Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I wholly agree with the statement by our revered chairman of the Finance Committee. The operative part of this measure is two pages. It is a simple statement. It came out from the Finance Committee almost unanimously.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. That would be four months ago, in mid-May. There has been plenty of time to examine it. The House bill has a few additional features we find attractive and which we think we could adopt and send right to the President who would sign it. It is a bipartisan measure. There are those who do not want this legislation. It has been avowedly, unashamedly, and legitimately their desire to prolong the debate until time runs out. If they could just add one amendment, the measure would have to go back to the House, then to conference, then to the floor. Time would run out. We have passed two appropriations bills. We are in a Presidential election year. That election is less than 60 days away. The desire to get back to our constituencies is legitimate and proper. Therefore, the device of delay is a legitimate, recognized, and familiar strategy. However, this is not a matter on which to delay. The Chairman was absolutely right, this may be the most important vote we take this decade. In my opening statement, I referred to the testimony of Ira Shapiro, our former Chief Negotiator for Japan and Canada at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. He, just by chance, concluded his testimony, in the last testimony we heard, as it happened: . . . [this vote] is one of an historic handful of Congressional votes since the end of World War II. Nothing that Members of Congress do this year--or any other year-- could be more important. Well, let us be about it. We look around and we are happy to see our friend from South Dakota, Senator Johnson, who wishes to speak on behalf of the measure. We welcome any other Member who wishes to speak. We have heard many. The real matter before the Senate is those who wish to offer amendments. A good friend, a distinguished Senator, the chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, laid down a measure last evening. We had to juggle our schedule to go to the water appropriations measure. But he is not here this morning. He claimed a place--which is fine, legitimately--but the place is empty. When I arrived, as when the Chairman arrived, looking to start the amendment process, no one was here. Now, sir, there can be only one response, and the Chairman has stated it. On Tuesday, I hope the Majority Leader will move to close debate by invoking cloture. It is a process with which we are familiar. We are not cutting off amendments; amendments will be in order afterwards. But we are sitting here asking for amendments, and none comes forward. This matter is of the utmost gravity, urgency, the issues that are in balance, and not just economic issues but political, military issues of the most important level. That is what is at stake. If nobody wishes to debate it, let's proceed to a final vote.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. And before we had the August recess.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Did you say the ``little State of Delaware''? Do you mean the first State to ratify the Constitution of the United States?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I bet I did, sir, because I heard it from your very self several times. I believe you are the second largest producer of automobiles in the Nation.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, if the Senator from Kentucky will indulge me for a 90-second comment, I thank my friend from South Dakota for that superb address of the importance of a mixed economy and the contacts they already have. I ask to be indulged a moment from an academic past. I was once a colleague and remained a good friend of Raymond Vernon, an economist who developed the theory of the product cycle: How a product begins to be produced in one nation, then will be exported, consumed abroad, then produced abroad and exported back. This goes on. The soybean--I now have to invoke my age in this regard. I remember as a boy in the 1930s reading in the Reader's Digest about this magic little bean that was grown in China and contained proteins of unimaginable consequence and would some day come to our country and be grown, and we would all be so much healthier and happier. That happened, and now those very Chinese are coming to South Dakota negotiating the sale of soybeans back to China. This is Vernon's product cycle, part of the dynamism of trade. It is never one way. It goes back and forth, not to be feared, not by us. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, if I may, the chairman is absolutely correct. I believe it to be the case. You can't obviously say this with complete confidence, but China will become a member of the WTO with us or without us. They have completed their negotiations with the great majority of the 137 members of the WTO. They will be admitted. However, having been admitted, the privileges of the relationship the WTO establishes includes being subject to the rule of law. Panels say what the trade law means. What have you done? What are the facts? Here is the judgment handed down, which can be appealed. It is a rule of law process. That is only available to countries that have met the WTO standard enunciated in Article 1, which says you must have given unconditional normal trade relations. If you have done that with another country, then you can non-apply the WTO to that country (and not gain any of the benefits the other country's concessions) or that country can take you into court--if you would like to put it that way-- and you can answer the decisions and so forth. This is everything you would hope for in a relationship where, up until now, we have had no recourse to binding dispute settlement. When faced with the unwillingness of the Chinese government from time to time to comply with trade agreements, we could do nothing, excepting to complain to them and say: We very much regret you did that. We don't want you to do it again. Once China joins the WTO and we extend PNTR, we will have a different answer: If you do it again, we will do this instead of saying you have broken a rule, as we judge it, and we will go to court. Going to court is so much better than going to war or otherwise.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The Chairman is absolutely correct. If I could make a point here--it is a personal one, but so be it--I first visited the People's Republic of China in 1975. I had been Ambassador to India, and, for reasons that were undiscernible at the time, the Foreign Minister of China wished to talk to me as I was on my way home. I received this message from George Bush, who represented our interests there. He was not ambassador. And, oh gosh, he was kept to the end of every line, and he had the smallest compound, and all the help went home at 7 o'clock. But he and Barbara were in good spirits. I made my way up to Tiananmen Square, to two enormous flagpoles. One of them had vast portraits of 19th century German gentlemen: Marx and Engels; the other, a rather Mongol-looking Stalin. They were the vanguard of revolution. At that point, one of the big issues was, When would the fourth Communist Party take place--the fourth in their history? The French Ambassador thought in the spring; the British Ambassador thought June; some said maybe it had been canceled. We were on Tiananmen Square. There was a Great Hall of the People. It had the look of a post office on a Sunday morning. The very week I was there and everyone was thinking about when it would happen, it was happening. That is how secret that world was. Four thousand delegates made their way in and out and voted unanimously. The Foreign Minister succeeded Mao. This was a Communist country. Everybody wore Mao jackets. The people were color-coded. The army was green; the civil service was blue; the workers were gray. We were taken to see the model apartments and so forth. The children would sing about growing up with industrial hands: We will settle the western regions; we will smash the imperialists. It is over. First they rejected Stalin. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic were, at times, in a shooting war-- which never sank in across the river, but all right. Then Mao disappeared. Go there now, and there is a little portrait of Mao above an entrance to the Forbidden City--this nice portrait, nothing domineering. Had anyone noticed in the photographs of the leaders of the United Nations, the head of the Chinese Government wears a blue suit, a white shirt, and a tie such as the distinguished Chairman? We just heard an hour ago from our Senator from South Dakota, last year there were 29 Chinese agronomists in South Dakota discussing the purchase of soybeans. They wouldn't come near us 30 years ago. They are here now. Can't we grasp this? Is there something missing?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Did the Senator have the experience that they talked in pairs the first time the Senator was there?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. That is what we are talking about. We are talking about those most elemental rule principles that Adam Smith laid down so many years ago: Comparative advantage. Remember, he used the image, he said: You could make port wine in Scotland and you could grow wool in Portugal. But on the whole, it is to our comparative advantage if Scotland made the wool cloth and sold it to the Portuguese who made the port wine and sent it to Scotland. I hope it is not indiscrete--I am sure it isn't because it came up in the Finance Committee--there is a wonderful compatibility between the poultry industry in Delaware and the Chinese trading system. The Chinese cuisine, Chinese tastes, happen to be for parts of the chicken which are least liked, in least demand among Americans. By contrast, the portions of the chicken which are most demanded among American consumers are least demanded among Chinese. What a happy arrangement to just trade. We keep what we would most desire, they take what they most desire, and we are better off. The Chinese importing animal protein? When we were there first, a Chinese family might see such a meal once a year. Hey, Americans, loosen up. Something good is happening. And be careful lest we miss an opportunity and something bad happens. I will say one more thing. I am sure he won't mind. After Senator Roberts of Kansas spoke yesterday, I happened to say to him on the floor what a fine statement he made. He said: You know, I am glad you mentioned that century and a half of the Chinese exclusion law--century. He said: My father was on the Panat. Like the father of our distinguished Presiding Officer, he showed great heroism, and was awarded the Navy Cross. He came back to Kansas and he said he never stopped talking about the way we treated the Chinese. You might start by saying what is that gunboat doing up the--was it the Yangtze?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. If we found a Chinese gunboat on the Missouri, we might say: I think you got your charts wrong here. This is U.S. waters, not yours. It is easy for us to forget because there was no indignity done us. It is not easy for them. I am not asking any sympathy for them, I am just giving a fact. If we suddenly break into that appearing hostile mode of wanting hegemony and all that, I shall be happy to have been out of this by then because we will be asking for terrible events: Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India--let's not do this. Let's do the sensible thing we have been trying to do since the day we began the Reciprocal Trade Agreements program in 1934. My colleague is bringing it to a culmination. I hope he is proud.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I look about. I was told the Senator from West Virginia might want to speak but he is not here. I think we have done our duty, I say to the Chairman.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, may I simply say we have been here all morning. We would be here all afternoon and into the evening if there were occasion--demand for it. We expected a measure to be brought up that was laid down last evening. It was not. We would be here all Monday. But when, on Tuesday, we move to close debate and the final 30 hours during which amendments will be offered, that is only appropriate. It is fair play by the rules and we will get to some conclusion. It will be a very fine conclusion. We began it yesterday morning when the motion to proceed was adopted, 92-5.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. On August 19, 2000, President Clinton signed into law bipartisan legislation that pledges more than $400 million to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases in Africa and around the world. There are few greater crises that face us today than the AIDS pandemic. Alarming statistics are reported from around the globe. In Africa, more than 13 million people have died from AIDS, and an estimated 24.5 million are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus HIV. More than 1 in 3 adults in Botswana are HIV-positive. Burma and Cambodia have recently had the sharpest increases in the rate of infection. In Haiti, more than 1 in 20 adults are infected. The XIII International AIDS Conference in South Africa was defined by the fact that 90 percent of those infected with HIV do not have the means to pay for the drugs to treat it. The epidemic is fueled by poverty, poor health, illiteracy, malnutrition, and gender bias. These are the same problems that developing nations have struggled with for many years. But even more urgency becomes warranted as these factors contribute to the exponential growth of an epidemic. According to AIDS expert Peter Godwin, an epidemic requires specific responses in three areas: long-term protection of vulnerable populations; short-term relief and rehabilitation of those in crisis; and the strengthening of basic institutions against future shocks to come. Each of these responses comprises an infinite number of sub-components. The Senate's passage of this bill is remarkable. But our work has just begun. According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, Asia has reached a critical point in the development of the AIDS epidemic. Though India has a relatively low infection rate, it has more than four million cases and is now the nation with the largest number of HIV cases in the world. In Africa, the U.N. has predicted that half of all 15-year-olds in the African countries worst affected by AIDS will eventually die of the disease, even if the rates of infection drop substantially in the next few years. Sandra Thurman, the director of the Clinton administration's anti-AIDS effort, put it best: ``We are at the beginning of a pandemic, not the middle, not the end.'' On February 3, Mr. Feingold and I introduced S. 2032, the Mother-to- Child HIV Prevention Act of 2000. This bill has been included in this assistance package and will authorize $25 million to bolster intervention programs, which include voluntary counseling and testing, antiretroviral drugs, replacement feeding, and other strategies. At the beginning of this year, a score of bills were introduced by my colleagues in this body. Some proposals were more ambitious than others. No single proposal would have been a complete solution. Neither is the relief package before us. But each was an approach that did not require waiting for a cure. And each could make a difference. I hope this momentum will not face--but instead, grow internationally and exponentially--and that we will not become fatigued by this most formidable challenge.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, as I indicated yesterday in remarks following an extensive comment by our sometime President pro tempore, our revered Senator from West Virginia, the Senator from Delaware and I would have to oppose all amendments. Whatever their good intentions or sound assertions, they would simply have the effect of costing us this epic and fundamentally important measure. I will just say one thing about clean coal. It is remarkable how much progress has been made in our time. I can recall, as a graduate student after returning from the Navy, I received a Fulbright fellowship to the London School of Economics. The clean air technology was so bad in Britain that there would be days, theoretically full daylight, in which the buses would be preceded by busmen carrying electric lights to show them their way through the streets of London. It was darkness at noon in the most extraordinary way. I visited what was then Peking, in our usage, in 1975. The air was not breathable. At that time, or just previously, the Mao government put out large matters about biological warfare by the United States which required the citizens to wear white masks during the day. Certainly it wasn't biological warfare; it was the air quality. It is not what it should be today. It is vastly better than what it was, and it will be vastly better yet as economic development proceeds. So with a measure of regret and great respect, I have to urge our Members to vote against this otherwise admirable amendment. On another vehicle, at another time, yes, but not this afternoon. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I think the Senator, the chairman of our committee, has spoken so well and effectively; the Senator from Montana equally so. I believe this debate has been thorough. We respect our friend from South Carolina. We know his views. We do not share them in this case. So much is at issue. Let us go forward and vote and get on with this matter.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I ask for an additional 1 minute to thank my illustrious, incomparable colleague for his remarks. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise with deference and not a small measure of awe at the continued erudition of my colleague from West Virginia. The first decision I made when I came to the Senate was to support him for majority leader, and I have not made one of equal consequence since. None has given me greater pleasure. I say on the question of amendments that it is a point of significance. When the Finance Committee reported a measure on its own, it was a two-page bill. It was not a complicated matter. It was just agreed to. It will allow us to reap the benefits of an agreement that was reached between two countries. Now, I must say with absolute openness--and I hope always to be such. Yes. It is the hope of the managers of the legislation that the Senator from Delaware, the chairman of the Finance Committee, and the ranking member, that we not amend the House bill. We have agreed to take up H.R. 4444, because if we amend it with a semicolon, it will require us to go back. The bill will go back. I do not have to tell the Senator. It will have to go to conference and pass the House again, and then come here and pass the Senate. Time has run out. This would have been a wholly acceptable and sensible approach in May, but here we are in September of an election year in the last weeks of the Senate. So the Senator from West Virginia is right. He said he has read it in the newspapers. I stand here to tell him that it is the case. I hope we made no effort to conceal this. It is simply our judgment and the administration's judgment. I would like to say one last thing about fast track. The Senator could not be more correct--that we have given up our right to amend the trade agreements. But we did that in the aftermath of the disastrous experience, which was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. If you were to make a list of five events that led to the Second World War, Smoot- Hawley would be one. We raised our tariffs to the 60-percent level by trading on the floor in the most normal political process that works very well in most matters. But in trade it can be ruinous. We reached a level of tariffs of 60 percent. We were in that early stage of a sharp market crash. The economy was down. But it came back up. But with Smoot-Hawley, indeed imports dropped by two-thirds. And exports dropped by two-thirds. The British went off free trade into commonwealth preferences. The Japanese went to the Greater East Asian Coprosperity sphere. In 1933, with unemployment rates of almost 33 percent, Germany elected Hitler chancellor. So under Cordell Hull, that great statesman from Tennessee, and Secretary of State under President Roosevelt, we began reciprocal trade agreements. We gave the President the authority to negotiate reciprocal reductions in tariffs without coming back for the formal approval of the Congress. This was the predecessor of, the precedent for, the fast track procedures that were established in the Trade Act of 1974. In effect, the Congress itself said we will deny ourselves this temptation, if you like. We can always take it back. Indeed, right now the President has no fast-track authority. It expired in 1994. He could not get it in the atmosphere of the divided parties. It is that atmosphere, too, that leads us to believe that we should not send this measure back to the House. It had been thought that the permanent normal trade relations bill might pass by two or three votes. It was more, but not overwhelming. As the Senator from West Virginia knows, here in the Senate Chamber 86 votes were cast in July on the motion to proceed. I want to be open about this matter, if I can, and as I am. There is nothing more to say than what I have said, save that I believe I have more time--possibly 3 hours--apportioned to me in this debate. If the beloved President pro tempore--and all of those things--would wish more of my time to speak further, he would only have to ask. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Will the Senator allow me a question?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I hope he will make available more of the research that has been described so carefully by himself and the Senator from Arizona. This is new to an easterner but not too new. Two-thirds of the State of New York is covered by hardwood forests and some cedar and pine. But these are important propositions that should be listened to intensively. I surely wish to be one who will do so, and I look forward to supporting the efforts that are indicated.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I am sure the chairman would wish us to yield such time as the Senator from Idaho needs to conclude.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I thank my revered chairman for this opportunity to discuss the most important issue we will deal with in this portion of this session of Congress. At the Finance Committee's final hearing on China this spring, on April 6, our last witness, Ira Shapiro, who was formerly the chief negotiator for Japan and Canada at the U.S. Trade Representative's office, closed his testimony with these words. . . . [this vote] is one of an historic handful of Congressional votes since the end of World War II. Nothing that Members of Congress do this year--or any other year-- could be more important. I rise to suggest, sir, that he is not wrong, and to explain at some length, if I may be indulged, the reasons therefor. The United States has a long history of commercial ties with China, beginning at a time when we exported raw materials, medicinal herbs and such like products, in return for sophisticated manufactures. The first American ship to visit China, the Empress of China, cleared New York harbor more than 216 years ago on February 22, 1784. It carried a cargo of 300 tons of ginseng, a wild root found in the uplands of States such as New York, where it is gathered to this day and is known as shang. The cargo included wool, cloth, lead, cotton, and pepper--pepper, I take it, to be a transshipment of pepper received from South Asia. She reached Canton 7 months later, on August 23, 1784, and returned to New York the following May where the vessel created a sensation with its exotic cargo of manufactures: porcelain, umbrellas, fans, and then some tea and spices. By the 1830s American commercial interests in China had grown considerably despite China's restrictions on trade. But American traders lagged far behind their British counterparts--one might say the Portuguese, as well, who were the first in the Far East--and when the British secured additional trading rights by the Treaty of Nanjing, concluded in 1842 after the first Opium War, as it was known, the merchants of Boston became especially fearful that American traders would suffer discrimination. In the context of today's debate, it is worth recalling that the U.S. response a century and a half ago to the fears that we were being locked out of the China market was just what we are talking about today. We sent a special emissary to ask the Chinese to grant the United States what is in effect normal trade relations status. Congress voted $40,000--some Members thought it to be an exorbitant sum--for a special diplomatic mission to China. Congressman Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts was dispatched as minister plenipotentiary. His instructions stated that his primary object was to secure for the United States the same commercial privileges that had just been won by the British. On July 3, 1844, Cushing signed the United States' first treaty with China. It was called the Treaty of Wanghia, named after a village near Macao which was a Portuguese settlement. Its centerpiece was ``a most