By Ted Lipien, BBG Watch
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Diversified Outreach of U.S. Media and Public Diplomacy During the Cold War – American Diplomats and Broadcasters Discuss Impact of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in Poland
Unlike today, during the Cold War, U.S.-funded radios, Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL), were highly popular and successful in countering anti-American propaganda. Unlike today, VOA and RFE/RL, were not under one centralized and dysfunctional management.
Equally effective in a different way during the Cold War was a separate U.S. public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy effort run by the United States Information Agency (USIA). Voice of America also engaged in public diplomacy, as well as in cultural diplomacy through various radio broadcasts, including “Music USA” jazz programs hosted by Willis Conover. For several decades, USIA was VOA’s parent federal government agency. RFE and RL were non-federal entities and had their own highly-focused and specialized management and oversight board.
But in the last twenty years, something has gone terribly wrong. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is calling the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which is now in charge of all U.S.-funded media outreach oversees, “a broken agency.” “This Broken Agency is Losing the Info War to ISIS and Putin,” a committee press release says. President Obama fails to mention the BBG while outlining plans to counter ISIL on the ideological front. A small group of VOA English newsroom reporters insists that countering violent extremism and Putin propaganda would violate their journalistic integrity. Audience engagement on the VOA English news website is minimal. Employee morale has been so low that well-known and respected scholar of public diplomacy and media, Martha Bayles, made an unusual appeal to the Broadcasting Board of Governors to appoint as soon as possible a qualified outside candidate to lead RFE/RL. A $400 million anti-discrimination class action lawsuit has been filed against the BBG in a federal court on behalf of its contract employees who claim that they are doing U.S. government work but are denied by the management salaries and benefits of federal workers.
U.S. public diplomacy, now firmly within the State Department, is doing just as poorly against ISIL and Putin propaganda. The Iranian opposition is convinced that we have abandoned them, President Obama announced a major move of his “Reset” with Russia on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of a neighboring county. The “Reset” policy itself was a fiasco. The State Department’s public diplomacy couldn’t even get the spelling of “Reset” right in Russian for Secretary Clinton. The Cuban opposition thinks we have betrayed them. That’s not how public diplomacy should perform for America.
Some BBG managers and reporters use arguments in favor of journalistic freedom and journalistic integrity as an excuse to justify failure, poor judgement or lack of objectivity. A Radio Liberty Russian Service manager, believed to be still in the same position, said in an interview shortly after journalist Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in Russia in 2006 that RL had confidence in Vladimir Putin as a reasonable leader. BBG managers did not think for a moment it was a bad idea for their U.S. Government agency to order a public opinion poll in an illegally annexed territory like Crimea in 2014 and report with pride that nearly everybody loves Putin. They somehow overlooked the Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian refugees. Public diplomacy at State said nothing to disavow what BBG managers said about Crimea. VOA repeated faulty poll results promoted by BBG managers.
Why almost nothing seems to be working in the battle for hearts and minds?
During the Cold War, the traditional State Department diplomacy effort was focused on trying to make communist regimes in Eastern Europe less dependent on Moscow. While the State Department and the White House were criticized at times for becoming too chummy with these regimes, this perception was counterbalanced by USIA programs, VOA, and especially RFE and RL. It all worked. The combined success was due in large part to successive U.S. administrations and the U.S. Congress recognizing distinctive roles of traditional government-to-government diplomacy, public and cultural diplomacy, U.S. media outreach through the Voice of America, and the so-called surrogate broadcasting by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. There were tensions and competition between traditional diplomacy and various elements of America’s soft power. Each had a different role to play. Together, they won the Cold War.
These important distinctions were fatally weakened with the consolidation of USIA into the State Department and the creation of the Broadcasting Board of Governors in the 1990s. America’s “smart power” was centralized and bureaucratized.
BBG CEO John Lansing (l), moderates a discussion with members of the Media Coordinating Council (ICC) in Voice of America’s new HD studio, February 26, 2016.
