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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown
Employee Warned Enron CEO of Implosion
Aired January 14, 2002 - 22:00 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.
AARON BROWN, NEWSNIGHT CORRESPONDENT: And good evening again, everyone. I'm not exactly sure what it means, but the program tonight has more variety in it than any we've done in four months. There is war news and there is Enron news and both are interesting and important. But neither dominates the program. Maybe it's a sign of something, or maybe it's just a short break in both stories.
Enron, I'm absolutely certain, has a long way to go and I was troubled reading the e-mails that came in after Friday's program about accusations of bias. The accusations of bias were split, pretty much down the middle. Some felt we had gone too soft on the administration. Others felt, in the words of one writer, "we were licking our lips in anticipation of bringing the Republicans down." It is, I think, pointless to argue with either. The coverage was very careful.
So I'll tell both sides in this, please relax, take a breath. Let's just see where this goes. It is very early in a complicated story. The business side is complicated. So is the politics.
If there is a scandal there, if there is one, I hope we're the ones who uncover it. That's our business, but that's different from wishing for a scandal. We're proud of our coverage of the attacks on 9/11, but we didn't wish for it to happen. The right thing to do and what this program and CNN ought to do, is just keep on digging, and the digging has just started.
So now, onto the whip we go on this 100 days since the war began, and the whip begins at the Pentagon, CNN's Bob Franken. Bob just back from Cuba, a headline please.
BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well there are so many questions at Guantanamo Bay, just how humanely do you treat your captives when you're convinced they're out to kill you at first opportunity, and how much do you care what the world thinks about it?
BROWN: Bob, we'll be back with you shortly to talk more about that. In Miran Shah, Pakistan, CNN's Kamal Hyder is on the videophone. Kamal, give me a headline and a little bit more from the war zone.
KAMAL HYDER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, another cold morning here and drones in the air, propeller aircraft in the air. No bombing as yet, but again the feeling that there may be something in the air. BROWN: Kamal, thank you very much. Back to New York now, the latest on the Enron case. CNN Financial News Correspondent Allan Chernoff is covering that story for us tonight. Allan a headline, please.
ALLAN CHERNOFF, CNN CORRESPONDENT: New details uncovered in the Enron scandal, a letter from an employee to the Chief Executive, warning that the company might implode in a series of accounting scandals.
BROWN: Allan back to you as well. We have much more to take care of as well. Two fascinating crime stories on the agenda tonight from opposite coasts, also some very compelling pictures today from a place on the receiving end of the trade center disaster. The place is called Fresh Kills Landfill, the largest landfill out there. It is on Staten Island in New York, and we'll take you there.
Also tonight, filmmaker Ken Burns joins us, someone we like a lot. He's here to talk about his latest documentary and he'll have something to say about Mark Twain that has not be said before.
And, farewell to "The Fantasticks" after 42 years on Broadway. We'll talk with an actor who remembers hearing about Martin Luther King's assassination right before the second act. He was a young man then. F. Murray Abraham joins us.
And Mondays are never easy to come back to work. Today, the staff made sure it wouldn't be easy for me. Yes, we have another mystery guest, a guest who will be a complete surprise to me until he or she walks onto the set.
Expect the unexpected in Segment 7. Yes, we're combining the two, so Sally in Michigan, just when we made peace, I suspect you'll be calling me a weenie again. Really. Such is the life I lead. All that ahead.
We begin with the war and the prisoners from it. The Pentagon prefers to call them detainees, which may have certain legal implications. We'll talk with an expert on that in a short while.
There's also a question of just what the interrogators can expect to learn from these men, and just how one goes about questioning people so committed to a cause.
In any case, another batch of detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay, the naval base there in Cuba. We have a pair of reports on this, and we start with CNN's Jamie McIntyre.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): As the latest group of Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, human rights activists are questioning whether the makeshift prison meets with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions.
JAMES ROSS, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: If U.S. soldiers, for example, were held in open mesh cages covered with a tin roof, I think the U.S. Government would complain about it.
MCINTYRE: But the Pentagon insists the detainees, it refuses to call them prisoners of war, are not being abused.
VICTORIA CLARKE, PENTAGON SPOKESWOMAN: Each day, the detainees are given three culturally appropriate meals. They have daily opportunities to shower, exercise, and receive medical attention. So in keeping with and accordance with the Geneva Convention, they are receiving very humane treatment.
MCINTYRE: The Pentagon says the International Committee of the Red Cross will be in a better position to judge whether the conditions are appropriate, and whether the shaving of the prisoner's heads and beards was warranted to combat head lice, as the Pentagon claims.
ROSS: Shaving prisoners whose beards may be for important religious purposes raises a concern, because that would be an affront to their dignity.
MCINTYRE: Meanwhile, the intensive bombing of the nine square mile cave complex at Zawar Kili in eastern Afghanistan continues, in what the Pentagon described as largely a demolition operation aimed at precluding terrorists from using the camp again, by sealing off more than 50 cave entrances and flattening all of the above ground buildings.
REAR ADMIRAL JOHN STUFFLEBEEM, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: It previously had been struck. What was not known was how extensive a complex it was, until we actually were on the ground and physically looking inside these caves to find out how extensive it was.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MCINTYRE (on camera): While the United States is wrapping up the demolition of the Zawar Kili complex, it is not giving up the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban forces. The area is, in the words of a Pentagon spokesman, riddled with caves and above ground structures, and so the search goes on. Jamie McIntyre, CNN, the Pentagon.
