A Clash of Choruses

...On March 21, 1996, at the height of the crisis in the Taiwan Straits, Trie brought an envelope containing some $460,000 to Michael Cardozo, director of the President's Legal Trust Fund...

...Thus, "for crying out loud" may serve instead of "for Christ's sake...

...Let us remember that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ran for President as ex-governors...

...A year and a half of arbitration later, Brcko, policed by American troops, remains a ticking time bomb, a good candidate for the first explosion after the GIs leave...

...The will of the American people" prevailed, said Speaker Newt Gingrich...

...Furthermore, in Eastern Europe state tobacco monopolies have been sold off to transnational companies that U. S. corporations have a large stake in...

...The sense of threat from Germany has diminished, but the fear of Russia remains palpable...

...But "Wild Bill" was embarking on a fascinating venture...

...According to a TimelCNN poll, 58 per cent of respondents thought the agreement was unfair because it mostly benefits the rich...

...Simultaneous Editing When the commander of the Russian Mir space station, Vasily Tsibliyev, was told by Moscow Mission Control on live television that he was being sidelined because of heart trouble, he responded, according to his simultaneous interpreter, "For crying out loud...

...Congress has had to pass a law to require hospitals to keep mothers for 48 hours after they have given birth...

...The officials also said Russia would have to use nuclear weapons in its defense earlier rather than later, because of the sorry state of its conventional forces...

...The Polish-Americans, Hungarian-Americans and Czech-Americans who cheered him had no doubt what he meant when he talked of guarding the newfound freedom of Central and Eastern Europe...

...But who will protect the interests of the outside world as the tobacco industry plans to compensate for lost smokers at home by more aggressive marketing overseas...

...The future of Brcko, fiercely disputed by the Serbs, who invaded and "cleansed" it in 1992, and the Muslim refugees, who want to return, was left to international binding arbitration in the hope that time would heal some wounds...

...and 52 per cent thought it was unlikely to result in a balanced budget...

...When Thomas Frist, the new CEO of Columbia/ HCA, was head of the Hospital Corporation of America, he was America's highest paid executive, with $ 125 million in salary and stock options...

...Since the Administration fears the consequences of a head-on collision with Russia, it seeks to cloak the issue in a veil of euphemism...

...There is no question that health care for profit has profited some...

...AVeil of Euphemism According to an American military intelligence report leaked to the Washington Times and subsequently confirmed by the Pentagon, between March 31 and April 5 the Moscow Military District conducted an exercise simulating a nuclear first strike in response to an attack by NATO, Lithuanian and Polish forces through Belarus...

...What their criticism added up to was the following: The package passed postpones rather than hastens the day of a balanced budget, and still will require tough decisions by a future President and Congress...

...But this debate is not likely to remain in wonderland very long...

...While there, she dedicated a bridge over the Sava River that was destroyed in the 1992 fighting and has been reconstructed by the GIs...

...The Justice Department has asked the help of the Chinese government in returning him, but to no one's surprise, it is not cooperating...

...If Clinton thought there was anything inappropriate about being warned by a fund-raising friend that he was risking war with China, he did not so indicate...

...Shortly after lunch, Middleton relayed to the White House a letter from Trie addressed, "Dear President...

...Yalta, in the Crimea, is where in 1944 Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt conceded hegemony over Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin...

...Among the 100 companies amonth recently licensed, one was run by a pawnbroker, another by a taxi driver, a third by an ex-convict...

...I remember the young Russian who invited me out for a drink in Moscow to show off his English...

...troops serving with NATO to protect them...

...The President said he was glad tensions had receded since March...

...Did Charlie Trie and campaign money influence American policy...

...But she is working on it...

...During the same week Columbia/ HCA, the world's biggest health care company with about 350 hospitals and more than 550 health care offices, announced the resignation of its two top executives amid an investigation of possible fraud that soon began to produce indictments...

...American exports of tobacco products have tripled in the 20 years since cigarettes became an issue in America...

...She hasn't fully sold President Clinton on that idea...

...Whether by coincidence or not, in July the American supervisor of the Brcko area, Robert W. Farrand, encouraged Muslims driven from several contiguous villages to quietly come back to their homes...

...For a letter from a private person, this one received extraordinary treatment...

...So the decision by Republican Governor William F.Weld of Massachusetts to fight full time for confirmation as ambassador to Mexico was a considerable surprise...

...Now the arbiters are looking at suggestions from think tanks—ideas like a five- or 10-year international trusteeship, or the creation of a federal district under the central Bosnia-Herzegovina government...

