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Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we are going to talk about the role of radio communications during the Cold War and our contemporary, uh, international space, the ways in which radio communications from the United States, broadcasting, information, news, updates on the world, and tracking events around the world, the way that has been so central to American policy and intellectual development over the last half-century, and the challenges that we face today, challenges to the continued use of radios, the continued broadcasting of information, and the spread of factual, objective, or near objective news in a world so filled with misinformation and disinformation. We are joined by a good friend, leading scholar, and quite frankly, I think the best person in the world to talk about this topic, Dr. Mark Pomar. Mark is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, and he has written extensively on this issue and worked extensively on this issue. Mark, thank you so much for being with us.

Well, I'm just delighted to be here.

Mark, has had such a central role in our topic today. After teaching Russian studies at the University of Vermont for seven years, he joined Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and he was director of their Russian service in Munich, as well as director of the Soviet division of Voice of America, and the executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting, which was a federal agency overseeing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. From 1994 to 2008, he was the senior executive and president of IREX, which was one of the largest nonprofit organizations funding research in Russia and research about Russia. I was one of many recipients of IREX funding, so it was instrumental in my own research. And from 2008 to 2017, he was the founding CEO and president of the US-Russia Foundation, which was a private US foundation that supported educational programs, exchanges, and most importantly, bringing knowledge across boundaries between these societies. For all of you listening today, I encourage you also to read Mark's most recent book, which is really fantastic. It's very readable. It's based on state-of-the-art research, and it tells the story of Cold War Radio. That's the title. It's a wonderful title. Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, published in 2022 and available at every major bookstore. Right, Mark?

It certainly is. There are actually available audiobooks as well.

Fantastic. So before we get into our discussion of the role of these important institutions and the role of broadcasting information during the Cold War and in the decades after the Cold War and its importance today, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Uh, Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? ("Radio Liberty.") I think that's an appropriate title, don't you? (Yes.) Let's hear it.

Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.

What's your poem about, Zachary?

My poem is about the sort of power of radio and of listening to the voices of Americans and American reporters and journalists and all these American-supported programs across the many sort of political social boundaries that separate our world. In particular, it's a sort of imagining of what it might be like today if one were able to, in Russia or in somewhere in one of the sort of totalitarian countries of Eastern Europe, to listen to a sort of American radio program sort of, like, right on the border, and how it's a sort of, like, bastion or breath of one world in another.

Yes. Yes. Mark, what do you think?

Well, I am very impressed by the poem, and I think you've captured one of the most important symbols, and that is the crossing of the barbed wire that the radios were really created to do, to break down that Iron Curtain that Churchill so properly said had descended. And I will tell you an interesting story that kind of actualizes your poem, if I can. When the Cold War ended in 1989, when Hungary was among the first to really bring down the barbed wire, they gave all of us a piece of the barbed wire embedded in a kind of plastic that you could put on your bookshelf, memorializing the fact that the radios had helped bring down the barbed wire, the actual barbed wire itself. And I have that at home, and I will happily bring it and show it to you. (Wow.) And it's from Hungary, given to all of us as a personal gift.

Wow. Wow. Mark, take us back to the founding of these organizations. Voice of America, I think, is the oldest of them. Maybe tell us a little bit about that, and then how Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty grew out of that or how they emerged as well.

Sure. Well, you know, in the 1930s, by the 1930s, every country had an external broadcaster, big or small, whether it was Radio Moscow, whether it was Radio France, whether it was Nazi Germany, whether it was Radio Canada. Everyone had a broadcaster except the United States, and advisors came to President Roosevelt and said, 'You know, we, we need to set something up.' And he hesitated because there's actually pressure from private broadcasters who wanted to dominate the shortwave broadcasting on, you know, space. But once World War II started, once United States was attacked in Pearl Harbor, those plans were actualized very quickly. And, of course, VOA was brought in as part of the war effort to tell our story. And I think what's very important to keep in mind is the first words of VOA spoken in German were 'We will tell you the news, whether it's good or whether it's bad. You will hear factual information,' something along those lines. Very nicely done.

And what distinguished VOA was precisely that it would talk about military losses, which was then considered quite unheard of. It was really, I mean, we could go on and on about VOA in the early days, but it was really headed by a wonderful American playwright called Robert Sherwood, who was one of Roosevelt's speechwriters. Actually, I think the author of The Arsenal of Democracy (I think that's right) that Roosevelt did. I believe Sherwood was the one who wrote that, and he really molded VOA into a liberal broadcaster in a very, very... and, so we're skipping a little bit ahead, but VOA was very much attacked by McCarthy under McCarthyism as harboring all these dangerous Europeans and foreigners with all kinds of potentially leftist views (Oh?) and so forth. But there's some wonderful stories about VOA in the beginning. Yul Brynner, the actor Yul Brynner, worked for VOA. (Wow.) So did many of the correspondents who then went on to work for CBS and NBC. They got their start at VOA during the war. So I think the story of VOA really needs to be known much more.

Yes. Yes. And how did it provide that, shall we say, more objective reporting at a time of war when there must have been a lot of pressure to tell only one side of the story?

Well, it got itself into a certain amount of trouble because it sometimes broadcast things that neither the Roosevelt administration nor certainly the military wanted to have on the air. So there was always tension. And by the way, that tension continued all the way through VOA's history, that what it would put out was not always what either the White House or the Pentagon or whatever other entity wanted to be on the air.

And why was it allowed to do that? It, as you say, it was attacked, Voice of America was at times by McCarthy. It was attacked in the late '60s, sometimes by Richard Nixon and others. But yet it, it survived at least until recently. How did it survive providing news that was not always in the interest of government, even though it was funded by government?

It had bipartisan support for the most part. In Congress, which is very important. And also in the mid-1970s President Ford signed sort of the charter and the law that embodied the fact that the VOA was the voice of the American nation, not of the administration. (Mm-hmm.) And I think that's very important to emphasize, so that of course every administration had its time in the sun, as it were, and they would, their views would be presented. But the law incorporated what they called "responsible discussion" of those policies, and that would mean that other voices would be presented, so that when the president gave the State of the Union, the party out of power would always have its voice reflected in VOA broadcasts about the State of the Union. That was embedded. When Watergate, and this is very important, when Watergate broke, and I know this from many Soviet listeners who were very, very much impressed by this, VOA covered the Watergate no differently than did any of the (Interesting) news organizations. And to listeners at that time in the Soviet Union, to see the VOA broadcasting about the president and the scandal and what was going on no differently, having their correspondent on Capitol Hill following the testimony. (Yeah.)

And I can skip ahead. The two impeachment trials that took place in the first Trump administration were covered by VOA in Russian. (Oh.) I happened to sit and listen to them in my home. And they broadcast the testimony, the hearings, the voting. It was presented absolutely straight even though at that time Trump was in the White House. So I think this is a tradition that goes way back. Uh, it has been supported at critical times.

I'll give you another very vivid example of VOA. Those may be listening who are older may recall that President Reagan made quite a blunder in 1984 when he thought that the microphone that he was testing his voice was dead, but it actually turned out to be a live microphone, and he said, 'I've just canceled the Soviet Union. We're about to begin bombing in an hour.' That made news everywhere in the United States, on every channel (I remember) and we broadcast it in Russian on VOA just like everybody else, and I know that because the director, I was then the head of the USSR division at VOA, and my news chief called me up at home and says, 'What do we do?' I mean, this is, I mean, in Russian to the Soviet Union. (Hahahah) And I said, 'You know, we have to do it. It's the law.' I did call the director of VOA to inform him that this was... and he says, 'Absolutely this is what we need to do. Now, don't play it 100 times necessarily, but it has to go on the air.' (Yes, yes. Zachary?)

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like people abroad, and particularly in Europe, have a very strong impression of American media like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. But could you explain for our American audience that maybe doesn't have the same sense of its importance what Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have meant for people in these countries?

Yes, thank you. I think that the creation of VOA was to really be the voice throughout the world of US society, of music, of culture, of politics and so forth. Radio Free Europe has a different sort of charge. It was really created with the start of the Cold War, interwoven with the Cold War as part of our effort to confront the Soviet Union, and it was addressed, and its origins really start, and it's very important to understand this, with the millions of people from Eastern, Central Europe, Soviet Union, who fled to the West during and after World War II. They were living in displaced persons camps throughout sort of the American sector in Germany. And George Kennan, who was really instrumental in creating both RFE and RL, and others as well, but he was more instrumental, and said, 'You know, these are people we could put to use. They are eager to do something.' They have a lot of connections. Some, in the case of Czechoslovakia and Poland, had been in the governments before, and in the Baltic states before World War II. And so RFE started first as a voice of Poland outside of Poland, so the idea being that you're in Munich, Germany, but you're creating a Polish broadcaster as if you were sitting in downtown Warsaw, and the same would be true for Czechoslovakia, for Hungary, for Bulgaria, for Romania. That was the beginning of Radio Free Europe. That same model was used three years later to create Radio Liberty for the Soviet Union, and very important to note, not just in Russian, but in the different (Mm-hmm) languages of the Soviet Union.

You know, I like to remind my British friends that, you know, the BBC only broadcast in Russian, whereas RFE/RL, or RL in this case, Radio Liberty broadcasts in Ukrainian, in Estonian, in Latvian, in Lithuanian, in Georgian, (Amazing) Armenian, (Amazing) Kazakh, Tatar Bashkir. (Wow.) You know, I'll tell you, I was in Kazan, which is the capital of Tatarstan. This was obviously in the '90s, and I was introduced at this very important gathering that I had worked at Radio Liberty, and this man comes up to me and he says, 'My parents listened to Tatar Bashkir. We didn't even know that Americans knew we existed' (Wow.) let alone to be able to broadcast in that language. (That's quite a story.) And I think it... and by the way, that has a whole very important tie to the whole decolonizing of the Soviet Union because what Radio Liberty did in particular was gave Ukrainians a voice, Belarusians a voice, Georgians, Armenians, that they would not have at a time when there was Russification throughout the Soviet Union. (Sure.) They kept alive a voice that otherwise would've been muffled.

In some ways they became a substitute radio station for societies that couldn't have their own radio stations.

Exactly. They were, used the term surrogate, which kinda has a harsh tone to me, but it was called surrogate radio. And the idea being, again, that you were presenting a lineup of news as if you were in that city. And by the way, let me give you an example from yesterday. Now we're jumping ahead. We're jumping ahead, I grant you, but Radio Liberty, VOA have all been closed. There's no money coming in. Radio Liberty and RFE broadcasters are, they're in Prague, and there's a good story as to (Hmm) why they're in Prague, which we should get to. And they're working for free, and they're putting out only a website. There's no nothing other than a website, and I looked at their news (Yeah) and their news is what you would expect news to be in Moscow. Uh, I mean in free (In a freer Moscow) freer Moscow. (So they're reporting on the Ukraine war, for example.) So they had who was arrested for protesting the (Yeah) Ukrainian war in Russia, but they also had a whole thing on Alexander Ovechkin winning that. That was one of the lead stories. (Sure, sure. They had- Passing Wayne Gretzky for goals, yes.) Yeah. They had a piece, very straightforward, totally objective on the latest Trump discussions, with any, uh, over tariffs. In other words, they had a lineup of things that a Russian would want to see. (Yeah.) And that's really the core of it.

(And why are they in Prague?) They are in Prague... It's an interesting story to start with. In 1992, '93 with the Clinton administration coming into power, there was a lot of discussion of 'do we need the radios in general because the Cold War's ended, and life is wonderful, and who needs this very important tool of the Cold War?' And the Clinton administration was quite ready to zero them out, and it was Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa who really pleaded with Clinton that we need these radios for a while. (That's so interesting, that's so interesting.) And Havel said, 'Here is a gift to the American people, a building in downtown Prague to commemorate sort of your contribution to our freedom. We're giving it to the Americans for free.' That won the day. And by the way, I can say that the bipartisan support led by Senator Joseph Biden, (Hmm) by the way, Biden was critical in bringing together the Republicans and the Democrats to support the continuation of the radios, but with the proviso that as countries graduated to free media, those services would close. So the Polish service closed, the Czech service closed. In time, the Romanians, Estonians, Latvians, and it was... idea behind it was that through analyzing and understanding the evolution, that when those countries no longer needed an outside domestic voice, then of course that would be the end of it. (Right.) While they needed it, RFE/RL would continue to provide that. That was the understanding, and that's the way it has always been developed.

