Fifteen hundred worried students looked up at me from a green field at the University of California Davis campus in the middle of the Central Valley farmlands. This demonstration, early in 1980, was the largest by students anywhere in this country since the 1960s. I had been invited to speak by a law student who listened to my broadcasts.

"You are being asked to register for military service allegedly because of Soviet action in Central Asia," I said. Moscow had just sent its troops into Afghanistan.

"Strange that India, the largest country in the path of what we have been told is Soviet expansionism...has taken no similar step, nor any other comparable to the long list of military, political, economic, and cultural measures [against the USSR] instituted by Candidate Carter." President Carter was running for re-election.

I had opposed the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and that of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and took a plague-on-both-your-houses stand against the 1969 border war between the USSR and China. My view of the Soviet entry into Afghanistan at the end of 1979 was different. I believed it was a response to the entry of U.S. aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf which had just occurred for the first time ever. Ostensibly they had been placed there because revolutionary Iran, having just overthrown the Shah, had taken the American Embassy staff hostage. To the Soviets, those carriers represented a potential for lightning nuclear attack by their aircraft upon what Winston Churchill had long since called its "soft underbelly."

Moscow, I believed, now felt itself surrounded by short-range U.S. nuclear capability. The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance had only just succumbed to the American demand for stationing U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, after years-long resistance by peoples, parliaments, and even former NATO officers, and despite one Soviet compromise after another. Moscow responded two weeks later, in my view, by entering Afghanistan in an attempt to show that no American action could effectively change the world balance of power.

In addition to these factors, I was very impressed by the top American expert on Afghanistan, who at that point was with the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. He wrote that it was the Shah of Iran, in power until very recently, who had stimulated the slaughter of Marxist officers by the government of neighboring Afghanistan. This had caused survivors to engage in a revolt they knew they could not win and to call upon Moscow for aid.

This was the fourth consecutive decade of hysterical trumpeting of the Soviet threat by Washington, echoed by the mass media, and it finally pushed me to the brink of losing hope. On April 24, 1980, the U.S. failed in a desperate attempt to rescue the Iranian-held hostages. America went wild with frustrated patriotism. On my broadcast immediately after this event, I deliberately chose words designed to stimulate the peace movement to a now-or-never effort.

A young man phoned during my KPFA talk-show period, and cried, "We have been humiliated; America has been humiliated." He continued, "My country, right or wrong!" I had thought that the Vietnam War, which ended only seven years earlier, put an end to that attitude. I answered him: "Sir, that's the beginning of a toast offered by one of Lincoln's generals, Carl Schurz. No one ever quotes the rest of that toast, which goes: 'When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."

Listeners responded to that broadcast in such a range of ways that I had to conclude that each heard what he wanted to. One in Berkeley wrote: "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your program last night, for saying what you said, for hearing the young man out, for your compassion and restraint in replying to him." A man in Sacramento summarized what he believed I had said, and offered his view: "You said you had always been optimistic about the American to have a... progressive outlook on the world and within the country itself. But now for the first time you are pessimistic....I was amazed with your discipline and self control when you allowed that Jingo to speak as long as he did."

The Iranian hostage-taking on top of the Afghan crisis brought the first ad hominem attacks upon me by university professors I had ever experienced. I was totally aware of the snide sniping from the Hoover Institution that had preceded my removal from KQED-TV in 1960, and from a cabal at U.C. Berkeley in an effort to accomplish the same at KPFA at that time. However, twenty years had passed since then.

Within days after the failed helicopter caper in Iran, the Daily Collegian at the Fresno campus of California State University carried a full page letter by a Prof. David Jones which criticized another professor there for recommending my broadcasts, particularly with respect to Afghanistan. Jones' politically stupid but savage letter also attacked me for allegedly not having spoken to my son Bob for years because he was a Trotskyist. Inasmuch as Bob had snapped lots of pictures of me playing softball at a recent picnic of his organization of Trotskyist young people, and everyone there had witnessed our good relationship, any number of people could testify to the falsity of Jones' charge. I wrote the Collegian a raging letter as long as his, which the editor published in full under a fine headline, "Mandel Calls Jones Liar."

All this at a university where I had never spoken.

A few weeks later the same thing happened at U.C. Davis, where I had. A professor Brzeski wrote a brief letter in the Aggie, the student newspaper. "Bill Mandel blames the Carter administration for the Afghani crisis. Naturally, what else would you expect of Mr. Mandel? You describe him as a 'Soviet affairs specialist'; in truth, he is but a Soviet propagandist conveniently domiciled in Berkeley. Mr. Mandel's life work is to misinform the public about the Soviet Union. He did his bit in Davis," Brzeski wrote.

The student who had invited me to Davis sent this clipping to me, with a note: "While I myself have my differences with some of your presentation, I am appalled by this libelous personal attack on your career, your reputation, and even your domicile."

But Brzeski was unluckier even than Jones. The Aggie published my response under the headline: "Used to Tag After Me," lifted from a sentence that continued "like a groupie. Witnesses are available." That had been during the struggle against HUAC, when Brzeski was a graduate student at Berkeley. I wonder how long it was before he was able to show his face again in the Davis faculty dining room.

The letter that affected me most came from Sol Mandelblatt, one of the volunteer Lincoln Battalion I have been in awe of all my life because they fought to defend Spain against Hitler and Mussolini and I did not. He wrote: "Got back from New York to hear your cri de coeur and - Stay On - you're the only game in town." In 1984 he wrote a poem about me:

Mandel Again

this guy:-
when the irises close,
when the bullets
armor uniforms
commissaries
bugles blare

battle readiness

mans the advance posts
issuing sustenance   balance
red blood corpuscles.

A fund-raising marathon for the station at this time included a USSR Day consisting of my best programs of recent years. This was to replace my weekly program for the duration the marathon. A "sizeable" contributor wrote the station: "NO Mandel - NO money this year!!" Despite the gag rule against discussing internal affairs on air instituted in the late '70s, I announced: "I will be on as usual, thanks to the flood of letters you have sent the station management." At that time, it still paid some attention to subscriber mail.

For that USSR Day, which occurred before the Iranian helicopter crisis, I selected from my interviews with Soviet workers, farmers, union officers, the vice-mayor of a Lithuanian city, the 'mayor' of a borough, Moslems, Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, peoples of the Caucasus, and a Black woman of U.S. parentage raised and resident in the USSR; film-makers, writers, sculptors, a metal-chaser, scientists. There were recordings of music, readings of creative literature, an interview with the head of a women's health center and teenagers and mature women discussing sex.

The upsurge of super-patriotism prompted by the hostage-taking led to an attempt by the American Nazis to speak at San Francisco's City Hall shortly thereafter.

Our son Bob was a chief organizer of a demonstration to prevent that, and asked me to speak. Attendance was fairly substantial and, to my surprise, did not consist primarily of people who had been directly touched by Nazism. Rather, it was youthful workingclass, interracial, with a number of Vietnam veterans. When a listener wrote asking me to broadcast my words there on KPFA, I did so. Some remain pertinent:

"When Jewish organizations today speak of the Holocaust as simply a Jewish tragedy, they are furthering the kind of anti-Semitism on which those Nazi leaflets played." I had quoted leaflets dropped by the Germans on those Soviet forces in World War II whose commanding generals, under Stalin, happened to be Jewish: "Don't die for the sake of the Jews!" I continued, using a statistic presented by the American prosecutor at the War Crimes Trial, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Jackson. From his figure of 25 million non-military victims of the Nazis, compiled from their own meticulously-kept written records, I concluded, based on the fact that 6 million Jews had been killed: "Over three-quarters of the civilians, children, the aged and sick, women and men, whom they murdered deliberately, were not Jewish."

I opposed allowing the Nazis to speak, on the basis of America's adherence to the U.N. Convention on Genocide, which reads: "the following acts shall be punishable:... (c)...incitement to commit genocide." "The framers of that Convention," I explained, "found...that there was no point at which they could draw the line between the propaganda to put the Germans in a frame of mind to wipe out other peoples by accident of birth and the actual commission of that deed." This is why any public allegation that the Holocaust did not occur is a crime in Germany and some other countries to this day. An American Nazi propagandist was sentenced to years in a German jail in 1996 after being extradited to that country by Denmark, which has a similar law.

