Rick Perlstein, in Boston Review (July 2004):

...Dissenters who do call for a bolder Democratic Party—one thinks of Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future—are sometimes dismissed as throwbacks to the ’60s. Well, I can’t be dismissed as a throwback. The ’60s ended when I was less than three months old. The traumas that shaped the world view of a Teixeira, a Greenberg, a Judis were the post-’60s backfirings of left-of-center boldness. The same goes for Al From, whose formative political experience, he has told me, was McGovern’s loss in 1972. The traumas of my own political generation, conversely, were the backfirings of left-of-center timidity.

Which may be why, when I read these writers’ stories about the history of the past 25 years, I don’t know what they’re talking about.

When Al From sent out the memo to potential members announcing the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 he blamed the Democrats’ decline on “consistent pursuit of wrongheaded, losing strategies” such as Walter Mondale’s “making blatant appeals to liberal and minority interest groups in the hopes of building a winning coalition where a majority, under normal circumstances, simply does not exist.” As a historian, I looked up the record. And what I learned was that Walter Mondale’s grand strategy for his general election campaign was a promise to cut the deficit by two thirds in his first term through $92 billion of spending cuts and a tax hike. He also promised $30 billion in spending to restore some of Ronald Reagan’s cuts in social services—the money coming from other cuts elsewhere.9

Now I’m not sure what kind of strategy it would have taken to beat Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” in 1984. But deficit reduction surely was not it. Deficit reduction was also not a direct appeal to liberal and minority interest groups.

Cut to 1988 and the Dukakis campaign, the inspiration for the famous 1989 DLC monograph by William Galston and Elaine Kamarck The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency, which argued that the Democrats had degenerated into “liberal fundamentalism.” But the closer I studied the actual content of that campaign, the more I trusted the assessment of Sidney Blumenthal in his book on the 1988 election, Pledging Allegiance: “Dukakis’s very inability to offer any definition of liberalism was taken as perhaps his most encouraging trait” by Democrats that year, he writes. “It was seen as an enormous shrewdness, a form of wisdom. Dukakis’s politics of lowered expectations, his career of slashing budgets and tax cuts, made him seem a new kind of Democrat, a man of his time.”10 Thus, under the slogan “This election is not about ideology, it’s about competence,” did Dukakis, incompetently, run. I’ll buy anyone a steak dinner who can, without a trip online or to the library, come up with a single “liberal fundamentalist” program that Dukakis advocated that year.11

And what about Bill Clinton in 1992? I once interviewed a liberal political activist who explained to me that the DLC loses every election but always manages to win the battle to interpret every election. It’s an exaggeration with more than a grain of truth. “Bill Clinton would not have been able to win the election if he had not run as a New Democrat, addressing the problems of cultural breakdown, the perceived practical failures of government, and public doubts about the welfare state,” the New Democrat historian and loyalist Kenneth Baer writes. As for cultural breakdown, any American who read a newspaper in 1992 knew that Bill Clinton had tried marijuana, violated the sanctity of his marriage vows, and dodged the draft. They voted for him anyway. And anyone who heard Bill Clinton speak during the 1992 general election season knows that a constant refrain was a promise of $50 billion a year in new investments in cities and $50 billion a year in new funding for education—and, what’s more, a first hundred days to rival FDR’s, culminating in the passage of a plan to deliver health care to every American. He also, of course, made noises about his toughness on crime, his commitment to beat down government bloat, his (vague) pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” He made rhetorical flourishes about issues like school choice. But the argument that DLC talking points won him the election cannot be sustained. It would also be wrong to argue that nobody-shoots-Santa-Claus-style liberalism did it. It was Ross Perot who won the election for Clinton, taking away many votes that ordinarily would have gone to Bush. Bush, with the economy as it was, had the lowest approval rating of any president seeking reelection in history. My little mutt Buster could have beaten George H.W. Bush in 1992.

*  *  *

Revisionism might seem a knottier course as our story progresses. Wasn’t it Clinton’s turn to a paleoliberal plan for universal health care that slew the Democrats in the 1994 Congressional elections, his neoliberalism that allowed him to get, as the subtitle of Dick Morris’s memoir Behind the Oval Office puts it, “Reelected Against All Odds”?12

But isn’t it also logical to hypothesize that the Democrats lost Congress not for proposing health care, but for losing on health care?

