[Swprograms] Former RFE Director Brown Obituary

[John Figliozzi <jfiglio1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I haven't seen this individual's passing noted anywhere in the  
shortwave press.  I think it deserves attention given Mr. Brown's  
important contributions.

John Figliozzi

----------------------




December 7, 2009

James F. Brown, Radio Free Europe Chief, Dies at 81

By DENNIS HEVESI
James F. Brown, who as the director of Radio Free Europe in the early  
1980s played a seminal behind-the-scenes role in the rise of the  
Solidarity movement, which eventually toppled the Communist Party in  
Poland, died in Oxford, England, on Nov. 16. He was 81 and lived in  
Oxford.

The cause was an infection after a broken leg, his wife, Margaret, said.

Although he was a British citizen, Mr. Brown was named director of  
Radio Free Europe, a network financed by the American government, in  
1978, bringing a deep knowledge of Eastern European history to the  
job. He was director until 1984, when he resigned because of  
disagreements with the Reagan administration.

Based in a white stucco building on the edge of the fashionable  
English Gardens section of Munich, Radio Free Europe was started in  
1951 with the intent of undermining Communist regimes in five Soviet- 
bloc countries: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and  
Poland. Its broadcasters were mostly exiles from those countries.

Until 1972, Radio Free Europe and its sister network, Radio Liberty,  
were covertly financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Radio  
Liberty, which Mr. Brown did not lead, broadcast into the Soviet  
Union. When the C.I.A.’s role was exposed, Congress made the networks  
quasi-governmental agencies with an independent board of directors.

In their early years Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts were hard-edged,  
emphasizing the likelihood of Communism’s impending demise. That  
changed after Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in November 1956,  
crushing the Hungarian revolution.

“Just prior to and during the revolution, R.F.E. did broadcasts that  
were incendiary, very polemical,” Arch Puddington, the author of  
“Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and  
Radio Liberty” (University of Kentucky, 2000), said Thursday. “After  
the revolution collapsed, there were investigations, leading to a  
change in the tone of the broadcasts.”

Mr. Brown and the tonal change proved a good fit. He joined the  
network as a research analyst soon after the Hungarian revolution. By  
1969 he was director of research. In 1976 he was named deputy  
director; two years later he took over as network director.

By that time Radio Free Europe had already become more like a  
conventional international broadcasting service, but still with an  
anti-Communist message for the millions who managed to tune in  
despite government efforts to jam the broadcasts.

“He was a prudent and moderate sort of man who wanted to ensure that  
the mistakes of ’56 were not repeated,” Mr. Puddington said. “On the  
other hand, he was very important in establishing the R.F.E. strategy  
on how it covered the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland in  
1980, the most serious challenge to Communist authority since 1956.”

Robert Hutchings, deputy director of Radio Free Europe from 1979 to  
1983, agreed.

Dr. Hutchings, who was later American ambassador at large to Eastern  
Europe and is now a diplomat in residence at Princeton, said Mr.  
Brown “was the antithesis of a propagandist.”

Yet, he said, “we learned from Lech Walesa” — the founder of the  
Solidarity movement and later Poland’s president — “that he only  
found out about the spread of strikes in the coastal area on the  
Baltic from Radio Free Europe, and it was on the basis of that  
information that he created the interfactory strike committee that  
became Solidarity.”

Founded in August 1980, Solidarity became a national protest movement  
and rocked the Polish Communist dictatorship until martial law was  
imposed on Dec. 13, 1981. Throughout that period, Dr. Hutchings said,  
Radio Free Europe was in constant communication with Mr. Walesa,  
Roman Catholic Church officials and reform-minded members of the  
Communist Party, “all in an effort to promote a process of peaceful  
democratic change.”

Although Solidarity was suppressed, it survived as other anti- 
Communist movements evolved in the Soviet bloc. And in June 1989 —  
under an agreement reached between the Polish government, Solidarity  
and church officials — a free election was held in Poland, leading to  
the first non-Communist government in Eastern Europe in 40 years.

“Jim Brown set a strategy of giving comprehensive and sympathetic  
coverage of the movement,” Mr. Puddington said, “while reminding  
listeners of the geographical realities that still existed, meaning  
that the Soviet Union was right next to Poland and precipitous  
actions by Solidarity might provoke a Red Army invasion.”

Radio Free Europe, Mr. Brown wrote in an unpublished memoir, “broke  
the Communist information monopoly and gave East Europeans the chance  
to think and judge for themselves.”

James Franklin Brown was born on Staten Island on March 8, 1928, one  
of two children of Josiah and Tabitha Evans Brown. His father, a  
British citizen, had been a miner in England but came to the United  
States and became a streetcar conductor. When Josiah Brown died in  
1933, his wife returned to England with the children.

James Brown received a degree in history, with a focus on Eastern  
Europe, from Manchester University in 1953. A year later he married  
Margaret Wood. Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters,  
Julia Mortimer and Alison Rolfe, and six grandchildren.

Mr. Brown joined Radio Free Europe after serving four years in the  
Royal Air Force. He resigned from the network in 1984 because he felt  
that the Reagan administration’s insistence on avid anti-Communist  
programming was counterproductive.

“Détente always weakened, not strengthened, Communism,” he wrote in  
his memoir.

In 1992, Mr. Brown wrote in his memoir, he met Vaclav Havel, the  
dissident Czech playwright who had been elected president of  
Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Mr. Havel enthusiastically greeted him, saying, “Jim! We were  
colleagues!” Mr. Brown wrote. “That made everything worthwhile.”


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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