BROWN: A bit more on the prisoners now. There certainly was a kind of surreal atmosphere about the odyssey they took, these Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, spirited out of Kandahar minutes after a fire fight, then taken halfway across the world. They landed on a very tiny piece of property. You could see, or at least sense, how small it was by the tight turn the C-141 made on its approach to Guantanamo.
All of this happened on Bob Franken's watch. He's back from Guantanamo at the Pentagon, and we turn to him again now for some impressions. Bob, it's good to see you. Describe that scene when they started to get off the plane, because at least in some cases, it was kind of nasty, wasn't it?
FRANKEN: Well, and certainly surreal. By the way, there's an interesting reason why that turn was so tight. That approach to Guantanamo is only three-quarters of a mile from Cuban air space. It's not used that often. They have to make that tight a turn to avoid an international incident.
Once the plane landed, it was on the ground for an hour. We were about 200 yards away, had a fairly clear view, had binoculars, could watch as each of the prisoners wearing this florescent bright orange jumpsuit. We described this the other day of course, a ski hat, orange ski hat. The explanation for that was because it was cold on the plane. Ear plugs to drown out the noise of the plane, a surgical mask that covered most of the face. The explanation we were given that, is that was a protection for the forces who were guarding them.
To put it very bluntly, they were worried that some of these men who might have had tuberculosis, who had tested positive, might frankly spit on some of their captors. They also wore blacked-out goggles and that was just to make it more difficult for them to revolt, if that's what they wanted to do.
As they got off the plane, a few seemed to resist, went to their knees and were picked up fairly abruptly. The explanation from the military was that they were just disoriented and that's why they went to their knees. We'd never be able to know for sure if that's true, nor will the rest of the world since we haven't been able to see the video.
They were spirited on the buses and off they went on a ferry boat, the kind that you see sometimes the commuters using in this country that take vehicles aboard. This time it was buses full of the most dangerous captives, and they went to their new home, which is this eight-foot by six-foot by eight-foot high, well it's a cage.
They don't like to call it a cage, but it is a cage. It is a mosquito-infested place at night. There is no mosquito repellent being handed out, but the place is supposed to be sprayed by mosquitoes. It is a pretty dismal existence, and nobody knows exactly how long these people will be there or what they're going to do with them.
BROWN: What sort of things did you pick up that maybe you didn't or weren't able to see? You were kept quite a ways away. Were you able to pick up little bits and pieces of information, the way reporters do?
FRANKEN: Well, as a matter of fact, we were told for instance, I mentioned earlier that they're going to deal with the interrogation that there's going to be an intense interrogation.
I had the chance to talk to a couple of the people who were the leaders in this effort, military types, and they were talking about the fact that they're number one, well aware that they're not talking to people who are going to want to talk with them and they're going to be extremely patient.
If they don't get answers the first time, they'll try the second time, third time, tenth time, however long it takes, and their job will be made much more difficult because it's very difficult to establish a personal relationship with somebody when you have to use a translator. So this is going to be an extremely tedious process, one however that will perhaps be helped by the fact that, like it or not, the Americans are going to be holding these people in very uncomfortable circumstances.
BROWN: Thanks. Bob Franken, back from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was a fascinating thing to watch the other day. Bob, thank you very much for joining us again.
I can't imagine there are many people out there watching who doubt that the people who were brought to Guantanamo are quite bad boys. They are among the most dangerous, the highest ranking members of al Qaeda and the Taliban that the U.S. Government and the allies have captured so far.
They're people who might have a lot to tell, but how do you get them to talk? That was the question Bob was referring to, and it's a question we'll ask our next guest. Thomas Behr joins us. He's a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, former naval law officer, veteran war crimes investigator, and he joins us tonight from Salt Lake City, Utah. Nice to see you sir, thank you.
THOMAS BAER, FORMER ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY: Nice to see you sir.
BROWN: How do you get someone to talk at all? I mean these are - why would they give up anything, all things considered?
BAER: Well I think one of the most significant threats that could be used against these so-called foreign Taliban would be to repatriate them to the countries that they come from.
If they were threatened with being returned to Egypt, to Pakistan, or in the case of the Chechans, to Russia, you'll see a lot of them talking very quickly, because in fact, the conditions which they are under now are nothing compared to what would happen to them if they went back to their home countries.
BROWN: I don't want to spend a terribly long amount of time on this next question, but I need to understand. Why is it the United States Government does not refer to them as prisoners of war?
BAER: Well because it trips off all sorts of legal obligations, and because this is not a war between states. This is an unusual situation. It's a war against a movement, against terrorism. Accordingly, there isn't any need to use rule brick that applies to war between states. And the Geneva Convention has specific provisions that relate to "prisoners of war," and there's no need for the United States to invoke those provisions. They're detainees.
BROWN: I'm sorry. Are there any rules to these interrogations? And I might as well put this word out there on the table, is torture, psychological or physical one of the available tools?
BAER: The answer is to your first question, there really aren't any rules. To your second question, the United States is a civilized nation and it's officers and citizens are civilized, and you can anticipate that there will be no torture.
On the other hand as I indicated earlier, these people come from Egypt, from Chechnya, from Pakistan, and were they returned to those countries, you could anticipate much harsher methods than would be used by our people.
