The Role of Congress In the War on Terrorism

Transcript

MR. STEPHEN HESS: Let's start our program today. We welcome you to the 15th program in the Brookings/Harvard Forum on the role of information and the media in the war on terrorism. I'm Steve Hess of Brookings. I co-host the program with Marvin Kalb, the Executive Director of the Washington office of the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard University.

Our program this morning is called "The Role of Congress in the War on Terrorism." It might perhaps have been called "Whatever happened to the Congress of the United States in the war on terrorism?," and we have four "Congress-watchers" who I'm quite sure are going to answer that question.

Moving around, next to me is Mort Kondracke who is the Executive Editor of Capitol Hill's paper, Roll Call and is one-half of the "Beltway Boys" on Fox TV.

Next is Candy Crowley who is the Senior Political Correspondent of CNN. When she was their congressional correspondent she won the coveted Dirksen Award in 1998 for her distinguished coverage of Congress.

Tom Donilon, next to her, is the Executive Vice President of Fannie Mae, but has observed Congress over the years from many interesting perches in the executive branch, as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Clinton Administration, on the Congressional Relations Staff at the White House under President Carter.

Next is our own Brookings Senior Fellow, Jim Lindsay, who is also the author of "Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy."

So we're going to approach this from a lot of different angles and Marvin, why don't you start with that.

MR. MARVIN KALB: Good. The way I would like to start is by raising the question that's been on my mind now for about two months in observing the effort to fight terrorism. One hears a great deal about a historic turning point in American foreign policy, and just the other day the National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, spoke of a "tipping point," suggesting that at one side there was one kind of a world, it tips, and on the other side we have another.

I am old enough to remember that when we were in the Vietnam War Senator Fulbright and a number of other senators up on the Hill made it not fashionable but acceptable, it legitimized a kind of not only dissent but debate on an issue involving the war.

So the question that comes to my mind immediately, and I would like to start with Mort and then we'll just go around, why is it that one has the impression today that the Congress has removed itself from the debate, if indeed there is a debate of any kind going on on the war against terrorism?

MR. MORT KONDRACKE: I think there was a tipping point. Prior to September 11th we thought we were living in a post Cold War world where the future was going to be some sort of straight line where there might be difficulties in the world but we didn't imagine that the survival of civilization was at stake. And suddenly it occurred to us that we are vulnerable, we were attacked for the first time on the mainland, the potential exists for our enemies to develop weapons of mass destruction, technology could mean that they could be miniaturized. We could, our cities are vulnerable to the worst kind of attack imaginable. So I think the world did change.

This is what, eight months since it all happened, and everybody I think is a little bit stunned still. There haven't been any more attacks and therefore a relative calm has imposed itself on us, but there's still a lot of tension.

Then there's the question of what are we going to do from now? Wars are inherently, I think, an executive activity, especially when you've had a surprise attack. I don't think after World War II the Truman Committee to investigate how the war was being conducted and financed was not formed in the first year of World War II, and if you'll remember the questions and the debates that got underway over Vietnam were a very long time coming. There were very few people who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, I believe one or two, and it was not until late in the game after Tet in 1968 that people like Fulbright and Gore and John Sherman Cooper and others raised issues about the war and even at that they never put a stop to it, but they did raise questions and they got a lot of heat for it in the initial going.

So it's a slow start and it would be a slow start under any circumstances.

I think that?And part of it is political. The Democrats are a little worried about?not a little. They're worried about criticizing the President when a war is underway that the public overwhelmingly supports, and his approval ratings are high. You saw in Florida last weekend that there was some criticism. There's been a little bit of criticism from Tom Daschle about where are we going here, what does this "axis of evil" mean? He's been pounded for it by the Republicans and then he silenced himself.

So I think, the bottom line is I think it depends on how it goes. If we keep winning and the President seems to have the program under control and in hand and is successful, then I think you'll hear less of the kind of debate that I think you should have. Questions should be raised. But public questions, I think you'll see less the more successful he is; the more he fails, if he fails, then you'll see more vocal?

MR. KALB: Let me raise a quibble with something that you said, and raise it only because I think it is relevant to our discussion. But the Gulf of Tonkin was 1964 and we had then about 10,000 to 12,000 advisors in Vietnam. And it was in 1966 that the major hearings began on Vietnam. So it was well before Tet that there was a significant national debate in this country about the direction of American policy on the war.

But Candy, you're up there every day I guess. Is there any direction, does one have a sense of an organized effort to debate where we are in this war against terrorism?

MS. CANDY CROWLEY: No, not at the moment. I think you found a couple of things, I just want to sort of say amen here. There's a lot of things going on.

One is people were stunned, so that sort of set everybody back including people on Capitol Hill who not only watched what went on in New York, but really sort of feared for their own lives. So everybody sort of was in a stunned silence.

After that you have sort of a natural tendency to allow the Administration to do something simply because it can move quickly than Congress ever can.

And third, you've got a nation that seems to be largely in favor of it. So those are three very powerful things that sort of stifle a huge outcry of criticism. But around the margins they've begun to do this, like what are we going to do in Afghanistan now that we've won the war? Are we going to stay there?

I think Congress doesn't seem reticent to criticize the Administration's policy in the Middle East so it's not an across-the-board thing. It just has to do with the war on terrorism.

I think you're going to see more of it.

The only thing I don't quite agree with because I don't know how it will play out, and that is what if there is another attack. What does that do? Does that again rally people around and do those ratings go back up to 90? Do you say he's doing it just right? Or do you say well why didn't you stop this? So I'm not really sure what happens if there is another attack in terms of whether this brings up debate.

I think the most glaring thing that happens, at least to me sort of watching this unfold, we never did discuss how it happened. We never did have those hearings on the CIA and the FBI and the intelligence community. It just seemed to me that that was such a verboten topic, and I found that really unusual.

Senator Shelby who said something like I don't want to quote him, but something that seemed critical sort of early on, and man, just got slammed really hard and we have yet to have any sort of discussion about we give you all millions and millions of dollars per years. What happened here? Was this an intelligence failure? I don't know the answer to that question but we've never even asked it. So I think that there were things around there that could have come up but that people were so stunned and so unwilling to not be hey, you can't get away with this for America, that that debate kind of went by the wayside. Then you had the Bush Administration saying to Daschle and others well, it would really tie them up to have these hearings. They really need to be over here stopping another event. So if we have hearings I'll have to spend months researching it. It kind of went away, and I find that in terms of democracy and trying to make agencies accountable probably the most glaring at this moment.

MR. KALB: Tom, you've worked for Democrats in the past and you've worked for a Democratic Administration. But I ask you now to pull back and ignore politics. We're in a national kind of crisis now. It's not a glaring headline at the moment but it's there and it's sort of, off on one side now is the Middle East which could be read as part of the overall war against terrorism. How do you see the essential silence from the Hill?

MR. THOMAS DONILON: I think a couple of things. Number one, it's emphatically the duty of the President to fight a war and I think that's recognized by both sides of the aisle on the Hill. It was a stunning event, as Candy and Mort indicated, and there was a compelling thrust to unite.

MR. KALB: Wasn't the Congress supposed to be part of this?

MR. DONILON: I think?

MR. KALB: But wasn't the Congress supposed to be part of this from the very beginning if you're fighting a war?

MR. DONILON: Absolutely. And I think that they?

MR. KALB: My question is where are they?

MR. DONILON: Let me get to that.

At the initial, given the stunning nature of the attack on the United States it was emphatically that we do look to our President in America in the 21st Century to lead our efforts against an external threat. That is the way the government has become organized and that's the expectation of the American people and the Congress has affirmed this decision I think particularly among the Democrats to indicate essential unity behind him and not to indicate any cracks in the unit with respect to fighting that, number one.

