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CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports

Giuliani and Clinton Stump for the Presidential Candidates; Chief Justice William Rehnquist Treated for Thyroid Cancer; Yasser Arafat May Be Allowed to Leave West Bank Headquarters.

Aired October 25, 2004 - 17:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


WOLF BLITZER, HOST: Happening now -- too much too soon? Within the past hour, news of Bill Clinton the campaigner and a commitment to a very aggressive travel schedule, just weeks after his open-heart surgery and days until the general election.
Stand by for hard news on WOLF BLITZER REPORTS.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER (voice-over): Supreme Court concerns -- the chief justice has cancer, raising new questions at a critical time.

Heavy artillery -- the campaigns bring out their big guns.

RUDY GIULIANI (R), FMR. MAYOR OF NEW YORK: We have made certain that we go on offense against them. And to make certain we continue to remain on offense, we need to reelect President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

BILL CLINTON (D), FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We can do better. And in eight days, we're going to do better with President John Kerry.

BLITZER: But is a convalescing Clinton ready for the rigors of the campaign trail?

Vanished -- hundreds of tons of very high explosives left unguarded in Iraq.

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics. This is one of the great blunders of Iraq.

GEORGE W. BUSH (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He's the right man to win the war? You cannot win a war you do not believe in fighting.

BLITZER: Showdown -- secretaries of state debate. I'll speak with Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is WOLF BLITZER REPORTS for Monday, October 25th, 2004.

BLITZER (on camera): Hello today from New York City.

Surprising news from the United States Supreme Court back in Washington, with potentially major implications for the presidential election now just eight days away. The chief justice of the United States, William Rehnquist, has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. We're on every angle of this important story.

We begin our coverage with CNN justice correspondent, Kelli Arena -- Kelli?

KELLI ARENA, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the chief justice remains in intensive care at Bethesda Naval Hospital, but officials there are not commenting. The only statement today came from the Supreme Court.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): The disclosure that the chief justice has thyroid cancer and underwent a tracheotomy over the weekend shocked even some of the most ardent Supreme Court watchers.

BRAD BERENSON, FMR. SUPREME COURT CLERK: Everybody has been aware really for years that there could be a Supreme Court vacancy, but this is a very, very visible reminder of it in the homestretch of a presidential campaign.

ARENA: His doctors aren't talking, and the court said little, but projected an air of normalcy. In a statement, it said he is "expected to be on the bench when the court reconvenes" next Monday.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST, CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT: Nothing is so dear and precious as time.

ARENA: Several senior government sources tell CNN the situation is far more serious than the public statement reveals, but say it's unlikely the court will elaborate, especially with one week to go before the election.

EDWARD LAZARUS, AUTHOR, "CLOSED CHAMBER": They don't like the idea of the Supreme Court being sort of a political football that the candidates trot out at their convenience. They want to be seen above politics.

ARENA: Rehnquist is described as both proud and stubborn.

REHNQUIST: Don't get in my way.

ARENA: At 80, he's the second oldest serving chief justice, a post he's held for 18 years. He joined the bench in 1972 and has led an increasingly conservative course.

BERENSON: The court has steadily but slowly moved more in his direction. He's come to be regarded as really a terrific chief justice, someone who has held the court together and affected its overall direction over quite a long period of time.

ARENA: The public knows him best from the impeachment trial of President Clinton.

REHNQUIST: ... the said William Jefferson Clinton be, and hereby is, acquitted of the charges in the said articles.

ARENA: He also presided over the Bush v. Gore case four years ago.

REHNQUIST: We'll hear argument now, number 009-49, George W. Bush and Richard Cheney versus Albert Gore.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA (on camera): In 2000, the Supreme Court sided with Bush in a 5-4 decision. If this election ends up in the high court as well and Rehnquist cannot return, that could leave the justices split 4-4 -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Kelli Arena with us. Thanks very much, Kelli, for that report.

There are different kinds of thyroid cancer, but in general it's one of the more curable forms of the disease. For more on all of this, let's check in with our medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen. She's at the CNN Center in Atlanta -- Elizabeth?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, you're right. It's usually a very treatable form of cancer, but there are many unanswered medical questions about the severity of the chief justice's disease.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): The Supreme Court has revealed little about Chief Justice William Rehnquist's condition. The press release from the court doesn't indicate what type of thyroid cancer he has or if it spread to other parts of his body.

It simply says that the chief justice "underwent a tracheotomy" on Saturday in connection with a recent diagnosis of thyroid cancer. The fact that he had a tracheotomy has some oncologist we spoke with concerned that the cancer might be especially concerned.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If someone is going to have a tracheotomy, then that implies that the tumor is around the trachea and is somehow impinging something regarding the flow of the breath through the trachea.

COHEN: In a tracheotomy, a hole is cut in the trachea, or windpipe, and a tube is inserted to allow the patient to breathe. Normally, thyroid patients don't need tracheotomies. Doctors perform them if the cancer has spread from the thyroid to the trachea or is the cancer in some other way has interfered with breathing.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, thyroid cancer is highly treatable, usually just with surgery to remove all or part of the thyroid. There's one rare type of thyroid cancer called anaplastic thyroid cancer, which is difficult, if not impossible, to treat. And no matter what type of thyroid cancer it is, it's more difficult to treat the older someone gets.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(on camera): Now, after the surgery, some patients need to be treated with radioactive iodine, which despite its scary name is not dangerous -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Elizabeth Cohen, thank you very much for that report.

To our viewers, here's your chance to weigh in on this story. Our Web Question of the Day is this: Will the next president's ability to shape the Supreme Court influence your vote? You can vote right now. Go to cnn.com/wolf. We'll have the results later in this broadcast.

The comeback kid rides again seven weeks after a quadruple bypass. The former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, couldn't pass up the last week of this very close presidential contest. He joined the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, for a rousing rally on the campaign trail.

Our national correspondent, Frank Buckley, is joining us live in Philadelphia -- Frank?

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the rock star of the Democratic party didn't disappoint his supporters here in downtown Philadelphia. A massive crowd coming out to see Senator John Kerry appear alongside former President Bill Clinton. The fire commissioner here telling me that the crowd estimate somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 people.

As you say, the former president recuperating from quadruple bypass surgery. He finally got a green light from doctors to go out on the campaign trail. The Kerry campaign hopes that Clinton will energize Democrats, particularly African-American voters, and also remind other voters of the prosperity of the 1990s. President Clinton comparing his years in office with President Bush's years in office to try to make the case that it's time for a change.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: On the economy, we have just lived through four years of the first job losses in 70 years, record bankruptcies, middle-class incomes declining, and poverty going up. In Pennsylvania alone, you've lost 70,000 jobs as compared with the 219,000 you gained by this time when that last fellow was president -- me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BUCKLEY: Now, Senator Kerry's embrace of President Clinton, a departure from Al Gore's strategy in 2000, in which Mr. Gore kept President Clinton at arm's length in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Senator Kerry indicating today that he was very happy to have President Clinton at his side. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KERRY: Isn't it great to have Bill Clinton back on the trail? I'll tell you, he led this nation to the strongest economy we've ever had. He expanded healthcare for millions of children in America. He helped bring our security and the security of the world to the level it ought to be. And he did this by always putting people first and fighting for the middle class.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BUCKLEY: While the Clinton event here certainly provided the picture of the day, it was once again news from Iraq that gave Senator Kerry an opportunity to go after President Bush on the issue of security, something that both men would like to own. This time, Senator Kerry reacting to reports that 380 tons of powerful explosives have gone missing in Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KERRY: The unbelievable incompetence of this administration step after step has put our troops at greater and greater risk, overextended the American military, isolated the United States, put a greater financial burden on the American people -- George W. Bush has failed the test of commander-in-chief.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BUCKLEY: And Senator Kerry continuing his campaign tonight in Michigan and Wisconsin. Tomorrow, he'll be delivering a speech on homeland security -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Thanks very much. Frank Buckley reporting for us from Philadelphia. Bill Clinton will step up his campaign efforts. We've learned that in the past hour. His next appearance tonight in Florida and Miami tomorrow, also in Florida, in Boca Raton. But Kerry officials say the former president will also be going to Nevada, New Mexico, and to his native Arkansas where Democrats now say they have, quote, "an opportunity."