When we were chatting just before you went on the air here, you said a very interesting thing which is that the people who talk may in some respects be more dangerous than the ones who don't. Explain what you meant by that.
BAER: Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, these are highly- trained people. We've learned that certainly from the facts of 9/11, and these are the leadership. There really are two types of talkers that are dangerous.
First of all, those who simply lie in order to sing for their supper; and secondly, those who spread disinformation as part of their training, essentially involved in a counter spying operation. And it's the skill of the interrogators, their psychological savvy if you will, that will be able to determine: a) whether someone is telling the truth; or b) if they are singing for their supper, and that's a very tough road to hoe.
BROWN: Tom thanks for joining us. Thomas Baer in Salt Lake City, Utah tonight. The trouble with all of this seems to me is we'll probably never know. This is all classified stuff, but we appreciate your time this evening. Thank you.
BAER: Thank you.
BROWN: Just ahead from NEWSNIGHT tonight, the President's health. Wasn't that a strange story over the weekend? And we'll take a look at the Enron mess. We'll look at a big name accounting firm, and if you think there's nothing interesting about accounting, we've got a few billion reasons why you might want to think again. This is NEWSNIGHT on CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: President Bush hit the road today, bruised but not beaten by his encounter with a salty snack food over the weekend. It didn't put a crimp on his swing through Illinois and Missouri today. The President did show a few scratches and bruises. He said a pretzel went down the wrong way, and then in his words, "he hit the deck."
So today, in addition to pushing for expanded trade and promising to fight for tax relief, the President also told everyone he met to listen to mom. Chew your food carefully. His brother Jeb had a bit to say on the subject as well.
JEB BUSH, GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA: Not to me. I've never passed out eating a pretzel.
(END VIDEOTAPE) BROWN: Mom did like Jeb best. In any case, as for the President, he finishes up his road trip tomorrow in New Orleans. It's actually not funny, but does sort of remind us of when President Carter was attacked by the rabbit. It's just kind of a weird thing that happened over the weekend.
While all of us are working to make sense of the Enron collapse, thank goodness for the company's auditors, Andersen. We may not understand the complexities of business accounting, but we do understand memos from lawyers telling accountants to destroy documents.
William Sapphire of the New York Times today titled his column, Andersengate. As Sapphire put it, the accountants seemed to forget that the "P" in CPA means public.
CNN Financial News Correspondent Allan Chernoff is here again to help us sort through this one, and there's plenty to sort through tonight. Allan.
CHERNOFF: Aaron, tonight we have a new piece of the Enron puzzle. In fact, it is a letter from an Enron employee to the company's Chief Executive. The employee was well aware that something was rotten in Houston.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHERNOFF (voice over): The letter to Chief Executive Ken Lay from an anonymous female Enron employee, who appears to be well acquainted with the company's accounting and it's (UNINTELLIGIBLE) partnerships.
"It sure looks to the layman on the street that we are hiding losses in a related company. I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals. There are probably one or two disgruntled, redeployed employees who know enough about the funny accounting to get us in trouble."
The letter was written in August, two months before Enron confessed its profits had been inflated. Congressional investigators believe the writer met with Ken Lay for an hour to discuss here concerns and that Enron later told its attorneys not to second-guess the accounting advice of Andersen, the auditor that had approved Enron's books.
Tonight, Andersen is working damage control, releasing an e-mail about the Enron audit from in-house attorney Nancy Temple, to a partner at the Houston office, saying:
"Consider reminding the engagement team of our documentation and retention policy."
Included in that policy, "only final documents will be retained. Graphs and preliminary versions of information will be destroyed currently. Deletion of information from electronic files will be accomplished in such a way that precludes the possibility of subsequent retrieval by Arthur Andersen personnel or third parties."
Temple has told Andersen she was referring to an audit that was in progress, not previous audits that were later found to be faulty. Staffers at the House Energy and Commerce Committee say Andersen destroyed documents as late as last November, after Enron had restated its financials and the SEC had begun a formal investigation. Documents that should have been held indefinitely, according to accounting experts.
ALAN ANDERSON, AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF CPAS: Well, if the records were subject to subpoena, and they are destroyed after the subpoena was rendered, that would be more than unusual. That would be illegal.
CHERNOFF: Andersen Chief Executive, Joseph Beradino, is fighting dearly to save his company's battered reputation.
JOSEPH BERADINO, ANDERSEN CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Andersen will have to change to restore the public's interest and confidence, and we are working hard to identify the changes we need to make.
CHERNOFF: Andersen was also the auditor that approved financials at Sunbeam, and Waste Management, companies that paid fines for crooking their books.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CHERNOFF (on camera): Another Big Five accounting firm is in trouble tonight. The Securities and Exchange Commission is censoring KPMG. The firm violated auditor independence rules at a time when it was a major investor in the short-term investments trust. KPMG was also the auditor of the fund, part of the AIM family of mutual funds. The SEC found that KPMG had no procedures in place to avoid such conflicts. Aaron.
BROWN: Well that's great. Now I got to keep two accounting firms separate. Let's go back to Andersen and Enron for a minute. When you're talking to people out there, no one knows how this is going to play out. But when you're talking to people, do they believe that Andersen, which is a huge company, will survive this?
CHERNOFF: There are questions being raised about this. We can't right away say that this is going to take the company down.
BROWN: No, I don't - right, we're not - I just want to know what people are thinking out there.
