PBS’ WOODRUFF HOSTING NATIONAL AIDS INQUIRY

The cool, elegant voice of anchor Judy Woodruff is the prelude.

She begins by saying the Public Broadcasting System’s “Frontline” broadcast, “AIDS--A National Inquiry,” (airing Tuesday on KCET Channel 28 at 8 p.m.) will “depart from its usual format.”

Instead of the documentary’s hourlong broadcast, Woodruff, “Frontline’s” regular anchor as well as Washington correspondent for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” notes the program will last two hours (see adjoining story). Woodruff is anchoring from the “primary location” at the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., outside Washington. With her is Harvard University law professor Charles Nesson, who will act as moderator and host of the discussions there. They’ll connect “via satellite” to Houston, Denver and San Francisco.

At that point, only the ash-blond anchor commands the screen. She is dressed almost severely in a high-necked black dress and is wearing a pair of tiny pearl earrings.

Cut, some moments later, to the depressed voice of Fabian Bridges--the inquiry’s centerpiece.

Wearing fatigues, his movements tracked by a PBS affiliate crew from Minneapolis, Bridges is standing at an open phone in a Cleveland bus station. He has been provided with a $20 bus ticket from Indianapolis authorities to get out of town. He is talking to his mother. “Can you please come and pick me up? . . . Why not? . . . Can I come home? Where am I going to stay? You want me to stay in the street?”

Before he died of AIDS last November at 32, Bridges had come full circle: from Houston, where he had worked as a $19,000-a-year employee for county flood control until disease disabled him; to Indianapolis, where his sister declined to take him in because she had a baby boy--”we heard only sexual contact,” his sister says of AIDS’ transmission, “now we’re hearing other things, like saliva or whatever”--then on to Cleveland, and finally back to Houston. At one point in his miserable odyssey, Time magazine called Bridges “a pitiful nomad.”

“AIDS--A National Inquiry” also appears to be a departure in that it begins where other discussions leave off. As Woodruff notes, a major focus of the inquiry will be “the role of government in protecting public safety while at the same time asking questions about protecting the civil liberties of victims, as well as the rest of us.”

Or, specifically, what do you do about a contagious individual, like Bridges, who admits he continues having sex without telling his partners he suffers from acquired immune deficiency syndrome? (Whether it’s for the money, for companionship, for a sense of normalcy, to lash out at the world for his illness--or all of the above--is difficult for a viewer to determine.)

In Indianapolis, Bridges was jailed for stealing a bicycle. Because of his illness, he was put in isolation.

“I felt I was being treated like an animal,” Bridges said later. Sheriffs as well as the maintenance crew passed his cell “whispering. . . . I was so humiliated, I just could have grabbed them by the neck, choked the hell out of them.” Or, if he had the power by throwing out his hand, he would have liked “to transmit the disease . . . and see how they reacted.”

A related issue appears to be the role of the Minneapolis crew in turning Bridges over to Cleveland health authorities.

“Originally, ‘Frontline’ was going to look at four AIDS victims,” Woodruff said in an interview at KCET recently, “but the story on Fabian Bridges became so compelling we decided to focus on him. . . .

“You realize, coming away from seeing this film, that they’re human beings. You go into this saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a little bit disgusting. I don’t know if I can handle this. Do I really want to know more about somebody who’s got this problem? It’s not my problem.’

“And yet you meet him (in the film), and he’s a very real human being. And this comes through vividly in the show.”

Woodruff had been dispatched to the West Coast to promote the AIDS broadcast; Los Angeles was her first stop. Saturday it would be back east to Pittsburgh to give a speech; then home to her family in Washington.

At 39, Woodruff--a former White House correspondent for NBC (1977-82) and author of a book about her experiences on that beat--sees herself as having “the best of both--one foot in documentaries and the other foot doing daily journalism (on MacNeil/Lehrer), my bread and butter. . . . My hands are full.”

