STEPHEN MILLER
79
I stressed that in making these recommendations I was not trying to
politicize the Radios.
I also told Buckley that there should be more news reporters assigned
to covering the U.S. He agreed, and soon I was given the title of Director
of American Programming. I assembled a staff of four young journalists
to write feature stories about life in America, especia ll y about entrepre–
neurs, nonprofit organizations, and grassroots political activity. The ven–
ture was not successful because many language services did not use the
articles. The "Euro-ist" outlook still prevailed in Munich. And since the
articles were not hard news, the language services were not required to
use them, despite Buckley's recommendation. After a year this venture
died a quiet death when three of my four journalists left for other jobs.
But the daily budget was revamped and it now included far more news
about the U.S. and a much wider spectrum of political opinion.
My job, it became clear to me, would never be well-defined, since it
depended greatly on the tasks that Buckley-and Shakespeare-would
assign me. Sometimes it seemed as if my main job was interviewing job
candidates. However, l did not playa major role in the hiring of George
Urban, who became director of RFE roughly a year after 1 arrived.
Urban replaced Jim Brown, who quit several months after Buckley
became president, citing "political differences with the way the Reagan
administration is now directing the radio.... " I approved of Brown's
departure-not because
I
disliked him, but because he was an unrecon–
structed "Euro-ist" who thought that news about Eurocommunists
deserved more coverage than news about the U.S.
Urban, a Hungarian native who had lived in Britain for many years,
seemed to be a good replacement; he was a Reaganite who was knowl–
edgeable about Eastern Europe. I admired his extended interviews of
distinguished European and American intellectuals, which were broad–
cast on the Radios and published in
Encounter
magazine. Yet Urban
turned out to be a poor director because he made enemies unnecessar–
ily. In a memoir about RFEI RL,
Radio Free Europe and the Pursuit of
Democracy:
My
War Within the Cold War,
Urban says that he made
enemies because of his "reputation for not suffering communists,
appeasers, and fools gladly." Arguing that the Radios "stood for a new
genre of psychological and political warfare," he saw himself as a gen–
erallecturing to the troops. He ran the morning staff meetings in a high–
handed manner, belabored the obvious by lecturing about the evils of
communism, and made petty objections to the language of scripts. Any–
one who disagreed with him was a fool or an appeaser. Or both.
