The hyperventilation of the Trump era inspires analogies to Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and fascism of every sort. But what may be the most precise description is how, in many ways, our country is coming to resemble post-Soviet Russia.
The USSR imploded in 1991, and for a decade or so it flailed in pursuit of a new identity. Then came Vladimir Putin, and over more than twenty years he has transformed Russia into what it has become today: belligerent, inequitable, and repressive, with a largely quiescent population.
The Russian populace has always tended toward submissiveness. It was a small revolutionary minority that toppled the tsar embraced Communism and until the 1980s virtually the entire population of the fifteen Soviet republics accepted their fate as vassals of the Kremlin.
American citizens have been much more influential, for better or worse, in the evolution of our society. Beginning with the Revolution, through the Civil War and the liberation and anti-war movements of the 1960s, our population has been instrumental in the shaping of the nation.
Until now.
Fifty percent or so of the electorate gave Donald Trump a second term as president, knowing the chaotic consequences of his first term: two impeachments, criminal indictments, and civil penalties unprecedented for the presidency. January 6, 2021, was a unique moment of historical violence, and in 2025 the perpetrators of that assault on democracy were pardoned.
Many important pillars of U.S. civil society — political, academic, media — have largely succumbed to Trump’s intimidation and edicts. While there have been periodic protest marches and some examples of resistance, the overriding reality is that MAGA has prevailed — and in some cases it has demolished or transformed seemingly immutable institutions of government, scholarship, and research and has undermined confidence in the meaning of truth.
How will we restore the constitutional checks and balances when they have been eliminated, with judicial and congressional acquiescence at the highest levels of leadership? Can the Pentagon, the State Department, Justice, Homeland Security, HHS, USAID, the CDC, and on and on be restored to their traditional roles? They were never by any means perfect, but now they have been transformed or obliterated.
And that is the comparison to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He has been repressing every facet of public and private life with impunity. He invaded Ukraine, determining to do away with a challenge to dominance of what he considered Russia’s rightful empire,
Internal Russian opposition to Putin has been neutralized in many instances in brazen fashion: the persecution and murder of the democratic activist Alexei Navalny and the assassination in the air of Putin’s maniacal rival Yevgeny Prigozhin are just two examples of the Russian president’s impunity.
Trump’s strategy of using executive powers and subordinated agencies of his administration to punish former antagonists and present critics is, for now, less directly lethal but nonetheless an egregious abuse of power.
And there is crony capitalism — Trump’s enrichment of himself and a selected cohort — that is shameless. Trump’s sons and the Kushner, Boulos, and Witkoff families are engaging in corruption so blatant, and in plain sight, that their predecessors in American life seem positively trivial. Remember the scandal of Billy Carter’s pathetic extraction of money from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya? Or Hunter Biden’s grief-stricken and alcoholic misadventures for which he was convicted and then pardoned by his father?
So why is such a vast swath of American society, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, from Congress to the universities, from the law firms to the media, accepting what is happening and even enabling it?
My sense is that the onslaught to our society is so relentless that the effect is numbing.
When I lived in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, most people there seemed to accept their fate and did what they could to live safe and relatively comfortable lives. In today’s Russia, from what we can see at a distance, this is still the case. If the casualty estimates from the Ukraine war are close to accurate, more than a million Russian families have suffered the loss of young men, dead, wounded, or permanently scarred in pursuit of Putin’s objectives, and his alone.
Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Vladimir Putin was, at least initially, elected to the presidency of Russia. But neither man was given a popular mandate for autocracy and a modern version of dictatorship — certainly not Trump.
That is why what is happening in the United States is so unfathomable. In our 250th year as a nation, is this really what Americans want as our destiny?
Of course not. What, then, are we going to do about changing the trajectory?
Repression, injustice, and discrimination were in the past alleviated by popular will but never really disappeared. They are being revived. The U.S. role in the world was intended to ensure security and democratic norms, again with imperfect results.
But never before have Americans accepted tyranny as a way of life. Which is why the present United States of Putinism has to be seen for what it is: undoubtedly the greatest test of popular will this country has faced in the memories of every last one of us.
Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award, In the Garden of Memory is a memoir on the family of Peter Osnos.
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland’s most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of one of the country’s most illustrious clans, noted for its achievements in business, politics, and culture-as they lived, struggled, and (mostly) survived through the turbulent twentieth century.
Rich with tales of bravery as well as poignant, sometimes comic anecdotes of everyday life, the book follows the family members as they scattered around the world to European spas, tsarist prisons, Soviet war camps, and the Royal Air Force. Tracing their roots to a renowned Austrian rabbi, the family members included an array of amazing characters. One became an industrial magnate who founded the Citro n automobile company in France; another was a Communist revolutionary who ended up being arrested, tortured, and executed by Stalin’s police. One worked as an undercover agent, another as a zoologist in France. One became a notable Polish publisher, another a leading Freudian psychiatrist.
Inevitably, the tragic history of the Second World War and its catastrophic impact on European Jews looms darkly over the narrative, yet remarkably enough only two members of the clan were killed in the Holocaust. Today the survivors have continued the family journey around the world, including in the United States. Beautifully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, In the Garden of Memory is ultimately the uplifting account of a family that never gave up hope and never gave in.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association.