Her husband, Wall Street Journal Washington bureau chief Albert Hunt, is one of the capital’s media lions, a regular on PBS’ “Washington Week in Review” and various network shows. Hunt and Woodruff, who met on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, are tagged in a Washington monthly as “the smartest media couple.”

Their son, Jeffrey, now 4 1/2, can boast bipartisan support. As a baby he’s been tickled under the chin by Ronald Reagan and cuddled by Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill.

“We have this little picture gallery in our basement, in his playroom, with just Jeffrey pictures,” Woodruff said. “The night of the State of the Union, he saw O’Neill on television, and said, ‘That’s Tip O’Neill!’ ”

Woodruff was born in Oklahoma and grew up “an Army brat,” which she believes taught her resilience. “The notion of being thrust from one situation to another fairly often forces you to think on your feet.”

She went to kindergarten in Germany, grade school in Missouri, New Jersey and Taiwan, and high school in Augusta, Ga. By the time she graduated from Duke University in 1968, with a major in political science, she knew she wanted to try her hand at television journalism. She had gotten her taste of Washington politics as a summer intern on Capitol Hill.

She figured she would have her best shot in Atlanta--big enough but not so big it would ignore a beginner. Woodruff got a job with the ABC affiliate as a combination secretary and researcher.

“I went there and said, ‘I’ll do anything. I’ll scrub the floor, I’ll answer the phone, I’ll make coffee. . . .’ I kept pestering.”

But she couldn’t get promoted.

“Each station in Atlanta had a woman reporter. The woman at that station happened also to be the weather reporter.” When the rival CBS affiliate lost its woman reporter and another reporter covering the state legislature in January, 1970, Woodruff changed stations. The second day, the state legislature became her beat.

She turned out to be in the right place at the right time. When NBC added her to its Atlanta bureau in 1975, she already knew the Carter insiders, and so it was natural that she be added to the campaign team--albeit as “third-string.”

“After he won the election, they sent me to baby-sit all the Cabinet selections, and I broke a bunch of stories then and really made a pest of myself arguing they should send me to Washington,” she said.

Aside from persistence in pursuit of stories, here is a woman with stamina--doing her afternoon stand-up from the White House lawn, and that night going to the hospital to give birth to her son.

Woodruff sees a “mixed” picture for women in television. “We’ve come a long way . . . but women don’t tend to be in the room when the decisions are made.”

“Telling Fabian Bridges’ story,” said Woodruff, “will attract people’s attention. It will force people to look at this issue: Is there a public responsibility in a situation like this? Do you keep hands off, or do you rush in and try to put this person in a place where it’s safe? Do you separate them from the rest of society? What do you do?”

While the anchorwoman did not directly report on this AIDS inquiry, she’s done a myriad of interviews for MacNeil/Lehrer on the AIDS issue.

The Minneapolis crew from WCCO-TV linked up with Fabian Bridges after stories about him had appeared in the Indianapolis Star.

“Bridges didn’t know where to stay; the city had no facilities for someone in his situation,” Woodruff said. “He revealed to them he is continuing to have sex, and they made this decision to turn him over to health authorities in Cleveland.

“They (the crew) just did an extraordinary job of depicting the media circus that arose around him. They had problems, they were torn. It came to a point where either he was going to be on the street or we were going to give him money to stay in a hotel room. They ended up giving him the money to have a place to stay.”

Asked how she felt about the crew turning Bridges in, Woodruff replied: “I think they did the right thing. I think I would have done the same thing under the circumstances. . . . (The program) is a beautiful opportunity to look at the collision of individual rights, individual civil rights with the rights to protect itself from a deadly disease. Beautiful in the sense of the issue itself. . . .”

Asked about those who would carry that argument a step further, advocating identification of AIDS victims through such physical means as arm bands or even tattoos, Woodruff shuddered.

“Personally, I find that problematic,” she said. “I would like to believe ideally that these people can have their own civil rights and do whatever it is they want without endangering others.

“You can’t see this film without having all these questions come to mind. It really forces you to ask, ‘Where do we go from here?’ ”