Apparently the endless cold war propaganda campaigns, yellow rain in Vietnam was allegedly some kind of mysterious Soviet chemical agent, the escape of anthrax bacilli from a Russian facility was a biological threat to the world, etc., got to me. A listener wrote: "I'm sorry for your hurt and rage but find it understandable and I'm glad you did so eloquently express your feelings." But there were letters that made me feel like dancing down the street. From a poet, Susu Jeffrey: "I remember telling you that I am late for Monday evening poetry readings so I can catch your show. You grinned.... And I remembered how open and young your face is."

Hmmm.

Eight Fresno subscribers, including two of the KFCF staff, jointly wrote: "we would like to suggest that you devote a whole day to U.S.-Soviet relations." That was after Reagan's election as president. The prevalent view among KPFA listeners was that his presidency would mean nuclear war. I looked for signs beneath his rhetoric for what his policy would really be, and had come to a different conclusion than most listeners. One Reagan interview provided the answer. He said that the U.S. would protect Saudi Arabia against foreign aggression or internal overthrow. That was actually a prediction of Bush's Desert Storm against Iraq a decade later.

Oil Über alles. But Reagan continued in that interview to say the U.S. wouldn't do anything about Iran, if Moscow endangered it, because we didn't have the strength, which was "too bad." I concluded that his administration would be based upon acquiring that strength, a prediction which turned out to be exactly right. A speech I gave at a huge 1981 protest in the Santa Rosa Civic Auditorium against the Bohemian Club's annual encampment of Establishment males from all over the country was built around the notion of Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's Secretary of Defense, as the most dangerous man in the world.

In a further attempt to calm the prevalent hysteria among peace-minded people, I had done a broadcast reviving my argument from the earliest cold war years. Its theme was that the U.S. and Russia had been allies in major world crises from the time of the American Revolution through World War II. President Wilson's participation in the armed Intervention against Lenin had been the only exception.

A Fresno listener named Brandon, who the next year brilliantly demonstrated in a letter to me that the Soviet system was failing, nearly a decade before I recognized that development, at this time wrote in the Folio a criticism of my view of history. The heat of the time brought equally heated responses from listeners, depending on their points of view. One listener wrote: "Please try not to put emotions under stress by antagonizing callers. The effect on some listeners (not me) is counterproductive." This was spelled out by the son of Latvian parents who were in that country during World War II: "When you receive calls that are in agreement with your position, you carry on a normal mutual conversation....When the caller brings up points that put the Soviet Communists in a negative light, two changes come over you: One, your tone of voice becomes high pressured; and two, you railroad the caller off the air as soon as possible."

Actually, I had a very specific practice that explains these differences. When listeners were clearly intelligent and rational, as this Latvian-American was, I deliberately sought to shake them into abandoning what I regarded as mental blocks to considering other points of view. When they were not rational or not particularly intelligent, I was gentle and tried to lead them along. The relative quiescence of social movements in the '80s left a vacuum that fringe groups sought to fill. In the context of the Pacifica stations, these were of two types, extremist Black nationalist elements on the one hand, and ultra-Leftist whites on the other. The former did not affect me directly, the latter did. In mid-1981 KPFK, Los Angeles, removed me from the air. The program director, Clare Spark, told a listener seeking to get me back on the air there that she was "disinclined to use any of your tapes on the grounds that you are a biased observer of the Soviet scene. She said she is looking for an unbiased observer. When I suggested that she was posing an impossible task for herself, her answer was 'so be it'."

I made a one-time announcement of this on KPFA, and asked listeners to write KPFK, with copies to me. Sixty-four took the trouble to write to that station in another city. Over three-fourths were people from whom I had never even had mail, much less met. As always, I was fascinated by the kind of people I found to be on my side. A former Air Force Russian language specialist wrote: "His format provides the only direct commentary on news events concerning the Soviet Union that can be considered objective." The founding president of the San Francisco Newspaper Guild was an "ardent listener." A female Japanese-American attorney wrote that my program "serves an important, crucial function in helping to counter the distortions about the Soviet Union all too prevalent right now." A very different kind of listener: "And to think that I support listener sponsored radio; which is not an easy task from Folsom State Prison, doing life." A professor at UC San Francisco described me as: "one of the most erudite, thorough and well-prepared men on radio - of any kind at all." Three of the writers were Black.

Despite difficulties on the air, there was still plenty of reason to regard myself as useful. A Chicano writer, Francisco Alarcon, welcomed two long translations of articles on Latin American literature I had sent him from Soviet Studies in Literature in consequence of broadcasts. A long-term Latino prisoner, David Martinez, listening in Folsom State Prison, asked for concrete data on the Soviet prison system. He wanted to know about mandated sentences, the death penalty, prison population per capita, approximate length of sentences. "In California for instance the buildings are bulging with 15 and 25-to-life first termers," he informed me, "Most not even up for parole consideration until 16 years 8 months of that life sentence....I have a lot of fun just listening to the local dummies call you with the U.S. media hysteria and getting their bubbles popped with a little backed up fact.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that someone here in Folsom is getting a great deal from your program, and I appreciate you being there with it. Adelante! In continued struggle."

My broadcasts were not confined to politics. A woman who identified herself as half-Aztec thanked another programmer and me "for putting together that beautiful Soviet music show....I have also enjoyed hearing your wife's [Tanya's] comments on [the film] 'Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears' and other topics. Your show devoted to science fiction writers was particularly interesting." I appreciated indications that I could see the world beyond my own sphere: "I'd also like to thank you for the time you graciously relinquished your program on the sad occasion of Rasta Bob Marley's death. It was an act of compassion."

I always had a substantial listenership among Third-World students studying in the U.S. A Kenyan asked for a transcription of a broadcast on Namibia. A Sudanese electronics engineer in Silicon Valley was a frequent participant in the phone-in discussions. An Iranian asked to use my broadcast on Secretary of Defense Weinberger in his class at Foothill College.

One advantage to KPFA's powerful 59,000-watt signal is that it provided intellectual contact for people living in physical isolation. "I am not a mainstream American, one listener wrote...I live in a tiny cabin in the woods and listen to KPFA, supporting myself as a carpenter even though I have a degree in philosophy." His address was Cohasset, which is someplace uphill from Chico, at the north end of California's Central Valley.

When KPFA needed a new manager, I wrote in the newsletter of the unpaid staff, Intercom , that we needed a person who knew "how and on what principles we handled the events that made us what we now are: the Free Speech Movement, the resistance to the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement in the South and the hot-summer rising, the Huelga [farm labor strike], People's Park, the women's movement, the lesbian-and-gay rights movement, the ecology movement in all its forms." The person must be "of long Northern California residence, with a gut feel for the difference in style and mood this special region requires, as distinct from the slickness and other characteristics needed elsewhere....The new person should be an individual demonstrably more devoted to free radio than to any specific solution to this country's social and economic problems. We don't need sectarianism."

The new manager, David Salniker, did correspond to those requirements, but unfortunately also brought a corporate mentality that marginalized the participation of unpaid staff in policy-making and ended the role of KPFA as an organizing center for popular movements. But I became more and more alarmed over the fact that KPFA News had gone far beyond what could be dismissed as tearing off and reading the news as presented by wire services. Its morning edition on November 2, 1981, caused me to write a letter to the station manager, program director, and the heads of the public affairs and news departments. I pointed out that the News had dealt, for the third straight day, with Swedish allegations, probably true, of a Soviet spy sub off its coast, unquestionably a violation of international law. I wrote:

"It was news when it happened, and it will be news when the incident is settled. But does anyone seriously contend that it endangered world peace or even local peace?" I then pointed out that there had been two stories that morning not carried at all by KPFA but reported, buried, in the San Francisco Chronicle, that did represent such a danger. One was of the sale of an aircraft for controlling warfare from the air to Saudi Arabia. According to the story, this was part of a deal to make Saudi Arabia the storage ground for a six-month supply of everything needed by the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force in a Middle East War. Such a war did, of course, take place when Bush attacked Iraq in 1990. The other Chronicle story KPFA didn't think worth reporting was an attack by China's leader, Deng Hsiao-ping, on the European anti-cruise-missile movement as weakening the worldwide alliance (NATO plus China) against the USSR."

My letter continued: "How many dozens of times (daily, for a long period) did it [KPFA] carry speculations on the Soviet 'drive to the sea' from Afghanistan through Pakistan? That was obvious cold war disinformation. The U.S. government knew better, because its own estimate of Soviet troops in Afghanistan has been 85,000, totally inadequate to such a task..."