And just to clarify for our listeners, as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were doing their work in various places, Voice of America continues to broadcast at this time everywhere, basically.

It does, but to, in the case of the Russians, they put together something called "Current Time," which is a joint sort of radio... because the budgets were cut so much, that to sort of capitalize, each side did part of the program. (I see.) So you had a Current Time in Russian where the Prague office would tap into much more of what was happening in Europe, what was happening in Russia. And by the way, from 1991 to 2022, Radio Liberty had an office in Moscow. A functioning news bureau doing interviews, running a normal news bureau as you would expect. It, of course, was closed with the war against Ukraine. But the coverage, of course, continued. The war in Ukraine was one of the big, big stories for the radios that you, both in Ukrainian, and in Russian.

So it's quite clear, and you've certainly described this in great detail in your book, the ways in which the radios, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America, provided information to people in information-starved societies, places where they were restricted in their own media for what they could cover, how many people listened to it as a kind of samizdat, as a kind of secret way of getting around their own censors. Zachary refers to this in his poem. After the Cold War, when the radios continued to operate in different form in Russia, in Kazakhstan, and various places like that, and continued to be used in new places. As I understand it, there was a Radio Cambodia (Yeah) Radio Free Marti for Cuba, right?

And also for Iran. I think one of the things that we have to note is that the young people of Iran are listening to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Farsi. (That's so interesting.) That's a very, very important part of...

And that's my question. How do we measure their effect after the Cold War? How would you describe their influence?

Well, you could always do surveys, of course. The surveys became open, and as we did surveys in general, you could see that the listenership was greater than we had anticipated during the Cold War when you couldn't do surveys. I think nowadays all media is niche media. (Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.) I mean, there's very little that is gigantic in covering. But Radio Liberty, just to take that as an example since I know it better, has always appealed to a certain urban, educated listener. Because a lot of what Radio Liberty put on would be programs on history, religion, culture, arts, music. So it sort of was oriented toward a urban educated listener.

But you mentioned something, Jeremi, that I think is very important to stress, and that, and, and Zachary mentions that in, of course, in his poem, and that is the sort of human rights dimension of it. (Yes, yes.) And I want to come back to that because (Please) there's a great book. I'm giving a plug for Benjamin Nathans's book on the Soviet human rights movement. (It's a wonderful book.) And what he describes is what I would call the "virtuous circle," and by that I mean human rights activists in their small Moscow apartments would put together petitions, pleas, they would have accounts of who had been arrested. Western correspondents would either broadcast or write about that in the West or, or more often bring the documents, the samizdat self-published documents out of the Soviet Union. They would go to Radio Liberty, VOA, BBC, and they would be rebroadcast back into the country. So what was being discussed in a Moscow apartment all of a sudden was available throughout the entire country. Which would then stimulate others in different republics to respond. (Sure.) And when arrests were made, when people were incarcerated, that information no longer was able to go broadly. Sakharov was known primarily because he was on Radio Liberty one way or another every day.

Right. So it's Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet scientist and dissident.

So I mean, it was that "virtuous circle." Now, I will also say that, and, and this is something I'm working on another book, and I have a whole sort of chapter on that part, is the important role that Radio Liberty did for the Jewish emigration. (Yes, yes.) It was instrumental in sort of, what was then called refuseniks, Jews who had wanted to emigrate to Israel or the West. They were denied the emigration visa, which you needed, but they also were fired from work, so they were in this no man's land in the Soviet Union. And that story is very much part of the Radio Liberty broadcast.

That's fantastic. I mean, so in essence, the radios are providing a distribution network (Exactly) for things that you couldn't distribute in these closed societies. Zachary?

What is the state of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America today? I know they're increasingly under threat. What does that look like? What are they able to do now? What are they not able to do?

I would say the tragedy is they've been shuttered. If you go on the VOA website, as I did this morning, the last entry is March 15th. There is nothing after March 15th. It is dead. People are either placed on leave, many have been fired. There is no VOA today. (First time since 1942) Since, first time since 1942. In the case of Radio Liberty, they won an injunction in court, a temporary restraining order, with the judge saying that they should be able to receive their funding. They have not received it. As my understanding is, today's news that I looked at was done by people doing it for free. In other words (Right) dedicated journalists. (What you saw on the, what you described) Yeah (a few minutes ago, yeah.) So that's it. We don't have a voice. We have basically, today, disarmed for nothing. We have, mind you, VOA combined. VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East broadcasters, there's several entities to this, basically have about 400 million weekly viewers, listeners. 400 million. A lot in Africa, a lot in Asia, (Sure, sure) a lot in America. That's gone. (Yeah.) We have left the entire global information space to China, to Russia, in the Middle East to Iran. That's it.

I like to say that the entire budget of all the radios, and they're not really radios, they're media platforms (Yeah) because they do podcasts, they do websites and so forth, the media platforms, the entire of everybody is about a quarter of the University of Texas Austin budget. (Wow.) They are under $1 billion for everything. (Wow.) So we are talking about literally pennies in terms of the US budget. Why they've been attacked is of course part of a much bigger question as to why the Trump administration is closing the Wilson Center, why it's closing other institutions. So it's part of a broad attack on, well, bipartisan national institutions, I think. And in the case of the radios, I call them the radios, but really the media, I think their whole premise is that they are nonpartisan, or they are bipartisan, but preferably nonpartisan. And I think that is something that this administration, which is a topic that gets us onto other issues, is really not accepting and trying to destroy.

There was a really interesting article in The New York Times a day or two ago, I'm sure you saw it, Mark, and I'm sure Zachary saw it as well, about the country of Cambodia. (Exactly.) And how the radios from the US were basically the only source of news, and with those gone now, local journalists have no way to operate. We were not only providing information, we were providing a space for journalists to operate in a society that otherwise would not allow them to do that. And it's really quite extraordinary. Why, Mark, do you think there has been this attack of this magnitude on the radios? As you referred to earlier, it's not the first time. Joseph McCarthy attacked the radios, and as I referred to, Richard Nixon and others attacked them at times. Why now this degree of effort to close these entities which, mind you, are pennies in the national budget? There's no real savings. Why?

So you don't think they're opposed to the media platforms, they're opposed to media platforms that aren't their media platforms?

Exactly. And, but, rather than trying to change it, they just want to close it.

Yeah, that's the surprising thing to me, that they don't do what most authoritarians do which is stack the existing institutions. I mean, you're a scholar of Russia as I am. (Yeah.) This has been the great achievement of Vladimir Putin, which is to take existing institutions (Yeah) and populate them with his cronies.

But that's a lot of work, and that would also, in the case of Voice of America, which is embedded in law to present all sides, you would run into essentially violating. I think that closing it is denying the Voice of America belongs to all of us. (Yes.) BBC, it's like BBC, and I oftentimes told Americans, 'Go on the website, listen to VOA. It's your' (Yeah) 'it's your station.' (Yeah.) 'You should take pride in it.' It belongs to all of us, and I think to close it down is not just a tragedy, it's a crime. It's a type of treason to deny our presence in the global information space.

Hmm. Zachary, are young people, especially those like you who care about politics but also are interested in the media, you're a journalist yourself, Zachary, writing for the Yale Daily News, and involved obviously with this podcast and elsewhere. Do young people who are in this space, do they pay attention to this? Is this an important issue today for your generation?

I think so. I do think that certainly the question of media bias and what are important sort of reliable sources of news matters, but I also think that so many young people aren't aware of this history of the important role of VOA and RFE and all of the sort of important American media outlets around the world. And I think the challenge is to inform people about all the important work that's being done and all the holes that are being left now in media coverage around the world.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've oftentimes, partly because during the shortwave radio broadcast years, of course, VOA was very hard to listen to in the United States, and it was not intended for Americans. (Right, right.) It was intended overseas. Of course, once technology took over and you could watch it, listen to it, I really encouraged people to do it because it's calm, it's normal. The surveys I have seen of media, fact-based, very close to the center, VOA always came out (Yeah) pretty much next to AP. I mean, those (Yeah) were sort of the...

Right, the Associated Press. Yeah, no, I've done probably hundreds of interviews with VOA reporters, and I always found them actually very middle of the road, very attentive to facts over opinions (Yeah, actually.) Mark, we always like to close with a question about how this history that, that you've elucidated so well for us today, how this history, can help us to think about actions we take today. What can we do to make this history not just part of our knowledge base, but part of our citizenship, part of what we do on a day-to-day basis? For those of our listeners who care about having an open, fact-based broadcasting of news to the world and see that as one of the roles of a democracy, especially a large democracy like ours, what can they do to help bring that back or protect that or promote that at a time when it's under attack?

Well, I think first of all, supporting and knowing about these entities, media entities, and they're much more than just RFE/RL and VOA. It also is Radio Free Asia. It's also Middle East Broadcasting. Middle East Broadcasting being extremely important given what's going on in the Middle East. You definitely want to have an American, you know, presence there rather than Al Jazeera and others, I think, supporting it. But in a broader sense, I am encouraging people, and I'm actually writing another book to encourage even more people, to study the radios as part of American and world history. It is so rich in terms of scholarship. It so invites people to look and examine how we function, good or bad, mistakes or no mistakes, but really it's part of it. Fortunately, the Hoover Institution has the entire RFE/RL archive, which would take several lifetimes to go through, but it's there. It's available. It's open. The Open Society Archives in Budapest have tens and tens of thousands of broadcasts that you can dial up from your home and listen to in whatever language you happen to know. So I think it's there to be studied, there to be incorporated into our understanding of world history, American history, and that may lead to a greater appreciation for what has been done and what needs to be done.

Yes. I mean, what always inspires me, I've spent time, as you know, Mark, originally in the archive when it was in Budapest before it was moved to the Hoover Institution. I've worked in it at Hoover, and I've listened to many of the broadcasts, especially from key moments in the Cold War. And it's inspiring, I think, to hear, particularly for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the various emigres covering news in their society, bringing a passion and a commitment to it, and innovating new ways to tell the stories of what's happening in their society. And I think for young journalists like Zachary and so many of our listeners, there's a lot we can learn from this, and there's a lot we can do, even within the constraints we face, to try to tell those stories and use the stories of the past to help inspire us to tell the stories today, we were talking about this earlier, Mark, you and I, before we came on, about what's really happening in Ukraine, for example.

Very important. And the radios covered the war so extensively. I would always look at them every day as part of my daily sort of check on what's happening in the world because they covered the front, they covered... And of course, Ukrainians would be able to, in Russian, explain very easily what they were doing. So I got it fresh from the front. So I think it's very important. But looking ahead, I think right now it's saving institutions because they are disappearing right before our eyes, along with many other institutions, but they are among the victims of this administration.

So that's a call to action, and I think it's a call to action not based on politics. What I respect so much about what you do, Mark, I really do respect this, is that you try to tell the story of the radios in a way that is historical and fact-based. You're not trying to promote one policy or another. You're promoting the most essential element of democracy, which is the fair distribution of information so people can make better decisions. You want an informed citizenry in the US, and in Russia, and in Ukraine, and elsewhere. And the United States has played a crucial role, as you've shown and discussed today, over about 80 years encouraging and promoting and supporting the spread of real information, fact-based information, to audiences that were information deprived. And if we get out of that business today, democracy is poorer at home (Absolutely) and poorer abroad. (Absolutely.) And so all of us need to stand up for this, I think.