In a neck and neck raise President Bush may be ahead by a nose. In the latest CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup poll, the president holds a slight 2 point lead among registered voters, but among those likely to vote he stretches that to five points over Senator Kerry. Asked how President Bush is handling his job, 51 say they approve, 46 percent say they disapprove. Just a snapshot where the election stands right now. We'll look at other major polls in just a moment.

On the campaign trail today, the focus is security, and the president is getting a boost from the former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani. Our senior White House correspondent John king is joining us now live from Davenport, Iowa -- John.

JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the president will be campaigning here at this event in a short time, on his way here from Council Bluffs, Iowa. He campaigned earlier in the day in Colorado. You mentioned security as the president's focus, that is his overriding theme in the final week here of the campaign. Inopportune from the White House perspective of course that story out of Iraq, 380 tons of munitions gone missing. The White House trying to play the significance of that down.

And another part of their strategy is to keep voters moving from Bush to Kerry is to make the case that Senator Kerry has been inconsistent on Iraq, saying he supports the war that opposed the war, that Saddam Hussein is a threat and then not a threat. As part of that message today, one of Senator Kerry's arguments on the campaign trail has been that the United States military let Osama bin Laden away, at Tora Bora -- let his escape from Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Senator Kerry says that is proof that Mr. Bush has mismanaged the war on terrorism. President Bush today in his speech is quoting something very different Senator Kerry said back in the fall of 2001.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In the fall of 2001 on national TV, Senator Kerry said this, "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively, and we should continue to do it that way." At the time, the senator said about Tora Bora, "I think we've been smart, I think the administration leadership has done it well, and we are on the right track." Well, all I can say is that I am George W. Bush and I approve of that message.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now Mr. Bush also trying to reach out to Democrats in these final days of the campaign, accusing Senator Kerry of abandoning the positions on national security held by Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, even quoting from John F. Kennedy's inaugural, as he says Senator Kerry is now soft on terrorism, running away from the legacy of his own party.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and John Kennedy is rightly remembered for competence and resolve in times of war and hours of crisis. Senator Kerry has turned his back on pay any price and bear any burden. He replaced his commitments with wait and see and cut and run.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, Iowa, a state that narrowly voted for Al Gore four years ago, the Bush campaign believes it has a good chance to pull this state off. Although Wolf, I did speak to the Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack, and the state Governor Vilsack says the Democrats have an unprecedented turn out the vote operation. He believes the Democrats will win on election day but the president certainly hopes to take this state away.

WOLF: John King in Davenport, Iowa. Thanks, John, very much.

A check of our latest poll of polls as we call it. That would be an average of national polls taken over the past four days, including our own CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup poll. It shows President Bush with an average of a three-point lead over Senator Kerry, 49 percent to 46 percent. We also have some results of the latest battleground polls in two states. In Florida an insider advantage poll of likely voters has President Bush and Senator Kerry dead even at 46 percent, with Independent candidate Ralph Nader coming up at 2 percent. In Pennsylvania, Mason Dixon poll of likely voters shows Kerry leading Bush 46 percent to 44 percent.

Terror concerns intensifying in Iraq right now after hundreds of tons, tons of powerful explosives reported missing. Could they be used in an attack against American troops?

Yasser Arafat on leave for the first time in almost three years. Israel says it will let the Palestinian leader leave his compound. Will he accept the offer?

And Clinton's help. There's yet more campaigning for the former president to do. Has he taken on too much too soon? We'll get a medical opinion, a guest standing by. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Just a pound, one pound may be enough to bring down an airplane, but now hundreds of tons of high explosives are missing from a site south of Baghdad. Let's go live to our senior Pentagon CNN correspondent, Jamie McIntyre.

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the Pentagon is disputing the idea that the U.S. military allowed those explosives to be looted, even though as they can't say what happened to them.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): As part of the prewar sanctions, the International Atomic Energy Agency placed under seal some 380 tons of high explosives, stored in bunkers at the massive Al Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad. Explosives that could be used to trigger nuclear weapons, but also could be used for deadly conventional attacks. Two weeks ago, October 10, Iraq's ministry of science and technology reported to the IAEA the explosives were lost and blamed theft and looting of government installations due to lack of security after April 9, 2003, the day Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled.

The Pentagon says the Al Qaqaa facility was a level II priority on a list of 500 sites to be searched and secured. U.S. officials say it was visited dozens of times by U.S. troops in the months following the invasion. And after searching 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings, the missing stockpile was never found.

ADAM ERELI, STATE DEPT. SPOKESMAN: We did not find any explosives under seal. We did find some explosives that were consolidated. We did not find any WMD. We first learned about absence of these particular explosives on October 15, and we are actively engaged in trying to determine the circumstances for their disappearance.

MCINTYRE: IAEA inspectors last checked the explosives in January of 2003, three months before the start of the war. But the agency admits it has no way to know if the explosives were moved before the invasion or looted afterwards.

MELISSA FLEMING, IAEA: The most immediate concern, given the security climate in Iraq, is that these explosives -- and this is a real massive quantity of explosives -- could have reached the hands of insurgents.

MCINTYRE: Iraq is awash in weapons and munitions from the old regime, but the missing explosives, known as HMX and RDX, are more portable and powerful. Less than a pound is believed to have brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry seized on the report to argue the Bush administration blundered badly in not sending enough troops to Iraq to secure weapons and stop looters.

KERRY: Secretary Rumsfeld, we know, cavalierly dismissed the danger of looting, and now we know the impact.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (on camera): The Pentagon says it has ordered coalition forces and the Iraq Survey Group, which spearheaded the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, to provide, quote, "a comprehensive response" -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Jamie McIntyre, thanks very much.

And more on those missing explosives -- that's coming up, as well the political impact. I'll speak with the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. They'll join me here.

Plus, a developing story we're following out of the Middle East: The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat now granted permission to leave his compound for the first time in years. We'll tell you why the Israelis are letting him do so.

And familiar faces in the home stretch -- Bill Clinton and Al Gore both on the campaign trail. Will their voices help or hurt John Kerry?

And look at this -- so sad -- falling face first on the ice. A world champion skater takes a major spill during this dangerous stunt. We'll tell you what happened and how she's doing.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: For the first time in almost three years, the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, may be allowed to leave his West Bank headquarters. An Israeli defense official says the 75-year-old leader can seek medical treatment outside his Ramallah compound. But the Palestinian authority says it never requested such permission, insisting Arafat should be free to travel wherever he wishes. Palestinian officials say Arafat is suffering from the flu.

Speaking to a pro-Israel group in Florida today, President Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had some strong words for Arafat.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: Now is the time to step aside, allow an empowered prime minister to take power, allow the cleaning up and the restructuring of the security forces under that prime minister so that Palestinians can also play a role in securing the Gaza.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: At least 15 Palestinians were reported killed today in Gaza, as Israeli troops responded to a series of weekend mortar attacks. The latest violence comes as the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon prepares to submit his Gaza withdrawal plan to a parliamentary vote that's scheduled for tomorrow.

Joining us from Boston, our world affairs analyst, the former Defense Secretary William Cohen. Mr. Secretary, thanks, as usual, for joining us. First of all, what do you make of Dr. Rice flatly saying it's time for Arafat to step aside and go away? That sounds like a -- like it would be sort of a departure from long-standing U.S. policy.

WILLIAM COHEN, CNN WORLD AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, firstly I think that Mr. Arafat has long since ceased to be a positive influence in terms of bringing about a peaceful solution in the Middle East. But it's not up to me or anyone else to tell Arafat to go -- that it's his time to go. He's still the chosen leader of the Palestinian people, and they will -- he will have to, first of all, make a decision whether he feels that he can contribute to a proper resolution, a peaceful resolution in the Middle East.

Secondly, the Palestinian people will have to make that choice. But I think for us to suggest or indicate that he has to go is not going to fall unwelcome is in the Middle East. It's up to him, and hopefully he would make a decision such as that to step aside and give someone else an opportunity to bring about a more positive outcome. But he's going to have to make that decision, not us.

BLITZER: Whoever is elected president of the United States, whether it's Kerry or Bush, clearly is going to have a major problem on his hands, namely the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Do you sense there's a major difference between these two candidates on this very sensitive issue?

COHEN: I don't sense there's any major difference, but I do believe that whether it's President Bush or President Kerry, either man has got to reenergize the President Bush's roadmap plan. To allow this to continue to just linger on without resolution, to not put the United States in position of trying to be a positive force, to really make it happen in terms of the kind of concessions that have to be made both by the Israelis and by the Palestinians, it seems to me we're going to continue to see a great deal of conflict in the region, and that the -- both the Israelis and the United States ultimately will suffer as a result of it.