Lloyd-Jones will be in conversation with Peter L.W. Osnos, the author of An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, the coauthor of Would You Believe . . . The Helsinki Accords Changed the World? and the editor of George Soros: A Life in Full. His most recent book is LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail. He is the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs and a former publisher of the Times Books imprint at Random House, where he was previously a senior editor and associate publisher. Prior to his career in book publishing, he spent eighteen years at The Washington Post, where he was a correspondent in Saigon, Moscow, and London and served as foreign editor and national editor. He is a graduate of Brandeis University and the Columbia School of Journalism, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He lives in Bethesda, MD.
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Winner of the Nike Prize, Poland’s most prestigious literary award
Joanna Olczak-Ronikier is one of Poland’s most admired dramatists, screenwriters, and authors. In the Garden of Memory, her most acclaimed work, traces the lives of four generations of her own family-Polish Jews who were members of…
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Baghdad, 1940. A shabby hotel in a chaotic city. Jozef, Marta, and Robert Osnos arrived, desperate for a place to stay. The proprietor noted their Polish passports and disappeared for a moment.
“He came back with a tall slender man who said in Polish, ‘What’s going on?’ then something in Arabic, then again in Polish, then arranged to have a room for everybody and promised to come to our quarters later to explain everything. That was John the Savior! He played a main role in our flight and my warmest feelings he will have forever.”
–From Marta Osnos’s memoir, Exodus: From Occupied Warsaw to Bucharest, Istanbul, Baghdad and Finally, Safety in Bombay
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To survive in the mayhem of World War II in Europe, especially if you were Jewish, meant some combination of miracles — a composite of luck, courage, guile, and coincidence.
Jozef, Marta, and Robert’s arrival in Baghdad was months into their journey from Poland, and at every stop there were great dangers and fateful encounters that enabled them to press on. In Bucharest there was an earthquake that terrified Robert even more than the bombing of Warsaw had, he would say. But in a garden behind their hotel Jozef met the Turkish ambassador, who had also rushed outside from a neighboring building. After talking to Jozef in French, he arranged a transit visa to Turkey. They still had to cross Syria, until finally, exhausted, they arrived in Baghdad.
Enter John Miś, a Pole who had turned up in Baghdad and was working as a language teacher at Markaziyah College. I recently did an extensive online search, with the help of researchers in Britain, that revealed some details of his life, but much of his personal background remains a mystery. He was not Jewish, and so leaving Poland was a choice. Why was he in Baghdad? To the eternal benefit of my family, he had connections at the British consulate and also with the Japanese, who in 1940 would still give travel visas to selected European refugees.
Mish (the English spelling of his Polish surname) was born in 1909 in the part of Poland that had been incorporated into Prussia in the late eighteenth century. He received a doctorate in languages in Berlin in 1934, speaking Chinese, Japanese, Manchu, and Malay on his way to fluency years later in more than thirty Asian languages.
After helping the family find a hotel room and arrange essential doctor visits, Mish guided them toward the British consulate, where they learned that with a transit visa to Bombay, they’d be allowed to stay for the duration of the war. This all sounds much more straightforward than in fact it probably was. In wartime, everything is hard.
The family made it to Bombay and began to reassemble their shattered lives. A year later, according to my mother’s memoir, Mish turned up in Bombay working for the Indian government in some intelligence-related capacity. Exactly what that meant I don’t know, nor apparently did my mother. The files that would describe his exact position are in London and still not readily available for examination.
The clearest explanation of his wartime work comes from a list of ten Poles who in 1946 received the King’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom. He is described as a “Chinese Intelligence Officer, Criminal Investigating Department, Bombay.”
King George VI instituted the award in 1945, “to recognise foreign nationals, mainly civilians of allied countries, who had given meritorious service in furtherance of the interests of the British Commonwealth in the allied cause during the Second World War.” The medal was awarded only 2,539 times.
In the reams of scholarship about Indian intelligence activities during the war, one summary is called “Indian Contributions to Intelligence and Espionage.”
“The British colonial administration had established intelligence networks to monitor nationalist movements and repress dissent,” the report said.
My guess is that Mish was a translator and analyst of Chinese and Japanese material gathered from surveillance or by on-the-ground espionage.
After the war ended in 1945, Mish stayed in Bombay for another year before arriving in New York, where he became director of the Oriental and Slavonic divisions at the New York Public Library. When he died in August 1983, he had received sufficient stature to merit a full obituary in The New York Times. “Under his leadership, and in a joint acquisition program with the Library of Congress and other institutions, the Oriental collection grew to include documents from North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines,” the paper wrote. “The collection was particularly notable for its material on the modern vernacular languages of India and its Japanese scientific and technical journals.”
Mish married an American journalist named Lucy Kent, became an American citizen, and adopted a son. The family lived in Bronxville, New York. I was told he was a man of consequence to our family but never really understood why.
A 1973 profile in the New York Daily News said, “Last year, he began receiving Chinese classics and non-propaganda from Hong Kong and then from Mainland China. He concluded correctly that the cultural revolution, the violent upheaval started by Mao in 1966, was over.” This was a crucial insight for policy makers in Washington.
