DATE: Wednesday, May 21, 1997               TAG: 9705210008

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B10  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   50 lines

TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT WRONG AND POISONOUSDAMAGED CONFIDENCE IN GOVERNMENT, NEWSPAPERS, INSTITUTIONS AND INDIVIDUALS IS NOT EASILY REPAIRED.

The legacy of ``The Tuskegee Experiment of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male'' lives on in the willingness of minority Americans - and sometimes majority ones - to believe conspiratorial theories about their government, no matter how nutty.

Ever at his best delivering heartfelt messages involving absolution and race, President Clinton apologized last week for one of the most shameful episodes in 20th-century U.S. history.

Beginning in 1932 and for many years thereafter, several hundred African-American males in Alabama were left untreated for syphilis as part of a government medical experiment at the Tuskegee Institute on the long-term effects of venereal disease. Many of the subjects died; dozens of family members were infected.

The willingness of Clinton to publicly speak the words ``I am sorry'' is a necessary part of the emotional healing process for those few who remain and for their families. Open acknowledgment of wrongdoing by transgressors makes forgiveness easier for victims to bestow.

It takes more than words to restore damaged trust, however. The ill effects of the government's Tuskegee deceit surface in the unwillingness of some African Americans to take part in public-health studies and in the acceptance of blurry tales of unrelated government misdeeds.

Most recently, many minority citizens found credible the idea, fostered by a series of stories in the San Jose Mercury News, that Central Intelligence Agency operatives deliberately spread crack cocaine into poor neighborhoods during the early 1980s as a way of raising money to support the Nicaraguan Contras.

The newspaper's executive editor recently issued a mea culpa of his own, admitting in a rare, front-page editorial that ``we fell short of my standards'' in the series, titled ``Dark Alliance.''

But as the nation painfully learned in the mixed racial response to the O. J. Simpson verdict, experience is a powerful teacher. Those who learn mistrust of a system in one situation are likely to apply that lesson in another.

Damaged confidence in government, newspapers, institutions and individuals is not easily repaired. But acknowledgment of wrongdoing coupled with reaffirmed efforts to avoid future transgressions can help set things right.

Clinton's apology on behalf of the nation was a first and long-overdue step toward confronting both the individual effects of the Tuskegee experiment and the larger mistrust of government that is its legacy.

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