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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Tornadoes Rip Through Midwest, Southeast; U.S. Captures "Mrs. Anthrax"

Aired May 05, 2003 - 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, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again, everyone. Most often these days we begin the program with things about war or terrorism, perhaps a search for peace in the Middle East.
Tonight, we begin with something different from all that, a force well beyond the control of man, the tornadoes that hit the country this weekend. As one farmer in Nebraska put it, I think we got half the cornfield in the house now.

Compared to the dozens who lost their lives this weekend, he was surely one of the lucky ones.

And so, we begin the whip in a place that was hit especially hard over the weekend, Pierce City, Missouri. David Mattingly is there for us, so David a headline from you tonight.

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, in Pierce City, Missouri, there is no electricity tonight, no running water, and after a devastating tornado, no solid ideas on what the future may hold for this small town -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you, back to you early tonight.

A new look at an ugly chapter of American history. Our Congressional Correspondent Jonathan Karl on that for us, so Jon a headline from you.

JONATHAN KARL, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: For 50 years the records of Joe McCarthy's closed hearings on communist subversion have been locked up at the National Archives. Today, the seal was lifted revealing a fascinating new look at one of the most dramatic political episodes of the 20th Century.

BROWN: Jon, thank you.

It was something else that had Washington buzzing today, the decline of a moralist perhaps. Bob Franken on that, Bob the headline.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, this is a charge about hypocrisy and charges about hypocrisy about hypocrisy, and a man who decided to quit after he decided, dare I say it, the cards were stacked against him. We'll torture this more in a moment.

BROWN: Thank you as well. And, a murder mystery that's consumed one small town in Maine, Jamie Colby in New Sweden, Maine with the latest on that, so Jamie a headline.

JAMIE COLBY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, parishioners at the Gustaf Adolf Church learned today from police that a fellow parishioner is considered the likely suspect in an arsenic poisoning at their church. Today they're asking themselves if they missed the signs that might have prevented this from happening -- Aaron.

BROWN: Jamie, thank you, back to you and the rest shortly.

Also coming up tonight in the hour and a half of NEWSNIGHT, Jeff Greenfield joins us, so does Joe Kline to talk about the Democratic debate over the weekend in South Carolina. We'll look at some of the issues dividing the contenders on the Democratic side.

Nic Robertson from Baghdad tonight looks at the latest to be captured among the most wanted Iraqis, the five of hearts in the Pentagon's deck of cards or, as others call her, Mrs. Anthrax.

We'll update you on the condition of Private Jessica Lynch who's ordeal may have been worse than first imagined, an ordeal that she can't fully remember, at least for now.

And, the inevitable question when you look at the sorry tales of two top coaches in college sports. What were they thinking, Beth Nissen on that tonight.

So, we have lots to do in the next 90 minutes, but we begin with the force of nature. "Worse than a nightmare," said a woman in Missouri, who tonight is mourning the loss of her grandparents. "I didn't have time to be scared" said a man from Tennessee, who hid with his three grandchildren in a closet when the storms rolled through. "When I came out" he said "I saw what happened. Then I got scared." Tonight, so do we all.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here comes the tornado. It's coming down the highway.

BROWN (voice-over): The tornadoes and violent thunderstorms that ripped through much of the middle of the country were so ferocious that dozens were left dead.

GOV. BOB HOLDEN (D), MISSOURI: It looks like that this is the most devastating series of tornadoes we've ever had in the state of Missouri in our history. We've got reported I think about 12, 13 fatalities in the state. The devastation in Pierce City here and in Stockton and other locations is just mind boggling.

BROWN: In Pierce City, Missouri, a small town in the deep southwestern corner of the state it seemed that every building in town was either destroyed or badly damaged. Many residents took shelter in the local National Guard Armory where today two bodies were discovered.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It looked like the post office was ripped half in two. The top of the Civic Center was gone. Most of the businesses around and across the street from the post office were demolished.

BROWN: To the north, severe damage as well. A series of tornadoes worked their way through an upscale section of homes not far from Kansas City. Local officials say most residents received warnings in time to seek shelter, but even for an area used to storms like these, the result was stark.

MAYOR JIM BARNES, KANSAS CITY: There's not been anything like it in this northern part of Kansas City that I can recall. This is about as bad as it's been.

BROWN: To the east in Tennessee, the city of Jackson, midway between Memphis and Nashville, saw tornadoes rip through late on Sunday. Eleven bodies were taken to the local hospital. Said one resident, "It's like downtown Baghdad."

DAN VAUGHN, MADISON COUNTY EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT OFFICE: It will be in the millions of dollars in damage and destruction. We know that we have just in one area of East Jackson 70 homes destroyed.

BROWN: Tornado damage too in Arkansas, where coincidentally the president touched down to make a previously planned speech.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Nature is awfully tough at times and the best thing we can do right now is to pray for those who have suffered.

BROWN: So many tornadoes touching down at one time, there were more than 80, is according to experts highly unusual. But what isn't unusual is the capricious nature of the weather. In Missouri, this woman's house was ruined but her mother's ceramic angels survived.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That is unbelievable that my mother's angels were not broke. God was looking out for us. He was.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A small blessing, which only highlights the larger one, given the enormous damage in places such as Pierce City, Missouri, it is a blessing that so many people survived, a mixed blessing, but they'll take what they can get.

Here's CNN's David Mattingly.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY (voice-over): The tornado left the streets of Pierce City, Missouri littered with shattered masonry and splintered wood, buildings that had withstood a century of wear and tear broke under the ferocious winds and crumbled in 30 seconds. Among the bricks and broken glass, homes and livelihoods were also buried. A year ago, Scott and Lynette Rector started this tea room and antique shop, part of the tourism economy that keeps the town going, now a total loss.

SCOTT RECTOR, PIERCE CITY RESIDENT: Every business in town is gone, every single one.

MATTINGLY: Just two blocks away the old church the Rectors were making into their home was also severely damaged. A brick bell tower in some places more than six inches thick broke under the strain.

LYNETTE RECTOR, PIERCE CITY RESIDENT: I don't understand how the bricks just blew out of the top. The bricks are gone out of some of the top.

MATTINGLY: In fact, for blocks around, people emerge from their basements and closets stunned by the storm's destructive power, something this town had never seen before.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Honestly, I figured well it's happened before and, I mean, they've had the sirens go off before and every other tornado that's gone through here has either been south of town or north of town.

MAYOR MARK PETERS, PIERCE CITY, MISSOURI: Around the corner, there's a basement, a little alcove in there, a very sturdy thing made out of concrete and hard rock.

MATTINGLY: Mayor Mark Peters was among dozens of residents who heeded early warnings and sought shelter in the local armory, but caught directly in the storm's path. Wind sent the roof and wall of one section crashing down, killing one person inside.

PETERS: I had a look at that street and see what it looks like and decide how much you can do to prepare for something like that. I think the answer is probably not much more than we did.

MATTINGLY: And the question of what could have been done is not nearly as important to residents as what will be done now. Some buildings are so badly damaged they will probably be demolished, pieces of history lost to a deadly storm.

Missouri Governor Bob Holden surveyed the damage listening to one resident plead for the life of her town.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is horrific. How can we save this? We have to try and save it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY: And people here with so much pride in their towns pass a loss of any one of these old buildings is painful. The idea that some of them may have to be demolished tomorrow just makes this pain just go on and on for days longer than they wanted to -- Aaron. BROWN: Two quick questions. How many people live in the town roughly, and as you look through downtown how much of it's damaged, every building damaged, half of it?

MATTINGLY: We're looking at a little over 1,000 people here. The downtown area is an area of about six square blocks. About four square blocks of those are very heavily damaged but there is damage across the town here. Someone who saw these tornadoes --\ this tornado come through say that it was jumping around quite a bit, so it did quite a large path right here through the town and a lot of cleaning up to do as a result of that.

BROWN: David, thank you very much, good work today, David Mattingly.

On now to Jackson, Tennessee, the town saw minor looting overnight until the mayor declared it a state of emergency. At least 11 people died when the storm came through, adding to the unease, more tornado warnings all over the region tonight.

Here's CNN's Jason Bellini.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON BELLINI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We know houses can be replaced and lives can not, but what about dreams? Linda Barnett until last night was well on the way to fulfilling hers.

LINDA BARNETT, TORNADO VICTIM: I was going to do a bread and breakfast here but I'll have to make other plans for retirement, won't I?

BELLINI: The tornado ripped through the three layers of brick that kept this house standing firm since around the Civil War.

BARNETT: I found this sign way up the street.

BELLINI: Like other houses on Main Street, Jackson, Tennessee, the authenticity, the charm, the history of her home were unquestionable. Her hospitality, the decor, were to be exceptional.

BARNETT: Well, I was looking forward to decorating eight big rooms.

BELLINI: Her home demolished, she thinks now not of the guests, the friends she would have in her bed and breakfast, but of those lives surrounding her now. Who do you have to help you?

BARNETT: Well, since my parents died I'm sort of my myself except for John.

BELLINI: Who's John?

BARNETT: John Palmer. He lives in the white house. He's really been a friend.

JOHN PALMER, TORNADO VICTIM: We're best of friends and we'll get through it I do believe.

BARNETT: Come here, Brett (ph). Come here get your (unintelligible).

BELLINI: Insurance will pay for a new house, new bricks, new lumber. Constructing new dreams will be left to her. Why do you want to have a bed and breakfast?

BARNETT: Well, I enjoy people. I enjoy sharing and that would be a way to do that with my retirement.

BELLINI: For now, she and John can do little more than sit on John's porch and contemplate.

Jason Bellini CNN, Jackson, Tennessee.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The president promised financial aid to help with the tornado damage. The president also spent a portion of his day asking Americans to press Congress to support his tax cut plan.

We go to the White House, CNN's Senior White House Correspondent John King, John good evening.

JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good evening to you, Aaron. Today a textbook example of a president whose popularity is quite high after the war in Iraq trying to transfer that popularity as the commander-in-chief to his domestic agenda, the chief item of course his economic plan centered on tax cuts.

But the president is having a great deal of difficulty so far. Today's challenge was in the state of Arkansas, as you mentioned, a state the president carried last time when he ran. In the presidential election he's favored there next time. He's of course from neighboring Texas.

Yet, the state has two Democratic Senators who have differences, in one case significant differences with the Bush tax cut plan. The president needs some Democratic votes, of course, because several moderate Republicans have said they will not support the president's tax cut plan.

So, you see the president here being warmly welcomed. He gave a speech defending his tax cut plan. He says the economy is doing OK but it needs a boost. Yet, this president, his approval rating at 70 percent after the war in Iraq, conceded in this speech today that he needs some help.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: It's time for them to move. The debate has started in Washington, D.C. The message I hope you send is the more tax relief, the more work is going to be available for your fellow citizens. I would hope you'd call the members of your Congressional delegation to let them know what you think, let them know your opinion. Democracy can work, particularly when a lot of people get on the phone or by e- mail and just let them know what's on your mind.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, here's how the debate looks right now. The House is considering a Republican tax bill that totals $550 billion in all that would lower taxation of dividend income. The president wanted to completely eliminate that. The House plan as it is now drafted would simply lower taxation of dividends.

The Senate Finance Committee gets to work on its proposal tomorrow. It is only $350 billion total, much lower than what Mr. Bush wanted. As of tonight the chairman saying he will propose to temporarily eliminate income taxes on dividends. Again, the president wants to do that permanently.

The Bush plan initially, as proposed by the president four months ago, called for some $726 billion in tax cuts, including total elimination of taxes cuts on dividends, so it is crystal clear the president will not get all he wanted. The question is how much he can get.

Mr. Bush came back to the White House after that speech in Arkansas today. Already in the works is his speech tomorrow to an anti-tax group here in Washington. The president again trying to rally grassroots support for people to put pressure on Congress, Vice President Cheney also making some calls today, and the president will have the bipartisan leadership of Congress here on Thursday to lobby yet again.

This is a key week as both the House and the Senate put to paper their competing tax cut proposals. The president is still hoping for at least $550 billion in the end. Some believe though, Aaron, despite all his popularity after the military conflict in Iraq he's going to have to settle for something less than that.

BROWN: Has he given up on I think there are four Republicans now who have said they won't support the 550 has he given up on them?

KING: Not given up completely, the treasury secretary, the vice president, and others lobbying those Republicans. The question is they all want what they call offsets. We'll hear a lot of funny language in Washington in the days ahead.

What that means is in the Senate side if you want to go higher than $350 billion in tax cuts, you have to offset it with spending cuts somewhere else. Sounds easy enough but once you then propose a spending cut, you might lose another vote because Senator X or Y refuses to cut that program. So, it is very complicated business right now.

BROWN: John, thank you, Senior White House Correspondent John King tonight.

And, ahead on NEWSNIGHT, the capture of another member of the deck of cards and questions about whether or not she played a role in the Iraqi bioweapons program. And, a question of whether gambling to the tune of millions of dollars is a vice, not according to Bill Bennett.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Two developments today in the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. There's word from the Pentagon that a truck found in northern Iraq is, in fact, a mobile bioweapons laboratory. Officials say expect an announcement tomorrow from Secretary Rumsfeld.

But is this the smoking gun? There have been reports like this before. We'll see. Sources tell us the van has been scrubbed, cleaned of any biological material but they did discover, according to these reports, equipment for making germs. That's one development tonight.

The other is the surrender of a woman who may have a lot to say about vans and labs and germs. Here's CNN's Nic Robertson.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Seen here shortly before the war, Huda Ammash rallies anti-American support, standing out not just because she was younger than most in the upper echelons of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party but because she was one of the only women.

