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From the White House, he received only a mild rebuke. Speakes shrugged, noting that the President "doesn't do it himself and I don't think he generally approves of it." One top official predicted that the controversy would "blow over pretty soon" and that Wick's job was "safe."
The White House has become accustomed to riding out storms stirred by Charles Wick. Many in Washington derided his appointment, noting that he had once arranged dance music for Tommy Dorsey and produced a movie called Snow White and the Three Stooges. In addition, he had a total lack of experience in foreign affairs.
USIA staffers feared that Wick would transform the carefully neutral Voice of America, the broadcast arm of the agency, into a propaganda organ. They were not reassured when he staged the over blown 1982 TV spectacular Let Poland Be Poland, starring a dozen Western heads of state and Frank Sinatra singing in Polish.
More worrisome to many of his subordinates was a leaked memo from a Wick aide calling on the agency to stress "propaganda" over news. Although some complain that Wick's idea for the Voice of America to broadcast editorials under mines the station's credibility, regular news broadcasts continue to be unbiased.
The career bureaucrats at USIA also began to complain less when Wick managed to boost the agency's funding from $426.9 million in 1980 to $659 million in 1984, reversing a decade-long budget decline. The added funds will permit the agency to re place obsolete equipment, including some radio transmitters captured from the Germans in World War II. Wick's major asset is his good friend. "He is tight as a tick with the President," says a top White House aide. Unlike most previous USIA chiefs, Wick attends the Secretary of State's morning staff meetings. This in side track, Wick says, enabled him to quickly prepare an audiovisual recording and translation of the voices of the Soviet fighter pilots as they moved in to destroy Korean Air Lines Flight 007 last September. The presentation was used with dramatic effect by U.S. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations.
But Wick obscures his accomplish ments with showy Babbittry. His back-slapping camaraderie grates on foreign diplomats. Last month he astonished an audience by suggesting that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher disapproved of the Grenada invasion because "she is a woman." Within the USIA, Wick is regarded as temperamental and high-handed by much of his staff. The victims of his ego make him pay for it in time-honored Washington fashion: they leak his pecca dilloes to the press.
— By Evan Thomas.
Reported by Jay Branegan and Christopher Redman/Washington