RFE/RL: New Yorker's Hertzberg Blogs About RFE/RL Experience
|
posted by eagle on September, 2009 as ANALYSIS / OPINION
New Yorker's Hertzberg Blogs About RFE/RL ExperienceSeptember 08, 2009 Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor and staff writer for the New Yorker, recently visited RFE/RL headquarters in Prague. Upon "beaming" back to the U.S., he posted this to the New Yorker's blog.
A U.S. Enterprise
Hendrick Hertzberg | The New Yorker
Space…the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.—“Star Trek” (2009)
After a few days of hanging around the Prague headquarters* of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I realized what the place reminded me of.
Start with the building. It’s like a giant hovering spaceship, sleek and metallic and futuristic, especially in contrast to the venerable city it is both part of and apart from. Its defenses are formidable and vaguely naval. There’s an outer perimeter wall (“Shields up!”) with an airlock-like security post, a fifty-foot grass moat, and another airlock at the entrance to the building proper. Lots of glass, some of it inches thick, and steel. The interior is surprisingly light and airy. Its heart is a four-story atrium. On the atrium floor, far below the solar skylights, editors sit like starship technicians before glowing computer screens. The doors between suites of offices and workspaces are extremely heavy, like bulkheads on a submarine. You get the feeling that should Klingon warriors succeed in taking over a section of the building, the rest could be instantly sealed off at the touch of a security officer’s button. The technology and equipment—the studios, the recording booths, the gadget-heavy meeting rooms—is very 23rd century. Good special effects.
Then there’s the crew. Though united in its dedication to the mission, it’s wildly heterogeneous, packed with multilingual humanoids from distant might-as-well-be-other-planets—odd corners of the galaxy like Afghanistan, Belarus, Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, and Iran. I can’t decide whether Jeff Gedmin, the current captain of RFE/RL, is more of a Kirk type or a Spock type. But his No. 2, the former National Review editor John O’Sullivan, has definite Scotty tendencies, while the newsroom chief, Jay Tolson, formerly of the Wilson Quarterly and U.S. News, bears a certain resemblance to Bones. (Needless to say, there are plenty of candidates for the Chekov slot.)
Finally, the mission. Kirk’s U.S.S. Enterprise was on a voyage of discovery—a fact-finding mission, basically. So is RFE/RL, but with a useful twist: it doesn’t just find facts, it distributes them, mostly to places where people would otherwise have little or no access to them. Both spaceships come in peace; their elaborate security systems serve strictly defensive purposes. But you can’t go where no one has gone before—and beaming down honest news, information, and commentary to people whose rulers would rather they didn’t hear it is a rough eqivalent—without a certain amount of dedication and, in some cases, courage. There are villains out there. Boldness is a must.
*RFE/RL headquarters used to be in Munich, but by 1993 the rent had grown too steep for an organization that no longer had the Cold War to focus Congress’s mind on its budgetary needs. So Vaclav Havel, in grateful remembrance of the days when he was not yet president of the Czech Republic but only a poor dissident hunched over a shortwave receiver, invited the Radios (as RFE/RL is sometimes called) to Prague. With the gentle humor for which he is known and loved, Havel offered the former seat of the rubber-stamp Communist parliament, a “modern” concrete structure right off Wenceslas Square, (it looks like a cut-rate Boston City Hall), and fixed the rent at three Czech pennies per year.
More than one office wall at RFE/RL has a blowup of an iconic photograph from 1968, taken in Venceslas Square during the Warsaw Pact invasion that crushed the Prague Spring. A Russian (or maybe Polish or Hungarian) tank, its crew looking young and nervous, is surrounded by a vast crowd of peaceful protesters. In the background is a skeleton of girders: RFE/RL’s future home, being built at Communist expense.
After September 11, 2001, RFE/RL became a likely target for Al Qaeda types, and its location in the city’s tourist and business heart made it a danger to its surroundings. Hence the move to a new, purpose-built building. The new building, which was finished just seven months ago, is less centrally located but still easily and quickly reachable via Prague’s wonderful streetcars or its excellent subway system, a rare positive legacy of the Soviet period.
comments (0)
|
