PROGRAM GUEST

SUSAN BUTCHER
Susan Butcher admits she hasn't paid much attention to the Winter Olympics. "Actually not," she said by phone from Fairbanks, Alaska. "We don't have any TV out there."

"Out there" is Eureka, a village northwest of Fairbanks near the Yukon River where there not only is no television but no phone and no freeways. No foolin'. Out there, the Winter Olympics seem a bit tame. Butcher, 33, does her thing without flags or fanfare and does it better than anyone else on earth. She never wanted to figure skate in a frilly costume the size of a snowflake or ride a luge in a plastic leotard.

All she ever wanted to be was the world's top sled dog musher, and she is - certainly a woman apart from her peers, male and female. After winning the Iditarod race from Anchorage to Nome the last two years, Butcher's place in the pantheon of mushing is assured. She'll try for three in a row, starting March 5. Butcher, who raced in her first Iditarod in 1978, has finished in the top five every year since '80, except in '85. That year she was leading in the early stages when she met a moose on the trail. It wasn't Bullwinkle. Normally, a moose will amble off at the approach of a human, but this one was looking for trouble. A few frantic minutes later, two of Butcher's dogs were dead, others injured and she was out of the race...

"You have to be very selfless in your dedication to your dogs. When you come into a checkpoint, although there may be a wood stove to warm your feet by, you stay outside, you take care of your dogs, get them bedded down and fed. It may take three hours. "Then you can go have your 15 minutes inside, and then it's time to go check your dogs, massage them down and get ready to go again. I might get a catnap." At a pace of 8 or 9 m.p.h., "You do some riding that can be fairly relaxing but the majority of it you're either pumping with one leg or running," Butcher said. "The most strenuous is going over the rough terrain and having to steer the sled, which weighs from 150 to 200 pounds with all the gear in it. Throwing the sled around is as exhausting as pumping or running.

Butcher, an athletic 5 feet 6 inches and 135 pounds, was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but explained, "This is the life I chose." Her best lead dogs are Granite and Tolstoy, each of whom has lead her to recent, victories.

Like all the Alaskan Huskies, Butcher said, "They live to race. They like the competition. They understand the competition. They want to pass the teams ahead of them. They know when there are no dogs on the trail ahead of them. "The biggest problem is slowing them down. In 1986, I ran four races. That's more races than any long-distance racer has ever run, and I now know why - 2,250 miles of races, which didn't include my 3,000 miles of training.

"Only one dog ran all four races, but many of them ran three. I was going into my fourth race thinking, gosh, I'm really burnt out, so these dogs must be real burnt out, too. "It was a 350-mile race, and I had absolutely no control of that team. I could not get them to stop. I was hooking trees with our snow hook, and they were tearing them over. This team was just crazy to go. They wanted to see what's around the next corner. They wanted to race.

"You have to run all of them at the same time. You need only one to three dogs to pull you and the sled and the gear, so it's way overkill, and you have all this immense amount of power. You've got nothing but a voice command. There are no reins or anything. It's all 'gee' for right, 'haw' for left, 'whoa.'

"You couldn't take Fifi the poodle out of somebody's apartment in New York and expect her to run the Iditarod, but you sure as heck could take one of these dogs that was raised from a puppy. They're ready for the Iditarod, and they just love it."

PROGRAM GUEST (Cont'd)

DAVID HALBERSTAM
The son of a surgeon and a schoolteacher, David Halberstam was born in New York City on April 10, 1934. His father, who served in the Army, traveled from one post to another throughout the country, and the family followed him around. The family moved to Connecticut, where in grammar school Halberstam competed for high grades with Ralph Nader.

As a student at Roosevelt High School in Yonkers, David Halberstam was a member of the track team and worked on the school newspaper. When he graduated in 1951, he entered Harvard University. He later became the managing editor of the Harvard Crimson. Having enjoyed his job as a reporter and believing that the racial question would develop into the major issue of the day, he went to work for the West Point (Mississippi) Daily Times Leader. In April 1956 he took a job on the Nashville Tennessean.

In the fall of 1960 Halberstam had joined the Washington bureau of the New York Times, for which he helped to report on the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

Halberstam was assigned to South Vietnam by the Times in September 1962. Almost from the beginning he encountered an official policy of optimism about the war, and within a month he began accompanying Vietnamese troops and their American advisers on military operations in the Mekong Delta.

News of the deteriorating situation in Vietnam, reported by Halberstam and Neil Sheehan of United Press International was attacked by the American mission in Saigon, the Pentagon, and the White House as inaccurate, biased, irresponsible, and sensationalized. For his reporting in Vietnam, Halberstam was named winner of a 1963 George Polk Memorial Award and shared a 1964 Pulitzer Prize. Halberstam left Vietnam after about 15 months

JOHN R. HORNER
John Horner is Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University. He has unearthed more dinosaur fossils than anyone in history. Professor Horner discovered his first dinosaur fossil at age eight, became interested in science, but felt that science courses were nearly impossible to pass. He flunked out of college seven times. At age 31, he discovered that his academic problem was a severe case of dyslexia. Two years later, discovered the first intact dinosaur eggs ever found in North America, then was the first to find fossils of baby dinosaurs in their nests. He later uncovered the largest deposit of fossilized bones of a single species of dinosaur to be discovered anywhere in the world, in one of the most remarkable finds in the history of vertebrate paleontology. Professor Horner's interpretive insights have revolutionized our understanding of dinosaurs.