favored nation clause.'' That was the 17th century term used at the time. The meaning is that you will get the same treatment as that nation which has the most favored treatment, which in effect means equal treatment for all, or what we call normal trade relations. Just equal treatment for all, ensuring that the American merchants would have the same terms of trade and negotiation as did the French and the English traders. A century and a half later, we are still grappling with these very same concerns. Thus, we find ourselves on September 5, 2000, debating the merits of establishing permanent normal trade relations with China, that term, ``normal trade relations,'' having been changed, having been adopted in the Finance Committee. We are very proud of our chairman in this regard, to have succeeded in changing the 17th century term ``most favored nation,'' which gave altogether the wrong impression to any but skilled trade negotiators and merchants. Our purpose is to ensure that Americans are not disadvantaged in the Chinese market and the Chinese not disadvantaged in ours. We begin the debate on a high note and with great expectations. Just as we left for the August recess on July 27, an overwhelming majority of Senators voted, 86-12, in support of the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to this bill. That is what we are doing now. It was almost exactly proportionately divided: 45 Republicans and 41 Democrats voted for cloture. The vote followed an unquestionably impressive and somewhat surprising vote in the House of Representatives on May 24. A margin of three or four votes had been predicted, with a 10-vote margin the most optimistic projection. In the end, the measure passed decisively: 237 yeas to 197 noes. The Finance Committee also has wholeheartedly endorsed the bill, on a bipartisan basis. On May 17, the committee ordered reported a very simple two-page bill, S. 2277. It is not a complicated matter, two pages states it all, to extend permanent normal trade relations to China. The vote was near to unanimous, 19-1. I remind my fellow Senators on this side of the aisle that all Democratic members of the Finance Committee voted in support of the bill. The House saw fit to add several provisions designed to implement elements of the November 15, 1999, U.S.-China bilateral World Trade Organization agreement to address several other facets of U.S.-China relations. Thus, the House bill, H.R. 4444, includes an import surge mechanism which codifies a provision of the November agreement, negotiated by our Trade Representative, to deal with that possibility in trade. It creates a human rights commission loosely modeled upon the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Helsinki Commission, and it authorizes appropriations for the Departments of Commerce, State, and Labor and the U.S. Trade Representative's office to monitor China's compliance with its World Trade Organization commitments--nothing major, nothing troubling. On June 17, the Finance Committee examined the House-passed bill in executive session. It was the near unanimous view of the committee that we simply ought to take up the House bill, pass it, and send it to the President, who has committed to signing it. It, after all, represents an enterprise that has been afoot through many administrations, and came to a successful conclusion in his when the World Trade Organization was created and the trade agreement was negotiated. And, so, the sooner the better. We all need some reminding of our history. China's accession to the World Trade Organization is consistent with longstanding U.S. trade policy and allows China to resume the role it played 50 years ago. There can be no doubt that passage of this legislation is in the interest of the United States. This is true whether we view the matter from the overarching perspective of our broad trade policy goals or look more narrowly at the benefits that China's accession to the World Trade Organization will bring to American farmers, industry, and workers. Let me make the case from both vantage points. In a very real sense, America's trade policy over the past 66 years--two-thirds of a century, ever since Cordell Hull created the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Program in 1934 in the depths of the Great Depression--ever since then we have pursued policies that have brought us to this moment of extraordinary completion. With its accession to the World Trade Organization, China merely resumes the role that it played half a century ago when it was instrumental in United States-led efforts to build a multilateral trading system from the economic rubble generated by us in the Smoot- Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. If you were to make a short list of five events that led to the Second World War, sir, Smoot-Hawley would be one of them. Tariffs in that act of 1930 increased to unprecedented levels--on average 60 percent. As predicted, imports dropped by two-thirds in value terms. But what had not been predicted was that there was a corresponding and almost precisely equal drop of two-thirds in the value of exports which materialized when our trading partners responded in kind and hiked their tariffs just as the United States had done. The result was ruinous, not only for the United States but for our trading partners. The British abandoned free trade and adopted Commonwealth preferences. The Japanese began the Greater East Asian Co- Prosperity Sphere. In 1933, with unemployment at 33 percent, Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. It took the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 to get the trade policy of the United States back on track. The impetus behind the Reciprocal Trade Agreements program was predicated on the view that the recovery of the U.S. economy depended on finding outlets for our production--that is, opening and developing export markets--and that the only way to accomplish this was to negotiate reciprocal reductions in tariffs. If I may be permitted a personal note, I was taught, after returning from the Navy in World War II--I was taught this subject by Harry Hawkins, a great State Department official who Cordell Hull, in his memoirs, observes handled reciprocal trade. This was not to them a mere economic issue--prices, trading and such like. This was an issue that had led the world to the brink of destruction in World War II. It was hoped that would never happen again. This is what we are talking about now, at a more attenuated level. But the belief that has driven American policy for two-thirds of a century is still alive and happily and importantly so. We did this initially on a country-by-country basis. From 1934 through 1947, the United States negotiated separate agreements with 29 countries. That is a large number. I believe the initial membership of the United Nations was in the neighborhood of 55 countries. So half the countries in the world had entered agreements by this time. With the conclusion of the Second World War, trade assumed an important role in postwar economic reconstruction plans, and the conviction emerged that multilateral trade agreements were more efficient and ultimately a more trade liberalizing means of spurring economic growth than a web of bilateral agreements, having all the countries involved reach the same agreement in the same setting. China played a central role in that thinking and planning from the beginning. China was one of the 44 participants in the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1 to 22, 1944. We saw the war coming to an end, and we were preparing for the aftermath. Bretton Woods established the International Monetary Fund down on Pennsylvania Avenue and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which we know as the World Bank, again not 20 blocks away. A multilateral trade agreement was expected to complement these institutions. There were three in mind: the fund, the bank, and the trade organization. Postwar planners did not turn their attention to trade until 1946. That year, China was appointed to the preparatory committee of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment, which was charged with drafting the charter for the International Trade Organization, the ITO. Thus, it was that China became one of the original 23 contracting parties to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade which was but one of the chapters of the ITO charter. It came to be known by its initials, the GATT, and it was put into effect in 1948 as an interim arrangement