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that staffers should broadcast only a pOSItive vIew of the Reagan
Administration.
For Buckley I had great respect and affection-he was a thoughtful
man who had the rare quality of being a good listener-but I felt that
he was caught in a managerial no-man's-land. On one side was the ener–
getic Shakespeare, who was deeply involved in the running of RFE/RL;
on the other side were the independent-minded Georges-Urban and
Bailey-who, it was rumored, went directly to Shakespeare when they
had a complaint. I also think Buckley was pained by the many factions
he encountered in Munich, and by the controversy over RL's broadcast–
ing. I suspect that he was glad to leave RFE/RL in 1986, when he
became a federal judge on the Court of Appeals.
By the end of 1986, the key members of the original Reagan team had
departed. Shakespeare became Ambassador to Portugal, and the two
Georges left to write books. The new Board chairman, Steve Forbes,
took the same line toward the Radios as Shakespeare, but he was more
tactful. To replace Buckley he hired Eugene Pell, a former television cor–
respondent for NBC who at the time was the director of the Voice of
America. The Radios, it seemed to me, were now in the hands of those
leaning toward the realist view.
I was now out of the management loop, but
J
landed another job at
the Radios-becoming the head of the Washington office of the Research
Institute. For the next seven years I edited a newsletter that was a digest
of reports from the institute. I also wrote articles about foreign policy. [n
1988 I published a piece in the
National interest
that took a skeptical
look at the realist U.S. policy of "differentiation" in Eastern Europe,
which mainly meant giving Romania Most Favored Nation trade status
in order to reward it for being less under Soviet influence than other
Eastern bloc countries (one observer spoke of Romania's "semi-indepen–
dent foreign policy"). I argued that the policy had not shown any results,
for Romania remained a brutally repressive regime that was not nearly
as free from Soviet influence as Ceausescu's propaganda maintained.
In the article I also criticized the assumption, which was widespread
among anti-anti-communists, that Cold Warriors suffered from what
Jimmy Carter called "an inordinate fear of communism."
If
that were
the case, then why in the
I950S
did the Eisenhower administration
reward Tito for breaking with Stalin-giving Yugoslavia aid, trade cred–
its, and arms? The Eisenhower administration, I said, decided
not
to set
up a Yugoslav Service at RFE.
I also wrote a piece about Soviet health care. One of the standard
arguments of anti-anti-communists was that the Soviet Union was a