Yes, and I think, coming back to Zachary's poem, it is freedom. It is the ability to express your views, and one of the things that I've emphasized in my work on the radios is that it values the individual freedom of every individual, the right to be, express your views, the right to explore, the right to have a say in your country's governance.

Zachary, I think 'cause we're closing on that note, this might be one of those special episodes where we read your poem a second time. Could you close us out with your poem, Zachary?

Sure. Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.

Mm-hmm. Zachary, thank you for that moving poem that I think encapsulates so much of Mark's lifetime of work and contributions and the role of international broadcasting. Mark Pomar, thank you so much for joining us. I encourage our listeners to learn more about Mark and his work, especially reading his book, Cold War Radio. And I want to thank most of all our loyal listeners and subscribers to our Substack for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. See you next time!

This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next...

Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we're going to talk about US humanitarian assistance and other foreign assistance in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is, of course, a major contemporary and historical topic, and we are very fortunate to be joined today with a really superb historian who has written what is the book on the topic now, and so we get to talk about this topic with someone who has spent, I think, about a decade examining how the United States developed the foreign intervention capabilities for humanitarian assistance, what they look like, why the United States does this, and what the legacies are for today. Our guest is Professor Julia Irwin. Julia, thanks for joining us today.

It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

We are too. Professor Julia Irwin is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University. She is, as I said, a leading scholar of humanitarian assistance and US foreign policy, as well as other issues in international history. She's the author of two wonderful books that I highly recommend to all of our listeners. Her first book is really the history of the Red Cross and its role in humanitarian interventions. It's titled Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation's Humanitarian Awakening. Her new book that we're going to focus on today has a wonderful title, Catastrophic Diplomacy, which Julia, I thought could be read in many different ways, yes?

Yes, I was hoping for the double or at least triple entendre.

Yes, how clever you are, Professor Irwin. The new book is titled Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century. I also wanted to mention that among the many other articles and activities that Julia is a part of, she's also the co-editor of a journal, the Journal of Disaster Studies, and again, that's a formidable title, isn't it?

Yes, it's well, hopefully there's more about how to resolve disasters than there is about the disasters themselves, but yeah, we'll be publishing our first issue in June this year.

Fantastic. So, I hope everyone will look up Professor Irwin's work, and particularly her new book, Catastrophic Diplomacy. Before we get into our discussion with Professor Irwin, of course, we have Mr. Zachary's scene-setting poem. What's the title of your poem today, Zachary? ("The Old Colossus.") "The Old Colossus." It better not be about me. All right, go ahead. Zachary.

The world can shake, does often stand not still moves mountains just because it can And wants that we should see its sneers and hear its taunts Like raindrops beating on a window sill The world has hungers we can never fill Is gaseous, spews its steam from fiery fonts Remakes anew our mossy forest haunts, and never ceases maiming Waits to kill. Still, when one shouts from ruined city blocks Still are there others shouting in the dust Still do the voices echo off the rocks And help we shall for listening we must Build up the streets and salvage sunken docks Still Lady Liberty does shine in rust

Wow, that that last line, Zachary, really hits a point that does Lady Liberty shine in rust. What do you mean by that line in particular?

I think the larger thesis of the poem is that an American commitment to, sort of, openness and liberty embodied by "The New Colossus," which is obviously Emma Lazarus' poem on the Statue of Liberty, that that spirit is part of what motivates our desire to help countries suffering from natural disasters, and the idea that even when this idea of liberty, or even when our country itself suffers from the effects of time, of weather, of change, of political stagnation, that we can find a way to help others who are in need and whom we are capable of helping.

So you see an altruistic spirit. (Yes, maybe.) "Maybe," haha. Julia, your book wonderfully complicates that. I read in your book just what Zachary's talking about, a certain benevolence, but many other things at work as well. Why does the United States get so involved in international disaster resistance, particularly in the early 20th century when you really start your story?

Yeah. And, well, let me just thank Zachary for that really poignant and beautiful poem to start us off. You know, it's one of the things I've been studying humanitarianism for about 20 years now, since I started graduate school, and it's, one of the things that interests me most about it, is it's the multiple motivations I think that go into any humanitarian relief operation. Certainly, for the US actors I'm talking about, many of them are motivated by altruism, by a desire to help suffering and reduce suffering. But at the same time that can can and does coexist with political calculations, strategic motivations, economic motivations. So, the desire to sort of assist other countries is for the interests of people who are suffering, but also in the United States' own national interests, and I think the sort of dual internationalist and nationalist, sort of, set of motivations is what makes humanitarian assistance so fascinating to study.

And one of the elements that I think you bring out beautifully in your book that I really didn't appreciate was how in the early 20th century, particularly with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and a series of disasters around the United States, and farther away in Martinique, in Japan, and elsewhere, the United States developed new capabilities. What did that mean for the United States in the early 20th century?

Yeah, so, as I write about in the book, the 19th century saw the United States not doing much in terms of official foreign disaster assistance operations, there were a few, a few and far between, but starting in the early 20th century, we start to really see this burst of responses to foreign catastrophes, and I argue in the book that it's for a few different reasons. First of all, the United States has, in the last couple of decades, before that, really become a world power. It wants to sort of burnish its image on the world stage in positive ways, so this is one of its motivations, but it also has new capabilities. The acquisition of US territories in places like Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone, the Philippines means that you have US troops stationed in these places, and they can and do respond to disasters in other countries, so the sort of geography has shifted. You have a lot more diplomats and consuls in the world who happen to be on the scene and sort of able to both report and assist when disasters happen. They often work with American missionaries who have a large presence in the world as well, and American business interests. So simply the sort of growth and the growing footprint of the United States on the world stage gives it both motivations and capabilities to deliver relief in ways that it couldn't in the 19th century.

Fantastic. Zachary?

How unique is the United States in seeing disaster response as a core part of its diplomatic work during this?

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's really, you know, this is becoming more and more, I think, what we might call an international norm. So you see a lot of other countries, especially kind of powerful, you know, great powers doing similar things. Sometimes, you know, there's an earthquake, for instance, in Messina, in southern Italy, in 1908 and you see the navies of several European powers, as well as the United States, coming to the scene to respond. There's sort of this is the growing willingness of states to provide cross-border aid. By the time you get to the 1920s we actually have some of the first international organizations, both non-governmental and governmental, that are devoted to coordinating international relief efforts, they kind of have their hit and miss in what they can do, but we start to see by the 1920s and into the 30s the evolution of an international humanitarian system that is concerned with disaster relief as well, so the United States is sort of part of this broader trend, for sure.

And one of the other really interesting parts of your book is you not only show the United States as part of an international fabric, including the British Navy and other actors, but also how within the United States there are what you call three pillars. What are the three pillars, and what is the significance of that for understanding the nature of American responses?

Yeah, so when I started writing this book, I think I kind of thought there would be two pillars, so we'll get into that, but the first is really the State Department and its staff, so diplomats, consuls, people who work within Washington and the State Department who are planning the United States, sort of, foreign policy agenda and activities. The second is the American voluntary sector. By this I mean organizations like the American Red Cross, which I wrote about in my first book, which really is the kind of humanitarian auxiliary of the United States for much of the first half of the. 20th century, but also other NGOs, especially later on groups like Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services, CARE, which not only sort of provide aid themselves but partner with the United States government in really kind of powerful ways. So these two organizations are these two sort of pillars, the State Department and its agents, the voluntary sector that partners with the US, were part of it.

And then, as I started researching the book more and more, I realized what a significant role the US military would play. When I started this book, I sort of understood that the military today plays a major role in humanitarian operations, but I assumed this was a later 20th century development, sort of a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War effort to reinvent the military, but in fact, as early as the early 20th century, you start to see the US Navy, especially, but also the Army Marines, depending on if they're on the scene, responding to a lot of catastrophes, the War and Navy Department committing rations, tents, their supplies to help disaster victims, so these three together, the military, the State Department, and their partners in the voluntary sector, are really responsible for cooperating to carry out disaster relief operations.

And who's driving the bus? I mean, it seemed to me, as I read through the book, that at different moments, different parts of the pillars, or a different pillar is stronger than others. Is that true? And how does that dynamic work?

Yeah, you know, I think if I had to sort of... it's the State Department that is a lot of ways kind of controlling the decision. The State Department is kind of making these decisions about whether to offer assistance to other countries, whether it is needed, and honestly, and using their own sort of words, whether it is in the United States' national interests to respond. They're certainly encouraged to do so, and are collaborating with the American Red Cross, especially early on, which is playing a major role in collecting funds and kind of generating support. As time goes on, the government plays a heavier and heavier role, has a heavier hand in making these decisions. So, especially as you get to the aftermath of World War II, for instance, you see a lot more of the kind of impetus coming from from government officials and not simply from from the American Red Cross. But the, I would sort of say that is where you're seeing a lot of the the decision to to respond lies within within these groups.

How do these countries that are provided with American disaster response respond to American help? Is it always welcomed during this period, or are there sometimes tensions?

Yes. Well, there are definitely tensions. And coming back to the title of Catastrophic Diplomacy, I think this is one of the places we see this. You know, one of the things that I think is interesting about disaster relief, and I, is most of these aid operations are undertaken with the invitation or sort of approval of the government of another country, so the United States sort of extends an offer of assistance, and if that government liked to accept it, it does. In general, especially in the early days, a lot of these responses are really major disasters, and kind of the governments and people in general are welcoming whatever aid they can get. I mean, this is these moments of really extreme upheaval, but that doesn't mean that people are simply immediately grateful and desiring American aid, and especially as time goes by, in a lot of cases tensions really start to mount. A lot of the American relief workers I write about act with the best of intentions, and some of them are quite sort of culturally sensitive and aware. Others are not acting with the best of intentions. Some of them are arrogant, some of them are chauvinistic, some of them express pretty significant racial and cultural prejudices to the very people they're supposed to be assisting. So these can and really did breed breed tensions at times.

There were also a few examples in the book where the United States really didn't get permission to extend the aid that it wanted to. There was a famous case in Jamaica in 1907 in which US Navy commander, sort of due to some miscommunications, landed several hundred armed US sailors in Jamaica, which was a British territory, without having the proper consent. This led to this diplomatic uproar. Later on, in the 20th century, there were attempts or considerations, even by the US government, to force aid into countries like China, after the revolution, as well as Cuba, after its revolution, attempting to show people living under communist governments that the United States cared about them through aid, so these very political motivations, these offers were refused by those governments, but you sort of see these, the ability for diplomatic tensions to arise over the issue of aid and unwanted aid, especially.

And that raises one of the key questions I had reading through this. You set up your narrative as if there are a lot of continuities, and you point to some of these continuities, particularly at the end of the book, but there also does seem to be a break after World War II, particularly with the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the creation of USAID in 1961 but even before that, you show that the Eisenhower administration is really interested in centralizing this process of aid and also pursuing development goals. What's the shift that's occurring there?

Yeah, so as I spoke about, sort of at the beginning of our conversation, in the early 20th century, the United States really kind of burst onto the scene as a world power expands its territories overseas as well. In the aftermath of World War II, or sort of during and after World War II, we see this other sea change in American power as the United States goes from being a world power to a superpower. It comes out of the war with the nation, or the world's largest military. It has access, or it has bases, or access to bases in some 2,000 different places, it means it has airplanes and ships stationed all over the world, as well as service personnel, as well as diplomats and consuls, and a lot of money.

With all of this, the United States begins to respond to far more disasters than it had during the early 20th century, far more regularly on a routine basis. It's at the same time that the kind of interest in international development is really coming, becoming a central concern of policymakers. Disaster relief becomes tied in with questions of international development in really interesting ways, not only in the 1960s under USAID, but under its predecessor organizations, things like the Point Four Program started by Truman, the International Cooperation Administration, that started under Eisenhower. So, you do have this growing interest by by both state and military officials in the problems of both disasters and development, and how kind of government power can be harnessed to respond to them.