As seen in this latest press release, the BBG’s bureaucracy now prides itself on pushing for even more consolidation between VOA and the surrogate media with the end result being a “practically defunct” agency, as aptly noted in 2013 by the then Secretary of State and BBG member Hillary Clinton. She bemoaned America’s inability to engage in the war of ideas. The February 26, 2016 BBG press release touts “BBG Networks Present A Unified Strategy.” For anyone who is familiar with the history of U.S. media outreach and public diplomacy, this statement and some of the details in the press release highlight a problem rather than a solution. Had U.S. media outreach strategy been unified to the same degree during the Cold War as presented in the BBG press release, either Voice of America or Radio Free Europe would not have been effective in carrying out their different missions.
The failed BBG bureaucracy has an obvious interest in keeping the status quo and increasing its power. Unfortunately, some BBG members and executives who have considerable experience in the private media sector lack any experience in foreign affairs, public diplomacy, U.S. international media outreach and government operations. As private media entrepreneurs, they see clearly benefits in centralization of management and consolidation of control. Any successful business person understands the advantage of having a market monopoly and full control of their businesses if they can legally achieve it. Their natural entrepreneurial tendencies are reinforced by BBG government bureaucrats who want the same thing for themselves for different, far more selfish reasons.
Yet we know that neither U.S. public diplomacy nor U.S. media outreach is working under this increasingly unified approach. Political leaders like Hillary Clinton, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, Ranking Member Elliot Engel and numerous members of Congress of both parties know the history of American broadcasting and public diplomacy much better than most BBG members. They understand the distinctions between various elements of soft power. Some longtime BBG bureaucrats also know it, but it is not in their personal interest to acknowledge this history or to share it with the BBG board. Some board members appear to be completely unfamiliar with how the United States had successfully exercised its soft power in the past through a variety of different institutional venues without subjecting them to central control, which would have destroyed their unique strengths and effectiveness.
As someone who had participated in that effort, I have put together observations about the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe in Poland made by highly experienced U.S. diplomats and broadcasters. Most of them had worked for the United States Information Agency. Many of them did not have any direct role in VOA or RFE operations, but they had more appreciation for uncensored U.S. radio broadcasts to Eastern Europe than their contemporary State Department colleagues who were trying to maintain a diplomatic dialogue with East European communist regimes, also for the long-term benefit of the United States, but in a different way.
Some USIA officers whose observations I will cite in this article, however, had served in key executive positions at VOA on temporary U.S. Foreign Service assignments. During the Cold War, there was interweaving of U.S. public diplomacy and media outreach through VOA, which foreign audiences appreciated. At the same time, the surrogate broadcasters vigorously guarded their independence and ability to engage in the war of ideas, which foreign audiences in Eastern Europe appreciated even more.
I believe it’s rather obvious from these historical accounts that a diversified approach was far more effective than the bureaucratic centralism being proposed by the current BBG board and its bureaucracy. Just as consolidating public diplomacy into the State Department has resulted in a number of spectacular failures, so has the current BBG policy of centralization and consolidation of media outreach without any regard for what works and what does not. Bigger is not always better, especially in government. That’s why the U.S. political system and government operations have always been based checks and balances. Central planning does not work for any kind of creative activity, especially in the digital age, especially in government. With many news sources and delivery platforms competing for audience’s attention, there is a need for more flexibility, more creativity and more independence — not more unification under a government bureaucracy.
The reminiscences by American public diplomacy professionals I have put together as they relate to Poland and U.S.-Polish relations, also show that the United States was able to attract extraordinarily talented and experienced individuals, both diplomats and journalists, to help us win the Cold War. That’s no longer true at the BBG. Whatever good journalists remain, they are being stifled by the bureaucracy which replenishes itself with people with similar backgrounds and abilities. Most of them never leave government service until they are ready to retire. Former USIA public diplomacy officers, on the other hand, had to pass a rigorous Foreign Service exam and learn foreign languages and cultures. During the Cold War, VOA, RFE and RL were far more selective in their hiring practices — RFE and RL far more selective than VOA. While not all Foreign Service Officers were outstanding, most were exceptionally talented. The few bad ones did not stay in one job forever. When they were not promoted, they had to leave the Foreign Service.
