Charles Wiley, a writer for more than two dozen magazines, newspapers, and radio stations, and speaker of over 3000 talks to hundreds of schools, clubs, and organizations in 50 states and six continents died on Wednesday, March 9, 2022, 1 AM in Corona, California. He was 95.
After an evening of work on his computer, he felt very tired and lay down on the bed near his workspace. When wife Alice Bell Wiley checked on him at 1 am, she discovered that he had peacefully passed away in the trenches of fighting for freedom.
From the 1930s as a vaudeville and Broadway child actor to war reporting during the wars of America from World War II to the Persian Gulf wars, Wiley was an electric presence and a courageous gatherer of facts.
Charles Wiley championed a heroic vision of the American tradition of democracy. As an actor, soldier, reporter, and speaker, his biggest impact was on the youth in America and friends of democracy around the world.
He fought Soviet Communism but was also fascinated by the Civil Rights and anti-war youth movements and often reported on them. He had one of the last interviews that Malcolm X gave before he was assassinated. He wanted to see the fatal stumble of the Soviets in Afghanistan so he walk its mountains while talking with Osama bin Laden.
Wiley had a very successful 13-year show business career. He was part of his father’s stand-up comic routines on vaudeville stage and radio and was a child actor, playing the role of Wally Webb, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway drama “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder. Wiley’s parents were personal friends of Thornton Wilder.
“We used to visit him in Connecticut,” he said. “I was a kid, so I didn’t appreciate it at the time. But I think ‘Our Town’ is one of the great plays. It reminds me of Seinfeld because it’s about nothing. It’s just life.”
He was also in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play “The Old Maid” (where he met Humphrey Bogart, who was the boyfriend of the actresses) and “Arrest That Woman.”
In 1939, he joined with many other actors in championing the appearance of opera star Marion Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Republic refused to let the African American sing in their hall. Anderson instead gave a free Easter Sunday outdoor concert to a live crowd of 75,000 and a radio audience numbering into the millions, which began with the patriotic song “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”
Soon after Pearl Harbor, at age 15, Wiley joined the USO and entertained the troops at bases throughout the United States for a year. But his desire was to get into the fight at the front lines.
So, at age 17, he enlisted in the United States Navy. His service included duty with the amphibious corps in the Pacific and a brief tour with naval intelligence. He received a battle star for Okinawa and, at end of the war, was among the very first Americans to occupy Japan. Wiley later helped evacuate the natives from the Pacific island Bikini before the atom bomb tests.
Like many of his generation, World War II was a paradigmatic event. He studied the war for over a half-century. His research took him to hundreds of battlefields, archives & museums all over the world – from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Telemark, Norway (where Hitler tried to develop an atom bomb); and from Stalingrad to Cassino.
Wiley talked to thousands who were involved – from average folks to generals and admirals. He interviewed the father of the H-bomb, Edmund Teller, and other scientists involved with the war efforts. Recently in the conservative opinion magazine The American Spectator, he summed up what he learned in several articles, including one published in December 2021, “When Americans United and Went to War.”
After the war, he studied journalism at New York University. As a journalist, Wiley has reported from 100 countries. He covered 11 wars, including reporting for NBC, UPI, the London Express, and numerous other U.S. and foreign news media. His articles and photographs also appeared in the New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, Time, National Review, and The American Spectator. He reinforced his commitment to a journalistic career by turning down the part of Officer Krupke in a production of West Side Story.
Wiley was fearless in his reporting in the war zones as well as behind the enemy lines of authoritarian countries. He went into Afghanistan, with the mujahedeen, during the war against the Soviet Union. Later, while in Kosovo, he visited the troops from many nations, including the Russian 13th Tactical Group.
However, he was also was arrested eight times by various secret police, including the KGB. In a remarkable meeting at the KGB Headquarters in Moscow, their chairman Vladimir Semichastny showed Wiley a portion of a file that labeled the reporter, “a very dangerous enemy of the Soviet Union.” In July and August 1960, he was infamously imprisoned in a Cuban dungeon while he was a correspondent for New York City radio station WOR. His hunger strike became the front page news at the time.
The Vietnam War experience was pivotal for Wiley. He covered the Vietnam war in 1962, 1964, 1968
(the Tet Truce offensive) and 1972 (the Easter offensive). He didn’t cover the war from a bar but from the field. For example, he logged into five combat missions with the Vietnamese Air Force. He flew with them as they came at treetop level into the besieged city of Hue, the war’s biggest most fierce battle.