until the charter had been ratified. It was just a very small office in Geneva. A British Treasury official, Eric Wyndham White and three secretaries, as I recall from those days, in a small house above Geneva ran it all and ran it wonderfully waiting for the ITO. The ITO never came to pass or did not come to pass at that time. It died in the Senate Finance Committee. The GATT survived. China remained a part of the GATT until March 8, 1950, when the Republic of China, by now located on Taiwan, notified the GATT that China would withdraw. I note, and I do not want to insist as my history is not that clear, but it was the Government of China of Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan that withdrew. I do not believe we have any record of the PRC, the People's Republic, as such having done it. It would not have mattered, but effectively China was out. It is to be noted--I am subject to correction--but it is to be noted. It was not until 1986 that the People's Republic of China became sufficiently interested in the subject of GATT to try to reclaim its seat, and the accession negotiations began. Indeed, China had hoped to become a founding member of the World Trade Organization which came into effect on January 1, 1995, only 5 years ago, and, in effect, incorporated the GATT and succeeded it, the GATT having been originally a part of the ITO. The negotiations with China proved too complex to meet that deadline, but they continued. Today after 14 difficult years in negotiation with the whole international community--not with our Trade Representative--China is within striking distance of becoming the 138th member of the WTO. It seems elemental that China, the world's 9th largest merchandise exporting nation in 1999 and the 11th largest importer--these are WTO statistics--ought to be in the World Trade Organization, and this is universally agreed. Agreed elsewhere, not unanimously agreed in the United States, but here we are with an 86-12 vote saying, ``Let's do it.'' It is equally obvious that it is in the United States' interest to have such a commanding player in a rules-based system that is largely the design and certainly is entirely the inspiration of the United States with the assent at that time of the United Kingdom and the participation of China and, I must grant, the U.S.S.R. and France. This brings me to a second broad observation. The economic case for permanent normal trade relations is, I would think, unassailable. Ambassador Barshefsky negotiated an outstanding market access agreement. That much is not in dispute. It was China and not the United States that had to make significant and wide-ranging market access commitments. Take just a few of the products that are of great importance to my State of New York. In 1998, New York's direct exports to China totaled $596 million, $1 billion all told if shipments to Hong Kong are taken into account as now they ought to be. New York's exports are no longer principally ginseng, although I would note that in 1999, the United States exported just over 512 tons to China and Hong Kong. Almost 90 percent of New York's exports are manufactured goods. On average, tariffs on such products under the agreement before us will fall from 25 percent to 9 percent by the year 2005. We are a leading producer of information technology, paper, optical fibers, photographic equipment, and photocopier parts. China will eliminate its tariffs on information technology products and photocopier parts. It is not in their interest to charge themselves more for the products that they want. China has promised deeper cuts on other products. Of particular interest, the tariff on digital cameras will fall from 45 percent to zero. Tariffs on wood and paper fall not to zero but to very low rates, in the 5 to 7.5 percent range. The opportunities for New York's financial services industry are staggering. Take insurance. Currently, the Chinese insurance market is valued at $10 billion a year and is estimated to be growing 20 percent annually. Twenty percent annually doubles every 4 years. At present, per capita spending on insurance in China is under $8, compared to a world average of $431. The market is there. Under its WTO agreement, China will eliminate current requirements that restrict foreign insurance companies to a handful of cities. China would also allow insurers to offer different types of policies--health insurance, group insurance, and the like. Again, to keep in the Senate tradition of speaking first of my own State, while this is not well appreciated, New York is still a major agricultural State. We are the Nation's second largest producer of apples and third largest producer of dairy products, grapes, and wine. Our agricultural exports are well above a third of a billion dollars. This agreement reduces tariffs on apples and pears and cherries from 30 percent to 10 percent, and on wine from 65 percent to 20 percent. I must not fail to mention that the Chinese will also cut their tariff on ginseng from 40 percent to 10 percent. New York is by no means the only State that will benefit. The distinguished chairman of the Finance Committee pointed out on July 27, just before we broke for the August recess, how China's accession to the WTO will benefit the State of Delaware, which is a major manufacturer, producing automobiles in abundance, chemicals beyond the imagination of most of us, and with a two-century tradition thereof. We grow ginseng; you produce chemicals--a pattern that I do not know if we want to maintain entirely, but there it is. California, which exported $2.5 billion in goods to China in 1998, will surely gain from China's commitments to eliminate tariffs on information technology products. What we think of in Silicon Valley, that is what we are talking about. There will be no tariffs on those products. Minnesota's exports to China more than doubled from 1993 to 1998-- doubled, sir--increasing from $119 million to $316 million. China will cut in half its tariff on scientific instruments--which Minnesota is probably internationally acclaimed for--cut them down to 6.1 percent, which is a derisory number, as any international trade expert will tell you. Minnesota's farmers will gain. China is already the world's largest growth market for soybeans and soybean products. I can remember as a boy in the 1930s reading--and for some reason I can remember--an article in the Reader's Digest telling us about the soybean, this amazing product that was grown in China that had such enormous potential for the rest of mankind. Indeed it did. Indeed it came here. And now we are sending it there. That is a pattern and point of fact that is well established in trade. We think of it mostly in terms of manufacturers. But it can obviously apply to agricultural products, too. Raymond Vernon, at Harvard, described this as the product cycle theory of international trade. A country begins to produce a certain product. It then begins to sell the product overseas. The product begins to be produced overseas. And then it begins to be sold back to the original nation, the nation where it was originally produced. We have seen this in automobiles, going from the United States to Asia, or Europe, and then coming back. I observe, sir, that we see it with soybeans. They came first from China. We consumed them, then produced them, and now we are sending them back to China. That is the felicity of trade and the importance of it. It can be said with certainty that every State in the Union will benefit from China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Permanent normal trade relations for China is necessary to realize the full benefits of China's accession to the WTO. Here is the rub: Our producers and workers and companies will not be guaranteed the full benefits of China's concessions until we grant China permanent normal trade relations status. The welfare of our workers, our manufacturers, our farmers, our lumbermen, our fishermen is at issue here. This is because the World Trade Organization requires that member states extend to each other unconditional normal trade relations. This principle is enshrined in the World Trade Organization--in the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1994, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, and the Agreement on Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights--a matter of increasing importance to the United States. It is an absolute requirement, and should be. That is what we had in mind at Bretton Woods in 1944, what we put in place, as we hoped, in 