CHERNOFF: The entire profession is in serious trouble right now, and they are going to have to do something to improve their image. Clearly Andersen is in the deepest trouble right now.
BROWN: If I were being even more cynical than I woke up this morning being, I would come away with the feeling that these accounting firms, to get the business that they get, and these are multi-million dollar accounts, will wink and nod if it is in their company, in the company's interest. Is that - am I being unfair here? CHERNOFF: Not in the least. In fact, there is you could argue, an inherent conflict of interest, because you are hired by a certain company to review their books. If they don't like the way you review it, well they can go hire somebody else. There's another scandal here, potentially. You could call it a scandal, in that the accounting firms also have had these auditing practices, and very often, and this was the case right here with Enron, the firm was doing auditing and also doing consulting at the same time.
BROWN: Allan, thank you. We're all going to get smarter about this before it's over. Up next, this step's a little easier to understand. Small town murder story. We thought twice about doing it until we learned the town hasn't seen a murder in more than 30 years, so we'll take a look at that. And that's nowhere near the only interesting thing about it, as you'll hear when NEWSNIGHT continues on a Monday.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Two crime stories as promised, one still very much a mystery, and the other one, the accused has been caught after a lengthy hunt, and we'll start with the second, the case of Christian Longo who prosecutors say murdered his wife and three small children in Oregon sometime last month.
He got more than 2,000 miles away from the scene of the crime, got out of the country, but in the end he was undone by the same way, or in the same way that other fugitives have been undone, the good old-fashioned face time on TV. It didn't work in getting bin Laden but it worked on Longo. Here's CNN's Susan Candiotti.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SUSAN CANDIOTTI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Publicity, it apparently did in Christian Longo, just like it has so many others. Captured in Mexico Sunday night without a fight, then voluntarily flown to Houston. A tip late Friday came on the very same day Longo was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. The tactic worked.
CHARLES MATHEWS, FBI SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE: It obviously took the publicity that we generated through the Top Ten and through other processes to help us focus in on him.
CANDIOTTI: A woman in Montreal, just back from a youth hostel near Cancun, called the FBI after recognizing Longo. After that tip, authorities tracked him to a beach camp in Tulum.
Longo stands accused of murdering his wife and three children, ages two, three and four, their bodies recovered from some bays in Oregon last month.
Earlier this month, a stolen car allegedly left behind by Longo, was found at the San Francisco Airport. An airline ticket to Cancun, bought with a stolen credit card, suggested his escape route.
MATHEWS: The additional publicity in the Cancun and the Tulum area finally focused on exactly where he was.
CANDIOTTI: Besides generating publicity from the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, Longo was profiled on the TV show "America's Most Wanted" Saturday night.
EXCERPT FROM "AMERICA'S MOST WANTED": Christian Longo was charged with four counts of Murder, but he could not be arrested. He had disappeared.
CANDIOTTI: Since the FBI's Most Wanted List was launched in 1950, 469 fugitives appeared on it. Nearly all, 440 were found; 142 located thanks to direct help from citizens, the list an invaluable tool.
CHRIS GREGKORSKI, FBI VIOLENT CRIMES UNIT: It is a buzz phrase that catches the public attention immediately, that this is a serious fugitive.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CANDIOTTI (on camera): What are the criteria needed to get on the Ten Most Wanted List? The FBI's urgent need for the public's help. The way to get off the list? Dropping the charges or getting caught. Susan Candiotti, CNN, Washington.
BROWN: Crime story two. Sometimes it's hard to figure out what that certain mix is that makes a crime story compelling, what takes it out of the local paper and into our view. This story has the mix. It isn't too hard to figure out.
The murder happened on Cape Cod, packed in the summer, but nearly empty, a bit spooky even in the winter. In the town where it happened, there hadn't been a murder since Lyndon Johnson was President.
The victim was a fashion writer, Crystal Worthington, who gave up the glamour for the more quiet life of Cape Code, and her two-year-old daughter was found with her; the child alive and alone, perhaps for a day and a half.
The girl, the child was fathered by a local fisheries official, the shellfish constable to get specific, who is very much married, has a large family and is now fighting for the custody of this child too. Those are just the basic details. It gets interesting, even more so from here.
It was reported on Sunday by New York Times reporter, Alex Kuczynski who joins us tonight. It's nice to see you. Welcome.
ALEX KUCZYNSKI, REPORTER, NEW YORK TIMES: Nice to see you.
BROWN: What got you interested in the story, by the way?
KUCZYNSKI: It's a tragedy and it's also an incredible mystery. The fact that it hasn't been resolved already, I actually find quite amazing. BROWN: I want to come back to that question. Tell me, give us a little more on the victim here, because she's - every good story needs a good character and she's a good character.
KUCZYNSKI: Oh, she's a complex, complex character. She was a woman who graduated with honors from Vassar, came from a long line of blue blood WASP New Englanders. Somewhere the wealth connection ran dry. She became a freelance fashion writer and traveled the world and lived in Paris and in London and interviewed everyone on the planet, and then came back to Cape Cod to find a father for her, as yet unborn child, and she found a married father of six.
BROWN: Yes, and she desperately wanted a baby at that point in her life?
KUCZYNSKI: Yes, she did and that's what's so, one of the real tragedies of this. She had abandoned, you know, the couture aggressive and lived in this tiny little house she inherited from her dead mother, whom she had come home to nurse through the final stages of cancer. And her daughter was born four days after her mother's death.