"In the 500 days of Poland's crisis, there have been at the very least 100 KPFA stories on Soviet invasion. If it occurred, that would be news. The real news...is that it has not occurred....Has KPFA News ever asked itself, out loud, before the listeners, why all sources made 'news' of a non-story?....I could cite examples of disinformation about the USSR endlessly: the 'poison toxins' in Cambodia, at least half a dozen times on KPFA News....The news featured about the USSR is consistently that which strengthens cold-war attitudes....It is precisely such 'news' stories, endlessly repeated, that turned the American people around from their very warm feelings toward their Soviet ally in World War II to the attitude that could elect a Reagan."

"The problem, in my view, is acceptance of the wire services and major newspapers as proper judges of what constitutes news. The fact that they are themselves extraordinarily big business, with a fundamental stake in anti-Sovietism, is totally ignored. "There's a lot of talk about 'balance' at the station nowadays. There can never be 'balance' in foreign news reporting unless TASS [the USSR news service] is added to the services used. And even if it were, its dispatches would be read with the scepticism toward everything Soviet that our newspeople unavoidably were indoctrinated with from the first TV they watched in childhood or the first day in school. Let them learn to regard as equally self-serving whatever Reuters or UPI feeds them with."

"In the '60s and early '70s KPFA News had regarded stories from those sources as automatically tainted. Its staffers had first-hand experience with their lying about student and Vietnam demonstrations, the mass shootings and beatings over People's Park in Berkeley, and the civil rights struggles they had been part of. The staff now was different, with a few exceptions. Memories had faded, and those who had gone to journalism school or worked on college papers were in awe of the mechanisms that supplied them. Having hit a stone wall within the station, I went outside, doing pieces at intervals for the organ of the general Berkeley Left, Grassroots. In the first, I wrote that the KPFA News "did not publicize [San Francisco Catholic] Archbishop Quinn's remarkable pastoral letter [on peace] until I xeroxed it, circulated it at a KPFA staff meeting, and pointed out that even Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle columnist] had stood up on his hind legs and criticized his own paper in print for putting it on an inside page instead of page one."

The hysteria within the station was indicated in a letter to me from a major donor: "When I tell Ralph Steiner," a paid staff member, "that I'm sending Bill Mandel's program to three senators, ten congressmen and to [Pulitzer journalists] Woodward & Bernstein, Ralph is affrighted out of his skin and begs me not to send it to strangers who may use in against Pacifica!"

I lost some and won some. The next fund-raising marathon included a full USSR Day, which I was asked to conduct. I put on my earlier interview with Helen Caldicott. This was the first time the Australian physician, peace worker, environmentalist, and feminist had appeared on KPFA. Gerry Whitney in Edmonton, Alberta, organized a symposium via telephone, the speakers being Admiral Eugene Carroll of the Center for Defense Information and myself. I pleaded with the Canadians to save us from our own folly. Next came a replay of an interview I had done with Soviet movie director Andrei Konchalovsky. At 10 p.m. came the last chance for a big money pitch, so we used the sure thing, my 1960 hearing before the House Committee on Un-American Activites. USSR Day brought letters like this one from a then schoolteacher at Mission High in San Francisco, Steph Lady. He is now a screenwriter and director and a personal friend: "I listened to the entire day with unflagging interest and have already forwarded hours of tape to distant points and respected friends around the country."

A woman in McKinley Park, Alaska, wrote for a copy of the Caldicott interview. Women I never met have often put a light note in my life. Marion Wylie was out of it with Alzheimer's when I drafted this chapter, and has since died. But in 1982 her letters were fun: "I like your style...you are an unusually useful man in a time when it is getting harder and harder to like men, in particular. Not that women are holding up their end of things very well, either....You have gotten better and better as you have talked on air...I hope you realize that! Since you were pretty good to begin with, this is really something....I was terrified of women for years...being one myself."

In mid-year, someone did a survey of the unpaid staff. My response provided a clear picture of my attitude: "Inasmuch as my purpose coincides with a stated principle of the Pacifica charter, I expect conscious cooperation with my efforts....There was a time when I was rebroadcast in the morning....I want minimal pre-emptions, because they destroy audience. I want to go on right on time, because that is what Americans expect of the media."

What I gave the station: "Highly valuable time in $$. Knowledge that is not offered to the American people by any other medium; a program that is unique in the entire world; broadcasts that are sufficiently good radio to bring in 45 minutes of phone-ins every time."

At the end of the year I made an unsuccessful stab at getting back on KPFK in Los Angeles, writing its news director: "What has kept my program on the air for a quarter century, against uninterrupted attack from Right and Left, is that I know my facts, and that, as one Pacifica National Board member put it, I am 'too honest'."

"That's a criticism I can live with."

When I think of what kept me doing those unpaid broadcasts so long I am reminded of another Folsom prisoner's letter of 1982: "In the 1930s Joe the Working Man organized himself because he had to. All the social benefits that resulted from that labor movement are now being voided by a class of people who are as shrewd as they are cruel....The U.S. strategy is to break up the USSR by preferably engaging them in an arms race the USSR cannot support ....Breakfast is at five, the next and only meal is at 5 p.m. That's how 'coddled' we inmates are. Ciao."

I replied: "How the hell did a guy with a mind as clear as yours wind up in that joint? Not that I don't know a couple of others with respect to whom the same question could be asked. And in one case at least, the answer is pretty heavy, unfortunately." Despite the clarity of the sentences I quoted, part of his letter made comparisons between this country and Nazi Germany. This gave me the chance to state a point of view that I find very pertinent when people confuse the appearance of militias, the destruction of the Oklahoma City federal office building by terrorist bombing with hundreds of deaths, the Ruby Ridge shootout, and the government's own military assault and burning out of a religious sect at Waco, Texas, with fascism. I wrote him:

"U.S. 'book-burning, union busting, arming, hysteria...' etc., to quote you, are extremely mild, except for the arming, compared to Nazi Germany. No prisoner of the Nazis would be allowed to write a letter like yours, or receive one like this. Don't oversimplify. Life, and politics, and individual human beings are extremely complicated and internally contradictory. The fact that people with heads like yours listen to my broadcasts is what keeps me going after a quarter of a century on the air. And the fact that I'm able to talk simply enough for people with less than college education to understand, even though my subject is most complex, I take as a compliment."

Who knows where that man, Al Angulo, is today, or if he is? Therefore I give him the last word, in his reply: "Your letter...pleased me almost to the point of flattery, even more importantly, it made me reconsider some of my ideas. The latter is no easy task. I am from the Mission [Latino district of San Francisco], and all about me were robbers, burglars, hookers, pushers, and just plain tough guys. Yet no one else from my family has so much as been busted; that is my guilt. In the end, try as I may, I am confused. Welcome Al, to the world of matter and contradiction, eh?

Those Indians and Africans who weren't wiped out outright, now have the liberty to inhabit either a reservation, a slum, a prison, or a Methadone clinic.

Domestically then, the difference is that we have no actual Dacha Dachaus. Whether a Viet-Namese is napalmed directly or an African starved to death, a San Salvadorean or a Lebanese is beheaded, or one thousand babies die from malnutrition daily, I think this distinction is lost on the victim. I bow to your wisdom and concede that Nazi Germany was a mad dog; this being so, the elite of the U.S. are then cunning and cowardly vultures. Any progressive change is good and desirable. Do a people deserve its form of government? Does a patient deserve a greedy physician? Shalom, Mr. Mandel."

For four solid years, while I was researching and writing Soviet But Not Russian, my primary social activism was on behalf of prisoners. The credit is due them, for it was initiated by their letters stimulated by my broadcasts and sometimes deeply involving KPFA as a station. Further conflict between me and the News Department arose out of my efforts for Larry Pinkney, a former Black Panther. His militancy started with his experiences as the only African-American student in a Maryland High School of three thousand, which had Ku Klux Klan agitators. Years later, Pinkney had been appointed by San Francisco Mayor Alioto, under pressure from segments of the Black, white, and Chicano communities, to the Civil Service Commission oral board interviewing candidates for the Fire Department.

He had been the only Black member, the only civilian, the youngest. Having lost the key to an apartment available to him, he tried to get in through a window. Police, tailing him, said as they seized him: "We have you now, nigger!" and beat him badly. He was convicted of burglary under the illegal-entry clause of the penal code.

