A Voice in the Box: My Life in Radio

News Leader

By the 1990s, NPR had recovered financially and was firmly within the circle of the most authoritative providers of news in America. The decade would see the TV networks shift their energies from daily news coverage to prime-time magazine features and celebrity interviews. Taking their place was the Cable News Network, able and willing to cover breaking news anywhere in the world at any time of day. C-SPAN now covered the political news conferences and congressional hearings once available only on NPR. United Press International was in critical condition, no longer a worthy wire-service competitor of the Associated Press. Fine old family-owned newspapers were gobbled up by the chains, making the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal more vital than ever. As for radio journalism, NPR stood alone, offering two-hour newsmagazines morning and evening seven days a week, opening bureaus in the United States and overseas while expanding newscasts to a twenty-four-hour-a-day schedule, and starting a midday program, Talk of the Nation. It’s a good thing we were ready for the nineties because the decade’s events were exciting. I don’t know one fellow baby boomer who expected to outlive the Cold War. Back in the eighties when Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement challenged the Polish government (and by extension, the Soviet Union), we feared they might be crushed as effectively as those involved in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the N E W S L E A D E R 90 A V O I C E I N T H E B O X “Prague Spring” of 1968. Instead, Solidarity’s success inspired the rest of Eastern Europe, and the dominos falling this time were the Communist governments. Pieces of the Berlin Wall were dispersed throughout the world as souvenirs. Independent republics emerged from the Baltics to the Balkans, and the Russian people prepared for the first elections they’d ever known. I have never taken such pleasure in reporting events to an audience. In those early post-Soviet days, NPR’s Brooke Gladstone filed a story on Russia’s Vladimir Orphanage three hours from Moscow. The star of her report was a seven-year-old boy named Vova, whom all the orphanage personnel adored but who had been impossible to place for adoption because he had a number of physical impairments. Rick Stafford heard that story while driving to his job in Cincinnati. “When I heard his voice,” Stafford recalled later, “and when I heard him singing, I just knew he was to be our boy.” Stafford and his wife, Diana, traveled to Russia, adopted the boy, and gave him a new Kentucky home. There was more good news from Africa with the end of apartheid. Majority rule was achieved in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. Unfortunately the stories from the rest of the continent were about war, famine, and disease. The Persian Gulf War brought many new listeners to NPR. We were able to send up to a dozen people to the region, thanks to a war chest amassed by our vice president for news, Bill Buzenberg (with major contributions from member stations such as KCRW in Santa Monica and WBUR in Boston). One of those reporters, Neal Conan, spent a week as a prisoner of Iraq’s Republican Guard. President George Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas provided legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg with a scoop that topped the many she had during the Iran-Contra period. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee holding confirmation hearings on the Thomas nomination were told that an unidentified former associate of the nominee accused him of sexual harassment. Committee members were happy to ignore this information until Nina convinced Anita Hill to go public with her accusation in an NPR interview. Feminists and other liberal Democrats opposed to Thomas’s judicial philosophy demanded that Hill be called as a witness at the confirmation hear- 91 N E W S L E A D E R ing. Hill’s testimony and Thomas’s rebuttal were so dramatic that even the television networks carried those sessions live. Thomas was confirmed , but congressional Republicans never forgot that Nina and NPR brought Anita Hill out of the shadows. They subpoenaed Nina’s phone records, but she fought that action and won. Bill Clinton was elected and had his health care initiative hammered by...