1946 with the International Trade Organization, which never came into being--or did not come into being until now. Sir, it is the very same principle that the United States sought to establish in our first trade treaty with China in 1844. We do not meet this requirement today since the U.S. law requires that China's trade status must be renewed annually, based on a review of China's immigration policies, to which I will address myself in a moment. But, sir, as we well know, this legislation was created during the cold war, was directed against the Soviet Union and the satellite states, and had nothing whatever to do with China. H.R. 4444--that is the bill before us--will put us into compliance with our WTO obligations with respect to China and allow us to gain--in full--the considerable benefits that Ambassador Barshefsky negotiated in the November 1999 agreement. There are those who argue that granting permanent normal trade relations is not necessary and that we will still reap at least some of these hard-fought gains by virtue of our previous trade agreements. I beseech the Senate, do not be lulled by this argument. First, it is contradicted by nearly all experts who have examined it in detail--the administration, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Research Service, and others. Second, our competitors will not be similarly hamstrung. They will benefit from all of the concessions that China made without restriction or question. They will prefer this situation from which we are excluded, and they will necessarily and legitimately seek to maintain it. We will have done ourselves the injury. No others can be blamed. More important--much more important, sir--China will view failure to enact this legislation as an unfriendly act, at the very least. The consequences could be severe, and they could endure. I would expect that they will because, sir, we have a long and troubling history of antipathy toward the Chinese. It is a strong term. I use it on this floor because it has been stated on this floor for a century and more; it is time to reverse it. Opposition to this measure--permanent normal trade relations--will be puzzling to many. But, sir, there is a long and rueful history in the United States of our racial antagonism toward Chinese emigration to this country, which now appears as an antagonism to the arrival of Chinese goods. It is not a pleasant history and it is painful to recount it. But it is necessary. It begins in California--which is understandable--where the movement to put an end to Chinese immigration into this country began in the late 1850s. By way of background, the Immigration and Naturalization Service reports that only 46 Chinese emigrated to the United States in the three decades between 1820 and 1850. The Chinese immigration explosion began in the 1850s, fueled by the California gold rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. From 1851 to 1880, 228,899 Chinese emigrated to the United States. By 1880, Chinese immigrants in California alone numbered 75,000, more or less--about 9 percent of the State's total population. Such was the demand for Chinese labor that the United States reinforced its ``open door'' policy by treaty: The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 guaranteed to the Chinese Government the unrestricted immigration of its citizens to the United States. The State of California applauded the arrangement at the time. But there was an almost immediate backlash from workers in California who had organized themselves into so-called ``anti-coolie'' associations beginning in the mid-1850s. In the 1870s, the anti-Chinese movement gained momentum in the face of an economic downturn and the near completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1876, a special committee of the California State Senate examined the problem and issued a report to the U.S. Congress entitled ``An Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration.'' And in July 1876, the United States Congress established a Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, chaired by Senator Oliver Morton of Indiana. The joint committee held 18 days of hearings in San Francisco in October and November 1876, and issued its final report in February 1877. A statement presented to the joint committee on October 26, 1876, on behalf of the ``Labor Union of San Jose, CA,'' was typical: Do they [the Chinese] prevent white immigration? We know that most assuredly they do, as of our personal knowledge we know numbers of laboring men during the past year that have come to the coast, and have had to leave the coast for lack of employment, in consequence of their inability to compete with Mongolians, and thus sustain a loss, through their influence, when they return to their old homes, not yet cursed by the presence of the Chinese. This will be found in the report of the Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration in Senate Report Number 689, 44th Congress, second session, page 1172, in the year 1877. Please note that this was written years before the establishment of the American Federation of Labor, which has had no such views; to the contrary. Still it was heard. The joint committee's final report makes painful reading, and I quote, Mr. President: To anyone reading the testimony which we lay before the two Houses it will become painfully evident that the Pacific coast must in time become either American or Mongolian. There is a vast hive from which Chinese immigrants may swarm, and circumstances may send them in enormous numbers to this country. These two forces, Mongolian and American, are already in active opposition. . . . The American race is progressive and in favor of a responsible representative government. The Mongolian race seems to have no desire for progress, and to have no conception of representative and free institutions. . . . It further appears from the evidence--and I continue to read from the report of the Joint Committee of Congress--that the Chinese do not desire to become citizens of this country, and have no knowledge of or appreciation for our institutions. Very few of them learn to speak our language. . . . To admit these vast numbers of aliens to citizenship and the ballot would practically destroy republican institutions on the Pacific coast, for the Chinese have no comprehension of any form of government but despotism, and have not the words in their own language to describe intelligibly the principles of our representative system. That is in the report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, to be found in Senate Report 689, 44th Congress, second session at pages Roman V to Roman VII. The joint committee's report paved the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended immigration by Chinese laborers for 10 years. The scope of the act was expanded in 1888, and renewed for another 10 years in 1892. And then, in 1902--the century we are still in if we count the numbers--Congress indefinitely renewed the Chinese Exclusion Acts. We handled these things somewhat more diplomatically with Japan. When the San Francisco Board of Education passed an order requiring all Oriental pupils--there were 93 at the time--to attend a public school specially set aside for them, President Theodore Roosevelt averted a foreign policy crisis by persuading the Board to rescind its order in exchange for his commitment to negotiate a ``gentlemen's agreement'' with Japan. The agreement of 1907-1908 was actually a series of diplomatic notes in which the Government of Japan voluntarily pledged to issue no more passports to coolies going to the mainland of the United States--coolies being the term for common laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Acts were not repealed until 1943. It was not until 1943 when Chinese immigrants were, for the first time, allowed to become naturalized American citizens. No other group on Earth has faced this discrimination. In the middle of the Second World War, we were allies. We were one year from the Bretton Woods agreement where China would sit with us and plan the postwar institutions of the world. Only then did we repeal that exclusion--not just in country but from the right of citizenship. Pay heed: This animus continued for the longest while, and sometimes from the most unexpected places. The term ``coolie labor'' became a term of opprobrium and hostility extending the globe over. Thus, in this past Sunday's New York Times book review came the review of the book, It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, by