Tom Friedman in yesterday's "New York Times" pointed this out, that our policy is now being tied directly to the fate and the future of the Israelis, as well, throughout not only the Middle East, but throughout the Muslim world.

So, we have to bring about and insist that we be a positive force to help bring about the two parties, reconciling in a way that will give security for Israel, autonomy, independence, and opportunity, and dignity for the Palestinians. Without that, we're looking for a very long and difficult future in the Middle East and elsewhere.

BLITZER: I know you're going to be heading over to that part of the world in the not too distant future. But do you see any hope in the short term of getting the peace process back on track?

COHEN: I think it's going to require the United States to become much more actively engaged. Once this election is over -- and I think it's been put on hold until after the election -- but once the election is over, I think the United States, being the only country that has the influence and the power and the ability to try to bring the parties together in a way that will provide the kind of security and opportunity for both parties, then it's -- it's certainly not going to happen.

So, we are the principal party involved. We can't force a solution, but we can serve as a positive force to help bring it about in the sense of using our diplomacy, our influence, and hopefully our exhortation to bring it about.

BLITZER: William Cohen, thanks very much for joining us.

Powerful explosives disappear near Baghdad. Could they be used to harm American troops in Iraq? I'll speak with former Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger.

Plus this...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: If this isn't good for my heart, I don't know what is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: But is the former president putting his health at risk? We'll have a leading cardiologist weigh in.

And another familiar face hits the campaign trail for John Kerry, but will these all-star appearances make a difference come Election Day. We'll tell you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BLITZER: As we mentioned, just seven weeks after heart surgery, Bill Clinton campaigned today with John Kerry. Clinton was one of two Democratic big guns lending a hand to Kerry in this last full week of the battle for the White House.

Joining us now with more on this, CNN's Brian Todd in Washington -- Brian.

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, if you need any more evidence of just how much is at stake in this election, look no further than Bill Clinton, out there now just seven weeks after bypass surgery, as you mentioned, and, with his former vice president, trying to pull every last vote in as we head down the stretch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TODD (voice-over): One is fresh off multiple bypass surgery.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If this isn't good for my heart, I don't know what is.

TODD: The other may well have spent the past year screaming himself into political oblivion.

AL GORE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!

TODD: But, right now, Bill Clinton and Al Gore may well be John Kerry's best friends on the campaign trail. From Philadelphia to Florida, the former president and vice president are hustling to rallies, speaking to church and community groups. Face time for these two is at a premium down the stretch.

And, analysts say, make no mistake. There are strategies behind this strategy. A visual of Bill Clinton revives the Democratic base, they say, and sends a message to the broader electorate: Remember the 1990s.

CLINTON: In Pennsylvania alone, you've lost 70,000 jobs, as compared with the 219,000 you gained by this time when that last fellow was president, me.

(LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: They were making money. People remember Clinton with a certain fondness. They remember, perhaps, those times as innocent, but yet prosperous. And a lot of the voters want to go back to then.

TODD: Analysts say there are risks to putting Clinton and Gore out this week. Clinton galvanizes Democrats, but also gets Republicans' dander up, reminding them and possibly some swing voters about his personal behavior in the White House. Gore carries his own baggage. Many Democrats aren't forgetting his endorsement of Howard Dean late last year. His overheated bellows at some speeches earlier this year led some observers to dismiss him as irrelevant.

GORE: It is beyond incompetent. It is recklessness.

TODD: But his razor-thin election loss in 2000 is not among Gore's liabilities, say some analysts, quite the contrary.

GORE: We don't want the Supreme Court so pick the next president, and we don't want this president to pick the next Supreme Court.

SCHNEIDER: His presence on the stump, and he would be better off not uttering a word. Just stand there and say, remember 2000. He's there to wave the bloody shirt, as they used to say after the Civil War.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TODD: So can Clinton and Gore be real difference makers in this last week? The consensus among analysts is yes, and the reason is, simply put, voter turnout. Each party knows the difference next week may be in one-upping the other in getting their people to the polls -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Brian Todd in Washington -- thank you, Brian, very much.

Clinton's appearance on the campaign trail so soon after his heart surgery raises the question of whether he's trying to do too much too soon. The former president addressed the issue is an interview earlier with ABC News.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: I feel good. My chest is a tender in the morning. When I get up and walk around and start moving around, I feel better immediately. But I've been really blessed.

I talked to my doctors about it, and they made some very helpful suggestions. They said, you know, I should get wherever I'm going early, in case I'm tired, so I can kind of regenerate.

DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS: Did Senator Clinton want you to go out? Was she worried this is too son?

CLINTON: No, but she doesn't want me to do too much. And I don't either. But I want to do this. Senator Kerry asked me to do it, and I want to do it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: And joining us now to talk more about Bill Clinton's health, Dr. Jannet Lewis. She's the director of noninvasive cardiology at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Lewis, thanks very much for joining us.

What do you think? How does he look? How does he appear to be doing based on what he says and what we've just seen?

DR. JANNET LEWIS, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL: He actually looks quite goods. He looks more slender. He looks like he is very committed to what he's doing.

He's undergone a very major operation. In general, patients who have this kind of surgery are ready to return to their employment four to eight weeks. So he's at six weeks, but he looked good.

BLITZER: He's going to be traveling a lot over the next eight days, campaigning for John Kerry, going to all these states around the country. Is this wise? Would you recommend a patient of yours do this only seven or eight weeks after a quadruple bypass surgery?

LEWIS: Now, of course, every patient is a little different, and everyone has their own pace of recovery.

So he has a team of physicians, and they've examined him and are following him very closely. And it appears that he's consulted with his physicians, and they think this is fine. I don't think is this is at all unreasonable.

BLITZER: Normally, normal patients his age, 58 years old, after quadruple bypass surgery, how long does it take to get back to a relatively normal schedule?

LEWIS: It can be as soon as three or four weeks. Some patients take a little bit longer. It depends what the individual's job is. But four to eight weeks is a reasonable period of time.

BLITZER: He said that he's lost another 15 pounds since the surgery. He had last quite a bit of weight on the South Beach diet earlier. A lot of us remember he was a bit heavier when he was president of the United States. Is it unusual to lose 15 pounds in the aftermath of this kind of a surgery?

LEWIS: Well, after this kind of major operation, a lot of individuals take a very different perspective on life. And weight loss and exercise is one of the things that they get very intent about. So it's not so unusual to have the weight loss, particularly if he had started this before.

BLITZER: In the interview on ABC earlier today, he says he wakes up early morning and he's still got some chest pains, some serious chest pains. He wants to get out and walk around before they sort of go away, a tension, if you will there. How long unusual is that?

LEWIS: Well, actually, what he has, he said he had some tenderness around the incision. And that's very common. He's not having any chest discomfort that's brought on by activity, per se. It's more the incisional pain. BLITZER: And that would be normal, right?

LEWIS: That's common. That's very common. And it takes a while for this to heal.

BLITZER: One final question, Dr. Lewis, depression. A lot of patients who have undergone this kind of bypass surgery, they come out depressed, perhaps understandably so. He doesn't look depressed, at least -- now, you saw the videotape of what he said in Philadelphia. You saw the interview on ABC earlier today. What's your sense?

LEWIS: He certainly does not look depressed. He looked energetic. He looked like he wanted to be out there. And, like I said, he looks more slender than he has been in the past. It is common for patients to have some depression, but he certainly doesn't appear to be.

BLITZER: Dr. Lewis, thanks very much -- Dr. Jannet Lewis of George Washington University Hospital, the medical school there. Thank you very much for joining us.

LEWIS: My pleasure.

BLITZER: Tons of powerful explosives vanish in Iraq. I'll speak with the former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger about terror concerns right now in Iraq,

Plus, an accident on ice, how a world-class figurer skater is recovering after plunging into the ice face-first.

And one family gets more than it bargains for during a routine stop at a gas station.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: As we mentioned, 380 tons of powerful explosives are missing from an Iraqi storage facility, a facility that was being -- that was supposed to be guarded by U.S. forces.

Just a short while ago, I discussed this issue with former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: Dr. Kissinger, Dr. Albright, thanks to both of you for joining us.

And I'll begin with you, Secretary Kissinger.

