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| NEWS OF THE YEAR | |
 December 28, 2000  |
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Historians look back at defining events of the year 2000.
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Richard, from a historical point of view, what was significant about this past year? RICHARD NORTON SMITH: Well, of course I'm tempted to answer the election. It was certainly the most memorable event of the year, although in an odd kind of way, it wasn't the election so much as what followed the election. But in fact, we won't know for several years whether the election of 2000 is the most historically significant or influential event. One thing we know happened this past year that will cast a very long shadow for centuries to come and that was the mapping of the human genetic code, which, by the way, ultimately will also affect our politics because, as we get closer to a culture of man-made man, there are bound to be a host of ethical, spiritual, moral and, yes, political issues, some of which could make the current controversy over abortion look relatively tame. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Haynes, do you have another choice for the most significant event of the year?
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| A Middle East war | ||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And, Roger, even though you've lost a wisdom tooth, do you still have enough wisdom to come up with an answer to this question? ROGER WILKINS: Well, since it almost all leaked out, I would say that the thing that concerns me most is the incredible meltdown of the $100 million Washington football team. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Really?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Michael Beschloss, what do you say is the most significant event of the year? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Well, you know what? While I'm listening to all this, Elizabeth, it reminds me of something, which is that in the 1960s, when John Kennedy suggested that we Americans land a person-- he said a man on the Moon by 1970, a lot of people said, "you know, $20 billion to land a man on the Moon, it was really in many ways a waste of money." But you know, that was the view that people had from that perspective. Many people think, and I think it's very possible, that 500 years from now, we may look back -- it won't be any of us, unfortunately -- but people might look back on the 20th century and say that a human being on the Moon was the most important thing, or one of them, that human beings did.
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| The presidential election | ||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Richard, respond to that. And also, what in the elections can you say now will be most lasting? What about the process or the way it was covered? RICHARD NORTON SMITH: Well, that's a great question, Elizabeth, because I was going to say the non-story of the year is a wonderful subtext for the election and the way we covered the election. Remember Y2K and doomsday? Well, it never happened. What happened was hype. And hype has infested not only the popular culture; in many ways, it's also infected the way we cover our democracy itself. We've known for a long time that politics has been looked at as a horse race, that's fine.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Haynes, when you look at the elections and all of this past year's politics, what do you see that's most lasting? HAYNES JOHNSON: Well, I think that certainly it's true about the media, but that's a long-term process. It's not new. We have been going through this cycle after cycle. It does increase. It's serious, and it's troubling. But I think what this election really told us was that the system fundamentally wasn't working at the very grassroots of democracy. Now, it worked in the sense we talked on this show before, and that we all got a lesson in what our system is, its strengths, and the strengths are manifold. But it also -- we got a lesson that there were fundamental ways in which we don't vote equitably. The more we learn about how the votes were counted, it's a real challenge on not just the new administration -- on the entire society, to make it fair. That's the essence of democracy. And that if you don't believe in it to be fair, then I think you have a serious long-term problem. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Roger Wilkins, your last remarks made me think that your looking at this past year is confirming a somewhat not negative but not optimistic view of human nature.
But the part of our election that really troubled me was the dubious integrity of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. You go back... it is hard to look at that five-person majority's judgment and not conclude with Justice Stevens that one thing is certain, that the integrity of the judicial process has been hurt here. And I haven't seen a decision which seemed so devoid of jurisprudential integrity since the old post-Civil War Supreme Court decisions which tried to slam blacks back into semi-slavery. So I would say that this judicial intrusion into the electoral process was deeply troubling. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Richard, before we move off the politics, you want to respond to that? RICHARD NORTON SMITH: Well, I certainly respect Roger's viewpoint. I think the other perspective would be that the court saved the country from another month of what was rapidly escalating polarization with the likely same result, two sets of election returns perhaps going to Washington, having a deeply divided Congress, possibly even having Al Gore himself cast the deciding vote. I'm not sure if that would have been much worse. |
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| World affairs | ||
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ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Michael, before we... actually, I want to move on to foreign affairs now. You heard what Roger said about the Middle East. What would you consider most significant in what happened outside of this country?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Haynes, what's your choice for a foreign story? HAYNES JOHNSON: I think the Middle East, as Roger said earlier. I think it's not that it's a new story. Obviously, it's thousands of years old. And the trouble is it keeps sinking in the same morass, and it never seems... you keep coming up with the hope that something's going to happen, and it is a testament-- and Roger said it better than I can-- to man's inhumanity to man. We just don't seem to be able to get it together at the last minute when we need to, and I think that's the thing that's most depressing. Russia is a serious question on the world horizon, if it's falling apart. And I think I'd also add that China's emergence is going to be looked at in years to come as a great story. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And, Roger, anything else you want to add about foreign stories? ROGER WILKINS: Oh, yeah. It's that we finally understand how devastating AIDS in Africa is, and we're looking at the rest of the world and saying, "Can we muster? We've got the money, we've got the technology, can we muster the humanity to help?" That's the story for last year and the issue for this coming year. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Richard, your foreign story?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And Michael, we have very little time left, but the rest of you, please tell me who you'd have as your man or woman of the year. MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think you can't do better than the Holy Father. And George Bush of course was on the cover of a news magazine named "Time" this past year. The interesting thing is that this election was so divided -- we were this year, that that was sort of a close call. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And, Roger, man or woman of the year? ROGER WILKINS: Oh, I wouldn't descent from Richard's choice, but if I had to pick a second one, it would be Tiger Woods. ( Laughter ) ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Haynes, who's your choice? HAYNES JOHNSON: Well, would I add someone we haven't talked about, Craig Ventner, who was the person who led the breaking of a genetic code, mapping of the human life that's going to change us so much. In the long run, he may be the most influential in the future. ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Happy New Year to all of you. Thanks. |
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ELIZABETH
FARNSWORTH: We look back at this year with NewsHour regulars Presidential
Historian Michael Beschloss and journalist and author Haynes Johnson.
