Parting With Illusions

...I suppose I am biased against Vladi- 1 mir Pozner...

...If a reporter back from an assignment told TV viewers that most of the homeless were bums or loonies, how long would he last in his job...

...tend to exclude unorthodox views is hard to deny (just look at Andy Rooney...

...Who gets more media exposure—unabashedly anti-capitalist advocates for the homeless, or free-market critics of rent control...

...ozner professes to be a great bet- liever in "humane socialism...

...What's the Freudian term for this—subconscious projection...

...Pozner may or may not be enough of a megalomaniac to really believe that "the American power structure" is out to get him, but one thing is certain: he desperately seeks credibility as a journalist...

...He says that when he uttered things now widely known (and acknowledged by the Soviets) to be, shall we say, untrue, he was not a cool and deliberate liar but, as the title suggests, a victim of illusions...

...That mainstream media in the U.S...

...Finally, "Americans are manipulated just as much (but far more expertly) by a 'free' press and a 'democratic' government as Soviets have been by their 'controlled' press and 'totalitarian' government...

...This might strike some of us as shameless, since the same Pozner once dutifully vilified the same Sakharov from our TV screens and defended his Gorky exile...

...He concedes that the First Amendment is a nice thing to have...

...There he was a few years later, excoriating the social ills of the old days and, in effect, elegantly admitting to past lies...

...He now says that he feels bad about it (and still he continues to distort the facts, implying that the banishment was no big deal—sort of like "being exiled to Detroit"—and neglecting to mention that Sakharov was cut off from outside communication by phone or by mail, tailed 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 and harassed by the KGB, and sadistically force-fed during his hunger strike...

...In an interview in the February 4, 1990, issue of Moscow News, Pozner states his opinion that the Soviet Union urgently needs independent, viewer-supported television...

...What leads Pozner to this discovery—by which he professes to be deeply saddened—is that Marshall Goldman and George Will have called him a propagandist...

...In his book, Pozner does even better...

...The second greatest threat to the princes and the minions, apparently, is . . . well, Vladimir Pozner...

...I loved the streets, I loved the smells, I loved the hustle and bustle . . . I still loved it, my town, my Big Apple...

...We learn about the time little Vlady's dad forced him to eat a repulsive meal, and about the painful guilt he feels over losing his temper and slapping his own daughter when she wouldn't eat...

...We also learn that Pozner is an all-American Soviet (the book ends with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes—not, mind you, Marx or Lenin...

...Gorbachev is saving troubled socialism by injecting it with a dose of capitalism just as FDR saved troubled capitalism by "injecting a healthy dose of socialistic programs...

...The American power structure fears him, he says, because with his accentless English he can be seen by Americans as a human being rather than a stereotyped Russky, and there's always the danger that they will actually listen to what he has to say and question the Cold War mentality and military spending...

...We learn about the time Pozner accidentally found out about his father's affair...

...I hate to be cynical but all of these revelations sound a bit strained, as if Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...He condemns emigres, defectors, and dissidents for playing into the hands of the anti-Communists: "They became pawns in a political game and, as such, did far more harm to their country than good...

...Not that Pozner didn't really feel any of the emotions he ascribes to himself...

...I suspect that today, this statement would be a bit too crude for any self-respecting "progressive" Soviet newspaper...

...It is worth noting that Gorbachev has largely accomplished just that without speaking any English at all...

...He asserts that he really did justify it to himself at the time: Doesn't every system neutralize its enemies in one way or another...

...Curiously, even though he readily admits that Soviet socialism as we have known it is nothing but one giant deviation from that ideal, he is quite vitriolic about Western "anti-Sovietism" and anti-Communism...

...Just as one is about to applaud him, Dr...

...1=1...

...There he was in the old days, explaining with a slick arrogance that the Soviet Union had no political prisoners, poverty, drug addiction, or prostitution...

...As an example, Pozner cites the 1986 WGBH program, "The Pozner File," in which his TV persona was dissected by several commentators...

...I believe he gives himself far too little credit for intelligence, and far too much for integrity...

...In the McCarthy era, the Pozners' life became rather complicated, so they went to East Germany when Vladimir Jr...

...Having most conveniently parted with his illusions just when it became safe and even profitable to do so, Pozner spares no effort to establish his credentials as a warrior for glasnost...