A suggestive piece of evidence comes from Greenberg, who had his focus groups write imaginary postcards to President Bush and his Democratic opponent. The most poignant comes from a Florida swing voter, who wrote, plaintively: “Dear Democratic Nominee, What can you actually do better. What happened to the health care programs you promised us 8 years ago?”

The point is supported by an argument of the political scientist Martin Wattenberg, who has demonstrated that “registered nonvoters in 1994 were consistently more pro-Democratic than were voters on a variety of measures of partisanship.” This suggests that the real triumph of the Republicans in 1994 was not ginning up any kind of new national consensus on their issues, but in motivating their own core voters to create a temporary mirage of such a consensus. And thus, when the Republican congress tried to legislate, radically, based on this purblind “mandate,” the more massive electorate in the presidential year 1996, more reflective of the ideological predilections of registered voters as a whole, found the Republican Senate leader Bob Dole easy to reject. “Whereas the credit for Clinton’s comeback in 1996 is often given to the triangulation strategy designed by his pollster Dick Morris,” Wattenberg concludes, “these results suggest that another plausible factor was the increase in turnout from 1994 to 1996.”13

Let me clear the decks, and let me do it bluntly. There is a more elegant explanation for why the Democrats succeeded in every election of the 1990s but one. It is, simply, that the core Democratic message of economic populism appeals to people—despite, not because of, the Democrats’ retreat from that selfsame message. And that the old ’60s bugaboos no longer keep people from voting for Democrats because so many voters are too young to remember, or care....

Daniel Pipes, at his blog (June 27, 2004):

A seemingly forgotten topic – the Lauder-Nader round of negotiations between Israel and Syria in August-September 1998 – has suddenly revived, thanks to Bill Clinton's autobiography, My Life, published June 22. In it, the former president roughly confirms my investigative article of July 1999, where I wrote that Binyamin Netanyahu"agreed that Israel would … return to the 1967 lines" separating the two countries. Here is Clinton, in the context of discussing the January 2000 Syria-Israel talks in Shepherdstown, Virginia:

Before he was killed, Yitzhak Rabin had given me a commitment to withdraw from the Golan to the June 4, 1967, borders as long as Israel's concerns were satisfied. The commitment was given on the condition that I keep it"in my pocket" until it could be formally presented to Syria in the context of a complete solution.

After Yitzhak's death, Shimon Peres reaffirmed the pocket commitment, and on this basis we had sponsored talks between the Syrians and the Israelis in 1996 at Wye River. Peres wanted me to sign a security treaty with Israel if it gave up the Golan, an idea that was suggested to me later by Netanyahu and would be advanced again by [Ehud] Barak. I had told them I was willing to do it.

This vague statement ("gave up the Golan" can mean many things) has prompted several reactions in Israel.

Netanyahu himself rejected Clinton's assertion."I never agreed to withdraw from the Golan Heights in any situation or in any talks," he said in one radio interview."The negotiations were unsuccessful because I insisted that the final international border be located miles eastward of the current border." In another radio interview, he repeated this with a few more details:"In no situation did I agree to leave the Golan. That's what caused the break-up of the negotiations. … I agreed only to make concessions in the Golan - concessions that were defined as setting the border ‘kilometers' from the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) - or, to be exact, ‘miles.' That's what we wrote there."

Ehud Barak, Netanyahu's successor, also rejected Clinton's account:"Netanyahu did not speak of returning to the international border line, rather a line that would leave a strip up to two miles wide."

Uri Saguy, Barak's chief Syria negotiator, in contrast, confirms that Netanyahu agreed to withdraw to the June 4, 1967 lines, i.e., to the water line of the Sea of Galilee. Saguy says that when he took on the task of coordinating negotiations with Syria, he read up on previous negotiations under four governments – those of Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak.

Anyone with eyes in his head, not to mention the Syrians, could have understood that all of the Israeli leaders were willing to leave all of the Golan Heights if satisfied in the realms of security, water, normalization, and also regarding a settlement in Lebanon."

By reading these documents, I learned that if I were a Syrian, I would understand from the proposal brought by [negotiator for Israel, Ronald] Lauder that if Israel can be satisfied regarding all of the abovementioned points, it would be willing to withdraw to the June 4, 1967, lines.