BROWN: And someone the other day really, just a few days ago, breaks into the house.
KUCZYNSKI: Yes, last Sunday, last Sunday at 4:30 p.m. she was discovered murdered.
BROWN: Sunday a week ago.
KUCZYNSKI: Sunday a week ago, right. Sorry. And she was discovered by Tim Arnold, a children's book author, who had brain surgery last summer and has been complaining of dizzy spells and you know, sort of blank spots. So that's fascinating in itself. You know, both men are cooperating with the police.
BROWN: Both men being Mr. Arnold who finds her.
KUCZYNSKI: Mr. Arnold.
BROWN: And help me on the name, I forget it.
KUCZYNSKI: And his name is Anthony Jacket.
BROWN: Jacket, who is the father of the child.
KUCZYNSKI: That's right.
BROWN: And now wants custody of the child.
KUCZYNSKI: That's right. He wants custody of the child. And the people who are actually caring for the child now are fighting that, because they were named in the will. And Mr. Jacket's attorney says no, you know, you can't just will your child to whomever you wish.
BROWN: I'm running out of time. I got a bunch of little questions.
KUCZYNSKI: OK.
BROWN: One of the more intriguing things in the article is, she changes her will to ensure that the father does not get the child, correct?
KUCZYNSKI: That's right.
BROWN: Are we left with the notion that she was afraid of something?
KUCZYNSKI: By all reports, she was estranged from her father and perhaps more estranged so in recent years, because of the birth of this illegitimate child. And apparently that went against his WASP sensibilities in a very major way.
BROWN: Now, was she trying to keep the child from the Jackets?
KUCZYNSKI: Oh, that's unclear.
BROWN: OK.
KUCZYNSKI: Apparently they were on amicable terms, and Mrs. Jacket, the mother of four -- of the six children, had -- they had all shared dinner together. They were friendly. But that was only in -- since April, so it was actually not a long-term friendship.
BROWN: Half a minute.
KUCZYNSKI: Yes.
BROWN: Just -- I want you to describe something that -- it was spooky there, wasn't it?
KUCZYNSKI: Well, last Friday -- on Friday, just this last Friday, I crossed the police barrier and no one was there. And it was raining. And I ran up the long driveway, and none of her family members had talked to me. And I ran down the road, and it was pouring rain, and in the backyard was -- were arrayed the toys of her daughter, you know, in the puddles of cold New England rain and sleet.
BROWN: Yes.
KUCZYNSKI: And it was terrifying, and incredibly sad. And then we realized what we all leave behind when we go, which is not very much.
BROWN: When I read the piece on Sunday, it reminded me why I tell my daughter to read the whole paper, the sports section, the style section. I try and do it too. It was a wonderful piece, it's nice to meet you finally.
KUCZYNSKI: Thank you so much. Well, good to meet you too.
BROWN: Thank you for coming in. KUCZYNSKI: Thank you.
BROWN: In a moment, one of our -- this is (UNINTELLIGIBLE) -- this is a good one tonight too -- America's greatest story tellers seen through the eyes of one of the country's greatest filmmakers. Ken Burns joins us, talk about Mark Twain, when NEWSNIGHT continues on CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Actually, I wrote this really long introduction, and I just decided I don't want to read it, I don't want to do it. I want to just get to this.
Ken Burns is here. Ken is a wonderful filmmaker. Lot of you will remember the PBS series he did on baseball and on jazz, and he's done a series on mark Twain. And the first installment aired tonight. We're going to show you a little bit of it, and then we'll talk to Ken. So roll the tape, please.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DAVID BRADLEY, WRITER: I think Mark Twain understood that if we were going to be a country, if America was going to be the nation that it started out to be, the problem of race had to be solved. And I think he realized that it wasn't being solved.
Mark Twain told the truth. He saw what we were about and was not afraid to deal with things that other people were afraid to deal with.
NARRATOR: Like the nation he would come to embody, he was always reinventing himself, always restless, always full of contradictions. "I am not an American," Mark Twain said, "I am the American."
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROWN: Part one aired tonight, part two tomorrow on PBS, I assume it's on in different times, different parts of the country.
It's nice to see you. Ken Burns joins us.
KEN BURNS, PRODUCER, "MARK TWAIN": It's great to see you.
BROWN: When did you start working on this?
BURNS: About three and a half years ago. We've been in parallel track while we're finishing the last leg of the trilogy, "Civil War," "Baseball," "Jazz."
BROWN: Yes.
BURNS: Did a lot of biographies, sort of -- I like biography, you know. Thomas Carlyle said that history is biography, and I love going into a person and seeing the way they influenced the age they lived in and the way that age influenced them.
BROWN: For people who don't know, don't remember, never learned, Mark Twain lived when?
BURNS: He lived from 1835 to 1910. In fact, he was born with Halley's Comet, and he went out with Halley's Comet...
BROWN: Right, but...
BURNS: ... so he was within, as he said, "these two unaccountable freaks." And the Lord wanted them to go in together and go out together.
BROWN: This notion of Twain and race have been intertwined forever, it seems like. And people have always reacted to him on the subject differently. I think "Huck Finn" remains one of the most banned books in the country.
BURNS: One of the most banned. And now for the most outrageous politically correct reasons of the use of the N-word, despite our popular culture being filled with it, and some crazy assumption that Twain is somehow racist.
