In the mid-1950s, I landed my first job as a paid journalist with the former Newark Evening News in New Jersey. That was nearly five years before my first encounter with America’s Voice. I can recall distinctly, as an overnight copy clerk with the News, stripping the wires and finding time on my hands around 3:00 A.M., when I sauntered into the office of the Old Man, the publisher, who seldom kept such hours, of course. There, in the piercing beam of a distant street light, the words of John Ruskin were framed in a plaque above the Old Man’s...

Imagine the sound of a million voices. A million people clamoring for a dialogue with their government and democratic reforms. It’s just past dusk in Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital of Beijing. It’s a sultry May evening in 1989, and many of the demonstrators in the huge plaza are camped out in tents or makeshift shelters. They’ve been here for days as their numbers have swelled to epochal proportions.

From the ancient Forbidden City overlooking the square, one can see smoke curling skyward from bright campfires on the dark cobblestones in the vast plaza. These splotches...

During the first decade, the struggle to get it straight was chaotic and at times heroic. The Voice of America went on the air seventy-nine days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II, the very reason for VOA’s creation. Then, after the century’s most terrible war, there was demobilization and the advent of the nation’s longest struggle “for the mind of mankind,” the Cold War. The Voice survived its first dozen years, severely battered but intact.

The pressures on the Voice were intense:

Internal pressures, as independent-minded, but extraordinarily talented...

The next dozen years at the Voice were ones of rebuilding in the wake of the McCarthy debacle. Bob Goldmann, who advanced to become chief of VOA News during that time, explained: “The journalists began to gain influence, but we struggled all along against actual or feared State Department pressures. It was a two-front struggle, really. On one front was State, the external struggle. The other was internal, against the mostly Eastern European language services within our own organization who wanted excessive anticommunist programming at a time we were emerging from this.”¹

It was a turbulent period. The Eisenhower administration’s...

I will begin with a personal account from my own years as a VOA foreign correspondent. It was back in the Paleozoic era, journalistically, long before satellite telephones, laptops, or even consistently reliable transoceanic telephone communications in zones of conflict. It was September 1970.

My assignment: to travel from home base in Athens to Cairo for coverage of the emergency Arab summit called by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to end the bloody civil war in Jordan between King Hussein’s Bedouin army and the Palestinian fedayeen, led by Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat.

The king’s men had prevailed, it...

Take a drive in the countryside southeast of Greenville, North Carolina, at dawn. Somewhere near Hams Crossroads and the village of Blackjack, deer occasionally wander out of the woods and onto the meadows, less than an hour’s drive from the Atlantic coast. It’s an area of cypress swamps, tobacco farms, and cotton fields. The Tar River snakes through the land nearby. As the sun rises above the Piedmont plain, you see mighty steel towers right in the middle of nowhere looming high in the heavens above the flatlands. These are high-frequency (HF) shortwave antennas. Some jut nearly 400 feet into...

It is what appears to be an ordinary rainy Monday morning at America’s Voice to the millions. The newsroom that never sleeps is rewriting the overnight stories as the sun sets in Asia. The broadcast staffs begin to drift in to prepare the broadcasts for noon, when thirteen languages will be on the air simultaneously. They “read in” (look at the news already on the wires) and set about their writing and production labors.

One can almost sense the pulses of a million news bits and information bytes this overcast morning. The reports are coming in from all continents and...

At home and abroad, VOA’s struggle to get it straight accelerated in the late 1960s and the 1970s. As we have seen, there were sustained clashes over content between the diplomats and the journalists. The conflict extended to the far corners of the Earth, and as Doug Roberts’s experience in southern Lebanon illustrated, it coincided with (some would say was exacerbated by) the emergence of a much-energized VOA news operation and the presence of more VOA correspondents abroad than ever before. Passage of the charter as law was an important landmark. Gradually, foundations were firming up for the news and...

Ironically, the VOA Charter, like the institution whose spirit it reflected, at first was one of America’s “best kept secrets.” There was quiet jubilation at the Voice on the afternoon it was signed into law. But there was no media reporting of the event, no mention of it in White House press releases. It was not until a front-page story in the Washington Post in August 1976 that the charter’s significance became widely known.¹

VOA director Kenneth R. Giddens maintained in that article that Public Law 94-350 set a new legal standard: “Now we can say: ‘This is the way...

One week after the release of the hostages held in Iran and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, there was a warm staff send-off for VOA’s last director under the Carter administration, Mary G. F. Bitterman of Hawaii. In her gentle way, she counseled: “If there’s one thing the people at the Voice of America have got to concentrate on, it’s how good they are, and the importance of their work, and how critical your efforts are to the people of the world, and my strong conviction that you must stand bold and tall. … There’s an old Irish wish which I wish...

It was August 1991, nearly two years after the Berlin Wall tumbled and signaled the end of the Soviet empire. VOA’s Reuel Zinn, a tall, lanky, ceaselessly energetic radio recording engineer whose belief in America’s Voice was total, was on temporary duty in Moscow. It was shortly after the aborted coup against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. One day, Reuel told his taxi driver that he worked for VOA. The driver took him at once to a vast plaza in front of Parliament, known as the Russian White House. There, on the wall near the base of the building, were hand-printed...

