.

The U.N. Security Council's passage of a joint U.S.-Russian resolution to strengthen sanctions on Afghanistan, including an arms embargo, likewise has had little effect other than to force the evacuation of all U.N. relief workers from the country and halt U.N. efforts to forge a peace agreement between the ruling Taliban movement and rival factions in the north.

A panel of anti-terrorism experts has recommended that Bush develop a national plan for combating terrorism within his first year in office. "The United States has no coherent, functional national strategy for combating terrorism," said Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore. "Instead, we have a loosely coupled set of broad policy documents, plans and specific programs.

"A terrorist attack on some level inside our borders is inevitable and the United States must be ready. We are not, as some suggest, totally unprepared to meet the threat of terrorism in our own front yard. But we can be better prepared."

The panel recommended that Congress consolidate authority over anti-terrorism programs into a Special Committee for Combating Terrorism, either a joint Senate-House committee or a separate committee in each chamber. It also said "adequate stockpiles of vaccines should be created and made accessible for rapid response to a terrorist biological attack."

While the Centers for Disease Control recently contracted for 40 million doses of effective smallpox vaccine, "much remains to be done to ensure effective distribution of vaccines, including better coordination with state and local agencies," it said.

Defense and health officials have agreed since the mid-1990s that the risk of a bioterrorist attack using anthrax, for example, was high enough to warrant precautions. But, in the words of Harvard University's Richard Falkenrath, "U.S. biodefense is underfunded, disorganized and excessively fragmented."

A $3 million exercise called TOPOFF (for top officials of the U.S. government) showed how things could fall apart. Conducted last May, it was a simulation of simultaneous attacks - chemical weapons in Portsmouth, N.H.; a plague in Denver and a nuclear "event" in Washington, D.C.

The exercise showed that hospitals were quickly overwhelmed, officials fought over who was in charge and hudreds of "victims" would have died if it had been a real emergency.

At a November conference sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, Falkenrath pointed out that the White House and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were the only ones with authority to coordinate federal, state and local agencies that would have to be involved in responding to such attacks.

"In my view, neither is really doing the job effectively," he said. Some of the $13 billion allocated to dealing with biodefense had gone to programs more political than useful, creating "an increasingly wide stratum of pork."

Dr. Jeff Koplan, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admitted that federal programs were slow getting off the ground. But 81 CDC labs in 50 states can now test for the biological agents considered most likely to be used in an attack - plague, tularemia, botulin toxin, smallpox and viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola and anthrax.

The CDC has set up eight so-called Push Packages, each consisting of 109 air cargo containers full of antibiotics and other medical supplies that could be shipped anywhere on 12 hours notice. But, as the TOPOFF exercise showed, things fell apart when the packages had to be distributed.

In one of his rare public speeches in Los Angeles recently, CIA Director George Tenet said: "We in the intelligence community believe the chances for unpleasant, even deadly, surprise are greater now than at any time since the end of the Second World War."

The "wild card" of technology - from nuclear proliferation to the information revolution - threatens American superiority in intelligence gathering while the "evil mix of fanaticism and flexibility" behind the October attack on the USS Cole made the next strike "not a question of if, but of when and where."

On the military front, Bush believes U.S. soldiers should be used to defend the country and fight wars that directly affect U.S. interests, not deployed on distant peacekeeping missions. But Army Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, says such missions are part of our responsibility as a global superpower.

"It is naive to think that the military will become involved in only those areas that affect our vital national interests," Shelton told a conference sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

"The strategic environment will most certainly cause us to deploy forces to achieve more limited military objectives. As a global power, I submit that we cannot retreat from one activity to do another exclusively."

Shelton did "draw a line between what I would call nation-building and what I would call sustaining a safe and secure environment" in places such as Bosnia and Kosovo. "We can provide a safe and secure environment, but we don't do the law enforcement, we don't do the court systems, we don't get commerce going again," he said.

"That is, in my definition, what you're doing when you get into nation-building. There are many that have tried to push us in that direction, (but) we have resisted."

Speaking at the same conference, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's chief adviser on national security matters, said the Clinton administration was right to have intervened in Kosovo to stop Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleansing, but she cautioned against keeping the U.S. military there too long.

"We as a country have got to take a hard look at the resources we are providing and the missions we are taking on," she said. "That is not to say the missions need to be ended."

With a defense budget of $310 billion for next year, U.S. military spending exceeds the combined total of the next 10 countries, including China and Russia. However, research and development of new weapons systems has lagged, force levels have declined to 1.4 million and overseas deployments have risen fourfold.

The Cold War may be over but our armed forces have never been busier. In the decade since the fall of the Iron Curtain, nearly 60 small-scale wars have erupted around the globe. And although we have intervened in few of them, Army deployments have skyrocketed from one every four years to one every 14 weeks.

All the service chiefs complain that this has eroded military readiness. Last year the Army's 10th Mountain Division received a readiness rating of C-4. In other words, it was deemed unfit for combat.

Four-star Gen. John Hendrix, head of the key Forces Command, says this is proof the Army needs a bigger budget and more manpower. He recently said 60,000 troops should be added, putting Army strength above 500,000 again, to keep pace with growing global missions like peacekeeping and humanitarian aid.

Air Force Secretary Whitten Peters believes the Pentagon's budget needs to grow by as much as $100 billion a year to maintain fighting readiness while modernizing aging weapons. But Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, disagrees, arguing that the United States is already too expensively ready for war.

"If you throw in our allies and NATO, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan," he points out, "you find out that we control 80 percent of the world's military expenditures."

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a highly respected nonpartisan think tank, also faults our defense planners for getting ready for the "wrong kind of war." We are still using Cold War measures to determine military readiness, it says, instead of getting ready for 21st century conflicts.

"The effectiveness with which the Pentagon addresses the most pressing U.S. security challenges in the future," said the CSBA, "rests much more on how wisely rather than how much it spends."

Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, the first Asian-American to wear four stars, seems to agree. "The magnificent Army that fought in Desert Storm is a great Army," he told Frontline recently, "but it was one designed for the Cold War And the Cold War has been over for 10 years."

Shinseki has committed the Army to a $70 billion modernization program designed to make it lighter on its feet and more quickly deployable. At the core of his strategy are six highly mobile brigades that can be sent, combat-ready, anywhere in the world within four days.

To this end the Army has contracted with General Motors Corp. and General Dynamics Corp. to develop a family of light armored vehicles that could wield as much firepower as an Abrams tank but weigh only a third as much. The eight-wheeled LAVs will be easier to deploy to farflung combat locations than tanks and treaded armored personnel carriers.

But Shelton faces considerable opposition from the "armored warrior" culture of the Cold War. And critics on the other side of the coin say he has not gone far enough. Instead of concentrating on armored vehicles, they say, the Army chief should be worrying about how to get his men into a war zone without friendly ports of entry and under missile fire.

They recommend a Star Wars approach - one that would confirm Russian and Chinese fears that our planned National Missile Defense system could also be used for offensive purposes.