Ernest Hemingway said that all of American literature begins with "Huck Finn." This is the most courageous writer we've ever had, who was willing, despite his Southern, Western backgrounds, coming from a slave-owning state and family, to take on the question of race in a way no one ever had.
Dick Gregory in our film said, "He's the first person to put a human face on a black person," that in the presence of Jim, we have the possibility of the rest of our, white America's, moral awakening. And the story of "Huck Finn" is -- there's not a better novel of American history.
BROWN: Did he mean it to be a children's book?
BURNS: Well, you know, he just tapped what he called "the fountain of my great deep" with "Tom Sawyer," which is narrated by Mark Twain. Then he starts writing "Huck Finn," and it's the dark undercurrent of that idyllic boyhood, in which, of course, the wonderful world of fishing poles and straw hats and bare feet gets turned up down when you realize that chattel slavery existed in the middle of this, that people can be beaten and sold and families separated.
And so it's written almost as a child's adventure, in the voice of Huck Finn, but it is insurrectionary and revolutionary and just, I think, turned American literature upside-down.
BROWN: When did you last read "Huck Finn," by the way?
BURNS: Oh, about three or four months ago. After I finished the film, I had to do it. I read it once while I was making the film and once just before we started it, and of course when they held a gun to my head in 11th grade and made me read it.
BROWN: Well, we all read it then.
What did he -- of his work, what was he most proud of?
BURNS: Well, he said that he liked this book called "Joan of Arc," which really is a minor thing. I think it's because his wife, who came from an upper middle-class, refined background, and his daughters, really wanted him to be known not as a humorist. You know, we don't give the Oscar for best picture to a comedy, because somehow we think it's lesser.
So too his family was worried in the Salons of Hartford and New York that he wouldn't be treated the same way if he was merely a humorist. So he liked to say that it was "Joan of Arc," which is a sort of refined and ennobling novel and not as good as the good stuff like "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "Huck Finn."
BROWN: Have you ever wondered about this character, maybe any character that you've worked with, how they would fare if they were here today?
BURNS: That's such a great question. Of all the historical figures I've studied over the last 25 years -- you know, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, you name it -- there is only one person that I think you could bring here, and within 15 minutes, he'd be up and running without anything fazing him. And that would be Mark Twain.
BROWN: Because?
BURNS: Because he got into essentially what it meant to be an American and into universal truths about human nature. He knew that human nature didn't change, only human circumstances. So he'd look around, he'd see the same bloviating fools, he'd see the same hypocrisy that needed to be harpooned amongst the rich and the pretentious.
And he would set out about his work and do it again, and the rest of us would love him. And because he delivered it in this sort of Trojan Horse of humor, we -- the medicine goes down a little bit better.
BROWN: No one's ever said "bloviating" on the program before, just now. What do you -- we've got 15 seconds or so. What are you working on?
BURNS: A biography of Jack Johnson, another film...
BROWN: The fighter.
BURNS: ... about the first -- The fighter. Another film about the first road trip in America, the first car -- cross-country car trip in 1903, a series on the national parks, a series on World War II, and Martin Luther King.
BROWN: You must be the luckiest guy on the planet.
BURNS: I've got -- You know I have the best job in the country.
BROWN: I've never doubted it. It's always nice to see you.
BURNS: It's my pleasure.
BROWN: And again, part two tomorrow on PBS, and with any luck it doesn't run opposite this.
Thank you, Ken, we'll see you soon, I hope.
Next on NEWSNIGHT, a graduate of "The Fantasticks," class of 1968, F. Murray Abraham, joins us, remembers the play, which closed last night here in New York, as we continue.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: I am going to read the introduction here. The facts are cool.
There are some things that become so much a part of the city's fabric that you don't always give them their due until they're gone. Maybe the World Trade Center was one of those.
In a smaller way, "The Fantasticks" fits as well, romantic musical that ran in a very quiet downtown street, tiny theater, for 42 years. No play ever ran that long. And last night, as you probably have heard by now, was its last performance, 17,162 performances.
Interestingly, it did not get rave reviews back in 1960. One critic called it "a trifle simple-minded," and it was never necessarily the kind of hit that packed them in the way some do, but it does have a certain sweetness about it.
And back in, I think, 1968, if I remember this right, F. Murray Abraham was in the play, and he joins us tonight to talk about it.
Nice to meet you.
F. MURRAY ABRAHAM, CAST MEMBER, "THE FANTASTICKS," 1968: Nice to meet you.
BROWN: Were you there last night?
ABRAHAM: Yes, I was, and I cried my little eyes out.
BROWN: And did everyone?
ABRAHAM: I hope so.
BROWN: Yes, I mean, it must -- you think about how long that play ran. What an extraordinary thing, and what a moment to close it down.
ABRAHAM: Yes, the idea, too, that you can do a thing like that, you can open a show to mediocre reviews, and because financially it's possible, economically, to keep it running, they did. And it was worth the gamble.
BROWN: Could that have happened today, by the way?
ABRAHAM: I don't think so, I'm sorry to say.
BROWN: Yes. It's a tougher business.
ABRAHAM: Yes, it is, and it's not as much fun. Partly the economics.
BROWN: Was it a great play, or just a really nice little play?
ABRAHAM: You -- if you're going to start defining what "great" is, if you can say that you write a song that everyone in the world knows, I think it's great.
BROWN: Yes.
ABRAHAM: I think so.