Number two, I think as you get distanced from those events and as you add things like, which are really the role of Congress?the budget, the structure of the government, the nature of future threats, I think the congressional role starts to become more prominent with the longer term issues and I think you'll see that. Again, the system just demands it. The President submitted for 2003 a doubling of the homeland security budget from $20 billion to $40 billion. It will now be up to the Congress to review that budget and decide what those priorities are.

I think the Congress has, because it does have the ability to step back, it's not managing this huge effort every day to try to do everything we can to ensure that we don't have another attack. And I think by the way, Candy, I think the odds are, given technology, given the dynamics, given the history of al Qaeda, I think that the odds are that we will face another domestic attack. I think we need to be prepared for that.

I don't know how the politics of the country, the culture of the country or the economy of the country will react to that. The odds are probably that we'll have to deal with it. But I think Marvin, as you get further away from the event, as you start to look towards longer term policy issues, budgets, the structure of the government, the nature of threats and policy issues now, the balance between rights and security and things like that, I think you'll see the Congress start to play a more active role.

They do have the ability on the Hill. One, they have the duty on the budget side, but they have the ability on the Hill and I hope they will step back and look at some of these longer term issues.

MR. KALB: Jim, you're our scholar.

MR. JAMES LINDSAY: Does that mean I have to bore you? [Laughter]

MR. KALB: You have to provide us with the verbal footnotes on this. Are you, as you look back, are you surprised by the relative silence from the Hill or is this something that given the track record you would have expected?

MR. LINDSAY: This is exactly what I would have expected. We're seeing the playing out of a dynamic that goes back to the earliest days of the republic.

The notion that Congress would quiet down particularly in the beginning of a war when the United States was attack, is a very old one. In fact if we go back to Federalist No. 8 and read Alexander Hamilton, he writes about this. That during war time power naturally flows away from legislature towards the presidency because of what's expected of the President and what he's capable of doing. So that I don't think is unusual, seeing sort of a natural playing out. It's partly driven by sort of the agreement that we need to act and the belief that we must rally around the President, and partly driven by politics. That is when the President's at 80 percent in the public opinion polls it's pretty difficult to go out and start criticizing him, particularly when the [President's] Republicans [are] Democrats because the Democrats' perception is for the past 20 or 30 year we've been weak on defense, so in some sense for them to go out and criticize the President would be playing to the worst stereotypes about Democrats on these issues, so they tend to be, for political reasons, don't want to get very far away from the President.

Having said that I think there are a couple of things to keep in mind. One, I don't think we should exaggerate the breadth of the congressional surrender to the President. One of the really remarkable things is on a number of issues where you would have expected a President in the 80 percent range to be able to get his way, he has not been getting his way, most notably on trade.

If you had told me you had a President who was at 90 percent public opinion approval ratings and you went up to the Hill for trade promotion authority, I would have thought it would have been a slam dunk. If you go back to last Sunday, Bob Zoellick had a piece talking about all the ways Congress is not cooperating with the President on trade issues.

I also think on some of the procedural aspects of the war on terrorism, whether we're talking about INS reorganization, the duties of Mr. Ridge, whether we should have a Homeland Security Agency, the issues to do with civil liberties and what have you, Congress hasn't gone along with the Administration. They've been fighting with them. So I don't think we should exaggerate.

I think on sort of core national security issues, on levels of defense spending, on issues like missile defense, and even on through standard foreign policy issues like let's say the coup in Venezuela where you would have expected Democrats to have come out and criticized the President for not standing up for democracy in Latin America, by sort of historic standards we really should have restrained.

One other point is when are we likely to see Congress revert back to becoming more critical of the Administration? I'll note even using your Gulf of Tonkin to the Fulbright hearing analogy, we're not going to see it until 2003. It takes some time.

And what's like to make Congress more critical is distance from events. Clearly that's going to matter.

Success or failure of the President's policy. I think Mort's quite right. Success brings out applause, failure brings out criticism. And I think beyond that members are going to be looking at inconsistencies. I think one of the interesting topics that generate the issue of criticizing the President on the Middle East, it's remarkable that criticism is actually fairly tepid on the Hill compared to the OpEd pieces in the nation's papers. But where people are criticizing the President isn't, Mr. President, you're acting too rashly, using force too much. They've gone to his right and said either you're being inconsistent or you're failing to really live up to your own policy prescriptions. We need to be tougher. I think in some sense you're likely to see sort of early criticism of the Administration is going to be that it's not living up to its rhetoric rather than it being too forceful.

MR. DONILON: Jim, I guess what you're describing is a dynamic where there's kind of an appropriate protected zone around the President with respect to the direct fight against al Qaeda and its offshoots in the war on terrorism, but as you get further away from that protected zone, both in terms of issues and then in terms of distance from the event, you'll see a much more aggressive congressional reaction.

MR. LINDSAY: And I'm actually surprised that the zone is actually as small as it is. Historically I would have thought the zone would have been a bit wider. Indeed it's remarkable, you can go back to the fall when the President went up with a bill especially in the Patriot Act asking for a lot of things in terms of being able to go after prospective terrorists, that there was actually a fair amount of congressional opposition. Then you had this sort of odd coalition of people, civil libertarians on the left uniting with civil libertarians on the right. I think if there's going to be one area in which this Administration is likely to get the most criticism going forward in the next six or eight months it's going to be from members of its own party. We've seen that particularly with the Weekly Standard which has launched its own?

MR. HESS: I think you're being just a bit generous to Congress. It strikes me that this is a congressional?

MR. LINDSAY: I'm an Article 1 guy, you're an Article 2 guy, Steve. [Laughter]

MR. HESS: This is a congressional election year where uniquely all members of the House and a third of the Senate are thinking an awful lot about themselves. You've had up to now a popular President. I don't know how it will change if it will change as we watch the President's ratings go down, but by and large it strikes me that you have an awful lot of folks that don't want to raise their head above the foxhole and get shot at and that's perhaps the rank and file.

As far as the leadership, hey, where are the Fulbrights? I haven't really noticed?Now all of you are saying yeah, things will change over time and I'm sure you're right one way or another, but we're sort of eight months into it. Candy has made a point which I think somebody, bring us up to date, the question of where is that great investigation on what happened with the intelligence failure on 9-11. There was set up about a month ago, given money, to have a joint session of the two intelligence committees. What happened? Where are they?

MR. KONDRACKE: This raises the issue of what's public and what's not public. There's a lot that we don't know that's presumably going, I hope is going on in executive session of the Armed Services Committees, the Appropriations Committees that deal with intelligence and defense and the Intelligence Committee itself. If they are doing their duty then behind closed doors they are asking, they should be asking the question. Is the money being well spent? How much do you need for the war on terrorism? Who's it going to and all that.

And this intelligence investigation of why 9-11 happened, did we have enough human intelligence? Was George Tenet building up our human intelligence capabilities, etc.? It seems to me it's appropriately done at this particular point behind closed doors with a report to be made public with generalizations. I don't think you want to have a public hearing roasting the intelligence community at a time when it's supposed to be out there getting agents in hostile territory.

So there's that distinction.

In public, as Jim mentioned, there was criticism of the Patriot Act, there are hearings underway in the Senate. Senator Lieberman. On how to organize the Homeland Security Office, whether it shouldn't be a Cabinet department and so on, and as Tom says, the closer home you are the more?and civil liberties being the closest home I guess?the more Congress feels capable of having an impact. The further you get overseas, the more reluctant they are.