...The National Security Council undertook to draft a reply, which then National Security Adviser Anthony Lake sent to Clinton as an official-looking document with Tab A, Tab B, Tab C—and a recommendation that the President sign it...

...That should give the President and Congress something to think about amid their bipartisan exultation...

...in nuclear weapons...

...But his foreign policy legacy may be facing its severest test in Bosnia...

...Penetrating the headquarters of former Bosnian President Radovan Karadzic in Pale, in the French-patrolled sector, would be far riskier...

...Trie has gone off to China and so far refused to come back and appear before the Senate committee...

...The self-appointed Beijing spokesman said the cause of the crisis was the visa given Taiwan's President Lee TengHui to come to the United States...

...In the debate on NATO expansion we are likely to hear a lot more about "echoes of Munich," which translates to "Don't let the Russians scare you...

...The President indicated his uncertainty when he said that war crimes suspects should be rounded up and NATO has the authority to apprehend them, yet stopped short of saying it would happen...

...Saving the GOP's Soul Resigning voluntarily is not much in the American tradition...

...About the same time Russian Embassy officials in Washington were telling commentators, on background, that their country should not be discounted as a superpower so long as it matches the U.S...

...There was some indication in the abortive coup against Speaker Newt Gingrich, too, that he had beaten back Rightwing young Turks rebelling against his perceived moderation...

...The New Yorker wrote that the agreement was really about spending the extra dollars flowing into Washington because of the unexpectedly strong economy...

...67 per cent thought it was arrived at for political advantage, not for the country's good...

...Newsweek, under the headline "Balancing Act," spoke of "Good theater, bad policy...

...But Washington subsidizes the promotion of U.S...

...Our embassies, under instruction from the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, have been known to lobby against foreign restrictions on American cigarettes...

...For example, when Lebed, in reply to a question, said, "Nyet," the interpreter said, "No way...

...If you ask her what Munich means today, she says it means that "International problems not dealt with early come home to America...

...In the next 40 years, the World Health Organization foresees 10 million tobacco-related deaths worldwide, 70 per cent of them in developing countries...

...The calculation on which he bases his apparently quixotic quest is interesting...

...In fact, an argument on this issue has been raging within both NATO and the Clinton Administration...

...All the more so because everything he said seemed designed to ensure that Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC) would never let him be considered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...Ask President Clinton who the enemy of the new NATO is and he says "Instability...

...No more Munichs" was a slogan that propelled America's best and brightest into Vietnam to keep the dominoes from falling to the Communists...

...She also openly criticized Serb leaders for resisting the return of Muslim refugees...

...In December 1995, during the feverish rush in Dayton to draw the territorial lines for a Bosnia peace agreement, the fate of one little patch on the map was left unresolved as too tough a nut to crack...

...In English it is one of those expressions that William Safire, the New York Times language maven, believes are sound-alike euphemisms for profanity...

...And "doggone" may substitute for "God damn...

...Whether America's ailing and aging have shared in the fruits of free market health care is another matter...

...They expect to unveil a new proposal by the end of the year...

...Neither of them was present at a Polish Embassy reception in Moscow in 1956 when Khrushchev, speaking to Western diplomats about the conflict between Communism and capitalism, bellowed, "We will bury you...

...Moscow clearly intends to make its voice heard in the debate on NATO enlargement, regardless of the Founding Act signed at the NATO Summit last May...

...Besides being an outlet for Bosnian commerce, it sits astride a corridor that connects the eastern and western parts of the Bosnian Serb Republic...

...Through most of the century, Central and Eastern Europe have faced aggression from Germany or Russia, or both...

...It questioned the deployment of U.S...

...Secretary Albright, who is fluent in Czech, gave her State Department interpreter a hard time during her visit to Prague...

...His dilemma is that he is being pressed by Congress to end the U. S. military involvement there next June...

...The second biggest hospital chain, Tenet Health Care, earlier made a multimillion-dollar settlement of fraud charges that included the billing of $7 for a Tylenol tablet...

...The Medical Code of Ethics provides that nothing should be allowed to impair the doctor's "free and complete exercise of his best medical judgment or skill...

...Learning of her Jewish antecedents and the death of her grandparents in the Holocaust has given yet another dimension to the Secretary's attitude...

...The new provisions further complicate instead of simplify the tax system, and the main beneficiaries may be tax accountants...

...They are trained to smooth out the speech of their principals...

