Walter Roberts: Early Years at VOA -- "You Had the Feeling That You Were in the Battle..."

Walter's observations about the early days of the Voice of America -- which coincided with the beginning, too, of the practice of modern U.S. public diplomacy -- are revealing.  He vividly recalls the frantic atmosphere of the war years, and the role of VOA's founding fathers -- Robert Sherwood and John Houseman -- in creating programming and laying the foundations for VOA's future.  He also describes how the British encouraged their U.S. counterparts -- including FDR himself -- to split genuine public diplomacy activities including VOA from any "gray" or "black" propaganda operations carried out by the Office of Strategic Services -- the OSS.    (Walter wrote at greater length about this same period in his 2009 article entitled The Voice of America:  Origins and Recollections.) 

"The Atmosphere was Warlike, as if You Were in the Middle of a Battle."

As far as both the leadership and the rank and file is concerned, I can best describe [the atmosphere at the VOA] by saying that these were people who were deeply dedicated to their jobs and regarded it as a very, very important adjunct to military operations.  These people worked 12, 16 hours a day.  For them, they lived through the war.  You had the feeling that you were in the battle, they were so excited.   I will tell you…on the day in February of 1943, when Stalingrad was finally rid of all Germans, I was in the news desk, and there were tickers there, the Reuters ticker, AP, UP and INS and I remember when the news came through on the ticker that Stalingrad had finally been liberated, the whole of the news desk got up and applauded.  That was later described by McCarthy, “there you are, those were all Communists. “  Because they applauded the Soviet victory.  That was not the case.  The Soviet Union was an ally of the United States, and when they won a battle, it was reducing pressure on American troops.  So you asked about the atmosphere.  The atmosphere was warlike, as if you were in the middle of a battle.  The only thing that didn’t happen you weren’t shot at.  That was the feeling of people they were excited, they were full of enthusiasm.  That goes from number one – Donovan and Sherwood – whom I did not know.  I mean I was, in 1942, twenty-five years old.  I was a very, very junior person.

"...And Don't Take the Train.  Fly!"

When war broke out, on December 7, 1941, the Coordinator of Information run by Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan, later General Donovan, had a subsection called FIS, the Foreign Information Service, and it was headed by Robert Sherwood, who was Franklin Roosevelt’s speechwriter.  He was in Washington, of course.  He had the idea that whatever information program, external international information program was to be created, should be located in New York.   So one day Bob Sherwood took a train and went to New York and personally looked for quarters, and found four floors, on 270 Madison Ave. in New York.  And he rented it. 

Robert Sherwood

He asked one of his good friends, Joseph Barnes, a very, very intelligent person, had been Moscow correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, which then still existed.  Went to Harvard at the age of 14.  As I remember him, and I had very little to do with him, a very, very nice person – he was asked to run the New York office.  But he was not a radio man.  It became very clear to Sherwood that what they could do best would be to start a radio operation, because all of other media, books and leaflets and so on was in some respects minor to having a strong radio voice from the United States.   So around Christmas 1941, he sent a telegram to John Houseman, who was a director and producer in Hollywood, who spoke several languages, was born in Romania of a British mother and an Alsatian father, and asked him whether he would like to join.  And to show you the sign of the times, he told him in the telegram: “and don’t take the train.  Fly!”  Because at that time, flying between the two coasts was an exception, very much of an exception.  If you had to go to Los Angeles from New York, or you had to go to San Francisco, you went by train.  Like the Trans-Siberian train.  [Laughs.]

John Houseman

So Houseman accepted, and flew to Washington, and in the early days of January 1942, went to New York and started a radio program.  And the first radio program – and the dates I am still working on, the exact dates.  But the first program in German – I think, and I say so in my article – went out on February the first, 1942.   Followed by French and Italian.  An English program was added on the eighth of March.  That date I think is firm, that is correct. 