Comment: I outlined the two sides of this dispute in my July 1999 article and by all measures, they are still very much locked in place. (June 27, 2004)

July 9, 2004 update: Dennis Ross' memoir, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (Farrar Straus Giroux) has just reached me, and he confirms on pp. 527-28 that Netanyahu had promised to return to the June 4 lines. Specifically, he tells about Bill Clinton in September 1999 receiving from Ronald Lauder"an eight-point paper which he claimed included the final points that had been agreed upon by both sides in 1998" and it indicated an agreement by Netanyahu for a"withdrawal to a commonly agreed border based on the June 4, 1967 lines." Ross notes with irony that this"meant that Barak's position on peace with Syria was less forthcoming than Netanyahu's."

What does it feel like to stand naked on a chair with a hood over your head and electrodes attached to your body? And, just as important, what is the point?

To the first of these questions, history provides no answer. Jacobo Timerman, an Argentine newspaper editor imprisoned and tortured in 1977 because the regime suspected an international Jewish plot to take over the country, recalled in his memoir that even though he had grown up on stories of Nazi camps and Soviet prisons, he could not begin to guess how it felt."I knew nothing," he writes."And it's impossible to convey what I know now."

Timerman is not the only one who will not let the historian inside that experience. Many have described it as"intimate" - the brutal, frightening intimacy that one associates with rape. It is an intimacy not so much between torturer and tortured as it is within the mind of the victim, something one cannot begin to explain to others.

Timerman's fellow prisoners rarely mentioned their own torture, except"via a random remark that didn't seem of consummate interest to anyone." Both intimate and painful, the experience became a grotesque part of everyday life."Sometimes," he recalled,"on hearing the howls that rose from the basement, a prisoner might say, as if in passing, 'They're giving someone the machine."'

There are two kinds of torture, broadly speaking: torture that appears to have no purpose beyond the sadistic, and torture in which the state or other authority tries to extract information.

But the events at Abu Ghraib show there's a fine line between the two. The American soldiers guarding suspected sympathizers of Saddam Hussein or insurgent guerillas may have believed they were"softening up" prisoners to yield more information. They may also have believed they were doing so on orders from commanders who, removed from the action, were presumably interested only in information, not in sadistic pleasure. But it seems that one fosters the other: A climate of brutal interrogation makes prisoners fair game for a kick from a passing guard and the myriad little punishments of one's cellmates....

Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton, the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton's funeral, while Burr (rightly or wrongly) was branded an assassin and fled south in anticipation of indictments in New York and New Jersey. To the horror of Hamilton's admirers, the vice president, now a fugitive from justice, officiated at an impeachment trial in the Senate of a Supreme Court justice.

At first glance, the storied Hamilton-Burr duel seems an aberrant, if fascinating, episode in early American history. We prefer to savor the glorious deeds of the Revolution or the resonant words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But the truth is that the 1790's and early 1800's were a period of glittering political malice and fierce personal attacks. If political debate had an incomparable philosophic richness, it was no less rabidly partisan than today — and even more bruising. Our modern tabloid press seems almost tame by comparison. There was no pretense of journalistic objectivity and editors flayed politicians with impunity. Under classical pseudonyms, political operatives gleefully murdered reputations — Washington was blasted as a would-be king, Jefferson as a zealous atheist — leaving the founders somewhat scarred and embittered men.

Such invective was perhaps inevitable after a prolonged revolution. Many politicians had honed their skills in attacks on the British and were masters at wielding words as weapons. The intensity of Tory-Whig clashes before the Revolution spilled over into equally nasty quarrels between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians afterward. Both sides saw themselves as custodians of the Revolution, lending a special venom to their feuds. Amid fears that the democratic experiment would be wrecked by civil war, foreign intrigue or invasion, political discourse was darkly tinged with paranoia.

Perhaps no other founder absorbed such virulent abuse as Alexander Hamilton. Starting out as an illegitimate, orphaned teenage clerk in the Caribbean, he might have seemed headed for obscurity. Then the local merchants on St. Croix, recognizing his outsized talents, paid to educate him at King's College (later Columbia) in Lower Manhattan. After serving as captain of an artillery company, this wunderkind rose miraculously to become aide-de-camp to George Washington, a battlefield hero at Yorktown, a postwar congressman, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, the guiding light of the Federalist Papers, and, when he was 34, the first Treasury secretary.