There's one other point. I'm frankly surprised that more questioning has not been done about the plan to go after Saddam Hussein. I know that there is deep reservation among the Democrats to doing this, and how it's being done. And Tom Daschle began to raise the issues and then sort of got stomped on, but it is up to him and up to the rest of the Democratic leaders to raise legitimate questions about how this war is going to be fought, can we win it, how many troops do we need, do we have the right places to base them, do we have allies on board, all those kinds of things that are just prudent in planning an operation, those questions ought to be raised.

MR. KALB: Mort, on the intelligence failure, it would seem to me that U.S. intelligence ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. They ought to be able to conduct the covert operations that have to be conducted covertly, and one would hope successfully, and at the same time be able to discuss what they can discuss in public.

This is an issue that affects the entire country. The President is out front and the people look to the President to lead the war, but as he himself has said, this is a very complicated war. It's not just a military action. A lot of things are involved. And I keep on wondering who is the person, persons up on the Hill right now with the courage, and that's the word I think is advisable, with the political courage to come forth as Fulbright did in '65 and '66, and blow a whistle and to say I a not arguing with you, President Johnson, that we shouldn't be in Vietnam and that it was not his [point]. It was the prosecution of the war in Vietnam that he argued about. And one could imagine, logically, that that same kind of an argument could be and should be conducted today.

MR. DONILON: Can I address that question? I think that's a little too simplistic.

MR. KALB: I'm known for that.

MR. DONILON: First of all, you should entertain the possibility that on the merits that members of Congress support the President in the actions that he took against the Taliban and taking down the Taliban government and everything that's been done in Afghanistan. So that lack of criticism shouldn't automatically be described as lack of courage. There actually could have been, and I think there was, widespread agreement that what the President did was the right thing to do. Now there are questions, I think legitimate questions about the peacekeeping and the future of Afghanistan and the structure of our programs there to make sure that we don't have a repeat of 1989 where we succeed and walk away, but that's another question. But I think we shouldn't in an academic discussion dismiss the fact that people were acting in good faith and on the merits with respect to the investigation.

The problem is and I had similar questions about it, but the problem is that you would be asking the intelligence community right now to give information publicly about the very people and institutions and entities that they have an ongoing operation against. And that's an exceedingly difficult thing to do.

MR. KALB: No. How did we get here today? The idea that most people supported the President in an attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan, forgive me, is simplistic because obviously you would do that. I'm trying to get at issues like how did we get here?

MR. KONDRACKE: If I was the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Graham, what I would be doing is holding closed hearings to examine all of this stuff, to make sure that it didn't happen again. And I would not?Remember the Church hearings on the intelligence community was terribly demoralizing to the CIA. Fortunately the Cold War was winding down, but nobody wanted to be an intelligence agent. It was exploring all the dirty?

MR. KALB: But Mort, that's the point. What he found was something wrong with the agency, not right.

MR. KONDRACKE: Exactly. And there are undoubtedly things that went wrong leading up to September 11th. I think that those things ought to be corrected. The question is whether it should be corrected in public at this particular time when we are talking about, as Tom says, the very people presumably who are now responsible for getting agents inside the al Qaeda or processing intelligence or whatever it is that they're doing, they're going to have to be called in public hearings to account for what they did six months ago when they're supposed to be out there doing it all over again.

MR. KALB: But do we know whether these private hearings are being held?

MR. DONILON: They're going to be.

MR. KALB: They're going to be.

MR. KONDRACKE: They're supposed to be. There's supposed to be a joint closed investigation?

MR. KALB: Wasn't there supposed to be about six months ago?

MR. KONDRACKE: They talked about having a public hearing and having a special select committee. Everything works more slowly on the Hill than it does in the executive branch so they've got to work this whole thing out. But it's supposed to happen. It hasn't happened yet.

MR. HESS: But Tom, when you were at the State Department and you were an Article 2, wouldn't you have been happy to have found the Hill quite as quiescent as they are now? Take the budget question you raised. Well, where are those hearings in that committee that are asking some pretty serious questions about the nature of this huge increase that the President has asked for in defense?

MR. DONILON: There will be an investigation. A joint committee's been established by the Congress and it's really more of a matter of kind of timing and the appropriate way to go about it.

I don't have any doubt that there will be a serious investigation of the pre-September 11th events as well as many years leading up to that because I think that the roots of this are complicated.

With respect to the Congress and the budget, Steve, I think you're exactly right. I think that the size of the defense budget increase and the size of the homeland security budget that's been proposed by the President, and it is a security budget as they posed it. The respected budget analyst on the minority side in the Senate, Bill Hoaglan, was quoted in the newspaper saying this was all across 2,000 accounts. There's a tremendous amount of oversight the Congress has to do to ensure that in fact they're meeting real threats and agencies haven't tried to dump things into homeland security as they would have in other parts of the budget. I think you're exactly right. And I think it's an appropriate role for Congress and should be an aggressive role for Congress since they're overseeing the public's money.

And the last thing I'll say on this, I think it's an appropriate role for Congress to step back and ask the questions, are we appropriately structured? You've seen Director Ridge now go public with his concerns about the resistance in the bureaucracy of pulling these agencies together in a rational way. It seems to me kind of a minimum test of whether we're serious about organizing ourselves would be whether we can get together a consolidated border agency.

MR. HESS: But if you were just a casual reader of the newspaper, rather than trying to find something about the Lieberman committee on this very serious question, it would look like Senator Byrd and others are really mostly concerned about the prerogatives of Congress. Are they treating us right? Can't we really have Ridge?

MR. LINDSAY: That's more, Steve, with the way the media covers these stories and the sort of template it tries to fit them in as opposed to what members themselves are trying to accomplish. I would even argue that Senator Byrd may be driven by bad motives. If you read the Federalist Papers, the whole system designed by management is basically the notion that people are going to pursue their self-interests, but the idea that they're left to pursue their self interest is something that is a better approximation of the common good.

I want to go back to the issue you raised before about who's going to come out and sort of speak and be the Fulbright of 2002. I think Mort touched on one of the reasons why you're not likely to see a Democrat any time soon become the next Fulbright. That is when Mr. Daschle sort of ventured out into this territory he got stomped, as Mort put it.

If you go back and look at what the Senate Majority Leader said, it was a rather unremarkable comment. He said the war's been a success so far, whether it's going to be in the future I don't know. He said I think it will be a failure if we don't get bin Laden. Now given that the President himself has spoken publicly about being hot on his trail and he wanted bin Laden dead or alive, those would strike me as particularly unremarkable comments.

Within three hours of the Senate Majority Leader's statement, Mr. Lott had put out a press release asking how Senator Daschle could dare to say these things in public. Mr. DeLay, the hammer of the House, put out a one-word press release. I guess he gets credit for brevity, simply said "Disgusting". And my Congressman, Tom Davis, put out a press release accusing Senator Daschle of providing aid and comfort to our adversaries.

MR. KALB: Is this the modern definition of courage?

MR. LINDSAY: ?of treason. I think Senator Daschle displayed courage. He did not back down from his comments. He stood by them. What was remarkable was that very few Democrats, actually none that I can think of, came to his defense.

MR. DONILON: John Kerry.

MR. LINDSAY: So we have one out of 50 who is running, and also comes from a state in which he's probably not going to get in trouble for that particular stance.

So I think the politics for Democrats, you want to call it lack of courage, I think it makes it very hard for them. I think it's more likely you're going to see criticism coming from the other side of the aisle. At least in the near term. And that's, again, not unremarkable. If you're going to say that demonstrates a lack of courage, well then American history is full of periods in which politicians weren't willing to stick their necks out. There's nothing unusual about that.

MR. KALB: Candy, as you've watched this over the years, is this simply an example as it appears to be emerging from our discussion of the President's popularity stifling perhaps even an honest desire on the part of some to stand up, blow the whistle and say wait a second. Before we plunge further let's figure out direction.