our preeminent political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, describing how one of the great socialist leaders of the early 20th century, a man esteemed in our history and a Member of the House of Representatives, had this to say on the floor of the House. I quote the review by David Glenn. Milwaukee's best-known Socialist leader, Victor Berger (himself an Austrian Jewish immigrant), delivered a racist harangue on the floor of Congress in 1911 against the immigration of ``modern white coolies . . . Slavians [sic], Italians, Greeks, Russians and Armenians.'' --this from a man who inspired the brotherhood of workers the world over. Allow me to quote Representative Berger's statement more fully, as reported in the Congressional Record of June 14, 1911. While the products of our factories are highly protected, sometimes as highly as 200 percent, the producers of these products are not protected at all. On the contrary, during the last 20 years Slavonians, Italians, Greeks, Russians, and Armenians have been brought into this country by the million. Simply because they have a lower standard of living they have crowded out the Americans, Germans, Englishmen, and Irishmen from the workshops, factories, and mines of our highly protected industries. He goes on to compare the wage rates that he believed to have fallen in the aftermath of white immigration. As I have said, one of the most enlightened men of that age used the term ``modern white coolies.'' That is a part of our history. It is time we moved on. I will move on in conclusion to two points. First, the macroeconomic implications of our trade policy. Discussions of trade policy would be incomplete without mention of the macroeconomic implications of trade policy and the Nation's persistent balance of payments deficit--an issue addressed by Wynne Godley in ``Drowning In Debt'' a Policy Note recently published by the Jerome Levy Institute. The issue is somewhat complicated and centers around some complex economic interactions. But certain simple propositions warrant revisiting. First, the large and persistent balance of payments deficit reflects an imbalance between domestic saving and domestic investment. Simply put our Nation is not saving enough. The improvement in government finances--moving from deficits of more than 4 percent of GNP to surpluses of more than 2 percent of GNP--have been partially offset by a decline in private savings. At the same time, an investment boom has required even more saving. In the short-run, this is not a problem, particularly since the investment boom will yield some dividends in the form of higher economic growth. Second, in the long-run, this imbalance cannot continue, particularly as we approach the retirement of the baby boom generation. Indeed, it would be more prudent to now run balance of payment surpluses, reflecting an abundance of domestic savings, which so to speak can be cashed in when the baby boom generation retires. Third, trade policies, such as approving PNTR for China will increase economic efficiency, but may or may not reduce the balance of payments deficit. Only sound domestic policies can do that, for example a responsible fiscal policy that encourages domestic saving including budget surpluses, can reduce the balance of payments deficits. Allow me to close on a personal note. In January 1975, returning from a posting at U.S. Ambassador to India, I had the great pleasure of visiting Peking--as it then was--as a guest of George and Barbara Bush, who then represented the United States at the capital in a less than ambassadorial capacity. We had not yet exchanged ambassadors with the Communist regime. I was struck by a number of seeming contradictions. The great Tiananmen Square was dominated by two vast flag poles. At the top of the first were two massive portraits of 19th century hirsute Victorian gentlemen, Marx and Engels. The other had portraits of a somewhat mongol looking Stalin and, finally, Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. The Great Hall of the People, as I wrote later, maintained throughout my visit ``the inert external manner of a post office on Sunday morning.'' In fact that very week, some 2,864 delegates had assembled there for the Fourth Party Congress. A new Constitution was adopted, Zhou Enlai was confirmed as Premier. And he declared that world war was inevitable. But that was not the impression one carried away. I have some confidence in what I say as two weeks later I wrote a long ``Letter from Peking'' for the New Yorker magazine. China, I wrote, ``is a huge industrializing nation.'' Its products were not at that point overwhelmingly impressive: ``In sum, Stalinist art and Meiji manufacture.'' Even so, Premier Zhou had predicted that by 1980 China would have a ``relatively comprehensive industrial and economic system,'' and that by the end of the century this, combined with science and technology, would put her ``in the front ranks of the world.'' Here we are at the end of that century. I came away from Peking convinced that the regime had broken its ties with Moscow. No one with an elementary sense of Eurasian history could believe they would last much longer. None you might say other than our intelligence agencies. Now the cult of Mao has receded. Some years ago I was back in what was now Beijing on a CODEL headed by much-loved Republican leader Bob Dole. The portraits atop the flag poles had vanished. Mao was consigned to a smallish portrait above an entrance to the Forbidden City on one side of the square. Industry and business moving forward regardless of ideology. At Shanghai the old European banks on the Bund were nominally empty--no exterior signs of any activity within--but were in fact bustling within, banking, as they had been 60 years earlier. No one should think of the People's Republic as a ``normal'' nation. It has a century of revolutionary past to accommodate to a more settled future. The potential for estrangement and worse is still there. To the extent that trade moderates international tensions, surely we will do so; indeed, insist on doing so. Too much is at stake not to do. I yield the floor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, William Maxwell has left us. As he once put it, an afternoon nap into eternity. Wilborn Hampton, in his wonderful obituary in The New York Times, ends with Bill wondering what he would do there where there was nothing to read! His list of books ends with the Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats. It would be appropriate to add Yeats' account of a contemporary: ``He was blessed, and had the power to bless.'' He was surely such to this senior Senator. I was a ragamuffin of a lad some fifty-sixty years ago. He suggested to me that I might one day write for The New Yorker. I took the compliment with as much credence as if he had said I might one day play for the Yankees. But then, many years later, I did write for The New Yorker. He had the power to bless. I ask that a copy of Wilborn Hampton's obituary from the August 1st edition of The New York Times be printed in the Record. [From The New York Times Obituaries, Tues. Aug. 1, 2000] William Maxwell, 91, Author and Legendary Editor, Dies (By Wilborn Hampton) William Maxwell, a small-town boy from Illinois who edited some of the century's literary lions in 40 years at The New Yorker while also writing novels and short stories that secured his own place in American letters, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91. John Updike, whose early stories for The New Yorker were edited by Mr. Maxwell, said in an interview several years ago: ``They don't make too many Bill Maxwells. A good editor is one who encourages a writer to write his best, and that was Bill.'' ``A lot of nice touches in my stories belong to Bill Maxwell,'' Mr. Updike said. ``And I've taken credit for them all.'' In addition to Mr. Updike, Mr. Maxwell, in his career as a fiction editor at The New Yorker, worked with writers like John Cheever, John O'Hara, J.D. Salinger, Shirley Hazzard, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, Harold Brodkey, Mavis Gallant, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Frank O'Connor. Polishing their manuscripts exerted an influence on his own writing, which included six novels, three collections of short stories, a memoir (``Ancestors,'' 1971), a volume of essays and fantasies for children. ``I came, as a result of being an editor, to look for whatever was unnecessary in my own writing,'' he said in a 1995 interview. ``After 40 years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life.'' William Keepers Maxwell Jr. was born in Lincoln, Ill., on August 16, 1908, one of three sons of William Keepers Maxwell, an insurance executive, and the former Eva Blossom Blinn. When he was 10, his mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, a shattering experience that he would revisit in ``They Came Like Swallows'' (1937), his second novel and the one that established him as a writer. His 14 years in Lincoln (sometimes called Draperville or Logan in his books), would provide, as Mr. Maxwell later put it, ``three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life.'' Lincoln was a postcard Midwestern town with tree-shaded streets and a courthouse square where an annual carnival was held and people paraded on patriotic holidays. In 1992 Mr. Maxwell wrote a reminiscence (in ``Billy Dyer and Other Stories'') of the ``many marvels'' of Lincoln: ``No house, inside or out, was like any other house, and neither were the people who lived in them. Incandescent carbon lamps, suspended high over the intersections, lighted the way home. The streets were paved with brick, and elm trees met over them to provide a canopy of shade. There were hanging baskets of ferns and geraniums, sometimes with American flags, suspended from porch ceilings. The big beautiful white horses in the firehouse had to be exercised, and so on my way to school now and then I got to see the fire engine when nobody's house was on fire.'' After Mr. Maxwell's mother died, he went to live with an aunt and uncle in Bloomington, Ill., which, compared with Lincoln, was a metropolis and ``where something was always going on, even if it was only the cat having kittens.'' From his earliest years, he loved reading. As David Streitfeld put it in an article in The Washington Post, ``Maxwell requires printed matter the way other people need oxygen.'' Mr. Maxwell said ``Treasure Island'' was the first work of literature he ever read. ``At the last page, I turned back to the beginning,'' he said. ``I didn't stop until I had read it five times. I've been that way ever since.'' Mr. Maxwell's father eventually remarried and moved to Chicago, taking his family with him. Mr. Maxwell earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois and a master's at Harvard and taught in Illinois for two years. As a youth he wanted to be a poet, but realized early that he did not have that gift and so started writing stories. He had published one novel, ``Bright Center of Heaven'' (1934), and had a second in his typewriter when he moved to New York with the $200 advance and applied for a job at The New Yorker. There was a vacancy in the art department, and Mr. Maxwell was hired at $35 a week to fill it. ``I sat in on meetings and then told artists what changes were wanted,'' he said. He eventually moved to the fiction department, where he worked with Katharine White, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship, though one that was always circumscribed by their professional status. Long after both retired, they still wrote letters that began, ``Dear Mrs. White,'' and ``Dear Mr. Maxwell.'' One day during World War II he interviewed a young woman who had applied for a job as poetry editor at The New Yorker. The magazine did not have a separate poetry editor in those days, and Mr. Maxwell had been doubling in that capacity. ``She was very attractive,'' he would succinctly explain later, ``and I pursued the matter.'' The woman did not get the job, but on May 17, 1945. Emily Gilman Noyes and Mr. Maxwell were married. The couple had two daughters, Kate Maxwell and Brookie Maxwell, both of whom live in Manhattan. Mrs. Maxwell died on July 23, in Manhattan. Besides his daughters, Mr. Maxwell is survived by a grandson and a brother, Robert Blinn Maxwell, of Oxnard, Calif. Mr. Maxwell's last book was ``All the Days and Nights,'' a collection of stories of fables. In a radio interview he said he began the book ``because my wife liked to have me tell her stories when we were in bed in the dark before falling asleep.'' As an editor, Mr. Maxwell was known for his tact in dealing with authors with reputations for being headstrong. He didn't always succeed. Brendan Gill wrote in his memoir, ``Here at The New Yorker,'' that Mr. Maxwell once took the train to Ossining, N.Y., to tell John Cheever that the magazine was rejecting one of his stories. Cheever became furious, not so much at the rejection, but that his courtly editor felt it necessary to come tell him in person. On another occasion, Mr. Maxwell again boarded a train, this time to go read three new stories by John O'Hara in the presence of the author. It was a command performance and he was nervous. The first two stories he read were not acceptable to The New Yorker, and Mr. Maxwell started reading the third with trepidation. Fortunately, the third turned out to be ``Imagine Kissing Pete,'' one of O'Hara's best. Some of Cheever's later stories caused consternation at The New Yorker because of the erotic content. When William Shawn, then the editor, objected to a reference to lust, ``I was beside myself,'' Mr. Maxwell said, ``It seems very old- fashioned now, but then it was unacceptable, and there was nothing I could do about it.'' When John Updike has his own editorial battles at The New Yorker, he said he always found an ally in Mr. Maxwell. ``There was always a lot of fiddling, and a lot of the fiddles came from Shawn. And Bill would assist me in ignoring them.'' Sometimes it was the editor who benefited from the advice of the writter. Mr. Maxwell has been working for eight years on a novel that was eventually titled ``The Chateau'' (1961), which he has set in France rather than in the familiar territory of the American Midwest. But it was not coming together. He showed the manuscript to Frank O'Connor, who read it and advised him that there were, in fact, two novels there. ``My relief was immense,'' Mr. Maxwell said, ``because it is a lot easier to make two novels into one than it is to make one out of nothing whatever. So I went ahead and finished the book.'' The letters of Frank O'Connor and Mr. Maxwell from 1945 to 1996, the year of O'Connor's death, were published in 1968 under the title ``The Happiness of Getting It Down Right.'' O'Connor, a prolific contributor to The New Yorker, revised endlessly, and after his death left 17 versions of one story that the magazine had eventually rejected. Mr. Maxwell's lack of celebrity never disturbed him. ``Why should I let best-seller lists spoil a happy life?'' he said. Among his novels are ``Time Will Darken It'' (1948) and ``So Long, See You Tomorrow'' (1980). His story collections included ``The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Tales'' (1966), ``Over by the River, and Other Stories'' (1977) and ``Billy Dyer and Other Stories'' (1992). A collection of essays was published as ``The Outermost Dream'' in 1989. The 1995 Alfred A. Knopf published a collection of his stories under the title ``All the Days and Nights,'' and Mr. Maxwell gained some long overdue public recognition. Jonathan Yardley, writing in The Washington Post, said the volume showed that ``Maxwell has maintained not merely a high level of consistency but has, if anything, become over the years a deeper and more complex writer.'' His honors included the American Book Award, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (He was elected to the academy in 1963.) In March 1997 Mr. Maxwell wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine in which he talked about his life as a writer and the experiences of age: ``Out of the corner of my eye I see my 90th birthday approaching. I don't yet need a cane, but I have a feeling that my table manners have deteriorated. My posture is what you'd expect of someone addicted to sitting in front of a typewriter. ``Because I actively enjoy sleeping, dreams, the unexplainable dialogues that take place in my head as I am drifting off, all that, I tell myself that lying down to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity is not something to be concerned about,'' he continued. ``What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead, they don't read books. This I find unbearable. No Tolstoy, no Chekhov, no Elizabeth Bowen, no Keats, no Rilke. ``Before I am ready to call it quits I would like to reread every book I have ever deeply enjoyed, beginning with Jane Austen and going through shelf after shelf of the bookcases, until I arrive at the `Autobiographies' of William Butler Yeats.''