The diplomats quoted here all had outstanding careers and made great contributions to the winning of the Cold War, whether at USIA, VOA, or the State Department. It’s obvious from reading these interviews what a great intellectual effort and talents of many highly trained individuals were needed to launch and sustain a successful counter to Soviet and communist propaganda. The idea that one “empowered” BBG CEO, no matter how good a manager he or she is, can now coordinate and oversee from the center of a Washington bureaucratic agency the entire U.S. media outreach effort and possibly also some of the public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy outreach, is monumentally misguided. He or she does not have anything even approaching the pool of talent that helped the United States win the Cold War. BBG officials and some poorly trained and poorly supervised journalists make embarrassing foreign policy-related and journalistic mistakes almost on a daily basis.
These accounts are not presented in any historical chronological order, but rather in terms of their connection to either VOA or RFE and relevance for understanding today’s problems of U.S. media outreach and public diplomacy. The interviews with former USIA and State Department diplomats who had served in Poland were conducted for the Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, VA, www.adst.org. Direct link: http://adst.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Poland.pdf Copyright Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, VA.
Even without focusing on today’s problems, these interviews offer a glimpse into fascinating history of U.S. broadcasting and diplomacy during the Cold War. For those interested in learning more, full interviews can be read on the ADST website.
Dell Pendergrast was Information Officer, USIS Warsaw (1974-1977). He was born in Illinois in 1941. He received his BA from Northwestern University and his MS from Boston University. His positions abroad included Belgrade, Zagreb, Saigon, Warsaw, Brussels and Ottawa. Charles Stuart Kennedy interviewed him on June 24, 1999.
DELL PENDERGRAST: “The public diplomacy we usually practiced at USIA has always focused on the long term, on what lies down the road, the ultimate outcome we’re trying to accomplish and encourage. Too often, in my judgment, traditional diplomacy is fixated on the immediate needs and health of the relationship with the ruling regime. The management of that relationship becomes paramount and sometimes, perhaps not always, overshadows long-term goals and values. That, very frankly, is something that concerns me a great deal about USIA’s integration into the State Department. I fear that the dominant priorities and impulses of traditional diplomacy – the management of today’s relationship with a particular government – will usually prevail at the expense of what we as a nation and a society really should be promoting. My State colleagues may view such sentiment as overly idealistic or unrealistic, but I sincerely think that clientitis is the most serious, endemic problem I’ve seen over the years in the Foreign Service.”
DELL PENDERGRAST: “There was certainly this sense both in the embassy and in Washington about the emotional, adventurous Poles pushing too far, about disrupting the equilibrium too much, that would arouse the Soviets. For an example, a constant irritant between the embassy and the Radio Free Europe in Munich was perceived bombastic language emanating from the Polish service of Radio Free Europe. It was never quite put so bluntly, but that was exactly what divided the exiles in Munich and the diplomats in Warsaw. I found myself personally in the middle, not necessarily adhering to either side. There probably was clientitis on one side and extremism on the other, which both made me uncomfortable. But the bottom line was that we saw the early impulses of communism’s fatal decline in the mid-’70s. And, it was, I thought, a perfect example of public diplomacy’s success, the triumph of the long- term cultural and educational and information approach that was having, over a period of time in a steady, deliberate way – a profound impact on these societies. And a lot of it was just personal contact by the embassy’s Polish-speaking officers, who circulated freely and actively in cultural and intellectual circles.”