Pinkney wrote me early in 1983, when completing in Vacaville a nine-year term that began in Canada. He is best described in a "To Whom It May Concern" letter about him from a member of the Canadian Parliament from the Conservative Party. Canada had cooperated with the U.S. desire to imprison Larry after he fled this country subsequent to that frame-up in 1973. It was only after the UN Human Rights Committee officially condemned the actions of the Canadian government in his case that he was transferred to imprisonment in the U.S. in his seventh year of incarceration, instead of being released. The Canadian M.P. wrote:

"I am our Party's spokesman on issues relating to Correction and Parole...I became acquainted with Mr. Larry Pinkney....I was quickly impressed with the high level of personal integrity which he displayed. He was not looking for any favours, he was not enumerating an inventory of complaints or alibis. In short, there was no evidence that he had ever become a part of the criminal sub-culture which makes up so much a part of our prison population....I have...found...him...meticulously honorable. My experience with him is that his word is his bond."

I sent him poems I had written in the early '50s, primarily about Black freedom struggles I had participated in. He wrote: "They made me feel love, but most of all, your poems make me feel hope. Your poem, 'For My Children, To Dr. DuBois,' is my favorite. Its strength lies in its combined gentleness and searing truthfulness; so powerful, yet so gentle."

A few months after our correspondence began, the Soviets shot down a Korean 747 that had overflown the most sensitive of Soviet bases and had Americans aboard. The American media frothed at the mouth. Larry wrote in appreciation for your having demonstrated courage and integrity by addressing the incident.... "I find it difficult to understand how a cockpit crew of a huge airliner could mistakenly and repeatedly violate the USSR's air space for a period of two and one half hours."

I wrote him: "Korean Airlines Double Oh Seven has been killing me. In addition to my own show, I've been on Traffic Jam, the Morning Show, Bari Scott's Saturday night show, two hours on a talk show in the south Bay, and by phone on WBAI in New York." After the third week of KAL 007 on my show, Larry wrote, regarding a Black caller the previous night: "the caller was speaking more out of frustration and despair....I am pleased that you were gentle with that caller, yet honest in your reply to him. You demonstrated not only your knowledge, which is immense, but also your sensitivity."

With respect to the Korean airliner I wrote Vera Hopkins, Pacifica historian, "People have sent me clippings on that from Toronto, Cleveland, Denver, St. Paul, and of course San Jose, Los Angeles, etc. [I was heard only in the last two of the cities listed. The others were former listeners who had moved but who felt that their information would help me bring clarity to those within range of our stations.] Other KPFA programmers have asked me onto their shows more than in any similar period during my quarter-century with the station. WBAI interviewed me by phone. So did Youth News. A West German magazine correspondent came by the house and did a long interview. Frankly, I find this encouraging. People feel I can be turned to when they are shaken, frightened, puzzled."

After a full month of intense pressures due to the airliner incident, I asked Tanya if we could take a week to unwind, and we drove along the Coast. North of Fort Bragg the driver of an oncoming pick-up truck suddenly decided to go in for coffee on our side of the road. He hit us head-on, and my vocal cords were paralyzed for six days from my throat hitting the shoulder strap. My singing voice was gone forever. Yet that safety device probably saved my life. Tanya was also spared by her safety-belt. I wrote Pinkney that I'd have to postpone a scheduled visit.

A year after we became acquainted, he was framed for allegedly trying to start a riot in prison. None had occurred. In fact, I had been kept informed of the situation as it developed in the previous week, he was trying to stop one from developing. When I told Bari Scott, the African-American woman who headed KPFA's Third World Department, about the situation, she contacted U.S. Senator Cranston's and Congressmember Dellums' offices. I wrote the Vacaville warden and the head of the state prison system essentially identical letters:

"I intend to broadcast on this matter...," of course in my Soviet program time, "and to ask listeners to write you....I visited Mr. Pinkney last Monday. Mr. Pinkney was greatly troubled by events earlier that day. He had taken the lead in calming the situation, which required approximately four group meetings in the course of the day. He was proud of the fact that he enjoyed the confidence of white and Chicano inmates as well as Black, and that this had made it possible to cool the situation....The removal of peacemakers looks to me like a great way to guarantee a riot next time racial friction occurs. Is that what the authorities desire?"

I described the situation to the News Director , who didn't cover it. When I asked why, she replied that it had "slipped her mind." So I went to the African American woman heading the Third World Department, who contacted the (independent) KPFA Saturday News. They phoned me and broadcast a good story, ending with a request for communictions to the authorities. On my own show, on which I gave the case five minutes at the start and two at the end, I got numerous phone calls from people who wanted to write.

Eight days after I informed the News Director of the situation, she could no longer resist the pressure, accepted a call from Larry, and broadcast it on the 6 p.m. news. I wrote him: "Everyone commented on your articulateness."

Representative Dellums wrote the Vacaville warden protesting the violation of state-wide prison rules in the Pinkney case, and saying that U.S. Senator Cranston and a state senator had also had their mail to Pinkney opened. This stimulated a "To Whom It May Concern" letter from the public information department of the prison system saying they got "a large number of similar letters and postcards regarding the situation of Larry Pinkney. Correspondents apparently learned of Mr. Pinkney's situation via a radio broadcast. Pinkney wrote me: "The reason I was found not guilty was not due to my firm presentation or even the witnesses in my defense. I was found not guilty due to the strong support from you, your listeners, and the other listeners to KPFA who contacted the Calif. Dept. of Corrections [CDC]." The authorities tried to get even by inferring in his record that he had provided them with information. He was really scared about them "setting me up with an untrue 'snitch jacket.' Nothing has changed since the demise of brother George Jackson!"

On my next show I included three paragraphs of his letter thanking listeners, and his frightened letter about being set up. I asked listeners to write the authorities about this. I wrote the warden and the director of the CDC: "To describe an inmate as an informer is an invitation to kill him. Such documents do not remain secret."

"Yet Mr. Pinkney wrote in that letter: 'At no time did I ever name the names of anyone.' This is a request that Mr. Pinkney be returned to Unit V [minimum security], that his personal papers be restored to him, that he not be transferred out of Vacaville, and that no 'snitch jacket' be placed in his file or, that if that has already been done, it be removed, expunged from the record, and destroyed. I have asked my listeners to join me in writing you...to this effect."

Jack McLean of Citizen Advocates, Sacramento, who had heard my update, hand-delivered pertinent information to the governor of California, mailed the same to all members of the Board of Corrections, talked to receptionists at the offices of sixteen state senators and assembly members.The governor wrote a letter of inquiry.

State Senator Petris sent an aide to talk to Pinkney, who wrote me: "The officials of this prison were in almost total shock that a senator would actually take personal interest in the situation of a prisoner."

Early 1984 saw the wrap-up of my controversy with KPFA News over its handling of Pinkney. At a staff meeting, I said that the News Director's failure to deal for eight days with the story that prison authorities were trying to discipline him for what was actually his role in preventing a riot was an act of racism. In a memo written for circulation within Pacifica, I wrote:

"I do not believe that [the News Director] believes in slavery, lynching, segregation, or discrimination. However, in a country in which the latter two are prevalent realities, plus regular police murder of Blacks, including young children, special sensitivity is demanded in any story where Blacks are involved, particularly in a situation in which the victim has a history of political militancy...Failure to act with such sensitivity is racist. I cannot avoid the conclusion that the very bad relationship between [the News Director] and myself over my 4 1/2 years of criticism of the News Department's handling of Soviet matters played a role in her not acting on the story."

"For anyone with any doubt about why militant activists like Pinkney wound up in prison, the following excerpt from his FBI file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, speaks for itself: "Pinkney is potentially dangerous due to his demonstrated ability to unify black and white. His associates are Negro, White, and Chinese. Special attention is being given to neutralizing him. The areas of sex and drugs appear to be the most effective ones to utilize. His habits in these areas are unknown, but are being monitored with this objective. The FBI is working in conjunction with [blacked out, but a covering note to the U.S. Secret Service, San Francisco, accompanies this]."

Pinkney asked me to pick him up on his release. His parents lived in Washington, D.C., and he had a sister in the Northwest. "There are very few people indeed that I would want to be anywhere near on that day, he wrote me, as I doubt strongly that they would or could conceive of what it means to me, what I have been through, or my psychological state of mind. With you however, there is no doubt that you know all these things far more poignantly than most people could ever know or hope to know."

