80
PARTISAN REVIEW
A new director of RL was hired a few months before [ joined the
Radios: George Bailey. We became friends. Bailey was a great bear of a
man who spoke a dozen languages fluently. His career, which he
recounts in his exuberant book,
The Germans,
was fascinating. He was
a former college boxer who served as an American liaison officer with
the Red Army during World War II and was a translator when the Ger–
mans surrendered to the Soviet army in
J945.
After the war he worked
as a journalist for the
Reporter
magazine and later for the West German
publishing firm of Axel Springer-where he provided financial support
for
Kontinent,
a magazine of Russian literature and thought that was
published in English and Russian.
Bailey greatly admired Russian culture, and was deeply disturbed by
the suffering the Russian people had endured in the twentieth century.
Some of his detractors at the Radios said that he was a soft touch when
it came to Russians-he would hire any Russian emigre who needed a
job, and he wouldn 't fire Russian staffers even if they were drunk all the
time.
The more serious charge was that Bailey allowed Russian nationalist
employees to air anti-Western, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic pro–
grams. The controversy was connected to the controversy in th e West
about the political views of Solzhenitsyn, whose speeches were often
broadcast on the Russian Service. Solzhenitsyn, a Russian nationalist,
certainly had strongly attacked the West, but was he also anti-Semitic
and antidemocratic? There was no consensus on this question.
Bailey denied the charge that he had broadcast anti-Semitic and anti–
democratic programs. He also argued that there was a difference
between Russian nationalism and Russian ultra-nationalism; the former
point of view deserved to be aired on the Radios but not the latter. Two
respected journalists, however, said that some programs on the Russian
Service were tainted by ultra-nationalism. [n response to these allega–
tions, as well as to complaints by a number of Jewish staffers who
worked for the Russian Service, a congressiona l committee investigated
the Radios in 1984, but found no evidence of anti-Semitic broadcasts.
Another investigation by the General Accounting Office came back with
the same verdict, though it did call for more controls over broadcast
content. But the controversy refused to go away. Representative
Lawrence Smith, a Democratic congressman from Florida, charged that
RFE/RL broadcast extremist, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic pro–
grams. Most damaging was the report written for Helsinki Watch, a
respected organization, by one of RL's own freelancers, Ludmilla Alex-