In this last role, he oversaw a department larger than the rest of the government combined, leaving behind a staggering legacy. He restored public credit in a nation bankrupted by war debt, devised the first tax, budget and accounting systems, installed the customs service and Coast Guard, and conceived the first central bank. At the same time, as chief explicator of the new Constitution — he composed 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers — he transformed the new charter from dead parchment to startling life.

Yet Hamilton was shadowed by merciless slander. Early on, he was reviled as a foreigner, a bastard, a mulatto (no solid evidence here), a cocky upstart and an adulterer. (This last charge would prove all too true when his trysts with Maria Reynolds while Treasury secretary were exposed.) But these slurs were mere curtain-raisers to a shameless campaign of character assassination that only mounted in fury as he put his Treasury programs into place. He was accused of plotting to bring back the British monarchy, of harboring a secret London bank account paid for by the British crown, of improperly speculating in Treasury securities. Not a syllable of this folderol was true, but it was regurgitated hundreds of times....

The fact that the New Yorker now has more subscribers in California than in New York is just one more indicator of the growing similarities between two cities that were once considered the extremes of American culture — New York City and Los Angeles. This is not good news for either L.A., the vanguard of American social change, or NYC, the vaunted engine of American culture. Rather, it reflects a creeping blandness in American life, fueled by the culture's endless packaging and sale of all that is unique.

New York and L.A. were once charged elements sparking creativity from coast to coast. But the distance between these opposing cities has collapsed under the weight of a culture consisting mainly of marketing messages. L.A. and New York have folded together like advertisements facing one another in a glossy magazine, and we have created a new entity, smeared with media ink — New Angeles.

At the moment, Los Angeles seems deeply alluring to the very New Yorkers who once dismissed it. Donald Trump, the latest New York robber baron, has made clear his intention of becoming involved in L.A. real estate development. East Coast architecture mavens have deified Frank Gehry for his contorted curves and have adopted Palm Springs as their shrine to mid-century Modernism. But California culture is being packaged by entrepreneurs, fed through the media machine and sold to an utterly conquered New York. In the triumph of the raw-food movement, cream sauces have disappeared along with New York culinary institutions like La Cote Basque. Mat-toting yoga students with sun-kissed complexions now stride imperiously down Avenue C past former shooting galleries. The new seats of power are in the Gehry-designed Conde Nast cafeteria and Miramax offices rather than at Le Cirque. New York is riveted by its sudden realization that the Old Guard has fallen under the Jimmy Choo-shod hoofs of a thousand Paris Hiltons.

For our part, Angelenos are currently charmed by images of East Coast cities like New York. We wander through the manufactured cityscapes of malls like the Grove or City Walk imagining that we are in Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side. We stroll past Disney-issue dancing fountains and street vendors on our way to the"neighborhood" movie theater. We pop into quaint local shops like the Gap or Barnes & Noble for a little browsing. Ah — city life.

In the past, L.A. routinely thumbed its nose at what urbanist Jane Jacobs called" contact" — the casual daily interactions of people of different classes mixing together in an urban environment. There was a certain power in refusing what was so clearly presented as a superior lifestyle.

Now we seek the comfort of contact but recoil from the reality of what it would mean to really come together as a city. We like our contact to be controlled in a way that it never could be in a city as densely populated as New York. The Westside remains largely inaccessible by public transportation and guarded by rows of towering hedges. We were at least more honest when we stayed in our cars, emerging only in parking garages or behind gates rather than trying to simulate traditional city life....

Los Angeles County's recent decision to remove a tiny cross from its seal has inspired an enormous protest from the region's evangelical community and its conservative allies.

The issue seems likely to embroil the county in a storm of lawsuits and lead perhaps to a divisive ballot measure during the next few months. Yet the whole battle smacks of a kind of amnesia about the roots of urban places.

Contemporary discussions of urban issues revolve around many things, from high-technology development to racial and sexual politics, but rarely mention the role of religion — churches, synagogues and mosques, and indeed, moral order — in city life. That's the postmodern, secular American approach, but it surely would have seemed odd to our urban predecessors for whom the linkage between the city and worship was utterly obvious.

The earliest cities of Mesopotamia, for example, were themselves largely directed by priests, who established coherent rules for the community. The temple, erected at the center of the town, was almost invariably the largest and most inspiring building.