And to what extent, Julia, do you see that as part of an altruistic, benevolent goal of improving and helping these societies, helping suffering people, maybe even guilt at not having done as much earlier, and to what extent do you see this as an instrumental way of pursuing an anti-communist agenda?

Yeah, and I would say that it is very much both at once. Again, you do have a lot of really well-meaning, you know, aid workers who are really concerned with the people they're assisting, who want to cooperate, collaborate, who want to kind of do things the right way, and to really improve people's lives, because they care about that as a value that they hold dear, but they're working with a lot of people whose primary goal is to defeat, you know, defeat global communism, to maintain US stability and power in the world, there's a lot of sort of private state department memos and correspondence, which are now fortunately declassified for us historians, where they really talk very explicitly about using aid to to counter communist propaganda or to really show the United States good side, the State Department takes a lot of notes on how much aid the Soviet Union is giving to other countries and makes sure that the United States is giving more in as many cases as possible. So, these political calculations are going on at the same time, and sometimes it leads to disagreements, there's fights, sometimes internal infighting between those people who really see aid as an international project and those who see it more as in line with national interests. So, I think that those kind of contests and competitions over the meaning and significance of aid are important to the story too.

I wanted to ask, how does the American public view foreign aid? It seems like during this period that the question of foreign aid becomes much more of a topic of public discussion with the creation of the Peace Corps, etc. How do the American, how does the American public during this period think of American foreign aid assistance?

Yeah, it's a, you know, one of the interesting things about sort of the sudden disasters that I'm really writing about in this book, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, a lot of times they're really perceived within American culture, I think kind of in popular culture more broadly, as these these events that are often considered acts of God, they're they're not the fault of anyone. There are sort of people who are blameless victims for their own suffering. For those reasons, there tends to be less, sort of, less public opposition in a lot of cases to giving at least some immediate aid to to survivors of these types of disasters than there are to other types of assistance. So it's an interesting kind of, there can often be more bipartisan support. That being said, it is certainly not universal.

One of the fun sources for this book was actually reading letters that people would write to, sometimes their congress people, sometimes to the state department, sometimes to the president himself, expressing their opinions about whether the United States should or should not give aid to a certain country, and people are very kind of clear about sometimes pushing for it, sometimes because it's the right thing to do, sometimes because it's a way to show American compassion, other times calling on their elected officials or their representatives to not give aid, because there are problems at home, though there are more important things to kind of focus on domestically, or maybe this country is an enemy of the United States and doesn't deserve, in their words, American aid. So some of these same debates that I think we see today, right, in the 21st century, over questions of a foreign, either humanitarian or even military assistance, really play out throughout the 20th century in the wake of a lot of these catastrophes.

So that leads me to ask a question I know you've thought a lot about, about where your book ends in the 60s and 70s is a period, and it's not unique to this period, but I think it becomes more common, that critics of the United States at home and abroad contend that foreign aid, humanitarian assistance, the Peace Corps, USAID - these are all arms of American imperialism, business interests, strategic interests being promoted in ways that are disguisingly looking like they're about good-natured activities, but really designed to put American influence and dominance in place. What's your response to that?

Yeah, and there is certainly some evidence of that too. For one of the, I think, most kind of clearest examples of this is the US Food for Peace program, which was started in 1954 under Eisenhower, it actually had a few predecessors, but this is really the major legislation establishing what became known as Food for Peace is in 1954. That organization was designed to provide surplus commodities to other countries, much of it sold, but on easy credit terms. Some of it donated for disaster relief and other famine relief things like this. That aid, though, was not simply, you know, that the food was not just, you know, kind of created out of thin air. It was these surpluses had arisen in domestic attempts to solve an American farm problem by subsidizing American agriculture. Long story, but it results in a lot of surpluses. Essentially, food aid becomes a way to help other nations while also helping American farmers and reducing these, kind of, what had become, by this point, embarrassing surpluses of food that were kind of going to waste, so this is one way that I think we see both American and international interests being served at the same time. There are a lot of companies that are involved and are promoting their products and getting government contracts to get their products out there. Some pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are donating types of supplies, food companies as well. So there certainly are these links between the, kind of, supply chain, the humanitarian supply chain, and the US government that make it, there are material reasons, I think, for some of these critiques.

But do you also think that American assistance in many cases has helped people? I mean, it's a very broad question. It's hard to pin it down, but sometimes it seems to me, at least, Julia, that the discussions of American imperialism, although legitimate and helpful, can deny the reality of sometimes this assistance really providing crucial benefits to people on the ground.

And one of the ways I like to sort of answer that question is that it is also just as political not to give assistance. The decision not to provide aid to a certain place or a certain group of people, or after a certain group amount of time has passed, is a political decision in its own right. So I think this kind of decision to give aid, to help, to assist, to make that part of United States foreign affairs identity, it's might even call it its brand, right? There's not necessarily something that is fully nefarious about this, right? And I think again, coming back to one of the points I made earlier, that that complex nature of this, that it can be at once altruistic and benevolent as well as strategic, and kind of calculating that these two things can coexist, is I think really interesting. So, yeah, no, I think that there is, if we had a world, if you, if we imagined a 20th century or 21st century without any American aid, or other humanitarian aid, for that matter, international aid, other nations aid, that world would look a lot different too, and maybe that's not really the world that we want to live in.

Right, well, I think that brings us to the question we always like to close on when we have the opportunity to talk to a historian about the development of a process and a set of activities over time. We now come to the present, and of course, these debates, these issues are with us. The Ukraine War has a whole disaster quality to it. We've seen recent earthquakes in various parts of the world where the United States has been called upon and sometimes has responded with a great deal of foreign assistance, sometimes it hasn't. What are the lessons we take from your book? What would you say to someone who's interested in these issues today, as I know you are, what should we be thinking about when the next disaster occurs?

Yeah, you know, what I try to do in the book is to highlight both, well, one of my grad school advisors called it the "warts and all" approach to history, it's really the good and the bad, and I, you know, rather than sort of painting this this black or white picture, I think there are moments where some of the, the aid workers, the diplomats in my book acted with, you know, ethical integrity, and, you know, did, you know, worked and cooperated with the people they're talking to, and managed to have a fairly effective and ethical response to a major crisis that really did help people. There are others who didn't. They acted for political reasons. They acted paternalistically. So, I think one of the lessons to hopefully take away is that, you know, thinking about this history and what went wrong, what went right, can can help us hopefully learn from those those times it went wrong, and then make it more right, kind of, in the future.

And does that mean the United States should be doing more, that it should be targeting fewer places? I mean, one of the narrative elements is that over time the United States gets involved in more and more places, and you, you imply, you're not, you're certainly not the first to imply, that oftentimes we're getting into places where we have very little understanding.

Yeah, you know, I think some of it comes back to, you know, if we want to kind of be effective, right, aid should not simply be given for political calculations, but we should prioritize the humanitarian considerations first. You know, where are the places that actually have the real need, the people's basic needs, for food, for shelter, for clothing, for and then promoting their dignity, right, should be create prioritized as opposed to making the decisions primarily out of either national interests or political interests, so if we can figure out a way to center humanitarian needs above all, I think that would be one of the best ways to go about it. Not quite sure that we will see that anytime soon, but it would be nice if we can imagine a world that way.

Yeah. Well said, very well said. Zachary. What do you think? I mean, is is foreign assistance, is humanitarian aid, is it something that interests young people who think about international affairs, or people of your generation too cynical about this?

I think, and people are very interested in disaster response, disaster aid, as I think they always have been, but obviously it's going to become even more relevant with climate change and the intense weather events that it will bring. I also think it's a great way to understand this "warts and all" approach to history. I think the topic of international disaster response from the United States is obviously one of a very mixed record, and it's important to be able to sit with those complexities, and I think studying this history offers young people practice doing that, but also a key example of where American presence isn't inherently good, isn't inherently altruistic, but can make a difference, and could make a difference.

Right, and you think, ([unintelligible]) sorry, gradually, sorry? (I said "very nicely put," Zachary) Ah. And Zachary, you think that that idealism is still burning in the hearts of young people? (I think so. I think so.) That's great, that's great. So, our final question, Julia, you've written this book on almost a century of US responses to foreign disasters. I'm just curious, if you think that this is something, this is the story is actually also relevant for thinking about domestic disasters?

Yeah, I mean that's a very good question. And in writing this book, I did sort of have to draw some lines. There's a lot of differences between those domestic and international disaster response, but legal differences, bureaucratic differences, but I think a lot of the same, sort of, broader lessons can can still apply. Why do we? Why do people choose to give? Why does the government prioritize certain states, certain disasters over others? Why do we often prioritize disaster response over prevention or mitigation or risk reduction activities, which could reduce suffering in the first place? These sorts of questions that I think are, come up a lot of, in the book, thinking about international questions apply domestically as well, and apply to a lot of disaster scenarios. So that would be, I think, kind of one way to think about it. There's a lot of really great books out there on US domestic disaster aid as well, so I have some wonderful colleagues working on some of these questions too.

And your answer just highlights why this is so central to our democracy. It's central to the way we think about our place in the world and our foreign policy. But also how we handle our own internal issues and our own internal challenging and, echoing Zachary, in a world of climate change where weather events seem to be more common, how we handle and help people who are suffering in different parts of our country.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and who we, again, include as citizens as people who are, you know, have the right to aid in assistance in times of crisis, too.

Well, Julia, you've given us really a lot to think about. You've written a wonderful book, and I think your discussion here should only wet the appetite of our listeners for more. I encourage everyone to read Professor Julia Irwin's book Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century. Julia, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much for the terrific conversation, I really enjoyed speaking with both of you, and thanks again Zachary for that wonderful poem to start us off.

Yes, Zachary. Zachary, thank you so much, we're going to be thinking about your poem until our next episode of course. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of This is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. See you next time!

This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next...

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we are going to talk about the role of radio communications during the Cold War and our contemporary, uh, international space, the ways in which radio communications from the United States, broadcasting, information, news, updates on the world, and tracking events around the world, the way that has been so central to American policy and intellectual development over the last half-century, and the challenges that we face today, challenges to the continued use of radios, the continued broadcasting of information, and the spread of factual, objective, or near objective news in a world so filled with misinformation and disinformation. We are joined by a good friend, leading scholar, and quite frankly, I think the best person in the world to talk about this topic, Dr. Mark Pomar. Mark is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, and he has written extensively on this issue and worked extensively on this issue. Mark, thank you so much for being with us.

Well, I'm just delighted to be here.

Mark, has had such a central role in our topic today. After teaching Russian studies at the University of Vermont for seven years, he joined Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and he was director of their Russian service in Munich, as well as director of the Soviet division of Voice of America, and the executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting, which was a federal agency overseeing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. From 1994 to 2008, he was the senior executive and president of IREX, which was one of the largest nonprofit organizations funding research in Russia and research about Russia. I was one of many recipients of IREX funding, so it was instrumental in my own research. And from 2008 to 2017, he was the founding CEO and president of the US-Russia Foundation, which was a private US foundation that supported educational programs, exchanges, and most importantly, bringing knowledge across boundaries between these societies. For all of you listening today, I encourage you also to read Mark's most recent book, which is really fantastic. It's very readable. It's based on state-of-the-art research, and it tells the story of Cold War Radio. That's the title. It's a wonderful title. Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, published in 2022 and available at every major bookstore. Right, Mark?

It certainly is. There are actually available audiobooks as well.

Fantastic. So before we get into our discussion of the role of these important institutions and the role of broadcasting information during the Cold War and in the decades after the Cold War and its importance today, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Uh, Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? ("Radio Liberty.") I think that's an appropriate title, don't you? (Yes.) Let's hear it.

Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.

What's your poem about, Zachary?

