Annotations for Speakers: Mark Pomar

Well, I'm just delighted to be here.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.