...In the last chapter, he rapturously describes the late Andrei Sakharov's brave confrontation with the so-called conservatives in the Congress of People's Deputies: "[This] spectacle . . . gave me hope that . . . perhaps we are now witnessing the birth of something that will help us rediscover what humanity lost so many centuries ago but has never forgotten...

...This is the main political leitmotif of Parting With Illusions: the rough moral equivalence of totalitarian systems and Western democracies...

...All on his own...

...but suppose you go to the USSR as a reporter for an American TV network and, upon returning, tell the viewers point-blank that they have been misled and the Soviet system is actually a fairer one than ours...

...China kills young people in Tiananmen Square...

...when they do, they are eliminated: "What really happened to Martin Luther King...

...I have seen him on TV—need I say more...

...indeed, Pozner's archenemy Reed Irvine would agree...

...It is hard to approach Parting With Illusions as a bona fide autobiography when you're inclined to mistrust every single word of it, including, as Mary McCarthy put it in reference to another comrade, the ands and the thes...

...America tolerates dissidents—being far wealthier and more powerful than poor little Russia, it can afford to—but only as long as they present no real threat to the power structure...

...The answer depends on how Machiavellian one believes current Soviet policies to be...

...Here he is describing his dismay at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: "What a great day for anti-Sovietism, what a great day for anti-Communism...

...it's Pozner himself, talking about someone else...

...The problem with state ownership of television, it seems, is that it prevents Pozner from being taken seriously...

...Does anyone honestly believe that a man by the name of James Earl Ray decided to shoot him...

...we kill them, more slowly and less spectacularly, in the ghetto...

...He adds that Western policymakers wanted the Soviets to intervene, because socialism with a human face is what they fear most: "If socialism demonstrated its ability to guarantee security for one and all, plus all the democratic freedoms the West takes so much pride in, plus economic efficiency, plus a good quality of life for all people, would that not be seen as a mortal threat by the princes of capitalism and their minions...

...Freud trips him up again: "It is state-run TV, and no matter who expresses his viewpoint on it, it can be interpreted as the Soviet government's position...

...Birth doesn't, yet death is as natural as birth...

...You'd get fired, right...

...The rest is history...

...Here he is on his return to America after decades of absence: "Yes, New York had changed, but it was still my New York...

...Pozner eventually became a commentator on English-language Radio Moscow...

...Now, in Parting With Illusions, Pozner sets out to tell the story of his life...

...His father, a Russian Jew, emigrated in 1922 with his parents and siblings but apparently remained a Communist at heart, and never gave up his Soviet citizenship or concealed his pro-Soviet (which, at the time, meant Stalinist) views...

...artificially grafted onto the body of the book...

...Pozner actually seems to believe that this "curious analogy," as he calls it, is original...

...To counter his image of a political propagandist, he does all he can to get personal with the reader...

...Leaving that aside, trying to discredit Pozner the network star through a relatively obscure program on WGBH seems quite preposterous...

...To neutralize the dangerous Pozner, "the ideological captains of the American media" work hard to label him a propagandist and make people distrust him...

...was fifteen, and back to the USSR three years later...

...What constitutes orthodoxy is a different matter...

...Never mind, of course, all the network TV reporters who have been enthusiastic about the Cuban health care system...

...State-run Soviet TV, he charges, parroted the official Chinese line on Tiananmen Square and kept silent about Ceausescu's crimes...

...Public television, which has given us loving tributes to Guatemalan guerrillas, as a mouthpiece for American interests...

...Pozner, as we all know, is the Russian on TV who looks, dresses, even talks like an American, for the simple reason that he grew up in New York...

...We get such profound observations as "Isn't it amazing that death shocks us...

...it's just that this book is not about a real person but about a self-made media product...

...19.95 Cathy Young An opportunist par excellence . . . handsomely rewarded by the Establishment for his absolute lack of any principle except the principle of serving the powers that be . . ." No, this is not one of Vladimir Pozner's detractors talking...

...Said one of them, media coach Arnold Zenker, "If you do what I do for a living, it's like being a violinist and watching Isaac Stern...

...Just like that...

...Does he need it to be a more effective propagandist for his masters, or is he—in the perestroika spirit of entrepreneurship—mainly selling Vladimir Pozner...