The first woman attorney general takes office, one of our stories tonight on Washington Week
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Now here's moderator Paul Duke. Good evening, the anti-spending bandwagon is rolling right
along here in the Capitol. Democrats, Republicans, and the White House all climbing aboard with the
administration announcing a new and painful round of military base closings. At the same time,
President Clinton is urging more aid for Russia's beleaguered Boris Yeltsin. Janet Reno has taken
office as the new Attorney General after being unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Also on
Capitol Hill, there is rising anger over some of the things children are watching on television
these days. For those of you watching this program, children and adults alike, we now give you Charles
McDowell of the Richmond Times Dispatch, Julie Johnson of Time Magazine, Doyle McManus of the
Los Angeles Times, and Stephen Roberts of U.S. News and World Report. Steve, crazy things are
happening around here. A lot of people who've been big spenders are suddenly becoming big cutters.
Well, it's true Paul. This is a week when sort of the essential character of Washington got
turned on its head. You know, normally members go to the leaders of the White House and say,
I'll give you my vote if you add more spending in my district. This week they said, I'll give you
my vote if you cut more from the budget. It really was a remarkable turn of events. And you had the
budget committees in the House and the Senate drafting resolutions, which will go to the floors
next week. And then these are just guidelines for spending. But you can see the priorities
pretty clearly. And one of the priorities that's very clear that's emerging is the biggest hits
are going to come in the defense budget. And the implications of that also got very clear this week
because you had today, Secretary of Defense Les Aspen announcing that a plan to cut 31 bases
around the country, trim back the operations in 130 others. This is going to mean the loss of 80,000
jobs, civilian and military directly, but many thousands of other jobs and a ripple effect,
the car dealers and the bartenders and the dry cleaners in these communities. And this is going
to be particularly hard on the coast. The Navy is taking the biggest hit in this round, San Francisco,
Doyle's hometown, and Florida, South Carolina. And so this is really a disaster area for these
communities. And what we thought of as a peace dividend, which we've been looking for, turns out
to be kind of a peace recession in a lot of these places. What you said is certainly the case. What
we had was the House and Senate Budget Committees setting the guidelines. And the interesting thing
is that those guidelines call for more cuts in federal spending than President Clinton had asked
for with the Democrats leading the way here. Are the members of Congress though now going to go
along with these new cutbacks in the defense establishment? Well, I think they will because
you make a point about this new mood in Washington, and I think it's there for a couple of reasons.
One is that there is a feeling that the members of Congress have to prove to their constituents
that they can run the government well and that they will use their money well. After all, they're
also asking for a lot of taxes. And you go around the country, people are not really convinced the
government is going to be very efficient or very careful with their money, and that's part of it.
Also, I think there's a tremendous rallying around of President Clinton. The fact is that even though
there are a lot of disagreements on some of the details, there is this overwhelming feeling that
they want him to succeed, they want to prove to the country the Democrats can run the government
well. And so you saw in both committees strict party line loyalty. The Democrats did not lose
one vote in either committee in either House, which is really what's going to happen down the line.
Steve, how much of this is political and then almost how much is really a budgetary question?
I mean, when you sort of look down the list of all the bases that are closing, California took some
hits, as you mentioned. What are some of the other things that went into the equation about where to
cut and where not to cut? Well, I think there's a military angle and there's a political angle.
The military angle clearly is that the Pentagon is coming to grips with finally with the realities,
and the main reality is that we're not going to have a 600 ship Navy. We're not even going to have a
500 or even a 400 ship Navy, probably have a 350 ship Navy. So the Navy is taking a lot of the big
cuts. There's a real cutback there. Also, there's a sense that the future missions of the military
are going to be much more related to the ability to deploy troops rapidly. The bases that are saved
are the ones that often are able to do that more quickly, Fort Lewis and the state of Washington
being a good example. There was some politics involved as well, however, because the initial
list included nine major bases in California. Now, California is very important to Bill Clinton.
It gave him a big margin in the last election. It's central to the political future of the
Democrats, and there are two new Democratic senators in California, one of whom, Dianne Feinstein,
has to run again in two years. So there was a real desire to help the Democrats in California,
so two or three actually of the bases that were supposed to be closed, California, got reprieved.
That got a lot of other Republicans very angry and said there was a politics at work. Of course,
that would never happen in Washington. The most interesting thing you say is just a remarkable
thing we're seeing of the people willing to support budget cuts, and that's a country full
of people that are doing that at a rate the polls now show I hardly believe. There's still going to
be a terrible griping in specific states. Is the administration going to ride it through, take the
heat, and do it? Are there going to be other hedges? Well, that's a very important question
because they, in fact, Bill Clinton tried to preempt a lot of the worst anxiety by the day
before he announced where the bases were going to be closed. He came out with a 20 billion dollar
program to aid the communities and the industries that would be affected, but we hear the phrase
defense conversion. It drips easily off official lips in Washington. It's much harder to do in
practice than it sounds. For instance, a lot of these, particularly the large defense industry,
as Senator Lugar said to me this week, he said, you know, you can't just take a factory that
used to make submarines and convert it into a factory that makes washing machines. You can't
do it. And in fact, one of the things that's happening is a lot of these defense industries
recognize that and are saying what we really want from the government is not money to convert to
domestic uses, but money to help us sell our arms abroad, which of course is a very dangerous
precedent. Despite all this frenzy for budget cutting, the president seems determined, Doyle,
to do whatever he can to help Boris Shelton hang on in Moscow. That's right, Paul. Bill Clinton
came into office, in fact, proclaiming Russia to be his first priority in foreign affairs,
but he's being handed a crisis there much earlier than he expected, much earlier than he wanted.
