Evelyn May Lieberman (née Simonowitz; July 9, 1944 – December 12, 2015) was the Director of the Voice of America (VOA) from 1997 until 1999 during the Clinton administration. She was the first woman to serve as White House Deputy Chief of Staff and was the first United States Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. It was Lieberman who transferred former…
I was born on May 10, 2022. I am a Polish Hound or Ogar Polski, a hunting dog indigenous to Poland. I now live in Portland, Oregon, with a Polish-American family, but I came to the U.S. on July 24, 2022, from Ogary Polskie z Poniatowskiego Dworku FCI in central Poland, run by award-winning Polish Hound breeders Anna and Łukasz…
By Ted Lipien As more and more questions are being asked by members of Congress and scandals reported by liberal and conservative press about the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — the tax-funded, U.S. government-managed international broadcaster — I would strongly recommend that Voice of America (VOA) USAGM federally-employed managers and journalists read The Katyn Diaries, a book about one of World War II major genocide murders. I…
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (1943) By Ted Lipien U.S. government propaganda pictures taken in 1943 by the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran showed Polish children and women several months after they had come out of Soviet Russia in a mass exodus of former Gulag prisoners and their families. The OWI photographs were carefully staged and their…
Tadeusz Lipień
4-go lipca Ameryka obchodziła Dzień Niepodległości. Ten szkic ma na celu przypomnienie jak mieszkańcy międzywojennej Rzeczypospolitej obchodzili w 1926 r. w wyjątkowy sposób 150-tą rocznicę podpisania amerykańskiej Deklaracji Niepodległości. Włączyłem do niego także osobiste wspomnienia o moich krewnych i innych mieszkańcach mojej rodzinnej miejscowości Mszany Dolnej, którzy w 1926 r. przesłali specjalne życzenia narodowi amerykańskiemu.
Województwo Lubelskie; Polskie deklaracje szacunku i przyjaźni dla Stanów Zjednoczonych: przedstawiciele województw i okręgów, organizacje prowincjonalne, instytucje wojskowe, organizacje społeczne, wydziały i studenci instytucji akademickich; Tom 2; Kolekcja Biblioteki Kongresowej; 1926 r.
Read in English: “History’s Greatest Fourth of July Birthday Card: A Personal Story of Polish-American Friendship“
By Ted Lipien
Today, July 4, 2017, America celebrates its Independence Day. This article is about a unique way in which the citizens of the interwar Polish Republic marked in 1926 the 150th anniversary of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence. I combined it with a personal story about my relatives and other inhabitants of my former hometown of Mszana Dolna who participated in the 1926 4th of July celebrations.
Read in Polish: “MSZANA DOLNA NA 150-TĄ ROCZNICĘ NIEPODLEGŁOŚCI STANÓW ZJEDNOCZONYCH“
Official documents declassified and released by the National Archives since 2012 show that during World War II and for years afterwards, the U.S. Government-run Voice of America external radio station broadcast Soviet propaganda and disinformation to Poland and to other countries throughout the world with the intention of covering up Stalin’s crimes. This was done primarily in the interest of supporting immediate U.S. military and foreign policy wartime goals set by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and other high-ranking U.S. officials. It was a far cry from the promise enunciated in what was later presented as VOA’s first broadcast on February 25, 1942 or about that time. The Voice of America did not adopt its full official name until a few years later but it was the same broadcasting organization, first within the Office of War Information (OWI) and after 1945 within the U.S. State Department (VOA staff was reduced in 1945, but many former OWI broadcasters continued to be employed by the State Department. Sometime in early 1942, a broadcaster announced in the first German U.S. shortwave radio broadcast to Germany: “The news may be good. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”
WWII diplomatic dispatches and other accounts prove beyond any doubt that following the wishes of the Roosevelt White House, its own parent agency, the Office of War Information–but largely on their own initiative and through the work of some of its staffers who later joined communist regimes in Eastern Europe–the Voice of America, although it was not yet its official name at the time, was guilty of hiding, censoring, distorting and minimizing news about Stalin’s order to kill Polish military officers and other POWs, estimated to number over 20,000, in in what became known as the 1940 Katyń Forest Massacre near Smolensk and at other locations in the Soviet Union.
I met Ken Tomlinson for the first time in 1982 when he became Voice of America director and I was in charge of VOA broadcasts to Poland. Ken asked me what the Polish Service needed to expand its news coverage and later made sure we got everything we wanted: more employees in Washington and reporters in the U.S., more overseas correspondents and stringers, more money to cover Solidarity-related news stories in the U.S. and in Europe.
Ken Tomlinson understood that the Polish Service was at that moment in VOA’s history the key to the success of its mission. Our audience grew to over 70 percent of the population and at the end communism in Poland collapsed and democracy was peacefully restored. There is no doubt that Ken Tomlinson, the Voice of America, and especially Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, helped Ronald Reagan bring down “the evil empire” faster than it would have happened otherwise.
Still during the martial law in Poland in the 1980s, I traveled with Ken and his wife Rebecca to Rome to meet Pope John Paul II. It was a brief meeting at a general audience, but the Pope showed a lot of interest in our work and asked a few questions. He thanked us for VOA news broadcasts to his beloved country.
President Obama, former Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and President Bronislaw Komorowski of Poland discuss Polish democracy, the contributions Poland is making in Tunisia, and President Obama thanks the people of Poland for being an inspiration to change around the world.
Sekretarz Stanu John Kerry wczoraj późnym wieczorem udał się na cmentarz w Laskach i złożył wieniec na grobie byłego premiera Tadeusza Mazowieckiego. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Warsaw on Monday night (November 4, 2013) and proceeded directly to the gravesite of former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, to lay a wreath and pay his respects. Mazowiecki, Eastern…