Might it be possible that as a result of the Administration's recent plunge into the Middle East crisis and the inability of the Administration to somehow or another move a positive image forward, that that might trigger a broader discussion about the larger foreign policy aims and conduct of the Administration?

MS. CROWLEY: Sure. I think the Middle East makes it more, the criticism on the Middle East and what's going on in the Middle East makes it much easier for people to criticize what's going on on the war on terrorism.

I think a couple of things, just sort of listening to this. One, I think you're absolutely right. Let's not take lack of criticism to be lack of courage. They did agree with him. Early on they said I think this guy is doing the exact right thing. There were stories all over the place about how glad Democrats were that Gore wasn't in. They really believed in what the President was doing.

But I think the other problem here, and this is maybe a news media problem, and I'm not sure really how this all takes place. But the fact of the matter is that when you question something now it is taken as criticism, and it's not necessarily. I mean what's wrong with a question about where are we going to go next? But the minute you become that person you're a critic as opposed to just shouldn't we at least ask what we're going to need to go in and take out Saddam Hussein? Shouldn't we at least ask what we're going to do about Afghanistan after the Taliban are all gone?

So what's happened here is that a hearing is taken as a criticism. I think somehow that needs to be turned around, that questions aren't criticisms, they're just questions.

The other thing that I'd just add as sort of a postscript on this whole intelligence community, and what happened is members of the public, don't you think most people want to know in some way, shape or form that this is being looked after sooner rather than later? I realize that the Hill works very slowly. Trust me, I understand that completely. But the fact of the matter is whatever went wrong on 9-11, I think most people would like to know it's being corrected, or if it didn't go wrong, okay, fine, and it's all just, we're this vulnerable and it's just going to happen again, whatever. But the idea that it either has to be either really secret or really public, there's something in the middle they could do here and it seems to me the further away we get from 9-11 the more people are saying how do we know that this won't happen again?

MR. KALB: Explain to me, get into your first point, why a question is regarded as criticism, and even if it be criticism what's so wrong about that? Explain it to me. Why?

MS. CROWLEY: I think people don't?The politics of a question are if you're seen as criticizing a President that most people agree with that's not necessarily a?

MR. KALB: What are they agreeing with him on and what is the criticism directed at?

The agreement on is that we were attacked and we want to fight back and hit the bad guys. Everybody agrees with that. That to me is an accepted moment in our history and let's move on from that now.

What I'm asking you, to think about the next stage of this. Does it have to be framed within a budget context? That only when the Administration comes to the Congress and says I want a hundred bucks to do this that the Congress says, okay, we'll give you 100; no, we'll give you 90; no, we'll give you 110.

Why must it be that? Is there no capacity in the Congress, Mr. Scholar, to pull back a moment and if we are indeed at a historic moment in our history, why doesn't it sound like a historic moment?

MR. LINDSAY: I'm not sure what a historic moment is supposed to sound like.

MR. KALB: Aw, come on.

MR. LINDSAY: No, I'm serious. Two quick points. One, I think that a question sounding like criticism is in the context of who's asking the question. Part of the problem Democrats face is that they don't have public credibility on these issues. So when they ask questions the presumption is they're asking questions because they're really weak on foreign policy and don't want to?

MR. KALB: John Kerry fought for his country.

MR. LINDSAY: John Kerry fought for his country, and he comes from the state of Massachusetts which is regarded as?

MR. KALB: You can't fight in Massachusetts?

MR. LINDSAY: The presumption is?

MR. KALB: We started the Revolution there.

MR. LINDSAY: And we still don't get credit for it because only two states celebrate Patriots Day which I take as a personal offense having come from the great commonwealth of Massachusetts.

But I think it's important to keep in mind that in looking at this context really does matter.

The second thing is, it's not as if we're not doing anything to fix these problems. There's an assumption through here that the reason we got September 11th was somebody inside the CIA must have screwed something up really badly, and it's not clear to me that that is true.

Number two, if there were screw-ups a lot of it happened out in public and they have been discussed. All the talk about fixing INS, about trying to find some way to coordinate state and local law enforcement, federal law enforcement authorities, all things that have been discussed in the press. Often I think they really don't know what they're talking about, but they're nonetheless still talking about it. We are addressing these things. There's a lot of time being spent, hearing being held on the President's requests, and people are going through it.

I think probably part of the problem is this notion that somehow Congress, as in it, which [inaudible], is going to sit back in some sort of Solomonic fashion and have this majestic?

MR. KALB: It's called the greatest deliberative body.

MR. DONILON: Marvin, can I interrupt? You asked are the larger questions being asked and that's a fair question.

I don't know, by the way, very much that the world changed all that much. Our recognition of the threat became clear after September 11th which I think is an important point.

There are hearings. Senator Biden's holding a set of really historic hearings asking the question are we addressing ourselves to the right threat? Now he got on the front page once when he had a scientist talking about dirty bombs, but he has these hearings week after week and the media doesn't show a lot of interest in it. But a lot of that work is going on. What are the threats? Are we organized to deal with them? Have we thought correctly about them? Go through the list of other policy issues.

Afghanistan, yes. There was broad agreement that we should go in and support the President and take down the Taliban. There are lots of questions being asked now about what happens after that. Senator Edwards asked this question in his speech just this last weekend about what's next in Afghanistan with respect to peacekeeping? There are big questions that are being asked about what's next in terms of reconstruction and our commitment there.

There are big questions being asked about what our policy is in the Middle East, especially from the Republican side. There are a lot of questions being asked about the adequacy of our non-proliferation efforts. If you think about the real ultimate threat it would be a?it's a nexus between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction which the President has talked about and there's lot of work being done on that. There would be today, I think, a big debate going on about Iraq if the middle East hadn't blown up over the last few weeks and taken all the efforts and attention of the Administration and policymakers there.

So I don't think it's fair to say that there's silence. I think as you get a distance away from the major events of September 11th and as these much more complicated, less black and white issues emerge, I think you do see debate and interest in the Congress on these issues.

MR. KALB: Let me ask the question this way, Mr. Secretary. Is the problem then not to be seen in Congress, not to be seen as a matter of political courage, but rather to be seen in the way in which the media handled this ongoing, supposedly serious debate about foreign policy that you've just outlined for us? Is it simply, you said that at one point Biden got on the front page. but it's not a consistent run on the front page. Why isn't CNN carrying these hearings live? They carry just about everything else live. Why not carry these hearings live if they're that important, if they're that meaningful? What's going on What about the media's role in all of this?

MS. CROWLEY: Obviously where you choose to shine the spotlight obviously is an editorial decision and what goes on live at CNN is certainly above my pay grade.

Right now we're looking at a war in the Middle East and that's where obviously all the attention is going to go.

Look, the news media, that stuff is out there but CNN and Fox and MSNBC and ABC and NBC don't put on everything. It sort of gets back to my cry constantly which is if you want to be fully informed there's a chance to do it but you're going to have to go out and look for it. These hearings are getting covered. Are they covered live on CNN? You've got me.

MR. KALB: Obviously?

MS. CROWLEY: I'm assuming some of them have been and others haven't.

MR. HESS: Is it fair then to rehearse this and say okay, Marvin asks where are the philosopher kings? Where are the big issues being developing? Tom says they're being, they're all out there, but somehow they're under the radar screen. Candy says hey, this isn't the way we cover things. We have a searchlight that moves from one place to the other. And you cover things because somebody focuses your attention. Mr. Biden in the Foreign Relations Committee holds hearings. That's when you cover it. You don't cover it when it's, as Mort describes it, all private conversations that are going on. It may well be, as I think the first round of responses is, just too early for that. That's why this isn't happening yet.