Larry 's indomitable spirit had come through most strongly in a letter to me describing a most unusual event behind prison walls: "When I heard that you were going to play that [HUAC hearing] recording, I did something that I have never done before [in over nine years behind bars]. I rounded up all the prisoners in my dorm and requested that they listen to it, which they did. They were elated hearing you do battle; and afterwards, there were many questions to me from the prisoners (both black and white) about what they had heard. They all clearly got the drift of what you were saying before HUAC, though they asked me to explain some of the words that you used after they heard it....They were cheering you on (something that utterly amazed me)....A couple of the prisoners are adamantly anti-communist; but even they were cheering you on....You got across even to people who have virtually no political astuteness at all."

Another prisoner with whom I developed a relationship was Jon (Mpaka) Meachum, in Folsom, serving double life for the murder of two fellow heroin dealers when in his mid-20s, plus a technical kidnapping charge and a gun enhancement, since he had been a parolee. The spelling in his first letter to me reflected his incomplete high school education, which he had just enrolled in a GED program to correct: "I'm a Black prisoner at Folsom Prison. I've listen to your Monday night show for the past month. I believe I'm asking you to be my mentor; for at this point I want to know all you know about everything you know...I've no outside contact... My goal: to learn all I can about the Social Sciences, particularly Economics, Sociology and Politics. As you can see I've a long long way to go....I'm 28 years of age. I'm now beginning to break the bonds of fatalism and nihilism, in part thanks to Felix Greene's book The Enemy: What Every American Should Know About Imperialism."

I responded with a long letter, in order to tell the story of Johnny Vinnaccia, the youthful Mafioso with three felony terms behind him whom I met when I was seventeen. Johnny had become a hero of Spain and subsequently of the Italian underground in part because I helped him get a political education. "I keep his memory alive by telling and writing this story whenever I get a chance, 35 years after his death, I wrote Meachum. That's the only real immortality we have: to live the kind of lives that cause others to remember us long, long after we're gone. I'll help all I can. You seem to have that kind of potential. He answered with a cry from the heart. "Received your letter...Words do not describe the beautiful feeling its content delivered. Most prisoners have no idea of the ramifications of what brought them to prison and what keeps them regulated to the cycle of in and out the revolving prison door. One's limited awareness becomes depleted when surrounded by hundreds of people who suffer profoundly from nihilism, fatalism, fear and ignorance, compounded by not having outside contact with progressive people."

"I originally wrote you on assumption and hope."

"For three years I've been trying to keep my rage and bitterness in check, to keep it from becoming self-destructive. That is very bad when compounded with the fight against self-pity, historically inherent self-hatred, family rejection beginning with my mother rejecting me 22 years ago. No, I don't hate her, for I understand (now a little) the psychological pressures/changes young black women went through in the 1950s."

It is very difficult not to let the correspondence with Meachum, and his life the next seven years, become a book in itself. He was a Jean Valjean of Les Miserables.

However, instead of being pursued through life out in the "free" world by a single human bloodhound as in that novel, he was ultimately beaten down by the routines of the prison system. After a few more letters and my first visits, it became clear to me that the way to get him out was on educational parole to pursue an advanced degree, which he unquestionably had the capacity for. He didn't know what a Ph.D. was. I explained, but told him that I could approach my professor friends to act on his behalf only if he could show straight A's. First he had to get his high school equivalency diploma and then the junior-college degree, both attainable from behind bars, albeit great external obstacles had to be overcome.

It was common enough for a prisoner to stab another inmate or try to escape from Soledad, the prison to which Meachum had been transfered. Every time that happened, the whole place was locked down, requiringclasses to be cancelled. That occured more or less monthly and lasted for days. He did not get straight A's, but was very proud when he made the dean's list after moving on to junior college, conducted at Soledad by Hartnell College in Salinas.

When his cellmate hid a window sash weight in their cell, both were put in solitary. Mpaka (his adopted African name, by which everyone called him) did not look good when I visited him during that period. The cellmate insisted to the authorities that he alone was guilty and Mpaka knew nothing about it, so it did not go into his "jacket" (record). Later, a nineteen-year-old from East Palo Alto, Mpaka's home turf, was sent to Soledad. The kid wanted to show he was the big man in that town, and needled Mpaka for months to get him into a fight. In a visit during that period, Mpaka visibly shook with rage in his effort to control the desire to strike back. He did not yield to the provocations.

For some reason, the administration decreed that a prisoner could have no more than ten books in his cell. That limited his library almost exclusively to textbooks for his courses. Perhaps that was the reason. I worked hard as a tutor. When he sent me a term paper, I wrote four hundred words of corrections. I pointed out Black English usages the instructor wouldn't accept. I offered suggestions as to how to avoid such mistakes in the future.

Just as I knew Mpaka through KPFA, so the people I rallied to his assistance were fans of my broadcasts: a prominent San Jose lawyer, a psychology professor at San Jose State, a plumber and his wife. I built that support network in part by reading a letter of his on the air in one of my deviations from Soviet subject-matter.

My father, then eighty-six, had bought him a subscription to the African Communist, which Mpaka had asked for: "Please express to the Elder Mandel my deepest gratitude for his kindliness and contribution. Out of 24 of my 29 years of existence I can count on one hand the times I've been subject to kindness without an ulterior motive."

"I need a better understanding of the women's side of the struggle. Perhaps Mrs. Mandel can give better insight in this. The last type of friend I need is one whom is hesitant about speaking their true thoughts for fear of disturbing my feelings. I'll need criticism sometime, so don't get passive on me. You and Mrs. Mandel have been together over 45 years, that draws forth my deepest respect."

When I had visited him several times, and after reading our correspondence, Tanya agreed to come along. Mpaka wrote: "The visit has had (and still is) a profound effect upon me. Tanya's outspokenness strengthens my belief in mentally independent women. I need more exposure to her type of woman. Tanya, you had such a affect [sic] on me during our visit that I wouldn't write until now. You see I don't like to be led by emotions." In a later letter: " Tanya, I meant no harm when you kissed my cheek after our last visit, I walked off so abruptly. Actions like that, especially from you, have a mother-son effect on me. Motherly affection was a very rare experience for me during my formative years and several things you've done during the short period I've known you have given rise to dormant emotions that I'd equate with a mother-son relationship.

"There once was a time I wouldn't talk to middle class whites. I believe it due to bitterness, fear and ignorance....I have a nine year old daughter living in Milpitas, do you go in that area when you're in San Jose?"

He was extraordinarly perceptive in dealing with this daughter. She had been caught stealing in Safeway for the second time: "Fay [the mother] first question to me was did I want to holler at, chastize, Shelby. My response: no. I think she needs to be talked to. I'm not the Authoritarian type with children, although I can be firm. I don't believe in rigid parental control. Nor am I familiar with pre adolescence's."

I was letter carrier between him and a female prisoner, because inmates were not allowed to correspond with each other. Letters had to be open for reading. She was a beauty he had known, and he tried to show her another way to live: "In the past we were more into the criminal (fast Life) mentality form of rebelling against the system. When we get out we have the tendency to say 'fuck the struggle' and become side tracked by drugs, pretty clothes, big pretty cars, etc. I don't measure people in weight, feet, inches nor by their financial assets, but I do judge them by their actions and deeds toward humanity. I don't believe in male domination of women. If Black women aren't free Black people won't be free! You are a woman, which unlike a Lady have no pretenses: Ladies are bourgeois oriented pseudo excuse for women."

In a later letter to her: "Bill and Tanya are more than mere friends to me, they are also my immediate family. Very very close to a mother/father/son relationship in a sense."

The years went by and the parole board refused to set him even a parole date, while the completion of junior college was pushed farther and farther back. His letters became less and less frequent. He wrote of his "waning sense of hope. If I didn't have a gradual, sometimes rapidly, growing political awareness, I would have given up, like so many others, on my people and the majority of the U.S. population. We [Black people] treat each other with increasing indifference and apathy. And it's so intense here in prison, I don't know how much more I can handle. Psychological torture is the worst and over the long term the most painful & destructive....You see I couldn't fit in like an Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Willie Brown nor Nathan Hare, and never like Huey P. Newton or Eldridge Cleaver." The last two references were to drugs.

Ultimately Tanya and I became a taxi service for bringing his daughter on visits, and a woman to whom he became attached by mail. The authorities eventually transferred him to San Luis Obispo. We would have visited him even down there in southern California, although that trip meant an overnight stay, in addition to car expenses, and the fine radio we got him so he could pick up KPFA at the very extreme of its range. But he had the decency to make no such demand, since he grew psychologically no longer able to continue holding up his end of our agreement: regular correspondence and progress toward the degree. Truly a tragedy.

