He pulls no punches

Though Ken Burns "couldn't make 'Fahrenheit 9/11' to save my life," he would defend to the death, or at least pretty rigorously, Michael Moore's right to make the controversial film accusing the Bush administration of faking the case for a war against Iraq.

"I've been very disappointed, particularly in a free society, that we should even be talking about whether he has the right to make what people are calling propaganda," the man behind "The Civil War," "Jazz" and other historical documentaries told reporters last week during PBS' portion of the annual fall TV preview. "He's entitled to it. Jerry Falwell has got a documentary on the murders that Bill Clinton created, starting with Vince Foster. I mean, this is the history of our country, the ability to stand up and say, 'I believe this guy is a ---.'"

Burns was on hand to discuss his new four-hour film about Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion (1908-14), due to premiere on PBS in January. But he touched on a wider range of topics and, befitting his latest subject, pulled no punches. He even declared PBS' recent seven-part history of the blues "a mess" that he "just couldn't get into."

Burns said his interest in the subject "is borne so deep in my consciousness, it's hard to think of it as something I took on as a kind of intellectual pursuit in adulthood. I can remember at a time when I was 9 or 10 years old, my mother was dying of cancer - which, as you can imagine, was terrifying and devastating for our family. And at the same time, the television set had dogs and fire hoses and Selma [Alabama].

"And I remember sort of translating the anxiety about the cancer that was killing my family to the cancer that was killing my country. It's been very much a part of my emotional makeup."

Burns said that time, study and exposure to black scholars such as Washington University professor Gerald Early, a key consultant on "Baseball," "Jazz" and now "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson," have given him - and thus his company's films - a more mature understanding of race in America.

•	He pulls no punches Burns defends Moore and takes on race in his film on boxer Jack Johnso Newsday, Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Byline: Noel Holston