Walter Roberts (writer)
Encyclopedia
Walter R. Roberts is a writer, lecturer, and former government official.
(August 26, 1916), educated at the University of Vienna
and Cambridge University (M.Litt.,Ph.D.).
He was a research assistant at The Harvard Law School
(1940–1942) and joined the US Government (Coordinator of Information) in 1942. After eight years of service with the Voice of America
, he was transferred to the Austrian Desk of the Department of State (1950).
In 1953, he was appointed Deputy Area Director for Europe in the newly created U.S. Information Agency (USIA). In 1955, he was a member of the American Delegation to the Austrian Treaty Talks that culminated in a State Treaty, signed in Vienna by the four occupying powers (U.S. Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union) on May 15, 1955.
In 1960, he was appointed Counselor for Public Affairs at the American Embassy in Belgrade
, Yugoslavia
. In 1966, he was assigned as Diplomat in Residence at Brown University
in Providence, R.I. and in 1967 he was transferred to Geneva
, Switzerland
to serve as Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. In 1969, he was appointed Deputy Associate Director of USIA and in 1971 was elevated to the Associate Director position, then the senior career post in USIA.
In 1973, his book Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies, 1941-1945 was published, described by Foreign Affairs as “the best book on the subject.” In 1974, he received the Distinguished Honor Award from USIA. He retired from the U.S. Government in 1974 to take the position of Director of Diplomatic Studies at Georgetown University
’s Center for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS). His first assignment there was to serve as executive director of a panel on International Information, Educational and Cultural Affairs (also called the Stanton Panel after its chairman, the then President of CBS, Dr. Frank Stanton
).
In 1975, he was called back into government to serve as executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting. (BIB, the government agency overseeing Radio Free Europe
and Radio Liberty. The BIB was dissolved and replaced in 1999 by the Broadcasting Board of Governors
. In 1985, he retired for the second time from the U.S. Government and was appointed diplomat-in-residence at The George Washington University
where he taught a course on “Diplomacy in the Information Age” for ten years.
In 1991, President George H. W. Bush
appointed him to be a member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and President Bill Clinton
reappointed him in 1994. In 1993, he accepted an appointment as a member of the board of the Salzburg Seminar
. In 2001, he co-founded (as successors to the Public Diplomacy Foundation) the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication at The George Washington University and The Public Diplomacy Council. He is still an advisor to the (renamed) Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication and a member emeritus of the board of the Public Diplomacy Council.http://publicdiplomacycouncil.org/board-members In 2009, he received the Voice of America “Director’s Special Recognition Award”.
Since his retirement from government, he has written and spoken widely on foreign affairs subjects.
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2011/0104/fsl/fsl_robertsvoa.html
Life and career
He was born in AustriaAustria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
(August 26, 1916), educated at the University of Vienna
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...
and Cambridge University (M.Litt.,Ph.D.).
He was a research assistant at The Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
(1940–1942) and joined the US Government (Coordinator of Information) in 1942. After eight years of service with the Voice of America
Voice of America
Voice of America is the official external broadcast institution of the United States federal government. It is one of five civilian U.S. international broadcasters working under the umbrella of the Broadcasting Board of Governors . VOA provides a wide range of programming for broadcast on radio...
, he was transferred to the Austrian Desk of the Department of State (1950).
In 1953, he was appointed Deputy Area Director for Europe in the newly created U.S. Information Agency (USIA). In 1955, he was a member of the American Delegation to the Austrian Treaty Talks that culminated in a State Treaty, signed in Vienna by the four occupying powers (U.S. Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union) on May 15, 1955.
In 1960, he was appointed Counselor for Public Affairs at the American Embassy in Belgrade
Belgrade
Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...
, Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
. In 1966, he was assigned as Diplomat in Residence at Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
in Providence, R.I. and in 1967 he was transferred to Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
to serve as Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. In 1969, he was appointed Deputy Associate Director of USIA and in 1971 was elevated to the Associate Director position, then the senior career post in USIA.
In 1973, his book Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies, 1941-1945 was published, described by Foreign Affairs as “the best book on the subject.” In 1974, he received the Distinguished Honor Award from USIA. He retired from the U.S. Government in 1974 to take the position of Director of Diplomatic Studies at Georgetown University
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
’s Center for Strategic and International Studies
Center for Strategic and International Studies
The Center for Strategic and International Studies is a bipartisan Washington, D.C., foreign policy think tank. The center was founded in 1962 by Admiral Arleigh Burke and Ambassador David Manker Abshire, originally as part of Georgetown University...
(CSIS). His first assignment there was to serve as executive director of a panel on International Information, Educational and Cultural Affairs (also called the Stanton Panel after its chairman, the then President of CBS, Dr. Frank Stanton
Frank Stanton
Frank Nicholas Stanton was an American broadcasting executive who served as the president of CBS between 1946 and 1971 and then vice chairman until 1973. He also served as the chairman of the Rand Corporation from 1961 until 1967.Along with William S. Paley, Stanton is credited with the...