Thinking about it now, I suppose discovering that Mish was undercover in Baghdad for Britain’s MI6 and doing cloak-and-dagger spying in Bombay would have added some spice to my sense of the man whom my parents clearly admired.
That did not emerge in my research about him. But his role as a savior to my parents and brother in the midst of their frenetic trek from Europe — they finally made it to the United States in 1944 with me in a basket — secured him a distinctive mention in Joanna Olzcak-Ronikier’s account of luck, courage, miracles, and valor in the lives of our family.
This is John Mish in New York after his arrival at the end of the war.
Baghdad, 1940. A shabby hotel in a chaotic city. Jozef, Marta, and Robert Osnos arrived, desperate for a place to stay. The proprietor noted their Polish passports and disappeared for a moment.
“He came back with a tall slender man who said in Polish, ‘What’s going on?’ then something in Arabic, then again in Polish, then arranged to have a room for ever…
I could claim it was a test of close readership of my pieces or, as been asserted in instant commentary, an example of misogyny. But having found a great picture of the group with the esteemed African-American Ed Bradley, and the talented beyond imagining Diane Sawyer, I was too busy patting my self on the back to properly proofread the caption.
With apologies.
And here is a bonus excerpt from Don Hewitt’s “Tell Me A story”:
“Not long after Ed signed on my secretary, Beverly Morgan, came into my office and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ What she had in her hand was a memo from Ed to the personnel office at CBS informing them that he was changing his name to ‘Shaheeb Sha Hab.’….
“ ‘Is he kidding?, ‘I asked Beverly.
“‘I don’t think so,’ she said,’the memo has already gone to personnel.”
Hewitt, swallowed hard and realizing he could not tell Bradley what to call himself. He thought it best to place a call to Kay Gardella, a columnist at the Daily News and let her break the news.
“Thats when Bradley cracked up, ‘Hang up,’ he said, ‘Tell her you’ll call her back.” And he burst out laughing. Shaheeb Sha Had indeed.”
That was then. This is now.
60 Minutes proved that television news, done with flair, can be worthwhile and profitable at the same time, in fact, very profitable. In that regard, no one honestly believes that the heads of the networks woke up one morning and said to themselves, “You know, I don’t think we are doing enough to inform the American people.” What they woke up and said to themselves was, “Can you believe the money that 60 Minutes makes?”
— from Don Hewitt’s memoir, Tell Me a Story, published in 2001
The late Don Hewitt, who died in 2009, was a genius. He was the creator and executive producer of the CBS News program 60 Minutes, from its first broadcast in 1968, and led it through decades as an overall top-ten television program — and in some years the “single most profitable hour in the history of television,” as Hewitt bragged, somewhat ruefully, in his memoir.
Why?
Because Hewitt recognized that in the competition between news as an essential public service and news as money-making entertainment, the outcome was inevitable. As 60 Minutes begins its fifty-eighth season this fall, the context is especially noteworthy, for two reasons:
· CBS’s former owners at Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit brought by President Trump about the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris for $16 million, and in anticipation of that outcome both the president of CBS News and the executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned. The settlement was widely considered a payoff to get the federal government’s approval for the sale of Paramount Global to Skydance Media, which had been stalled for months.
· Skydance Media’s CEO, David Ellison, now the CEO of the merged company, Paramount Skydance, has shown his intention to corral CBS News within parameters acceptable to Trump — which undermines the principles of brash independence that Don Hewitt and his colleagues had fiercely upheld for so long.
The tensions inherent in gathering the news, presenting it, paying for it, and measuring its value are time-tested subjects. By the nature of its journalism — investigative, challenging, often deliberately provocative — complaints about 60 Minutes pieces were predictable. There have been lawsuits, threatened and actual, along with the claim that the program reflected ideological or political biases.
Even well before 60 Minutes, the possibility of retribution by a political target made CBS’s ownership uneasy. George Clooney’s film (and later, theatrical hit) Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow’s attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade, conveyed the tension in the 1950s between CBS News and the network’s founder and chairman, William S. Paley, about possible repercussions.
Murrow had the stature to press ahead. But his legendary producer, Fred Friendly, left CBS a decade later because the network refused to preempt soap operas to broadcast U.S. Senate hearings on the Vietnam war.
When Larry Tisch, a business mogul, bought CBS decades later, he was less politically uptight (as I recall) but began a relentless round of cost-cutting and even came, largely unsuccessfully, after the 60 Minutes budget.
As he emphasized in his book and to anyone who might question him, Don Hewitt’s uppermost priority — sustained in the years following his retirement in 2004 — was to get the best possible story, regardless of who might be embarrassed or indignant. Don’s power was the program’s enormous success.
So, what’s different now? Circumstances and context.
The early years of television news reflected the culture of that era: post-war national exuberance at the phenomenon represented by television, and the Federal Communications Commission’s adherence to the Fairness Doctrine, which rendered programming politically middle-of-the–road, by today’s standards.
Then came the age of the top-tier “anchor” (a term Hewitt coined): Huntley-Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, and the esteemed trio of Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather, the last and the feistiest of the group.