Ammash got her Master's in microbiology at the University of Texas, her Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Missouri. But according to the former head of Iraq's bio warfare program in the 1980s, she has had no significant role in producing WMD.

DR. NISSAR AL HINDAWI, FORMER HEAD, IRAQI BIO WARFARE PROGRAM: All of her life she's been in the administrative field not in scientific and actual work.

ROBERTSON: Outside of government, Ammash helped run this medical test laboratory. Her partner there also doubts accusations she was involved in WMD.

DR. TAHA SHEBEEB: As long as I know -- as far as I know, sorry, she didn't work in anthrax at all, at all.

ROBERTSON: In her political life, 48-year-old Ammash accelerated through he ruling Ba'ath Party ranks, achieving Iraqi national command membership in August, 2001, more senior than a minister.

Some attributed her rapid rise through Ba'athism stultified ranks to her father who had been a friend of Saddam's, at his side during the 1963 Ba'athist Revolution, and laterally an ambassador until his death, rumored to be at Saddam's instigation.

Others attribute Ammash's ascension to power to her close friendship with Saddam's first wife Sajida. AL HINDAWI: She was able to play a good role in getting Sajida back in good terms to Saddam Hussein.

(on camera): And Huda Ammash it seems the coalition has landed a complex character, quite how much she knows about weapons of mass destruction though remains open to question.

Nic Robertson, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So, we'll ask some questions. Joining us from London, Ibrahim al-Marashi, who's a research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, good to have you with us tonight, sir.

So, which is she, is she the evil scientist in the WMD program or is she a more benevolent person?

IBRAHIM AL-MARASHI, CENTER FOR NONPROLIFERATION STUDIES: I would say that it's really hard to tell. What I can tell you is that her arrest is indicating that pieces of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction puzzle are finally coming together.

If you take that with the arrest of the minister of Iraq's military industrialization program on Friday, Abdel Tawab Mullah Huweish and her arrest together, she'll give us a better idea of how Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program developed. To say whether she's benevolent or benign that waits to be seen.

BROWN: But there's no question in your mind that there was recently such a program and that there were these weapons of mass destruction because as you know the Pentagon's had a heck of a time finding any.

AL-MARASHI: It's what really has been indicated in the last discoveries of these mobile labs, not only in the north or Iraq but in the south of Iraq that the arsenal might not necessarily exist. It's what's called the breakout capability, the infrastructure to produce these weapons overnight, to keep them mobile and so forth. It seems like the Iraqi government did make an active effort to keep this capability.

BROWN: Is it possible that these labs had other purposes or could they only have been used to make weapons of mass destruction?

AL-MURASHI: If those labs are genuine labs used for civilian purposes then I doubt he would have (unintelligible) buy these mobile labs, bring them from abroad and so on. The fact that he wanted to keep them mobile and the fact that they were buried indicates that they did have more sinister purposes.

BROWN: So, what we may have here is a government that indeed destroyed its weaponized material and kept the capability to start it again when the pressure was off?

AL-MURASHI: Exactly. What we've seen is the paperwork to keep the know-how of how to produce these weapons as well as those facilities, as well as the staff that had the technical know-how to recreate these weapons, which Huda Ammash is one of these people, would be one of these people.

BROWN: That's perhaps a more political question than is appropriate but is that going to be -- if that turns out to be the case, is that going to be persuasive to the world community, the community that had questions about the appropriateness of the war in the first place?

AL-MURASHI: I don't think so. I think what the world community is looking for is exactly that, that smoking gun. They're going to either look -- want to find Scud missiles tipped with chemical warheads, artillery shells, or aerial bombs filled with either biological or chemical weapons.

That's what the world community is looking for. But in my opinion, the actual infrastructure I think is indicative of the fact that he did have the capability of producing these weapons in the future.

BROWN: He just knew that the inspectors would find it, is that the idea, so rather than make it and get caught, he retains the ability to do it on another day?

AL-MURASHI: That's exactly it, to destroy the most obvious weapons but keep these kind of labs hidden.

BROWN: That will be a frustration for a lot of people at the Pentagon, I expect. Thank you very much, good to talk to you tonight.

AL-MURASHI: My pleasure.

BROWN: Coming up on NEWSNIGHT, we'll check out some of the day's other top stories including the latest on the Scott Peterson case, as his new lawyer vows to find the real killer of Laci Peterson.

And, from Guantanamo Bay news that some detainees some, will soon be sent back to Afghanistan.

Around the world this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A few quick items from around the country tonight beginning with the Laci Peterson case in California. Scott Peterson appeared at a hearing today in Modesto, California.

His new lawyer, Mark Geragos, argued that the arrest and search warrant records should stay sealed, saying that certain parts could unfairly harm the defense.

Geragos said afterwards he'd not only prove that Peterson is innocent, but he would also "find out who did this to Scott's wife and son." Big move by a top university to keep SARS off its campus, UC Berkeley said it will turn away new students from China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong this summer. The decision affects several hundred students set to begin the summer term at Berkeley later this month.

The U.S. Supreme Court today decided to set new limits on telemarketers asking for money for charity. If the fundraiser lies or is misleading about where the donations go, states can take them to court. The Supreme Court decided that free speech doesn't protect telemarketers who intentionally deceive donors.

We are so pleased to have the round-up back, another sign of normalcy around here. We thought we'd throw the world round-up in as well in this segment.

So here we go, a few more stories from around the world and they begin at Guantanamo Bay, the detention center there where 13 inmates are getting out sometime in the next few days. They'll get clothing and money and a flight to Afghanistan. Then it's up to Afghan authorities what they'll do with them.

No details from the Pentagon on who they are, where they're from, or why they're being let go. There are some reports that some of the children there, 13 to 16 will be among those sent home.

Secretary of State Powell leaves for the Middle East on Friday. He's expected to meet with Israel's prime minister, the new Palestinian prime minister. He'll also stop in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and in Egypt.

And, Jay Garner, the man in charge of running Iraq says he'll have the beginnings of an interim government in place by the middle of the month. Nine Iraqis will be chosen by the Americans to take part initially, some of them exiles, some locals, Sunnis, Christians, and Shiites among them. The group would serve as a liaison between the Iraqis and the American administration which will continue to run the country.

And one of integrated South Africa's founding fathers died today. Walter Sisulu was 90 years old. He was the strategist behind the fight against apartheid but he preferred to stay in the background, leaving the spotlight to his protege Nelson Mandela.

Still to come on the program tonight the vice in the eye of the beholder, Bill Bennett and his gambling hobby, a short break first.

This is NEWSNIGHT from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: And next on NEWSNIGHT: The presidential election 18 months away, but they're debating. Jeff Greenfield joins us. And what we learned when the Democratic candidates got together over the weekend -- that and more in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: If the hypocrisy of other people is the drug of choice for cynics, the Bill Bennett story is 100 pure crack. It isn't every day that a man who made millions of dollars promoting virtue is found to have blown millions of dollars on vice, a legal vice, we have to add, which didn't move the cynics one bit. So, today, Mr. Bennett took the next step.

Here's CNN's Bob Franken.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BOB FRANKEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): "My gambling days are over," said Bill Bennett, as the author of the "Book of Virtues" embraced the virtue of reform. That was inspired by a long weekend of articles and ridicule over reports that the champion of high moral standards was a high roller who had bet millions over the last decade at Atlantic City and Las Vegas casinos.

After first contending that no one was harmed by his gambling, as opposed to the instant gratification he so roundly condemned as drug czar in his best-sellers and in his stinging condemnations of President Clinton, now Bennett was issuing a statement saying he had learned a lesson: "I have done too much gambling. And this is not an example I wish to set. Therefore, my gambling days are over."

Bennett insisted that he had complied with all laws concerning reporting wins and losses. A leading fellow conservative, Dr. James Dobson, who heads "Focus on the Family," offered his support, after saying he was disappointed to find out Bennett was dealing with what appears to be a gambling addiction.

There's always a question about who really cares about this sort of thing outside the Beltway, but, inside, it was enough to cause the twaddle to flap.

PAUL BEGALA, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": Bill Bennett is a hypocrite of the first order. He has a perfect right to go and gamble. Some people think that's a sin. Others don't. But for him to stand up there and lecture us about what songs we should hear, what movies we should see, who our president should date, when he's out there losing $8 million, he's a hypocrite. He ought to be called to count for it.

ROBERT NOVAK, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Paul, you are a hypocrite, because you are moralizing when you talk about his gambling.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FRANKEN: Well, at the very least, William Bennett, in publicly admitting to seeing the error of his way, was following a rule that applies to both gambling and politics: Cut your losses -- Aaron.

BROWN: Easier to do in politics sometimes than gambling.

Thank you, Bob, very much. In case you missed the president aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln last week, you'll surely have another chance to see it, tens of thousands of chances, probably. The images will be seen again and again as the presidential campaign gets under way. Now consider the plight of those who wish to replace him a year from now. They can't match the P.R. power of the sitting president, let alone a sitting president fresh off the war.

All they can do is debate and hope someone is paying attention. We know they did the first part Saturday in South Carolina. We're not sure about the second.

Here's CNN's Jeff Greenfield.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST (voice-over): Yes, it was historically, perhaps hysterically, early for a presidential debate.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, MODERATOR: The nine Democratic candidates.

GREENFIELD: And, yes, nine candidates make for some awkwardness. But we really did learn something about Saturday night's debate. We learned a lot about the premises candidates are bringing to this contest. We learned that Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean know that a loss for either in New Hampshire, a neighboring state to both, effectively knocks the loser out, which is why things between the two got a bit testy.

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I believe that anybody who thinks that they have to prepare for the day that we're not the strongest is preparing for a day when we have serious problems.

HOWARD DEAN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: No commander in chief would ever -- and I am no exception -- willingly allow our military influence to shrink. Unilateralism is a mistake. That's what I said for it. I think the senator made a mistake in criticizing me.

KERRY: I don't need any lectures in courage from Howard Dean.

GREENFIELD: We learned that Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, instead of tacking left to burnish his liberal credentials for the Democratic primary voter, is emphasizing his centrist credentials on the electorate and national security.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D-CT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And the fact is, they're not going to choose anyone who sends a message that is other than strength on defense and homeland security.

GREENFIELD: On spending.

LIEBERMAN: We're not going to solve these problems with the kind of big-spending Democratic ideas of the past. And we can't afford them. GREENFIELD: Even on guns.

LIEBERMAN: Licensing registration, in my opinion, are bad ideas and violations of that fundamental right.

GREENFIELD: We learned that North Carolina Senator John Edwards is relying heavily on populist, "I'm for the little guy" themes. Listen to how he attacked Congressman Dick Gephardt's ambitious health plan as too pro-big business.

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I think that's taking money that people desperately need, giving it to people, the very people that we've had trouble with. To me, this is what it feels like. It feels like saying, you're in good hands with Enron.

GREENFIELD: And we learned from the series of attacks on Dick Gephardt's health plan that his rivals are concerned that plan might help to burnish Gephardt's assets as a longtime Democratic leader with strong ties to labor, assets he was happy to tout.

REP. RICHARD GEPHARDT (D-MO), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If you're looking for the fresh face and the new face, I'm probably not your candidate. If you're looking for somebody that has real experience over 27 years in the House, 13 years as Democratic leader on every domestic and foreign issue this country's faced, then I may be your candidate.

SEN. BOB GRAHAM (D-FL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I come from the electable wing of the Democratic Party.

GREENFIELD: For Senator Bob Graham of Florida, that is a major theme, the two-term former Florida governor, three-term senator from the most competitive big state in the country. Graham's resume is powerful. But in recent campaigns, resumes haven't mattered much.

AL SHARPTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We can defeat that when all of us come together.

GREENFIELD: And as for Reverend Al Sharpton, the only candidate in the race who has never won an election or held a public office, the premise is also clear: Do well in South Carolina, with its large African-American vote, and you become a real player.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: If you read the press clips, it was a good night for Senator Lieberman, not so hot for Senator Kerry. But with eight months to go before anybody casts a vote, those assessments don't mean that much. What may be significant is that this fight for the nomination may also be a fight about what the Democratic Party does or should stand for -- Aaron.

BROWN: Again.

GREENFIELD: Again.

BROWN: Again.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Joe Klein is with us, too. Mr. Klein writes a political column for "TIME" magazine. We'll talk about all of this.

Let me come back to you.

Why is everyone -- and everyone does seem to say it was a great night for Senator Lieberman. Why?

GREENFIELD: Because he stood out. A lot of people think that a centrist candidate, when he runs for the Democratic nomination, invariably has to start inching to the left. And Lieberman set down a few markers. I think he said very clearly Saturday night: I'm not doing that.

I thought the fact that he -- remember, in 2000, Bradley and Gore were fighting over how rigorously to register and license handguns. Lieberman is saying, no, no. I think that was an interesting signal. And he was pretty clear about that.

BROWN: One more question on this. Was he, in any sense, different than he was in the last campaign? Did he take positions on Saturday he hadn't taken or did he modify positions he hadn't?

GREENFIELD: Well, it's -- try night and day. When you're the No. 2 guy with the guy -- he and Al Gore had differences. And, quite rightly, Lieberman in 2000 said: Hey, I'm No. 2. Here, he's saying: I'm running for the top job and this is where I stand.

So this is really, I think, the reemergence, in bold face, of a more centrist, less liberal Lieberman.