…One of the things that came to my mind, and I’m sure to hundreds of other people who were involved in this – the United States we don’t have any transmitters.  Yes, we did have transmitters, but they belonged to private corporations.  NBC, CBS had shortwave transmitters.   Westinghouse, General Electric, Crosley Corporation -- they had broadcasting mostly in Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America.   But in the middle thirties, or I should say perhaps ‘37, they all started already doing some German broadcasts, and some Italian, and some French broadcasts.  And they continued.  But they were not United States governmental broadcasts.  And one thing for the record, and I’m happy to do this interview.  The term Voice of America was invented by Robert Sherwood.  There are lots of people who claim that they had invented it.  But I know it was Bob Sherwood.   And I think the term Voice of America was used in the second week of broadcasting.  Until then, and I have that from a BBC file, the programs are called “America Calling Europe.”  And that in the three languages:  German, Italian and French.

"You Can't Run a Program that Combines Intelligence and Information"

[The relationship with the British was] very close.  As soon as the war broke out, I remember two Britishers – one from the BBC, and the other one from the PWE, Political Warfare Executive.  After all, the British had already been in this business for two years.  War started in Europe on September 1, 1939, and this was December ’41 – so it’s two years and two months.  And they came over ostensibly to help.  And indeed they helped, beautifully.  But I cannot deny that the British at the beginning and throughout the war, tried to claim an advisory role to us, in both intelligence and information.  And I might add here that…the British were very helpful in dividing intelligence from information.  When they came over and found the Coordinator of Information, and Mr. Donovan was more interested in intelligence work, and particularly in black and gray operations in the field of radio, rather than white – what we hand in mind in the Voice of America – the British made it very clear, and even I think got to Roosevelt, saying “You can’t run a program that combines intelligence and information.”  So, in June 1942, Roosevelt divided the Coordinator of Information into the OWI and the OSS.  From then on the Office of War Information was clearly a white operation; and the OSS was clearly a gray and black operation.  And the OWI was later, via the State Department, transformed into the U.S. Information Agency; and OSS was later transformed into the Central Intelligency Agency.

Walter Roberts: How I Got to the VOA -- "It Wasn't Simple..."

The story of Walter's path to the United States, and to a long career in public diplomacy, is both extraordinary -- a fortuitious daisy chain of small miracles and individual determination -- as well as the reflection of the hard choices millions faced under the shadow of Nazism at the outset of World War II.

"It Is a Little Bit of an Extended Story..." 

It is a little bit of an extended story – it wasn’t simple.  I was 21 years old when the Germans occupied Austria.  I came from a middle class family.   My father was editor-in-chief of an economic weekly and previously a university professor.  What was cataclysmic as far as I was concerned  -- and many of my friends and relatives -- was that the Nuremburg Laws...were extremely broad as far as Jewish origin is concerned.  My father had gone through a rather anti-Semitic era in Austria when he was at the university and one day decided to change religions.  When he married my mother, they were married in a Protestant church.  I was baptized when I was eight days old.  And so I lived my life going to church every Good Friday and assuming that I was not Jewish.  But before Austria was annexed, we all became aware of how these laws were applied in Germany, and for all intents and purposes I was a Jew.  On the day Hitler occupied Austria, I was prohibited from going to the university.  It was a Friday evening and my father didn’t go to work the next Monday. 

...The question was not how to get out of Austria.  The question was how to get into another country.  And all possibilities were basically closed.  My father, when Hitler came to Germany, was a rather prescient man.   So as early as when I entered high school, he sent me to England.  And then I took even two semesters in 1935 -36 in the law school in London and obviously made a good impression on one of the professors, a professor of Roman Law.  So when Hitler came to Austria, I wrote this professor whether he could help me get back into England.  He knew about a rather generous scholarship at Trinity College at Cambridge University.  He thought that I should apply for that and he would give his stamp of approval.  By God, I won the scholarship and was able to get a British visa, and therefore able to go to England.  