When President Lyndon Johnson watched Walter Cronkite conclude on the air in February 1968 that the Vietnam war was a stalemate, he reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
While talk radio has always been opinionated and vituperative, it was the advent of Fox News, MSNBC, and the free-for-all of the internet and social media that emphasized the polarizing aspects of news rather than moderation.
And Hewitt’s belief that profit incentives tend to determine broadcast choices, even for news, remains the case, and more so.
What’s much more prevalent now is that what is considered to be news — and truth — is subject to interpretation on a plainly political spectrum.
Hewitt’s heirs will have to resist MAGA-style attacks and intimidation. Ellison’s hiring of Keith R. Weinstein, the former president of a conservative think tank with no news experience, as ombudsman is an ominous sign, as is his plan to acquire (for a reported $100 million or more) The Free Press, a commentary and news site that positions itself in opposition to the values of traditional news organizations, and to create a leadership role at CBS News for The Free Press’s founder, Bari Weiss.
My assumption is that in the coming years CBS News will be navigating competing pressures of profit and politics greater than the staff have ever confronted before.
Don Hewitt’s portrait should be prominently displayed everywhere, as a reminder of his commitment to the story, wherever it leads.
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The weeklong suspension of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC and the cancellation eight months from now of Stephen Colbert by CBS recalls this much earlier moment in television history. That was then. This is now.
Jack Paar was taken off the air in 1960 due to a censorship issue by NBC. The network had cut a joke about a “water closet” from the previous night’s show, which was perceived as offensive by some viewers. Paar, who was upset by the cut, walked off the set and left the audience confused. He later returned to the show after a month off, apologizing for his outburst and expressing his dissatisfaction with the censorship.
In the International Bomber Command Centre’s records, Flight Sergeant Jan Ryszard Bychowski of the RAF was killed in a crash of his Avro Lancaster aircraft on May 22, 1944. He was buried in Newark-on-Trent Cemetery, Polish Plot Grave H320B (exhumed July 29, 1974, for reburial in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York).
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Magda Gabor was the eldest of the three Gabor sisters, who were famous enough in their era for a 750-page book called Those Glamorous Gabors: Bombshells from Budapest, Great Courtesans of the 20th Century to be published in 2013. It was awarded the prize for Best Biography at the Hollywood Book Festival that year.
Invariably described as actresses and socialites, the sisters made nineteen trips to the altar. Magda was married six times, Eva had five husbands, and Zsa Zsa had eight. The first of Magda’s husbands was a man she called Count Jan de Bychowsky.
I was aware of the man because my mother talked about her cousin, “a shoe salesman” (with apologies to shoe salesmen, this was not a compliment) who married Magda Gabor and was renamed by her Count Jan de Bychowsky of Warsaw, which made her a countess.
There is no such inherited title that I could find in a determined search.
But in Those Glamorous Gabors, the author, Darwin Porter, writes, “The count was the scion of one of the oldest and most prestigious families in all of Poland, his pedigree stretching back to the days of the Vikings.”
After meeting Jan in London in 1937, Magda wrote to her mother, Jolie, in Budapest: “I’ve fallen in love with the Count of Warsaw. He is a divine creature, so strong, so masculine, so handsome, so intelligent…can you imagine your Magda one day presiding as the Countess of Warsaw? Oh, I forgot to mention. He is the sole owner of the Bychowsky family castle outside Warsaw.”
“When Jolie learned to her disappointment,” Porter writes, “that the Bychowsky castle had been stripped of most of its art and furnishings, she sent her daughter and her new son-in-law as a wedding present, two truckloads of antique reproductions. ‘I’ve learned that the count had a prestigious title but no money. The family fortune and its treasures had disappeared at the end of World War I.’”
Descriptions of Jan emphasize his military bearing and his skills as a fighter pilot. A grainy uncredited photograph in the book of him in full flight gear is captioned “prior to an aerial dogfight against the Nazis.”
By 1939, the book reports, “Magda found she and her husband were growing increasingly estranged. She wanted to retain her title as the Countess of Warsaw, but Jan, for nights in a row, didn’t come home…He kept telling her he was preparing his regiment for the imminent invasion of Hitler’s forces from the West.”
Three weeks before the invasion, Magda wrote to her mother that she had fallen in love with another man, a fighter pilot named Zdzislaw Henneberg. “Nuci, Nuci,” she wrote her mother, I have just learned that when I divorce Jan, I will have to surrender my title as Countess of Warsaw. Zdzislaw is a common man. He has no title. But I will make the sacrifice to be with the man I love.”
Once the war started, according to the story, Zdzislaw went to join the battle and Jan, unaware of his wife’s affair, succeeded in getting them both across the border into Romania, en route to England, where Jan said he would “fly again in a plane to fight the Nazis.”
Zdzislaw and Jan, the book relates, both joined the Poles who formed RAF units, which were legendarily gallant and successful in the Battle of Britain. (Official records list Zdzislaw as a fighter pilot who was killed in 1941.)
In a visit to Magda, Jan, who apparently had never discovered his wife’s infidelity, asked for a divorce because he was in love with a “ruddy-cheeked Devonshire girl. I call her my English Rose.”