BROWN: Everyone, Mr. Klein, seems to be waiting for John Kerry to fall down. Do you agree with that?

JOE KLEIN, COLUMNIST, "TIME": Well, he's very tall.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Don't be so literal with me.

KLEIN: And, also, he has this reputation for being aloof. And he got off a pretty good line when he was challenged on his aloofness. He says, I'm going to disappear and go off by myself and consider that.

In fact, there were a number of good lines. Lieberman got a good one off when he was challenged for being too soft. He said to the moderator, George Stephanopoulos, "I'm going to come over there and strangle you, George."

BROWN: Well, I think that's great if you're running to be Jay Leno. I'm not sure... KLEIN: But, with Lieberman, the reason why he did well -- two reasons, actually. One is that the expectations were incredibly low. All of his previous appearances during this campaign had been kind of Milquetoasty. And he was tough. And he attacked his opponents. In fact, he was tougher in this debate than he was when he debated Dick Cheney in 2000. So that's No. 1.

And No. 2 is that he created his own piece of real estate in this race. He said: I'm going to be the most conservative Democrat on this platform. And he did it very forcefully. He did it very clearly. He spoke English. There was never a false step.

BROWN: Senator Edwards, neither of you has mentioned him. Well, you did in the piece, did in the piece.

GREENFIELD: Yes, I think this is clearly the populist theme.

BROWN: He's got a lot of money.

GREENFIELD: I'm sorry?

BROWN: He's got a lot of money.

GREENFIELD: Yes. Well, but there are populists with a lot of money.

BROWN: Yes, there are.

GREENFIELD: But: My dad came from humble origins. My mom worked in the post office. I'm for the little guy. Corporate culture is bad.

I think the question about John Edwards is -- I think he's the youngest person in the race. And the question is, does he look like he's running for student body president, rather than president of the United States? That's the stylistic question. Substantively, the question is this populism, the constant going after the corporate culture, is that going to mean much in 2004?

KLEIN: Well, it's easy to be a rich populist when you're a trial lawyer. He's a trial lawyer. Most of his money has come from trial lawyers. And what do trial lawyers do? They spend all their time suing big corporations in damage suits.

I don't know whether that will work. But I do think that it was very clever to attack Dick Gephardt's universal health care plan, his huge plan, from the left, as being a -- as soaking the poor. I think that a lot of other people in the race made some telling criticisms of that. And I think, over the next month, you're going to see some of the other Democrats come out with more modest and reasonable and plausible universal health care plans.

BROWN: All right, onto the other political story of the day. Why is there glee -- let me just say glee -- over the Bill Bennett story? GREENFIELD: Well, if the word isn't too fancy, it's really schadenfreude. It's taking delight in the misfortune of others, particularly someone who has made his millions as a virtue craft.

Bill Bennett's whole theme -- and, by the way, it's one that people have listened to and nodded about -- is that there's a link between personal behavior and the broader culture, that the pursuit of instant gratification, that the giving-in to appetites has serious social consequences. He's the creator of the index of leading social indicators, one of which is, how much compulsive gambling is there?

So, to see someone like that in the grip of -- I don't know what you call it. I'm not a shrink. But if it's not a compulsion or an addiction, it's a kind of a medication, if you've ever seen anybody even playing the nickel slots, is to say, "Aha." People do like to see preachers with feet of clay.

BROWN: But this isn't exactly Jimmy Swaggart here.

KLEIN: I'll tell you something, I'm not gleeful.

BROWN: OK.

KLEIN: I've known Bill Bennett for a long time. I like him a lot. He's a very smart guy. He has a great self-deprecating sense of humor.

And his problem is this, that -- and it's the problem of religion, which is that, when religious people talk about virtues, talk about the good things in life, the things that you should do, they're on pretty solid ground. And when he turned to talking about vice, especially Bill Clinton's vices and the vices of the American people in not being outraged about Bill Clinton's vices, he turned a corner. And that makes this day more delicious for a lot of people.

BROWN: Quickly, is he done, because I think it was Mr. Bennett who said, you're never really done in American life?

GREENFIELD: No. I don't think -- first of all, today, he kind of cut his losses and said, this was really not a good idea.

I have a feeling he may alter his approach to rhetoric. There may be a good deal more, if I may use the word, humility. But, no, I think there are second acts in American life.

BROWN: Ten seconds.

KLEIN: Blessed are the meek. I think that, if he goes that way, he'll have many more acts.

GREENFIELD: I'm still wrestling with Begala talking about the president's dates.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: I know, a conversation for another night. Thank you both. It's nice to have you both with us. Thank you.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, we'll update the condition of Private Jessica Lynch. What does she remember, what does she not remember about her ordeal? There are actually lots of questions about the ordeal itself.

And from Maine: the latest on the mystery of the murder in the church.

We have much more ahead on a Monday night. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: There's more mystery than fact where Private Jessica Lynch is concerned. The Iraqi doctors who treated her told a newspaper in Toronto she suffered no battlefield injuries, that her injuries all appeared to be the result of her fall from the truck she was riding in when her unit was ambushed. They also say she was well treated, very well treated in their version of events. Whether this is true or not, Private Lynch has yet to say. She remains hospitalized, out of public view, and apparently with significant holes in her memory.

Here's CNN's Patty Davis.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PATTY DAVIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It turns out Jessica Lynch may not remember much of her ordeal. Doctors say it's not uncommon to have amnesia after such a traumatic event.

Lynch was plucked out of an Iraqi hospital in a daring rescue by U.S. troops nine days after her 507th Maintenance Unit was ambushed by Iraqi troops. The private 1st class is recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., from her wounds, including a head laceration, spinal injury, two broken legs, a broken right arm and right foot.

One defense official says Lynch told her debriefers she does not remember details from the time of the ambush to the point where she was brought to the Iraqi hospital, where she was rescued. Lynch's doctors say her amnesia is not consistent and it vacillates. A spokeswoman says doctors are not concerned about amnesia, her mental and physical state. In fact, doctors say they're pleased with her progress. She's in satisfactory condition undergoing occupational and physical therapy.

The U.S. military has been hoping Lynch can shed some light on the brutality that she and her fellow soldiers in the 507th Maintenance Unit suffered at the hands of the Iraqis, nine of whom were killed in the ambush. But Lynch isn't the only eyewitness. Five others in Lynch's unit were also taken prisoner by the Iraqis and rescued by U.S. troops weeks later.

(on camera): They're back home in the U.S. They, like Lynch, could help provide crucial details to the ambush and their captivity, as well as possible Iraqi war crimes.

Patty Davis, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Sunday services were held yesterday at the Gustaf Adolph Church in New Sweden, Maine. Worshipers had coffee and pastry afterward, but that was perhaps the only normal thing about it. A look at who wasn't there yesterday can help tell the mystery of this little church in Maine: the church elder who was killed by arsenic poisoning last week and the longtime parishioner linked to the crime that's shaken the small town to its core.

Reporting for us tonight: CNN's Jamie Colby.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JERRY NELSON, FRIEND: He would help me if I needed help. He was always helping someone.

JAMIE COLBY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): That is how many of the people in New Sweden, a northern Maine town, population 621, remembered Daniel Bondeson, the man now linked to the poisoning of 16 people at the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church, who himself died Friday of a single gunshot wound at home; 53-year-old Bondeson, born in and raised here, wasn't at church a week ago when coffee tainted with arsenic was served.

Though not a regular churchgoer, he'd been to a bake sale there the day before.

LT. DENNIS APPLETON, MAINE STATE POLICE: We feel Mr. Bondeson is linked to the poisonings.

COLBY: Lieutenant Dennis Appleton, the lead investigator in the church poisoning, says he now believes Bondeson's motive may be church related.

APPLETON: We're considering motive. We know some of the dynamics of what was going on with him within that church community. And so we're looking at those as motive.

COLBY: Many parishioners who have already been fingerprinted and who have submitted DNA samples are being requestioned, with results that Appleton says are taking investigators closer to solving this crime.

APPLETON: People didn't want to believe it, but they began to say: Wow, I guess we'd just better bare our souls.

COLBY: An expected autopsy report on Bondeson was not released Monday. It would have ruled his death either a suicide or murder, perhaps a clue if anyone else was involved.

APPLETON: We feel that there's a potential for more than one person to be involved. We haven't ruled that in or out. COLBY: This is a community with few secrets, except perhaps one, the one that still troubles Bondeson's friend and fellow school teacher Brenda Jepson.

BRENDA JEPSON, FRIEND: Here, everybody knows everybody else. Everyone's related or somehow interconnected. And if it were possible to know ahead of time that somebody was tormented, that somebody was feeling very unhappy, we would have known it here. And we didn't. We obviously didn't know that.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COLBY: And, Aaron, parishioners had also hoped to get more information about the autopsy on Daniel Bondeson today that would have told them if the single gunshot wound that he took to the chest was due to a suicide or a murder. As frightening as it is for them that this arsenic poisoning could take place at their church is the fact that there may also be an accomplice, someone still alive, possibly among them -- Aaron.

BROWN: Jamie, thank you -- Jamie Colby in New Sweden, Maine, tonight.

After the top of the hour, we'll take a look at tapes of the McCarthy era, 50 years old, released today -- files as well.

Also coming up on NEWSNIGHT: coaches under fire, not for their performance of their teams, their won-loss record, but for their behavior, or bad behavior, off the court.

A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, now you've probably seen the ads for those videos "Girls Gone Wild," young college students behaving badly on spring break, and no doubt regretting what they did the next morning. This story is sort of a twist on that. Call it coaches gone wild, the difference being these aren't kids who went a little too far. These are two top coaches in college athletics -- or, should we say, they were. They're supposed to be setting an example, not becoming campus embarrassments.

Here's NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Iowa State Basketball Coach Larry Eustachy resigned today from his $1-million-a- year job after photos surfaced showing him drinking with students and kissing women at a college party earlier this year. There were reports that Eustachy had partied with college students after two other recent Iowa State basketball games.

GREGORY GEOFFROY, PRESIDENT, IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY: We believe accepting his resignation will bring resolution to a very difficult issue.

NISSEN: Mike Price had a similar public fall from a notable height. As head football coach at Washington State, Price had taken his team to the Rose Bowl in January. Four months ago, he was offered a seven-year, $10 million contract to take one of the highest-profile jobs in college football, head coach of the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide.

But last month, while in Pensacola, Florida, to play in a pro-am golf tournament, Price spent a night drinking heavily in a topless bar. He ended up in his hotel room with a stripper named Destiny, who charged $1,000 worth of room service to his hotel bill by ordering one of everything off the menu. Price made a tearful public apology for what he called inappropriate behavior and asked for forgiveness.

MIKE PRICE, FOOTBALL COACH: I don't know what kind of a world it would be and how many people would be in that world if it was a world where you make one mistake and you're done.

NISSEN: University of Alabama President Robert Witt was unmoved. Price was fired.

RICHARD LAPCHICK, SPORTS AND ETHICS SPECIALIST, UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA: When a coach misbehaves and it becomes public information, that reflects on the entire institution. It's not just the coach and his football program or the athletics program. He's the representative of the University of Alabama.

NISSEN: Iowa State's Eustachy too made a remorseful public apology.

LARRY EUSTACHY, FOOTBALL COACH: I have no excuses for my behavior. I stand here sitting in front of you as I am for what I've done.

NISSEN: The coach also announced that he is an alcoholic and is undergoing treatment. Richard Lapchick, who researches sports and ethics, believes the role of alcohol in both incidents strongly influenced Alabama's and Iowa State's actions towards the coaches.

LAPCHICK: If you went to a college campus today and asked the vice president for student services what the biggest problem on a college campus is today, there would be one answer: alcohol. If the probably best-known figure on that campus is seen drinking in excess in public places, it's going to send the wrong message right across the campus.

NISSEN: The message sent at Iowa State and Alabama: Coaches are responsible for their team's record on the field and a clean record of personal behavior off it.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: As NEWSNIGHT continues -- and NEWSNIGHT does continue -- we'll spend part of the next half-hour on files that have been opened 50 years later about the investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

We'll take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Thank you. Welcome back.

We're devoting a sizable portion of the rest of the program tonight to one of the great inventors of the 20th Century, Senator Joseph McCarthy. The senator will not be remembered for creating a polio vaccine or a transistor or even coming up with a fizzy new soda.

His great accomplishment lay in perfecting the modern mass- produced lie. During a time when the country was terrified of communist subversives at home, he said he knew where to find them, and there were plenty. But he didn't really know, so he lied.

Then he turned a Senate committee that he sat on into an assembly line for building bigger lies. In went innocent people, out came traitors, much of it played out on radio and on television.

But hours and hours went on in secret as well. And today, some of the secrecy was finally lifted.

Reporting for us tonight, CNN's Jonathan Karl.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, NEWSREEL)

ANNOUNCER: In Washington, the press rushes the meeting room of the Senate Investigating Subcommittee...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JONATHAN KARL, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It has been 50 years since Senator Joe McCarthy conducted his crusade to root out communists from the highest levels of government and American society.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOSEPH MCCARTHY (R), WISCONSIN: And another Fifth Amendment communist was finally dug out of the dark recesses and exposed to public view.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KARL: But while millions watched those congressional hearings unfold, there was a side to McCarthy's inquisition the public has never seen, until now.

Three hundred and ninety-five Americans were interrogated in closed, secret hearings. They included the ordinary, the famous, and some who wore the uniform of the U.S. military.

CNN got an exclusive look at the transcripts of those secret hearings, which have been under seal for a half a century.