How is it possible that, in the after the aftermath of the major combat, the U.S. didn't secure that facility with, what, 380 tons of conventional explosives and simply let it, apparently, get into the hands of terrorists or insurgents or bad guys?

HENRY KISSINGER, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, at the end of the war, there was the difficulty that the units that were supposed to come from the north through Turkey had to go by sea and came up from the south. So there may not have been enough troops at the beginning to secure every weapons site. But I think that that was the fundamental problem.

BLITZER: As you know, Dr. Kissinger, one pound of some of those explosives could bring down Pan Am 103, one pound of that. There are tons, 380 tons, thousands and thousands of pounds of this. This sounds like a catastrophic disaster in the making.

KISSINGER: Well, Wolf, you know as well as I do that, at the end of the war, decisions like this had to be made by the local commander. He had to decide where to deploy his troops. It isn't that the White House moves around the individual units. And one certainly has to look into the question of why the decision was made to guard this place less or to move troops there more slowly.

BLITZER: Well, that's a fair point.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Let's let Dr. Albright, Secretary Albright, respond to that.

The military commanders on the ground, Secretary Albright, obviously failed, at least in securing this one very important facility.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, I think, Wolf, it's the perfect example of the lack of planning generally for the post-military part of this, so to speak.

We do have the best military in the world, but everybody had this idea that it would be a cake walk, there wouldn't be any problems, and there was looting everywhere. And it's one thing to -- as horrible as it is to have looted the museum, but, in fact, you have allowed this kind of amount of explosives onto the market is an outrageous mistake and one, I'm afraid, that we're going to pay for, for a very long time.

BLITZER: But can you blame the president of the United States, Secretary Albright, for this, or should you blame Tommy Franks, who was the military commander, or others below in the chain of command?

ALBRIGHT: Well, it's hard to figure out whom to blame generally.

But the truth is that this war and everything about it has been a misjudgment. And the fact the troops were not in the right places, Secretary Kissinger says that there were troops not coming in from north. That was a lack of planning with Turkey. So it's one thing after another and a chain of unintended consequences for which we're all going to pay dearly. This is an outrageous mistake that I think is very, very dangerous.

BLITZER: All right, let's let Dr. Kissinger respond.

Go ahead, Mr. Secretary. KISSINGER: I supported the decision to move into Iraq.

I believe it was the right and prudent decision in the circumstances that we faced after 9/11. It was a situation, the lack of which we had not encountered before, and, therefore, it is always possible to find confusions and mistakes that were made. Maybe if Madeleine had been on Omaha Beach on the day that we landed there, she should have said this is bad deployment and we could have done things differently.

There was, undoubtedly -- at the beginning of any military operation, it is not clear what the best deployment with respect to every detail is.

(CROSSTALK)

KISSINGER: But we achieved a quick victory.

BLITZER: Let me let Dr. Albright respond.

It's been called a catastrophic success. Tommy Franks has called that. The president has called it. They didn't expect to win this quickly, and, as a result, some of the problems that developed in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime occurred and they weren't ready for it.

ALBRIGHT: But I think we do count on the president of the United States and the military commanders to make judgments that do not lead us into this kind of a situation.

And we are being asked over and over again by the president and others, do we feel safer today than when the war started? I personally have never felt safer, and now I feel even less safe as a result of the fact that 380 tons of explosives is out there. And I think that this is a question about what this president has led this country into.

I did not -- I said this was a war of choice, not of necessity. But I do think that securing military sites is a necessity. And so I don't understand how this happened.

BLITZER: All right.

Dr. Kissinger, do you feel safer knowing that 380 tons of these explosives are at large?

KISSINGER: Of course I don't feel safer that 380 tons of explosives are at large.

But I feel safer that Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein is no longer there, and that we are no longer facing an opponent in the midst of an area from which the attacks on 9/11 had taken place, an opponent who was working on weapons of mass destruction, accumulating large stockpiles of explosions, who had used some of these and had the largest army in the area. And in cleaning up this mess that had taken over 20 years, it is possible that some mistakes were made. But, overall, I feel safer. And a year from now, as this develops into an increasingly successful operation, I will feel even safer. It has to be measured against that and not against any one thing.

(CROSSTALK)

ALBRIGHT: Henry, if this had happened on your watch, you would be mortified by this, and I think this is a very bad situation.

I'm very glad that Saddam Hussein is not around, but there are now insurgents that are killing Iraqis that we are trying to train. I think this is a bigger mess than it ever was. And now, with this additional 380 tons of material out on the market, I think we're in very bad shape. And I don't wish anybody failure, but this is a horrible situation as a result of bad planning.

BLITZER: Dr. Kissinger, it also comes on the heels of what we found out, that, only yesterday, over the weekend, almost 50 Iraqis, most of them soldiers, were butchered. They were massacred, shot execution-style as they were returning from training. It seems to give the appearance that things are getting worse in Iraq, rather than getting better.

KISSINGER: Look, we're dealing with a big country in which it is not possible to secure every road.

And if you go through military operations of any war, you can always find one incident in which there was a setback or in which people were killed. The question is, is it possible or are we succeeding in improving the situation to a point where we can establish in Iraq a government that is nonradical, nonfundamentalist, and which will therefore be an example to the rest of the region?

We have no choice, and we should stop talking in this manner, because we have absolutely -- about how bad this war is.

BLITZER: Right.

KISSINGER: We have absolutely no choice except to bring about an outcome in which a moderate government concerned with the well-being of the people is established in Baghdad.

BLITZER: All right.

KISSINGER: And in order to get there, we will have to overcome the old parties. We will have to get rid of the al Qaeda people. It will be a very bitter battle that will have its ups and downs.

BLITZER: All right, Dr. Albright, very briefly, I'll give you the last word.

The United States, as Dr. Kissinger says, can't simply cut and run right now, and Senator Kerry doesn't want the United States to do so. ALBRIGHT: No.

Unfortunately, we are now in a situation where we have to do what Henry is saying we have to do. But it is harder every single day because of the mistakes and misjudgments made by this administration. And 380 tons of explosive in the hands of insurgents makes it a much harder job for America to do.

BLITZER: Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, as usual to both of you, thank you very much for joining us.

ALBRIGHT: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: The top justice of the United States Supreme Court confronting cancer. Up next, we'll take a closer look at William Rehnquist's legacy.

First, though, a quick look at some other stories you may have missed this past weekend.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER (voice-over): A small plane crash plunged the motor sports world into grief. Ten people were killed, including a son, a brother and two nieces of racing team owner Rick Hendrick. The plane was en route to Martinsville, Virginia, for the Subway 500 NASCAR race.

Accident on ice. The audience at Pittsburgh's Mellon Arena gasped as world champion pair skater Tatiana Totmianina plunged face first into the ice. She suffered a concussion, but, as bad as this looks, she hopes to be training again in 10 days.

Gas station crash. A car careened into this service station near Cleveland and slammed into a gas pump. A customer and his family managed to scatter just as the pump exploded. Authorities say the driver of the out-of-control car took off on foot, but was arrested.

And that's our weekend snapshot.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: More now on the surprise announcement from the Supreme Court that the chief justice, William Rehnquist, is being treated for thyroid cancer. Over three decades, Rehnquist has witnessed and helped shape U.S. history.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER (voice-over): William H. Rehnquist was sworn into the Supreme Court in 1972 by President Richard Nixon. Fourteen years later in 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist chief justice, and the era of the Rehnquist court began.

As chief justice, Rehnquist swore in both the first President Bush and the second President Bush. He also presided over both the inauguration and the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. While the inaugurations just impeachment put Rehnquist in the public spotlight, it's his role in Supreme Court decisions that will provide his legacy.

A strong conservative who once campaigned for Barry Goldwater, Rehnquist's tenure coincided with a gradual, but steady move away from the more liberal court of the '60s, lead by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Scholars say Rehnquist played a major role in the drive to reduce federal power and increase states' rights. And he's also been a supporter of the death penalty and of public funding for religious educational institutions.

In 1973, Rehnquist opposed the Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Rehnquist authored a 1995 decision that blocked Congress from banning guns near schools. Four years ago, he was one of five justices who stopped the final recount of the Florida election ballots, ending all challenges to the presidential election of George W. Bush.

An 80-year-old widower, Rehnquist is the second oldest man ever to provide over the Supreme Court. The oldest was Roger Taney, who remained chief justice until his death at the age of 87 in 1864.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: And we'll have the results of our Web question of the day. That's coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Here are the results of our Web question of the day.