But the idea about not allowing questions to be asked, that this is somehow dirty pool, is pretty counterproductive to what the history of Congress has been, at least since 1994. That is, it's become a very very partisan body. Everybody is very happy to attack everybody else. Everybody is quite used to and enjoys responding to the attack.

So in part, maybe it goes back to the people keeping their head down in the foxhole, but more likely, going back to Candy because you're the political correspondent what's going to cover this both in this year's elections and then two years from now, doesn't this start to play out in electoral terms as the President starts to be attacked? Makes mistakes? The Middle East perhaps is the entry to that. But aren't we about to have no one asking polite questions but everybody soon shouting again? Isn't that really what we're soon into? The idea that we at Brookings have been worrying about for some years, this permanent campaign, just is on hold now, but we're going to have these issues discussed soon, but in the crudest form. Is that a bad look at the future?

MR. KONDRACKE: I was about to say something like what you just got through saying. Tom Patterson wrote the book Out of Order some years ago, I guess it was before the '92 campaign, and said that the press used all of politics and public affairs as a strategic game. I'm not sure whether it was the media that imposed this framework on the politicians or whether the politicians imposed it, were doing it all along and the press suddenly discovered it. But in fact what everybody seems to calculate is how is what I say today going to play into my chances of winning the next election, and am I going to improve my party's chances of taking over Congress or am I going to give an opening to the other side?

So in this context, and the press plays into it by reporting, as Candy said, questions as criticism, and plays it into the context of the next election and is Bush up, is Bush down? Is Daschle up, is Daschle down? And everybody is constantly fighting. So the questions are going to be taken in an election context. It's an election year and seats are on the line and if Tom Daschle is being beaten up for something that he said that's quite legitimate in Washington, the person who's going to pay for it is probably Tim Johnson in South Dakota because somebody's going to take out an ad saying Tom Daschle is helping Saddam Hussein, as has already happened in the energy context.

So as Ross Perot once said, these are very nice people caught in a lousy system and the system is one of intense partisanship and strategic gaming.

MR. DONILON: That's not new then. If you're working in the executive branch for a cabinet secretary or for a member of the Congress, before you give a major speech or appear on a network television show you'll get a call from a producer or the reporter saying what's he going to do? Where is the hit? You're likely to get attention if you go on a Sunday show and you attack somebody and enter into conflict, much more than you will if you call a set of reporters into your office on the Hill, Senator Biden calls them in and he sits around the conference table and say I'm going to have a set of historic hearings, there's going to be 12 hearings. The Joint Chiefs, the CIA have said these are the real threats we have over the next decade. I'm going to have a set of thoughtful hearings on these, right

The chances of getting the item in the newspaper the next day are zero, and the chances of you getting in the newspaper the next day if you have three sentences in a 3,000 word speech that attacks the Administration is high and that's the way it works in terms of press coverage of these issues, I fear.

MR. LINDSAY: That also colors what people think Congress would do, because what people know is what the spotlight is shined on and how the story is framed by journalists. So I would say it's actually both. There clearly is often a lack of political coverage on Capitol Hill. There's nothing new about that, it's as old as the republic. At the same time it's encouraged by journalists to place stories. Let's face it, going to a hearing on INS reform does not make for really good television, unless somebody gets out and wags a finger and attacks an Administration official.

MR. KALB: Jim, for the last 15 years up at this place [Harvard] we have had probably thousands of officials coming up to discuss hundreds of issues, and when it's impossible really to define a problem and when it's impossible simply to state out front that politicians don't take the lead, the blame is always placed on the press, the media.

If you guys covered it right, if you guys had the courage to point the spotlight at the hearings that Senator Biden is conducting, then the American people would be wiser and we'd have a better democracy. That's a cheap way of handling the discussion.

MR. DONILON: Let me come back at that though. Let's take a different context, one that I know your senator studied a lot.

Would we have been better off as a country and would policymakers have been better off if the news divisions of the major networks hadn't pulled back radically on international coverage over the last decade? Would we have known more about the world? Would we have known more in particular about the Arab Middle East? Would we have known that something was going on out there that we should be paying attention to?

MR. KALB: Absolutely.

MR. DONILON: So these decisions by the media I do think, Marvin, make a difference.

MR. KALB: I think it makes a huge difference. But to explain it all as a result of the failure of journalism to function better is to say also, or at least open the door to the possibility that the system isn't functioning better.

Mort's answer a moment ago about the power of political calculation to determine whether somebody goes out front, how you deal with the war, how you deal with the Middle East, that seems to me to be a very sensible argument and probably, Candy, am I right that this is what determines, it's the politics, it's the raw politics of it that will determine how a politician is going to behave? And it almost flows from the words themselves.

MS. CROWLEY: Well it's a determinant. And it's a pretty powerful determinant. I think there are politicians who have acted against their own political interests over the course of history.

Look, everything has political implications. You just can't get around that. The question is how much into consideration you take them.

Tom Daschle is perfectly free to come out and say whatever he wants whenever he wants. He didn't have to go back underground, if indeed he did. I'm not sure I buy that whole scenario. But in any case all of these politicians have the ability to command the microphone, command the spotlight and put aside the political implications, but you can't get rid of the political implications and you're not going to stop us from not looking at 2004, or 2002. Why is Gore in Florida not talking about foreign policy? There's just political implications to everything. You can't take that out but you can, a politician can minimize it in his strategy and what he says or what he doesn't say, what he investigates, what he doesn't investigate.

MR. HESS: So Candy, that's the political implications. Now as we're moving in, on the front page it's less Afghanistan more Israel and the Palestinian authority.

This is an area in which Congress has always been very attentive and very vocal. As we move into this are they going to take the positions from whence they come? Does this overheat things? Does this move it on? There was a big Israeli support rally on Monday, at least one potential presidential candidate, Gephardt was out making a speech with a group. There will be one on Saturday with the Palestinians, who will be up there?

Talk about Congress as the cycle of terror moves into the Middle East at least once around before we turn the questioning over to the audience.

MR. KONDRACKE: I think Congress as the American people, perhaps even more than the American people, is pro-Israeli. I think you may, it's going to be interesting to see whether any member of Congress shows up for the Arab rally. I have a feeling that in the Black Caucus there is a lot more support for the Palestinian side than has yet surfaced and I think that's a story to watch, but fundamentally I think politicians are going to be pro-Israeli, partly because of their Jewish constituency, partly because Israel is on the right side of this battle, I think.

So the criticism of Bush has been rather mild, and largely on his own terms. It has been you didn't get in there early enough, you should have been there sooner, that was the Kerry criticism down in Florida. The other one as far as Lieberman, that you're inconsistent, it's basically the Netanyahu criticism that how dare you say that you can fight terrorism in Afghanistan with everything you've got but Ariel Sharon is not allowed to fight it in Israel? Nobody's got a good idea, frankly. Nobody has a better idea than what Bush is trying to do which does inhibit commentary. If you haven't got anything to say, it's very hard to say something.

MS. CROWLEY: I think that's right. The problem is there's not a clear solution out there. I was talking to somebody the other day and I said you know, before Colin Powell went over there it was all, the United States isn't involved enough, they've got to get involved, they've got to get involved, so they sent over Colin Powell and now it's well why did they send Colin Powell over there? I mean you know it was a failure and?So there's no really good, clear answer out there that one can be advocating so that does sort of dampen the criticism.

Having said that I still think what we said before, which is that to open this door in the Middle East because there is a terrorist tie?The Middle East is like the knee bone being connected to the thigh bone. All of this connects. Whatever we're going to do in Iraq connects to whatever happens in the Middle East. Even what we might do in Afghanistan. Our standing in the Arab world. All of this is linked together so I think it does open the door for more questioning and more criticism about long term policy.

