Bernard Harold Kamenske, a journalist at the Voice of America for 28
years and its senior news executive from 1973 to 1981, and later as
senior editor in Washington of the Cable News Network from 1981 to 1983
died Thursday, Sept. 25, 2003.



At the time of his retirement from VOA in 1981, the Washington Post, New
York Times, National Public Radio and Broadcasting Magazine all cited
Mr. Kamenske's unrelenting insistence on honesty, candor and high
journalistic standards at the Voice. VOA was the nation's largest
publicly funded international broadcasting organization with an
estimated weekly audience in excess of 91 million listeners worldwide,
in more than 50 languages.



Mr. Kamenske, a legend in international broadcasting circles, was widely
credited with being a prime mover five years before he left the Voice in
getting its Charter for news accuracy and objectivity enshrined into
law. Prior to 1976, it had been an executive order for nearly two
decades. Sponsored as Public Law 94-350 by Senator Charles Percy
(R-Illinois) and Bella Abzug (D-NY), the bipartisan Charter had a
greater influence than any other single document in shielding VOA from
efforts inside or outside government to compromise its journalistic and
programming integrity.



Born in Nashua, New Hampshire, Mr. Kamenske attended private schools in
Boston and began his career as a journalist as a writer and editor at
the Associated Press in Boston in 1944. Throughout the 1940s, he was a
newswriter and editor at WCOP, a Cowles communications Corporation radio
outlet and as News Director at WORL, Boston, before entering the U. S.
Army during the Korea War in 1951.



While awaiting assignment to Korea as a combat correspondent, Mr.
Kamenske sustained serious injuries when struck by a motorcycle courier
at the then Camp Rucker, Alabama. He spent 3 1/2 years undergoing
experimental and massive reconstruction surgery in military and Veterans
Administration hospitals in the Boston area. He joined VOA as a

newswriter in 1955, shortly after that organization's headquarters was
shifted from New York to Washington.



A year after joining the Voice, Mr. Kamenske was promoted to the
position of Latin America editor in the central newsroom, and developed
a system of formatting news regionally which was a model for both
central and language services in the decades which followed.
Subsequently, Mr. Kamenske rose through the ranks and became a duty
editor, or shift supervisor, for all VOA news operations. He received
USIA superior honor awards in 1963 for his newswriting during the Cuban
missile crisis and 1966 for sustained excellent coverage of South and
Central America.



Mr. Kamenske's journalistic career at the Voice also coincided with the
Suez and Hungarian crises of 1956, the Kennedy assassination, the
Vietnam War, the historic Apollo manned lunar landing, the Watergate
scandal, President Nixon's resignation in 1974, and the birth of the
Solidarity labor movement in Poland. As a writer, editor and executive
at VOA, Mr. Kamenske was involved in producing news about all these events.



He was married in 1960 to Dr. Gloria Lee Cheek, later a senior official
and widely respected psychologist at the National Institutes of Health,
Bethesda, Maryland. In 1972 and 1973, Mr. Kamenske was promoted to
chief of the Voice's Current Affairs Division, before becoming chief of
the VOA News Division in 1973.



As VOA newsroom chief, Kamenske was instrumental in expanding its
regional source wires and news service subscriptions, inspiring its
correspondents in the U. S. and overseas, and securing the
administrative and editorial separation of its foreign correspondents
from U. S. missions abroad. He was tireless in his pursuit of the
facts, and fondly known throughout the Voice as "Bernie" or "BHK".



He was acclaimed as a champion of journalistic integrity by Alan Heil in
Heil's history of the Voice of America published this year.



Upon his retirement, the Washington Post reported that Mr. Kamenske was
noted for his "cantankerous, impassioned defense of the journalistic
integrity of the Voice... A veteran Senate staff member said: 'He more
than anyone else has kept the sanctity of VOA news --- he sleeps with
the First Amendment every night'."



There were widespread reports, in late 1981, that Kamenske's decision to
retire stemmed largely from efforts by the incoming Reagan
administration to make the Voice more strident. In an editorial
saluting Mr. Kamenske's importance in committing VOA to "accurate,
objective and comprehensive news," the New York Times said: "Over the
decades, the Voice has won an enormous audience around the world. It
has earned trust because it is rarely strident or tendentious. Yet
today, sad to say, that hard-won trust is being put in jeopardy by
over-eager idealogues... To change the Voice's approach and heighten the
ideological pitch will not make it an antidote to Radio Moscow. Only an
echo."



At CNN, Kamenske carried his commitment to accuracy and honesty in
reportage to its Washington newsroom, teaching the international news
business to young reporters the network recruited in its early years.
Since retiring from CNN in 1983, Kamenske has been president of his own
consulting firm on media affairs, NewsViews, Inc., of Bethesda,
Maryland. He is a member of the Radio and Television News Directors

Association (RTNDA), the American Foreign Service Association, and the
National Press Club (honorary member). Mr. Kamenske is listed in
Marquis Who's Who In the Media and Communications, First Edition, 1996.



Mr. Kamenske, son of the late Nathan and Golda Glassman Kamenske of
Boston, is survived by his wife, Gloria Cheek Kamenske, and his sister,
Jeannette Ruderman of Hollywood, Florida.



Details about plans for a memorial service and where contributions might
be sent as a memorial will be announced later.