DAVID OSHINSKY, MCCARTHY BIOGRAPHER: What we really have never had in the past is Joe McCarthy in private, surrounded by his henchmen, running a one-man operation in which hundreds of witnesses are being interrogated.

KARL: Exercising Fifth Amendment rights in these secret hearings was risky. In one hearing, McCarthy threatened a New York City teacher who refused to answer all his questions.

(on camera): To an aide, McCarthy said, "Will you transmit this testimony to the board of education? I assume with this testimony, they will discharge this man." And then he added, "I may say, your wife's testimony is being transmitted to the board of education also. I assume she will be discharged also."

McCarthy's public hearings took place before the TV cameras on Capitol Hill, but many of his secret hearings took place deep within the recesses of this federal courthouse in New York City.

(voice-over): A man suspended from the Army Signal Corps simply because his mother had been a communist was grilled by McCarthy. "Well, did you ever ask her if she was a communist?" McCarthy demanded. "No, sir." "When you went to see her, weren't you curious? If somebody told me my mother was a communist, I'd get on the phone and say, `Mother, is this true?'"

(on camera): This courthouse storage room is exactly the kind of place McCarthy liked to bring his witnesses. No windows, unventilated, oppressively hot, a setting for intimidation. One witness had to cut short his testimony when he began to suffer an apparent nervous breakdown.

OSHINSKY: When you were in that kind of basement, I think you had the sense that you were getting the kind of going-over that you would get in the worst type of Southern police station or KGB unit in the Soviet Union. And McCarthy did kind of thrive on that type of fear.

KARL (voice-over): But some refused to be intimidated. McCarthy ordered America's premiere composer, Aaron Copland, to testify in secret session. Copland eventually was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in May 1953, Joe McCarthy accused him of being a communist agent.

McCarthy, "You have what appears to be one of the longest communist front records of anyone we have had here." Copland, "I spend my days writing symphonies, concertos, ballads. And I am not a political thinker."

Copland conceded that he had worked with lots of musicians over the years, and yes, some of them may have been communists.

(on camera): Copland said, "I had no fear of sitting down at a table with a known communist because I was so sure of my position as a loyal American." DON RITCHIE, SENATE HISTORIAN: Aaron Copland stood up to McCarthy in the executive sessions. And one of the things that becomes clear as you look through all of these hearings is, the people who stood up to McCarthy, who were articulate, who didn't bend, who didn't cower, who didn't stonewall, McCarthy didn't call on to testify in public.

KARL (voice-over): Amid the five volumes of secret transcripts, interrogations by McCarthy's staff, including his notorious sidekick, Roy Cohn, and, for several months, a 27-year-old future Democratic presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy.

It may surprise those who remember his late career, but the young Kennedy was an ardent anticommunist sympathetic to McCarthy's goals. In one hearing, Kennedy repeatedly grills a suspected communist. "You realize that you are under oath now," he says, over and over again, until Roy Cohn cuts him off, saying, "May I suggest, Mr. Chairman, that we let the witness think it all over and come back tomorrow?"

RITCHIE: Robert Kennedy quits the committee in the summer of 1953. He actually has a fistfight with Roy Cohn. It's clear that it was McCarthy that Bobby Kennedy couldn't get along with, it was Roy Cohn he couldn't get along with And they became bitter enemies for the rest of their lives.

KARL: McCarthy's downfall followed his abusive treatment of Army officers in the secret hearings.

(on camera): After Lieutenant Colonel Chester Brown refused to answer questions, McCarthy said, "I think -- may I say this -- that any man in the uniform of his country who refuses to give information to a committee of the Senate which represents the American people, that that man is not fit to wear the uniform of his country."

(voice-over): Those attacks against the military infuriated president and war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who felt that McCarthy had finally gone too far.

OSHINSKY: He was essentially humiliating men in uniform. And the more Eisenhower learned of this, the more Eisenhower understood that McCarthy simply had to be confronted.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOSEPH WELCH, ARMY LAWYER: I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KARL: Shortly before McCarthy took over as the chairman of that Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, he famously promised to fill the Leavenworth prison, federal prison, with communists.

And through these hearings, Aaron, through these transcripts, over and over again, you hear -- you see him threatening people that they may end up in jail for their not cooperating with this committee, for invoking their Fifth Amendment rights, for lying, or for their communist sympathies.

But at the end of all this, 395 witnesses in private session, more than 100 witnesses in public session, not a single person went to jail as a result of McCarthy's investigation.

BROWN: Well, Jon, take a moment and explain why -- I mean, this isn't exactly top secret classified information. Why did it take so long to come out?

KARL: Well, this was executive sessions hearings, which are normally sealed. These were private hearings done so the committee could investigate. They were kept sealed for so long because the people felt that they didn't want to have these record out in public.

This was McCarthy's -- this was -- this is everything about McCarthy. It's not only the transcripts, it's also the personal files on all 395 people that were dragged before these secret sessions. And there was a real privacy issue.

Now virtually all of the people that testified before that committee are long gone. They felt that it was possible to lift that seal and let these records out.

BROWN: And this was a decision made by whom?

KARL: This was a decision -- the Senate has a policy on sealed records that are normally released after 20 years, and they can be kept to 50 years. This is ultimately a decision that is made by the committee of jurisdiction. In this case it was the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

BROWN: Jon, thank you. It's a fascinating -- those are fascinating files to come out. It's good to have you with us. Thank you.

Says something that a man has both an era and an -ism named after him.

We're joined now in Chicago, a historian who's devoted a large part of his professional career to McCarthyism and the McCarthy era, Joe McCarthy, the man, as well, Richard Fried, professor of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago, as well as the author of "Men Against McCarthy" and "Nightmare in Red."

It's good to have you with us, sir.

RICHARD FRIED, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, CHICAGO: Nice to be here.

BROWN: Anything surprise you?

FRIED: Actually, from what I've read so far, nothing particularly. It's rehearsals for what we know, by and large, happened in public. BROWN: The point of these private hearings relative to the public hearings was what?

FRIED: There were two reasons for doing that. First of all, you wanted to know whether you had something. And you could screen out crazies. And there were a few, I think, or sheer rumor, not that that always stopped McCarthy. And secondly, it was sort of like taking a road show to Hartford. You'd try it out before you opened on Broadway.

BROWN: You know, the -- he -- or -- he in particular, Roy Cohn, certainly, are portrayed in absolutely black-and-white terms. Is that fair?

FRIED: Not in every respect. McCarthy was actually a much-loved man. People who knew him report that. He was for -- the elevator operators in the Senate Office Building, he was friendly rather than arrogant. And he was like that to lots of people. He didn't have an air about him, and people sensed that he was a small-d democrat.

BROWN: Why did it -- I don't know, they -- I can -- I think the question, professor, I want to ask is, why did it go on so long? If it was so uncomfortable for the country, so uncomfortable for the Senate, so uncomfortable for the White House, the institutions of government, why did it go on and on?

FRIED: A police action, which was actually a war, and two election cycles in which McCarthy was thought to carry heavy weight, plus the events of the cold war, some of which didn't look so good from the American point of view.

McCarthy got a lot of credit for defeating some of his opponents in the 1950 Senate elections, the same in 1952. It was thought that his issue, the issue that he'd made his, had helped Eisenhower, although, in fact, Eisenhower would have won no matter what.

So you've got that momentum. Then you've got the Korean War, which makes plausible the notion that our foreign policy is being done in by the wrong people. It takes awhile for that to ebb. And Eisenhower's ending the Korean War with an armistice in July of 1953, I think, does a lot to leach the poison out of the atmosphere.

BROWN: Did television, which was a relatively new business at the time, television play a role either in perpetuating it or ending it?

FRIED: I'm not sure it did either.

BROWN: OK.

FRIED: I think that most people got their McCarthy coverage from the daily newspaper, which has a -- in the '50s, more people are reading newspapers. Television -- it's a lot -- it's on during the day, and not everybody can watch. Not all of the hearings are covered. Even the famous Army hearings, before long, they're only being broadcast by ABC and Dumont, and there are whole stretches of the country that don't get live coverage.

BROWN: Is it...

FRIED: So...

BROWN: I'm sorry, go ahead, finish.

FRIED: Go ahead. Well, I just think that it was a kind of a second-hand sense that people got of McCarthy. And the one thing he did, his great achievement, was to make it very clear that you could be for communism or against communism, and clearly he was against it.

BROWN: Just one or two other (UNINTELLIGIBLE) quick ones. Is it -- do you agree with the notion that essentially he was a bully, and if you stood up to the bully, he'd run away?

FRIED: That's often true. He was a bully. The one thing, the one -- I would call it maybe a smoking water pistol in these hearings, is that he spent the first month of these executive sessions looking for ways to get back at his enemies.

He had a shorter enemies list than Nixon, but he was going after, for example, the chief counsel of the Tiding Subcommittee, which was the first group in 1950 to investigate his charges.

And the committee report called what McCarthy did a fraud and a hoax. And McCarthy did not forgive. So he looked for ways to implicate that lawyer by connecting him with a kind of not entirely -- not rosy-smelling influence peddler around Washington.

And the same with other people, like Senator Benton of Connecticut, who sort of took up the charge of going after McCarthy in 1951. McCarthy tried to connect him with people in the State Department who had weaknesses.

BROWN: Professor, nice to have you with us. Thank you. Professor Fried, good to talk to you.

FRIED: My pleasure.

BROWN: Thank you.

And still ahead, we'll check morning papers from around the country, and probably Chicago as well. That's tomorrow morning's papers. That's coming up next. We'll take a break first.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this traffic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this traffic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this traffic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: So why are we doing that, you ask? Because George Weill, who wrote the theme to "Gilligan's Island," died on the 2nd of May in Tarzana, California.

Here's a guy that wrote 400 songs, and he's remembered for that one. He also wrote "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Mr. Weill was 87. We note that.

Come on, bring it in. The morning papers now. A time to check morning -- this one just in, hot off the presses, doesn't get better than that, does it?

Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, have I?

"New York Times," "Bank Aide Says a Hussein Son Took $1 Billion." Seizure Occurred Just Before War Started." "In the hours before the American bombs started falling on the Iraqi capital, one of President Saddam Hussein's sons and close adviser carried off nearly a billion dollars."

So wherever he is, if he is, he's living large.

Anything else on "The Times"? Well, I'm sure there is, but no time to go through it.

OK, "The Cincinnati Inquirer," it's election day in Cincinnati, and "Tax Issues on the Ballots Today." I think there was a story in the paper last week, in this paper. They weren't expecting much of a turnout, even that.

"Iraq Regime Taking Shape," so Iraq still makes the front page. But the big story, you'll see this a lot, "Death Count Climbs After Midwest Storms." The tornadoes that wracked the middle of the country, big news in Cincinnati, and big news around the country.

This -- I can't do this if I just see these when they arrive like that. It's "The Oregonian," but I'm sure it's a fine paper today.

"Tornadoes Ravage the Midwest," "USA Today," and "Berkeley Students" -- "Berkeley Blocks Students From Nations Hit by SARS," if you're traveling, you will get that. Also reports that the New Jersey Nets won.

"The Miami Herald" has a couple of great stories, "12,000 Students in Dade," that's the county around Miami, "May Not Advance. Many Third Graders Fall Short of Florida Standards," perhaps a third, or is it a quarter? A quarter of Miami-Dade County third-graders will not pass the exams.

Down in the corner, "U.S. Blocking the Unveiling of Congress' September 11 Probe." It's been a terrible time getting the Bush administration to release all the documents that an independent commission needs.

And I guess -- do we have time? Fifteen seconds, so we can do one more.

"The San Francisco Chronicle," their big story, "Sam's Story, Walnut Creek Teen's Road From Meth." It's a very sad tale of a young man caught in the grips of a horrific addition, methamphetamines. That's "The San Francisco Chronicle," which also has a lot of other cool stories.

(UNINTELLIGIBLE) we'll take a break, and wrap it up for the night in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We end the night where we began, the story of the tornadoes and the people who will spend this week and no doubt countless more picking up the pieces of their lives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Boy, this is going to be incredible, you guys. This is going to be incredible.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have -- we're (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get ready for one of the most incredible things you've ever seen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are going to pause for just a moment to send an emergency alert.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, my God. Oh, what am I going to do?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You saved my house, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), I'm glad you're here. Oh, God.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, what a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) town.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You'll be all right.

THOMAS MAJORS, PIERCE CITY COUNCILMAN: It's the Main Street of Pierce City, and we have antique shops and, oh, the pharmacy, and the grocery store's completely gone, and just leveled all the -- pretty much took the tops off of everything.

HOLDEN: It looks like that this is the most devastating series of tornadoes we've ever had in the state of Missouri in our history.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) get out of there.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: On our doorstep!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The garage.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is clearly ground zero. Right here, a telephone pole that has snapped and fallen, and you can see the base of the telephone pole right here to my right, shards of it sticking up like toothpicks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Looked like the post office was ripped half in two. The top of the civic center was gone, most of the businesses around and across the street from the post office were demolished.

MAYOR JIM BARNES, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI: Folks are feeling pretty fortunate. Last night, after the storm, the spirits were pretty good. Today when folks see the devastation in a broader area, they're getting a little depressed, they're mostly just looking for help, and we're trying to provide that the best we can.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

BROWN: Tough way to start the week.