My poem is about the sort of power of radio and of listening to the voices of Americans and American reporters and journalists and all these American-supported programs across the many sort of political social boundaries that separate our world. In particular, it's a sort of imagining of what it might be like today if one were able to, in Russia or in somewhere in one of the sort of totalitarian countries of Eastern Europe, to listen to a sort of American radio program sort of, like, right on the border, and how it's a sort of, like, bastion or breath of one world in another.

Yes. Yes. Mark, what do you think?

Well, I am very impressed by the poem, and I think you've captured one of the most important symbols, and that is the crossing of the barbed wire that the radios were really created to do, to break down that Iron Curtain that Churchill so properly said had descended. And I will tell you an interesting story that kind of actualizes your poem, if I can. When the Cold War ended in 1989, when Hungary was among the first to really bring down the barbed wire, they gave all of us a piece of the barbed wire embedded in a kind of plastic that you could put on your bookshelf, memorializing the fact that the radios had helped bring down the barbed wire, the actual barbed wire itself. And I have that at home, and I will happily bring it and show it to you. (Wow.) And it's from Hungary, given to all of us as a personal gift.

Wow. Wow. Mark, take us back to the founding of these organizations. Voice of America, I think, is the oldest of them. Maybe tell us a little bit about that, and then how Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty grew out of that or how they emerged as well.

Sure. Well, you know, in the 1930s, by the 1930s, every country had an external broadcaster, big or small, whether it was Radio Moscow, whether it was Radio France, whether it was Nazi Germany, whether it was Radio Canada. Everyone had a broadcaster except the United States, and advisors came to President Roosevelt and said, 'You know, we, we need to set something up.' And he hesitated because there's actually pressure from private broadcasters who wanted to dominate the shortwave broadcasting on, you know, space. But once World War II started, once United States was attacked in Pearl Harbor, those plans were actualized very quickly. And, of course, VOA was brought in as part of the war effort to tell our story. And I think what's very important to keep in mind is the first words of VOA spoken in German were 'We will tell you the news, whether it's good or whether it's bad. You will hear factual information,' something along those lines. Very nicely done.

And what distinguished VOA was precisely that it would talk about military losses, which was then considered quite unheard of. It was really, I mean, we could go on and on about VOA in the early days, but it was really headed by a wonderful American playwright called Robert Sherwood, who was one of Roosevelt's speechwriters. Actually, I think the author of The Arsenal of Democracy (I think that's right) that Roosevelt did. I believe Sherwood was the one who wrote that, and he really molded VOA into a liberal broadcaster in a very, very... and, so we're skipping a little bit ahead, but VOA was very much attacked by McCarthy under McCarthyism as harboring all these dangerous Europeans and foreigners with all kinds of potentially leftist views (Oh?) and so forth. But there's some wonderful stories about VOA in the beginning. Yul Brynner, the actor Yul Brynner, worked for VOA. (Wow.) So did many of the correspondents who then went on to work for CBS and NBC. They got their start at VOA during the war. So I think the story of VOA really needs to be known much more.

Yes. Yes. And how did it provide that, shall we say, more objective reporting at a time of war when there must have been a lot of pressure to tell only one side of the story?

Well, it got itself into a certain amount of trouble because it sometimes broadcast things that neither the Roosevelt administration nor certainly the military wanted to have on the air. So there was always tension. And by the way, that tension continued all the way through VOA's history, that what it would put out was not always what either the White House or the Pentagon or whatever other entity wanted to be on the air.

And why was it allowed to do that? It, as you say, it was attacked, Voice of America was at times by McCarthy. It was attacked in the late '60s, sometimes by Richard Nixon and others. But yet it, it survived at least until recently. How did it survive providing news that was not always in the interest of government, even though it was funded by government?

It had bipartisan support for the most part. In Congress, which is very important. And also in the mid-1970s President Ford signed sort of the charter and the law that embodied the fact that the VOA was the voice of the American nation, not of the administration. (Mm-hmm.) And I think that's very important to emphasize, so that of course every administration had its time in the sun, as it were, and they would, their views would be presented. But the law incorporated what they called "responsible discussion" of those policies, and that would mean that other voices would be presented, so that when the president gave the State of the Union, the party out of power would always have its voice reflected in VOA broadcasts about the State of the Union. That was embedded. When Watergate, and this is very important, when Watergate broke, and I know this from many Soviet listeners who were very, very much impressed by this, VOA covered the Watergate no differently than did any of the (Interesting) news organizations. And to listeners at that time in the Soviet Union, to see the VOA broadcasting about the president and the scandal and what was going on no differently, having their correspondent on Capitol Hill following the testimony. (Yeah.)

And I can skip ahead. The two impeachment trials that took place in the first Trump administration were covered by VOA in Russian. (Oh.) I happened to sit and listen to them in my home. And they broadcast the testimony, the hearings, the voting. It was presented absolutely straight even though at that time Trump was in the White House. So I think this is a tradition that goes way back. Uh, it has been supported at critical times.

I'll give you another very vivid example of VOA. Those may be listening who are older may recall that President Reagan made quite a blunder in 1984 when he thought that the microphone that he was testing his voice was dead, but it actually turned out to be a live microphone, and he said, 'I've just canceled the Soviet Union. We're about to begin bombing in an hour.' That made news everywhere in the United States, on every channel (I remember) and we broadcast it in Russian on VOA just like everybody else, and I know that because the director, I was then the head of the USSR division at VOA, and my news chief called me up at home and says, 'What do we do?' I mean, this is, I mean, in Russian to the Soviet Union. (Hahahah) And I said, 'You know, we have to do it. It's the law.' I did call the director of VOA to inform him that this was... and he says, 'Absolutely this is what we need to do. Now, don't play it 100 times necessarily, but it has to go on the air.' (Yes, yes. Zachary?)

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like people abroad, and particularly in Europe, have a very strong impression of American media like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. But could you explain for our American audience that maybe doesn't have the same sense of its importance what Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have meant for people in these countries?

Yes, thank you. I think that the creation of VOA was to really be the voice throughout the world of US society, of music, of culture, of politics and so forth. Radio Free Europe has a different sort of charge. It was really created with the start of the Cold War, interwoven with the Cold War as part of our effort to confront the Soviet Union, and it was addressed, and its origins really start, and it's very important to understand this, with the millions of people from Eastern, Central Europe, Soviet Union, who fled to the West during and after World War II. They were living in displaced persons camps throughout sort of the American sector in Germany. And George Kennan, who was really instrumental in creating both RFE and RL, and others as well, but he was more instrumental, and said, 'You know, these are people we could put to use. They are eager to do something.' They have a lot of connections. Some, in the case of Czechoslovakia and Poland, had been in the governments before, and in the Baltic states before World War II. And so RFE started first as a voice of Poland outside of Poland, so the idea being that you're in Munich, Germany, but you're creating a Polish broadcaster as if you were sitting in downtown Warsaw, and the same would be true for Czechoslovakia, for Hungary, for Bulgaria, for Romania. That was the beginning of Radio Free Europe. That same model was used three years later to create Radio Liberty for the Soviet Union, and very important to note, not just in Russian, but in the different (Mm-hmm) languages of the Soviet Union.

You know, I like to remind my British friends that, you know, the BBC only broadcast in Russian, whereas RFE/RL, or RL in this case, Radio Liberty broadcasts in Ukrainian, in Estonian, in Latvian, in Lithuanian, in Georgian, (Amazing) Armenian, (Amazing) Kazakh, Tatar Bashkir. (Wow.) You know, I'll tell you, I was in Kazan, which is the capital of Tatarstan. This was obviously in the '90s, and I was introduced at this very important gathering that I had worked at Radio Liberty, and this man comes up to me and he says, 'My parents listened to Tatar Bashkir. We didn't even know that Americans knew we existed' (Wow.) let alone to be able to broadcast in that language. (That's quite a story.) And I think it... and by the way, that has a whole very important tie to the whole decolonizing of the Soviet Union because what Radio Liberty did in particular was gave Ukrainians a voice, Belarusians a voice, Georgians, Armenians, that they would not have at a time when there was Russification throughout the Soviet Union. (Sure.) They kept alive a voice that otherwise would've been muffled.

In some ways they became a substitute radio station for societies that couldn't have their own radio stations.

Exactly. They were, used the term surrogate, which kinda has a harsh tone to me, but it was called surrogate radio. And the idea being, again, that you were presenting a lineup of news as if you were in that city. And by the way, let me give you an example from yesterday. Now we're jumping ahead. We're jumping ahead, I grant you, but Radio Liberty, VOA have all been closed. There's no money coming in. Radio Liberty and RFE broadcasters are, they're in Prague, and there's a good story as to (Hmm) why they're in Prague, which we should get to. And they're working for free, and they're putting out only a website. There's no nothing other than a website, and I looked at their news (Yeah) and their news is what you would expect news to be in Moscow. Uh, I mean in free (In a freer Moscow) freer Moscow. (So they're reporting on the Ukraine war, for example.) So they had who was arrested for protesting the (Yeah) Ukrainian war in Russia, but they also had a whole thing on Alexander Ovechkin winning that. That was one of the lead stories. (Sure, sure. They had- Passing Wayne Gretzky for goals, yes.) Yeah. They had a piece, very straightforward, totally objective on the latest Trump discussions, with any, uh, over tariffs. In other words, they had a lineup of things that a Russian would want to see. (Yeah.) And that's really the core of it.

(And why are they in Prague?) They are in Prague... It's an interesting story to start with. In 1992, '93 with the Clinton administration coming into power, there was a lot of discussion of 'do we need the radios in general because the Cold War's ended, and life is wonderful, and who needs this very important tool of the Cold War?' And the Clinton administration was quite ready to zero them out, and it was Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa who really pleaded with Clinton that we need these radios for a while. (That's so interesting, that's so interesting.) And Havel said, 'Here is a gift to the American people, a building in downtown Prague to commemorate sort of your contribution to our freedom. We're giving it to the Americans for free.' That won the day. And by the way, I can say that the bipartisan support led by Senator Joseph Biden, (Hmm) by the way, Biden was critical in bringing together the Republicans and the Democrats to support the continuation of the radios, but with the proviso that as countries graduated to free media, those services would close. So the Polish service closed, the Czech service closed. In time, the Romanians, Estonians, Latvians, and it was... idea behind it was that through analyzing and understanding the evolution, that when those countries no longer needed an outside domestic voice, then of course that would be the end of it. (Right.) While they needed it, RFE/RL would continue to provide that. That was the understanding, and that's the way it has always been developed.

And just to clarify for our listeners, as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were doing their work in various places, Voice of America continues to broadcast at this time everywhere, basically.

It does, but to, in the case of the Russians, they put together something called "Current Time," which is a joint sort of radio... because the budgets were cut so much, that to sort of capitalize, each side did part of the program. (I see.) So you had a Current Time in Russian where the Prague office would tap into much more of what was happening in Europe, what was happening in Russia. And by the way, from 1991 to 2022, Radio Liberty had an office in Moscow. A functioning news bureau doing interviews, running a normal news bureau as you would expect. It, of course, was closed with the war against Ukraine. But the coverage, of course, continued. The war in Ukraine was one of the big, big stories for the radios that you, both in Ukrainian, and in Russian.

So it's quite clear, and you've certainly described this in great detail in your book, the ways in which the radios, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America, provided information to people in information-starved societies, places where they were restricted in their own media for what they could cover, how many people listened to it as a kind of samizdat, as a kind of secret way of getting around their own censors. Zachary refers to this in his poem. After the Cold War, when the radios continued to operate in different form in Russia, in Kazakhstan, and various places like that, and continued to be used in new places. As I understand it, there was a Radio Cambodia (Yeah) Radio Free Marti for Cuba, right?

And also for Iran. I think one of the things that we have to note is that the young people of Iran are listening to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Farsi. (That's so interesting.) That's a very, very important part of...

And that's my question. How do we measure their effect after the Cold War? How would you describe their influence?