Holger Jensen is international editor. E-mail: hjens@aol.com

---

The Chairman and the CEO

Washington Post
Sunday, December 24, 2000; Page A01
By Dana Milbank Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45627-2000Dec23?language=printer

It has been fashionable in recent days for political insiders to say that Vice President-elect Cheney will become the nation's "prime minister," with President-elect Bush serving as ceremonial head of state. Cheney allies, though, reject the parliamentary analogy in favor of a corporate one: Bush as the nation's chairman of the board, Cheney as America's chief executive.

Call it Bush-Cheney Inc. Chairman Bush sets the tone, sets goals and signs off on final decisions. CEO Cheney makes it happen. It would be an unprecedented role for a vice president, exceeding by far even the significant role Vice President Gore has played in the Clinton White House.

The analogy seems particularly apt now that Cheney, as chairman of Bush's transition, is assembling what is arguably the most corporate administration the country has ever had.

There's Cheney, fresh from oil-services giant Halliburton Co., and Bush, a Harvard MBA who successfully ran a baseball team. The new Treasury Secretary-designate, Paul H. O'Neill, hails from Alcoa and International Paper. Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, is late of an automobile trade group; domestic policy chief Josh Bolten is a Goldman Sachs alum; Commerce Secretary-designate Donald L. Evans is an oil man; Office of Management and Budget Director-designate Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. is a pharmaceutical executive; and personnel czar Clay Johnson was a mail-order honcho.

The list goes on. Equally important, though, is the corporate culture infusing the administration Cheney is building: a buttoned-down operation that jealously guards information, has a rigid hierarchy and defined chain of command, and places compatibility of personnel over ideology and ends over means.

At the center is Cheney himself, the quintessence of the company man -- only his company is the government. A student of power and a lifelong devotee of governance, Cheney is unusual for a modern politician, particularly for one from the Republican Party, which has come to value outsiders. Cheney came to Washington, after working for a Wisconsin governor, as a Hill staffer. He climbed his way through the Nixon and Ford administrations, then up the leadership ladder in Congress. He ran the Defense Department and helped govern a political think tank. "He was bred for governance," says Marshall Wittmann, a conservative analyst with the Hudson Institute.

Along the way, Cheney developed a corporate executive's style for management. By the time he arrived at Halliburton late in life, Cheney fit right in. "He views governing more like a business," says Dave Lesar, Cheney's number two and then successor at Halliburton. So businesslike was Cheney at Halliburton that he couldn't honor his own implementation of casual Fridays. "For Dick that meant he wore a tie with a sports jacket, not a suit," Lesar says.

Cheney, in an interview last week, puts his corporate style this way: "Corporation people are very much results oriented. Process is important, but it's important in order to get to an objective, to produce a result. In government, process is seen to be the be-all and end-all. In Congress, for example, nobody's responsible for what Congress does or doesn't do. They're just responsible for their individual votes."

Cheney can be Machiavellian in his wielding of power. He has been known at various times to fire subordinates to demonstrate his authority. "If somebody gets too far out of line, he really has no hesitance about letting them go," says Kenneth L. Adelman, a longtime friend. "He's really very different from other top people like Ronald Reagan or Cap Weinberger, who were always reluctant to let somebody go." He also knows the managerial skill of negotiation, Adelman adds. "Cheney recognizes it's important to have fights with Congress and it's important to lose fights."

While high-level government officials are notorious for their susceptibility to political and personal winds, Cheney has a managerial style that is dispassionate, even cold. He sets goals, demands efficiency, and punishes those who fail. "He is a chief executive type, unemotional," says Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who worked with Cheney when he was defense secretary. "He delegates based on performance: Here's the task, and if you don't achieve this goal, I'm going on to the next person." Cheney's view, Portman says, is "we're not family, we're colleagues."

"That's unusual in government," Portman says. "Government folks are such bad managers because they have a tough time being tough."

For underlings, this can be motivating -- and unnerving. "Every day's a dance with death," says a member of Cheney's staff. Asked whether he ever had occasion to feel Cheney's displeasure, Sean O'Keefe, a former secretary of the Navy, says: "Thank Christ I did not."

Though his boss, the president-elect, also uses a businessman's eye in government, their two styles are quite different. Bush favors a flat hierarchy and gives authority to a wide range of underlings, common among the new generation of managers. Cheney's style, with a more tightly controlled inner circle, is reminiscent of the old-line industrial concerns.

"He is very much a chain-of-command kind of guy," says a top transition aide. "He has very clear lines of authority and responsibility." Comparing Cheney and Bush, the aide says: "They both have a tendency to hub and spoke, but Cheney has a smaller wheel." Jim Stevenson, an aviation writer who had been critical of Cheney as defense secretary, puts it less kindly: "He'd surround himself with a few close associates and they'd huddle together like musk ox protecting their young."

But Cheney's admirers and critics alike agree on several things. He is uncommonly dedicated to his work, he is unusually efficient for a government executive, and he is invariably successful. From his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations to Congress, the Pentagon, Halliburton and the early phases of Bush's transition, Cheney has delivered the desired result.

From his early days in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Cheney's work ethic made him extreme even in a place full of workaholics. He'd arrive at 5:30 each morning and work late into the night. "It was really ridiculous," says Adelman, who worked with Cheney at President Richard M. Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity.

Cheney was a Yale dropout with time as a telephone lineman on his rï¿1/2sumï¿1/2, but he also had the drive of one who was the first member of his family to go to college. Donald S. Rumsfeld noticed that quality when he hired him at the White House from an American Political Science Association fellowship. "When things would get frantic and hectic and there was a crisis here and a problem there, he would get cooler and enjoy it," Rumsfeld says. Cheney, for his part, lists Rumsfeld as his top model: congressman, White House denizen, Cabinet member, business executive.

Cheney also exhibited early on a management trait that would follow him through his career: a preference for ends over means, or results over process. Around 1970, young Cheney found himself arguing with then-Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) over various government assistance programs. Cranston favored the programs because of their noble purpose, but Cheney only wanted to fund them if they could produce demonstrable results, a reasoning that would later influence his votes against the preschool program Head Start.

After a few years in the House, Cheney and his wife, Lynne, set about writing what amounts to a textbook of political management. Published in 1983, the book, "Kings of the Hill," dissects the routes to power used by top House leaders such as Henry Clay, James Blaine and Sam Rayburn. "One characteristic they invariably shared was a love for the institution they served," the Cheneys wrote. Referring to Woodrow Wilson's characterization of the House as a "vast picture thronged with figures," they wrote, "One must also keep in mind the power of strong individuals to reshape the forms they find. . . . It is they who make the institution less complicated than Wilson's simile suggests."

Cheney, never one for introspection, declines to say which leader's path to power most inspired him. "It's a fascinating collection," he says mildly. "I wouldn't call it a model."