"LOU DOBBS TONIGHT" starts right now.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com


Aired October 25, 2004 - 17:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
WOLF BLITZER, HOST: Happening now -- too much too soon? Within the past hour, news of Bill Clinton the campaigner and a commitment to a very aggressive travel schedule, just weeks after his open-heart surgery and days until the general election.
Stand by for hard news on WOLF BLITZER REPORTS.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER (voice-over): Supreme Court concerns -- the chief justice has cancer, raising new questions at a critical time.

Heavy artillery -- the campaigns bring out their big guns.

RUDY GIULIANI (R), FMR. MAYOR OF NEW YORK: We have made certain that we go on offense against them. And to make certain we continue to remain on offense, we need to reelect President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

BILL CLINTON (D), FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We can do better. And in eight days, we're going to do better with President John Kerry.

BLITZER: But is a convalescing Clinton ready for the rigors of the campaign trail?

Vanished -- hundreds of tons of very high explosives left unguarded in Iraq.

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics. This is one of the great blunders of Iraq.

GEORGE W. BUSH (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He's the right man to win the war? You cannot win a war you do not believe in fighting.

BLITZER: Showdown -- secretaries of state debate. I'll speak with Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is WOLF BLITZER REPORTS for Monday, October 25th, 2004.

BLITZER (on camera): Hello today from New York City.

Surprising news from the United States Supreme Court back in Washington, with potentially major implications for the presidential election now just eight days away. The chief justice of the United States, William Rehnquist, has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. We're on every angle of this important story.

We begin our coverage with CNN justice correspondent, Kelli Arena -- Kelli?

KELLI ARENA, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the chief justice remains in intensive care at Bethesda Naval Hospital, but officials there are not commenting. The only statement today came from the Supreme Court.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): The disclosure that the chief justice has thyroid cancer and underwent a tracheotomy over the weekend shocked even some of the most ardent Supreme Court watchers.

BRAD BERENSON, FMR. SUPREME COURT CLERK: Everybody has been aware really for years that there could be a Supreme Court vacancy, but this is a very, very visible reminder of it in the homestretch of a presidential campaign.

ARENA: His doctors aren't talking, and the court said little, but projected an air of normalcy. In a statement, it said he is "expected to be on the bench when the court reconvenes" next Monday.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST, CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT: Nothing is so dear and precious as time.

ARENA: Several senior government sources tell CNN the situation is far more serious than the public statement reveals, but say it's unlikely the court will elaborate, especially with one week to go before the election.

EDWARD LAZARUS, AUTHOR, "CLOSED CHAMBER": They don't like the idea of the Supreme Court being sort of a political football that the candidates trot out at their convenience. They want to be seen above politics.

ARENA: Rehnquist is described as both proud and stubborn.

REHNQUIST: Don't get in my way.

ARENA: At 80, he's the second oldest serving chief justice, a post he's held for 18 years. He joined the bench in 1972 and has led an increasingly conservative course.

BERENSON: The court has steadily but slowly moved more in his direction. He's come to be regarded as really a terrific chief justice, someone who has held the court together and affected its overall direction over quite a long period of time.

ARENA: The public knows him best from the impeachment trial of President Clinton.

REHNQUIST: ... the said William Jefferson Clinton be, and hereby is, acquitted of the charges in the said articles.

ARENA: He also presided over the Bush v. Gore case four years ago.

REHNQUIST: We'll hear argument now, number 009-49, George W. Bush and Richard Cheney versus Albert Gore.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ARENA (on camera): In 2000, the Supreme Court sided with Bush in a 5-4 decision. If this election ends up in the high court as well and Rehnquist cannot return, that could leave the justices split 4-4 -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Kelli Arena with us. Thanks very much, Kelli, for that report.

There are different kinds of thyroid cancer, but in general it's one of the more curable forms of the disease. For more on all of this, let's check in with our medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen. She's at the CNN Center in Atlanta -- Elizabeth?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, you're right. It's usually a very treatable form of cancer, but there are many unanswered medical questions about the severity of the chief justice's disease.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): The Supreme Court has revealed little about Chief Justice William Rehnquist's condition. The press release from the court doesn't indicate what type of thyroid cancer he has or if it spread to other parts of his body.

It simply says that the chief justice "underwent a tracheotomy" on Saturday in connection with a recent diagnosis of thyroid cancer. The fact that he had a tracheotomy has some oncologist we spoke with concerned that the cancer might be especially concerned.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If someone is going to have a tracheotomy, then that implies that the tumor is around the trachea and is somehow impinging something regarding the flow of the breath through the trachea.

COHEN: In a tracheotomy, a hole is cut in the trachea, or windpipe, and a tube is inserted to allow the patient to breathe. Normally, thyroid patients don't need tracheotomies. Doctors perform them if the cancer has spread from the thyroid to the trachea or is the cancer in some other way has interfered with breathing.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, thyroid cancer is highly treatable, usually just with surgery to remove all or part of the thyroid. There's one rare type of thyroid cancer called anaplastic thyroid cancer, which is difficult, if not impossible, to treat. And no matter what type of thyroid cancer it is, it's more difficult to treat the older someone gets.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(on camera): Now, after the surgery, some patients need to be treated with radioactive iodine, which despite its scary name is not dangerous -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Elizabeth Cohen, thank you very much for that report.

To our viewers, here's your chance to weigh in on this story. Our Web Question of the Day is this: Will the next president's ability to shape the Supreme Court influence your vote? You can vote right now. Go to cnn.com/wolf. We'll have the results later in this broadcast.

The comeback kid rides again seven weeks after a quadruple bypass. The former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, couldn't pass up the last week of this very close presidential contest. He joined the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, for a rousing rally on the campaign trail.

Our national correspondent, Frank Buckley, is joining us live in Philadelphia -- Frank?

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the rock star of the Democratic party didn't disappoint his supporters here in downtown Philadelphia. A massive crowd coming out to see Senator John Kerry appear alongside former President Bill Clinton. The fire commissioner here telling me that the crowd estimate somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 people.

As you say, the former president recuperating from quadruple bypass surgery. He finally got a green light from doctors to go out on the campaign trail. The Kerry campaign hopes that Clinton will energize Democrats, particularly African-American voters, and also remind other voters of the prosperity of the 1990s. President Clinton comparing his years in office with President Bush's years in office to try to make the case that it's time for a change.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: On the economy, we have just lived through four years of the first job losses in 70 years, record bankruptcies, middle-class incomes declining, and poverty going up. In Pennsylvania alone, you've lost 70,000 jobs as compared with the 219,000 you gained by this time when that last fellow was president -- me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BUCKLEY: Now, Senator Kerry's embrace of President Clinton, a departure from Al Gore's strategy in 2000, in which Mr. Gore kept President Clinton at arm's length in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Senator Kerry indicating today that he was very happy to have President Clinton at his side. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KERRY: Isn't it great to have Bill Clinton back on the trail? I'll tell you, he led this nation to the strongest economy we've ever had. He expanded healthcare for millions of children in America. He helped bring our security and the security of the world to the level it ought to be. And he did this by always putting people first and fighting for the middle class.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BUCKLEY: While the Clinton event here certainly provided the picture of the day, it was once again news from Iraq that gave Senator Kerry an opportunity to go after President Bush on the issue of security, something that both men would like to own. This time, Senator Kerry reacting to reports that 380 tons of powerful explosives have gone missing in Iraq.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KERRY: The unbelievable incompetence of this administration step after step has put our troops at greater and greater risk, overextended the American military, isolated the United States, put a greater financial burden on the American people -- George W. Bush has failed the test of commander-in-chief.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BUCKLEY: And Senator Kerry continuing his campaign tonight in Michigan and Wisconsin. Tomorrow, he'll be delivering a speech on homeland security -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Thanks very much. Frank Buckley reporting for us from Philadelphia. Bill Clinton will step up his campaign efforts. We've learned that in the past hour. His next appearance tonight in Florida and Miami tomorrow, also in Florida, in Boca Raton. But Kerry officials say the former president will also be going to Nevada, New Mexico, and to his native Arkansas where Democrats now say they have, quote, "an opportunity."

In a neck and neck raise President Bush may be ahead by a nose. In the latest CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup poll, the president holds a slight 2 point lead among registered voters, but among those likely to vote he stretches that to five points over Senator Kerry. Asked how President Bush is handling his job, 51 say they approve, 46 percent say they disapprove. Just a snapshot where the election stands right now. We'll look at other major polls in just a moment.