We'll see you again tomorrow, 10:00 Eastern time. Good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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





"Mrs. Anthrax">


Aired May 5, 2003 - 22:00   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again, everyone. Most often these days we begin the program with things about war or terrorism, perhaps a search for peace in the Middle East.
Tonight, we begin with something different from all that, a force well beyond the control of man, the tornadoes that hit the country this weekend. As one farmer in Nebraska put it, I think we got half the cornfield in the house now.

Compared to the dozens who lost their lives this weekend, he was surely one of the lucky ones.

And so, we begin the whip in a place that was hit especially hard over the weekend, Pierce City, Missouri. David Mattingly is there for us, so David a headline from you tonight.

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, in Pierce City, Missouri, there is no electricity tonight, no running water, and after a devastating tornado, no solid ideas on what the future may hold for this small town -- Aaron.

BROWN: David, thank you, back to you early tonight.

A new look at an ugly chapter of American history. Our Congressional Correspondent Jonathan Karl on that for us, so Jon a headline from you.

JONATHAN KARL, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: For 50 years the records of Joe McCarthy's closed hearings on communist subversion have been locked up at the National Archives. Today, the seal was lifted revealing a fascinating new look at one of the most dramatic political episodes of the 20th Century.

BROWN: Jon, thank you.

It was something else that had Washington buzzing today, the decline of a moralist perhaps. Bob Franken on that, Bob the headline.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Aaron, this is a charge about hypocrisy and charges about hypocrisy about hypocrisy, and a man who decided to quit after he decided, dare I say it, the cards were stacked against him. We'll torture this more in a moment.

BROWN: Thank you as well. And, a murder mystery that's consumed one small town in Maine, Jamie Colby in New Sweden, Maine with the latest on that, so Jamie a headline.

JAMIE COLBY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Aaron, parishioners at the Gustaf Adolf Church learned today from police that a fellow parishioner is considered the likely suspect in an arsenic poisoning at their church. Today they're asking themselves if they missed the signs that might have prevented this from happening -- Aaron.

BROWN: Jamie, thank you, back to you and the rest shortly.

Also coming up tonight in the hour and a half of NEWSNIGHT, Jeff Greenfield joins us, so does Joe Kline to talk about the Democratic debate over the weekend in South Carolina. We'll look at some of the issues dividing the contenders on the Democratic side.

Nic Robertson from Baghdad tonight looks at the latest to be captured among the most wanted Iraqis, the five of hearts in the Pentagon's deck of cards or, as others call her, Mrs. Anthrax.

We'll update you on the condition of Private Jessica Lynch who's ordeal may have been worse than first imagined, an ordeal that she can't fully remember, at least for now.

And, the inevitable question when you look at the sorry tales of two top coaches in college sports. What were they thinking, Beth Nissen on that tonight.

So, we have lots to do in the next 90 minutes, but we begin with the force of nature. "Worse than a nightmare," said a woman in Missouri, who tonight is mourning the loss of her grandparents. "I didn't have time to be scared" said a man from Tennessee, who hid with his three grandchildren in a closet when the storms rolled through. "When I came out" he said "I saw what happened. Then I got scared." Tonight, so do we all.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here comes the tornado. It's coming down the highway.

BROWN (voice-over): The tornadoes and violent thunderstorms that ripped through much of the middle of the country were so ferocious that dozens were left dead.

GOV. BOB HOLDEN (D), MISSOURI: It looks like that this is the most devastating series of tornadoes we've ever had in the state of Missouri in our history. We've got reported I think about 12, 13 fatalities in the state. The devastation in Pierce City here and in Stockton and other locations is just mind boggling.

BROWN: In Pierce City, Missouri, a small town in the deep southwestern corner of the state it seemed that every building in town was either destroyed or badly damaged. Many residents took shelter in the local National Guard Armory where today two bodies were discovered.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It looked like the post office was ripped half in two. The top of the Civic Center was gone. Most of the businesses around and across the street from the post office were demolished.

BROWN: To the north, severe damage as well. A series of tornadoes worked their way through an upscale section of homes not far from Kansas City. Local officials say most residents received warnings in time to seek shelter, but even for an area used to storms like these, the result was stark.

MAYOR JIM BARNES, KANSAS CITY: There's not been anything like it in this northern part of Kansas City that I can recall. This is about as bad as it's been.

BROWN: To the east in Tennessee, the city of Jackson, midway between Memphis and Nashville, saw tornadoes rip through late on Sunday. Eleven bodies were taken to the local hospital. Said one resident, "It's like downtown Baghdad."

DAN VAUGHN, MADISON COUNTY EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT OFFICE: It will be in the millions of dollars in damage and destruction. We know that we have just in one area of East Jackson 70 homes destroyed.

BROWN: Tornado damage too in Arkansas, where coincidentally the president touched down to make a previously planned speech.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Nature is awfully tough at times and the best thing we can do right now is to pray for those who have suffered.

BROWN: So many tornadoes touching down at one time, there were more than 80, is according to experts highly unusual. But what isn't unusual is the capricious nature of the weather. In Missouri, this woman's house was ruined but her mother's ceramic angels survived.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That is unbelievable that my mother's angels were not broke. God was looking out for us. He was.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: A small blessing, which only highlights the larger one, given the enormous damage in places such as Pierce City, Missouri, it is a blessing that so many people survived, a mixed blessing, but they'll take what they can get.

Here's CNN's David Mattingly.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY (voice-over): The tornado left the streets of Pierce City, Missouri littered with shattered masonry and splintered wood, buildings that had withstood a century of wear and tear broke under the ferocious winds and crumbled in 30 seconds. Among the bricks and broken glass, homes and livelihoods were also buried. A year ago, Scott and Lynette Rector started this tea room and antique shop, part of the tourism economy that keeps the town going, now a total loss.

SCOTT RECTOR, PIERCE CITY RESIDENT: Every business in town is gone, every single one.

MATTINGLY: Just two blocks away the old church the Rectors were making into their home was also severely damaged. A brick bell tower in some places more than six inches thick broke under the strain.

LYNETTE RECTOR, PIERCE CITY RESIDENT: I don't understand how the bricks just blew out of the top. The bricks are gone out of some of the top.

MATTINGLY: In fact, for blocks around, people emerge from their basements and closets stunned by the storm's destructive power, something this town had never seen before.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Honestly, I figured well it's happened before and, I mean, they've had the sirens go off before and every other tornado that's gone through here has either been south of town or north of town.

MAYOR MARK PETERS, PIERCE CITY, MISSOURI: Around the corner, there's a basement, a little alcove in there, a very sturdy thing made out of concrete and hard rock.

MATTINGLY: Mayor Mark Peters was among dozens of residents who heeded early warnings and sought shelter in the local armory, but caught directly in the storm's path. Wind sent the roof and wall of one section crashing down, killing one person inside.

PETERS: I had a look at that street and see what it looks like and decide how much you can do to prepare for something like that. I think the answer is probably not much more than we did.

MATTINGLY: And the question of what could have been done is not nearly as important to residents as what will be done now. Some buildings are so badly damaged they will probably be demolished, pieces of history lost to a deadly storm.

Missouri Governor Bob Holden surveyed the damage listening to one resident plead for the life of her town.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is horrific. How can we save this? We have to try and save it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY: And people here with so much pride in their towns pass a loss of any one of these old buildings is painful. The idea that some of them may have to be demolished tomorrow just makes this pain just go on and on for days longer than they wanted to -- Aaron. BROWN: Two quick questions. How many people live in the town roughly, and as you look through downtown how much of it's damaged, every building damaged, half of it?

MATTINGLY: We're looking at a little over 1,000 people here. The downtown area is an area of about six square blocks. About four square blocks of those are very heavily damaged but there is damage across the town here. Someone who saw these tornadoes --\ this tornado come through say that it was jumping around quite a bit, so it did quite a large path right here through the town and a lot of cleaning up to do as a result of that.

BROWN: David, thank you very much, good work today, David Mattingly.

On now to Jackson, Tennessee, the town saw minor looting overnight until the mayor declared it a state of emergency. At least 11 people died when the storm came through, adding to the unease, more tornado warnings all over the region tonight.

Here's CNN's Jason Bellini.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON BELLINI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We know houses can be replaced and lives can not, but what about dreams? Linda Barnett until last night was well on the way to fulfilling hers.

LINDA BARNETT, TORNADO VICTIM: I was going to do a bread and breakfast here but I'll have to make other plans for retirement, won't I?

BELLINI: The tornado ripped through the three layers of brick that kept this house standing firm since around the Civil War.

BARNETT: I found this sign way up the street.

BELLINI: Like other houses on Main Street, Jackson, Tennessee, the authenticity, the charm, the history of her home were unquestionable. Her hospitality, the decor, were to be exceptional.

BARNETT: Well, I was looking forward to decorating eight big rooms.

BELLINI: Her home demolished, she thinks now not of the guests, the friends she would have in her bed and breakfast, but of those lives surrounding her now. Who do you have to help you?

BARNETT: Well, since my parents died I'm sort of my myself except for John.

BELLINI: Who's John?

BARNETT: John Palmer. He lives in the white house. He's really been a friend.

JOHN PALMER, TORNADO VICTIM: We're best of friends and we'll get through it I do believe.

BARNETT: Come here, Brett (ph). Come here get your (unintelligible).

BELLINI: Insurance will pay for a new house, new bricks, new lumber. Constructing new dreams will be left to her. Why do you want to have a bed and breakfast?

BARNETT: Well, I enjoy people. I enjoy sharing and that would be a way to do that with my retirement.

BELLINI: For now, she and John can do little more than sit on John's porch and contemplate.

Jason Bellini CNN, Jackson, Tennessee.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The president promised financial aid to help with the tornado damage. The president also spent a portion of his day asking Americans to press Congress to support his tax cut plan.

We go to the White House, CNN's Senior White House Correspondent John King, John good evening.

JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good evening to you, Aaron. Today a textbook example of a president whose popularity is quite high after the war in Iraq trying to transfer that popularity as the commander-in-chief to his domestic agenda, the chief item of course his economic plan centered on tax cuts.

But the president is having a great deal of difficulty so far. Today's challenge was in the state of Arkansas, as you mentioned, a state the president carried last time when he ran. In the presidential election he's favored there next time. He's of course from neighboring Texas.

Yet, the state has two Democratic Senators who have differences, in one case significant differences with the Bush tax cut plan. The president needs some Democratic votes, of course, because several moderate Republicans have said they will not support the president's tax cut plan.

So, you see the president here being warmly welcomed. He gave a speech defending his tax cut plan. He says the economy is doing OK but it needs a boost. Yet, this president, his approval rating at 70 percent after the war in Iraq, conceded in this speech today that he needs some help.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: It's time for them to move. The debate has started in Washington, D.C. The message I hope you send is the more tax relief, the more work is going to be available for your fellow citizens. I would hope you'd call the members of your Congressional delegation to let them know what you think, let them know your opinion. Democracy can work, particularly when a lot of people get on the phone or by e- mail and just let them know what's on your mind.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, here's how the debate looks right now. The House is considering a Republican tax bill that totals $550 billion in all that would lower taxation of dividend income. The president wanted to completely eliminate that. The House plan as it is now drafted would simply lower taxation of dividends.

The Senate Finance Committee gets to work on its proposal tomorrow. It is only $350 billion total, much lower than what Mr. Bush wanted. As of tonight the chairman saying he will propose to temporarily eliminate income taxes on dividends. Again, the president wants to do that permanently.

The Bush plan initially, as proposed by the president four months ago, called for some $726 billion in tax cuts, including total elimination of taxes cuts on dividends, so it is crystal clear the president will not get all he wanted. The question is how much he can get.

Mr. Bush came back to the White House after that speech in Arkansas today. Already in the works is his speech tomorrow to an anti-tax group here in Washington. The president again trying to rally grassroots support for people to put pressure on Congress, Vice President Cheney also making some calls today, and the president will have the bipartisan leadership of Congress here on Thursday to lobby yet again.

This is a key week as both the House and the Senate put to paper their competing tax cut proposals. The president is still hoping for at least $550 billion in the end. Some believe though, Aaron, despite all his popularity after the military conflict in Iraq he's going to have to settle for something less than that.

BROWN: Has he given up on I think there are four Republicans now who have said they won't support the 550 has he given up on them?

KING: Not given up completely, the treasury secretary, the vice president, and others lobbying those Republicans. The question is they all want what they call offsets. We'll hear a lot of funny language in Washington in the days ahead.

What that means is in the Senate side if you want to go higher than $350 billion in tax cuts, you have to offset it with spending cuts somewhere else. Sounds easy enough but once you then propose a spending cut, you might lose another vote because Senator X or Y refuses to cut that program. So, it is very complicated business right now.

BROWN: John, thank you, Senior White House Correspondent John King tonight.

And, ahead on NEWSNIGHT, the capture of another member of the deck of cards and questions about whether or not she played a role in the Iraqi bioweapons program. And, a question of whether gambling to the tune of millions of dollars is a vice, not according to Bill Bennett.

From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Two developments today in the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. There's word from the Pentagon that a truck found in northern Iraq is, in fact, a mobile bioweapons laboratory. Officials say expect an announcement tomorrow from Secretary Rumsfeld.

But is this the smoking gun? There have been reports like this before. We'll see. Sources tell us the van has been scrubbed, cleaned of any biological material but they did discover, according to these reports, equipment for making germs. That's one development tonight.

The other is the surrender of a woman who may have a lot to say about vans and labs and germs. Here's CNN's Nic Robertson.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Seen here shortly before the war, Huda Ammash rallies anti-American support, standing out not just because she was younger than most in the upper echelons of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party but because she was one of the only women.