Vello Ederma was not a Foreign Service Officer. He is a former Voice of America (VOA) European Division Deputy Director and former VOA Newsroom editor. In a letter he wrote to Senator Jessie Helms in 1995, Vello Ederma predicted with remarkable accuracy the decline of both U.S. international broadcasting and U.S. public diplomacy as a result of the creation of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and consolidation of the United States Information Agency into the State Department. In 1995, Ederma was protesting Helms’ efforts in cooperation with the Bill Clinton Administration to eliminate USIA and move public diplomacy functions into the State Department. As the European Desk chief in the VOA Newsroom, Ederma had a major disagreement with the Polish Service chief, as in those days VOA language services were not supposed to carry sensitive target area news. Ederma changed that rule, arguing that if the Poles tear up railroad tracks in anti-regime protests, the VOA Polish Service has to carry such news. The Polish Service chief complained all the way up to USIA top echelon, but lost.
Encouraged by its ever-growing bureaucracy, the Broadcasting Board of Governors is again using “consolidation” arguments to resist structural reforms proposed in the bipartisan bill H.R. 2323 which attempts to undo at least part of the damage to U.S. international broadcasting and U.S. public diplomacy as a result of legislative changes in the 1990s which saw the abolishment of USIA and the consolidation of public diplomacy functions into the State Department.
VELLO EDERMA: Thank you for your answer to my plea not to destroy the Voice of America. Your operative answer of course is the last sentence: “However, consolidating the administrative functions for our international broadcasting ventures will allow the United States to more effectively use the resources we have available.” And you state that “the programs will be directed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.” The first statement appears inaccurate and the second a major fallacy. I understand your intentions are budget-driven, but the fat in budgets can be trimmed without cutting the guts or junking the broadcasts.
Unfortunately, the two statements have no connection with the real world and may eventually destroy VOA.
In reality,the programs will never be “directed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.” This group will meet a few times a year for a few hours to ratify whatever is being done. More likely, the Board will create a new bureaucracy. This will open up all kinds of “command and control” possibilities that will very likely infuriate senators like yourself, whether on philosophical or any other grounds Only this time you will have yourself to blame.
(…)
The separation of “public diplomacy” functions from traditional, secretive State Department diplomacy has served the U.S. national interest well. The ability of Americans to connect with the foreign media, educational and other open public environments without the tinge of “officialdom, propaganda or intelligence” has created a second tier of friendly relationships among peoples that the State Department has never been able to do nor is that its function. USIA officials have always had the ability to communicate more openly and freely with the public and interest groups, sowing greater confidence and trust. State officials or Foreign Service officers in the field talk to their respective government counterparts, not to the public at large.
(…)
The simple fact is that we need a credible VOA now more than ever, not a State mouthpiece. American ideals and values of freedom, democracy and the free market that we want to convey are best done by a free VOA, NOT a State mouthpiece or a CNN. The idea of “consolidating administrative functions” to “allow more effective use of resources” is wide of the mark. Reality is very different. Such consolidation of resources will destroy VOA credibility. When it happens, and it surely will, I’ll remind you of what I said in this letter.
Almost every prediction Vello Ederma made in his 1995 letter to Senator Jessie Helms turned out to be true.
We are seeing history repeating itself for an even worse outcome in 2016 with BBG bureaucracy’s and leadership’s efforts to achieve an even greater consolidation of the agency and resisting bipartisan reform efforts through H.R. 2323 legislation.
Carl A. Bastiani was Principal Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Krakow (1979-1983). Mr. Bastiani was born and raised in Pennsylvania and educated at Seminaries in Iowa and Illinois and at the University of Chicago and Georgetown University. A specialist in Italian and Romanian affairs, Mr. Bastiani served at four posts in Italy (Naples, Genoa, Rome and Turin) and in Romania and Poland. He also had several tours of duty at the State Department in Washington, DC. Mr. Bastiani was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 2008.
CARL BASTIANI: “They were getting the news and they were listened to [Voice of America and BBC]. However, Radio Free Europe, RFE, was really the best at this. They used to get local news from people in Poland like Reuters and Associated Press gets theirs world-wide from stringers. RFE was broadcasting it to the Poles like a local network. They had great credibility and were very much listened to. RFE played the role in Poland of the voice of a responsible opposition in a democratic country, exposing the shortcomings of the powers that be. And that’s why the regime’s misinformation was not believed by most Poles. Because of VOA and the BBC as well, but they focused more on presenting the views of the West and what was going on in the rest of the world.”