Well, you could always do surveys, of course. The surveys became open, and as we did surveys in general, you could see that the listenership was greater than we had anticipated during the Cold War when you couldn't do surveys. I think nowadays all media is niche media. (Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.) I mean, there's very little that is gigantic in covering. But Radio Liberty, just to take that as an example since I know it better, has always appealed to a certain urban, educated listener. Because a lot of what Radio Liberty put on would be programs on history, religion, culture, arts, music. So it sort of was oriented toward a urban educated listener.

But you mentioned something, Jeremi, that I think is very important to stress, and that, and, and Zachary mentions that in, of course, in his poem, and that is the sort of human rights dimension of it. (Yes, yes.) And I want to come back to that because (Please) there's a great book. I'm giving a plug for Benjamin Nathans's book on the Soviet human rights movement. (It's a wonderful book.) And what he describes is what I would call the "virtuous circle," and by that I mean human rights activists in their small Moscow apartments would put together petitions, pleas, they would have accounts of who had been arrested. Western correspondents would either broadcast or write about that in the West or, or more often bring the documents, the samizdat self-published documents out of the Soviet Union. They would go to Radio Liberty, VOA, BBC, and they would be rebroadcast back into the country. So what was being discussed in a Moscow apartment all of a sudden was available throughout the entire country. Which would then stimulate others in different republics to respond. (Sure.) And when arrests were made, when people were incarcerated, that information no longer was able to go broadly. Sakharov was known primarily because he was on Radio Liberty one way or another every day.

Right. So it's Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet scientist and dissident.

So I mean, it was that "virtuous circle." Now, I will also say that, and, and this is something I'm working on another book, and I have a whole sort of chapter on that part, is the important role that Radio Liberty did for the Jewish emigration. (Yes, yes.) It was instrumental in sort of, what was then called refuseniks, Jews who had wanted to emigrate to Israel or the West. They were denied the emigration visa, which you needed, but they also were fired from work, so they were in this no man's land in the Soviet Union. And that story is very much part of the Radio Liberty broadcast.

That's fantastic. I mean, so in essence, the radios are providing a distribution network (Exactly) for things that you couldn't distribute in these closed societies. Zachary?

What is the state of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America today? I know they're increasingly under threat. What does that look like? What are they able to do now? What are they not able to do?

I would say the tragedy is they've been shuttered. If you go on the VOA website, as I did this morning, the last entry is March 15th. There is nothing after March 15th. It is dead. People are either placed on leave, many have been fired. There is no VOA today. (First time since 1942) Since, first time since 1942. In the case of Radio Liberty, they won an injunction in court, a temporary restraining order, with the judge saying that they should be able to receive their funding. They have not received it. As my understanding is, today's news that I looked at was done by people doing it for free. In other words (Right) dedicated journalists. (What you saw on the, what you described) Yeah (a few minutes ago, yeah.) So that's it. We don't have a voice. We have basically, today, disarmed for nothing. We have, mind you, VOA combined. VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East broadcasters, there's several entities to this, basically have about 400 million weekly viewers, listeners. 400 million. A lot in Africa, a lot in Asia, (Sure, sure) a lot in America. That's gone. (Yeah.) We have left the entire global information space to China, to Russia, in the Middle East to Iran. That's it.

I like to say that the entire budget of all the radios, and they're not really radios, they're media platforms (Yeah) because they do podcasts, they do websites and so forth, the media platforms, the entire of everybody is about a quarter of the University of Texas Austin budget. (Wow.) They are under $1 billion for everything. (Wow.) So we are talking about literally pennies in terms of the US budget. Why they've been attacked is of course part of a much bigger question as to why the Trump administration is closing the Wilson Center, why it's closing other institutions. So it's part of a broad attack on, well, bipartisan national institutions, I think. And in the case of the radios, I call them the radios, but really the media, I think their whole premise is that they are nonpartisan, or they are bipartisan, but preferably nonpartisan. And I think that is something that this administration, which is a topic that gets us onto other issues, is really not accepting and trying to destroy.

There was a really interesting article in The New York Times a day or two ago, I'm sure you saw it, Mark, and I'm sure Zachary saw it as well, about the country of Cambodia. (Exactly.) And how the radios from the US were basically the only source of news, and with those gone now, local journalists have no way to operate. We were not only providing information, we were providing a space for journalists to operate in a society that otherwise would not allow them to do that. And it's really quite extraordinary. Why, Mark, do you think there has been this attack of this magnitude on the radios? As you referred to earlier, it's not the first time. Joseph McCarthy attacked the radios, and as I referred to, Richard Nixon and others attacked them at times. Why now this degree of effort to close these entities which, mind you, are pennies in the national budget? There's no real savings. Why?

So you don't think they're opposed to the media platforms, they're opposed to media platforms that aren't their media platforms?

Exactly. And, but, rather than trying to change it, they just want to close it.

Yeah, that's the surprising thing to me, that they don't do what most authoritarians do which is stack the existing institutions. I mean, you're a scholar of Russia as I am. (Yeah.) This has been the great achievement of Vladimir Putin, which is to take existing institutions (Yeah) and populate them with his cronies.

But that's a lot of work, and that would also, in the case of Voice of America, which is embedded in law to present all sides, you would run into essentially violating. I think that closing it is denying the Voice of America belongs to all of us. (Yes.) BBC, it's like BBC, and I oftentimes told Americans, 'Go on the website, listen to VOA. It's your' (Yeah) 'it's your station.' (Yeah.) 'You should take pride in it.' It belongs to all of us, and I think to close it down is not just a tragedy, it's a crime. It's a type of treason to deny our presence in the global information space.

Hmm. Zachary, are young people, especially those like you who care about politics but also are interested in the media, you're a journalist yourself, Zachary, writing for the Yale Daily News, and involved obviously with this podcast and elsewhere. Do young people who are in this space, do they pay attention to this? Is this an important issue today for your generation?

I think so. I do think that certainly the question of media bias and what are important sort of reliable sources of news matters, but I also think that so many young people aren't aware of this history of the important role of VOA and RFE and all of the sort of important American media outlets around the world. And I think the challenge is to inform people about all the important work that's being done and all the holes that are being left now in media coverage around the world.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've oftentimes, partly because during the shortwave radio broadcast years, of course, VOA was very hard to listen to in the United States, and it was not intended for Americans. (Right, right.) It was intended overseas. Of course, once technology took over and you could watch it, listen to it, I really encouraged people to do it because it's calm, it's normal. The surveys I have seen of media, fact-based, very close to the center, VOA always came out (Yeah) pretty much next to AP. I mean, those (Yeah) were sort of the...

Right, the Associated Press. Yeah, no, I've done probably hundreds of interviews with VOA reporters, and I always found them actually very middle of the road, very attentive to facts over opinions (Yeah, actually.) Mark, we always like to close with a question about how this history that, that you've elucidated so well for us today, how this history, can help us to think about actions we take today. What can we do to make this history not just part of our knowledge base, but part of our citizenship, part of what we do on a day-to-day basis? For those of our listeners who care about having an open, fact-based broadcasting of news to the world and see that as one of the roles of a democracy, especially a large democracy like ours, what can they do to help bring that back or protect that or promote that at a time when it's under attack?

Well, I think first of all, supporting and knowing about these entities, media entities, and they're much more than just RFE/RL and VOA. It also is Radio Free Asia. It's also Middle East Broadcasting. Middle East Broadcasting being extremely important given what's going on in the Middle East. You definitely want to have an American, you know, presence there rather than Al Jazeera and others, I think, supporting it. But in a broader sense, I am encouraging people, and I'm actually writing another book to encourage even more people, to study the radios as part of American and world history. It is so rich in terms of scholarship. It so invites people to look and examine how we function, good or bad, mistakes or no mistakes, but really it's part of it. Fortunately, the Hoover Institution has the entire RFE/RL archive, which would take several lifetimes to go through, but it's there. It's available. It's open. The Open Society Archives in Budapest have tens and tens of thousands of broadcasts that you can dial up from your home and listen to in whatever language you happen to know. So I think it's there to be studied, there to be incorporated into our understanding of world history, American history, and that may lead to a greater appreciation for what has been done and what needs to be done.

Yes. I mean, what always inspires me, I've spent time, as you know, Mark, originally in the archive when it was in Budapest before it was moved to the Hoover Institution. I've worked in it at Hoover, and I've listened to many of the broadcasts, especially from key moments in the Cold War. And it's inspiring, I think, to hear, particularly for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the various emigres covering news in their society, bringing a passion and a commitment to it, and innovating new ways to tell the stories of what's happening in their society. And I think for young journalists like Zachary and so many of our listeners, there's a lot we can learn from this, and there's a lot we can do, even within the constraints we face, to try to tell those stories and use the stories of the past to help inspire us to tell the stories today, we were talking about this earlier, Mark, you and I, before we came on, about what's really happening in Ukraine, for example.

Very important. And the radios covered the war so extensively. I would always look at them every day as part of my daily sort of check on what's happening in the world because they covered the front, they covered... And of course, Ukrainians would be able to, in Russian, explain very easily what they were doing. So I got it fresh from the front. So I think it's very important. But looking ahead, I think right now it's saving institutions because they are disappearing right before our eyes, along with many other institutions, but they are among the victims of this administration.

So that's a call to action, and I think it's a call to action not based on politics. What I respect so much about what you do, Mark, I really do respect this, is that you try to tell the story of the radios in a way that is historical and fact-based. You're not trying to promote one policy or another. You're promoting the most essential element of democracy, which is the fair distribution of information so people can make better decisions. You want an informed citizenry in the US, and in Russia, and in Ukraine, and elsewhere. And the United States has played a crucial role, as you've shown and discussed today, over about 80 years encouraging and promoting and supporting the spread of real information, fact-based information, to audiences that were information deprived. And if we get out of that business today, democracy is poorer at home (Absolutely) and poorer abroad. (Absolutely.) And so all of us need to stand up for this, I think.

Yes, and I think, coming back to Zachary's poem, it is freedom. It is the ability to express your views, and one of the things that I've emphasized in my work on the radios is that it values the individual freedom of every individual, the right to be, express your views, the right to explore, the right to have a say in your country's governance.

Zachary, I think 'cause we're closing on that note, this might be one of those special episodes where we read your poem a second time. Could you close us out with your poem, Zachary?

Sure. Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.

Mm-hmm. Zachary, thank you for that moving poem that I think encapsulates so much of Mark's lifetime of work and contributions and the role of international broadcasting. Mark Pomar, thank you so much for joining us. I encourage our listeners to learn more about Mark and his work, especially reading his book, Cold War Radio. And I want to thank most of all our loyal listeners and subscribers to our Substack for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. See you next time!

This is Democracy. A podcast about the people of the United States. A podcast about citizenship. About engaging with politics and the world around you. A podcast about educating yourself on today's important issues. And how to have a voice in what happens next...

Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we are going to talk about the role of radio communications during the Cold War and our contemporary, uh, international space, the ways in which radio communications from the United States, broadcasting, information, news, updates on the world, and tracking events around the world, the way that has been so central to American policy and intellectual development over the last half-century, and the challenges that we face today, challenges to the continued use of radios, the continued broadcasting of information, and the spread of factual, objective, or near objective news in a world so filled with misinformation and disinformation. We are joined by a good friend, leading scholar, and quite frankly, I think the best person in the world to talk about this topic, Dr. Mark Pomar. Mark is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, and he has written extensively on this issue and worked extensively on this issue. Mark, thank you so much for being with us.

Well, I'm just delighted to be here.

Mark, has had such a central role in our topic today. After teaching Russian studies at the University of Vermont for seven years, he joined Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and he was director of their Russian service in Munich, as well as director of the Soviet division of Voice of America, and the executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting, which was a federal agency overseeing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. From 1994 to 2008, he was the senior executive and president of IREX, which was one of the largest nonprofit organizations funding research in Russia and research about Russia. I was one of many recipients of IREX funding, so it was instrumental in my own research. And from 2008 to 2017, he was the founding CEO and president of the US-Russia Foundation, which was a private US foundation that supported educational programs, exchanges, and most importantly, bringing knowledge across boundaries between these societies. For all of you listening today, I encourage you also to read Mark's most recent book, which is really fantastic. It's very readable. It's based on state-of-the-art research, and it tells the story of Cold War Radio. That's the title. It's a wonderful title. Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, published in 2022 and available at every major bookstore. Right, Mark?

It certainly is. There are actually available audiobooks as well.

Fantastic. So before we get into our discussion of the role of these important institutions and the role of broadcasting information during the Cold War and in the decades after the Cold War and its importance today, we have, of course, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Uh, Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? ("Radio Liberty.") I think that's an appropriate title, don't you? (Yes.) Let's hear it.

Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.

What's your poem about, Zachary?

My poem is about the sort of power of radio and of listening to the voices of Americans and American reporters and journalists and all these American-supported programs across the many sort of political social boundaries that separate our world. In particular, it's a sort of imagining of what it might be like today if one were able to, in Russia or in somewhere in one of the sort of totalitarian countries of Eastern Europe, to listen to a sort of American radio program sort of, like, right on the border, and how it's a sort of, like, bastion or breath of one world in another.

Yes. Yes. Mark, what do you think?

Well, I am very impressed by the poem, and I think you've captured one of the most important symbols, and that is the crossing of the barbed wire that the radios were really created to do, to break down that Iron Curtain that Churchill so properly said had descended. And I will tell you an interesting story that kind of actualizes your poem, if I can. When the Cold War ended in 1989, when Hungary was among the first to really bring down the barbed wire, they gave all of us a piece of the barbed wire embedded in a kind of plastic that you could put on your bookshelf, memorializing the fact that the radios had helped bring down the barbed wire, the actual barbed wire itself. And I have that at home, and I will happily bring it and show it to you. (Wow.) And it's from Hungary, given to all of us as a personal gift.

Wow. Wow. Mark, take us back to the founding of these organizations. Voice of America, I think, is the oldest of them. Maybe tell us a little bit about that, and then how Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty grew out of that or how they emerged as well.

Sure. Well, you know, in the 1930s, by the 1930s, every country had an external broadcaster, big or small, whether it was Radio Moscow, whether it was Radio France, whether it was Nazi Germany, whether it was Radio Canada. Everyone had a broadcaster except the United States, and advisors came to President Roosevelt and said, 'You know, we, we need to set something up.' And he hesitated because there's actually pressure from private broadcasters who wanted to dominate the shortwave broadcasting on, you know, space. But once World War II started, once United States was attacked in Pearl Harbor, those plans were actualized very quickly. And, of course, VOA was brought in as part of the war effort to tell our story. And I think what's very important to keep in mind is the first words of VOA spoken in German were 'We will tell you the news, whether it's good or whether it's bad. You will hear factual information,' something along those lines. Very nicely done.

And what distinguished VOA was precisely that it would talk about military losses, which was then considered quite unheard of. It was really, I mean, we could go on and on about VOA in the early days, but it was really headed by a wonderful American playwright called Robert Sherwood, who was one of Roosevelt's speechwriters. Actually, I think the author of The Arsenal of Democracy (I think that's right) that Roosevelt did. I believe Sherwood was the one who wrote that, and he really molded VOA into a liberal broadcaster in a very, very... and, so we're skipping a little bit ahead, but VOA was very much attacked by McCarthy under McCarthyism as harboring all these dangerous Europeans and foreigners with all kinds of potentially leftist views (Oh?) and so forth. But there's some wonderful stories about VOA in the beginning. Yul Brynner, the actor Yul Brynner, worked for VOA. (Wow.) So did many of the correspondents who then went on to work for CBS and NBC. They got their start at VOA during the war. So I think the story of VOA really needs to be known much more.

Yes. Yes. And how did it provide that, shall we say, more objective reporting at a time of war when there must have been a lot of pressure to tell only one side of the story?

Well, it got itself into a certain amount of trouble because it sometimes broadcast things that neither the Roosevelt administration nor certainly the military wanted to have on the air. So there was always tension. And by the way, that tension continued all the way through VOA's history, that what it would put out was not always what either the White House or the Pentagon or whatever other entity wanted to be on the air.

And why was it allowed to do that? It, as you say, it was attacked, Voice of America was at times by McCarthy. It was attacked in the late '60s, sometimes by Richard Nixon and others. But yet it, it survived at least until recently. How did it survive providing news that was not always in the interest of government, even though it was funded by government?

It had bipartisan support for the most part. In Congress, which is very important. And also in the mid-1970s President Ford signed sort of the charter and the law that embodied the fact that the VOA was the voice of the American nation, not of the administration. (Mm-hmm.) And I think that's very important to emphasize, so that of course every administration had its time in the sun, as it were, and they would, their views would be presented. But the law incorporated what they called "responsible discussion" of those policies, and that would mean that other voices would be presented, so that when the president gave the State of the Union, the party out of power would always have its voice reflected in VOA broadcasts about the State of the Union. That was embedded. When Watergate, and this is very important, when Watergate broke, and I know this from many Soviet listeners who were very, very much impressed by this, VOA covered the Watergate no differently than did any of the (Interesting) news organizations. And to listeners at that time in the Soviet Union, to see the VOA broadcasting about the president and the scandal and what was going on no differently, having their correspondent on Capitol Hill following the testimony. (Yeah.)

And I can skip ahead. The two impeachment trials that took place in the first Trump administration were covered by VOA in Russian. (Oh.) I happened to sit and listen to them in my home. And they broadcast the testimony, the hearings, the voting. It was presented absolutely straight even though at that time Trump was in the White House. So I think this is a tradition that goes way back. Uh, it has been supported at critical times.

I'll give you another very vivid example of VOA. Those may be listening who are older may recall that President Reagan made quite a blunder in 1984 when he thought that the microphone that he was testing his voice was dead, but it actually turned out to be a live microphone, and he said, 'I've just canceled the Soviet Union. We're about to begin bombing in an hour.' That made news everywhere in the United States, on every channel (I remember) and we broadcast it in Russian on VOA just like everybody else, and I know that because the director, I was then the head of the USSR division at VOA, and my news chief called me up at home and says, 'What do we do?' I mean, this is, I mean, in Russian to the Soviet Union. (Hahahah) And I said, 'You know, we have to do it. It's the law.' I did call the director of VOA to inform him that this was... and he says, 'Absolutely this is what we need to do. Now, don't play it 100 times necessarily, but it has to go on the air.' (Yes, yes. Zachary?)

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like people abroad, and particularly in Europe, have a very strong impression of American media like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. But could you explain for our American audience that maybe doesn't have the same sense of its importance what Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have meant for people in these countries?

Yes, thank you. I think that the creation of VOA was to really be the voice throughout the world of US society, of music, of culture, of politics and so forth. Radio Free Europe has a different sort of charge. It was really created with the start of the Cold War, interwoven with the Cold War as part of our effort to confront the Soviet Union, and it was addressed, and its origins really start, and it's very important to understand this, with the millions of people from Eastern, Central Europe, Soviet Union, who fled to the West during and after World War II. They were living in displaced persons camps throughout sort of the American sector in Germany. And George Kennan, who was really instrumental in creating both RFE and RL, and others as well, but he was more instrumental, and said, 'You know, these are people we could put to use. They are eager to do something.' They have a lot of connections. Some, in the case of Czechoslovakia and Poland, had been in the governments before, and in the Baltic states before World War II. And so RFE started first as a voice of Poland outside of Poland, so the idea being that you're in Munich, Germany, but you're creating a Polish broadcaster as if you were sitting in downtown Warsaw, and the same would be true for Czechoslovakia, for Hungary, for Bulgaria, for Romania. That was the beginning of Radio Free Europe. That same model was used three years later to create Radio Liberty for the Soviet Union, and very important to note, not just in Russian, but in the different (Mm-hmm) languages of the Soviet Union.

You know, I like to remind my British friends that, you know, the BBC only broadcast in Russian, whereas RFE/RL, or RL in this case, Radio Liberty broadcasts in Ukrainian, in Estonian, in Latvian, in Lithuanian, in Georgian, (Amazing) Armenian, (Amazing) Kazakh, Tatar Bashkir. (Wow.) You know, I'll tell you, I was in Kazan, which is the capital of Tatarstan. This was obviously in the '90s, and I was introduced at this very important gathering that I had worked at Radio Liberty, and this man comes up to me and he says, 'My parents listened to Tatar Bashkir. We didn't even know that Americans knew we existed' (Wow.) let alone to be able to broadcast in that language. (That's quite a story.) And I think it... and by the way, that has a whole very important tie to the whole decolonizing of the Soviet Union because what Radio Liberty did in particular was gave Ukrainians a voice, Belarusians a voice, Georgians, Armenians, that they would not have at a time when there was Russification throughout the Soviet Union. (Sure.) They kept alive a voice that otherwise would've been muffled.

In some ways they became a substitute radio station for societies that couldn't have their own radio stations.

Exactly. They were, used the term surrogate, which kinda has a harsh tone to me, but it was called surrogate radio. And the idea being, again, that you were presenting a lineup of news as if you were in that city. And by the way, let me give you an example from yesterday. Now we're jumping ahead. We're jumping ahead, I grant you, but Radio Liberty, VOA have all been closed. There's no money coming in. Radio Liberty and RFE broadcasters are, they're in Prague, and there's a good story as to (Hmm) why they're in Prague, which we should get to. And they're working for free, and they're putting out only a website. There's no nothing other than a website, and I looked at their news (Yeah) and their news is what you would expect news to be in Moscow. Uh, I mean in free (In a freer Moscow) freer Moscow. (So they're reporting on the Ukraine war, for example.) So they had who was arrested for protesting the (Yeah) Ukrainian war in Russia, but they also had a whole thing on Alexander Ovechkin winning that. That was one of the lead stories. (Sure, sure. They had- Passing Wayne Gretzky for goals, yes.) Yeah. They had a piece, very straightforward, totally objective on the latest Trump discussions, with any, uh, over tariffs. In other words, they had a lineup of things that a Russian would want to see. (Yeah.) And that's really the core of it.

(And why are they in Prague?) They are in Prague... It's an interesting story to start with. In 1992, '93 with the Clinton administration coming into power, there was a lot of discussion of 'do we need the radios in general because the Cold War's ended, and life is wonderful, and who needs this very important tool of the Cold War?' And the Clinton administration was quite ready to zero them out, and it was Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa who really pleaded with Clinton that we need these radios for a while. (That's so interesting, that's so interesting.) And Havel said, 'Here is a gift to the American people, a building in downtown Prague to commemorate sort of your contribution to our freedom. We're giving it to the Americans for free.' That won the day. And by the way, I can say that the bipartisan support led by Senator Joseph Biden, (Hmm) by the way, Biden was critical in bringing together the Republicans and the Democrats to support the continuation of the radios, but with the proviso that as countries graduated to free media, those services would close. So the Polish service closed, the Czech service closed. In time, the Romanians, Estonians, Latvians, and it was... idea behind it was that through analyzing and understanding the evolution, that when those countries no longer needed an outside domestic voice, then of course that would be the end of it. (Right.) While they needed it, RFE/RL would continue to provide that. That was the understanding, and that's the way it has always been developed.

And just to clarify for our listeners, as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were doing their work in various places, Voice of America continues to broadcast at this time everywhere, basically.

It does, but to, in the case of the Russians, they put together something called "Current Time," which is a joint sort of radio... because the budgets were cut so much, that to sort of capitalize, each side did part of the program. (I see.) So you had a Current Time in Russian where the Prague office would tap into much more of what was happening in Europe, what was happening in Russia. And by the way, from 1991 to 2022, Radio Liberty had an office in Moscow. A functioning news bureau doing interviews, running a normal news bureau as you would expect. It, of course, was closed with the war against Ukraine. But the coverage, of course, continued. The war in Ukraine was one of the big, big stories for the radios that you, both in Ukrainian, and in Russian.