“After packing a few possessions, he left the cottage,” Porter reported. “She never saw him again.”
In her 1975 memoir, Jolie Gabor wrote that “Magda returned to Budapest and never learned what happened to Count Bychowsky. Actually, he died in 1944 when his Hurricane was shot down over the English Channel.”
Magda’s love life progressed. In Budapest she fell in love with Dr. Carlos Garrido, Portugal’s ambassador to Hungary, and “through him,” according to the book, “Magda became a heroine of the Hungarian Underground, battling the forces of Hitler then occupying her homeland.”
Wikipedia’s biography of Magda carries this entry about her marriages:
“Jan Bychowsky (m. November 19, 1937 – May 22, 1944; his death), a reputed Polish count and RAF pilot. Gabor gave her name as “Magda de Bychowsky” and her marital status as divorced on a February 11, 1946, airline passenger manifest, accessed on ancestry.com December 30, 2011; according to this form, she had left her city of residence (Lisbon, Portugal), where she lived at 17 Buenos Aires, and arrived in New York to visit her family.”
She soon married William M. Rankin, a screenwriter, and then four more men before dying at age eighty-one in 1997 in Palm Springs, California.
Jan de Bychowsky’s life details in the available online databases always list his date of death as May 22, 1944 – the day when Jan Ryszard Bychowski was killed. I could never find any reference to Jan de Bychowsky’s military service, anywhere at any time.
Tellingly, in The Glamorous Gabors there is an italic note on page 45, where the count makes his first appearance, that says: In some news accounts, Magda was incorrectly reported to have married the similarly named Sgt. Jan Bychowski, who was a young poet who died in England on May 22, 1944, at the age of twenty-two.
Jolie Gabor, Magda’s mother, moved to New York, where she opened a jewelry shop on Madison Avenue. My mother told me that she would stop in the store occasionally and the subject of a family connection would come up.
Alas, I never pursued the saga with my mother to its logical conclusion — that the count was no count and that his death was conveniently listed as May 1944 in a plane crash.
What did happen to “Jan de Bychowsky”? He apparently kept in touch with my mother. She shared with me a letter she had from him in 1960 from Paris, where he was living, including the detail that his new apartment had an “ensuite bathroom.”
I can’t pin it down, but that may be when my mother told me the story of her cousin, “the shoe salesman.”
This is the picture and caption said to be Magda’s husband in the Gabor biography
The lineup of reporters,columnists, and editors leaving the Washington Post in the past couple of years is invariably presented as an exodus of “stars” and reflects the problems that the Post has had in the latter years of Jeff Bezos’s ownership.
That the Post began losing money after a successful run and has had upheavals in newsroom leadership in the troubled tenure of the publisher Will Lewis is an undisputed reality.
But I want to make a case for aspiring journalists, and even those with some years of experience, that this may be the right time to try for a job at the Post. Why? Because while nearly all of the stars who are leaving excelled in their various roles, it was the Post that gave them the platform from which to display their talent.
Reaching back decades in the annals of the Post to support my point: In the 1970s, much of the paper’s foreign coverage relied on young stringers in far-flung trouble spots. There was Bill Branigin in Tehran during the revolution there, Michael Dobbs in Eastern Europe as Soviet hegemony reached its apogee, Caryle Murphy in southern Africa in apartheid’s heyday, and Karen DeYoung in West Africa.
Branigin, Dobbs, and Murphy (who later won a Pulitzer) became Post stalwarts with impressive careers, and DeYoung has had one of the most illustrious records of anyone at the paper — as a correspondent, senior editor, and, to this very day, an ace on the national security beat.
DeYoung’s editors on the national desk, relative newcomers, talk about her with enormous respect for what she has done and continues to do in these exceptionally turbulent times.
Today’s staff at the Washington Post, even after buyouts and layoffs, is considerably larger than it was when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as local reporters, made history that is still the benchmark for journalism of impact.
And the Post’s circulation in the Washington, D.C., area then was roughly half of what it is today around the world — the majority of which, of course, is now digital rather than print.
The Post’s strength came from two things: the commitment of Katharine Graham and her family to the company and the newsroom, and the Post’s overwhelming dominance in the Washington advertising marketplace, which was its principal source of revenue.
As Mrs. Graham would say, “The Post is Woodward and Bernstein and Woodward and Lothrop,” the downtown department store, now long gone.
I was there in that era, and we always felt that in the competition with the New York Times for stature, the Times had resources we could not match, although we were more aware of that than was generally believed.
But the Post’s energy was a great asset. The Style section reinvented coverage of the arts, society, culture, and even politics everywhere, including at the stuffier Times. And during the tenure of Leonard Downie Jr. (1991-2008), the Post set a record for the most Pulitzer Prizes awarded under a single executive editor — twenty-five.
The stars leaving the Post now seem mainly to be going to the Times and The Atlantic, currently among the acknowledged leaders in legacy media (“legacy” meaning that they have been around from well before the internet upended the business model of news).
But my personal and not altogether uninformed view is that there are already so many notables at the Times and The Atlantic that space in the limelight is crowded. I won’t name names, but my sense is that a number of the new arrivals are less visible in their roles than they were at the Post.