Meachum has the unusual distinction, for an uneducated lifer, of acknowledgment in a volume that had fairly wide use in higher education, my Soviet But Not Russian: "Particular thanks are due to Jon 'MPaka' Meachum, who made meticulous comments under the difficult circumstances of a prisoner sharing a cell in a state penitentiary." I had asked him for "your most detailed comments: things you don't understand, or want more about, or disagree with. Likewise, I would wish to know what changes you would want to see made, to improve it."

Larry Pinkney had also read the manuscript of many chapters of that book: "I found the Russian equivalent of 'kike' or, for Blacks, 'nigger,' to be extremely interesting. I again emphasize that it was refreshing and important that you draw parallels for the reader between the prerevolutionary struggles in Russia and the peoples, i.e., Black people, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, poor whites in America, etc."

The anti-Soviet panic promoted by government, supposedly impartial organizations, and media during Reagan's second term reached such a peak that it is forgotten by most in a form of denial. My first broadcast of 1983 was with three women who had just visited the USSR as peace activists. They told the audience that some members of their group had been warned by family members not to go "because they'll never leave that place alive."

I quoted that in writing a listener who had sent me a long letter with respect to Soviet dissidents. I commented: "Amnesty International [whose reports the listener had forwarded to me] deserves a great deal of the credit for the existence of that state of mind, which I regard as horrible, monstrous." I then quoted the Secretary-General of Amnesty as stating that his organization had not published a report on political prisoners in China: "One of our problems has been we felt the Chinese prisoners would not be helped by pressure from abroad." But it was always okay to hammer the Soviet Union. I defined my own position: "My program has been aggressively critical of Soviet civil liberties practices in three periods when the war danger receded.... When the danger of war is high, I focus on relieving tensions, not worsening them."

Later events proved that I did not understand why the USSR had developed at variance with its proclaimed ideals. But I never closed my eyes to factual reality. A listener asked my opinion, in 1983, of a book by a Soviet official who had emigrated, called The Corrupt Society. I wrote in reply, before having read the book:

"There is a great deal more corruption in the USSR than I would like to see....People try to get what they can and what they need....If Reagan and Weinberger force a diversion of raw materials, power, transportation, machinery, labor, from Soviet production of consumer goods to keeping up with us in arms, the things available for purchase do not keep up with demand. People try to solve that problem by offering to pay under the table, or offering presents, or outright bribes. A few actually engage in setting up secret manufacturing plants using materials, etc., obtained from government enterprises by malfeasance. The penal ties are severe, but some will take the chance. Some individuals very high in the Soviet structure have peddled influence....Corruption in the USSR does not change the non-exploitative essence of the society."

The supporter of Amnesty International continued our discussion in a second letter, to which I replied: "There is not anything Amn. Int'l. can publish about civil liberties violations in the USSR without adding to Cold War tensions unless it deals with U.S. human rights violations to a comparable degree: the three million totally homeless in this country right now. The figure in the USSR is zero. The 20,000,000 wholly or partially unemployed here; the figure there is zero. The elderly, not homeless, who die of hypothermia because the utilities turn off their heat for nonpayment of bills. The figure there is zero. The police who kill Blacks every day of the week (no exaggeration: see Urban League nationwide figures), and lower-class whites as well....Our 'civil libertarian' society won't even give me the status that attaches to a college professor, although it was delighted to use my knowledge when we were wartime allies [with the Soviets] and just thereafter."

A certain public awareness that KPFA had a place in history emerged at this time. The East Bay Express had an article on that theme. The following week a letter to the editor appeared: "How can David Lerner purport to have written an historical article about KPFA while not having mentioned Bill Mandel, Elsa Knight Thompson...?"

The station's in-house historian, Vera Hopkins, who was a founding member of Pacifica and thus knew it at least a decade longer than I, interviewed me in 1983 and sent me the transcription of her notes:

"He said in reply to my question that early KPFA was devoted to the ideals of pacificism and civil liberties, to about the mid-1960s. After that the station began to make time for people who were involved rather than people who reported. From the mid l960s to the mid 1970s participatory democracy was in vogue.... Today we are at our best in representing the ethnic minorities and women. In public affairs and news we have become a radio station rather than a unique institution [all emphasis added - W.M.]....We don't go as deep as we used to. At KPFA in the past five years, in news and public affairs, we have moved away from the notion of content as the primary concern to the notion that polish on the air is important."

This was widely perceived, and in January 1984 Pacifica President Peter Franck had a private statewide meeting in San Luis Obispo with personalities then entirely outside Pacifica. They alleged that Pacifica had abandoned its principles in favor of commercialism. Ultimately this resulted in the replacement of Franck as president and also of his chief opponent, Executive Director Sharon Maeda. But it naturally created a furor at the station, and I signed a document along with several others, which read in part: "For a wide variety of reasons, National Public Radio exerts a pull on KPFA and its programming. Sometimes, that pull is strong....American media has been much improved by the presence of Pacifica 'graduates'....Asking the question, 'What issues should I address in my programming?' is different from asking, 'What programming can I find funding for?'" With respect to people trained at NPR, we stated: "These people may bring...a view of how a radio station should function and what a radio station should do that might not be fully consistent with Pacifica's aims and objectives.

Staff in those years took it for granted that the most fundamental matters of policy were its concern. While the perceived issues were very much the same as a decade later, management in the 1980s proceeded from the premise that it must find solutions that would satisfy sentiment down below. The lack of social, economic, and political analysis and of a Left outlook affected me. Pacifica News Service (PSN) inside the Washington Beltway now turned to academics for comment on Soviet developments. In earlier years such people were automatically suspect as trained seals of the Establishment, and I was the Pacifica source in that field as a matter of course. I wrote a scathing Open Letter to PNS about this in February 1984. I pointed out that when Soviet leader Brezhnev's successor, Andropov, had recently died, I was interviewed about that on commercial KCBS - the number two station in Northern California, by the San Jose Mercury-News and separately by KPFA, KPFK and WBAI. Pacifica News Service, on the other hand, phoned a professor at the University of Edinburgh, another in Georgia (U.S.A.), and a researcher at the Brookings Institution.

I commented: "That is McCarthyism. Here's why. I am one of the tiny handful of most senior professional Soviet-affairs experts in the world, in the field far longer than any of the people you interviewed.... The fact that Pacifica has carried me since 1958 is something it should wear like a medal...as the clearest proof that it does not yield. This truly is 1984. I have been unpersoned. Not only am I unknown to the general public outside Northern California, but the youngest generation of U.S. Soviet scholars doesn't know that I exist. But it is shameful when that is the case in a radio network I have been associated with for a quarter century. And it is worse than shameful when McCarthyist standards are applied: to the degree that my conclusions do not fit into the conventional wisdom of... younger radicals who haven't the remotest fraction of my experience... My expertise and competence are shunted aside. I expect that from most commercial publishers and the Sovietology profession, the academic embodiment of the Cold War. It is outrageous when it happens at Pacifica."

To people who had just begun listening, my programs continued to be a discovery. An old acquaintance wrote me about a "new KPFA subscriber [who] heard your program during the marathon, and during the re-play of your appearance before HUAC he drove off the freeway and telephoned his subscription to the station!"

Although KPFA's listeners are thought of as being intellectuals and yuppies, this was far from universal. A letter to me read: "I am now 72 years old. In my working years I was just an uneducated drifting manual construction worker and country worker. In the early '30s I rode freight trains and slept in hobo jungles. I've lived a hard, full life, and I can't die younger. I don't trust the American newspapers or news services. Keep on beating at these fascist bastards and their pimps."

But there were intellectuals whose support I particularly welcomed. The rising role of Latinos in California made me happy about a letter from a retired Chicano college teacher who was proud of the fact that a novel of his, "which presents the case for Chavez' UFW [United Farm Workers] and farmworkers... has been widely used in Chicano studies around the country the past ten years." He wrote me that he was impressed by my "intense honesty....The world badly needs more good Americans like you."