...Had one of his smooth-as-silk interpreters been on hand, that probably would have come out as, "Our system will outlive yours...

...So, what is expanding NATO really about...

...Appeasement" almost instantly became a synonym for yielding to an aggressor and inviting further aggression...

...Wild Bill" was the headline on an editorial in the Wall Street Journal remarking on how strange it is for someone to run for ambassador by accusing the confirmation gatekeeper of "ideological extortion...

...The grand compromise on the budget between President Clinton and Congress exhibited elements of Republican moderation...

...Yet even while the President was signing the respective bills on August 5, they were being torn apart at the Heritage Foundation by a panel of economists—Stuart Butler, Robert Reischauer and Robert Shapiro—who range across the ideological spectrum...

...A Wall Street Journal editorial page headline read, "The Balanced Budget Illusion...

...During a visit to Prague at the end of a seven-country tour, she went to the Pinkas Synagogue to see the names of her relatives on the memorial wall...

...Nevertheless, Albright is frank to admit that she is conditioned more by "no more Munichs" than by no more Vietnams...

...The tax breaks are inequitably distributed, favoring the rich and to a lesser extent those with children...

...But Brandeis Professor Deborah Stone, in her study of "The Doctor As Businessman," found that managed care changes a doctor's role, rewarding him for selling fewer services...

...Schorr, here's mud down your hatch...

...But Weld is clearly running for a position higher than ambassador, namely the Presidency...

...She frequently interrupted him to say, "Not exactly," and then offered her own translation...

...Patients have a right to know that they are getting the best medical treatment," he said, '"not simply the cheapest...

...There are risks to his reputation either way...

...Moreover, in dealing with some of the world's trouble spots Albright will be more apt than her colleagues to display a muscular willingness to use American power...

...The Russians are quite proud of their mastery of idiomatic American...

...Death for Export Local Attorneys General have done a superb job of representing the interests of their states in negotiating a deal with the tobacco industry...

...Poor Panacea Before the Senate Committee on Aging, the Government Accounting Office reported on fraud and substandard care by home health companies not only hastily certified by Medicare but rarely monitored because of shrinking investigative resources...

...Like the German-bom Henry Kissinger, the Czechborn Albright came to her job with an attitude...

...President Clinton has shrugged off the idea of international regulation, saying that other countries could follow the American example...

...Today's global village demands more and more skillful simultaneous interpreters...

...The letter closed, "it was good to hear from you...

...But he knows that if he leaves Bosnia in the hands of suspected mass murderers, his Dayton Peace Accords will become little more than a footnote to a resumed war...

...It is known that Albright has been arguing with Secretary of Defense William Cohen about keeping American troops in Bosnia past next June...

...Washington is reluctant to put American lives in danger for such a venture...

...aircraft carriers in the Taiwan Straits as an interference in China's internal affairs, and warned, "it is highly possible for China to launch real war...

...Later she said, "This is a new part of my identity, adding something stronger, sadder and richer to my life...

...There were criticisms by others as well: Time magazine, under the headline "A Conspiracy of Celebration," notedhow the big issues—Medicare and Social Security—were quietly tabled...

...This past June, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Brcko, hoping to revive flagging peace efforts...

...In the "for profit" health industry it is customary to refer to diseases as "product lines...

...The plan was successfully sabotaged by Karadzic, who is determined to keep the town in Serb hands...

...The "Dear Charlie" letter, dated April 28, explained that the aircraft carriers were deployed to signal both Taiwan and Beijing that the United States was concerned about maintaining stability in the Taiwan Straits region, and was not meant as a threat to China...

...Well perhaps not, but it wasn't for lack of trying...

...Special Forces unit in Bosnia has reportedly been training for the contingency of a lightning strike to seize Karadzic and possibly General Ratko Mladic...

...Today, more American cigarettes are smoked abroad than at home...

...I have long been impressed with Russia's corps of interpreters, many of whom are graduates of Moscow's famous Foreign Languages Institute...

...Czechoslovakia became a twice-betrayed country and Albright's family twicedriven refugees...

...The miracle is not simply agreeing, it is what you agree about...

...tobacco products abroad...

...Senators John H. Chafee of Rhode Island and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, among the few Republican moderates left rn the Senate, agreed to spearhead the fight for Weld's confirmation...

...Meanwhile, without NATO's help there have been agreements to resolve ethnic border problems between Hungary and Romania, Slovakia and Hungary, Romania and Ukraine...

...He has built several defensive lines and has spotters on mountain tops...

...Raising his glass, he said, "So, Mr...