The competition for major play is intense. And stars tend to be impatient for luster. Many of the biggest news stories carry multiple bylines these days, diminishing the glory that goes with exclusives.
So, what the Post badly needs now is this:
The attention of Jeff Bezos. What does his attention mean? A good start would mean a renewal of his initial enthusiasm for the Post’s prospects: editorially by adding staff, a savvy approach to digital reach, and imaginative ideas for reinventing the company’s business model.
Bezos has said publicly that his intention is to return the Post to greatness, as he did in the early years of his ownership. Personally, and apparently politically, his priorities seem to have changed. We will see whether the mission can be resurrected.
The second requirement is to attract, nurture, and feature reporters and editors among whom will come the next generation of stars.
I can say this with certainty because all those many years ago, I saw it happening to my generation’s reporters and editors at the Post, on their way to being the absolute best in journalism. Seeing talent emerge is a thrill — and worth the effort for all concerned.
For those of us who value the extraordinary role that C-SPAN plays in our polarizing and cacophonous era, this expansion of its reach on what are now the most important media platforms is a cause for major celebration. Congratulations to all who have worked so effectively to make it possible.
September 3, 2025
We are pleased to announce that beginning this fall, all three C-SPAN networks will be available on YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV—the two largest live streaming television platforms in the United States. This expansion significantly broadens access to C-SPAN’s trusted, nonpartisan coverage of the nation’s democratic process.
“C-SPAN’s mission is to bring American democracy unfiltered to as many viewers as possible. Today’s announcement guarantees that millions more Americans will now have access to their government in action,” said C-SPAN CEO Sam Feist.
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Sam Feist who joined C-SPAN last winter as CEO, was recruited from CNN, where he was the Washington bureau chief. His career in public affairs programming began, he says, when as a ninth grader in Ridgefield, Connecticut, he organized a candidate debate for the town’s first selectman on behalf of the League of Women Voters.
C-SPAN leadership is a natural career pinnacle.
In a January conversation as he was settling in, we focused on three issues that will shape the future for an enterprise that for forty-five years has been supported by cable companies. C-SPAN now consists of three television networks, a radio channel, and a website that maintains a vast archive of material — all available for free.
(1) Funding and Distribution. How to enhance the resources and reach of C-SPAN. The cable companies have provided almost 100 percent of C-SPAN’s revenues, and with the rise of competing streaming services, the viewership available to C-SPAN through cable has been reduced by as much as 40 percent.
(2) Programming. How to make best use of the 24/7 broadcast schedule — with live programming, events, documentaries, and interviews developed and hosted by C-SPAN staff. Full coverage of the Senate and the House of Representatives is, of course, the primary content when they are in session and was the initial reason for C-SPAN’s creation in 1979.
(3) Content Moderation. All callers to C-SPAN are screened before they get on the air. Now that Facebook, X, et al., have decided that anything goes when it comes to people’s comments, what will happen to C-SPAN’s discourse? Can it maintain logic, common sense, and accuracy?
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“Cord cutting from traditional cable and satellite companies has had an enormous impact on our distribution,” Feist says, “particularly as so many cable customers switch to YouTube TV, Fubo TV and Hulu, which don’t currently carry C-SPAN.”
From the outset, the cable industry has seen a benefit to broadcasting the sessions of Congress, where members can reach constituents directly — and without commentary, a political plus for them.
The owners of what are known in technical lingo as vMVPDs — “virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributors” — like You Tube TV, Fubo TV and Hulu are all purely profit-focused. C-SPAN, by contrast, is considered a public service and not a financial asset.
So, why bother to carry it? the owners ask.
FAST channels — “Free Ad-Supported Television” — are the latest approach to streaming. From the earliest days of broadcast, viewers got whatever was on air without paying for it, and endured advertising in return. This has now become accepted practice in streaming as well. Today’s streaming behemoths like Netflix and Apple TV+ have vast numbers of paying subscribers and now seek growth by offering lower monthly fees to those viewers willing to watch ads in the middle of their programs.
If C-SPAN were to create a FAST of its own, would it for the first time in its history use advertising to pay for it?
C-SPAN’s challenge — and Feist’s immediate objective — is to persuade vMVPDs and FASTs to include C-SPAN in their packages to subscribers. There are two ways to do this: Start selling advertising would be the most dramatic change, or lobby members of Congress to take action, reminding them that C-SPAN covers what they do.
Politicians are always attuned to their self-interest, and Feist believes they may advocate for all streaming platforms to include C-SPAN. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) are the first members of Congress to publicly make that case.
Feist is also exploring ways to add revenue in the manner of other nonprofit media outlets: subscriptions, donations, paid events, and philanthropic grants. He says that C-SPAN will not ask for government funding, as NPR and PBS still do — and which makes those networks subject to political pressure.
To repeat: C-SPAN is and never will be a government enterprise, but its purpose is conveyed in this motto: “Democracy Unfiltered.”
So, what all these acronyms and money issues mean for C-SPAN is this: The “good old days” of a single funding and distribution source (the cable industry) has to be reinvented for the digital era.