Cheney rose to power in the House through the Republican caucus by using his prominence as a former White House staff chief to gain immediate influence, rather than wait to build seniority. "His strength was within the caucus," says Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), a onetime colleague of Cheney's. "Everybody understood he was a different type." After just one term, Cheney became head of the Republican Policy Committee, eventually becoming the minority whip. He most likely would have become the House Republican leader if he weren't tapped to run the Pentagon.

One accomplishment of Cheney's as a House leader may provide a hint about his managerial style in the new administration. He became the GOP point man on aid to the Nicaraguan contra rebels. Over several years, he held together most of the Republicans, then cobbled together a majority by courting conservative Democrats. "Dick walked around and made sure the votes would be there," Leach says.

At the Defense Department, military commanders were at first stunned by the iron fist with which Cheney ruled. Just eight days into the job, he rebuked Air Force Chief of Staff Larry D. Welch in a news conference over the general's discussions with members of Congress about strategic missile modernization. Cheney called Welch's actions "inappropriate," saying he would "make known to him my displeasure." Welch, since retired, now says it was "a two-hour flap," that Cheney later explained to him privately. But at the time, says O'Keefe, "he was sending a very strong message saying we were not going to have that."

The brass took another blow when Cheney fired a successor to Welch, Gen. Michael J. Dugan, who had spoken to reporters about the targeting of Saddam Hussein in the bombing of Baghdad. Cheney told Dugan that he "displayed egregious judgment," and made him the first member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be fired since 1949. "That sends a signal of accountability," says Adelman, who was with Cheney when he decided to dismiss Dugan. "That may be Dick's style with subordinates."

Even luminaries such as Gens. Colin L. Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf learned not to exceed their assignments. Once, after Powell met with President George Bush to discuss the Persian Gulf War, Cheney took the Joint Chiefs chairman aside with instructions to "stick to military matters," as Powell recalled in his memoir. And when Schwarzkopf later said publicly that he had recommended continuing the ground war to Baghdad, Cheney shot back that Schwarzkopf "raised no objection to terminating hostilities."

As manager of the Pentagon, Cheney showed some flexibility. He'd scrap his schedule if a subject interested him, extending a 20-minute meeting to two hours. He relished back-and-forth with subordinates who disagreed with him. But pity the adviser who wasn't up to the task. "You'd think, 'Oh God, I don't want to disappoint this guy,' " says David J. Gribben, who worked for Cheney as legislative director at the Pentagon. Though Gribben says Cheney never raises his voice or demeans an underling, assistants still dread "the thought of going in to Cheney and being found not prepared."

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cheney, as defense secretary, practiced a form of gamesmanship with Congress. Facing certain cuts, Cheney decided to put three items on the chopping block rather than let Congress do the cutting for him. He offered up cuts in the National Guard, base closures, and the V-22 Osprey, knowing full well that Congress would balk. Congress "won" the battle by refusing to make many of the cuts, but Cheney therefore had leverage in protecting his priorities. "We lost some of those battles -- and we got 90 percent of what we wanted," Gribben says.

Aviation writer Stevenson, who has written a book about the A-12, an attack jet canceled by Cheney, criticizes Cheney for blaming underlings for failings that were his own. "He was the Teflon man," Stevenson says. "Others were taking the fall." Still, Stevenson has a grudging respect for Cheney's results. "He was one of the better defense secretaries," he says. "He was ready to start slashing and burning to reduce the budget."

By the time he arrived at Halliburton in 1995, Cheney found it easy to convert his executive "skill set," as the management consultants call it, to the private sector. "There's no doubt Dick was very at ease in the corporate world," Halliburton's Lesar says. The pattern was almost identical. "He was all business," says Lesar, nothing touchy feely. And he immediately asserted his dominance in symbolic ways. He spent two months studying the management of Halliburton, says Lesar, then fired "three or four of the top 10."

Cheney's years at Halliburton were prosperous, though it's unclear how much was Cheney's work and how much was the booming economy's doing. The firm slashed costs, restructured its balance sheet, integrated clashing divisions, modernized its technology and vastly increased its size by going on a buying spree. Cheney's pattern was the same: Give leeway to a tight band of loyalists, and punish those who transgressed. Once again, he showed ideological flexibility when it suited his managerial aims. He opposed sanctions against Iran, where Halliburton wanted to do business. "Our government has become sanctions-happy," he said in 1998. Now he supports Bush's position in favor of sanctions.

Now assembling the Bush administration, Cheney inspires fear and awe among those involved in the transition. He's been serving at various points as Bush's spokesman, his legislative liaison, his personnel manager, and his strategist -- in short, his chief executive. The unusually potent role for a vice president, the Hudson Institute's Wittmann says, is what Reaganites were thinking of in 1980 when they briefly floated the idea of former president Gerald R. Ford joining the ticket as vice president with the understanding that he would be much more. "This is the Reagan-Ford relationship that never was," Wittmann says.

To get an idea of how Cheney will influence the new administration, it's instructive to draw a corporate-style organization chart of the transition. The dozens of workers are divided into groups: legal, policy, strategy, administration, communications, press. Each group's head reports to Johnson, who in turn reports to Cheney, who answers only to Bush. The only person who reports directly to Bush other than Cheney, transition officials say, is White House staff chief Card -- who also answers to Cheney in a dotted-line relationship.

Such an arrangement might confuse those accustomed to Bush-Quayle or even Clinton-Gore. But it should look familiar to the folks at General Electric.

---

Summary of Bush's Opinions

Associated Press
December 24, 2000 Filed at 12:34 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-Bush-Agenda-Glance.html?pagewanted=all

ABORTION:
Opposes abortion rights except in cases of rape or incest or when a woman's life is endangered. Would nominate ``strict constructionists'' to Supreme Court, taken by some to mean justices sympathetic to abortion restrictions. Said he was disappointed by federal approval of the abortion pill but did not think a president could overturn it. Would sign ban on procedure called partial birth abortion by critics.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE:
Ban unregulated ``soft money'' from corporations and unions, not from others. Allow political ``issue ads.'' Increase disclosure.

CIVIL RIGHTS:
Opposes racial preferences inherent in affirmative action, supports existing ``don't ask, don't tell'' policy on gays in military. Opposes gay marriage.

DEATH PENALTY:
Supports.

DEFENSE:
Sees nuclear stockpile as excessive and favors cuts even if Russia does not match them. Would build robust missile defense system, seeking Russia's agreement to amend Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, but proceeding if necessary without such agreement. $20 billion more for weapons research and development over five years, $1 billion more a year for military pay raise, giving average soldier $750 more in first year.

EDUCATION:
$47 billion, 10-year plan. In first five years, $5 billion more for literacy, $8 billion more for college scholarships and grants, $300 million fund (rising to $500 million) to reward states that improve achievement based on increased student assessments. Five percent cut in education money to states where performance lags. Let families save, tax-free, $5,000 per year per student for education expenses at all ages. More spending flexibility for states that administer national test to samplings of students or a compatible state test approved by Washington. More charter schools.

Would let federal tax dollars be used to help parents send children to private schools, when public schools in poor areas fail to meet standards for three years.