John W. Shirley was Public Affairs Officer, USIS Warsaw (1970-1971). He was born in England to American parents in 1931. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1957 and served in the U.S. Air Force overseas from 1954 to 1956. After entry into USIA his postings abroad have included Yugoslavia, Trieste, Rome, New Delhi, and Poland, with an ambassadorship to Tanzania. Mr. Shirley was interviewed in 1989 by G. Lewis Schmidt.
JOHN SHIRLEY: “Let me generalize for a moment.
I think that the Agency’s work in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — and I very much include the work of the Voice of America — was in every respect more important than anything we did anywhere else in the world. Throughout the 40 years of Soviet domination it was we — “we,” USIA; “we,” VOA and Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle – – who kept alive in the peoples of those countries the hope that someday things would change and that the West cared.
Not only was it a matter of providing information, but also of sustaining their hope by letting them know that we cared enough to broadcast to them, to have exchange programs with them, to show them exhibits, to talk to them as individuals, to send professors to their universities, to open libraries in which they could spend happy and profitable hours. A dollar spent in Eastern Europe was worth a thousand dollars. A dollar spent in many other parts of the world was worth $10.00 or $1.00, and sometimes only 50 cents.”
Ambassador Nicholas A. Rey was U.S. Ambassador Poland (1993-1997). He was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1938 before moving to the US. He attended Johns Hopkins University, and went on to serve in the Treasury Department. He was appointed Ambassador to Poland in 1993. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 2002.
AMBASSADOR NICHOLAS A. REY: “USIS was also party to the single most ironic event, among the many Polish ironies, that I witnessed. This was the return to the Polish Archives of copies of tapes of all the Radio Free Europe Polish Service Programs. This is the single best source of the “Truth” of what happened in Poland during the Cold War. The Polish Archives are a subsidiary of the Ministry of Education and the Minister accepted the tapes on behalf of Poland at the official ceremony. The Minister was Jerzy Wiatr, who in the 1980s Communist Government had been Minister of Propaganda. At the celebratory luncheon, he actually had the gall to tell Jan Nowak (Who had been the head of RFE’s Polish Service for many years) and me that the only difference between that old government and us was the question of timing [of when the change to democracy should occur].”
Chester A. Opal was Information Officer, USIS Warsaw (1946-1949). He was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1918. He attended the University of Chicago. He began his Foreign Service career in 1946. His career included positions in Poland, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, Austria, Vietnam, and Washington, DC. In addition, Mr. Opal helped to found the NATO Information Service (NATIS). He was interviewed by G. Lewis Schmidt in 1989.
CHESTER A. OPAL: “Of the USIS program itself, I have no idea whether it was effective. We felt that our chief purpose was to establish the fact, one, that we had not forgotten the Polish people. And two, that we had our eye on the regime and we knew what was going on and if the boom ever fell we would know what the situation was. As part of this awareness program, I started a daily cable which we sent from Warsaw to Washington, in which I reported on the weather in Warsaw, for example, or tell of men who were now walking the streets with their little party buttons on their lapels so the secret police wouldn’t bother them or in anyway frighten them. It was little items like this that I would report to Washington and they would come back over the Voice of America as a regular broadcast of news.
This was intended to show to the Poles that we had eyes everywhere in Poland, we knew very well what was going on in that country and the regime wasn’t going to get away with anything.”
CHESTER A. OPAL: The one thing I do want to say something about is the importance of the Voice of America in Poland. We used to broadcast–it was not jammed at that time–and I have mentioned the cable that I used to send and the other items that they would pick up from our reports from the post. One thing that didn’t occur to me then but should have been evident, was something that I brought out in Vienna in ’53 at a meeting that was conducted by Chris Ravndal, who was the Minister to Hungary. At the time we were discussing Voice of America policy and there was an awful lot of discussion of the reputation of BBC for fairness and how we are thought not to be fair and unprejudiced.
