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Greenfield at Large

Is It Ever Possible to Right the Wrongs of the Past?

Aired July 18, 2001 - 22:30   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.
JEFF GREENFIELD, HOST: A suspect in a fatal bombing brought to court nearly 40 years later. A one-time radical accused in a murder plot a quarter-century old. Demands for reparations for slavery, for the Holocaust.

Is it ever possible to right the wrongs of the past? Tonight on GREENFIELD AT LARGE.

Bobby Frank Cherry, a 72-year-old who used to be in the Ku Klux Klan, will not go on trial for the 1963 bombing that killed four black girls. On Monday, he was found not competent to stand trial.

Why did the president of Poland apologize for what happened in the small town of Jedwabne 60 years ago? Because, he said, Polish citizens, not just German soldiers, participated in the massacre of some 1,600 Jews. And he apologized, he said, "in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by this crime."

These and many other cases have become part of an overall debate: how and whether we can act today to redress the sins of yesterday.

Here's CNN's Garrick Utley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARRICK UTLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): They were girls, they were black, and they died young. Died when the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by white racists in 1963. It took 14 years for the first murder conviction. It took 38 years for the second.

In May, Thomas Blanton Jr. was sentenced to four life terms after determined investigators reopened the case.

A crime of a different magnitude: the Holocaust. Justice did not end at Nuremberg with the conviction and execution of Nazi leaders. It was only last month that the final agreement was announced to pay nearly $5 billion to the surviving slave laborers forced to work in German factories.

But sometimes the past is allowed to remain the past. After communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there were few efforts to prosecute the former dictators or their accomplices.

(on camera): So how large is our appetite to obtain justice and what is that basic instinct that drives us?

(voice-over): Crimes against humanity moves us to bend laws, or at least stretch them across borders with an international tribunal to bring a Slobodan Milosevic to account.

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC, FORMER PRESIDENT OF YUGOSLAVIA: That's your problem.

UTLEY: Seeking convictions is only one path to justice. In South Africa, how do you prosecute 30 years of crimes under apartheid? Justice, it was said, would come from hearing the truth in hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The commission, which has ended its hearings, was given the power to grant amnesties and recommend financial compensation for victims of apartheid. But can the truth, no matter how powerful, be a substitute for punishment?

(on camera): Is reconciliation possible without a sense that justice has been done? Which brings us to the story of some Americans who sought justice and didn't find it.

(voice-over): In World War II, in the Pacific, 25,000 Americans taken prisoner were forced to work in Japanese factories and mines where they were beaten and starved. Two years ago, many of those companies, which still operate, were sued by some of the 6,000 surviving American slave workers, but a U.S. district court dismissed the case.

(on camera): The judge ruled that the 1951 U.S.-Japan peace treaty barred any further claims from the POWs, and said, "The immeasurable bounty of life for themselves and their posterity in a free society and in a more peaceful world services the debt."

(voice-over): Which is what American and Japanese leaders have been saying for the past half century. Is that reconciliation? Yes, but is it the justice the human spirit seeks?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: CNN's Garrick Utley.

My guests tonight know something about wrestling with the past from the perspective of the present. Ken Burns began making documentaries with "Brooklyn Bridge" some 20 years ago. His work since then includes the landmark "Civil War" series, "Baseball" and "Jazz." His "Mark Twain" documentary will be seen in January.

Writer Hampton Sides is a contributing editor from "Outside" magazine, and his new book, "Ghost Soldiers," tells the true story of the American mission to recognize -- to rescue, rather, American prisoners of war during World War II. Robert George is not only associate editorial page editor at "The New York Post," but much more important to us he's a panelist on CNN'S "TAKE 5."

A hypothetical, Ken: Let's say one of those Birmingham bombers, they had a change of heart and he'd never been caught, but for the last 38 years, he, out of remorse, been ministering to the poor, black and white alike, and he was found. Do you think we would insist on his punishment because of the nature of that deed?

KEN BURNS, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER: I think so, but I think we would measure the life that had gone in the intervening time. I think we have to remember Faulkner said this wonderful thing, which I read early in the Civil War series. He said, "History is not was, but is."

So many of the questions that we're trying to tackle today are so much bigger than our political perspective -- our dialectically predisposed perspective could deal with, that we're dealing with complicated things of human emotion confused by guilt and reconciliation, all of those things.