BROWN: Tell me how you ended up in the play. Was I right, '68?
ABRAHAM: That's right, '68. Some amazing things that year. "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" came out, and of course Dr. King was assassinated.
BROWN: Yes.
ABRAHAM: And that was something.
BROWN: And you were a young man running from one audition to another?
ABRAHAM: Yes, I guess I was a young man. I still feel like that. But yes, I was. But I was in acting class, and the stage manager for "The Fantasticks" said that there's an opening, would you like to audition? It's one of those wonderful coincidences.
BROWN: How long did you do the show?
ABRAHAM: I did it for about 14 months. But I went in as the boy's father, but mostly did the old actor, the Shakespearian actor. And then every time someone took a vacation, I'd say, Can I please do that part for a week? Do I did five different roles.
BROWN: Now, tell me again how long you did it? I...
ABRAHAM: About 14 months.
BROWN: Is it hard to go out there every night and do the same piece of material for, you know, what do you do, eight shows a week?
ABRAHAM: I could ask you the same thing.
BROWN: Well, but my material changes every night, although it hasn't necessarily seemed that way for a while. But you really do the same -- they are the same lines. It's the same songs, it's the same stuff. ABRAHAM: Well, that separates the really good actors from the -- you know, everyday actors. It's -- to me, it's a thrill every time. I really mean it, I really love it a lot.
BROWN: Yes, yes, I believe you.
ABRAHAM: This is a drag that it's closing, I got to tell you. It was a great experience for me, and very meaningful. I mean, it was my first show in New York.
BROWN: Fair enough. But it had, as they say, a hell of a run. And it's hard, in a way, to feel bad about something that, after 17,000 shows, you know -- there are -- it's a tough -- this...
ABRAHAM: No, no, no, you're right, you're right. I'm just sentimental, that's all.
BROWN: Yes.
ABRAHAM: But it's cool, it's fine. It's great to know that a show like that, as (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and sweet as it was, can exist and be successful in a town like New York.
BROWN: What does that say, that it was that way?
ABRAHAM: Well, it says that there is a little soft spot in our hearts that we need to nurture. I don't know where you're going to go to find that now, because boy, oh, boy, there's so much reality stuff happening. I like a little fantasy in my life.
BROWN: In -- does Broadway today need to be bigger, bolder, louder, these days to...
ABRAHAM: How about just better?
BROWN: ... justify the prices and bring people in?
ABRAHAM: I hear what you're saying. How about just better? How about a little more thoughtful? How about a little more originality instead of just recreating something that's 50 years old, 40 years old, bringing these other old musicals in?
BROWN: Yes.
ABRAHAM: I mean, come on, how about a little imagination?
BROWN: It's so expensive to take a risk.
ABRAHAM: Yes, well, life's a risk. Give it a shot.
BROWN: We have. Thanks for coming in.
ABRAHAM: Thanks a lot.
BROWN: It's a treat to meet you.
ABRAHAM: It was a pleasure.
BROWN: Would you leave a little of your voice behind?
ABRAHAM: With pleasure.
BROWN: Thanks.
ABRAHAM: Try to remember.
BROWN: Thank you.
We'll take a break, we'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: It's painful to think that the remnants of ground zero, historical artifacts, really, and especially the human remains, have landed in the world's biggest garbage dump -- that's ground zero tonight -- the garbage dump, the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island is the place where they have taken everything.
The irony of that name, of course, brutally apparent from the first load of debris that got there. It remains so today.
These days, the sifting, the searching, the nitty-gritty work is being done mostly now at Fresh Kills. And we haven't had many opportunities to actually see what goes on there, and today we did get a chance to. We took that opportunity. Sacred ground in its own way.
Our guide on the tour is Chief William Allee of the New York Police Department.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHIEF WILLIAM ALLEE, NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT: We're searching for human remains, we're searching for personal property, photographs, anything of -- that could be important to connect a victim to the family or friends.
But as you can see, the material gets offloaded, gets put on these trucks that stay within this facility, where it becomes processes.
This is the scrapper, who's taking this, all of the metal that's been gone through and it's no longer needed. It's being loaded on cars and will be taken to a scrap yard in New Jersey for recycling.
This activity goes on all day until 1:00 in the morning. It stops from 1:00 till 5:00 for equipment maintenance.
And the stuff that you see coming out of the conveyor belt is the stuff that's already been processed. Anything that goes up into those little enclosures, you have a group of detectives. You can see their shadows. They're examining it, and they can stop it any time they want. This is the area where all of the fire apparatus, most of the fire apparatus, winds up. It's kind of a special place. You can see the condition of the trucks, and these are the people that responded, and this is the vehicles that they came in.
And every time you come up here, you look at the debris, you look at what happened, and you can't help but thinking about the fact that, well, how come you survived and someone else didn't?
And I think in a lot of cases it was a matter of just turning one way as opposed to turning the other way. It wasn't because of any inherent skills. I think it was just -- that's the way it was.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BROWN: The scene at Fresh Kills today.
It's been a very full night.
Coming up, Segment Seven, and the $64,000 question, who will the next guest be? The answer revealed to me and to you in a moment. Yes, the mystery guest, when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROWN: Tonight's Segment Seven is the mystery guest, or, as one e-mail writer put it, "two really dumb ideas rolled into one."
People, come on!
The premise here is, the staff finds someone of interest and tells everyone on the staff but me, and then I'm expected to intelligently interview that person, or at least intelligently as I interview anyone else, and in any case, it beats the accordion guy, right?