MR. DONILON: Typically foreign policy issues are not bread and butter voting issues in most congressional districts. The Middle East is an exception to that. It has to do with our long and historic and important relationship, our being the United States relationship, with Israel. It has to do with our strategic interests in the region. So it is more political than most foreign policy issues.

I agree with Candy. I think the real impact here, what's going on, is the impact on other policy issues. The Iraq projects, the security of Israel generally, I think that's the real policy impact and it connects on policy.

MS. CROWLEY: The other thing that was brought up over here, what's interesting about the criticisms here is that it's coming from mostly conservative Christian criticism. The tie there to Jerusalem, they are the most pro-Israeli, pro-Sharon group at this point, so the criticism Bush is getting is not from natural critics, but from those who actually need to come out and vote in an off-year election. So you have to be very careful about the criticism from there because it does affect who comes out and that's a core constituency.

MR. DONILON: It's political on the margins but the policy impacts of getting this right are huge. The security of Israel, our vital interests in the Middle East generally, the terror project generally and not being distracted from it, and getting cooperation from key governments in the region. The Iraq project. And last, our long term relationship with that part of the world. As it's not becoming a part of the world with 800 or 900 million people who are kind of in desperate shape, bad governance, terrible economics, misinformed, and who develop as their reason for being, being against us. So that the policy implications of getting this right are huge.

MR. LINDSAY: I think on the Middle East a lot of smart things have been said. I think most of the criticism you're going to get from the Hill is largely going to be what I call politically safe criticism. You're not living up to your own rhetoric, you're not engaged or leading. But I think Candy is quite right, there's a real problem in criticizing the Administration if you don't have a real alternative for what they should do.

I think also the criticism is going to be hamstrung a bit by what Tom pointed out, that as much as people may want to try to score political points on this, they understand that the President is dealing with real, very, very serious issues. The stakes are very very very high and I think there is a legitimate and I think wise reticence on many members of Congress just to try to score a lot of political points.

Having said that I do think the Middle East has a real danger for the Bush Administration because it is a situation in which your policy is more likely to fail than it is to work. When your policy start failing and it looks like you aren't able to control events, that can drive down your public approval rating and it can sort of very quickly start to legitimate other kinds of questions. And also because of the tie-in, I think quite rightly, the knee bone is connected to the shin bone sort of analogy, all of a sudden now you can use this as a way to go after concerns or raise concerns you might have about Iraq.

So I think it helps to erode the President's political capital and foreign policy.

MR. KALB: Remember that before?by the way, we're going to get to you all now with questions.

I was just reminded of something. Before President Carter called people at Camp David in 1979, at that time the odds on failure were overwhelming and yet he did it and he came up with a success that was historic at that time.

MR. DONILON: President Clinton did the same thing in August of 2000.

MR. KALB: And almost got there.

MR. LINDSAY: And I would argue that Bush in terms of politics in America has a great deal of discretion to go out and try a solution. I think he would have tremendous support.

MR. DONILON: I think that's a very important point. These tremendous breadth of action. MR. LINDSAY

MR. LINDSAY: There's a real consequence of sort of the historic turning point after September 11th I would argue it's not in the world out there, it's not necessarily in American foreign policy from the political landscape here at one. One of the important things is that not only has Congress been more restrained in criticizing the President, sort of the corollary to that, the President is more free to maneuver and the question is whether the President is going to use this political capital at sort of his own discretion to make things happen. He clearly did in the case of Afghanistan but that was sort of running down?

MR. KALB: That?

MR. LINDSAY: The question is, is he going to step up to the plate with the Middle East? Of course the problem he is saying it's easy to say step up to the plate in the Middle East and make it happen. The question is what exactly you want to have them do.

MR. KALB: He's laid that out. The broad vision is fairly clear to everybody what's going to happen.

MR. LINDSAY: I'm not so convinced.

MR. KALB: Okay.

MR. HESS: When someone comes around, please tell us who you are, if you represent a group, and use the microphone.

Q: The article in today's paper that Tommy Franks being, in conducting the war from Florida impeded their hunt for bin Laden, would that be something that Congress would be investigating?

MR. KONDRACKE: They absolutely should. I've heard it mentioned by countless people as something that is just wrong, to be that distance. And as the article pointed out, there was no one higher ranking than a lieutenant colonel on the ground out there. That's pretty bad. So yeah, that's a definite point of criticism.

Q: Mary Mullins, I work with the Bosnia Support Committee.

I wanted to ask about two relationships with Congress, the citizens relationship with Congress. In the late 1980s I reported some subversive activity that I felt was detrimental to the country. I reported it at first to the police and I wrote a letter to the Attorney General of the United States, and the police suggested that I go to my congressman. My congressman would never speak with me. I had to speak with the people that work in their offices and they didn't take me seriously at all. It was, I wouldn't know how a citizen would approach Congress. I couldn't get appointments with them, and it didn't seem important.

MR. KALB: So the first point of your question is?

MS. MULLINS: That's the first point is how does a citizen approach Congress on a matter they think is important.

The second is about, I heard Mr. Rahman speak, the Palestinian representative to the United States and he was saying that he felt the Americans were more Zionist than the Israelis. In their congresses. In the Knesset there are Israelis that speak very strongly against this military aid to Israel and the way Mr. Sharon is conducting the war. But in the American congress you don't hear any criticism of military aid or any criticism of force against citizens of?

MR. KALB: And your question is why is that the case?

MS. MULLINS: Yes.

MR. KONDRACKE: The second part I think is that the polls indicate that the country is overwhelmingly sympathetic towards the Israelis. And I think members of Congress are even more so because they have more Jewish constituents than they do Palestinian constituents. The organized Jewish community is much more adept politically than the organized Arab community. And also there is a longstanding tradition of support for a fellow democracy. So their sympathies just naturally flow toward the Israelis. I think that's the answer to that part of the question.

MR. KALB: The first had to do with the average citizen getting through to the Congress. What do you think, Tom?

MR. DONILON: Well, a good congressperson will have a good constituency operation and that's how he or she will stay in office. My tip would be if it's an important public issue and you can't get the attention of your congressional office go to your local newspaper. That's the fastest way to get the congressperson's attention is it have it appear in the local newspaper.

MR. LINDSAY: Write a letter.

Q: Al Millikan, Washington Independent Writers.

Cynthia McKinney made comments in Berkeley, I heard some media types roundly condemn her and say that those in the government should do the same. I'm wondering if the government has properly dealt with her and has she been taken seriously? The fact that she's Afro-American and woman, is she dismissed as someone that's not a proper critic of the Administration? I know she was roundly criticized for offering to receive humanitarian raid from Saudi Arabia that Rudy Giuliani turned down, but no one seems to be saying that we should reject Saudi Arabian oil. And when it comes to the bin Laden family, it seems only a foreign media type like Christopher Hitchens brought up the fact that those members of the bin Laden family after September 11th were quietly rounded up and sent back from this country. It seems to me that maybe the friends that bin Laden's had with various politicians, that may help explain it. And it certainly would seem beneficial for the family personally. But as far as the war on terrorism and as far as the welfare of the American public weren't there reasons that those family members should have been detained and questioned more than they were?

MS. CROWLEY: On Cynthia McKinney, here again I'm unsure whether it was a question or a criticism, but the suggestion was that the President and the Bush Administration knew in advance of the 9-11 attacks and that there should be hearings into this because there was a connection that somehow big business would profit from 9-11 and that's why members of the Bush Administration didn't prevent it. This just isn't the kind of criticism that's going to fly right now without some proof to it. Her own delegation, Del Miller and Max Cleland both came out and said nothing could be further from the truth. And she has been sort of roundly smacked down on that.

I think since then somebody has said no, no, she was just sort of asking the question. It seems to me that was a question that a lot of people thought was off the wall.