Yes, as long as the statute is out, absolutely, but there is mitigating circumstances.

GREENFIELD: But Robert George, it also raises this question: If Sara Jane Olson, the SLA woman who is going to apparently go on trial for this murder plot, if she built a bomb to blow up four African- American kids in Birmingham, would we feel the same way about her as some do because she spent 25 years in the underground after the Weather underground experience? In other words, do we measure this by what the deed was?

ROBERT GEORGE, "NEW YORK POST": We -- we measure it by the deed, and we measure it by the, almost the, quote, "extenuating circumstances," if you will.

It's much easier for us to say it's absolutely evil for racists to be blowing up a church. But somehow a bombing in the midst of the 1960/'70s, kind of liberal consciousness-raising and so forth, that somehow -- that somehow seems to be mitigated. And so maybe that, in addition to how she's served -- she's been a -- a good wife and mother and so forth in the intervening years somehow means that we somehow shouldn't be as harsh with her.

GREENFIELD: Do you accept that distinction?

GEORGE: I don't -- I don't accept that. I don't accept that distinction. I think -- I think we should go after those who were bombing just because they were trying to make a political statement, because ultimately the racists -- the racists in the South were also making a political statement.

GREENFIELD: But that's the point, Hampton: What is it about such long-ago deeds that -- that we feel compelled to punish? Not to apologize for, not to make restitution, not to change even society. What is it about us that says, no, we don't care if it was 50 years when you were a concentration camp guard, you've got to pay?

HAMPTON SIDES, AUTHOR, "GHOST SOLDIERS": Yeah, these things don't die, you know, within a generation, and I think the most important thing with the people that I've been interviewing in connection with the POW story in the Philippines is that yeah, they would like an apology, yeah, they would like some sort of reparations. But most importantly for them, they want acknowledgment just from the Japanese government and textbooks in Japan that this happened.

And in the popular culture of Japan today, the mistreatment of American POWs isn't even on their radar screen. I mean, they're just not aware of it.

And I think these men, the ones I've interviewed, would be willing to forego all the rest if they just get simple acknowledgment this happened.

GREENFIELD: You've anticipated where we're going. We'll take a break. When we come back later, the uniquely American dilemma: facing slavery. Later, we'll tell you about the exoneration of one man. But when we come back, I want to talk about the need for acknowledgment: that in a minute.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DESMOND TUTU, NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER: Just come out more and more strongly, is that for individuals, and also for communities and nations. Without forgiveness, there is no future.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa talking about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and what it's purpose was.

We are back with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, "The New York Post's" and CNN's "Take 5's" Robert George and "Ghost Soldiers" author Hampton Sides.

Hampton really raised this point, I thought teed it up splendidly. If the point of things like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and similar enterprises in Argentina and Chile and East Germany, not to punish, what are they trying to do, Ken?

BURNS: I think they are trying to heal the future. I mean, this is what we think when we divide these periods, we make a huge mistake. We find out who we are by finding out what happened in the past, but more importantly, by the questions we asked of the past.

But all of that is designed to figure out how we go forward, so Truth and Reconciliation, which I found so moving when I would listen to the hearings and the extended things, was a point -- almost utterly a Christian movement, where you can just begin to move forward.

It doesn't separate the issues of justice or punishment. It just says there is another angle to it, and there is an angle of reconciliation.

GREENFIELD: Hampton, your book, which, in researching the rescuing American POWs from a Japanese prison -- it also immersed you in the nature how Japan regards what it did in World War II. How --- it seems to me they have a problem acknowledging culpability, at least at some level.

SIDES: I think part of that fact has to do with the emperor himself was absolved of all crimes after the war. If the captain on the ship is not responsible for the crimes, who is? I think it threw the culture in a little bit of disarray as to how you view accountability.

If the emperor had come forward and said, I take responsibility for what happened, I think it would have been a very different situation.

GREENFIELD: But this is the same country where we have seen when an airline crashes, the head of the airline personally goes to the survivors or the victims' families and apologizes. Or they apologize to workers they have laid off. It seems that one, at the same time, it's a culture where apology comes a lot easier than it may in the West, and yet, this other kind of apology for World War II actions, which are...

SIDES: Particularly the emperor, it was a very complex institution and was a source of great debate within the American occupation, how to deal with the emperor.