On the campaign trail today, the focus is security, and the president is getting a boost from the former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani. Our senior White House correspondent John king is joining us now live from Davenport, Iowa -- John.

JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the president will be campaigning here at this event in a short time, on his way here from Council Bluffs, Iowa. He campaigned earlier in the day in Colorado. You mentioned security as the president's focus, that is his overriding theme in the final week here of the campaign. Inopportune from the White House perspective of course that story out of Iraq, 380 tons of munitions gone missing. The White House trying to play the significance of that down.

And another part of their strategy is to keep voters moving from Bush to Kerry is to make the case that Senator Kerry has been inconsistent on Iraq, saying he supports the war that opposed the war, that Saddam Hussein is a threat and then not a threat. As part of that message today, one of Senator Kerry's arguments on the campaign trail has been that the United States military let Osama bin Laden away, at Tora Bora -- let his escape from Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Senator Kerry says that is proof that Mr. Bush has mismanaged the war on terrorism. President Bush today in his speech is quoting something very different Senator Kerry said back in the fall of 2001.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In the fall of 2001 on national TV, Senator Kerry said this, "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively, and we should continue to do it that way." At the time, the senator said about Tora Bora, "I think we've been smart, I think the administration leadership has done it well, and we are on the right track." Well, all I can say is that I am George W. Bush and I approve of that message.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now Mr. Bush also trying to reach out to Democrats in these final days of the campaign, accusing Senator Kerry of abandoning the positions on national security held by Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, even quoting from John F. Kennedy's inaugural, as he says Senator Kerry is now soft on terrorism, running away from the legacy of his own party.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and John Kennedy is rightly remembered for competence and resolve in times of war and hours of crisis. Senator Kerry has turned his back on pay any price and bear any burden. He replaced his commitments with wait and see and cut and run.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, Iowa, a state that narrowly voted for Al Gore four years ago, the Bush campaign believes it has a good chance to pull this state off. Although Wolf, I did speak to the Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack, and the state Governor Vilsack says the Democrats have an unprecedented turn out the vote operation. He believes the Democrats will win on election day but the president certainly hopes to take this state away.

WOLF: John King in Davenport, Iowa. Thanks, John, very much.

A check of our latest poll of polls as we call it. That would be an average of national polls taken over the past four days, including our own CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup poll. It shows President Bush with an average of a three-point lead over Senator Kerry, 49 percent to 46 percent. We also have some results of the latest battleground polls in two states. In Florida an insider advantage poll of likely voters has President Bush and Senator Kerry dead even at 46 percent, with Independent candidate Ralph Nader coming up at 2 percent. In Pennsylvania, Mason Dixon poll of likely voters shows Kerry leading Bush 46 percent to 44 percent.

Terror concerns intensifying in Iraq right now after hundreds of tons, tons of powerful explosives reported missing. Could they be used in an attack against American troops?

Yasser Arafat on leave for the first time in almost three years. Israel says it will let the Palestinian leader leave his compound. Will he accept the offer?

And Clinton's help. There's yet more campaigning for the former president to do. Has he taken on too much too soon? We'll get a medical opinion, a guest standing by. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Just a pound, one pound may be enough to bring down an airplane, but now hundreds of tons of high explosives are missing from a site south of Baghdad. Let's go live to our senior Pentagon CNN correspondent, Jamie McIntyre.

JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, the Pentagon is disputing the idea that the U.S. military allowed those explosives to be looted, even though as they can't say what happened to them.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): As part of the prewar sanctions, the International Atomic Energy Agency placed under seal some 380 tons of high explosives, stored in bunkers at the massive Al Qaqaa facility south of Baghdad. Explosives that could be used to trigger nuclear weapons, but also could be used for deadly conventional attacks. Two weeks ago, October 10, Iraq's ministry of science and technology reported to the IAEA the explosives were lost and blamed theft and looting of government installations due to lack of security after April 9, 2003, the day Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled.

The Pentagon says the Al Qaqaa facility was a level II priority on a list of 500 sites to be searched and secured. U.S. officials say it was visited dozens of times by U.S. troops in the months following the invasion. And after searching 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings, the missing stockpile was never found.

ADAM ERELI, STATE DEPT. SPOKESMAN: We did not find any explosives under seal. We did find some explosives that were consolidated. We did not find any WMD. We first learned about absence of these particular explosives on October 15, and we are actively engaged in trying to determine the circumstances for their disappearance.

MCINTYRE: IAEA inspectors last checked the explosives in January of 2003, three months before the start of the war. But the agency admits it has no way to know if the explosives were moved before the invasion or looted afterwards.

MELISSA FLEMING, IAEA: The most immediate concern, given the security climate in Iraq, is that these explosives -- and this is a real massive quantity of explosives -- could have reached the hands of insurgents.

MCINTYRE: Iraq is awash in weapons and munitions from the old regime, but the missing explosives, known as HMX and RDX, are more portable and powerful. Less than a pound is believed to have brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry seized on the report to argue the Bush administration blundered badly in not sending enough troops to Iraq to secure weapons and stop looters.

KERRY: Secretary Rumsfeld, we know, cavalierly dismissed the danger of looting, and now we know the impact.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCINTYRE (on camera): The Pentagon says it has ordered coalition forces and the Iraq Survey Group, which spearheaded the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, to provide, quote, "a comprehensive response" -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Jamie McIntyre, thanks very much.

And more on those missing explosives -- that's coming up, as well the political impact. I'll speak with the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. They'll join me here.

Plus, a developing story we're following out of the Middle East: The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat now granted permission to leave his compound for the first time in years. We'll tell you why the Israelis are letting him do so.

And familiar faces in the home stretch -- Bill Clinton and Al Gore both on the campaign trail. Will their voices help or hurt John Kerry?

And look at this -- so sad -- falling face first on the ice. A world champion skater takes a major spill during this dangerous stunt. We'll tell you what happened and how she's doing.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: For the first time in almost three years, the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, may be allowed to leave his West Bank headquarters. An Israeli defense official says the 75-year-old leader can seek medical treatment outside his Ramallah compound. But the Palestinian authority says it never requested such permission, insisting Arafat should be free to travel wherever he wishes. Palestinian officials say Arafat is suffering from the flu.

Speaking to a pro-Israel group in Florida today, President Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had some strong words for Arafat.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: Now is the time to step aside, allow an empowered prime minister to take power, allow the cleaning up and the restructuring of the security forces under that prime minister so that Palestinians can also play a role in securing the Gaza.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: At least 15 Palestinians were reported killed today in Gaza, as Israeli troops responded to a series of weekend mortar attacks. The latest violence comes as the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon prepares to submit his Gaza withdrawal plan to a parliamentary vote that's scheduled for tomorrow.

Joining us from Boston, our world affairs analyst, the former Defense Secretary William Cohen. Mr. Secretary, thanks, as usual, for joining us. First of all, what do you make of Dr. Rice flatly saying it's time for Arafat to step aside and go away? That sounds like a -- like it would be sort of a departure from long-standing U.S. policy.

WILLIAM COHEN, CNN WORLD AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, firstly I think that Mr. Arafat has long since ceased to be a positive influence in terms of bringing about a peaceful solution in the Middle East. But it's not up to me or anyone else to tell Arafat to go -- that it's his time to go. He's still the chosen leader of the Palestinian people, and they will -- he will have to, first of all, make a decision whether he feels that he can contribute to a proper resolution, a peaceful resolution in the Middle East.

Secondly, the Palestinian people will have to make that choice. But I think for us to suggest or indicate that he has to go is not going to fall unwelcome is in the Middle East. It's up to him, and hopefully he would make a decision such as that to step aside and give someone else an opportunity to bring about a more positive outcome. But he's going to have to make that decision, not us.

BLITZER: Whoever is elected president of the United States, whether it's Kerry or Bush, clearly is going to have a major problem on his hands, namely the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Do you sense there's a major difference between these two candidates on this very sensitive issue?

COHEN: I don't sense there's any major difference, but I do believe that whether it's President Bush or President Kerry, either man has got to reenergize the President Bush's roadmap plan. To allow this to continue to just linger on without resolution, to not put the United States in position of trying to be a positive force, to really make it happen in terms of the kind of concessions that have to be made both by the Israelis and by the Palestinians, it seems to me we're going to continue to see a great deal of conflict in the region, and that the -- both the Israelis and the United States ultimately will suffer as a result of it.