The cold war tension in the first half of the '80s, before Gorbachev came to power, was heightened by Israel's invasion of Lebanon and bombing of Beirut. A listener's reaction to my speech during a protest left me feeling at peace with myself . Alberto Miranda by name, a Puerto Rican, he wrote me:

"I know everyone addresses their letter with Dear whatever, whether they mean it or not, but you are indeed very dear to me. I try to always listen to your show. I always learn something. I am proud that KPFA has you on. During the demonstration at the Federal Building soon after the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians, when your name was announced, I clapped and cheered along." A young mother introduced herself on that occasion, and then wrote me: "My daughter [age nine] was delighted to meet you at the demonstration, and happy (and surprised) to discover that [I was] such a nice, friendly man." There is a wonderful word in Yiddish describing my reaction to that: kvell.. It means "rejoice," but that's too cold. "Warms the cockles of my heart" is closer, if clu msy. At bottom, I am an educator, and it is very important to me when something I do influences the youngest generation. And so, when another letter on that same occasion read: "Even my ten-year-old son is becoming a listener," that put me on cloud nine. A dozen years later I broadcast on a tiny station after being dropped by KPFA. A listener called and said: "I was raised on Bill Mandel."

It goes without saying that approval by fellow-Jews was particularly welcome in the aftermath of the bombing of Beirut. Ann Gonick had organized and raised the money for the remarkable ad, "Menachem Begin [the Israeli premier] Does Not Speak For Us," signed by four hundred Bay Area Jews, overwhelmingly not Leftists, in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the first-ever statement of opposition to Israeli policy by Jews outside the Jewish press. In consequence, Ann, a KPFA broadcast volunteer from South Africa, appeared on national TV. She wrote me: "Thank you for your inspirational show tonight. I was falling into a deep depression and hopelessness when you came on the air. Your strength of feeling and devotion bring back life and courage."

This, of course, was one of the many times I stepped outside Soviet affairs in a broadcast. Generally, the more critical the situation, the warmer the letters I received:

"There were so few of us at my college in Santa Barbara who would defend Iranian students [when the American Emnbassy staff in Teheran was held prisoner for months]! I remember the hysteria, the attacks on any dark-skinned person, the huge and ugly crowds, how we had to escort our friends around campus for fear of attack, the serious discussions about 'safe house' in case things got bad. Thank you again, Mr. Mandel - for your courage, your honesty, your sensitivity, your sense of perspective. Thanks especially for being a voice of reason in these times. Oh - and a link with our past and our history."

On the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, November 7, I invited my father, then eighty-nine, to guest on my show and reminisce about working in the Soviet Union in 1925 and 1931-2. Eve Buckner, then the assistant manager of KPFA, sent me a note: "I am writing this right after your show tonight which I found very inspiring. Apparently our listeners got turned on, too....Your father was a real joy to hear tonight."

"You should encourage him to come back to KPFA. I always think that these old folks have so much to tell us and that we too often push them aside."

After the Polish and Afghan crises, I had continued intermittently sending the station manager notes I titled "KPFA Newswatch." One brought my criticisms to a sharpness exceeding anything earlier. The evening News had stated flatly, not as a quote and without attribution or qualification, that the credentials of a local TV newsman had been seized from him by a member of Soviet military intelligence at their consulate. I wrote: "No consulate is permitted to have any military intelligence people. Therefore the only possible ultimate source for such a statement has to be the FBI, CIA, or other U.S. counterintelligence source. Is KPFA News taking their word nowadays?"

The following day the News interviewed a spokesperson for the TV station regarding its ad showing a Soviet missile killing Santa Claus. This was during the shopping weeks before Christmas. The interview ended with the spokesperson repeating the ad's closing paragraph reference to two little children having been among those who died on the Korean airliner. On this, my letter to the manager read: "KPFA News made no comment of any kind on the flat reaffirmation that the Soviets are baby-killers." I pointed out that the San Francisco Chronicle's icon columnist, Herb Caen, attacked that ad two days running, and another writer in that paper devoted an entire column to attacking it. A columnist in the competing Hearst San Francisco Examiner called the promo "an affront to adult sensibilities."

Whenever our government went to extremes, I tried to prevent people from going over the edge, politically. With respect to the 1984 election, I responded to a young artist in the town of Pacifica: "Elections, however poor the choice, represent one important difference between democracy and fascism....The system we now have does permit you and me some say in our destiny....Fascism has the capacity to exterminate entire categories: Jew, Gypsies, and homosexuals, in the German instance, plus political opponents. That is why one must not confuse it with milder forms of capitalist rule, in which public opinion, at the ballot-box and otherwise, does have some effect, and opponents can physically survive."

Citizen diplomacy sprang into existence after the shooting down of that Korean airliner over strategic Soviet military installations in 1983. Relatively prosperous whites, chiefly New Age, lost faith that either our government or the Soviet would save us from nuclear holocaust. Perhaps the most important organizer of citizen diplomacy was Sharon Tennison, an intensive-care nurse and small manufacturer of nursing supplies. She had been married to an army officer, and has a southern accent one can cut with a knife. Sharon had been taken to see a lynching when a child, at a time when that was regarded as instructional for a little white girl. She is a born humanist, and at one point I had to dissuade her from dropping her efforts to end the Cold War by citizen-to-citizen activity and going to Nicaragua as a nurse.

Sharon began her citizen diplimacy simply by organizing perhaps twenty people to take a tour to the Soviet Union and make contact with ordinary Soviet people. She informed the FBI, so that no one could think she was acting behind the back of the government. Her group was so frightened of the KGB that it practiced splitting up to enter Moscow subway cars, two persons to a car, and entering last so they could not be followed. They would then distribute "we want peace" materials, translated into Russian, and were amazed to find plain folk inviting them to their homes. Eventually she organized a massive "Moscow Meets Middle America" homestay exchange in small American cities funded by local governments and professional and business people.

In the first couple of years of her activity, I was the source of basic information and counsellor to her Center for U.S.-U.S.S.R. Initiatives. On one occasion I conducted an all-day seminar for about fifty of its members at a lighthouse-turned-hostel. When the USSR broke up, her Soviet contacts formed the basis of efforts, for which she obtained funding from major foundations and then from Washington's Agency for International Development, to train Russians and Ukrainians to run elementary businesses. Yet when I told her, in the early '90s, that I had given up on socialism, she was most disappointed. To her it was not the rigorous Marxism that had been my only hope of making socialism a reality, but a vague dream of a fair and equitable society. Of course I want that too, but the questions are how does one define it and how do we get there.

Citizen diplomacy spread like wildfire. At the beginning of 1984, a Berkeley private school teacher sought my help for a letter exchange between her 7th-graders and Soviet kids. A deluge of such requests followed. But my decade of isolation from academe, my last teaching was a course in Soviet Law at the Golden Gate University Law School in 1978, pigeonholed me as a radio person rather than a scholar, even in the Bay Area. A teacher wanted me to speak on Soviet education at one of many panels while a Cal doctoral candidate would address the entire school. I replied by picking up on a phrase Berkeley's Black Congressmember Ron Dellums had used often a decade earlier, when he referred to "women as niggers," "the aged as niggers," "the disabled as niggers." I said I was that Ph.D. candidate's academic grandfather, and I would not accept the status of "the blacklisted as niggers."

Such incidents proved to be very minor impediments to the usefulness of my broadcasts to the citizen diplomacy movement. In mid-1984 a listener wrote me that, during the spring, she heard me read a letter from a boy in Baku, Azerbaijan, and talk about my friend there, Ilya Kamenkovich. He was a very Communist Jewish war veteran who spent his time talking to school classes about what the Nazis had done to children. I had given his address on the air. This listener wrote him and received a reply.

"I was so very touched by the letter, she wrote me later, and by Ilya's effort, and so moved by my fury at being told whom I should hate and whom I should fear that I...sent a letter to Ilya that I intended also for the entire population of Baku. I wanted him to run through the streets waving my letter (I am only partly joking) and shouting, Mary Anne does not hate you, Mary Anne is not your enemy."