Now.
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On the question of programming — what brings viewers to C-SPAN’s networks — Feist wants to emphasize live programs: news as it is being made. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News do that, surrounded by commentators describing what is happening and telling viewers what they should think.
C-SPAN can let viewers decide for themselves. But that means being present at those events, which in turn requires staff and cameras — back to funding.
My greatest personal interest is the programming that C-SPAN itself creates. For years, Booknotes, Brian Lamb’s Sunday evening interviews with authors, was C-SPAN’s most popular show. (C-SPAN does not collect audience ratings. But when I published books based on those conversations, they were national bestsellers.)
Lamb was insistent that he was not the “star” of Booknotes, but he definitely was, for his distinctive style of preparation and questioning. Like him, NPR and PBS hosts do not come draped in the glamour and paychecks of commercial newscasters. Their fans are drawn to the style they project — less bombastic, less opinionated, curious rather than pontifical.
Identifying talent is an art. There are many people with the right talent in the broader media world for C-SPAN to hire. Sam Feist and his colleagues need to look for them.
As a publisher, I have watched with interest and admiration the weekend programming of “Book TV,” two days during which nonfiction books are featured at events or interviews. The audience for book programming is significant; stores like Politics and Prose in Washington draw good-size audiences for their events and then stream most of them, which can attract thousands of views.
Feist intends to help venues improve their setting for events (lights and sound quality, for example). Making the authors and locations partners in production would enhance the experience for all concerned.
C-SPAN’s documentary series on presidents, first ladies, and other historical figures and periods have been very good. Again, the goal is programming that is absorbing, without becoming so expensive that it is out of reach.
So, this is the programming objective: Do more with what is already there. The memorable line from the film Field of Dreams applies: “If you build it, they will come.”
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How the viewer call-ins will evolve — the open lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are a unique feature of C-SPAN’s programs — in a world of social media free-for-all remains to be seen. In live programming, fact-checking isn’t feasible. When a caller descends into rants, conspiracies, or insults, the hosts have always had the prerogative to end the call.
Free speech and censorship are especially sensitive topics in this era. Maintaining standards is another of C-SPAN’s goals in our time of media mayhem.
When Sam Feist learned that C-SPAN was looking for a new CEO, he knew immediately that he wanted the job. Predictably there were those in the commercial media who said that he would be consigned to a niche.
Maybe, but what a classy niche to be in.
The New York Times, Tuesday, May 30, 1944
New York Flier Is Killed
The Polish Telegraph Agency reported yesterday in a London dispatch that Sgt. Jan Bychowski of 49 East Ninety-sixth Street, New York, had been killed in action last week over Germany. He was the navigator of a Polish air force bomber. The son of a Polish psychiatrist, Dr. Gustav Bychowski, the flier came to the United States with his father after the German invasion of Poland. He volunteered for the Polish forces and trained in Canada before going overseas.
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Jan Ryszard Bychowski was born in Vienna in 1922. His father, Gustav, was there studying psychiatry with Sigmund Freud, on his way to becoming a prominent psychoanalyst in Poland and then for decades in New York. Taking advantage of the city’s nightlife, he married Ellen, a “music hall dancer” according to the brief description that In the Garden of Memory gives her.
The marriage did not last. In the 1940s, Ellen was living in Buenos Aires with her partner, Zosia, and sent affectionate letters to her son, Rysz, then serving with the Polish forces in Britain’s Royal Air Force. Written in English to get past censors, she wrote in May 1943: “My dear precious boy, I am so happy of your letters and beg you above everything else to take care of yourself, so that we may find you healthy and victorious back home…always your Ellen.”
She would never see him again.
Gustav’s second wife was Maryla Auerbach, “elegant. pretty and well educated” and “from the rich Jewish plutocracy.” In the Garden of Memory observes that she was “certainly a much more suitable wife for a renowned Warsaw psychiatrist.”
Among the many relatives Joanna Olczak-Ronikier writes about in her book, Rysz stands out as heroic, a martyr of course, but also for his charm and talent. Joanna’s chapter about him is called “The Boy from Heaven.”
Although only twenty-two when he was killed, he left behind a remarkable collection of writing, journalism, essays, and fiction, curated by his family and donated to the Jewish Historical Society.
I was especially struck by this item from “The “March of Time,” a national radio broadcast, on July 16, 1942, produced by Time Inc. and hosted by Westbrook Van Voorhis:
Van: This week from Canada…A twenty-year-old Polish youth who had come 20,000 miles from bombed-out Warsaw…stands at our March of Time microphone…about to leave on the last lap towards his destination. Journey’s end for him is in the air over Europe, raining death on the Nazi conquerors of his country, Richard Bychowski.
Richard: I came here tonight because I wanted to say goodbye to a fellow countryman of mine in exile in the United States. He was the composer of the music the orchestra is now playing. His name, Jan Ignace Paderewski. His temporary address…Arlington National Cemetery.
Goodbye, Mr. Paderewski…it is fitting that you are near the great George Washington. Each of you was his country’s first leader when that country gained its freedom and the day will come again when our Poland will be a free and beautiful land.