ENVIRONMENT-ENERGY:
Increase domestic production and exploration, including in the protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Increase reliance on natural gas. Halve capital gains taxes when landowner sells property for conservation. $50 million in matching grants with states for landowners to restore habitat or protect rare species while farming or ranching. Opposes unilateral extension of federal control over forests, seashores and monument properties. Opposes ratification of Kyoto agreement on global warming.

FARM AID:
Supports eventual ``transition to a market economy.'' Sets aside extra $7.6 billion for crop insurance over 10 years.

GUN CONTROL:
Raise age for handgun possession to 21. Background checks at gun shows if they are instant. Would sign a bill requiring child-safety locks to be sold with guns. Says existing gun laws have not been adequately enforced. Says it's up to states whether law-abiding citizens should be allowed to carry concealed guns.

HEALTH CARE:
Tax credit of up to $2,000 per family to help low-income working Americans buy health insurance. Expand tax-free medical savings accounts that can be used to pay for health expenses. Add 1,300 rural health care centers. Create $158 billion plan to cover prescription drugs for the elderly poor and subsidize choice in drug plans for other Medicare beneficiaries.

IMMIGRATION:
More visas for highly skilled workers and temporary farm laborers. Spend $500 million over five years to speed processing of immigration applications. Split Immigration and Naturalization Service into two services devoted to welcoming legal immigrants and cracking down on illegal ones.

INTERNET:
Extend moratorium on new Internet sales taxes at least through 2006. $400 million over five years to improve education value of Internet use in schools.

PRIVACY:
``I will ensure Americans can exercise their right to know how their information is collected, how it will be used, and to accept or decline the collection or dissemination of this information, especially sensitive medical, genetic, and financial information. ... I will prohibit genetic discrimination, criminalize identity theft, and guarantee the privacy of medical and sensitive financial records. I will also make it a criminal offense to sell a person's Social Security number without his or her express consent.''

RETIREMENT:
Give workers option of staying entirely in Social Security system or else investing a portion of their Social Security taxes in individual retirement accounts, taking a smaller payout from the program when they retire but supplementing their benefits with the private investments.

For younger workers, has not ruled out further increase in age for receiving Social Security benefits .

TAXES:
Cut all income tax rates, with lowest rate dropping to 10 percent and highest to 33 percent. Double child tax credit to $1,000. Charitable deductions could be taken by people who don't itemize. Promises no increase in personal or corporate tax rates. Eliminate inheritance tax. Reduce marriage penalty paid by many two-income couples by allowing a deduction of 10 percent of the lower-earning spouse's salary, up to $30,000. Estimated cost through 2010: at least $1.3 trillion.

TRADE:
Negotiate more trade agreements. Give priority to a free-trade agreement for the Western Hemisphere.

WELFARE:
$8 billion plan in first year to encourage churches and other groups to assume more responsibility for needy through tax breaks and other incentives.

---

Striking Strengths, Glaring Shortcomings

New York Times
December 24, 2000
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/24/national/24CLIN.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON - For eight years, Bill Clinton has been the bright sun and the bleak moon of American politics, embodying much of the best and the worst of his times. Even as he prepares to leave office after two tumultuous terms, he remains near the center of the collective consciousness.

In countless ways, Mr. Clinton has been the unavoidable man.

He exploited the daily rhythms of popular culture to redefine his office; he nudged the political culture to the center to reshape the Democratic Party; he rode the unbroken growth of the national economy to high approval ratings; and he helped foster the flowering of the information age, even as it amplified his flaws. He presided over a period of rapid change, in the world and in the presidency itself. He kept his office relevant and carried his country along on a wild ride.

The first president born after World War II, the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to a second term, the first to lead in a post-cold-war world, Mr. Clinton also became the first elected president to be impeached, over his deceptions about an affair with a White House intern half his age.

He polarized the electorate like no president since Richard M. Nixon, and he left a trail of disappointed friends and former aides, some of whom feel betrayed, and others who barely speak to him now.

But in the face of a citizenry skeptical of government action at home and wary of commitment abroad, Mr. Clinton managed to shape a new kind of limited executive activism that kept the presidency in the thick of things, whether in modest domestic initiatives or efforts to promote peace and trade around the world. Without ever winning a majority of the popular vote, and despite the huge failure of his effort to overhaul the nation's health care system, he still helped bring the federal budget into balance for the first time in a generation and signed a major restructuring of the welfare laws.

Throughout his tenure, voters consistently said they did not particularly trust Mr. Clinton personally, but they trusted him to look out for their interests, and his job approval ratings seemed to rise with his legal bills. He used surpassing gifts of innate empathy to find a new presidential style of relating to the public, and to forge an extraordinary connection with ordinary Americans, especially minorities. If the Constitution had not barred him from running again, polls suggest he might well be preparing for a third term.

"I believe that Clinton is the best tactical politician, certainly of my lifetime," said no less a cold-eyed critic than the president's old nemesis, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "I don't think he's F.D.R.'s peer, but if you just measure his ability to figure out, `O.K., this will buy me the next six months,' he does that better than anybody I've seen, and at a lower cost generally."

In a recent Oval Office interview, Mr. Clinton ranged over his tenure, expounding on the global economy, elaborating on his efforts to find a "third way" between the politics of left and right, reflecting on his personal and policy failures and, once or twice, attacking his critics.

"My whole view of the world is that we're in a new aspect of human affairs," Mr. Clinton said, in a response to a question about the impact of the Internet that quickly expanded to address broader themes.

"Nobody's got a pointer on the truth, nobody is totally right, and we need to be doing more listening to each other and trying to find common ground."

Of course, Mr. Clinton's own parsing of the truth infuriated a large segment of the populace, and his short-term legacy may well be the most closely contested presidential election in more than a century, its legal machinations and 24-hour-a-day tactical cut-and-thrust constituting the pitch-perfect coda to his often rancorous political era.

But Mr. Clinton is also likely to be recalled as the president who presided over - some will say helped spark - one of the greatest surges in prosperity and innovation in American history, and who helped make the transition from the standoff of the cold war to an era in which American influence was unchallenged. Indeed, the question was no longer whether the nation was in decline relative to Asia and Europe but whether it could manage the resentments its sweeping influence engendered.

At home, he learned to use his bully pulpit, and the power of the executive order, liberally, remaking workplace rules and cordoning off millions of acres as national monuments to block logging and other businesses.

"All the dramatics and high and low comedy and conflicts of the last eight years have tended to obscure this central and serious fact: that Clinton may well be remembered not for the booming economy and not even impeachment, but for the new role for the president and the government that he articulated," said his former chief speechwriter, Michael Waldman.

"He tried to govern in the grand style in the first two years of his term, passing big programs and rallying the public with big speeches." Mr. Waldman said. "And it just didn't work. He had to find a way to be president that was much more in keeping with the smaller but still active government the country would tolerate right now."