I listened to this for almost a day as they went around the table and I had no real interest in the Voice because of the post that I was at, which was Vienna. But I said, ‘I served behind the Iron Curtain and I can tell you there are people who sit in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, who will turn on Radio Ankara and Radio Madrid, every morning of their lives to hear that there is going to be a revolution in their country and that they are going to be liberated the following day. Now nothing occurs to this society they inhabit, but the next morning they turn on Radio Ankara and Radio Madrid because they want to hear how they’re going to be liberated the next day and they’re going to be free men. Nothing happens that day and the following day they do the same thing. Their temperament demands it.’
‘There are people in these countries and in Poland, which I can speak for, who listen to Voice of America and who listen to BBC. BBC was the channel by which they received their instructions from the government in London and by which they sent instructions from one sewer in Warsaw to London, back to men in another sewer in Warsaw, during the uprising of ’44. Britain had a reputation then for being sympathetic with the Poles, they had gone to war because of the invasion of Poland in ’39 and therefore, it was fine.’
‘Their feeling about Britain, that it was neutral in its broadcasts, is, I think, an index of the proportion of assumed British involvement. Britain no longer controlled their destiny and I think if you will go around the world and find out where the British are still exercising power one way or another, the people will say that they are not neutral to the degree that they exercise actual or potential power.’
‘The Poles believe that we have power in the world, therefore, everything we say has some meaning in relation to our power. The British no longer have any power; therefore, they can be neutral. And whether they are neutral or not they are going to be thought to be neutral because, what is the point of their not being neutral? They don’t control power, they don’t have the capacity to free these people or to oppress them or anything else. Therefore they exist out there and since they are not as incendiary as Radio Madrid or Radio Ankara, they are obviously neutral. The America does exercise power. It is the dominant power in the world’–this was in 1953 remember–‘and therefore the assumption is that the Voice of America is implementing this power, one way or another, either actually or potentially. Therefore, it can’t be neutral. I say I don’t know why we exercise ourselves over this question.’
I carried this idea to Washington later and to Henry Loomis when I wrote a charter for the Voice of America. This was the thing that I brought out in Beirut, that I remembered yesterday, that struck Director Leonard Marks. Because there still is this concern about the British neutrality and BBC objectivity. I don’t care how much we try to present it but I think we should be true to ourselves, be true to our own ideas of truth and honesty. I think we should do this and we should hold to this. But we shouldn’t worry about imitating the British and their kind of ‘objectivity’ because we will never pull it off. Until we arrive at the British world position which is nothing now. This was the point that I made.
Apparently the point had some effectiveness because the meeting in Vienna in 1953 immediately disbanded and we had no further discussion. I remember someone said, ‘I don’t know how he got into this meeting but he sure messed it up.’ At any rate, I still believe this. I believe that as long as we’re thought to have some influence and power, our ‘voice’ and everything we do will be thought to be prejudiced in favor of our power and it’s natural for people to make this assumption. I don’t think we should worry about that. We should, as I said, be as true to ourselves as we can, which is what I said in my culture paper too. Be true to ourselves and not worry about the impression we make because we cannot think for others and then try to outthink them because you wind up at the same place anyway, which is with yourself and that’s what you have to live with.”
Ambassador John D. Scanlan was Consular/Political Officer in Warsaw (1961-1965). He was born 1927 in Minnesota. He served in the Navy in World War II and attended the University of Minnesota. He joined the Foreign Service in 1955. His postings included Moscow and Warsaw. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in 1996.