The full interview in Rysz’s voice is here
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Rysz (I never heard him called anything else) graduated in May 1939 from the Stefan Batory High School. Batory was a King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in the 1500s, and his name is featured on monuments, streets, and schools all over Poland. The school was secular. In its records, Rysz was described as being of “Mosaic” origins, essentially a euphemism for Jewish.
A school friend, Koscik Jelenski, wrote years later that when he arrived at Batory, “I was immediately taken under the wing of a twelve-year-old boy (like me) lively, likeable blond boy with freckles and a snub nose… I remember that on the second day we ‘bribed’ a fat boy to whose two-person desk I was assigned. Rysiek sat in his place and from then we practically never apart.”
He describes how in their second year together Rysz got the answer wrong to a math quiz, and the class began chanting “Zyyt,” a slur of the word for Jew. When a “bloody fight began,” he continued, “only five of our thirty-plus classmates fought on our side.”
Rysz was a Polish patriot to his core, willing to give his life to his country’s defense. But the animus to Jews he encountered, even in his Polish flight unit, endured. Shortly before he died, he wrote to his father that he could never again live in Poland.
The summer after he graduated, he visited a place in the countryside where Joanna, then four years old, and my brother Robert, then eight, were on vacation. A photograph of them captured their unsuspecting innocence about the German invasion that was about to happen. It is the cover of In the Garden of Memory.
Rysz’s parents and his sister Monica, a toddler, left Warsaw when the war started, and only months later was he persuaded to join them instead of the resistance in formation. Because Gustav was already a famous psychoanalyst, the Bychowskis managed to get visas to the United States.
His parents went to New York, while Rysz enrolled as a student at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. The transcripts showed him as “a determined student as he encountered this new language and world.”
After a year, Rysz left for Ontario, where Poles were being trained for roles in the RAF. These Polish fighters in exile were considered exceptionally formidable. In the Battle of Britain in 1940, the Poles scored the highest kill rate against the Luftwaffe of any of the RAF units.
Rysz wrote of his growing commitment to aviation: “Up in the air there’s such perfect peace and quiet that you don’t want to return to earthly matters.” An article he wrote about the Poles training in Canada appeared in the New York Times, which was probably what led to his appearance on “The March of Time.”
He completed the training in December 1942 and went to Britain, where he qualified as a flight sergeant, flying as a navigator in bombing missions over Germany. Squadron 300, also known as the Masovian, had as its motto We Fight to Rebuild.
The squadron flew 3,891 sorties and spent 20,264 hours in the air, according to official records. It was involved in most of the major air offensives in the war. After Poland fell, aviators began to organize in France and relocated to Britain as the last country with the means to challenge the Germans. In all, 19,400 Poles served in the RAF, the largest non-British contingent. Two thousand were killed.
In the Garden of Memory’s description of Rysz’s life over the next two years reflected intensity and an effort to manage stress: “He went out on dates and to dances. He fell in love, and it was requited, writing his family, ‘You should be pleased, because she isn’t anyone’s wife…and there’s no question of matrimony.’” In September 1943 he was promoted to the rank of senior sergeant navigator.
But he felt growing bitterness about what he found among many Poles in the RAF regarding what was happening to the Jews in Poland. A letter to his father that was later reprinted in books and articles reflected his anger:
“My colleagues in the air force were either indifferent or openly pleased…For weeks on end I have seen boys smiling scornfully at the sight of headlines in the Polish Daily about the murder of Jews…I can see that there was nothing but indifference (in Poland) surrounding the Jewish people as they went to their death and contempt that they were not fighting, satisfaction that ‘its not us.’ The Jews could not escape because en masse because they had no where to go. Outside the ghetto walls there was an alien country, an alien population, and that seems to be the terrible truth…”
His conclusion:
“I hope I shall come out of the war safe and sound. I am already determined not to return to Poland…above all I’m afraid of knowing the whole truth about the reaction of Polish society to the extermination of the Jews…people who found it possible to ignore their destruction, occupy their homes and denounce or blackmail the survivors.
“That’s all I wanted to tell you, dearest Daddy.
“Maybe one day, years from now, I’ll go back there to gather material for a book about the Jewish tragedy that I would like to write.”
What happened on May 23, 1944, is summarized in a report in Britain’s National Archives: Rysz’s plane, an Avro Lancaster 1, left Faldingworth station at night with a target of Dortmund in Germany. The plane “suffered engine problems and turned back, jettisoning some of its bomb load to the sea. On return to Faldingworth, the Lancaster struck the gun butts.”
Two other members of the crew were killed also.
Rysz was buried in the Polish plot at Newark-on-Trent Cemetery.
The files at the Jewish Historical Society, so carefully maintained by Rysz’s family for decades, contain scores of condolence letters to Gustav and the family. I saw Gustav quoted as saying in his grief that if he had not had his daughter Monica, he would not have been able to go on.
In 1974, after Gustav’s death at seventy-seven, on a dance floor with Maryla in Morocco, Monica initiated the recovery of Rysz’s ashes, which were buried alongside his father’s headstone at a cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, outside New York City.
The next piece in the series will be the sequel to this story, and it will be, I assure you, surprising.