The scenes in Moscow this week, of course, were dramatic. The showdown between Yeltsin and the
Congress, where there seems to be a majority of holdovers from the old communist days, ending
today when Yeltsin stormed out, saying he would go to the people for a referendum. The Congress
said, no, you can't have a referendum. Then late in the day, the Congress blinked a little bit and
said, we'll think about a referendum. What you've got here is gridlock Moscow style. The Russians
are a dramatic people. Their form of gridlock is a little more death-defying than ours is.
It doesn't look like this is a crisis that's going to come to a head in the next 48 hours.
It's not going to return Russia to the dark ages over the next week, but it's one that is right
up there on Bill Clinton's plate. And as I say, he had initially hoped that he could put off the
Russia problem for a little bit. He didn't even want to have a summit, first thing. The crisis
in Moscow convinced him to go ahead and offer Yeltsin a summit, which is going to happen in
three weeks. What Clinton told his aides this week is he wants them to scramble to get a big
aid package ready that he can unveil, perhaps even before the summit, to influence events in
Moscow to show that if the people support Yeltsin, if Yeltsin can hang in there, there is the prospect
of increased Western aid and a brighter economic future. Well, there are two problems with an aid
package. One is the American public is rather unwilling to support it. The latest polls show
that 62% of the American public don't want to aid the Soviet Union. But there's also this question
about what aid really can make a difference. I mean, within the administration, what do they
think they can do that can really help Yeltsin? It seems to be such a difficult situation. Well,
that is the big problem. And there's enormous frustration in the administration and in other
governments to try and figure out what you can do. And in fact, in political terms, the Russian
opposition says, look, last year, George Bush promised $24 billion worth of Western aid. Half
of it never showed up and the half that showed up didn't do much good. So there's a real problem
finding something that is going to have some purchase here. But there is one important person
who is now rallied to the president's side and that's former president Richard Nixon. That was
the most fascinating moment for me of the week. Richard Nixon, the man Bill Clinton marched
against when he was a student at Oxford, the man Hillary Clinton worked against as a young aid on
the House Judiciary Committee and the impeachment hearings, if we want to go back far enough.
Richard Nixon in the White House as the senior advisor on Russian affairs to Democratic President
Clinton. What Mr. Nixon is doing here is very interesting. He has made Russia really his
personal crusade, probably the last of his long political career. He has told Clinton he's going
to keep the pressure on on that issue, just as he did on George Bush. Bill Clinton came out of that
meeting beaming and saying that he and Richard Nixon were on the same wavelength. Well, what
happens though if Yeltsin does something like say dissolve the parliament? I mean, are we ready to
respond? Do we know what the next step will be, even if we do have Nixon and Bill Clinton locked
arm in arm in the Oval Office? Well, in a short term sense, the administration is going to let
Yeltsin do basically whatever he thinks he needs to do to keep his reforms going. And in fact,
some officials are saying privately that for Yeltsin to dissolve his Congress and rule by decree for
a while would not be their first choice, but it might solve a lot of problems. In a longer term
sense, there's that aid riddle we were talking about. But there is, despite the polls that show
it run against it, there is a growing body of support for it. Not only on Mr. Nixon's side,
but Senator Dole, the Republican leader in the Senate, made a made a big speech today saying,
I'd rather feed the Russians now than fight them later. And there are others in the Senate and the
House who are coming. Dole, we would support, you're beginning to think, it sounds like we would
support Yeltsin, even if the Congress has heavily tried to cast him out, we would stand with him
against what looks like the will of the people? Oh, not the will of the people, but the will of
the Congress. But what Secretary of State Christopher said this week was, this Russian Congress,
remember, is a relic of the old communist era. Now, here's the trick, though. Yeltsin asks for a
referendum. His opposition is saying, well, maybe we'll go to a referendum. Nobody is sure, even in
the Clinton administration, nobody is sure who will win that showdown. Janet Reno coasted the
confirmation in the Senate this week. But now she moves to the Justice Department, where she takes
over. But obviously, Julie, that's going to be the rough part of the job. Well, first of all, a couple
of things are important for this week, Paul. Finally, Bill Clinton closed the circle on filling
that last empty chair in his cabinet. And I think that was really important. We've been through this
before, and we've talked around this table before about how difficult it has been for him to get
that post at Justice taken care of. And if the first confirmation hearings was characterized by
controversy, by an uptight Senate Judiciary Committee, by tortured questions about nannies
and babysitting, what we saw on Capitol Hill this week was just absolutely the opposite. Carol Moseley
Braun called it a veritable love beast. Senator from Illinois. The Senator from Illinois. Janet Reno
herself won a unanimous vote from the Senate Judiciary Committee before she went on to get
a 98 to 0 vote of support from the full Senate. And then what happened? She went almost immediately
smack dab into a full plate of issues waiting for her as soon as she emerged from her swearing in
ceremony this morning. Not the least of which was a shooting at a women's health clinic going in
Pensacola, Florida, that immediately brought the Congressional Women's Caucus into the White House,
meeting with Bill Clinton, re-elevating the issue of abortion and putting a lot of legal minds
together to think, where do we go from here on this? And try to provide greater protection for
these women. Well, not only to provide greater protection, but to see should there be an enhanced
federal role? Should the FBI be, you know, looking into some of these incidents in a way that it has
not been? And in a way, quite frankly, it does not have jurisdiction to do right now. But you also
have the question of violence that not only in Pensacola, but of course, the standoff in Waco
that remains, the bombing in the World Trade Center in New York. There's a climate, as she takes over,
of violence in a number of areas. Do you expect her to deal with violence in a number of areas?