November 12, 1993

NEW YORK CITY, very early Saturday morning. The parents of young children have awakened to the alarming sound of a clock that's signaling a dash toward a little-league soccer game, or to the cheerful, high-pitched plaints of you-know-who. A long day looms. Didn't we used to look at art on Saturdays? Yes, dear, we did, but the museums are too crowded for our merry band now, and gallery workers frown audibly at small bodies sliding across those shiny floors. And besides, Morley Safer indicated recently on "60 Minutes" that we're suckers for believing that anything made in our 40-ish lifetimes might be art. Sure, the question "Is it art?" is a loutish exercise in reductive reasoning, but quickly following are the slightly more respectable, "If it's art, is it a good painting or sculpture, i.e., better than that one over there?" and, "Why is it worth $275,000?"

Marion Birkhimer had been waiting 25 years for this day, ever since she returned from a two-year tour as head surgical nurse on the hospital ship Repose off the Vietnam coast. In 1968, Americans did not want to hear about the pains soldiers were suffering in an unpopular war, Ms. Birkhimer said. And they especially did not want to hear from the women who served in Vietnam and later became a forgotten part of the conflict's forgotten corps.

Sputtering for months, the business community's lobbying campaign is now running wide open, producing mailings, telephone calls, newspaper advertisements and speeches on behalf of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Hundreds of business executives are spending more time on Capitol Hill than at home, and hundreds of factory workers are being pulled off the line to visit members of Congress. "I think we've done more on Nafta than on any legislative issue in history," said Lawrence A. Bossidy, the chairman of Allied Signal Inc. and the head of USA-Nafta, an umbrella coalition of thousands of companies and trade organizations backing the pact.

Andreas Gembler, the head of the Philip Morris International tobacco operations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, points to a simple statistic to explain the company's decision to sink nearly $1 billion into the region after the collapse of Communism. About 700 billion cigarettes are sold there annually, making the market 40 percent larger than that of the United States. "No industry can ignore the consumer in this part of the world," Mr. Gembler said.

After round-the-clock negotiations that ended yesterday afternoon, the BellSouth Corporation agreed to invest $1.5 billion to back QVC Network's bid for Paramount Communications. But just as QVC made a new alliance, it lost an old one. The Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating antitrust issues in QVC's proposed hostile takeover of Paramount, has insisted that QVC sever its ties with Liberty Media, its largest shareholder, to get a green light from the Government.