Twenty-five years ago, Marlen E. Neumann set out to heal a riot-torn city.

Alongside seven other members of a state commission appointed to investigate the causes of the 1965 Watts riots, Neumann spent more than three months walking the scorched earth of the district--interviewing residents, scrutinizing conditions, gauging the anger that for six days had rocked Los Angeles.

"That community needed answers," said Neumann, the sole woman appointed to the riot commission. "And they also needed calming."

From Aug. 11 to 16, blacks long frustrated by their lot and angered by a controversial police arrest wreaked havoc on their community. Stores were looted and burned. Whites driving through the riot zone were snatched out of their cars and pummeled, their autos torched. Rooftop snipers fired on police officers and firefighters.

When the riots finally ended, 34 people were dead, including a firefighter and a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, and 1,032 were injured. About $40 million worth of property was damaged or destroyed.

Eight days later, then-Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown assembled what became known as the McCone Commission, named after Chairman John A. McCone, an industrialist and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Charged with ensuring that such violence never again touched the city, the commission launched an inquiry into the riot and its causes, fashioning a 101-page white paper filled with ambitious remedies for many of Watts' ills.

Now, a quarter-century later, members of the commission and its 70-person staff express sadness and frustration as they reflect on what became of their report and its proposed remedies.

The commission had offered up ambitious prescriptions: "emergency" literacy and preschool programs, improved police-community ties, increased low-income housing, more job-training projects, upgraded health-care services, more efficient public transportation, and many more.

While some of the recommendations were adopted and sustained, bringing with them a handful of substantive changes in Watts, most were not. Some were enacted and then, for a variety of reasons, were scaled back or allowed to die out altogether. Others were simply ignored.

"I guess I'm struck with a sense of futility," said Ben S. Farber, a young prosecutor fresh out of the U.S. attorney's office when the commission recruited him to work out of its headquarters in the Sierra Building.