Joining them are presidential biographer and historian Richard Norton
Smith, and historian Roger Wilkins of George Mason University.
HAYNES
JOHNSON: Well, it's weird because we haven't precast us at all. We never
know what we're going to say to each other -- but that's exactly what
I would say. If you're in Washington, incestuous as it is, you'd say
the election. But I don't think that's the most important thing. I think
we might look back on this time and say this was the year in which the
boom seemed to end, when the bubble was in danger of bursting, affecting
the long-term economy. But I think overshadowing that, I agree with
Richard, the long-term ramifications of this stunning advancement in
genetics, which is going to change everything in life and affect us
profoundly in the future. 
ROGER
WILKINS: But beyond that, I have been terribly troubled by the renewal
of the hostilities in Israel and the war between the Palestinians and
the Israelis. You know, when I was in high school out there in Grand
Rapids where Richard is, Ralph Bunt was negotiating a truce between
the Palestinians and the Israelis, and we were thinking that it was
going to last forever, that the U.N. would monitor it, there would be
peace. And every time you seem to touch the peace, you find a truth,
that the haters control the veto button. Every time you almost get peace,
it explodes. And I think that that tells us something really profound,
not just about the Middle East, but about ourselves as human beings,
that we horde our grievances and occasionally they explode. 
But
since we're dealing only with a more limited perspective tonight, I'd
say the election of 2000 in one sense, and that is that this is the
first election since 1928 where, thank God, we were not electing a President
under the shadow of an international emergency, like the Cold War or
World War II or an economic crisis like the recession even of 1992,
and that's a wonderful thing. But the downside of that is that it makes
presidents less powerful. We're at the end of the period that Arthur
Schlessinger called, the imperial presidency, and I think as the first
post-imperial president, George W. Bush has his work cut out for him.
This
year it seems to me was the first election in which we paid less attention
to the horses than we did to the handicappers, to the spin doctors and
the focus groups and all of the special pleaders who shouted at each
other as if you test democracy by decibel level. I think that's worrisome.
I think there's a trivialization, I think there's an element of the
media which are interested in conflict over conflict resolution. And
in many ways the legitimate media, the mainstream media, are beginning
to take their message from the fringe. I mean the NewsHour is a wonderful
oasis. My concern is that the desert is getting bigger.
ROGER
WILKINS: Well, yes, and I saw part of that in the election. I would
say two good things happened in elections: Mexico got a new president
and got rid of the old party that had been in power for 70 or 80 years;
and Slobodan Milosevic is halfway off the stage. Both of those are to
the good. 
MICHAEL
BESCHLOSS: Well, one thing was last March we saw for the first time
in a millennium, a democratic transfer of power in Russia to Vladimir
Putin, who was elected to a four-year term as president, which is a
wonderful thing, exactly what many of us Americans had been dreaming
of all through the Cold War. This is the kind of system that we wanted
to see in Russia. But at the same time, this is a Putin who's going
to be much tougher for a new American administration than was Boris
Yeltsin, someone who wants to make Russia strong, possibly conceivably
an economic rival, military rival, political rival to the United States.
And the result is that I think we may see that Putin's ascendancy is
the end of this odd period of the last eight or nine years where Americans
were not very interested in foreign affairs and nor were presidents.
RICHARD
NORTON SMITH: Well, you know, it's interesting. Roger mentioned Vicente
Fox, whose election in itself is a real landmark for hemispheric democracy
and a cause for celebration. And if he succeeds, that success will have
real implications for this country, as well. He is just starting his
career on the world stage. Let me pick as a man of the year a man who
is clearly near the end of his time on the world stage, and that's the
Pope. This year of course was the holy year in the Catholic Church,
highlighted by a very emotional pilgrimage to the Middle East. This
is a man who, after 22 years on the throne of St. Peter, clearly a man
of diminished strength but undiminished moral stature, continues really
to tower over his contemporaries. And because he confronted successfully
almost every kind of evil that human kind or technology could conjure
up in the old century, I think he'll continue to be an influence well
into the new one.