Tom Friedman in yesterday's "New York Times" pointed this out, that our policy is now being tied directly to the fate and the future of the Israelis, as well, throughout not only the Middle East, but throughout the Muslim world.

So, we have to bring about and insist that we be a positive force to help bring about the two parties, reconciling in a way that will give security for Israel, autonomy, independence, and opportunity, and dignity for the Palestinians. Without that, we're looking for a very long and difficult future in the Middle East and elsewhere.

BLITZER: I know you're going to be heading over to that part of the world in the not too distant future. But do you see any hope in the short term of getting the peace process back on track?

COHEN: I think it's going to require the United States to become much more actively engaged. Once this election is over -- and I think it's been put on hold until after the election -- but once the election is over, I think the United States, being the only country that has the influence and the power and the ability to try to bring the parties together in a way that will provide the kind of security and opportunity for both parties, then it's -- it's certainly not going to happen.

So, we are the principal party involved. We can't force a solution, but we can serve as a positive force to help bring it about in the sense of using our diplomacy, our influence, and hopefully our exhortation to bring it about.

BLITZER: William Cohen, thanks very much for joining us.

Powerful explosives disappear near Baghdad. Could they be used to harm American troops in Iraq? I'll speak with former Secretaries of State Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger.

Plus this...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: If this isn't good for my heart, I don't know what is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: But is the former president putting his health at risk? We'll have a leading cardiologist weigh in.

And another familiar face hits the campaign trail for John Kerry, but will these all-star appearances make a difference come Election Day. We'll tell you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BLITZER: As we mentioned, just seven weeks after heart surgery, Bill Clinton campaigned today with John Kerry. Clinton was one of two Democratic big guns lending a hand to Kerry in this last full week of the battle for the White House.

Joining us now with more on this, CNN's Brian Todd in Washington -- Brian.

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, if you need any more evidence of just how much is at stake in this election, look no further than Bill Clinton, out there now just seven weeks after bypass surgery, as you mentioned, and, with his former vice president, trying to pull every last vote in as we head down the stretch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TODD (voice-over): One is fresh off multiple bypass surgery.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If this isn't good for my heart, I don't know what is.

TODD: The other may well have spent the past year screaming himself into political oblivion.

AL GORE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!

TODD: But, right now, Bill Clinton and Al Gore may well be John Kerry's best friends on the campaign trail. From Philadelphia to Florida, the former president and vice president are hustling to rallies, speaking to church and community groups. Face time for these two is at a premium down the stretch.

And, analysts say, make no mistake. There are strategies behind this strategy. A visual of Bill Clinton revives the Democratic base, they say, and sends a message to the broader electorate: Remember the 1990s.

CLINTON: In Pennsylvania alone, you've lost 70,000 jobs, as compared with the 219,000 you gained by this time when that last fellow was president, me.

(LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: They were making money. People remember Clinton with a certain fondness. They remember, perhaps, those times as innocent, but yet prosperous. And a lot of the voters want to go back to then.

TODD: Analysts say there are risks to putting Clinton and Gore out this week. Clinton galvanizes Democrats, but also gets Republicans' dander up, reminding them and possibly some swing voters about his personal behavior in the White House. Gore carries his own baggage. Many Democrats aren't forgetting his endorsement of Howard Dean late last year. His overheated bellows at some speeches earlier this year led some observers to dismiss him as irrelevant.

GORE: It is beyond incompetent. It is recklessness.

TODD: But his razor-thin election loss in 2000 is not among Gore's liabilities, say some analysts, quite the contrary.

GORE: We don't want the Supreme Court so pick the next president, and we don't want this president to pick the next Supreme Court.

SCHNEIDER: His presence on the stump, and he would be better off not uttering a word. Just stand there and say, remember 2000. He's there to wave the bloody shirt, as they used to say after the Civil War.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TODD: So can Clinton and Gore be real difference makers in this last week? The consensus among analysts is yes, and the reason is, simply put, voter turnout. Each party knows the difference next week may be in one-upping the other in getting their people to the polls -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Brian Todd in Washington -- thank you, Brian, very much.

Clinton's appearance on the campaign trail so soon after his heart surgery raises the question of whether he's trying to do too much too soon. The former president addressed the issue is an interview earlier with ABC News.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: I feel good. My chest is a tender in the morning. When I get up and walk around and start moving around, I feel better immediately. But I've been really blessed.

I talked to my doctors about it, and they made some very helpful suggestions. They said, you know, I should get wherever I'm going early, in case I'm tired, so I can kind of regenerate.

DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS: Did Senator Clinton want you to go out? Was she worried this is too son?

CLINTON: No, but she doesn't want me to do too much. And I don't either. But I want to do this. Senator Kerry asked me to do it, and I want to do it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: And joining us now to talk more about Bill Clinton's health, Dr. Jannet Lewis. She's the director of noninvasive cardiology at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Lewis, thanks very much for joining us.

What do you think? How does he look? How does he appear to be doing based on what he says and what we've just seen?

DR. JANNET LEWIS, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL: He actually looks quite goods. He looks more slender. He looks like he is very committed to what he's doing.

He's undergone a very major operation. In general, patients who have this kind of surgery are ready to return to their employment four to eight weeks. So he's at six weeks, but he looked good.

BLITZER: He's going to be traveling a lot over the next eight days, campaigning for John Kerry, going to all these states around the country. Is this wise? Would you recommend a patient of yours do this only seven or eight weeks after a quadruple bypass surgery?

LEWIS: Now, of course, every patient is a little different, and everyone has their own pace of recovery.

So he has a team of physicians, and they've examined him and are following him very closely. And it appears that he's consulted with his physicians, and they think this is fine. I don't think is this is at all unreasonable.

BLITZER: Normally, normal patients his age, 58 years old, after quadruple bypass surgery, how long does it take to get back to a relatively normal schedule?

LEWIS: It can be as soon as three or four weeks. Some patients take a little bit longer. It depends what the individual's job is. But four to eight weeks is a reasonable period of time.

BLITZER: He said that he's lost another 15 pounds since the surgery. He had last quite a bit of weight on the South Beach diet earlier. A lot of us remember he was a bit heavier when he was president of the United States. Is it unusual to lose 15 pounds in the aftermath of this kind of a surgery?

LEWIS: Well, after this kind of major operation, a lot of individuals take a very different perspective on life. And weight loss and exercise is one of the things that they get very intent about. So it's not so unusual to have the weight loss, particularly if he had started this before.

BLITZER: In the interview on ABC earlier today, he says he wakes up early morning and he's still got some chest pains, some serious chest pains. He wants to get out and walk around before they sort of go away, a tension, if you will there. How long unusual is that?

LEWIS: Well, actually, what he has, he said he had some tenderness around the incision. And that's very common. He's not having any chest discomfort that's brought on by activity, per se. It's more the incisional pain. BLITZER: And that would be normal, right?

LEWIS: That's common. That's very common. And it takes a while for this to heal.

BLITZER: One final question, Dr. Lewis, depression. A lot of patients who have undergone this kind of bypass surgery, they come out depressed, perhaps understandably so. He doesn't look depressed, at least -- now, you saw the videotape of what he said in Philadelphia. You saw the interview on ABC earlier today. What's your sense?

LEWIS: He certainly does not look depressed. He looked energetic. He looked like he wanted to be out there. And, like I said, he looks more slender than he has been in the past. It is common for patients to have some depression, but he certainly doesn't appear to be.

BLITZER: Dr. Lewis, thanks very much -- Dr. Jannet Lewis of George Washington University Hospital, the medical school there. Thank you very much for joining us.

LEWIS: My pleasure.

BLITZER: Tons of powerful explosives vanish in Iraq. I'll speak with the former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger about terror concerns right now in Iraq,

Plus, an accident on ice, how a world-class figurer skater is recovering after plunging into the ice face-first.

And one family gets more than it bargains for during a routine stop at a gas station.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: As we mentioned, 380 tons of powerful explosives are missing from an Iraqi storage facility, a facility that was being -- that was supposed to be guarded by U.S. forces.

Just a short while ago, I discussed this issue with former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: Dr. Kissinger, Dr. Albright, thanks to both of you for joining us.

And I'll begin with you, Secretary Kissinger.

How is it possible that, in the after the aftermath of the major combat, the U.S. didn't secure that facility with, what, 380 tons of conventional explosives and simply let it, apparently, get into the hands of terrorists or insurgents or bad guys?