So here we go. We'll roll the prompter, and the name will be revealed to me.
For maybe the first time, I get to talk to this reporter without time delay, CNN's Nic Robertson. Hi.
NIC ROBERTSON, SENIOR CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, how are you?
BROWN: Nice to see you. Actually he was in my office. He didn't give this away today.
ROBERTSON: I didn't, did I?
BROWN: Nic, as I guess all of you know, was voted the sexiest correspondent in Afghanistan, which wasn't that tough.
Welcome. Why are you here?
ROBERTSON: We have an award to come this week.
BROWN: I didn't mean that nastily, but...
ROBERTSON: We did a documentary last year that's won an award, documentary on Northern Ireland and the peace process in Northern Ireland, called "Dying for Peace," on one of the IRA's top gunmen, if you will, turned peacemaker, turned minister of education. He was the chief of staff of the IRA.
So we're here to pick up an award for that.
BROWN: Congratulations...
ROBERTSON: Yes, thank you.
BROWN: ... on that, and congratulations -- and I've told you this, I told you this afternoon when you came into my office -- on really extraordinary work, which is one part journalism -- or two parts journalism and one part endurance when you're in situations like that.
ROBERTSON: Yes, it was four months, and by the end, I was ready for a break. But it was interesting all the way, and you're stimulated by the story. You go through the peaks and troughs, you go through the 11th, you go through getting kicked out of Afghanistan, and you go through getting back in for two days, and then booted out, working with almost no sleep, and then get ready to go back.
And peaks and troughs. And the last one was a long peak, yes.
BROWN: Yes. And in fact, the 11th was the first time you and I ever talked. You were in Afghanistan. You had that crazy videophone. There were tracers in the sky. We certainly here didn't know what was going on. What did you think was happening that day? Did you think the Americans had launched a quick strike?
ROBERTSON: I knew that it was possible, I knew also that we would find out pretty quickly from our reporters at the Pentagon whether or not that was the case. I'd seen explosions in Kabul before, I'd seen the city attacked, I'd seen the response. I'd also watched cruise missiles come in in Baghdad and Yugoslavia, so I had a sense of what they were like.
Not only that, nobody knew at the time, but there was actually a thunderstorm going on around the city and the mountains at the time. The flashes of lightning over the horizon, and, you know, and big flashes reflecting on the clouds.
So there was a lot going on, there was a lot to try and dissemble or understand that was actually happening in front of us.
BROWN: Do you keep a journal when you're there?
ROBERTSON: I do keep a journal of sorts, but as the days get longer, the journal gets shorter.
BROWN: How did -- where did you sleep? How did you live when you were in Afghanistan? ROBERTSON: When we were in Tora Bora, we were up on the mountainside, and we were -- I was sleeping in a bus that had the chairs taken out of it, and one day that crashed off the hillside into a ravine, lost all my gear down the mountainside.
You -- we sleep where we can. You know, sometimes there's a hotel, sometimes there's no water.
BROWN: And I assume our bosses, our collective bosses, do the best they can to take care of you when you're on those situations.
ROBERTSON: They do, they look after us. They give us people to advise us on security, they give us, you know, whatever we need to stay safe, to do the job, the food, the backup, the water, whatever it is it takes to do the job. And the support, it needs a lot of moral support.
BROWN: You're not a guy that likes to talk about stuff like this, but did you -- were you scared, ever scared?
ROBERTSON: Yes, there were moments, especially in the early days when our fixers at the time decided that it was too unsafe and they left, and the other journalists left. We wanted to stay, too good a story to walk away from. So you want to stay, but you got to fight those -- you know, fight those flight fears. You want to get out. But you fight it and stay, if you can.
BROWN: There's a story -- actually, but I don't think it's an Afghanistan story, I think it's an Iraq story, isn't it, where you ended up with a guy that fixed the satellite dish to get the signal out at the beginning of the war? Is that right?
ROBERTSON: Well, that was me, I was the guy that did the dish.
BROWN: Yes, so you were a technician on the technical side before you were on the correspondent side.
ROBERTSON: That's right, 11 years ago, yes.
BROWN: And then someone figured out just how sexy you are and sent you out in the field, is that right?
ROBERTSON: No, my wife figured out I was sexy, and she married me, and then I got out -- to go out in the field as a reporter.
BROWN: And you live in London.
ROBERTSON: I do, yes.
BROWN: And you got -- I know this, because I asked you earlier. You have two young kids.
ROBERTSON: Yes.
BROWN: And you must be -- you must have missed them terribly over there. ROBERTSON: It's really tough. There are moments when the story slows down and you're so far away from home, and you get to talk to them on the phone when they've just got up, or you've missed them because they've gone to bed, and you're finished working and you can't talk to them. So it's tough, you know, it's very tough.
BROWN: You caught a hell of a story and you did a hell of a job.
ROBERTSON: Thank you.
BROWN: And all of us here are appreciative of your efforts and your colleagues' efforts as well. Thank you.
ROBERTSON: Thank you.
BROWN: Now I'll get you for coming on tonight. Thank you.
That's the program for tonight. Tomorrow and the rest of the week, we're in L.A. Got some interesting things happening there, we hope you'll join us for that. We'll explain why we're in L.A. tomorrow.
And we'll see you then at 10:00 Eastern time. Good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.
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