RICHARD E. RAINWATER
Richard Rainwater is a legendary financial dealmaker from Fort Worth, Texas. The son of a wholesale grocer, he graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in mathematics and earned his MBA from Stanford. He landed a job as an investment banker, but soon accepted an invitation from former Stanford classmate Sid Bass to manage and diversify his family portfolio. Richard became the chief financial architect for the Bass family investments, which launched an incredible saga in American business history. He was given $5 million to invest during his first year and managed to lose it all, then sought an investment strategy and applied his scientific mind to his quest. Richard became a "perpetual-motion deal machine" and the "best-kept secret in high finance" as he propelled the family fortune to more than $5 billion while creating one of the great American dynasties of the 20th century. In 1986 he launched his own business, investing in more than 30 companies and purchasing one million square feet of office space in Texas. Richard Rainwater has been heralded as the "capitalist cowboy for the '90s, leading the way into new frontiers of finance."

THE HONORABLE WILLIAM S. SESSIONS
In his first contact with the press since being elevated from relative obscurity to national attention Friday, William Steele Sessions relished a reporter's description of him as "a West Texas tough guy."

But the FBI director-designate quickly quipped that "I don't wear a gun belt and I don't have any cowboy boots to my name."

The banter provided a telling exchange that showed how the Republican federal judge can at once maintain his hard-line courtroom stands and appeal to judicial observers from the other end of the political spectrum.

His well-earned reputation as a law-and-order conservative has not stemmed the flow of high praise from the other ideological extreme where his commitment to fairness has been pointedly noted. Despite his political leanings, he has ruled in favor of civil rights plaintiffs in major cases and has not been afraid to take on powerful members of the Texas Establishment.

"I dare say we probably wouldn't agree on a single political issue, but I probably would have rather tried a case in his court than any judge I felt a kinship with ideologically," said Gerald H. Goldstein of San Antonio, general counsel of the Texas Civil Liberties Union. To Sessions, his steely reputation is the product of a career devoted to hard work, not the hard right. "If I'm a West Texas tough guy, it's simply because we've dealt with difficult problems...drug and immigration problems. Whether you are a judge or whether you are involved in prosecution or defense, these are very difficult times," he said. While claiming that he has "a wealth of ignorance about running the FBI," he demonstrated Friday that he appreciates the revolutionary changes the bureau has undergone since he left Washington in 1971 and the challenges he faces in "turf wars" and other problems within the agency.

When asked if this would be a particularly difficult time to take over the FBI, Sessions replied: "I would think not. It's the natural function in a free society - people seeking to see what's going on in their government."

His reputation for fairness - the quality that has gained him such wide respect - may be the most effective tool he has in dealing with the problems at the FBI. In his meeting with reporters Friday, he stressed a strong commitment to protecting citizens' constitutional rights. "I'm very aware, keenly aware, of Fourth, Fifth, First, Sixth Amendment rights," he said. "These are the things judges are made of." Moreover, he is regarded highly for judicial management skills that can be applied to the FBI post. Interviews of lawyers who have practiced before Sessions, judges who serve alongside him and Justice Department veterans who portray him as a take-charge jurist who insists on "personal accountability."

He is especially tough when sentencing those convicted of crimes that challenge the "integrity of the process," such as perjury or obstruction of justice. Sessions was described by friends and associates as a devoted outdoorsman and sometime mountain climber who keeps a book about Texas' rugged Guadalupe Mountains next to a volume about Abraham Lincoln.

"He's just a real straight arrow," said James W. Blagg, a San Antonio attorney and former federal prosecutor. "He will treat you courteously but he strives to avoid any kind of even appearance of impropriety in everything he does." Sessions earned both his undergraduate and law degrees from Baylor University. Before coming to Washington, he practiced law in Waco, Texas. He served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955.

Sessions was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on May 27, 1930, and is married with four children. Two sons are lawyers in San Antonio, the third works for AT&T. His youngest child, daughter Sarah, is a ballet dancer.

NANCY WEXLER, Ph.D.
Nancy Wexler is Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at Columbia University in New York City. Her mother and uncles were afflicted by Huntington's disease, an inherited brain disorder that impairs nerve control and thinking (victims are unable to walk, stand or even speak intelligibly). She made her life's work the search for the single, dominant gene that killed her mother, and which she has a 50-50 chance of having herself. Dr. Wexler went on to spearhead an international scientific effort that led, a year ago, to the discovery of the gene that causes Huntington's. She has also become the leading expert on the traumas associated with genetic testing. Dr. Wexler is the recipient of the highest honor in American medicine for "groundbreaking research and for increasing awareness of all genetic disease."