Walter R. Roberts was a writer, lecturer, and former government official.
Life and career
Walter R Roberts was born in Austria-Hungary, educated at the University of Vienna and Cambridge University, and died in Washington D.C.. He was a research assistant at The Harvard Law School and joined the US Government in 1942. After eight years of service with the Voice of America, he was transferred to the Austrian Desk of the Department of State. In 1953, he was appointed Deputy Area Director for Europe in the newly created U.S. Information Agency. 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 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, Mihailović 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. His first assignment there was to serve as executive director of a panel on International Information, Educational and Cultural Affairs. In 1975, he was called back into government to serve as executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting. The Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication and the Public Diplomacy Council. He is still an advisor to the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication and a member emeritus of the board of the Public Diplomacy Council. In 2009, he received the Voice of America "Director's Special Recognition Award". In 2014, his book "Tito, Mihailović and the Allies, 1941 – 1945" was republished in Serbia. After his personal recollections about Josip Broz Tito were published by American Diplomacy, the Serbian newspaper Politika covered the story on its front page. After his retirement from government, he wrote and spoke widely on foreign affairs subjects.
Culture and Information: Two Foreign Policy Functions, Sage Publications, 1976.
Articles
"U.S. Experience in Evaluating Information Programs", Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, Stuttgart, 1975
"The Global Information Revolution and the Communist World", The Washington Quarterly, Spring, 1986
"The Information Revolution: A Breakthrough in the East?" The World Today, June 1989. Published in German by the Europaische Rundschau in the Fall of 1989.
"A New Status for Eastern Europe?", The World Today, October, 1989
"Germany: The Gorbachev Memorandum", The World Today, October, 1990
"Diplomacy in the Information Age", The World Today, 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
