As the Voice of America (VOA), the United States government radio station for international audiences, observes its eightieth anniversary, it may surprise Americans who know about its existence that in its first years during the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the U.S. taxpayer-funded broadcaster had a long period of intense fascination with Soviet communism. During World War II,…
Polish Journalist Stefan Bratkowski Dead at 86, Praised Radio Free Europe During Cold War
I was saddened to learn that Stefan Bratkowski, born 22.11.1934, described on Culture.pl website as “one of the outstanding Polish journalists of the last few decades” died on April 18, 2021. He was one of the organizers of the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański Association of Employees, Freelancers and Friends of the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe formed in Poland in 1994.…
Anniversary of Katyn murders–a war crime covered up by Soviet propaganda and Voice of America
81 years ago, on April 3, 1940, the Soviet secret police NKVD started the mass murders of Polish military officers and intellectual leaders in carrying out orders of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and other members of the Communist Party Politburo who were already responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians, Ukrainians and people of other nationalities. One of the…
Soft Propaganda by Former Voice of America Editor Targeted Americans in Support of Communist Regime
Mira Złotowska, later known as Mira Michałowska, who during the Cold War published books and articles in English in the United States and in Great Britain as Mira Michal and used several other pen names, was one of many radically left-wing journalists who had worked in New York on Voice of America (VOA) U.S. government anti-Nazi radio broadcasts in the…
Refugee Voice of America Journalists Stood Up to the Anti-Reagan VOA Newsroom and Won the Cold War
By Ted Lipien “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” ― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between In the early 1980s, vehemently anti-Reagan Voice of America (VOA) central English newsroom journalists, almost all of them U.S.-born, engaged in dogged resistance against officials and managers selected by the new administration to run the U.S. taxpayer-funded international media outlet operating…
Voice of America Announcer Who Refused VOA Director’s Orders to Read Stalin’s Lies
By Ted Lipien One of the most principled and courageous Voice of America (VOA) journalists, Konstanty Broel Plater, was born in Poland 111 years ago on September 19, 1909. Yet his name remains unknown to nearly all VOA employees whom successive U.S. government broadcasting leaders have convinced that the first VOA director John Houseman who, in reality, invented fake radio…
USAGM uhonorowuje Zofię Korbońską, dziennikarkę sekcji polskiej Głosu Ameryki
Informacja prasowa USAGM [U.S. Agency for Global Media – Agencji Stanów Zjednoczonych ds Globalnych Mediów] USAGM uhonorowuje Zofię Korbońską, dziennikarkę sekcji polskiej Głosu Ameryki [Voice of America – VOA] 16 sierpnia 2020 r Waszyngton, DC – Dziś mija 10-ta rocznica śmierci Zofii Korbońskiej, uczestniczki antyhitlerowskiego ruchu oporu w Polsce w czasie drugiej wojny światowej, która po wojnie w ucieczce przed…
Communist secret police in Poland spied on Voice of America’s Willis Conover to shut down Radio Free Europe
By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum Polish communist intelligence service and secret police spied on Voice of America’s (VOA) jazz expert Willis Conover during his visit to Poland in 1959 and tried to exploit it to influence U.S. diplomats into silencing Polish broadcasts of Radio Free Europe (RFE). As reported by Polish media, the spying on Conover is…
Toward the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, the Republican administration of conservative President Ronald Reagan greatly increased spending on U.S. international broadcasting to the Soviet Union and to other communist-ruled nations. Broadcasts to nations behind the Iron Curtain were carried out by the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). President Reagan…
‘What is true of the parts is true of the whole’ fallacy in journalism and propaganda
Today’s Voice of America (VOA) reporters might benefit from seeing a historical example of how a former VOA journalist who during the Cold War became an anti-American propagandist for the communist regime in Poland wrote one-sided narratives using a few news facts and some true information about the United States and Canada to create an almost entirely false picture of…
Radio was a ‘childhood companion’ of Polish Nobel Prize author Olga Tokarczuk
I learned something today by reading on the Internet the Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture delivered on December 7, 2019 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. As a young girl growing up in Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s, a country at that time still under communist rule until 1989, she was often listening…
Hollywood’s Polish Latin lover who terrorized Voice of America broadcasters
By TED LIPIEN
The name of the handsome man with a tanned Latin complexion in the 1942 publicity photo was Edward Raquello. He was a Hollywood actor, but he soon became known as a “very talented terror” at the Voice of America (VOA), the U.S. government radio station broadcasting abroad, where he was hired that year as a producer and put in charge of training radio announcers during World War II and later in the early years of the Cold War. Before his Voice of America career, he played Latin lovers in a number of Hollywood films. Radio Daily, the national newspaper of commercial radio and television, referred to him in a report on July 7, 1943 as being “once known as the ‘Polish Valentino’ at the time the late Carl Laemmle brought that European film star to to Hollywood.” The paper praised his role as the “Polish immigrant” in a radio play titled America the Beautiful. Had we known earlier that Edward Raquello was the voice of the Polish immigrant, the paper wrote “the thrill to our ears wouldn’t have been so unexpected” “[His]splendid performance” Radio Daily added, “will be remembered (at least by this reporter) for many years,”[ref]Radio Daily, “Main Street Old Scoops Daly,” July 7, 1943, page 4. https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Radio-Daily/RD-1943/RA-1943-07.pdf.[/ref]
His American friends called him Eddie. Raquello was his American name. His name in Poland, where he was born on May 14, 1900 to a middle class Jewish-Polish family in Warsaw, then still within the Russian Empire, was Edward Zylberberg (Silberberg). His father died when he was a child. He was raised by his uncle, Beniamin Rykwert, the head of the Nożyk Synagogue who supervised his religious education. His mother, who died in 1932, ran a successful bakery and patisserie shop in Warsaw.