This pattern can be seen virtually everywhere, from the cities of Mesoamerica and Peru to China and India. Babylon, the greatest metropolis of Mesopotamia, derived its name from Babi-ilani, or"the gate of the gods," the place from which the divinities were believed to have descended to Earth. Inca urban society rested on the belief that their rulers were gods and that their capital, Cuzco, constituted"the navel of the world."

The religious role in urban history goes well beyond architecture. City life, in contrast to nomadic or rural village life, has always depended on a community's ability to establish a common moral order among strangers from outside the family or clan.

In the earliest cities, priests, or kings who derived their authority from the gods, were the ones who devised the codes that kept increasingly complex societies operating in what we might call a civilized manner....

MILES O'BRIEN, ANCHOR: John Kerry's choice of John Edwards as his running mate is no big surprise. To many, Edwards is generally considered one of the most skilled campaigners in the Democratic field. But can he help cinch the deal for Kerry, and what are the historical precedents in all of this?

Douglas Brinkley is a presidential historian, director of the Eisenhower Center in New Orleans.

Professor Brinkley, good to have you back with us.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, EISENHOWER CENTER: Thank you for having me.

O'BRIEN: All right, first of all, first take on this one, will history treat this decision well?

BRINKLEY: Well, only time will tell, but certainly it makes a whole lot of sense. John Edwards is this year's flavor. Starting in February, he really picked up steam. He became sort of the number two Democratic behind John Edwards. He comes from a different geographic region. He's from the South, as you've been talking about. He's Baptist, Kerry's Catholic, there's a big age difference, but it makes for a pretty good combination.

So I think most core Democrats in the country are probably pleased with John Edwards as being the nominee.

O'BRIEN: Well, on a sultry summer day, we make a lot of these kinds of things, and people in the political class love talking about it, but I always hearken back to what John Nance Garner said about the office -- about equivalent to a warm pitcher of spit, or something like that. That might be cleaned up a little bit.

The point is, though, have times changed, and maybe perhaps has Dick Cheney, Al Gore -- have they changed the vice presidency such that these choices really matter to voters?

BRINKLEY: Well, John Nance Garner was one of the many vice presidents Franklin Roosevelt had. He used to change them every four years. So, as Garner said, sometimes the V.P. is like the spare tire in the automobile of government. He felt like a loose wheel.

In our modern culture, though, more and more the vice president's had I think a more essential role. It really began with Jimmy Carter bringing Walter Mondale into more, and you've seen every president since Carter having the vice president, I think, growing in stature, to the point now where some people feel that Dick Cheney is almost a prime minister, or running the office chief of staff in addition to being V.P.

And then when one looks at history, look how many great men become president by being vice president, meaning -- Theodore Roosevelt was simply McKinley's vice president. He came in under that assassination. And you had FDR dying and Truman coming in, or John F. Kennedy being shot and Johnson coming in. So it's clearly the quickest stepping stone to the White House.

O'BRIEN: A heartbeat way, as they say. Let's talk about -- you mentioned Jimmy Carter. Of course, in '76, he ran against Gerald Ford. The ticket was Ford and Dole, but perhaps we've all forgotten about a previous iteration of vice presidential Republican running mates for Ford.

BRINKLEY: Well, you know, Nelson Rockefeller was the V.P., and Ford dumped him in favor of Dole, and it turned out to be a terrible mistake. Because Daddy King, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s father was so powerful in the black community that he was going to stick with Rockefeller, because Rockefeller's money had been supporting all the black colleges, particularly the ones in Georgia.

And suddenly, when Rockefeller got dumped and Dole was on the ticket, Daddy King and a lot of black leaders said, you know what, we're going to back this one-term Georgia governor. And Carter had run as a redneck conservative in the South, wasn't trusted by the black community, but they trusted him more than they did with Bob Dole being added to the ticket. And, hence, it really solidified Carter's ability to be a Southerner that was carrying the black vote.

O'BRIEN: So, did Gerald Ford -- did this escape the Ford operation? Did they not see the significance of that move, perhaps? I mean, really, you could make a case the election might have turned right on that decision.

BRINKLEY: I think so. I'm writing a little book with the"New York Times" on Gerald Ford, and it's a very key moment. Gerald Ford himself would tell you that there's -- if he would have kept Rockefeller, he probably could have won. The selection of Dole turned out to be a disaster for him for this very reason.