Straight talk to Africa from America’s Voice evolved over several decades. In early 1962, Edward R. Murrow, director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), traveled throughout Africa and became convinced of the dire need for news and information in a continent just then emerging from colonial rule. The fledgling Africa Division of the Voice, established three years earlier, thus was reinforced because of fresh interest at the top.

I can recall attending meetings of the new division, in my role as a regional editor for Africa in the Worldwide English Division. Our perspectives were quite different. Worldwide English was...

In early October 1991, Prince Norodom Ranaridh of Cambodia visited the Voice of America. He met with Director Chase Untermeyer. “If I am speaking English to you today,” he said, “it is due to the VOA.” The prince explained that he had been a faithful listener to Special English since arriving in exile in Thailand eight years earlier. He added that he had to learn the language to work with leaders and staff in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).¹

To listeners in much of the world, learning English is a daunting task because it is a fluid, constantly...

Music is the universal language, ideal for a global broadcast network. At VOA, it has taken many forms over the years. One of the Voice’s first directors of music, Bess Lomax, recalled in 1945: “An especially interesting bit of testimony has come to us from the leader of a group of Frenchmen who had been smuggling allied fliers out of France. While listening to the radio on a ship carrying him to the United States, he heard Yankee Doodle. He jumped up and said: ‘That is the song that kept us alive during the occupation. That was the one radio...

In the mid-1990s, a National Geographic television crew made a journey to the high plains of Tibet, close to the roof of the world. It was a journey filled with sights, sounds, and pictures endlessly fascinating to a Western video production team. One of their most vivid memories was a visit to the vast kitchen of the Drebung monastery, high in the hills above the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. The room had a vaulted ceiling and echoed with sonorous chants. It was cavernous, an ancient mirage and ideal documentary material. Buddhist monks in saffron-colored sashes were stirring tea in huge black...

“The impermanance of things”—John Buescher’s eloquent phrase—is also an apt description of one of the world’s most volatile regions: the Middle East. Perhaps that’s one reason Arabic at the turn of the century was second only to English as an internationally broadcast language.¹

The year the Cold War really ended, 1991, the United States waged its first hot war since Vietnam. The Persian Gulf crisis and war lasted for seven months—from August 2, 1990, when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, until February 28, 1991, when his forces were driven out after a six-week air and...

History has a curious way of framing things. When geopolitics and the multimedia world of the 1990s turned so many things upside down, those who previously stifled the free flow of information suddenly, themselves, became utterly dependent on the very sources they once had tried to block.

Mikhail Gorbachev, a captive of Soviet hardliners and isolated in a Black Sea villa during the aborted coup of 1991, had his aides rig up a shortwave radio to find out what was going on. He later credited the BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and VOA with keeping him abreast of events...

The final two decades of the twentieth century—from the dawn of the Solidarity movement in Poland to the reorganization of America’s overseas information program—culminated in significant changes in U.S. international broadcasting. Just a dozen weeks before the year 2000, the Voice of America and the other publicly funded overseas civilian networks achieved organizational (or nominal) independence.

The endgame, however, was strikingly different from VOA’s very public, failed autonomy struggle of the 1970s. It began with the activities of opposition movements in Communist Eastern Europe and ended with a post–Cold War review of all of America’s overseas information...

As the Voice marked its sixtieth anniversary, it remained as Jeffersonian as ever in its resolve to report events in what John Chancellor had called “the dark corners of the world.” It covered wars, disease, natural disasters, and human rights violations everywhere, striving to be both a town crier to the world and “an alarm bell of civilization.” It was never an easy task. Rung carelessly, the “alarm bell” could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In Bernie Kamenske’s memorable phrase, it was not only a struggle to get it straight. It was a struggle not to get it wrong.

The standard—...

You have seen in chapter 1 how the lady with the lamp, shining over New York Harbor, inspired the prodemocracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. The light of her torch attracted several generations of VOA broadcasters or their parents as well. You do not have to go to detention centers in China, remote reaches of Africa, or other dark corners of the world to hear descriptions of war, famine, and tyranny by people who experienced it firsthand and were driven, against great odds, to escape it. Wander around the halls of America’s Voice near the foot of Capitol Hill in Washington,...

The most frequently asked question about the Voice of America in the 1990s was: Why is VOA still needed? The Cold War is over.

The answer came swiftly, as the new century dawned, on a bright and beautiful Tuesday morning in the second week of September 2001. Within just two hours, about 3,000 innocent civilians were killed, including Americans and those of more than eighty nations. Terrorists had hijacked four commercial airliners, including one in the skies over Pennsylvania; toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; and destroyed a section of the Pentagon outside...

The appetite for accurate world and U.S. news and information is time-less, as the campaign against terrorism—military and diplomatic—has so vividly reminded us. It is incalculably greater in the twenty-first century than it was at the founding of the republic or even when the Berlin Wall tumbled down. Long before the invention of radio and long before the Cold War, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of the power of facts and ideas to transform lives. VOA has tried to embody that principle for more than six decades.

With the nation’s support, the Voice’s burden...