The final eighteen months before Gorbachev began to reverse American attitudes toward the USSR were, in some respects, the worst ever in my relationship to Pacifica until I was fired in 1995. Yet they were the best in my relationship to listeners subsequent to the period of hero-worship following the HUAC hearing. In January 1984 I turned to the listenership for financial support to publish my book on Soviet minority peoples by advance purchase. A female electrician, Gwen Winter, got La Semilla Cultural Center in Sacramento to mail nine hundred xeroxes of my appeal to their list. Linus Pauling's medical librarian obtained copies to distribute at the Physicians for Social Responsibility annual meeting in Washington. [Pauling, a biochemist, was the only person ever to be awarded two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry in 1954, and, in 1962, the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts against nuclear weapons.] A Palo Alto student at Columbia University's Russian Institute xeroxed copies and posted them. The San Franciusco Bay Guardian phoned, shocked that I'd had trouble being published, and made a news story of my appeal. A Davis listener xeroxed and circulated copies at a Christian Peace-Making Conference. A broadcaster on independent KKUP in Silicon Valley phoned and sent money. A listener to Pacifica's Los Angeles station, KPFK, mailed xeroxes to his acquaintances. A woman with whom I had traveled to the South thirty years earlier to save the Martinsville Seven sent for more copies. A WBAI listener, formerly a New York City official, "deeply moved" by an ad publicizing the information in this paragraph, sent fifty names for me to send my appeal to.

That was my standing with listeners, but not with Pacifica. I foresaw the possibility of my being dumped: "I am an indelible part of its history, no matter when or under what circumstances my broadcasts come to an end....The fact that there are Pacifica people...to whom I am unknown is a reflection of not-so-unconscious yielding to McCarthyism in Pacifica." In 1994 the nationally-syndicated conservative columnist George Will wrote that it was time to forget "human rights" as an issue, since its function was anti-Soviet, and the USSR was gone!

A letter from a Fremont listener summed up what I tried to say in my complaints to the Pacifica management over various matters: "You appear to be objective; you admit there are things about the country and its institutions you don't like or don't understand. All this sounds reasonable to me. Further, I think that if we had men and women of your caliber in the State Department today, our relations with the USSR would be as good or better than they are with Communist China, and we could cut our defense budget 90%."

In addition to my show on the Soviet Union, I was then broadcasting an earlier version of this autobiography in another time slot provided by the Drama and Literature Department. The idea that my American people, the people who had elected Roosevelt, was apparently going to re-elect Ronald Reagan, made me desperate. It was clear to me that the swing to the Right was going to last. I hoped that if I could help people understand how my generation had learned to fight to improve life for ordinary folk, a new generation might be aided by that knowledge. Knowing that human lives are more interesting listening than history as such, and having participated in virtually every movement for social progress since I was ten, I thought that presenting this message in the form of personal experience would win the broadest audience.

The department originally found eighteen half-hour slots for this. Had I tried to fit my life into that amount of time, the result would have been a list or at best a chronology. Fortunately, I let it write itself. But the result was that, at the end of that series, I had only reached age thirty-five, when I had been called before McCarthy.

Listeners asked for more time. An artist in San Francisco wrote: "Even though I am only a low income individual, I sense the importance of your work enough that I will pledge a $40 subscription to KPFA if they will allow you to complete your autobiography." Another wrote: "Hurry up and finish your book. It will make powerful reading," and sent a letter to management asking for additional time for me. The nicest read: "I'll probably buy his book, but there's nothing like hearing it, especially from such a dynamic and possessed individual - he makes the radio bleed and breathe."

I was ultimately given a total of fifty-one half-hours. The story was deliberately carried only through the end of the '60s in the belief that one needs some distance in time in order to have a proper perspective.

Broadcasting and trying to keep Pacifica on track continued to require enormous energy. Mother Jones' publisher Adam Hochschild and Saul Landau of the Institute for Policy Studies visited the USSR and broadcast their observations and conclusions. They joined the human rights bandwagon. I wrote the KPFA Folio: "The most important human right is the right to live. Hochschild and Landau agreee that the USSR supports that by its foreign policy. It is also the most important civil liberty. Police killings are as rare as in England. Quite recently, a couple of Soviet cops were actually executed for killing when neither self-defense nor protection of others required it. Ever heard of that in the U.S.? Or even England?"

Earlier I quoted a wonderfully warm letter from Alberto Miranda. He wrote me another a year later: "A few weeks ago, you started your program by saying you appreciated those listeners that aren't highly educated, don't consider themselves intellectuals. It put me at a sort of ease, since I only finished high school. Because you have good teaching qualities, it facilitates comprehension to almost anyone. When you answer a question, you expand it, you might take it from a different angle, from our cultural viewpoint, you exude a sense of fairness. When you have guests, you ask questions with the listener in mind....Whenever I hear the hearing with Joe McCarthy, what amazes me is that you never allowed yourself to be subjugated. No: 'oh no, poor me versus them' attitude on your part. Dramatic? yes, but you were the star. You had to be. Joe McCarthy and his sidekick Roy Cohn never would have agreed to the script. I end up thinking, that's him, none other than our own Bill Mandel." Such letters still cause me to choke up and bring tears to my eyes when I re-read them years later in the privacy of my study.

My contacts across the social spectrum continued. Two San Quentin prisoners wanted to subscribe to English-language Soviet newspapers and magazines. One of them wished to work toward a law degree in Soviet jurisprudence. They followed up by sending me their lengthy document on prison civilization, asked me to do a broadcast on the Soviet prison system, and wanted KPFA to increase my program time.

Out in the "free world," just as the letter from the retired Chicano professor three years earlier remained sharp in my memory, so did one that arrived now from a Tomasita Alvarado in San Jose: "I come from a migrant farm-working background and have experienced and still experience intense poverty, discrimination and all the things that come with the latter and the former (segregation, poor education, demoralization, crime)." What impressed me was not only that such a person would listen to me and write, but that the occasion for doing so was to send me a review in the Mercury-News of my Soviet But Not Russian, which she was reading.

As always, rank-and-file listeners kept me aware of where their interests lay. One in bucolic Marshall on Tomales Bay asked me to do a broadcast on environmental matters such as Russia's Lake Baikal "and other critical issues that have been overshadowed by Arms talk and the socio-political arena." But in that arena, a listener in Happy Camp, up in gold country, asked for evidence of war crimes by CIA-supported mullahs in Afghanistan to support the civil suit he had filed against the CIA in federal court. It asked the Director of that agency whether "operations" which cause the deliberate death of innocent participants are in conflict with Article 6 of the Constitution binding U.S. citizens to its treaties, particularly the Geneva Convention on the Law of War prohibiting violence against persons taking no part in hostilities.

My delightful Puerto Rican fan, Alberto Miranda, sent me a videotape of my appearance on TV discussing my book: "I ask no reimbursement. I am pleased just to hear you....By the way, as Billy Crystal would say, 'you look marvelous.' Sorry, I just couldn't help that." Next he sent me a Chanukah card consisting of lines from my McCarthy hearing that remained in his memory. Shortly afterward, an expensive hard-cover book by Noam Chomsky arrived: "Seeing you surrounded by books" in a photo accompanying an article on me in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle, "thought you would care to have this one. Plus, I want to have the feeling that I've given you one. So please, accept."

There was life outside KPFA. Son Bob, a member of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, secured passage of a resolution to engage in the most militant action against apartheid in South Africa ever taken by any labor organization in this country. It proposed to block the loading or unloading of cargo to or from South Africa. This meant, among other possibilities, loss of at least one day's pay, a good deal more money than most anti-apartheid activists ever contributed. The day one such vessel arrived in San Francisco, he phoned and asked if Tanya and I would join the picket line shortly after dawn the following morning. We were now sixty-eight.

As always when there was a possibility of arrest or violence, I dressed straight-arrow in a conservative suit and tie, plus a wool overcoat against the chill and fog. A family affair: son Dave was also there. He actually had his body against the hood of an immense tractor-trailer, heading a long line of trucks coming to pick up the freight. A picket line of longshoremen, Black and white, and other opponents of apartheid, many of them former or still Communists, circled and blocked the roadway. An African-American longshoreman, with bullhorn, addressed the line of trucks seeking to enter the pier, calling upon the union Teamsters not to cross their line. They didn't.

Saying No To Power Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker
- by William Mandel © 1999-2001 All Rights Reserved

Chapter 25
Battle for the Airwaves

News|Support ÷ History ÷ "Saying No To Power" ÷ Discussion   Home ÷ Sign the Letter to Reinstate Bill to KPFA ÷ Site Credits ÷ E-mail the Webmaster

Brought to you by the Committee to Restore William (Bill) Mandel to KPFA.

        

billmandel.net, billmandel.com mcmxcix-mmi eYe Openers design  ÷webmaster.wm÷ - All rights reserved - Created 08 28 99
Saying No To Power William Marx Mandel, 1999-2001 - All rights reserved - All content herein, subject to this copyright reservation.