MR. LINDSAY: I think it's also important to keep in mind that Representative McKinney has a reputation of often making what one would consider to be outlandish criticisms. So in part, this is where context matters. Who's asking the question, how it's being asked. Part of the problem for Cynthia McKinney is Cynthia McKinney. That is she has often said outrageous things and when you get a reputation for sort of extreme views people tend not even to listen to you even if you may happen to be right.

QUESTION: Susan Morrison from American University.

I'd like to ask you about press coverage. We've heard a lot of, Mr. Donilon you've talked about they're not covering anything, maybe it's a news media problem, and somebody says most people want to know this is being addressed, whatever this is.

So do you really think that the news media is not covering things that are going on around the war, the efforts of Congress? And if not, is it possible that that's because Congress, the individual congressmen have decided not to because they are clearly the greatest source for any kind of story, at least in my 20 years in town.

MR. DONILON: I think there has been and the Pulitzer Prizes I think show this year, tremendous media coverage of the war on terrorism and lots of issues around it.

I think as a general matter, though, the media is interested in the most immediate issues. They're interested in conflict issues more than they're interested in kind of long term policy issues, and it is hard, and my only point was that it's harder to get coverage of the kind of consideration of longer term policy issues, the kinds of issues that Marvin was asking about, about the ultimate issues, about where's American foreign policy going, are we addressing the right threats? It is harder to get coverage of those than it is to get an immediate day story about a conflict between two politicians.

I think the quantum of coverage, obviously, has been tremendous around the war on terror and there's been spectacular reporting on it, again as indicated by the Pulitzer Prizes.

The last thing I'll say is I hope, and I hope we do get some distance away from events like September 11th, I would hope that the media would not retreat into its aversion to international coverage and kind of retract to the Gary Condit stories of pre 9-11 and will learn the lesson that it's important for Americans to understand what goes on around the world given really what one writer's called the death of distance.

MR. HESS: Let me say something because it does relate to Congress and the news. Many years ago I wrote a book about the Washington reporters in which it was possible to trace the fact that although stories looked terribly presidential if you looked at the headlines and so forth, when reporters filled out this log of mine daily on where they were getting the information, it was fascinating to see how many of these stories were actually circulating through the Congress and coming out that way. Even though they might have been coded presidential, the sources, the best sources were often in Congress. There were a lot of people up there who love to talk to reporters and so forth. That really I don't think has been happening. Sure, the seven Pulitzer Prizes and so forth, most of those came from outside of Washington or for other reasons, but for some reason I think there was blockage in this either because as Tom rightly pointed out they agreed with the President, or as others pointed out, you keep your head down because it's bad politics, the President is up there. Or for a third reason, they have nothing to say, there's no solution to this problem or that problem.

But for some reason I do think that part of this that we've been worrying about, that Marvin has said where are these great hearings and so forth, can be traced to the fact that Congress really hasn't been in the loop in the same way on this issue for one reason or another that they usually are in everything that goes on in the city.

MR. LINDSAY: I think we also have to avoid romanticizing the past. I understand the Fulbright hearings in the summer of '66 and maybe because I was only seven years old at the time it didn't have quite the same impact on me, but I think it's important to keep in mind that while the Fulbright hearings came out, and they were striking because here you had the man who had been the floor manager of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, William Fulbright, all of a sudden raising questions about his President's policies. It had very little effect on Congress as a whole. It had very little effect on American policy towards war. Tremendous impact on the relationship between Johnson and Fulbright. And it wouldn't be until Johnson's policies of manifest failure after the Tet Offensive that you all of a sudden see members of Congress coming out in very large numbers being critical of the war. Indeed what's striking when you look at the evolution of congressional, common in the Vietnam War versus public opinion, that in many ways the public led members of Congress.

In the fall of '67 the war becomes increasingly unpopular, so much so that the Johnson Administration in the last fall of '67 launches a conscious public relations campaign, persuades the American public that we're doing well and that the light is near the end of the tunnel. They even bring Westmoreland back to go on a public speaking tour to assure Americans. Then all of a sudden you have two months later the Tet Offensive which sort of gives lie to what the Administration's been saying. Then all of a sudden everybody's freed up, you've got people like Bobby Kennedy coming out and all of a sudden the shifting tone becomes one of maybe we ought to rethink what we're doing, which wasn't really what Fulbright had been arguing in '66.

So I don't think we should romanticize how it worked in the past and somehow today's crop of ball players isn't as good as back in time.

MR. KONDRACKE: Historically also you could argue that it was the press that led the way, that led Congress. The first doubts about the Vietnam War that I remember were from David Halberstam and other reporters who were saying the way we're doing this is not working. We are not winning battles that we claim that we're winning. I think that this led to not a change of tactics but instead toward, and Tet remains a very controversial moment. Did we really lose Tet? The press all reported that we lost when in fact we really decimated the Viet Cong. That's a case where public opinion I think may have been mis-molded. Somebody holding hearings might have corrected that widespread impression.

MR. KALB: I don't want to take on your seven year old memory of an event. You were obviously brilliant, but wrong. [Laughter]

What happened at that time, and not to relive this?I can't help it. But to say that the Fulbright hearings had no impact upon public opinion, what I would suggest is that you go back and check the public opinion at that time.

MR. LINDSAY: I have.

MR. KALB: I'm sure you have, and maybe you ought to look at it again.

There was an enormous impact that it had, and it had an impact in the way in which I guess I am appealing for some of the same things to return now.

It's not that you have an immediate impact on this impact on policy, this public impact on the opinion poll or one thing or another. It is a psychological thing that happened. It happens over a period of time. It makes certain people feel that doubts that they might have had are legitimate doubts that can now be pursued in an OpEd piece, that can now be pursued in a college classroom or around a dinner table in the evening. People began with the Fulbright hearings to discuss the war in Vietnam in a way they had not before, when they were dependent upon David Halberstam's report?

MR. KONDRACKE: The point was?

MR. KALB: That was three years earlier.

MR. KONDRACKE: ?by 1966 there was already enough evidence hey, this is not working.

MR. KALB: That's right.

MR. KONDRACKE: Up to this point, Afghanistan seems to have been working and the worldwide war against al Qaeda seems to have been working. And there's not really a wedge here for somebody to say hey, wait a minute, something's going wrong.

The minute something serious goes wrong, believe me, people will start asking questions.

MR. LINDSAY: There's something else important here which is why the Fulbright memory is not really relevant here. You said it's important to have someone like Fulbright come out because he has stature, legitimates criticism. What's interesting, and people can write OpEds. Well, if I picked up the OpEd pages of a variety of newspapers there's actually a fairly robust debate going on. Some of my colleagues have written extensively, taking issue with various things that have been happening. So in that sense if there's been a legacy of Fulbright or a legacy of Vietnam, is the extent to which a lot of this in the broader public already happened. These debates are being had, I've been on numerous call-in radio shows, people get on and air their very thoughtful, very passionately held views. I did a thing last night at Prince Georges Community College where people had very very strong views about the Middle East, the President of the United States, overall American foreign policy. So I think in some sense our internal domestic politics are quite different and you don't really need to have a Senator come out and legitimate it. I think in many ways Congress is likely to lag behind their constituents on this.

MR. KALB: That is the question that comes up. Why in fact is that happening?

QUESTION: My name is Dee Road, and my question is to Candy.

I'm wondering if, as it was suggested before, that our interest in the international world was kept before the people's eyes rather than, at times our media is so focused and fixated on events happening here in the States, if maybe we might have seen something coming on us as it came on us on September 11th.

MS. CROWLEY: It's sort of a chicken and an egg question. Which came first, the public's disinterest in international news or the media's non-coverage of it? Look, I don't know any journalist that doesn't want to go someplace overseas and report back very cool stories on what people are thinking and how they view the U.S. and what real impact our policies have and what real impact the perception of us have and where the perception came from.