AMBASSADOR JOHN D. SCANLAN: “We were undermining the Polish communist system by keeping creative Poles in touch with cultural developments in the United States, keeping them informed. This was the period when the Soviets were trying to keep information out of the Soviet Union and to some extent out of Eastern Europe. They were not that successful with regard to Eastern Europe. They spent more money jamming the Voice of America than we spent broadcasting. You can hear the jammers even in Poland. But Radio Free Europe got through even though the Poles had a jamming program, too. VOA did. We were getting information into Poland and through Poland into the Soviet Union. It was a very successful program in many ways. For instance, we sent so many Polish scholars of sociology to the U.S. in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s under a Ford Foundation program and under other programs that we helped develop a very good school of Polish sociology. They put out a quarterly publication on sociology which was excellent. I recall being told by some of these Polish sociologists that their Soviet colleagues told them that they had to learn to read Polish. They could get the Polish quarterlies. They couldn’t get the American quarterlies.”
Q: I would think that one of the greatest tasks that you might have been faced with was the death of President Kennedy. Were you there?
AMBASSADOR JOHN D. SCANLAN: Yes. John Steinbeck was there at the time. He had been at that famous dinner at the White House with all the Nobel laureates where Kennedy said this was the greatest collection of wisdom at dinner since Thomas Jefferson dined alone. In any case, Steinbeck on that occasion was approached by Kennedy to go to Eastern Europe. He went to 3 countries, Yugoslavia also. I had been his escort in Poland most of the time including the day that Kennedy was shot. We went down to Lodz. He had been in western Poland, where he had been taken care of by our Poznan consulate staff. Then they delivered him to Lodz, the second largest city in Poland. There was a university there and he was going to speak to the American literature program students. We were there with him for that. They gave a dinner for him. Then we drove him back to Warsaw. He was with his wife, Elaine, and we were in my car. My wife was there. He was kind of tired. He had been in Poland for a week and had had programs every day. He didn’t want to do anything that evening. We said, “Would you like to come back to our house and have just a simple spaghetti dinner?” He said, ‘That would be wonderful. I’ve had all this heavy Polish food.’ So we had a nice, quick spaghetti dinner at our house. Then I took him to his hotel. I dropped by the embassy then because I had been gone all day. It was about 8:00 PM. I walked into the embassy and went back to the press and culture section and saw the press officer, Phil Arnold, working with the ticker. He said, “Jack, President Kennedy’s been shot.” We didn’t have rapid communications in those days. So, we were getting a report on VOA. I said, “I’d better tell Steinbeck.” I called the hotel and the maid on their floor had just told them but they had nothing further. So, I said, “Well, I’ll come by and bring a portable radio.” “Yes, please do that. I’m very concerned.” So, I dropped by my home first to tell my wife what was going on. While I was home briefly, the desk officer, the second or third guy on the Polish American desk in the foreign ministry, came to my door to express his condolences and his personal grief. This guy was a communist official from the foreign ministry, a very nice guy. Unfortunately, he died fairly young, Andrzej Wojtowicz. He was later posted in Washington and was quite popular here as a Polish diplomat. That was the nature of the society. The Poles took this almost as a personal loss. So, I went back to the hotel. Steinbeck was in his pyjamas and bathrobe and Elaine was there, very upset by this. We didn’t know what had happened, who had shot him. It was a horrible feeling. We were cut off from the world, listening on VOA and static and what have you. We were getting the reports. Elaine was from Texas and was a personal friend of John Connaley, who was also shot. They had been in Texas just before coming on this trip and had heard all of this violently anti-Kennedy stuff from some of the wealthy Texans. I think Steinbeck at that point was almost prepared to believe that this could have been a plot by some of these violently anti-Kennedy Texans.
Terrence Catherman was a USIA Foreign Service Officer and served as Voice of America, Deputy Director in Washington, DC in 1983. He was born in Michigan and attended the University of Michigan in the early 1940s prior to joining the army. He completed his bachelors and master’s degrees in political science. He joined the Foreign Service and received his first post in Tel Aviv, Israel. His Foreign Service career also took him to Germany, Russia and Yugoslavia. He was interviewed by G. Lewis Schmidt in January 1991.