"So I Got a Telephone Book of New York, and Wrote Down a Hundred Names"

...The quota number for Austrians [to enter the United States] was very small.   The quota numbers were assigned on the basis of the census in the United States:  how many Austrians lived in the United States, how many Germans, how many Czechs and so on...The United States did not recognize the annexation of Austria, but in one respect it did.  It combined the German and the Austrian quotas, which was of great help to Austrians because the Germans had almost exhausted – I mean this was ’38, five years of Nazi regime, most of the people from Germany who wanted to go to the United States had gone by that time – so it was to the great advantage of Austrians.   The question was how to get into the United States to prove that you have enough means to live in the United States.  So somebody had to sign what was called an affidavit of support.   So I got a telephone book of New York, and I wrote down a hundred names, and wrote letters – about a hundred.  Ninety-seven did not reply.  Three of them replied and said they didn’t have enough means to support me.  But one of them said that he knows a dentist in his house who said he would like to sponsor anybody from overseas, from Germany or Austria.  And so he mentioned my name to him; he said “why not?” 

"It Was an Enormous Decision..."

So I was in England in my first year, going for a Ph.D.  Mind you, I was by that time twenty-three years old and had no degree.  I was denied a degree in Austria but Cambridge University regarded me as a postgraduate student and allowed me to go for my Ph.D.  In the spring of 1939, I got a message from the American Embassy in London that my quota number had been reached, and that my affidavit of support by [the New York dentist] is OK and I should go through a certain medical exam and come down to London and pick up my visa.  It was an enormous decision.  Do I go to the United States or do I sort of hitch my star to a British education and a British future?  I decided to go to the United States. 

...I had a girlfriend in Vienna, who had an uncle in Chicago, and she left for Chicago before I even went to England.  And we stayed in touch.  I arrived in the United States on the fifteenth of August of '39, two weeks before the outbreak of war in Europe.   We got married on the day of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which made it very clear that war would break out any day.  And indeed it did, on September 1, 1939.  So I had to make a decision.  Do I throw all of this away in England, and start anew here in the United States – or should I go back to England?  

There was a very, very unknown clause in the immigration law that allowed an immigrant to leave the country for one year, which could be extended to 18 months.  So I persuaded my new wife to go with me to England.  This was regarded by everybody in the United States whom I knew, American or foreigner who had just come to America, as the most idiotic thing you can do:  you travel in wartime from the United States to England.   But we went on an American ship, spent the next year in England, came back to the United States in June of 1940...John Harvard is a Cambridge graduate, so there is some sort of a relationship between Cambridge and Harvard, and Cambridge wrote to Harvard that they would like me to spend a third year of the PhD program at Harvard.  Which was granted.  But where was the money?  There were British Treasury regulations that did not allow Cambridge University, or rather Trinity College, to transfer my scholarship.  But the Dean of the Harvard Law School told me, one day,  I may have a job for you.  And there was a famous German-Austrian professor, with the name of [Hans] Kelsen, who wrote the Austrian constitution of 1919, who was aprofessor at Berkeley, and who came on a two-year assignment to Harvard.  And his English wasn’t very good.  And he and Harvard Law School obtained a Rockefeller fellowship; and I got that Rockefeller fellowship. 

"I Answered in the Affirmative..."

I finished the third year  -- almost –- but as I said in an article that I recently published, sometime between Pearl Harbor and Christmas, I met a professor at Harvard, a famous man, William Langer, German history, who asked me whether I knew German.  And I answered in the affirmative.  And he said:  Would you like to work for the United States government?  And I said certainly.  He said:  You will hear from us.  As I later learned, Langer immediately after Pearl Harbor signed up with the Coordinator of Information, in the intelligence area.  When I heard about it, I assumed I would be asked to join his department.  But that was not the case.  They wanted me to go to New York, where the foreign information service, which was part of the Coordinator of Information, was located.  And I was asked, in my first interview there, whether I could reconstruct the propaganda directive of the German Propaganda Ministry, Dr. Goebbels and company, as to what was being said every week to the German people, to rally them and to make them more interested in the war, be more pro-war.  I asked for certain documents that I needed, and they were supplied through the American Legation in Bern, Switzerland, like the internal broadcasts in Germany, and the main editorials of Nazi newspapers and so on.   And I reconstructed that.  And that seemed to have been satisfactory.  And I was hired.  This is how I got to the Voice of America.