).
In 1975, he was called back into government to serve as executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting. (BIB, the government agency overseeing Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a broadcaster funded by the U.S. Congress that provides news, information, and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East "where the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed"...
and Radio Liberty. The BIB was dissolved and replaced in 1999 by the Broadcasting Board of Governors
Broadcasting Board of Governors
The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for all non-military, international broadcasting sponsored by the U.S government. It was previously a department within the United States Information Agency until 1999.-Origins:Starting in...
. In 1985, he retired for the second time from the U.S. Government and was appointed diplomat-in-residence at The George Washington University
George Washington University
The George Washington University is a private, coeducational comprehensive university located in Washington, D.C. in the United States...
where he taught a course on “Diplomacy in the Information Age” for ten years.
In 1991, President George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush
George Herbert Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 41st President of the United States . He had previously served as the 43rd Vice President of the United States , a congressman, an ambassador, and Director of Central Intelligence.Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, to...
appointed him to be a member of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
reappointed him in 1994. In 1993, he accepted an appointment as a member of the board of the Salzburg Seminar
Salzburg Seminar
Salzburg Global Seminar is an American non-profit organization that holds seminars on economics, politics, and other issues for future political, economic, and business leaders from around the world...
. In 2001, he co-founded (as successors to the Public Diplomacy Foundation) the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication at The George Washington University and The Public Diplomacy Council. He is still an advisor to the (renamed) Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication and a member emeritus of the board of the Public Diplomacy Council.http://publicdiplomacycouncil.org/board-members In 2009, he received the Voice of America “Director’s Special Recognition Award”.
Since his retirement from government, he has written and spoken widely on foreign affairs subjects.
Books
- Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies,1941-1945, Rutgers University Press, 1973; reprinted by Duke University Press, 1987
- Culture and Information: Two Foreign Policy Functions (with Terry L.Deibel), Sage Publications, 1976. {http://books.google.com/books?id=OVMWOwAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Walter+R.+Roberts%22&ei=v6wGTOXwOp2yNKyy9bAE&cd=1}
Articles
- “U.S. Experience in Evaluating Information Programs”, Zeitschrift fuer Kulturaustausch, Stuttgart, 1975
- “The Global Information Revolution and the Communist World” (with Harold E. Engle), The Washington Quarterly, Spring, 1986
- “The Information Revolution: A Breakthrough in the East?” The World Today (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), June 1989. Published in German by the Europaische Rundschau in the Fall of 1989.
- “A New Status for Eastern Europe?”, The World Today (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), October, 1989
- “Germany: The Gorbachev Memorandum”, The World Today (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), October, 1990
- “Diplomacy in the Information Age”, The World Today (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), July, 1991. Published in German by the Europaische Rundschau in the Fall of 1991.
- ”The Life and Death of Integration in Yugoslavia”, Mediterranean Quarterly, Spring, 1992
- “Torn Curtain” (with Harold E.Engle), Foreign Service Journal June, 1993
- “The Voices of America”, World & I, November, 1993
- “Eberhard P. Deutsch: A Comment” Austrian Information (Washington, D.C.) Vol.49, No. 11, 1996
- “Austria as a Model”, Foreign Policy, Fall, 1996
- “Follow the Austrian Model”, Washington Quarterly, Winter, 1997
- “The Only Good Serb is a…” (With David Binder), Mediterranean Quarterly, Summer, 1998
- “Serbs as Victims”, The Washington Post, April 10, 1999
- “Government Broadcasting”, Virtual Diplomacy (Net diplomacy-Beyond Old Borders) U.S. Institute of Peace, August, 2002
- “Rebuilding Public Diplomacy” (with Barry Fulton), National Strategy Forum Review, Spring, 2004
- “The Evolution of Diplomacy” Mediterranean Quarterly, Summer, 2006 http://mq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/17/3/55?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=roberts&fulltext=The+Life+and+Death+of+Integration+in+Yugoslavia&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT
- “What is Public Diplomacy? Past Practices, Present Conduct, Possible Future”, Mediterranean Quarterly, Fall, 2007 http://mq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/18/4/36?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=roberts&fulltext=The+Life+and+Death+of+Integration+in+Yugoslavia&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&resourcetype=HWCIT
- “Rebooting America’s Image Abroad”, WhirledView, February 14, 2009 http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2009/02/page/3/
- "The Voice of America – Origins and Recollections”, American Diplomacy, Oct.26, 2009 http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2009/1012/fsl/roberts_voice.html
- "The Voice of America - Origins and Recollections II", American Diplomacy, Jan.11, 2011
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2011/0104/fsl/fsl_robertsvoa.html
- "The Israel Palestine Conflict: 1967 Lines with Mutually Agreed Swaps", American Diplomacy, Sept.21, 2011 http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2011/0912/ca/roberts_isrpal.html