You have to get into the racial politics of 1976 and what Carter's record had been up until that time, and understand that the Rockefeller family had been liberal Republicans from the Northeast who had been very, very generous to the civil rights movement.

O'BRIEN: All right. Final thought on, perhaps, vice presidents who have hurt the top of the ticket. Would you go along with the theory that Dan Quayle hurt the senior Bush?

BRINKLEY: There's absolutely on question about it. Dan Quayle was a disaster. Everybody, now, looking back at that election, realizes Quayle should have been dumped. He had become, whether rightfully or wrongfully, a public joke. He was fodder of comedians. Nobody took him serious. People didn't feel that he was a -- that could effectively be a commander in chief.

He has grown in stature, Dan Quayle, since back then, but he was fumbling so often that his name became synonymous with buffoonery. And the loyalty that President Bush showed to Quayle was really almost unimagined, and I think it cost him the presidency.

O'BRIEN: But people in America appreciate loyalty, don't they?

BRINKLEY: That's a line you've got to draw, and it's one that I think this president's clear that he's sticking with Dick Cheney at least right now, and loyalty is speaking very loudly, but there are many Republicans that'll tell you that he'd be better off with a Giuliani or a McCain or a Powell or a Rice or somebody who would be a more centrist candidate and bring the compassion back into Bush's conservatism....

Last month, Jarek Mensfelt, spokesman for the Auschwitz memorial site, announced plans to preserve the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria in the notorious death camp at Birkenau near the Polish town of Oswiecim."This is an attempt to keep it as it is now -- in ruins -- but not let the ruins go," he said."It was meant to be here forever as a warning."

In the coming weeks, as the Auschwitz preservationists begin their work, they should be guided by the knowledge that these heaps of dynamited concrete and twisted steel are not only historic artifacts but among the few remnants of untainted, forensic evidence of the Holocaust.

Of course, the historical and circumstantial evidence of a premeditated Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe is overwhelming. There are the watch-tower-girded enclosures of Nazi concentration camps and the extensive testimonials of Holocaust survivors, as well as the court protocols of Nazi war criminals, but there is little forensic evidence proving homicidal intent. The Nazis were scrupulous when it came to obscuring the"Final Solution" in bureaucratic euphemism and also dismantling or obliterating their machinery of death. The dearth of hard evidence has fueled a growth industry in Holocaust-denial.

The revisionists' plaint is simple: They demand a proverbial"smoking gun" to prove that the Nazis deliberately and systematically designed an industrial system of extermination. They do not deny that millions of European Jews died from malnutrition, exhaustion and disease. They do not even deny that Zyklon B gas was employed at Auschwitz, but they claim it was used for delousing rather than homicidal purposes. One French critic has denounced them as"assassins de la memoire" -- murderers of memory.

Auschwitz has been a particular target of Holocaust deniers -- in particular, the gas chamber in Auschwitz I, the original base camp a mile east of Birkenau. It was here that some of the first experiments with poison gas were undertaken in a converted air-raid shelter refitted with air-tight doors and special ducts for homicidal purposes. Dynamited by the Nazis in the autumn of 1944, the gas chamber was reconstructed after the war. As one revisionist notes:"The official view holds that the Soviets and Poles created a 'gas chamber' in an air-raid shelter that had been a 'gas chamber.' The revisionist view holds that Soviets and Poles created a 'gas chamber' in an air-raid shelter that had been an air-raid shelter."

While most serious historians refuse to dignify such statements with a response, Polish administrators have taken the bait. In response to revisionist charges, they tested the gas chamber walls for residual traces of cyanide gas but found none. Unlike the delousing chambers, whose walls still show cyanide"staining," the gas chambers betrayed no residual traces of Zyklon B. The homicidal process was so murderously brief that the cyanide never penetrated the interior surface. Similarly, it was found that repeated postwar" cleaning" had leached the last traces of cyanide from the heaps of human hair, one of the most damning pieces of Holocaust evidence.

Four years ago, this evidence was used by the revisionist David Irving in his libel suit against Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt. Though the judge handed down an unequivocal verdict against Mr. Irving, the Holocaust deniers remain undeterred."While the judgment in the Irving-Lipstadt trial is certainly a heavy blow for Irving personally," a leading revisionist publication observed,"it is only a temporary setback for the ultimately unstoppable march of revisionist scholarship."