For most of his tenure, Mr. Clinton presided over a hostile Republican Congress, and it was from this defensive posture that he operated most successfully. He co-opted the Republicans' longstanding political advantage on issues from crime to the economy to welfare, and even, for a time, on morality and values. His critics in both parties derided the approach as mere tactical positioning, reflecting Mr. Clinton's determination to win and keep power more than any core convictions. But he described this approach as the essence of his governing philosophy.

"A lot of people criticized me at the time," Mr. Clinton said in the interview, referring to the 1992 campaign, in which he first outlined these views. "They said, `Well, he doesn't have a foot in either camp. Therefore, he must not have any convictions.'

"But that's not where I saw it at all," he said. "For example, I didn't think we could have an economic policy that would work unless we both got rid of the deficit and invested more in education and science and technology. I didn't think we could have a welfare reform policy that worked unless we both required people to work, and then rewarded work.

"I thought we had to find a way to clean up the environment and preserve it and improve the economy," he added. "I didn't think we could have a crime policy that would work unless we had more police and more prevention."

Mr. Clinton's achievements in these spheres were real. But they were undercut to a degree that only history can ultimately settle by the spectacular public disclosure of his personal flaws, and by the political firestorm they fueled.

"In many ways, this is a tale of two presidencies," said Leon E. Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff and budget director. "One, obviously brilliant and extremely capable, with the ability to help produce the greatest economy in the history of this country and to focus on major domestic priorities and, in effect, protect peace in the world.

"And the other is the darker side," Mr. Panetta said, "the one that made a terrible human mistake that will forever shadow that other presidency. Every person who's occupied that office has had their strengths and their weaknesses, and the prayer of the country is that their strengths will always be foremost. But in fact, their weaknesses are there, and part of the person, and we may think those weaknesses can be controlled, but time and time again, we've seen they can't be."

Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor and onetime friend whom Mr. Clinton nominated to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, then dropped in a controversy over her legal writings, also said his record would be mixed.

"President Clinton has been extremely effective in the symbolic presidency, a talented politician, a gifted communicator," she said. "He has staged his presidency in a way that meets the needs of the information economy, a public sphere dominated by visual images, personality and sound bites. If we define effective as a president who can live in that world and survive and communicate some of his dearly cherished views, he has been effective.

"If we are speaking about a leader who has identified fundamental problems that people don't really know how to deal with, he has been ineffective," Professor Guinier added. "He has not identified that vision and has not moved people toward it. He is someone who truly had enormous talent but also had a few flaws, Achilles' heels that just held him captive."

In the end, Professor Guinier said, Mr. Clinton "became more consumed with winning than leading," and was "such a good politician that he began to believe that in winning he was actually leading."

Another old friend, Peter B. Edelman, who resigned as an assistant secretary of health and human services over Mr. Clinton's decision to sign the 1996 welfare law, said simply, "I hold him to a high standard, because he is a very intelligent man, and he has not lived up to the standard that is appropriate to him."

High intelligence, and great resilience in the aftermath of missteps, have been Mr. Clinton's hallmarks. Mr. Gingrich recalled that as long ago as 1993, at a White House ceremony, the president had said to him, "You know, I'm like that clown you had when you were a kid, and there's sand in the bottom: You knock it down and it comes back up."

"He said, `I'm not pretty, but I always come back up,' " Mr. Gingrich added.

Mr. Clinton took, and gave himself, no shortage of knocks. Even his aides like to joke that he served not two terms but four.

The first was his troubled first two years, culminating in the failure of his health care plan and the Republican takeover of Congress. The second was his comeback from that defeat, culminating in his successful standoff with the Republicans over the budget, the passage of the welfare bill and his re-election in 1996. The third was the scandal over his affair with Monica Lewinsky and his subsequent impeachment for lying about it under oath. And the fourth was a denouement of ambivalence and opportunities lost, punctuated by a successful military intervention in Kosovo, that ended in last month's electoral dead heat between his handpicked successor and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.

First elected with just 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race, Mr. Clinton faced criticism from his first day in office from opponents who regarded his presidency as illegitimate. The passage, by a single vote in the summer of 1993, of a package of measures to reduce the federal budget deficit was the major achievement of Mr. Clinton's first year in office, and it helped pave the way for the biggest success he claimed for his tenure: a booming economy.

But the 1994 failure of his effort, led by his wife, Hillary, to overhaul the nation's health care system overshadowed almost everything else about his first two years, and led the Republicans to reclaim majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Even now, Mr. Clinton identifies that as his biggest policy failure.

"I suppose on a policy front, that certainly ranks right up there. I wish we'd gotten, I wish we'd been able to do more," he said.

"The reason is we didn't have the money to," Mr. Clinton added. "If you want to provide health insurance, universal health insurance, there's only two ways to do it. It's not rocket science. You've either got to require the employers to offer the health insurance and then give them a little financial, a tax break to the people who have a hard time providing it, or you have to pay for it with tax money."

Because the administration had just raised taxes to help reduce the deficit, he said, there was no appetite for raising them further, and the economy was not strong enough to persuade Congress to impose employer-mandated health insurance payments in the face of business opposition.

The administration also took criticism for the overall size of the plan and for drafting it largely in secret.

"That was my mistake," Mr. Clinton said of the whole matter. "I've always thought my wife took too big a hit on that. I asked her to come up with a universal plan that maintained private health providers. And there aren't any other options and neither option, frankly, in 1994, was politically doable in that Congress, and maybe not in the country by the time the interest groups got through mangling on it. So that was my mistake, and it's one I have to live with, like all my other mistakes."

But Mr. Clinton resolved never to be caught again in the mistake of trying to make the country swallow programs more ambitious than it wanted. With the help of Dick Morris, his astute, politically nimble consultant, Mr. Clinton found a way to exploit the political center on issues from food- safety regulations to school uniforms to 48- hour hospital stays for new mothers.

Many such moves he could make on his own, without Congressional approval. No issue seemed too minor to attract his attention, as he tried to attract the nation's. His speechwriter, Mr. Waldman, said the staff calculated that in a typical noncrisis year, Mr. Clinton made about 550 speeches, while Ronald Reagan had made 320 and Harry S. Truman 88.

That was in part because of a sea change in the postmodern role of the presidency. Mr. Clinton became the first president to live in a relentless real-time media culture that magnified his every mistake. His most mundane utterance might be carried live on cable and the Internet from the Rose Garden, even as the major broadcast television networks often balked at giving him the time to address the nation that his predecessors routinely claimed.

Early in his term, Mr. Clinton's aides were unnerved to realize, in airports or other public settings, that people barely seemed to notice if the president was on television because they were so used to seeing him interviewed. So his public appearances became more tightly structured, each one seen as an opportunity to make a point Mr. Clinton wanted to make.

To a degree that often seemed to surprise everybody but Mr. Clinton, the strategy worked. In 1995, he gave the longest State of the Union address on record - an hour and a half. Pundits were scathing, but the public loved it. Mr. Clinton seized the mantle of fiscal responsibility from the Republicans, and by the fall, just a year after they had swept to victory in the 1994 midterm elections, Mr. Clinton had his opponents on the defensive as he prevailed in two government shutdowns prompted by a standoff over the Republicans' budget proposals.