...Munich, of course, is where in 1938, when Albright was just a year old, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain and his French counterpart, Edouard Daladier, signed their "Peace In Our Time" Pact with Adolf Hitler, giving him a green light to invade Czechoslovakia...

...Millions of people in the Third World and Eastern Europe, though, are sitting ducks for Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man (Marlboro is the most popular brand abroad...

...No proof of that surfaced in the first three weeks of the hearings, scheduled to resume September 3, but buried in the transcript are indications that fund-raiser Yah Lin ("Charlie") Trie did pursue a Chinese government interest with his friend, President Bill Clinton...

...He did this by arranging for U.S...

...That attitude has to do with Munich, and it has to do with Yalta...

...NATO expansion was born with a Clinton campaign speech in Detroit last October, trolling for ethnic votes...

...In my day in Moscow, Soviet Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev's star interpreters, the American-accented Oleg Troyanovsky and the British-accented Victor Sukhadrev, had a full-time job softening his lusty barnyard epithets and sometimes menacing language...

...When General Colin L. Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, she once almost gave him apoplexy by asking what American forces were for if they were not to be used...

...One-third of the cigarettes smoked worldwide are smoked in China, most of them of Chinese manufacture, but big tobacco is out to change that...

...It is his belief, or perhaps merely surmisal, that the conservative revolution among the Republicans has about run its course and it is time to position himself for the comeback of the GOP moderates...

...Thus the U. S. provided helicopter transport but not ground troops for a recent operation in the British-patrolled sector in Western Bosnia, where one suspect was killed and another arrested...

...The drive to privatize health care has had adverse effects on patients...

...which risk he decides to take may aifect his place in history...

...Russian General Aleksandr I. Lebed, on the other hand, during a recent visit to Washington, had an interpreter who could make Lebed's Russian come out American...

...And until the issue of Russia is faced, that debate is not likely to get very far...

...Some of the more developed countries, like Britain, Israel and Taiwan, are considering their own regulations and their own suits against the tobacco industry...

...Russia will see to that...

...President Clinton has denounced managed care organizations that forbid their doctors to advise patients of needed, but costly, procedures...

...Nor does the American public seem particularly impressed...

...The same day, Trie had lunch with White House aide Mark Middleton...

...This could be the beginning of what Weld has called "a fight for the soul of the Republican Party...

...It called for a return of Muslim refugees and the rebuilding of a multiethnic community...

...This is bad timing...

...A dream come true," declared Republican Representative John R. Kasich of Ohio...

...An historic agreement," President Clinton called the scheme to balance the Federal budget and cut taxes...

...It is early to be thinking of Presidential primaries, but surveying the scene as Weld might survey it, there is no obvious Republican front-runner, and supported by New England Republicans he could surely expect to do well in New Hampshire against, say, Patrick Buchanan or even Speaker Gingrich...

...What makes it an intractable problem is its strategic position in Northeastern Bosnia on the Sava River...

...The arbitration commission, headed by former State Department Legal Adviser Robert Owen, attempted a settlement in January 1996...

...Trie cautioned Clinton that trouble with China "will affect your Administration's position, especially in this campaign year...

...Ask Secretary Albright what danger NATO faces and she will cite everything fromnuclear proliferation to letter bombs to ethnic conflict...

...At this writing there has been no decision to use these troops, and no calculated effort to capture the major indicted war crimes suspects is likely unless the President does what he fervently hates to do—jeopardize American lives...

...Albright is only the second naturalized citizen to be Secretary of State...

...When she welcomed the Czech Republic as a prospective NATO member, she said "the injustice of the Munich Pact" was being undone...

...Albright's Attitude Several of President Clinton's firstterm international successes have suffered reverses—in Cambodia, the Middle East and Haiti...

...The French are reportedly insisting on shared risks, meaning American involvement on the ground...

...He did not, however, examine the assumption that the free market is a panacea for reducing medical costs, although this has put much of our health care in profit-driven hands while shrinking the structure of regulation...

...Actually, a U.S...

...There are nervous quavers every time President Boris N. Yeltsin gets sick...

...said the Governmental Affairs Committee had evidence of a plan by high-level Chinese government officials to influence the American political process...

...They were joined on August 7 by Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana...

...Psychiatrists complain of managed care pressure to use cheap drugs rather than expensive therapy...

...No expression like "for crying out loud" exists in Russian...

...Dear Charlie' Opening the Senate hearings on campaign fund abuses last July 8, Chairman Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn...