Wisconsin State Journal from Madison, Wisconsin • 47

UTL(. I 1F National Foreign editor Brian Howel, 252-6163 Wisconsin State Journal Sunday, February 24, 1991 The art of intelIkjence2F C7 TO aliioioiia dry pe i -r 1 f. Jd i Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court Peter Popov ich administers the oath of office to Sandra Gardebring last month in St. Paul. In an interview, Gardebring said, "I wouldn't expect the women to vote as a bloc any more often than men." Tipping the scales Women dominate Minnesota high court Drought brings era of anxiety By John Woestendiek Kmght-Ridder Newspapers KERNVILLE, Calif.

Bob Powers walked across what used to be a lake, kicking up clouds of dust with each footstep and speaking as if the town he was born in 66 years ago still stood. "That's the school. Over there's the Methodist church, where my wife and I got married. That's old Bill Tibbetts place," he said, pointing at the concrete foundations that are all that remain of old Kernville. After almost four decades under a man-made lake, old Kernville has resurfaced amid one of the longest-running and most severe droughts in California's history.

As reservoirs recede across the state, long-submerged communities, railroad tunnels, even the wreckage of a plane that disappeared with two men aboard on Father's Day 1963, have reappeared like ghosts from the past But that's not the scary part. Far more haunting in a state with spiraling urban populations, plummeting water reserves, and, since October, only a fourth of its normal rainfall and a tenth of its normal snowpack are the questions that the drought is raising about the future. As the drought enters its fifth year, the Golden State has turned golden-brown, and the local, state and federal water projects that made California bloom and prosper Associated Press jority reduced support payments for older women who had spent their prime years rearing children. "It's not a question of liberal or conservative but of a different set of experiences," said Aviva Breen, director of the state legislature's 'With the white male establishment, one woman was OK and two women were not bad, but when it came to a majority, they (several male lawyers) were dead set against Rudy Perpich son of ex-Gov. Rudy Perpich commission on the economic status of women.

At the same time, no one is minimizing the symbolic significance of the event, both on and off the court. To boys and girls now growing up in Minnesota, Breen said, an important institution with a majority of women on it will never be such an oddity. Moreover, the women on the court say the new numbers afford them a peculiar kind of freedom: to be themselves, rather than to be perceived as standard bearers for their sex. Now, they say, they can be liberals or conservatives, activists or strict constructionists, heavyweights or hacks all the things male judges have always been free to be, including very different from one another. "I wouldn't expect the women to vote as a bloc any more often than the men," Gardebring said.

The four women come from widely varying legal backgrounds. Wahl was a public defender and law professor before her appointment, while Coyne was a partner in a large Minneapolis law firm. Tomljanovich was a trial judge and Gardebring a state administrator before being named to the state appellate court in 1989. Their marital backgrounds, too, Please turn to Page 3F, Col. I Associated Press A bouy, which normally floats 20 to 30 feet off the lake bottom, lies on the dry bed of Lake Oroville, a key acre-feet of water during the as California enters its fifth year of only 940,000 acre-feet of water in reservoir of the California State Water Project.

Located north of Sacramento, the reservoir normally March 1 for only the second time in the city's history, depends on how much water it will be allowed from the Colorado River. The Metropolitan Water District, which delivers water to 27 agencies serving 15 million Southern Californians, imposed its third cut in as many months last week a 31 percent cut in deliveries. "In a worst-case situation, there would be farms going out of business, a shift away from the farm economy in California, the spread of desalination, and an increase in water prices," Thompson said. To some extent, those things are already happening. Farmers, still recovering from a Christmas freeze, saw their deliveries from the state Water Project halted this month.

Last week, authorities announced that deliveries from federal water projects, upon which farmers depend even more heavily, will be cut by 75 percent. Many of California's farmers, whose production of half of the nation's fruits and vegetables make Please turn to Page 3F, Col. 4 By David Margolick Mew York Tunes MINNEAPOLIS Everyone knows that women are entering the legal profession in record numbers. But no powerful legal institution no law school faculty, no large corporate law firm, no appellate court has ever been dominated by women. Until now.