Ammash got her Master's in microbiology at the University of Texas, her Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of Missouri. But according to the former head of Iraq's bio warfare program in the 1980s, she has had no significant role in producing WMD.

DR. NISSAR AL HINDAWI, FORMER HEAD, IRAQI BIO WARFARE PROGRAM: All of her life she's been in the administrative field not in scientific and actual work.

ROBERTSON: Outside of government, Ammash helped run this medical test laboratory. Her partner there also doubts accusations she was involved in WMD.

DR. TAHA SHEBEEB: As long as I know -- as far as I know, sorry, she didn't work in anthrax at all, at all.

ROBERTSON: In her political life, 48-year-old Ammash accelerated through he ruling Ba'ath Party ranks, achieving Iraqi national command membership in August, 2001, more senior than a minister.

Some attributed her rapid rise through Ba'athism stultified ranks to her father who had been a friend of Saddam's, at his side during the 1963 Ba'athist Revolution, and laterally an ambassador until his death, rumored to be at Saddam's instigation.

Others attribute Ammash's ascension to power to her close friendship with Saddam's first wife Sajida. AL HINDAWI: She was able to play a good role in getting Sajida back in good terms to Saddam Hussein.

(on camera): And Huda Ammash it seems the coalition has landed a complex character, quite how much she knows about weapons of mass destruction though remains open to question.

Nic Robertson, CNN, Baghdad.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So, we'll ask some questions. Joining us from London, Ibrahim al-Marashi, who's a research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, good to have you with us tonight, sir.

So, which is she, is she the evil scientist in the WMD program or is she a more benevolent person?

IBRAHIM AL-MARASHI, CENTER FOR NONPROLIFERATION STUDIES: I would say that it's really hard to tell. What I can tell you is that her arrest is indicating that pieces of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction puzzle are finally coming together.

If you take that with the arrest of the minister of Iraq's military industrialization program on Friday, Abdel Tawab Mullah Huweish and her arrest together, she'll give us a better idea of how Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program developed. To say whether she's benevolent or benign that waits to be seen.

BROWN: But there's no question in your mind that there was recently such a program and that there were these weapons of mass destruction because as you know the Pentagon's had a heck of a time finding any.

AL-MARASHI: It's what really has been indicated in the last discoveries of these mobile labs, not only in the north or Iraq but in the south of Iraq that the arsenal might not necessarily exist. It's what's called the breakout capability, the infrastructure to produce these weapons overnight, to keep them mobile and so forth. It seems like the Iraqi government did make an active effort to keep this capability.

BROWN: Is it possible that these labs had other purposes or could they only have been used to make weapons of mass destruction?

AL-MURASHI: If those labs are genuine labs used for civilian purposes then I doubt he would have (unintelligible) buy these mobile labs, bring them from abroad and so on. The fact that he wanted to keep them mobile and the fact that they were buried indicates that they did have more sinister purposes.

BROWN: So, what we may have here is a government that indeed destroyed its weaponized material and kept the capability to start it again when the pressure was off?

AL-MURASHI: Exactly. What we've seen is the paperwork to keep the know-how of how to produce these weapons as well as those facilities, as well as the staff that had the technical know-how to recreate these weapons, which Huda Ammash is one of these people, would be one of these people.

BROWN: That's perhaps a more political question than is appropriate but is that going to be -- if that turns out to be the case, is that going to be persuasive to the world community, the community that had questions about the appropriateness of the war in the first place?

AL-MURASHI: I don't think so. I think what the world community is looking for is exactly that, that smoking gun. They're going to either look -- want to find Scud missiles tipped with chemical warheads, artillery shells, or aerial bombs filled with either biological or chemical weapons.

That's what the world community is looking for. But in my opinion, the actual infrastructure I think is indicative of the fact that he did have the capability of producing these weapons in the future.

BROWN: He just knew that the inspectors would find it, is that the idea, so rather than make it and get caught, he retains the ability to do it on another day?

AL-MURASHI: That's exactly it, to destroy the most obvious weapons but keep these kind of labs hidden.

BROWN: That will be a frustration for a lot of people at the Pentagon, I expect. Thank you very much, good to talk to you tonight.

AL-MURASHI: My pleasure.

BROWN: Coming up on NEWSNIGHT, we'll check out some of the day's other top stories including the latest on the Scott Peterson case, as his new lawyer vows to find the real killer of Laci Peterson.

And, from Guantanamo Bay news that some detainees some, will soon be sent back to Afghanistan.

Around the world this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: A few quick items from around the country tonight beginning with the Laci Peterson case in California. Scott Peterson appeared at a hearing today in Modesto, California.

His new lawyer, Mark Geragos, argued that the arrest and search warrant records should stay sealed, saying that certain parts could unfairly harm the defense.

Geragos said afterwards he'd not only prove that Peterson is innocent, but he would also "find out who did this to Scott's wife and son." Big move by a top university to keep SARS off its campus, UC Berkeley said it will turn away new students from China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong this summer. The decision affects several hundred students set to begin the summer term at Berkeley later this month.

The U.S. Supreme Court today decided to set new limits on telemarketers asking for money for charity. If the fundraiser lies or is misleading about where the donations go, states can take them to court. The Supreme Court decided that free speech doesn't protect telemarketers who intentionally deceive donors.

We are so pleased to have the round-up back, another sign of normalcy around here. We thought we'd throw the world round-up in as well in this segment.

So here we go, a few more stories from around the world and they begin at Guantanamo Bay, the detention center there where 13 inmates are getting out sometime in the next few days. They'll get clothing and money and a flight to Afghanistan. Then it's up to Afghan authorities what they'll do with them.

No details from the Pentagon on who they are, where they're from, or why they're being let go. There are some reports that some of the children there, 13 to 16 will be among those sent home.

Secretary of State Powell leaves for the Middle East on Friday. He's expected to meet with Israel's prime minister, the new Palestinian prime minister. He'll also stop in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and in Egypt.

And, Jay Garner, the man in charge of running Iraq says he'll have the beginnings of an interim government in place by the middle of the month. Nine Iraqis will be chosen by the Americans to take part initially, some of them exiles, some locals, Sunnis, Christians, and Shiites among them. The group would serve as a liaison between the Iraqis and the American administration which will continue to run the country.

And one of integrated South Africa's founding fathers died today. Walter Sisulu was 90 years old. He was the strategist behind the fight against apartheid but he preferred to stay in the background, leaving the spotlight to his protege Nelson Mandela.

Still to come on the program tonight the vice in the eye of the beholder, Bill Bennett and his gambling hobby, a short break first.

This is NEWSNIGHT from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: And next on NEWSNIGHT: The presidential election 18 months away, but they're debating. Jeff Greenfield joins us. And what we learned when the Democratic candidates got together over the weekend -- that and more in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: If the hypocrisy of other people is the drug of choice for cynics, the Bill Bennett story is 100 pure crack. It isn't every day that a man who made millions of dollars promoting virtue is found to have blown millions of dollars on vice, a legal vice, we have to add, which didn't move the cynics one bit. So, today, Mr. Bennett took the next step.

Here's CNN's Bob Franken.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BOB FRANKEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): "My gambling days are over," said Bill Bennett, as the author of the "Book of Virtues" embraced the virtue of reform. That was inspired by a long weekend of articles and ridicule over reports that the champion of high moral standards was a high roller who had bet millions over the last decade at Atlantic City and Las Vegas casinos.

After first contending that no one was harmed by his gambling, as opposed to the instant gratification he so roundly condemned as drug czar in his best-sellers and in his stinging condemnations of President Clinton, now Bennett was issuing a statement saying he had learned a lesson: "I have done too much gambling. And this is not an example I wish to set. Therefore, my gambling days are over."

Bennett insisted that he had complied with all laws concerning reporting wins and losses. A leading fellow conservative, Dr. James Dobson, who heads "Focus on the Family," offered his support, after saying he was disappointed to find out Bennett was dealing with what appears to be a gambling addiction.

There's always a question about who really cares about this sort of thing outside the Beltway, but, inside, it was enough to cause the twaddle to flap.

PAUL BEGALA, CO-HOST, "CROSSFIRE": Bill Bennett is a hypocrite of the first order. He has a perfect right to go and gamble. Some people think that's a sin. Others don't. But for him to stand up there and lecture us about what songs we should hear, what movies we should see, who our president should date, when he's out there losing $8 million, he's a hypocrite. He ought to be called to count for it.

ROBERT NOVAK, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Paul, you are a hypocrite, because you are moralizing when you talk about his gambling.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FRANKEN: Well, at the very least, William Bennett, in publicly admitting to seeing the error of his way, was following a rule that applies to both gambling and politics: Cut your losses -- Aaron.

BROWN: Easier to do in politics sometimes than gambling.

Thank you, Bob, very much. In case you missed the president aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln last week, you'll surely have another chance to see it, tens of thousands of chances, probably. The images will be seen again and again as the presidential campaign gets under way. Now consider the plight of those who wish to replace him a year from now. They can't match the P.R. power of the sitting president, let alone a sitting president fresh off the war.

All they can do is debate and hope someone is paying attention. We know they did the first part Saturday in South Carolina. We're not sure about the second.

Here's CNN's Jeff Greenfield.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST (voice-over): Yes, it was historically, perhaps hysterically, early for a presidential debate.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, MODERATOR: The nine Democratic candidates.

GREENFIELD: And, yes, nine candidates make for some awkwardness. But we really did learn something about Saturday night's debate. We learned a lot about the premises candidates are bringing to this contest. We learned that Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean know that a loss for either in New Hampshire, a neighboring state to both, effectively knocks the loser out, which is why things between the two got a bit testy.

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I believe that anybody who thinks that they have to prepare for the day that we're not the strongest is preparing for a day when we have serious problems.

HOWARD DEAN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: No commander in chief would ever -- and I am no exception -- willingly allow our military influence to shrink. Unilateralism is a mistake. That's what I said for it. I think the senator made a mistake in criticizing me.

KERRY: I don't need any lectures in courage from Howard Dean.

GREENFIELD: We learned that Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, instead of tacking left to burnish his liberal credentials for the Democratic primary voter, is emphasizing his centrist credentials on the electorate and national security.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D-CT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And the fact is, they're not going to choose anyone who sends a message that is other than strength on defense and homeland security.

GREENFIELD: On spending.

LIEBERMAN: We're not going to solve these problems with the kind of big-spending Democratic ideas of the past. And we can't afford them. GREENFIELD: Even on guns.

LIEBERMAN: Licensing registration, in my opinion, are bad ideas and violations of that fundamental right.

GREENFIELD: We learned that North Carolina Senator John Edwards is relying heavily on populist, "I'm for the little guy" themes. Listen to how he attacked Congressman Dick Gephardt's ambitious health plan as too pro-big business.

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I think that's taking money that people desperately need, giving it to people, the very people that we've had trouble with. To me, this is what it feels like. It feels like saying, you're in good hands with Enron.

GREENFIELD: And we learned from the series of attacks on Dick Gephardt's health plan that his rivals are concerned that plan might help to burnish Gephardt's assets as a longtime Democratic leader with strong ties to labor, assets he was happy to tout.

REP. RICHARD GEPHARDT (D-MO), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If you're looking for the fresh face and the new face, I'm probably not your candidate. If you're looking for somebody that has real experience over 27 years in the House, 13 years as Democratic leader on every domestic and foreign issue this country's faced, then I may be your candidate.

SEN. BOB GRAHAM (D-FL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I come from the electable wing of the Democratic Party.

GREENFIELD: For Senator Bob Graham of Florida, that is a major theme, the two-term former Florida governor, three-term senator from the most competitive big state in the country. Graham's resume is powerful. But in recent campaigns, resumes haven't mattered much.

AL SHARPTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We can defeat that when all of us come together.

GREENFIELD: And as for Reverend Al Sharpton, the only candidate in the race who has never won an election or held a public office, the premise is also clear: Do well in South Carolina, with its large African-American vote, and you become a real player.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: If you read the press clips, it was a good night for Senator Lieberman, not so hot for Senator Kerry. But with eight months to go before anybody casts a vote, those assessments don't mean that much. What may be significant is that this fight for the nomination may also be a fight about what the Democratic Party does or should stand for -- Aaron.

BROWN: Again.

GREENFIELD: Again.

BROWN: Again.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Joe Klein is with us, too. Mr. Klein writes a political column for "TIME" magazine. We'll talk about all of this.

Let me come back to you.

Why is everyone -- and everyone does seem to say it was a great night for Senator Lieberman. Why?

GREENFIELD: Because he stood out. A lot of people think that a centrist candidate, when he runs for the Democratic nomination, invariably has to start inching to the left. And Lieberman set down a few markers. I think he said very clearly Saturday night: I'm not doing that.

I thought the fact that he -- remember, in 2000, Bradley and Gore were fighting over how rigorously to register and license handguns. Lieberman is saying, no, no. I think that was an interesting signal. And he was pretty clear about that.

BROWN: One more question on this. Was he, in any sense, different than he was in the last campaign? Did he take positions on Saturday he hadn't taken or did he modify positions he hadn't?

GREENFIELD: Well, it's -- try night and day. When you're the No. 2 guy with the guy -- he and Al Gore had differences. And, quite rightly, Lieberman in 2000 said: Hey, I'm No. 2. Here, he's saying: I'm running for the top job and this is where I stand.

So this is really, I think, the reemergence, in bold face, of a more centrist, less liberal Lieberman.

BROWN: Everyone, Mr. Klein, seems to be waiting for John Kerry to fall down. Do you agree with that?