The question is, you were talking about entities that are corporations that need to make money, that need to put their money where people's interests are and at the same time balance it with what they need to know, and I am all for it. I'm all for having bureaus in every major city on all major continents. The problem is it is a costly adventure for an American public that has shown very little interest in knowing what's going on in New Zealand or Zimbabwe or that sort of thing. So it's a tough business decision.

Now I don't want it to be?I don't know any journalist that wants it to be a business decision. Every journalist I know wants every decision on what you cover to be a journalistic decision only.

MS. ROAD: Specifically I'm talking about tragic situations like the Condit situation, like OJ Simpson, like the tragic death of Princess Diana. Other events that certainly capture our eyes and our hearts. But do we need to see this replayed over, over, over again, over again, on every station 24 hours a day? Here in the States we almost lose contact that there is a world outside of the States.

MS. CROWLEY: Again, I'm with you in theory, in principle, I could have done with less OJ and more what's going on in the Arab world and how do they view it. But the cold, hard facts are the reason that OJ Simpson was on 24 hours a day for seven months or eight months is that people were watching. There's competition out there. There's fierce competition out there.

MR. LINDSAY: I want to actually say something nice about the news media. I don't think it's a chicken and egg question at all. I think it is very very clear that most of the time most Americans aren't interested in things that happen outside the country. Sort of a standard thing is Time Magazine. When it puts a foreign head of state on its cover, newsstand sales are much lower than they are otherwise. OJ Simpson was on TV a lot because people found it compelling TV. It may not have been good or important in the cosmic tail or things, but people watched.

The other thing is that I do think there's this notion somehow, if only we had carried it more we'd understand these issues abroad, and I think it's a bit of a fallacy. I'm not sure how much they learn from what they watch on TV or read the newspaper.

But if you're talking about Osama bin Laden, you're talking about al Qaeda, there were stories about that. Plenty of stories. We had a President of the United States who went around worrying openly about bioterrorism, if there were all these little agents that would kill us, and it helped drive up some book sales for some people who write about bio-terror.

But I think it's real easy to sort of blame the news media and say if only they had covered, if we hadn't had so much about Prince Di and Elton John would somehow have appreciated what was going on, I think that's too convenient.

MR. DONILON: I disagree with you. One is I hope a lesson out of September 11th, to the news media, that things that happen far away from here can have a huge impact on us directly. And there was at the end of the Cold War, Jim. a big retrenchment on international coverage. That's established by lots of studies this institution and others have sponsored.

The second is, it's a broad philosophical issue, but if the news media is just going to provide what people want to see maybe they should just hire Tetter or a pollster to tell them what to cover as opposed to having?

MR. LINDSAY: No, they have?

MR. DONILON: ?have editors. If you have a pollster why do you need an editor?

And third, I think that media coverage of issues has an impact not just on informing the American people but on policymaking as to what's important and what they should focus on.

Today lots of people know about the education system in Pakistan and the development of the Madrasas. Eight months ago no one had heard anything about it. It had a huge impact.

MR. LINDSAY: But I doubt that would have been a story that anyone would have covered before September 11th, even before you closed down your bureaus in Paris and Tokyo and London.

MR. KALB: I think it would have been?

MR. KONDRACKE: I'm all for having those bureaus, believe me, but on the other hand this was not a story that you needed a bureau in anywhere very far away to cover.

We had the incident of the Khobar Towers. That was a widely publicized. We had the Cole attacked. For heaven's sakes there was a bomber caught on New Year's Eve 2000 heading for LAX.

MR. KALB: The two embassies in Africa.

MR. KONDRACKE: Yeah, so this is?There were reports saying we were vulnerable and the press didn't pay any attention to them, Congress didn't pay any attention to them, President Clinton paid some attention to them but he certainly didn't elevate them as he should have to the top rank of national priority to say wait a minute, we've got to get our homeland security toughened up here because we're going to get hit one of these days. So it was a total system breakdown.

MR. LINDSAY: But it's also worth pointing out that the Bush Administration when it first came in didn't elevate terrorism to the top of its list either. Part of the problem was people didn't believe something this bad could happen. It was beyond the bounds of the unimaginable. Then to put a knock on the media so I can play both sides of the fence, one of the things, we had the trials of the participants in the '98 embassy bombings. There was a lot of testimony in which in open court it became pretty clear what the ultimate goals were, and what's remarkable is that it was picked up by almost no newspapers including?

MS. CROWLEY: But you know something about it?

MR. LINDSAY: It was picked up by government officials who follow these things quite closely and wrote something that eventually appeared in the?

MS. CROWLEY: But the question always is what do you focus your attention on not is it not out there. It's out there. The question is what it in the headlines. Generally when people complain about media coverage it's not that it wasn't covered at all, it just wasn't covered to the extent they wanted it covered. That's generally?

Q: Fernando from the Brazilian Embassy.

You mentioned trade promotion and how Congress was [unintelligible] President Bush, then you mentioned Venezuela, then of course there was the idea of political calculation. Is that supposed to be a pattern here, we should expect Congress taking action when the issue resonates more with the voters? And giving President Bush a free reign when it's an issue that might be important to the cosmic scale of things but not very much, doesn't resonate as much with the voters. And it should we expect this pattern to last election or?

MR. LINDSAY: I think it's the fundamental dynamics of American politics and that is politicians tend to worry about issues that directly affect their constituents and the less it directly affects their constituents or some subset of their constituency, the less likely they are to pay attention to it. It's the nature of an electoral system.

MR. KALB: We're just going to go down now, just a final comment.

MR. DONILON: I think as Steve outlined, kind of the reasons for a congressional action or inaction pretty clearly, I do think that it just is a fact of the American system that the President, emphatically, the institution that we look to to fight a war, I think as you get some distance you'll get much more congressional involvement. I do think you need to entertain the possibility that in fact Congress did support the President on the merits of these things and as the issues become less black and white and more complicated I think you'll certainly see more congressional involvement.

MS. CROWLEY: I think all things are sort of multi-determined. I must say I'm not sure that I even agree with the basic premise of the question which is that there hasn't been criticism.

I also think that we ought to at least be aware that there are politicians, and I think this goes to you question, there are people in government who do understand that this is beyond politics. It's not only just about our future meaning the U.S. future, but about the world's future and who genuinely are working absent a political element. It doesn't mean that there aren't political implications, but there may not be political motivation and that's a different thing.

I covered Capitol Hill for a very long time and was always astounded by the non-political motivation of a lot of people that are up there who really do want to make the world better, want to make the U.S. better. So don't come away believing that because there are political implications that there are always political motivations.

MR. KONDRACKE: I think in times of war there is a natural tendency for everybody to rally together and to support the Chief Executive and that that inhibits this kind of questioning that you want to erupt.

I think you will have a debate over Iraq. I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been more of it up to now but I think it's going to happen.

MR. HESS: Despite Marvin and my best efforts to act as the picadors and stir you folks up, we had four panelists who continued to be reasoned, balanced, nuanced, and understanding of the American system, and yet we had a good time.

We thank very much Mort, Candy, Tom and Jim. We hope you had fun too and the audience. I should tell you that next week, same time, same station, April 24th, Wednesday from 9:30 to 11:00 our special guest is going to be Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and he's the number three person in the Pentagon. We are going to have a group of journalists going at him of whom it will include Barbara Bradey of National Public Radio and David Martin of CBS. The conversation will be at least about the military tribunals but I'm sure about everything else that the Pentagon is currently engaged in. Please join us, we'd love to have you with us again.

Thanks very much. Thanks to our wonderful panelists.