Overseas Press Club

The Overseas Press Club, established in 1939 by a group of past and present foreign correspondents from the American news media, aired radio programming on WNYC from 1940 to the mid70s. Those programs included broadcasts of speeches made by notable figures at OPC events, the OPC's annual awards ceremonies honoring the best of their constituents' journalistic efforts, and question-and-answer sessions between America’s finest foreign correspondents and the day’s most prominent entertainers, journalists, and statesmen.

The OPC was founded in 1939 amid the waking disquiet of a widening European war. Former foreign correspondent, Wythe Williams, then editor of The Greenwich Time, seems to have held the most significant role in OPC’s formation—he was the OPC’s organization committee chairman before its birth, and its first president after—but he certainly did not do it alone. Early members drew from the crème of past and present foreign correspondents of the era, including Robert Davis of the New York Sun, Joseph Shaplin of the New York Times, Eugene Lyons, formerly of the United Press, and Robert “Bob”  Benjamin, who chaired the organization’s first dinner, and many thereafter. The legendary photojournalist, James H. “Jimmy” Hare, then retired, was named their honorary president.

The newly-minted OPC’s purpose was to:

“...bring together men and women whose past and present activities in the service abroad of the American press has given them common professional and social interests; to provide facilities for the expression of those interests; to promote good fellowship among its members, and to encourage the highest standards of independence, democracy and professional skill in the American foreign press services.” [sic] (1)

The OPC would act on these promises by creating annual awards honoring its most successful correspondents, through publishing a variety of books highlighting the finest journalism the OPC had to offer, and, eventually, through the broadcast of radio programs on WNYC.

The OPC brought in just one figure from the field of radio for its initial class of officers however, Irene Kuhn, then new to NBC, showing perhaps a resigned (if false) recognition of radio’s limited applicability to journalism regarding foreign events, but perhaps too some favoritism for print. By mid-1963 however, whatever bias might have existed had softened, and under the new presidency of Barrett McGurn of the New York Herald Tribune (2), the OPC began an active relationship with WNYC, one that would bring a number of OPC related programs to WNYC airwaves, often more than one per day. The OPC’s presence on WNYC would thin with the municipal crises that hit the city (and WNYC) in the late 1960s and 70s, but during its prime, the OPC-WNYC relationship was strong, and is fortunately well-documented in the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

During its time with WNYC, the OPC would pull in panels from its vast reserves of foreign correspondents to interrogate the newsmakers and personalities of the day, including author and boxing aficionado Günter Grass, writer and firebrand (and future Amiri Baraka) LeRoi Jones, civil rights leader James Farmer, journalist David Halberstam, and more. Its shows’ perspective—shared with the similar but shorter-lived International Interview (inverted, it drew from foreign journalists covering the United States)—brought a worldliness to the OPC’s often spirited discussions not often heard in other, more provincial programming. As the OPC provided a more catholic perspective to seemingly domestic issues like racism, sexism, economics, and inequality, it showed too, as when Jones tells us "where it’s at with Mr. Charlie," how wildfires at home can lend different light to international strife. The breadth of material covered by the OPC, and the variety of subjects considered, is staggering. Listeners would hear from politicians like Nixon and Schlesinger, Buckley and Beame, and journalists and scholars too—all natural candidates for the OPC air—but they could also hear the ever outre Josephine Baker spark with age-filtered wisdom on her life and career, the daring young aviatrices of the Angel Derby combat on-air-sexism, and a (relatively) young Alec Guinness handle his interlocutors' queries with genuine class.

Today, WNYC’s Overseas Press Club Collection gives us a unique insight into mid-century globalism and a feel for the hot-and-cold embers of the international political scene. The items in this collection range from 1940 to 1967, but the majority are from 1963 to 1967. The collection is drawn from recordings borrowed from the NYC Municipal Archives, and were digitized from the original transcription discs and acetate open-reel tape at the WNYC Archives as part of two separate grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For our readers interested in current activities and programs of the club, please see: OVERSEAS PRESS CLUB OF AMERICA.

1. “Overseas Press Club Selects Officers” New York Times: 24 Apr 1939. Web. 22 July 2016
2. “New Officers Are Elected by Overseas Press Club”  New York Times: 16 May 1963. Web. 22 July 2016