JOE KLEIN, COLUMNIST, "TIME": Well, he's very tall.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: Don't be so literal with me.

KLEIN: And, also, he has this reputation for being aloof. And he got off a pretty good line when he was challenged on his aloofness. He says, I'm going to disappear and go off by myself and consider that.

In fact, there were a number of good lines. Lieberman got a good one off when he was challenged for being too soft. He said to the moderator, George Stephanopoulos, "I'm going to come over there and strangle you, George."

BROWN: Well, I think that's great if you're running to be Jay Leno. I'm not sure... KLEIN: But, with Lieberman, the reason why he did well -- two reasons, actually. One is that the expectations were incredibly low. All of his previous appearances during this campaign had been kind of Milquetoasty. And he was tough. And he attacked his opponents. In fact, he was tougher in this debate than he was when he debated Dick Cheney in 2000. So that's No. 1.

And No. 2 is that he created his own piece of real estate in this race. He said: I'm going to be the most conservative Democrat on this platform. And he did it very forcefully. He did it very clearly. He spoke English. There was never a false step.

BROWN: Senator Edwards, neither of you has mentioned him. Well, you did in the piece, did in the piece.

GREENFIELD: Yes, I think this is clearly the populist theme.

BROWN: He's got a lot of money.

GREENFIELD: I'm sorry?

BROWN: He's got a lot of money.

GREENFIELD: Yes. Well, but there are populists with a lot of money.

BROWN: Yes, there are.

GREENFIELD: But: My dad came from humble origins. My mom worked in the post office. I'm for the little guy. Corporate culture is bad.

I think the question about John Edwards is -- I think he's the youngest person in the race. And the question is, does he look like he's running for student body president, rather than president of the United States? That's the stylistic question. Substantively, the question is this populism, the constant going after the corporate culture, is that going to mean much in 2004?

KLEIN: Well, it's easy to be a rich populist when you're a trial lawyer. He's a trial lawyer. Most of his money has come from trial lawyers. And what do trial lawyers do? They spend all their time suing big corporations in damage suits.

I don't know whether that will work. But I do think that it was very clever to attack Dick Gephardt's universal health care plan, his huge plan, from the left, as being a -- as soaking the poor. I think that a lot of other people in the race made some telling criticisms of that. And I think, over the next month, you're going to see some of the other Democrats come out with more modest and reasonable and plausible universal health care plans.

BROWN: All right, onto the other political story of the day. Why is there glee -- let me just say glee -- over the Bill Bennett story? GREENFIELD: Well, if the word isn't too fancy, it's really schadenfreude. It's taking delight in the misfortune of others, particularly someone who has made his millions as a virtue craft.

Bill Bennett's whole theme -- and, by the way, it's one that people have listened to and nodded about -- is that there's a link between personal behavior and the broader culture, that the pursuit of instant gratification, that the giving-in to appetites has serious social consequences. He's the creator of the index of leading social indicators, one of which is, how much compulsive gambling is there?

So, to see someone like that in the grip of -- I don't know what you call it. I'm not a shrink. But if it's not a compulsion or an addiction, it's a kind of a medication, if you've ever seen anybody even playing the nickel slots, is to say, "Aha." People do like to see preachers with feet of clay.

BROWN: But this isn't exactly Jimmy Swaggart here.

KLEIN: I'll tell you something, I'm not gleeful.

BROWN: OK.

KLEIN: I've known Bill Bennett for a long time. I like him a lot. He's a very smart guy. He has a great self-deprecating sense of humor.

And his problem is this, that -- and it's the problem of religion, which is that, when religious people talk about virtues, talk about the good things in life, the things that you should do, they're on pretty solid ground. And when he turned to talking about vice, especially Bill Clinton's vices and the vices of the American people in not being outraged about Bill Clinton's vices, he turned a corner. And that makes this day more delicious for a lot of people.

BROWN: Quickly, is he done, because I think it was Mr. Bennett who said, you're never really done in American life?

GREENFIELD: No. I don't think -- first of all, today, he kind of cut his losses and said, this was really not a good idea.

I have a feeling he may alter his approach to rhetoric. There may be a good deal more, if I may use the word, humility. But, no, I think there are second acts in American life.

BROWN: Ten seconds.

KLEIN: Blessed are the meek. I think that, if he goes that way, he'll have many more acts.

GREENFIELD: I'm still wrestling with Begala talking about the president's dates.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: I know, a conversation for another night. Thank you both. It's nice to have you both with us. Thank you.

Ahead on NEWSNIGHT, we'll update the condition of Private Jessica Lynch. What does she remember, what does she not remember about her ordeal? There are actually lots of questions about the ordeal itself.

And from Maine: the latest on the mystery of the murder in the church.

We have much more ahead on a Monday night. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: There's more mystery than fact where Private Jessica Lynch is concerned. The Iraqi doctors who treated her told a newspaper in Toronto she suffered no battlefield injuries, that her injuries all appeared to be the result of her fall from the truck she was riding in when her unit was ambushed. They also say she was well treated, very well treated in their version of events. Whether this is true or not, Private Lynch has yet to say. She remains hospitalized, out of public view, and apparently with significant holes in her memory.

Here's CNN's Patty Davis.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PATTY DAVIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It turns out Jessica Lynch may not remember much of her ordeal. Doctors say it's not uncommon to have amnesia after such a traumatic event.

Lynch was plucked out of an Iraqi hospital in a daring rescue by U.S. troops nine days after her 507th Maintenance Unit was ambushed by Iraqi troops. The private 1st class is recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., from her wounds, including a head laceration, spinal injury, two broken legs, a broken right arm and right foot.

One defense official says Lynch told her debriefers she does not remember details from the time of the ambush to the point where she was brought to the Iraqi hospital, where she was rescued. Lynch's doctors say her amnesia is not consistent and it vacillates. A spokeswoman says doctors are not concerned about amnesia, her mental and physical state. In fact, doctors say they're pleased with her progress. She's in satisfactory condition undergoing occupational and physical therapy.

The U.S. military has been hoping Lynch can shed some light on the brutality that she and her fellow soldiers in the 507th Maintenance Unit suffered at the hands of the Iraqis, nine of whom were killed in the ambush. But Lynch isn't the only eyewitness. Five others in Lynch's unit were also taken prisoner by the Iraqis and rescued by U.S. troops weeks later.

(on camera): They're back home in the U.S. They, like Lynch, could help provide crucial details to the ambush and their captivity, as well as possible Iraqi war crimes.

Patty Davis, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Sunday services were held yesterday at the Gustaf Adolph Church in New Sweden, Maine. Worshipers had coffee and pastry afterward, but that was perhaps the only normal thing about it. A look at who wasn't there yesterday can help tell the mystery of this little church in Maine: the church elder who was killed by arsenic poisoning last week and the longtime parishioner linked to the crime that's shaken the small town to its core.

Reporting for us tonight: CNN's Jamie Colby.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JERRY NELSON, FRIEND: He would help me if I needed help. He was always helping someone.

JAMIE COLBY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): That is how many of the people in New Sweden, a northern Maine town, population 621, remembered Daniel Bondeson, the man now linked to the poisoning of 16 people at the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church, who himself died Friday of a single gunshot wound at home; 53-year-old Bondeson, born in and raised here, wasn't at church a week ago when coffee tainted with arsenic was served.

Though not a regular churchgoer, he'd been to a bake sale there the day before.

LT. DENNIS APPLETON, MAINE STATE POLICE: We feel Mr. Bondeson is linked to the poisonings.

COLBY: Lieutenant Dennis Appleton, the lead investigator in the church poisoning, says he now believes Bondeson's motive may be church related.

APPLETON: We're considering motive. We know some of the dynamics of what was going on with him within that church community. And so we're looking at those as motive.

COLBY: Many parishioners who have already been fingerprinted and who have submitted DNA samples are being requestioned, with results that Appleton says are taking investigators closer to solving this crime.

APPLETON: People didn't want to believe it, but they began to say: Wow, I guess we'd just better bare our souls.

COLBY: An expected autopsy report on Bondeson was not released Monday. It would have ruled his death either a suicide or murder, perhaps a clue if anyone else was involved.

APPLETON: We feel that there's a potential for more than one person to be involved. We haven't ruled that in or out. COLBY: This is a community with few secrets, except perhaps one, the one that still troubles Bondeson's friend and fellow school teacher Brenda Jepson.

BRENDA JEPSON, FRIEND: Here, everybody knows everybody else. Everyone's related or somehow interconnected. And if it were possible to know ahead of time that somebody was tormented, that somebody was feeling very unhappy, we would have known it here. And we didn't. We obviously didn't know that.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COLBY: And, Aaron, parishioners had also hoped to get more information about the autopsy on Daniel Bondeson today that would have told them if the single gunshot wound that he took to the chest was due to a suicide or a murder. As frightening as it is for them that this arsenic poisoning could take place at their church is the fact that there may also be an accomplice, someone still alive, possibly among them -- Aaron.

BROWN: Jamie, thank you -- Jamie Colby in New Sweden, Maine, tonight.

After the top of the hour, we'll take a look at tapes of the McCarthy era, 50 years old, released today -- files as well.

Also coming up on NEWSNIGHT: coaches under fire, not for their performance of their teams, their won-loss record, but for their behavior, or bad behavior, off the court.

A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Well, now you've probably seen the ads for those videos "Girls Gone Wild," young college students behaving badly on spring break, and no doubt regretting what they did the next morning. This story is sort of a twist on that. Call it coaches gone wild, the difference being these aren't kids who went a little too far. These are two top coaches in college athletics -- or, should we say, they were. They're supposed to be setting an example, not becoming campus embarrassments.

Here's NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Iowa State Basketball Coach Larry Eustachy resigned today from his $1-million-a- year job after photos surfaced showing him drinking with students and kissing women at a college party earlier this year. There were reports that Eustachy had partied with college students after two other recent Iowa State basketball games.

GREGORY GEOFFROY, PRESIDENT, IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY: We believe accepting his resignation will bring resolution to a very difficult issue.

NISSEN: Mike Price had a similar public fall from a notable height. As head football coach at Washington State, Price had taken his team to the Rose Bowl in January. Four months ago, he was offered a seven-year, $10 million contract to take one of the highest-profile jobs in college football, head coach of the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide.

But last month, while in Pensacola, Florida, to play in a pro-am golf tournament, Price spent a night drinking heavily in a topless bar. He ended up in his hotel room with a stripper named Destiny, who charged $1,000 worth of room service to his hotel bill by ordering one of everything off the menu. Price made a tearful public apology for what he called inappropriate behavior and asked for forgiveness.

MIKE PRICE, FOOTBALL COACH: I don't know what kind of a world it would be and how many people would be in that world if it was a world where you make one mistake and you're done.

NISSEN: University of Alabama President Robert Witt was unmoved. Price was fired.

RICHARD LAPCHICK, SPORTS AND ETHICS SPECIALIST, UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA: When a coach misbehaves and it becomes public information, that reflects on the entire institution. It's not just the coach and his football program or the athletics program. He's the representative of the University of Alabama.

NISSEN: Iowa State's Eustachy too made a remorseful public apology.

LARRY EUSTACHY, FOOTBALL COACH: I have no excuses for my behavior. I stand here sitting in front of you as I am for what I've done.

NISSEN: The coach also announced that he is an alcoholic and is undergoing treatment. Richard Lapchick, who researches sports and ethics, believes the role of alcohol in both incidents strongly influenced Alabama's and Iowa State's actions towards the coaches.

LAPCHICK: If you went to a college campus today and asked the vice president for student services what the biggest problem on a college campus is today, there would be one answer: alcohol. If the probably best-known figure on that campus is seen drinking in excess in public places, it's going to send the wrong message right across the campus.

NISSEN: The message sent at Iowa State and Alabama: Coaches are responsible for their team's record on the field and a clean record of personal behavior off it.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: As NEWSNIGHT continues -- and NEWSNIGHT does continue -- we'll spend part of the next half-hour on files that have been opened 50 years later about the investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

We'll take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT from New York.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Thank you. Welcome back.

We're devoting a sizable portion of the rest of the program tonight to one of the great inventors of the 20th Century, Senator Joseph McCarthy. The senator will not be remembered for creating a polio vaccine or a transistor or even coming up with a fizzy new soda.

His great accomplishment lay in perfecting the modern mass- produced lie. During a time when the country was terrified of communist subversives at home, he said he knew where to find them, and there were plenty. But he didn't really know, so he lied.

Then he turned a Senate committee that he sat on into an assembly line for building bigger lies. In went innocent people, out came traitors, much of it played out on radio and on television.

But hours and hours went on in secret as well. And today, some of the secrecy was finally lifted.

Reporting for us tonight, CNN's Jonathan Karl.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, NEWSREEL)

ANNOUNCER: In Washington, the press rushes the meeting room of the Senate Investigating Subcommittee...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JONATHAN KARL, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It has been 50 years since Senator Joe McCarthy conducted his crusade to root out communists from the highest levels of government and American society.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOSEPH MCCARTHY (R), WISCONSIN: And another Fifth Amendment communist was finally dug out of the dark recesses and exposed to public view.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KARL: But while millions watched those congressional hearings unfold, there was a side to McCarthy's inquisition the public has never seen, until now.

Three hundred and ninety-five Americans were interrogated in closed, secret hearings. They included the ordinary, the famous, and some who wore the uniform of the U.S. military.

CNN got an exclusive look at the transcripts of those secret hearings, which have been under seal for a half a century.