In the battle against Holocaust deniers, Birkenau's extermination facilities remain important forensic evidence....

ANCHOR: GABE PRESSMAN

BODY: GABE PRESSMAN, host:

It's the 228th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a day to celebrate the beginning of our nation and the succession of great leaders who've led this country through the generations, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the declaration, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Our guests on this Fourth of July are two Lincoln scholars, former Governor Mario Cuomo, who's written a book called"Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever," and Harold Holzer, the author of 23 books on Lincoln, including his latest,"Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President." How would Lincoln, a brilliant orator, look at today's America?

Announcer: From Studio 6B in Rockefeller Center, this is a presentation from Newschannel 4, Gabe Pressman's NEWS FORUM. Now your host, senior correspondent Gabe Pressman.

PRESSMAN: Good morning and welcome, Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer. How do you think Lincoln, whose debates with Douglas became legendary, would look at the presidential election campaign of 2004? Do you think, for example, that he'd appreciate the 30-second or 13-second soundbites?

Former Governor MARIO CUOMO (Author,"Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever"): The--first, let me clarify your credits. You--you said the--two Lincoln scholars. I would say that Harold Holzer is a true Lincoln scholar. I wouldn't put myself in that category, although I know an awful lot about Lincoln and have read him for longer than Harold has because I'm considerably older. But I think Lincoln would be very uncomfortable with today's politics and I can--I can't imagine any politician doing what Lincoln did at Cooper Union which--which Harold's book, you know, describes so beautifully.

The--that speech, Harold will argue and many of the real scholars will argue, made Lincoln. But it made him by demonstrating his extraordinary in--intelligence, his subtlety, his personal command of ideas and words. It was a--a tour de force by an individual.

PRESSMAN: How long were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the average debate?

Mr. HAROLD HOLZER (Author,"Lincoln at Cooper Union"): Each one was three hours.

PRESSMAN: Right.

Mr. HOLZER: A 60-minute opening statement and then a 90-minute rebuttal and then a 30-minute re-rebuttal.

PRESSMAN: So how do you think he'd look at 13-second l--TV commercials?

Mr. HOLZER: Well, you know, i--the governor's right about the candidates being able to hold attention for that long, but there was also a different political culture in operation. And one in which people really demanded that candidates and leaders exhausted themselves and challenged them with rhetoric. People came to political events expecting to be entertained, informed, enlightened, convinced. They were prepared to spend a couple of hours of their day listening to politicians.

PRESSMAN: Is it less of a thinking culture today?

Mr. CUOMO: I don't think there's any question about that. I--I don't think in these upcoming conventions you're going to see any really long speeches. I remember a convention or so ago, the Republicans announcing their speeches would all be no longer than 15 minutes, I think. But what was the point of that? And they said, 'Well, people don't pay attention beyond that.' Now I...

PRESSMAN: How long was your famous speech in 1984?

Mr. CUOMO: Oh, much longer than that. It was 45, 46, 47 minutes at least, I guess, maybe. And there were an awful lot of--excuse me--interruptions so--well, it was closer to an hour probably.

PRESSMAN: Interruptions? There were cheers.

Mr. CUOMO: Well, it was closer--I think it was closer to--to an hour, but I--I don't remember. Then, of course, President Clinton, then--then Governor Clinton, gave a speech in '88 that was just as long.

PRESSMAN: It was...

Mr. CUOMO: It didn't go as well, but...

PRESSMAN: It was--it was ponderous.

Mr. CUOMO: Well, yeah. But at least--but the--but the difference was you could get away with long speeches in those years. I don't think you can do it now. I--I wish John Kerry would have--as a Democrat, I wish he'd have an hour to get up and--and describe exactly what he's all about. But I think the assumption is people wouldn't pay attention to that long.

PRESSMAN: Isn't it a fact, though, that 'letters of faith,' that 'right makes might,' those words by Lincoln s--said here in New York at Cooper Union in 1860, that that was a pretty concise summary of his feelings and--and his policy?

Mr. HOLZER: It was--it was concise, but it came at the end of 90 minutes of very careful legal and historical justification for the federal authority exercising its right to stop the spread of slavery. It came at the end of a--of sort of a--an imagined dialogue with the South in which he chastises them for anything they might do in the future to threaten the sanctity of the union and the idea that the country was based on the aspiration for human freedom....