HENRY KISSINGER, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, at the end of the war, there was the difficulty that the units that were supposed to come from the north through Turkey had to go by sea and came up from the south. So there may not have been enough troops at the beginning to secure every weapons site. But I think that that was the fundamental problem.

BLITZER: As you know, Dr. Kissinger, one pound of some of those explosives could bring down Pan Am 103, one pound of that. There are tons, 380 tons, thousands and thousands of pounds of this. This sounds like a catastrophic disaster in the making.

KISSINGER: Well, Wolf, you know as well as I do that, at the end of the war, decisions like this had to be made by the local commander. He had to decide where to deploy his troops. It isn't that the White House moves around the individual units. And one certainly has to look into the question of why the decision was made to guard this place less or to move troops there more slowly.

BLITZER: Well, that's a fair point.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Let's let Dr. Albright, Secretary Albright, respond to that.

The military commanders on the ground, Secretary Albright, obviously failed, at least in securing this one very important facility.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: Well, I think, Wolf, it's the perfect example of the lack of planning generally for the post-military part of this, so to speak.

We do have the best military in the world, but everybody had this idea that it would be a cake walk, there wouldn't be any problems, and there was looting everywhere. And it's one thing to -- as horrible as it is to have looted the museum, but, in fact, you have allowed this kind of amount of explosives onto the market is an outrageous mistake and one, I'm afraid, that we're going to pay for, for a very long time.

BLITZER: But can you blame the president of the United States, Secretary Albright, for this, or should you blame Tommy Franks, who was the military commander, or others below in the chain of command?

ALBRIGHT: Well, it's hard to figure out whom to blame generally.

But the truth is that this war and everything about it has been a misjudgment. And the fact the troops were not in the right places, Secretary Kissinger says that there were troops not coming in from north. That was a lack of planning with Turkey. So it's one thing after another and a chain of unintended consequences for which we're all going to pay dearly. This is an outrageous mistake that I think is very, very dangerous.

BLITZER: All right, let's let Dr. Kissinger respond.

Go ahead, Mr. Secretary. KISSINGER: I supported the decision to move into Iraq.

I believe it was the right and prudent decision in the circumstances that we faced after 9/11. It was a situation, the lack of which we had not encountered before, and, therefore, it is always possible to find confusions and mistakes that were made. Maybe if Madeleine had been on Omaha Beach on the day that we landed there, she should have said this is bad deployment and we could have done things differently.

There was, undoubtedly -- at the beginning of any military operation, it is not clear what the best deployment with respect to every detail is.

(CROSSTALK)

KISSINGER: But we achieved a quick victory.

BLITZER: Let me let Dr. Albright respond.

It's been called a catastrophic success. Tommy Franks has called that. The president has called it. They didn't expect to win this quickly, and, as a result, some of the problems that developed in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime occurred and they weren't ready for it.

ALBRIGHT: But I think we do count on the president of the United States and the military commanders to make judgments that do not lead us into this kind of a situation.

And we are being asked over and over again by the president and others, do we feel safer today than when the war started? I personally have never felt safer, and now I feel even less safe as a result of the fact that 380 tons of explosives is out there. And I think that this is a question about what this president has led this country into.

I did not -- I said this was a war of choice, not of necessity. But I do think that securing military sites is a necessity. And so I don't understand how this happened.

BLITZER: All right.

Dr. Kissinger, do you feel safer knowing that 380 tons of these explosives are at large?

KISSINGER: Of course I don't feel safer that 380 tons of explosives are at large.

But I feel safer that Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein is no longer there, and that we are no longer facing an opponent in the midst of an area from which the attacks on 9/11 had taken place, an opponent who was working on weapons of mass destruction, accumulating large stockpiles of explosions, who had used some of these and had the largest army in the area. And in cleaning up this mess that had taken over 20 years, it is possible that some mistakes were made. But, overall, I feel safer. And a year from now, as this develops into an increasingly successful operation, I will feel even safer. It has to be measured against that and not against any one thing.

(CROSSTALK)

ALBRIGHT: Henry, if this had happened on your watch, you would be mortified by this, and I think this is a very bad situation.

I'm very glad that Saddam Hussein is not around, but there are now insurgents that are killing Iraqis that we are trying to train. I think this is a bigger mess than it ever was. And now, with this additional 380 tons of material out on the market, I think we're in very bad shape. And I don't wish anybody failure, but this is a horrible situation as a result of bad planning.

BLITZER: Dr. Kissinger, it also comes on the heels of what we found out, that, only yesterday, over the weekend, almost 50 Iraqis, most of them soldiers, were butchered. They were massacred, shot execution-style as they were returning from training. It seems to give the appearance that things are getting worse in Iraq, rather than getting better.

KISSINGER: Look, we're dealing with a big country in which it is not possible to secure every road.

And if you go through military operations of any war, you can always find one incident in which there was a setback or in which people were killed. The question is, is it possible or are we succeeding in improving the situation to a point where we can establish in Iraq a government that is nonradical, nonfundamentalist, and which will therefore be an example to the rest of the region?

We have no choice, and we should stop talking in this manner, because we have absolutely -- about how bad this war is.

BLITZER: Right.

KISSINGER: We have absolutely no choice except to bring about an outcome in which a moderate government concerned with the well-being of the people is established in Baghdad.

BLITZER: All right.

KISSINGER: And in order to get there, we will have to overcome the old parties. We will have to get rid of the al Qaeda people. It will be a very bitter battle that will have its ups and downs.

BLITZER: All right, Dr. Albright, very briefly, I'll give you the last word.

The United States, as Dr. Kissinger says, can't simply cut and run right now, and Senator Kerry doesn't want the United States to do so. ALBRIGHT: No.

Unfortunately, we are now in a situation where we have to do what Henry is saying we have to do. But it is harder every single day because of the mistakes and misjudgments made by this administration. And 380 tons of explosive in the hands of insurgents makes it a much harder job for America to do.

BLITZER: Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, as usual to both of you, thank you very much for joining us.

ALBRIGHT: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: The top justice of the United States Supreme Court confronting cancer. Up next, we'll take a closer look at William Rehnquist's legacy.

First, though, a quick look at some other stories you may have missed this past weekend.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER (voice-over): A small plane crash plunged the motor sports world into grief. Ten people were killed, including a son, a brother and two nieces of racing team owner Rick Hendrick. The plane was en route to Martinsville, Virginia, for the Subway 500 NASCAR race.

Accident on ice. The audience at Pittsburgh's Mellon Arena gasped as world champion pair skater Tatiana Totmianina plunged face first into the ice. She suffered a concussion, but, as bad as this looks, she hopes to be training again in 10 days.

Gas station crash. A car careened into this service station near Cleveland and slammed into a gas pump. A customer and his family managed to scatter just as the pump exploded. Authorities say the driver of the out-of-control car took off on foot, but was arrested.

And that's our weekend snapshot.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: More now on the surprise announcement from the Supreme Court that the chief justice, William Rehnquist, is being treated for thyroid cancer. Over three decades, Rehnquist has witnessed and helped shape U.S. history.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER (voice-over): William H. Rehnquist was sworn into the Supreme Court in 1972 by President Richard Nixon. Fourteen years later in 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist chief justice, and the era of the Rehnquist court began.

As chief justice, Rehnquist swore in both the first President Bush and the second President Bush. He also presided over both the inauguration and the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. While the inaugurations just impeachment put Rehnquist in the public spotlight, it's his role in Supreme Court decisions that will provide his legacy.

A strong conservative who once campaigned for Barry Goldwater, Rehnquist's tenure coincided with a gradual, but steady move away from the more liberal court of the '60s, lead by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Scholars say Rehnquist played a major role in the drive to reduce federal power and increase states' rights. And he's also been a supporter of the death penalty and of public funding for religious educational institutions.

In 1973, Rehnquist opposed the Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Rehnquist authored a 1995 decision that blocked Congress from banning guns near schools. Four years ago, he was one of five justices who stopped the final recount of the Florida election ballots, ending all challenges to the presidential election of George W. Bush.

An 80-year-old widower, Rehnquist is the second oldest man ever to provide over the Supreme Court. The oldest was Roger Taney, who remained chief justice until his death at the age of 87 in 1864.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: And we'll have the results of our Web question of the day. That's coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Here are the results of our Web question of the day.

"LOU DOBBS TONIGHT" starts right now.

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