DAVID OSHINSKY, MCCARTHY BIOGRAPHER: What we really have never had in the past is Joe McCarthy in private, surrounded by his henchmen, running a one-man operation in which hundreds of witnesses are being interrogated.

KARL: Exercising Fifth Amendment rights in these secret hearings was risky. In one hearing, McCarthy threatened a New York City teacher who refused to answer all his questions.

(on camera): To an aide, McCarthy said, "Will you transmit this testimony to the board of education? I assume with this testimony, they will discharge this man." And then he added, "I may say, your wife's testimony is being transmitted to the board of education also. I assume she will be discharged also."

McCarthy's public hearings took place before the TV cameras on Capitol Hill, but many of his secret hearings took place deep within the recesses of this federal courthouse in New York City.

(voice-over): A man suspended from the Army Signal Corps simply because his mother had been a communist was grilled by McCarthy. "Well, did you ever ask her if she was a communist?" McCarthy demanded. "No, sir." "When you went to see her, weren't you curious? If somebody told me my mother was a communist, I'd get on the phone and say, `Mother, is this true?'"

(on camera): This courthouse storage room is exactly the kind of place McCarthy liked to bring his witnesses. No windows, unventilated, oppressively hot, a setting for intimidation. One witness had to cut short his testimony when he began to suffer an apparent nervous breakdown.

OSHINSKY: When you were in that kind of basement, I think you had the sense that you were getting the kind of going-over that you would get in the worst type of Southern police station or KGB unit in the Soviet Union. And McCarthy did kind of thrive on that type of fear.

KARL (voice-over): But some refused to be intimidated. McCarthy ordered America's premiere composer, Aaron Copland, to testify in secret session. Copland eventually was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in May 1953, Joe McCarthy accused him of being a communist agent.

McCarthy, "You have what appears to be one of the longest communist front records of anyone we have had here." Copland, "I spend my days writing symphonies, concertos, ballads. And I am not a political thinker."

Copland conceded that he had worked with lots of musicians over the years, and yes, some of them may have been communists.

(on camera): Copland said, "I had no fear of sitting down at a table with a known communist because I was so sure of my position as a loyal American." DON RITCHIE, SENATE HISTORIAN: Aaron Copland stood up to McCarthy in the executive sessions. And one of the things that becomes clear as you look through all of these hearings is, the people who stood up to McCarthy, who were articulate, who didn't bend, who didn't cower, who didn't stonewall, McCarthy didn't call on to testify in public.

KARL (voice-over): Amid the five volumes of secret transcripts, interrogations by McCarthy's staff, including his notorious sidekick, Roy Cohn, and, for several months, a 27-year-old future Democratic presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy.

It may surprise those who remember his late career, but the young Kennedy was an ardent anticommunist sympathetic to McCarthy's goals. In one hearing, Kennedy repeatedly grills a suspected communist. "You realize that you are under oath now," he says, over and over again, until Roy Cohn cuts him off, saying, "May I suggest, Mr. Chairman, that we let the witness think it all over and come back tomorrow?"

RITCHIE: Robert Kennedy quits the committee in the summer of 1953. He actually has a fistfight with Roy Cohn. It's clear that it was McCarthy that Bobby Kennedy couldn't get along with, it was Roy Cohn he couldn't get along with And they became bitter enemies for the rest of their lives.

KARL: McCarthy's downfall followed his abusive treatment of Army officers in the secret hearings.

(on camera): After Lieutenant Colonel Chester Brown refused to answer questions, McCarthy said, "I think -- may I say this -- that any man in the uniform of his country who refuses to give information to a committee of the Senate which represents the American people, that that man is not fit to wear the uniform of his country."

(voice-over): Those attacks against the military infuriated president and war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, who felt that McCarthy had finally gone too far.

OSHINSKY: He was essentially humiliating men in uniform. And the more Eisenhower learned of this, the more Eisenhower understood that McCarthy simply had to be confronted.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOSEPH WELCH, ARMY LAWYER: I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KARL: Shortly before McCarthy took over as the chairman of that Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, he famously promised to fill the Leavenworth prison, federal prison, with communists.

And through these hearings, Aaron, through these transcripts, over and over again, you hear -- you see him threatening people that they may end up in jail for their not cooperating with this committee, for invoking their Fifth Amendment rights, for lying, or for their communist sympathies.

But at the end of all this, 395 witnesses in private session, more than 100 witnesses in public session, not a single person went to jail as a result of McCarthy's investigation.

BROWN: Well, Jon, take a moment and explain why -- I mean, this isn't exactly top secret classified information. Why did it take so long to come out?

KARL: Well, this was executive sessions hearings, which are normally sealed. These were private hearings done so the committee could investigate. They were kept sealed for so long because the people felt that they didn't want to have these record out in public.

This was McCarthy's -- this was -- this is everything about McCarthy. It's not only the transcripts, it's also the personal files on all 395 people that were dragged before these secret sessions. And there was a real privacy issue.

Now virtually all of the people that testified before that committee are long gone. They felt that it was possible to lift that seal and let these records out.

BROWN: And this was a decision made by whom?

KARL: This was a decision -- the Senate has a policy on sealed records that are normally released after 20 years, and they can be kept to 50 years. This is ultimately a decision that is made by the committee of jurisdiction. In this case it was the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

BROWN: Jon, thank you. It's a fascinating -- those are fascinating files to come out. It's good to have you with us. Thank you.

Says something that a man has both an era and an -ism named after him.

We're joined now in Chicago, a historian who's devoted a large part of his professional career to McCarthyism and the McCarthy era, Joe McCarthy, the man, as well, Richard Fried, professor of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago, as well as the author of "Men Against McCarthy" and "Nightmare in Red."

It's good to have you with us, sir.

RICHARD FRIED, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, CHICAGO: Nice to be here.

BROWN: Anything surprise you?

FRIED: Actually, from what I've read so far, nothing particularly. It's rehearsals for what we know, by and large, happened in public. BROWN: The point of these private hearings relative to the public hearings was what?

FRIED: There were two reasons for doing that. First of all, you wanted to know whether you had something. And you could screen out crazies. And there were a few, I think, or sheer rumor, not that that always stopped McCarthy. And secondly, it was sort of like taking a road show to Hartford. You'd try it out before you opened on Broadway.

BROWN: You know, the -- he -- or -- he in particular, Roy Cohn, certainly, are portrayed in absolutely black-and-white terms. Is that fair?

FRIED: Not in every respect. McCarthy was actually a much-loved man. People who knew him report that. He was for -- the elevator operators in the Senate Office Building, he was friendly rather than arrogant. And he was like that to lots of people. He didn't have an air about him, and people sensed that he was a small-d democrat.

BROWN: Why did it -- I don't know, they -- I can -- I think the question, professor, I want to ask is, why did it go on so long? If it was so uncomfortable for the country, so uncomfortable for the Senate, so uncomfortable for the White House, the institutions of government, why did it go on and on?

FRIED: A police action, which was actually a war, and two election cycles in which McCarthy was thought to carry heavy weight, plus the events of the cold war, some of which didn't look so good from the American point of view.

McCarthy got a lot of credit for defeating some of his opponents in the 1950 Senate elections, the same in 1952. It was thought that his issue, the issue that he'd made his, had helped Eisenhower, although, in fact, Eisenhower would have won no matter what.

So you've got that momentum. Then you've got the Korean War, which makes plausible the notion that our foreign policy is being done in by the wrong people. It takes awhile for that to ebb. And Eisenhower's ending the Korean War with an armistice in July of 1953, I think, does a lot to leach the poison out of the atmosphere.

BROWN: Did television, which was a relatively new business at the time, television play a role either in perpetuating it or ending it?

FRIED: I'm not sure it did either.

BROWN: OK.

FRIED: I think that most people got their McCarthy coverage from the daily newspaper, which has a -- in the '50s, more people are reading newspapers. Television -- it's a lot -- it's on during the day, and not everybody can watch. Not all of the hearings are covered. Even the famous Army hearings, before long, they're only being broadcast by ABC and Dumont, and there are whole stretches of the country that don't get live coverage.

BROWN: Is it...

FRIED: So...

BROWN: I'm sorry, go ahead, finish.

FRIED: Go ahead. Well, I just think that it was a kind of a second-hand sense that people got of McCarthy. And the one thing he did, his great achievement, was to make it very clear that you could be for communism or against communism, and clearly he was against it.

BROWN: Just one or two other (UNINTELLIGIBLE) quick ones. Is it -- do you agree with the notion that essentially he was a bully, and if you stood up to the bully, he'd run away?

FRIED: That's often true. He was a bully. The one thing, the one -- I would call it maybe a smoking water pistol in these hearings, is that he spent the first month of these executive sessions looking for ways to get back at his enemies.

He had a shorter enemies list than Nixon, but he was going after, for example, the chief counsel of the Tiding Subcommittee, which was the first group in 1950 to investigate his charges.

And the committee report called what McCarthy did a fraud and a hoax. And McCarthy did not forgive. So he looked for ways to implicate that lawyer by connecting him with a kind of not entirely -- not rosy-smelling influence peddler around Washington.

And the same with other people, like Senator Benton of Connecticut, who sort of took up the charge of going after McCarthy in 1951. McCarthy tried to connect him with people in the State Department who had weaknesses.

BROWN: Professor, nice to have you with us. Thank you. Professor Fried, good to talk to you.

FRIED: My pleasure.

BROWN: Thank you.

And still ahead, we'll check morning papers from around the country, and probably Chicago as well. That's tomorrow morning's papers. That's coming up next. We'll take a break first.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this traffic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this traffic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this traffic port aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. Five passengers...

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: So why are we doing that, you ask? Because George Weill, who wrote the theme to "Gilligan's Island," died on the 2nd of May in Tarzana, California.

Here's a guy that wrote 400 songs, and he's remembered for that one. He also wrote "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Mr. Weill was 87. We note that.

Come on, bring it in. The morning papers now. A time to check morning -- this one just in, hot off the presses, doesn't get better than that, does it?

Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, have I?

"New York Times," "Bank Aide Says a Hussein Son Took $1 Billion." Seizure Occurred Just Before War Started." "In the hours before the American bombs started falling on the Iraqi capital, one of President Saddam Hussein's sons and close adviser carried off nearly a billion dollars."

So wherever he is, if he is, he's living large.

Anything else on "The Times"? Well, I'm sure there is, but no time to go through it.

OK, "The Cincinnati Inquirer," it's election day in Cincinnati, and "Tax Issues on the Ballots Today." I think there was a story in the paper last week, in this paper. They weren't expecting much of a turnout, even that.

"Iraq Regime Taking Shape," so Iraq still makes the front page. But the big story, you'll see this a lot, "Death Count Climbs After Midwest Storms." The tornadoes that wracked the middle of the country, big news in Cincinnati, and big news around the country.

This -- I can't do this if I just see these when they arrive like that. It's "The Oregonian," but I'm sure it's a fine paper today.

"Tornadoes Ravage the Midwest," "USA Today," and "Berkeley Students" -- "Berkeley Blocks Students From Nations Hit by SARS," if you're traveling, you will get that. Also reports that the New Jersey Nets won.

"The Miami Herald" has a couple of great stories, "12,000 Students in Dade," that's the county around Miami, "May Not Advance. Many Third Graders Fall Short of Florida Standards," perhaps a third, or is it a quarter? A quarter of Miami-Dade County third-graders will not pass the exams.

Down in the corner, "U.S. Blocking the Unveiling of Congress' September 11 Probe." It's been a terrible time getting the Bush administration to release all the documents that an independent commission needs.

And I guess -- do we have time? Fifteen seconds, so we can do one more.

"The San Francisco Chronicle," their big story, "Sam's Story, Walnut Creek Teen's Road From Meth." It's a very sad tale of a young man caught in the grips of a horrific addition, methamphetamines. That's "The San Francisco Chronicle," which also has a lot of other cool stories.

(UNINTELLIGIBLE) we'll take a break, and wrap it up for the night in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We end the night where we began, the story of the tornadoes and the people who will spend this week and no doubt countless more picking up the pieces of their lives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Boy, this is going to be incredible, you guys. This is going to be incredible.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have -- we're (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get ready for one of the most incredible things you've ever seen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are going to pause for just a moment to send an emergency alert.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, my God. Oh, what am I going to do?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You saved my house, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), I'm glad you're here. Oh, God.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh, what a (UNINTELLIGIBLE) town.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You'll be all right.

THOMAS MAJORS, PIERCE CITY COUNCILMAN: It's the Main Street of Pierce City, and we have antique shops and, oh, the pharmacy, and the grocery store's completely gone, and just leveled all the -- pretty much took the tops off of everything.

HOLDEN: It looks like that this is the most devastating series of tornadoes we've ever had in the state of Missouri in our history.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) get out of there.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: On our doorstep!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The garage.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is clearly ground zero. Right here, a telephone pole that has snapped and fallen, and you can see the base of the telephone pole right here to my right, shards of it sticking up like toothpicks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Looked like the post office was ripped half in two. The top of the civic center was gone, most of the businesses around and across the street from the post office were demolished.

MAYOR JIM BARNES, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI: Folks are feeling pretty fortunate. Last night, after the storm, the spirits were pretty good. Today when folks see the devastation in a broader area, they're getting a little depressed, they're mostly just looking for help, and we're trying to provide that the best we can.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

BROWN: Tough way to start the week.

We'll see you again tomorrow, 10:00 Eastern time. Good night for all of us at NEWSNIGHT.

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