But you know there was a war crimes tribunal. There were hundreds of people who were tried. Many executed. Then there was this treaty that was mentioned early in the show, 1951, that basically quit all claims. From then on, Americans were not suppose to bring the war up anymore. And we're supposed to build this democracy anew, and I think the Japanese now feel like they're being broadsided by all these American claims for apologies, for reparations, so forth and so on.

BURNS: But it still shows you this idea of reconciliation, that is exposing the truth, making the kinds of apologies often gets at the heart of the matter, much better than the attempt to mete out justice, the attempt to exact revenge, to have some sort of...

GEORGE: For example, we had a very small version of that in the United States recently. In Tulsa, actually, basically we were trying to basically getting at the root of this awful race riot that happened in the early part of the 20th century.

And a lot of truth did come out, though ultimately the politicians basically said, this is all we can do. They didn't go as far as they did in South Africa to say there should be reparations even for this specific awful incident that destroyed the black economic section of Tulsa. But at least it's a step in the right direction, in a sense to recognize a certain amount of responsibility, and as you said, to try to heal...

BURNS: Well, the Japanese dysfunction, is if you are going to be able to say I'm sorry in the present for the clear and obvious things but you can't do it across time, then where are you at? We can even see in Japanese society, the results of that constriction.

GREENFIELD: I want to put a question on the table, which is: in what sense does it makes sense for a whole country to apologize? We will get to reparations in a minute, but just on the broader issue. You know...

SIDES: Well, in this case, you know, I think it's a somewhat hollow significance, because most of the people apologizing weren't the perpetrators. It's not going to help the victims. We are talking two, three generations. It would be a symbolic thing, at the very most.

GREENFIELD: The harsher way to put it is, that it's action on the cheap, that feel-good, therapeutic thing that makes you feel -- like wearing a ribbon and...

SIDES: In a corporate situation, one of the things they want the corporations to apologize, it would -- greed might be a motivating factor if Mitsubishi wants to do business with us, well, we just apologize and get on with it. The apology itself comes laden with all sorts of complexities.

GEORGE: It's easy to go after corporations, as oppose to sue a country for actual money.

BURNS: I'm not sure it's a new-age kind of thing, where if we just apologize, I think it's part of this sense that we mislead ourselves when we think we know ourselves, and so many disparate human impulses -- one for revenge, one for reconciliation, one for forgiveness -- and all of these things play in our daily lives and our purpose here I think is to try to superimpose some sort of structure or lens, over which we can see these terrible events.

And some people need that. We know the hollowness of an apology several generations later, but something also, as you said, just to know somebody would stand up and say, you know what? This was horrible.

SIDES: It would mean a lot to these men, and even more importantly, again, is the acknowledgement. If they taught in the textbooks -- just yesterday in Korea there was a large demonstration against the new Japanese textbook, that is, doesn't mention the Korean comfort women issue. These were sex slaves basically during World War II.

Again, it's the acknowledgement that this happened that's causing greater human cry.

GREENFIELD: I'm going take a break, and Robert will pick up when we get back, because I also want to ask the question beyond acknowledgement, are there concrete steps that one can take when you're dealing with an issue as complicated and as emotionally laden as slavery?

We'll be back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: We are back with filmmaker Ken Burns, "TAKE 5's" Robert George and author Hampton Sides.

Robert, in 1988, I think it was, the U.S. government not only apologized to the Japanese-Americans who were interned (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and other camps, $20,000 for each survivor, and if that person is deceased, his spouse, children.

Is there an analogy there between that compensation and the demands that we are hearing among some for reparations for slavery?

GEORGE: Well, from a practical sense, it was easier to identify the specific -- the specific survivors, the specific individuals who are still alive from the internment camps. And in that sense, when you identify them and you can come up with some kind of a rough financial compensation, that's good.

Part of the problem that you have in the context of slavery is just the -- is just the length of time. So in that sense, I don't think -- I don't think there is a reasonable -- there is a reasonable analogy.

The other problem is -- is it's a reflection of kind of American culture. The -- American -- America being a country -- a country of immigrants, in a sense, we try not to be prisoners of our history, of the history of whatever -- whatever country we tried to, in a sense, escape from.