TERRANCE CATHERMAN: “Toward the end of that first year and a half in Washington, the Poles began their clamp down. USIA responded, as did the US Government, of course, with approbation, and the Poles began jamming the Voice and I was sent down to the Voice of America as Deputy Director in a period when the Voice was once again beginning to occupy center stage because in that crisis people were looking to the Voice as a source of information, and as a source of broadcasting official commentaries on world affairs. So it was exciting.
The Voice is always in a turmoil. It is right now. We are in another crisis here.
Q: Yes, a little later I would like to get your thoughts on the most recent attempt on the part of the Agency to pull the Voice’s personnel and their budgeting back into the central office.
CATHERMAN: Yes, I was, of course, in the Voice of America when Mr. Wick gave VOA autonomy over the conduct of its personnel and administrative offices. And now I am back at the Voice, working as a retiree, when the opposite move is being made. So I have seen it go both ways. If I may comment right now on that, I think Mr. Wick was very wise to do what he did because he won the loyalty of the directors of VOA in giving VOA some autonomy in conducting its personnel affairs. USIA had never done a very good job of administering VOA. For one thing USIA has other interests and VOA has only one and that is broadcasting. So, USIA tended to apply different criteria in its hiring policies than VOA wanted to apply. VOA needed broadcasters. USIA needed foreign service officers, writers, a variety of people, cultural affairs specialists, etc. and did not concentrate adequately on getting broadcasters for VOA. So I think that was a very wise move on Mr. Wick’s part. In return he had very good relations with the directors of VOA. In a way I thought they felt they were beholden to him for that move. Another thing that Mr. Wick did in that period when I was here was commence an enormous rebuilding of the VOA broadcasting infrastructure. There was a time when people were talking in terms of putting upwards of a billion dollars alone in VOA construction. That has since eroded.
Q: It was pretty much brought up sharp about four or five years ago.
CATHERMAN: But those were heady days down here. They were ideologically fraught. I came down here at the same time that some very extremely right wing ideologues also arrived in the Voice of America. The editorials they tried to write I thought were so full of anti-Soviet invective that they did not properly represent official American attitude towards the Soviet Union, nor were they proper content for VOA broadcasts. I had quite a struggle on that one. As a matter of fact, I think eventually I was eased out of the Voice because of my obstreperousness in protecting the VOA news service from that kind of influence and in trying to temper the political content.
Q: What was your observation of the feeling of the rank and file of the VOA personnel at that time? Were they also disturbed by this heavy orientation towards the extreme right wing.?
CATHERMAN: Well, they were outraged. That is an element of VOA was outraged. Another element of VOA was outraged that we were not harder. That is endemic to VOA. VOA has elements that will be outraged at whatever happens. It is a huge amorphous group of people. There are all kinds of elements down here as there must be because we are an international broadcaster. We have all these language services and we also have a determined core of American journalists who consider themselves journalists and are going to defend the First Amendment, as any right thinking journalist would do. All kinds of people down here encompassing the political spectrum.
Q: Do you still have bad feeling between the English language broadcasts and the other language services?
CATHERMAN: Sure.
Q: Still as tough as it ever was?
CATHERMAN: I think that that sort of back biting here in the Voice has subsided somewhat, but it has not disappeared. It is not as rampant as it seemed to me it was when I was here 10 years ago. I think part of that is the soft touch of the administration of the Voice right now. The people who are running the Voice are very attuned to the various tensions here and pay attention to them, and don’t fan the flames. Which has been done in the past.
Q: I headed, at the request of then Director Jim Keogh, a study group that came down here in ’74 and it was rampant at that time. The battle of the English language broadcasting which felt it was riding high was the principal element of the Voice and the opposition, the language services which was terribly intense at that time.
CATHERMAN: This came to the fore again, of course, just recently when Mr. Gelb came over here and insisted on appearing before the employees of VOA together with Mr. Carlson. In the process it seemed to me at any rate, some sores in VOA were reopene