So it's quite clear, and you've certainly described this in great detail in your book, the ways in which the radios, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America, provided information to people in information-starved societies, places where they were restricted in their own media for what they could cover, how many people listened to it as a kind of samizdat, as a kind of secret way of getting around their own censors. Zachary refers to this in his poem. After the Cold War, when the radios continued to operate in different form in Russia, in Kazakhstan, and various places like that, and continued to be used in new places. As I understand it, there was a Radio Cambodia (Yeah) Radio Free Marti for Cuba, right?

And also for Iran. I think one of the things that we have to note is that the young people of Iran are listening to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Farsi. (That's so interesting.) That's a very, very important part of...

And that's my question. How do we measure their effect after the Cold War? How would you describe their influence?

Well, you could always do surveys, of course. The surveys became open, and as we did surveys in general, you could see that the listenership was greater than we had anticipated during the Cold War when you couldn't do surveys. I think nowadays all media is niche media. (Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.) I mean, there's very little that is gigantic in covering. But Radio Liberty, just to take that as an example since I know it better, has always appealed to a certain urban, educated listener. Because a lot of what Radio Liberty put on would be programs on history, religion, culture, arts, music. So it sort of was oriented toward a urban educated listener.

But you mentioned something, Jeremi, that I think is very important to stress, and that, and, and Zachary mentions that in, of course, in his poem, and that is the sort of human rights dimension of it. (Yes, yes.) And I want to come back to that because (Please) there's a great book. I'm giving a plug for Benjamin Nathans's book on the Soviet human rights movement. (It's a wonderful book.) And what he describes is what I would call the "virtuous circle," and by that I mean human rights activists in their small Moscow apartments would put together petitions, pleas, they would have accounts of who had been arrested. Western correspondents would either broadcast or write about that in the West or, or more often bring the documents, the samizdat self-published documents out of the Soviet Union. They would go to Radio Liberty, VOA, BBC, and they would be rebroadcast back into the country. So what was being discussed in a Moscow apartment all of a sudden was available throughout the entire country. Which would then stimulate others in different republics to respond. (Sure.) And when arrests were made, when people were incarcerated, that information no longer was able to go broadly. Sakharov was known primarily because he was on Radio Liberty one way or another every day.

Right. So it's Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet scientist and dissident.

So I mean, it was that "virtuous circle." Now, I will also say that, and, and this is something I'm working on another book, and I have a whole sort of chapter on that part, is the important role that Radio Liberty did for the Jewish emigration. (Yes, yes.) It was instrumental in sort of, what was then called refuseniks, Jews who had wanted to emigrate to Israel or the West. They were denied the emigration visa, which you needed, but they also were fired from work, so they were in this no man's land in the Soviet Union. And that story is very much part of the Radio Liberty broadcast.

That's fantastic. I mean, so in essence, the radios are providing a distribution network (Exactly) for things that you couldn't distribute in these closed societies. Zachary?

What is the state of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Voice of America today? I know they're increasingly under threat. What does that look like? What are they able to do now? What are they not able to do?

I would say the tragedy is they've been shuttered. If you go on the VOA website, as I did this morning, the last entry is March 15th. There is nothing after March 15th. It is dead. People are either placed on leave, many have been fired. There is no VOA today. (First time since 1942) Since, first time since 1942. In the case of Radio Liberty, they won an injunction in court, a temporary restraining order, with the judge saying that they should be able to receive their funding. They have not received it. As my understanding is, today's news that I looked at was done by people doing it for free. In other words (Right) dedicated journalists. (What you saw on the, what you described) Yeah (a few minutes ago, yeah.) So that's it. We don't have a voice. We have basically, today, disarmed for nothing. We have, mind you, VOA combined. VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East broadcasters, there's several entities to this, basically have about 400 million weekly viewers, listeners. 400 million. A lot in Africa, a lot in Asia, (Sure, sure) a lot in America. That's gone. (Yeah.) We have left the entire global information space to China, to Russia, in the Middle East to Iran. That's it.

I like to say that the entire budget of all the radios, and they're not really radios, they're media platforms (Yeah) because they do podcasts, they do websites and so forth, the media platforms, the entire of everybody is about a quarter of the University of Texas Austin budget. (Wow.) They are under $1 billion for everything. (Wow.) So we are talking about literally pennies in terms of the US budget. Why they've been attacked is of course part of a much bigger question as to why the Trump administration is closing the Wilson Center, why it's closing other institutions. So it's part of a broad attack on, well, bipartisan national institutions, I think. And in the case of the radios, I call them the radios, but really the media, I think their whole premise is that they are nonpartisan, or they are bipartisan, but preferably nonpartisan. And I think that is something that this administration, which is a topic that gets us onto other issues, is really not accepting and trying to destroy.

There was a really interesting article in The New York Times a day or two ago, I'm sure you saw it, Mark, and I'm sure Zachary saw it as well, about the country of Cambodia. (Exactly.) And how the radios from the US were basically the only source of news, and with those gone now, local journalists have no way to operate. We were not only providing information, we were providing a space for journalists to operate in a society that otherwise would not allow them to do that. And it's really quite extraordinary. Why, Mark, do you think there has been this attack of this magnitude on the radios? As you referred to earlier, it's not the first time. Joseph McCarthy attacked the radios, and as I referred to, Richard Nixon and others attacked them at times. Why now this degree of effort to close these entities which, mind you, are pennies in the national budget? There's no real savings. Why?

So you don't think they're opposed to the media platforms, they're opposed to media platforms that aren't their media platforms?

Exactly. And, but, rather than trying to change it, they just want to close it.

Yeah, that's the surprising thing to me, that they don't do what most authoritarians do which is stack the existing institutions. I mean, you're a scholar of Russia as I am. (Yeah.) This has been the great achievement of Vladimir Putin, which is to take existing institutions (Yeah) and populate them with his cronies.

But that's a lot of work, and that would also, in the case of Voice of America, which is embedded in law to present all sides, you would run into essentially violating. I think that closing it is denying the Voice of America belongs to all of us. (Yes.) BBC, it's like BBC, and I oftentimes told Americans, 'Go on the website, listen to VOA. It's your' (Yeah) 'it's your station.' (Yeah.) 'You should take pride in it.' It belongs to all of us, and I think to close it down is not just a tragedy, it's a crime. It's a type of treason to deny our presence in the global information space.

Hmm. Zachary, are young people, especially those like you who care about politics but also are interested in the media, you're a journalist yourself, Zachary, writing for the Yale Daily News, and involved obviously with this podcast and elsewhere. Do young people who are in this space, do they pay attention to this? Is this an important issue today for your generation?

I think so. I do think that certainly the question of media bias and what are important sort of reliable sources of news matters, but I also think that so many young people aren't aware of this history of the important role of VOA and RFE and all of the sort of important American media outlets around the world. And I think the challenge is to inform people about all the important work that's being done and all the holes that are being left now in media coverage around the world.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've oftentimes, partly because during the shortwave radio broadcast years, of course, VOA was very hard to listen to in the United States, and it was not intended for Americans. (Right, right.) It was intended overseas. Of course, once technology took over and you could watch it, listen to it, I really encouraged people to do it because it's calm, it's normal. The surveys I have seen of media, fact-based, very close to the center, VOA always came out (Yeah) pretty much next to AP. I mean, those (Yeah) were sort of the...

Right, the Associated Press. Yeah, no, I've done probably hundreds of interviews with VOA reporters, and I always found them actually very middle of the road, very attentive to facts over opinions (Yeah, actually.) Mark, we always like to close with a question about how this history that, that you've elucidated so well for us today, how this history, can help us to think about actions we take today. What can we do to make this history not just part of our knowledge base, but part of our citizenship, part of what we do on a day-to-day basis? For those of our listeners who care about having an open, fact-based broadcasting of news to the world and see that as one of the roles of a democracy, especially a large democracy like ours, what can they do to help bring that back or protect that or promote that at a time when it's under attack?

Well, I think first of all, supporting and knowing about these entities, media entities, and they're much more than just RFE/RL and VOA. It also is Radio Free Asia. It's also Middle East Broadcasting. Middle East Broadcasting being extremely important given what's going on in the Middle East. You definitely want to have an American, you know, presence there rather than Al Jazeera and others, I think, supporting it. But in a broader sense, I am encouraging people, and I'm actually writing another book to encourage even more people, to study the radios as part of American and world history. It is so rich in terms of scholarship. It so invites people to look and examine how we function, good or bad, mistakes or no mistakes, but really it's part of it. Fortunately, the Hoover Institution has the entire RFE/RL archive, which would take several lifetimes to go through, but it's there. It's available. It's open. The Open Society Archives in Budapest have tens and tens of thousands of broadcasts that you can dial up from your home and listen to in whatever language you happen to know. So I think it's there to be studied, there to be incorporated into our understanding of world history, American history, and that may lead to a greater appreciation for what has been done and what needs to be done.

Yes. I mean, what always inspires me, I've spent time, as you know, Mark, originally in the archive when it was in Budapest before it was moved to the Hoover Institution. I've worked in it at Hoover, and I've listened to many of the broadcasts, especially from key moments in the Cold War. And it's inspiring, I think, to hear, particularly for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the various emigres covering news in their society, bringing a passion and a commitment to it, and innovating new ways to tell the stories of what's happening in their society. And I think for young journalists like Zachary and so many of our listeners, there's a lot we can learn from this, and there's a lot we can do, even within the constraints we face, to try to tell those stories and use the stories of the past to help inspire us to tell the stories today, we were talking about this earlier, Mark, you and I, before we came on, about what's really happening in Ukraine, for example.

Very important. And the radios covered the war so extensively. I would always look at them every day as part of my daily sort of check on what's happening in the world because they covered the front, they covered... And of course, Ukrainians would be able to, in Russian, explain very easily what they were doing. So I got it fresh from the front. So I think it's very important. But looking ahead, I think right now it's saving institutions because they are disappearing right before our eyes, along with many other institutions, but they are among the victims of this administration.

So that's a call to action, and I think it's a call to action not based on politics. What I respect so much about what you do, Mark, I really do respect this, is that you try to tell the story of the radios in a way that is historical and fact-based. You're not trying to promote one policy or another. You're promoting the most essential element of democracy, which is the fair distribution of information so people can make better decisions. You want an informed citizenry in the US, and in Russia, and in Ukraine, and elsewhere. And the United States has played a crucial role, as you've shown and discussed today, over about 80 years encouraging and promoting and supporting the spread of real information, fact-based information, to audiences that were information deprived. And if we get out of that business today, democracy is poorer at home (Absolutely) and poorer abroad. (Absolutely.) And so all of us need to stand up for this, I think.

Yes, and I think, coming back to Zachary's poem, it is freedom. It is the ability to express your views, and one of the things that I've emphasized in my work on the radios is that it values the individual freedom of every individual, the right to be, express your views, the right to explore, the right to have a say in your country's governance.

Zachary, I think 'cause we're closing on that note, this might be one of those special episodes where we read your poem a second time. Could you close us out with your poem, Zachary?

Sure. Where the road ends, the line of trucks stops, and the barbed wire blooms like bougainvillea. You can still pick up the signal. You can still hear the voices whispering into the cold night. You can, when the night is still, walking by the fence, hear them on the other side, listening. On the borderline, someone is speaking in rhythms of red, white, blue, and America, and they are saying something simple. Perhaps it is true. This is freedom.

Mm-hmm. Zachary, thank you for that moving poem that I think encapsulates so much of Mark's lifetime of work and contributions and the role of international broadcasting. Mark Pomar, thank you so much for joining us. I encourage our listeners to learn more about Mark and his work, especially reading his book, Cold War Radio. And I want to thank most of all our loyal listeners and subscribers to our Substack for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. See you next time!