And so in that sense, I think the people who are Americans now, who have descendants who don't go back to the times of slavery, you know, what is their -- what is there moral guilt, if you will?

SIDES: And it opens the floodgates up to like every group who has -- feels that they've been wronged. I think that that sense of like, you know, there are so many claims that could be brought...

GREENFIELD: But you could argue that the slavery experience is unique, at least in the sense it is the one group brought here absolutely involuntarily. You know, it's not sweat shops, it's not the railroad gangs of the Chinese. It's -- it's...

GEORGE: And who also -- who also -- just from a practical sense, who gets it? I mean, I was -- for example, I was born in the West Indies, though I am, quote, "African-American" by color and so forth. But I'm not...

BURNS: There's almost -- there's almost a kind of moral, ethical statute of limitations. And what we have with the Japanese-Americans, we had a manageable, distinct situation. But African-American history is American history. It's so completely intertwined.

The man who enshrines our creed -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" -- owned 200 human beings and never saw fit in his lifetime to free them -- and set in motion, for good and for ill, in American narrative in which the separating even by blood. What is the definition of a negro?

GREENFIELD: There's one other thing I want to put on the table, which is maybe, as you think back to what South Africa when it became free, what Germany -- I think to some extent Russia is going through this -- Argentina, Chile, maybe it is a mark of a free society that is willing to raise these questions. That is you don't hear much about China today, say, or I don't know, Libya, Iraq. They don't have a whole lot of truth and reconciliation commissions. So can we take some heart from that at least?

BURNS: Two different ways -- you've got -- you've got as a symbol of a democratic society wishing to turn the spotlight back on itself and say, "Who am I?" But it's also, as I said at the very beginning, it's in essence about healing. How do you go forward?

You don't -- you're not going to go -- know where you're going unless you know where you've been.

SIDES: And yet, you know, we don't always train the spotlight on ourselves. There's an interesting thing that happened in my home town of Santa Fe, which -- I'm from New Mexico. And more people from New Mexico than from any other state were caught in the Bataan Death March. And so there's -- it's an issue that's very real and present there. But at the same time, interestingly enough, there was one of these Japanese-American interment camps in Santa Fe.

Recently, a group of people tried to erect a plaque just to say, this happened, there was a camp here. You know, well, the hue and cry could be, you know, heard around the world, and certainly around the state. They didn't want anything to do with this.

Just to acknowledge that it happened, you know, these very people who are criticizing the Japanese government for white-washing what happened in the Philippines are wanting to white-wash what happened, you know, right here in our own backyard.

GREENFIELD: So in a sense what happened to them...

(CROSSTALK)

SIDES: But you know...

GREENFIELD: What happened to them at the hands of the Japanese is affecting their attitude toward Japanese-American citizens.

SIDES: Yeah, they think we're equating these two captivity experiences or something.

GREENFIELD: Robert, I want to get you in here.

GEORGE: Well, no, no, no. It's -- it's true. When you said, you know, how do we, in a sense, how do we move on, because there are many of those who are against the idea of reparations, who feel that in a sense we -- there is a sense of dwelling too much on -- on a certain period in history and figuring -- figuring out how you can actually just move on, and if you just focus on that particular period, are you -- can you really grow up?

GREENFIELD: We've come to the end of our hour, half-hour. I want to thank my guests: "Civil War" and "Jazz" documentary maker Ken Burns, Robert George of "The New York Post" and CNN's "TAKE 5," and Hampton Sides, author of "Ghost Soldiers."

When we come back, how to admit you might have been wrong 359 years later?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: "And another thing": If justice delayed is justice denied, well, consider this case. In 1992, after years of consideration, the Vatican decided to overturn a verdict approved by a previous pope. The year of the original case? 1633. The defendant? Astronomer Galileo Galilei.

At a previous trial, Galileo had been ordered not to teach the Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The fear? The theory, if it undermined the Biblical claim that the Earth was the center of the universe, it might also undermine the church itself. But Galileo kept on teaching the theory, and in 1633, he was put on trial, convicted, sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life.

As part of his sentence, he was forced by the Roman inquisition to publicly renounce his teachings. Immediately after he renounced his beliefs about the Earth's movement, it is said that he whispered, "And yet still it does move." So it does. So must we.

I'm Jeff Greenfield. Tomorrow, Ken Auletta. "SPORTS TONIGHT" is next.

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