While still in Poland, Wowek, as he was affectionately called by his family, changed his last name to a more Polish-sounding name, Kucharski. In 1917, he began studies at the technical university in Warsaw, but his higher education was interrupted by the 1919-1920 war with the Soviet Union. Edward must have been a highly capable young man because he was chosen as a personal driver for Polish general Józef Haller despite the fact that some of Haller’s volunteers were strongly anti-Semitic, falsely accusing Polish Jews of siding with the Bolsheviks. With the exception of a few Polish and Polish-Jewish communists who took orders from Moscow, Edward and many other Jewish students saw themselves as Polish patriots and fought alongside ethnic Poles in the 1920 Battle of Warsaw which stopped and reversed the advance of the Soviet Red Army.
After the Polish-Soviet war, Edward started his acting career in Polish films. He also performed in theaters in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Kraków, Berlin, London, and Paris. An excellent, comprehensive and well-sourced article in Polish by young journalist Marek Teler, titled “Edward Raquello – zawrotna kariera polsko-żydowskiego Latynosa” (“Edward Raquello — A Meteoric Career of A Polish-Jewish Latino”), describes how Edward found his way to Hollywood. Rosabelle Laemmle, the daughter of the Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle reportedly hired Edward as her dancing partner in Paris when he fell on hard times. She immediately noticed his resemblance to Rudolf Valentino. The party-loving young woman was believed to have persuaded her father to offer Edward a contract with Universal Pictures. He arrived in New York on March 26, 1926.
A Latin Lover and Broadway Actor
Edward’s first Hollywood name was Edward Regino before he changed it to Raquello, possibly to honor his beloved sister Rachel who remained in Poland. Rachel survived the Holocaust, but his other sister, Jentel, was murdered in a German concentration camp together with her husband and their two children.
Edward Raquello’s first notable American role was that of a dancer Raoul in the silent movie The Girl from Rio. Afterwards, his movie career had stalled for a few years, during which he appeared in several Broadway plays, often playing handsome and aristocratic foreigners, mostly of Latin origins. In 1937 he signed a contract with 20th Century Fox and resumed his movie career, appearing in several films, including Charlie Chen at Monte Carlo and Idiot’s Delight with Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in the main roles. In 1938 he became an American citizen. Some of his other film roles were in Missing Daughters (1939), The Girl from Mexico (1939), and Calling Philo Vance (1940). He never became a major Hollywood movie star but had a reasonably successful American career as a film and theatre actor. Marek Teler reported that Raquello promoted Polish culture in the United States and assisted visiting Polish journalists in arranging interviews with film celebrities in Hollywood. In 1940 he played the role of a Polish officer Major Rutkowski in a Broadway production of Robert E. Sherwood‘s play There Shall Be No Night about the 1939-1940 Soviet attack on Finland. The play was directed by Alfred Lunt who admired Raquello’s acting talent and once fired another actor who publicly insulted Edward on stage during a rehearsal. Edward Goldberger, a veteran VOA broadcaster who had worked with Raquello said later in an interview that Raquello had to have provoked the actor to such an unprofessional outburst as he was later known to provoke many VOA broadcasters with his own erratic behavior. One explanation for it might have been that he suffered from an undiagnosed Addison’s disease, but according to Goldberger, Raquello was a unique, talented but difficult person.
But the thing that came into my mind was, he must have been like that then, too. What provoked this guy to do something so unprofessional? It must have been that Raquello was Raquello.[ref]The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project Information Series,”EUGENE KERN AND EDWARD GOLDBERGER.” Interviewed by: Claude ‘Cliff’ Groce. Initial interview date: December 12, 1986. Copyright 2000 ADST. https://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Kern,%20Eugene.toc.pdf[/ref]
My photo with the great Polish patriot, anti-Nazi fighter, and political leader Stefan Korboński was taken on June 20, 1976 in front of the White House on the day of my daughter’s baptism. Stefan and his wife, Zofia Korbońska, my colleague in the Polish Service of the Voice of America (VOA), were Leokadia W. Lipien’s (Lodi Rohrer) godparents. Stefan Korboński (2…
Polish children refugees from Russia – silenced by Soviet and U.S. propaganda
U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (OWI – 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.[ref]Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White…
Vice President George H.W. Bush interviewed for Voice of America by Ted Lipien and Wayne Corey in 1987
Cold War Radio Museum Voice of America (VOA) Polish Service director Ted Lipien and VOA English Service correspondent Wayne Corey interviewed the then Vice President George H.W. Bush on September 24, 1987 in his office in Washington shortly before his trip to Italy to see Pope John Paul II and to Poland to confer with government and opposition leaders.…