Last month, in the waning moments of his tenure, Gov. Rudy Per-pich of Minnesota named a fourth woman, Sandra Gardebring, to that state's Supreme Court. When she was sworn in on Jan. 4, it marked the first time that women had achieved the most critical of critical masses on a court of last resort: a majority. It is no longer news when a woman is named to a state supreme court.

Currently, at least one sits on 27 of them. (On the seven-member Wisconsin Supreme Court, Shirley Abrahamson is the lone woman) But for the most part, one is where the count has remained, just as it has on the United States Supreme Court. Only one state, Oklahoma, has two women on its highest court, and none have three. But the first woman named to the Minnesota Court, Rosalie Wahl, named by Perpich in 1977, turned out to be more prelude than token. A second woman, M.

Jeanne Coyne, was appointed by Gov. Albert Quie in 1982. Perpich named the third, Esther Tomljanovich, in August 1990 and Gardebring on his last work day in office. No one is predicting that the new female majority on the seven-member Minnesota court will instantly produce changes in its jurisprudence, though some lawyers anticipate heightened sensitivity to cases involving domestic abuse, child custody, spousal support, sexual harassment, employment discrimination, and other issues of traditional concern to women. Edward Winer, a Minneapolis divorce lawyer, said he expected the state Supreme Court to accept more family law cases and to "be more sensitive to traditional home-makers' being forced to return to the job market." In at least three instances in the past several years, the court's women have dissented from rulings in which the male ma H.

Norman Schwarzkopf The general liked your last the officer would say. Or, more ominously, 'The general did not like your last an unnamed officer are reducing the flow as never before. In the most dammed state in the country 1,200 dams and about 150 reservoirs sustain life in what is essentially a desert water reserves have shrunk to their lowest point ever, less than half their 1987 ievels. Built in large part on the promise that there would always be water enough for everyone and by water moguls who went to great lengths to make good on that promise California is now coming to terms with the fact that there is not. "I won't kid you, a drought of this magnitude will change the way we live," Gov.

Pete Wilson said Friday at a news conference in Sacramento. "It will cause inconvenience. It will cause anxiety. And it will cause some pain. There is no getting around it, this is the time for sacrifice." The governor called on all California communities to adopt rationing to reduce water consumption by as much as 50 percent in preparation for "a probable worst-case scenario." While urban water utilities, in the parlance of desert landscapers, are urging customers to xeriscape their yards, bathe their children together and take other conservation measures to avoid paying penalties, farmers have seen their water deliveries drastically cut and their own importance questioned.

Agriculture uses more than 80 percent of the developed water in California some of that on surplus crops and, thanks to subsidies, obtains it at rock bottom prices. By James LeMoyne New York Times Under Pentagon rules, American military officials decide which American units can be visited by reporters, how long a visit will last, which reporters can make the visit and, to some extent, what soldiers may say, what television cameras can show and what can be written. Three Pentagon press officials in the gulf region said they spent significant time analyzing reporters' stories in order to make recommendations on how to sway coverage in the Pentagon's favor. In the early days of the deployment. Pentagon press officers warned reporters who asked hard questions that they were seen as "anti-military" and that their requests for interviews with senior commanders and visits to the field were in jeopardy.

This dampened critical reporting. The effects of this during several visits to Army, Air Force and Marine units were mixed. Press handlers were intrusive and officers were guarded or hostile. This made stores about winter. However, drought, there is the reservoir.

Santa Barbara, 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, faces probably the most severe shortage, with its secondary reservoir empty and its primary supply destined, without rain, to dry up by the end of this year. Hoping to limit growth, Santa Barbara decades ago opted not to take part in the California Water Project, so a planned aqueduct to the city was not built. Now, water prices have doubled, some residents are having their lawns painted green during a ban on watering, and neighbors snitch on neighbors who waste water as the city waits for a desalination plant to open in spring 1992. If the drought continues, what's happening in Santa Barbara and other cities along the central coast could foreshadow the future for the rest of the state, even those areas that are served by projects that connect them to other sources of water. San Francisco, Thompson said, has an 18-month supply of water.

The outlook for Los Angeles, where rationing will go into effect on chances of getting the interview. "The general liked your last story," the officer would say. Or, more ominously, "The general did not like your last story." He said that if articles were not "liked," the interview would probably be denied. One article the Pentagon officials said they definitely did not like included quotes from Army enlisted men who criticized President Bush and who, after two months in the desert, emotionally questioned the purpose of their being sent to fight and perhaps to die in Saudi Arabia. The day the article was published, the Pentagon press officer strongly intimated that it might well scuttle the interview with Schwarzkopf.

The interview was later canceled with no explanation other than that the general's "schedule has changed." In a meeting one and a half months later, Schwarzkopf apologized for the cancellation and denied it was due to the seemingly irksome story. While farmers and urban dwellers are sharing the misery, battles between the two groups, as well as between communities, could develop as officials juggle the reserves to make sure nobody goes dry. State and local water officials are pondering alternatives. Several desalination projects are under way, and ideas such as shipping water in from British Columbia by ocean tankers and towing icebergs up from Antarctica are not viewed as far-fetched, as they once were. Still, the question nobody seems to ask, and nobody wants to answer, remains: Could California run out of water? "We haven't yet," said Dean Thompson, a specialist at the State Drought Center in Sacramento, pointing out the state survived a seven-year drought in the 1930s and an intense dry spell in 1977.

Since 1977, California's population has grown by more than 7 million people. And at the rate reservoirs lost water in 1990, three more years of drought would leave many of them dry. it almost impossible to speak frankly and get to know the troops of a particular unit. But on other occasions, commanders and troops were eager to share their views and press officials did not try to control interviews. In general.

Pentagon press officers seemed most restrictive of television. At times they staged events solely for the cameras, at others, press handlers would stop an on-camera interview because they did not like what was being portrayed. By far the most open moments came when press officers left reporters alone and troops felt at ease to speak their minds. But if the troops' frank comments angered senior Pentagon officials, reporters' access immediately suffered. For nearly two months, for example, this reporter had a standing request for an interview with the chief American commander.

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Over several weeks a Pentagon press officer telephoned with updates on the CENSORED BY PENTAGON: One reporter explains how United States military controls the news Reporters covering the coalition forces in the Persian Gulf region are operating under restrictions imposed by the U.S. military that, among other things, bar them from traveling without a military escort, limit their forays into the field to small escorted groups called pools, and require all reports to be cleared by military censors.

Reporters have complained that the rules limit their ability to gather information independently and, by not allowing them to get close enough to the action of the people involved, obstruct informed and objective reporting. James LeMoyne, a New York Times correspondent who left to write a book, has covered conflicts in Northern Ireland and Central and South America. He was on assignment in the gulf region from September to December, before the war began. This is his account of how the rules affected his ability to report. In the meantime, the commander and some of the men in the unit who had been quoted as being critical of Bush denounced the article in a letter.

A request to return to the unit, to find out why they had apparently changed their minds, was denied. A few days later a junior officer of the unit whose members had been quoted paid a quiet visit. He said that be and other men in the unit thought the article was fair, but said that "all hell broke loose" when it was published. He said that senior commanders had demanded explanations of the soldiers' critical views. For the next six weeks, almost all print news reporters were denied visits to Army units.

When reporters pressed for access, they were told there was no transport available or that units were changing position and could not be easily contacted in the field. A Pentagon press official said privately that Army commanders felt there had Please turn to Page 2F, Col..