Ken Burns, the documentary maker, described Mr. Clinton as "someone who has moved us from one kind of world to another." And so he has, from a world in which the Internet was barely a force in American life when he first ran for president to one in which the instantaneous reality of cyberspace affects every aspect of daily life.

Mr. Clinton, by virtue of his relative youth, and the generational shift embodied in his election, also moved the presidency from card files to e-mail messages and from a certain parental reserve to a more accessible image: commander in chief as older sibling.

From his saxophone and shades to his MTV answer about boxers or briefs, Mr. Clinton made the modern presidency more understandable and approachable, and eliminated a substantial measure of the distance that had insulated the office and its occupants.

His television skills were so obvious that becoming host of a TV interview program has loomed as a potentially serious post- presidential career option. But there was a cost, and a darker side, to that familiarity.

Well before taking office, and then while in office, Mr. Clinton became grist for a seemingly endless series of tattletale memoirs, tabloid gossip, Internet screeds, late- night sex-and-cheeseburger jokes, and even a best-selling novel and movie, "Primary Colors," whose hero was a thinly veiled portrayal of him. A recent episode of the television drama "Law & Order" featured a murder suspect who had failed to confess to the police that he was having an affair with the dead woman. When prosecutors called that a sign of guilt, the defense lawyer exploded: "He conveniently omitted having sex with a woman other than his wife? Now where have we heard that before?"

Mr. Clinton has said he is not sure it is such a bad thing for the president to be seen as human. In an interview this year with the author of "Primary Colors," Joe Klein of The New Yorker, he said, "We need to demystify the job. It is a job."

But Mr. Clinton has also complained that he was forced to govern in the face of opposition far more implacable than that confronted by most of his predecessors, and in the face of a culture of investigation that has seemed to overtake Washington in the last decade.

There is some truth in that. Years of investigation into the failed Arkansas real estate investment known as Whitewater - intensified early in Mr. Clinton's first term by the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a deputy White House counsel - and other associated inquiries never produced clear evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons, though several former associates were convicted of various crimes.

Mr. Clinton was all too aware that intense scrutiny was part of the price of politics, and that the old rules had changed; after all, aides have said, he decided against running for president in 1988 partly out of concern that reports of dalliances with other women might undo him. So when the Lewinsky scandal became public a year into his second term, as a result of his testimony in a sexual harassment lawsuit dating to his days as governor of Arkansas, even aides under few illusions about the president's weaknesses were dumbfounded.

"That is the most inexplicable element of his presidency," said Michael D. McCurry, the former White House press secretary, who, after leaving his post, said in an interview with the BBC that in hindsight, he had to question Mr. Clinton's fitness for office. "I mean, what could he have been thinking, and why?"

"I'm reasonably well convinced that he fully understood the burden of the office," Mr. McCurry said. "I don't know enough about psychology to know what it is, but something in the back of the mind said, `I'm just not worthy of this, or maybe I'm not up to this.' It's some kind of insecurity, I guess."

For more than a year, a president steeped in the lore of his office, minutely versed on the strengths and weaknesses of his predecessors and consumed with his own potential legacy, was all but paralyzed. At one point in the late summer of 1998, after he had acknowledged first to a grand jury, then to the public, offering misleading answers about the Lewinsky affair under oath, even a couple of his top advisers thought his presidency was over.

But Mr. Clinton also displayed a profound ability to compartmentalize his problems. Just a week after the scandal erupted in January 1998, he delivered a State of the Union address that crystallized his determination to use the projected federal budget surplus to "save Social Security first," a political goal that has dominated all policy discussion on the subject since. He took a more active role in foreign policy, the major arena in which he could act unilaterally.

And Mr. Clinton's approval ratings remained high, which only infuriated his critics further.

David Schippers, the Chicago lawyer who served as chief investigative counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during impeachment, voted for Mr. Clinton in both presidential elections. But during the impeachment inquiry, Mr. Schippers became one of the sharpest Clinton critics, distressed at the president's evasions and the legal rulings they helped prompt, including a Supreme Court decision that Secret Service agents could be compelled to testify about those they protect.

"As a president, give the devil his due," Mr. Schippers said. "The people were happy with him, and he spun the Congress like they were a bunch of rag dolls. I stand in awe of his political abilities."

At 54, Mr. Clinton will be the youngest former president since Theodore Roosevelt, and from his presidential library in Little Rock, Ark., and an office in New York, he said he expects to "be a good citizen of our country and have a positive impact around the world," using Jimmy Carter as a model.

"Bill Clinton's legacy isn't over; it's only midstream," said the historian Douglas Brinkley.

As he leaves office, Mr. Clinton's troubles are not over, either. He faces a mountain of legal bills, the threat of disbarment in Arkansas and even the specter of a possible perjury indictment by the last Whitewater independent counsel, Robert W. Ray.

"The fight over his presidency after it is over will be as vocal and vigorous as it was during it," said Rahm Emanuel, a former senior adviser who has remained fiercely loyal to Mr. Clinton.

Throughout the turmoil of his career, Mr. Clinton's greatest personal and political resource has been a relentless optimism - a force that ranges from ebullience to weary resignation - allowing him to press on when others would give up.

George Stephanopoulos, his former close aide who broke with him over the Lewinsky affair, wrote in his memoir of the White House: "I came to see how Clinton's shamelessness is a key to his political success, how his capacity for denial is tied to the optimism that is his greatest political strength. He exploits the weaknesses of himself and those around him masterfully, but he taps his and their talents as well."

Mr. Clinton has lived more lives than most politicians ever dream of having, and skirted more deaths, only to rise again. Indeed, asked to describe his single best campaign event, Mr. Clinton did not hesitate to point to "that moment in that hot building in Dover, N.H., in '92" when, as he put it, "I knew I wasn't going to die."

At that moment, of course, much of the smart money thought Mr. Clinton was already dead, dispatched by tabloid reports of his affair with a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers and reports in more serious publications about his efforts to avoid the draft and his subsequent efforts to blur and evade that truth. In New Hampshire that night, he ad-libbed a speech telling voters that if they would stick with him, he would stick by them, "until the last dog dies."

It has been convenient in recent years to describe Mr. Clinton as a tragic figure, a hero brought low by his foreordained flaws. But it seems just as plausible now to regard him, in Shakespearean terms, as a comic figure, who endures all manner of slips and humiliations to remain alive and standing, smiling, on stage at journey's end.

To be sure, a raw and wounded bitterness lingers just beneath Mr. Clinton's skin. Asked if the nation could have enjoyed the best of him without also enduring the worst, the president at first demurred. "Oh, that's a judgment for somebody else to make," he said tightly.

Then Mr. Clinton wheeled on his questioners. He sharply criticized The New York Times's coverage of the Whitewater affair, and the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist accused of mishandling nuclear secrets, then declared, "I wish we could have had the great New York Times without that," adding, "But we couldn't."

Finally, he said, "The American people will have to make that judgment."

Mr. Clinton said he might someday make a stab at describing what the personal crisis that precipitated the political crisis of impeachment had meant to him.

"I might," he said. "Most people have no idea about what, personally, I've gone through for the last couple of years, and I might do that. But I did the right thing not to do it, at this point, because the people hired me to do a job, and I got up every day and did it."

Mr. Clinton, though, has also been lucky, as he readily acknowledges.

"The price I paid for my personal mistake was, believe it or not, more than anything else a profound personal price," he said. "I'm glad that I saved my family. I'm glad that my life is happy and in good shape, and I'm glad my country is still in good shape."

On a fund-raising trip to California last fall, Mr. Clinton met a baby girl whose tiny fingers reached out to clutch at his own big hands. "Look at her," he said then. "She's holding on. That's 90 percent of life, just holding on."

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

WORD FOR WORD
THE GAB OF GIFTS
Toy Story: How Much Is That Nuclear Reactor in the Window?

New York Times
December 24, 2000

By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/24/weekinreview/24WORD.html?pagewanted=all

WHEN Christmas dawns tomorrow, millions of children will discover conclusively whether they've been naughty or nice during the past year. Christmas is a time of reckoning for plenty of adults, too. Chief among them are the hundreds of exhibitors who, for a few frantic days the previous February, unveil their wares at Toy Fair, the annual New York trade show sponsored by the Toy Manufacturers of America. With about $23 billion in annual domestic sales at stake, many a purveyor at Toy Fair hopes its products will become megasellers during the holiday season. Most of the time, of course, they don't.

That may explain the whiff of desperation in much of the following promotional literature distributed at Toy Fair by vendors with visions of Power Rangers and Tickle Me Elmo dancing in their heads. Even though some of these items have made their way to shelves, others have already gone the way of the Pet Rock. In any event, Merry Christmas to all, and remember - batteries not included.

•Faces is a CD-ROM program for budding criminologists:

You've seen it on TV. The police artist manipulates his miraculous computer program. Soon the face prints out so perfectly, it's posted with an all points bulletin. Now this exclusive program, Faces, has been released for civilian use. . . . Have someone describe a friend, then recreate the face before his eyes. Recompose your favorite actress to see what she will look like years from now. Or, if you've got the nerve, do it for a girlfriend!

•Say hello to Washy Squashy, the "magical modeling soap for ages 4 to 104":

Never before has there been such an entertaining and magical swish to the swash of the bath! . . . Allow your eyes to be soothed by the gentle colors as your hands enjoy the squishing, squashing, molding and mushing of our wonderful magical soap. Fashion figurines, mold monsters, make splashing spiders and cookie cutter crustaceans. Attach a rope so your soap can swing, make bubbly birds with slimy wings! Air dry them and enjoy them again . . . This time it will be in the bath as you silly slither and slinky slide them all over your little bodies!

•"Adventures in Oz with Cheryl" is an exercise video and playset aimed at "1) motivating children; 2) physical fitness; 3) collecting Wizard of Oz memorabilia." Here's how:

Our adventure begins when Dorothy's house is caught in a cyclone. As the storm tosses her and everything else into disarray, Dorothy begins teaching the importance of a clean room and good personal hygiene. Dorothy then meets the Lizard of Oz, who is a librarian from the University of Oz, and soon realizes that she has landed in a very unusual place - Munch"kid"land. She learns from the Lizard that long ago the Nice Witch threw a terrible tantrum because she couldn't skip down the Yellow Brick Road. The Nice Witch locked up her magic silver exercise shoes Archie and Lefty, and then cast a spell of lazy rain over the Land of Oz, so that no one would ever want to play or exercise again. So Dorothy, a fitness expert from Kansas, declares it her mission to make the Land of Oz healthy and happy again.

In the game Boy Crazy!, girls use 363 cards depicting real teenage boys to match their fellow players with perfect dates. Meet some of the lads:

Tim (Colorado): If you catch Tim acting shy, that's a good thing! That's how he acts when he's interested in a girl! But Tim always remains true to himself, ever since someone gave him that advice. Ironically, he once was caught acting like a foreign exchange student at the movies.

James (Missouri): Cars, cars, cars. James loves anything that goes vroom. Though he admits he sometimes fails to think about the consequences of his actions, he makes sure he never drives faster than his guardian angel can fly. If you're a girl who loves life in the fast lane, this car lover is certain to make your heart race.

Ray (Florida): Ray sees himself as sweet, honest and smart. Eventually, he hopes to make it in Hollywood. Ray's favorite pickup line is, "You're so beautiful, your beauty shines brighter than the sun." You can see why he was valedictorian of his class - he's quite creative!

•Remember Sea-Monkeys, those add-water- and-stir brine shrimp? They're no longer confined to fish bowls, as this pitch for the new "PenQuarium" reveals:

How can a Sea-Monkey help you do homework or coach you in class? Bring along your favorite little pets in the new PenQuarium - a traveling Sea-Monkey aquarium which also functions as a working pen! The water-filled portion can hold two or three adult Sea- Monkeys for 12 to 14 hours (then transfer them back to their home tank). The PenQuarium also features a light to help see your Sea- Monkeys when the sun goes down!

•Lionel Trains is celebrating its centennial with an item that never made it past the prototype stage some 40 years ago: the Model 463 Nuclear Reactor:

For the most part, the 463 is true to the original prototype in both aesthetics and functionality. However, a few enhancements have been made. Where the prototype has one bin to accept material, the 463 has two to allow "raw" steel material to enter the dome, and "spent" glow-in-the-dark nuclear isotopes to exit. Lighting has been upgraded as well, with a circular sequential light unit, and a super bright L.E.D. to give the appearance of nuclear reactions firing inside.

•The Baby Buzz'r is a battery- operated smiley face that buzzes, beeps and blinks. Its inventor explains why it is "a must-have item for caregivers everywhere":

As a physician, I have had the opportunity to test Baby Buzz'r in a variety of settings and have been amazed by its effectiveness in pacifying even the crankiest of babies. Its captivating face, twinkling eyes, sweetly singing smile and attention-grabbing vibrations charm, pacify and entertain most children. Baby Buzz'r's ability to placate fussy babies and toddlers enhances the bonding process between kids and their parents. Many caregivers report that performing previously challenging tasks such as taking a temperature, buckling a seat belt or changing diapers are now a breeze because of Baby Buzz'r!

•Finally, there is Tangle, a series of plastic twists that can be bent into different shapes. Its creator's ambitious marketing plan, in part:

TANGLES AT THE TOP: A free Tangle is available for any world leader who promises to Tangle before using armed force in any conflict. Tangles have already been sent to the U.S. president, vice president and all the members of Congress. A leader who Tangles will always come up with a creative peaceful solution to any problem.

TANGLES BEHIND BARS: Free Tangles will be donated to every prison whose warden requests them. Prisoners who Tangle do not fight or try to escape. The work they do improves as shown by our test on a Georgia chain gang who built an innovative kid's park out of old tires in their free time.

TANGLE WEDDED BLISS: Any couple who sends us a copy of their marriage license will get a free marriage Tangle. Couples who agree to Tangle when they have a disagreement instead of fighting stay married longer and have better sex lives.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Daily Energy Update

Yahoo News
Sunday December 24, 9:10 pm Eastern Time
Press Release
Sunday, December 24, 2000

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE) -- The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power forecasts a peak energy load today in Los Angeles of 3150 Megawatts (MW) and expects declining loads through the holidays and into the New Year.

-- DWP has 1,000 MW of uncommitted energy available today.

-- This energy will be available to California entities such as the Independent System Operator (ISO) or the California Power Exchange (PX) to assist them in meeting their normal and emergency energy needs. No power will be sold outside of the state.

-- Throughout the energy crisis, DWP has provided surplus energy to California. Yesterday, DWP provided 300MW per hour to the ISO.

-- DWP has 24 major thermal generating units at eight facilities. Today, fourteen units are operating including all ten base load units. Of the ten units not operating, two units have scheduled major maintenance activities underway; two units are undergoing minor maintenance; and the remaining six units are available for use as the market requires.

-- Additionally, DWP has 27 hyrdo generating units at thirteen facilities. The output of these units is dependent on stream flows and reservoir levels. Current conditions allow for utilizing about 80% of DWP's hydro-generating capacity.

-- While electric rate increases are being sought by some utilities in California, Los Angeles city residents continue to enjoy stable rates that have remained unchanged for almost nine years. DWP provides electricity and water to the city's 3.8 million residents.

Contact:
Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power Darlene Battle, 213/367-1368

-------- police

LAPD chief says case will go on

USA Today
12/24/00- Updated 07:27 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/ndssun03.htm

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks said he continues to support convicting three officers for corruption even though a judge overturned the guilty verdicts.

''This is not over by a long shot,'' Parks said in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. ''It's unfortunate that we've gone through a trial of this length and depth and then to have to go through it again, but we'll be prepared to refile it if necessary.''

Sgts. Edward Ortiz and Brian Liddy and Officer Michael Buchanan were convicted of conspiracy and other charges last month. Prosecutors said the officers framed gang members they claimed tried to run them down with a pickup truck.

Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Connor overturned the convictions Friday, saying jurors had been confused about some of the evidence. The next court hearing in the case is scheduled for Jan. 16.

Parks said that police investigators would meet with district attorney's officials, who must decide whether to appeal the ruling or seek a new trial.

One possibility is that the U.S. Attorney's office might take over the case in a federal civil rights prosecution, the Times said, citing law enforcement sources close to the investigation.

''The prosecution did an excellent job with this case in the trial, and they'll be even better prepared next time,'' Parks told the newspaper.

Ortiz, Liddy and Buchanan were the first members of the now-defunct Rampart station anti-gang unit to be tried in connection with a corruption scandal sparked by allegations made by ex-officer Rafael Perez. Perez alleged that officers beat, robbed, framed and sometimes shot innocent people.

Winston Kevin McKesson, who represents Perez, said the judge's ruling will not alter the fact that ''the conscience of the community - the jury - has spoken.''

Lead defense attorney Barry Levin said the three officers felt vindicated, adding: ''I'm thankful that we have a system of checks and balances so that when there is a mistake it can be rectified.''

-------- activists

Disabled Activists Slam Stadium Seating

Yahoo News
Entertainment News
Sunday December 24 04:37 PM EST
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/eo/20001224/en/disabled_activists_slam_stadium_seating_5.html

While movie chains like Sony, AMC and General Cinema have been suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous expansion by filing for bankruptcy, other major chains are having problems of a seating kind.

The U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts is suing National Amusements Inc., operator of Showcase Cinema, and Hoyts Cinema Corp., for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act in the way their stadium seating is designed.

Two separate lawsuits filed this week by attorney Donald Stern in U.S. District Court in Boston contend that handicapped moviegoers are denied access to better seats because the bleacher-like stadium seating in the chains' movie theaters make it difficult if not impossible for them to climb the stairs.

"National Amusements and Hoyts have described stadium theaters as a 'breakthrough in the industry' and inspired by 'what the customer wants as a perfect movie-going experience,' " says Stern. "No justification exists for denying that experience to individuals who use wheelchairs or have mobility impairments."

The stadium seats that Stern refers to (and we've grown accustomed to) are perched farther back from the screen, but are elevated on a series of risers. Each riser is usually 12 to 18 inches above the one below it allowing for unobstructed viewing, like those at a sports stadium.

Stern's basic argument is that wheelchair-bound patrons are discriminated against because the offending movie chains only make handicap space available at the very front or the very back of the theater--while the best sightlines are to be found up high.

"[Stadium-style seating] effective treats individuals with mobility impairments as second class citizens. Such conduct is discrimination, pure and simple, and the Americans with Disabilities Act forbids it," adds Stern.

Stern's seeking court orders to require the movie chains to design and build better bleachers that don't exclude the disabled under the guidelines set forth in the ADA. He also wants modifications made to any existing stadium-seating.

Andy Washburn, an ADA information specialist with Adaptive Environments, a national organization providing technical assistance and consultation to architects, corporations and the disabled, says the lawsuit is a long-time in coming and follows a similar suit the Department of Justice filed against the AMC theater chain in early 1999.

"[Stadium] seating is obviously designed to provide a certain level of experience to the moviegoer," says Washburn. "But for the disabled, it's a very bad seat because it's so low and the screen is so close at that height."

The AMC case has yet to be settled, but Washburn sees a growing trend whereby theater chains are using this type of seating arrangement more and more as a selling point to patrons-the companies promise bigger screens and better views, but unfortunately lose sight of ADA requirements and their disabled customers.

One wheelchair-bound activist, Betsy Pillsbury, said going to movie theaters where there is stadium seating isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"You're not able to sit with your friends," she said. "You have to sit alone. You have to sit up front and crane your neck and the screen is out of focus."

If a court were to order Hoyts and National Amusements to modify their existing stadium-seating, Washburn suggests retrofitting the theaters with platforms that could help make the risers more accessible to people with disabilities.

"Platform lifts could come up from the floor, would run on the stairs, fold up so it would be out of the way, and generally not require a ton of architectural work-only ripping out a couple of seats. That might be a solution for the bigger theaters," offers Washburn.

As far as building future stadium-style theaters, the ADA specialist says it's all starts at drawing board.

"In new construction, it's simply a matter of design," says Washburn. "There's no reason not to design an entrance in the middle."

Together, the Massachussets-based National Amusements, which is owned by media behemoth Viacom, and Hoyts Cinema run over 40 movie theaters across the country featuring stadium seating.

Neither company would comment on the lawsuit.

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