Wiley interviewed many of the key players. During critical periods, he had long one-on-one interviews and briefings with General Westmoreland, Presidents Diem and Thieu, Marshal Ky, and other top figures. He also flew to China and the Soviet Union to question their leaders and the public about the Vietnam War. He returned to Vietnam and Cambodia after the conflict to dig deeper into the unknown stories of the war.
Every which way the journalist looked in the tumultuous 1960s, there was a gold mine of personalities and stories to collect. Wiley immersed himself into the times, striking up a number of unlikely friends and acquaintances. He found that perhaps the most fascinating, brilliant personality was Malcolm X. With the Black Muslim, Wiley ended up with a continuously electric relationship.
As Wiley recalled his first conversation with X to A Journey through NYC religions, the Black Muslim said goodbye by calling him “Satan.” However, the reporter continued to try to connect with X and finally did. He liked how Wiley was always straightforward with him. “And after that, I met him and we had a lot of phone conversations. And that was when the phones were attached to the wall by a little wire. And, and I used to tuck it in under my chin while I did dishes and stuff, and talk to Him about everything in the entire world. I mean, you name it, we would talk about it. And he had a great sense of humor.”
Wiley’s last interview with X was before he was assassinated by the Black Muslims in 1965. They met in a café in Corona, Queens. X came with bodyguards and joined Wiley and his wife Alice. “We met with him at two o’clock, after lunchtime and before the evening crowd when the place would be empty. And so he came walking in after a couple of minutes after two. He left his bodyguards outside. Instead of sitting across from us, he sat down with us. So there we were, the three of us sitting three across, obviously, with our back to the wall facing the windows.” X then told us that he would be murdered soon. Wiley recalls X as “one of the most intelligent people whom I have interviewed.”
The journalist’s “Who was Malcolm X?,” published in National Review on March 23, 1965, is still regarded as one of the best takes on the African American leader by a conservative.
Wiley was disturbed about how politicized and anti-American the press became during the course of the Vietnam war. He saw the time as a pivotal one for U.S. media turning away from objective reporting to advocacy reporting. He foresaw that this would continue to grow and cause a high distrust of news media and extreme divisions within society.
He became a bit of an activist, helping to gather together one of the largest pro-American soldier parades in United States history, an event known as the “hard-hat parade.” The official title was “Home with Honor” parade, which involved over 150,000 marchers on March 31, 1973 – the day the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. He recalled the parade for students at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. The local newspaper reported on Wiley’s talk:
The two-mile parade was led by 1,000 servicemen who marched up Broadway past Times Square to Central Park, where they sat in grandstands while the 150,000 civilians – including policeman, firefighters, veterans organization members, hard hat workers, and citizens – marched past them to pay tribute. Today, Americans believe no brass bands celebrated GIs coming home from Vietnam; however, the NYC event included 100 brass bands, Wiley said.
The distorted coverage caused three major misconceptions in the U.S. conscience: that Americans “turned their backs on GIs when they came home”; there were “anti-war demonstrations on every street corner” and “there was no parade to welcome them home,” Wiley said.
“It’s not true. None of it happened.”
National coverage of the war was “a terrible example” of the media’s power, he said.
He formed the National Committee for Responsible Patriotism to give a balanced view of America in its war. He also taught at numerous teach-ins on college campuses.
Wiley moved seamlessly from writing to speaking with an electric, blunt, but endearing style that changed many lives around the world. His talks took him to Germany, Australia, South Africa, Taiwan, Luxembourg. Thailand, Belarus, Namibia, and Albania. He lived briefly in the Soviet Union while giving talks at Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) University. Wiley lectured, and resided on campus, in China (Jinan University), (Guangzhou), and elsewhere abroad.
Most recently, he gave talks at two universities in Bogota, Colombia — and in Moscow at two universities, an international symposium and to the staff of a major transnational academic publication.
When speaking about American democracy and the importance of objective reporting, he occasionally agreed to do so under the auspices of the U.S. government like the White House Public Outreach Group and contributed to establishing guidelines for a free press in Mongolia.
Wiley broadened his audience as a well-known radio and television talk show personality and commentator on national networks and local programs. His appearances on the legendary Barry Farber Show in New York City were always heavily listened-to highlights of the year. In his reminiscence in The American Spectator after Farber’s death, Wiley recalled, “On countless occasions, people I’d just met told me that they listened to me for hours on Barry’s show. That includes many old folks who say they were fans when they were teenagers … a half-century ago.” He also appeared regularly on CNN and C-Span.
Wiley felt that the American news consumer was being alienated and underserved by journalism that emphasized opinionated news reporting and writing that usually reflected an anti-American, liberal bias. Consequently, many of his talks featured analysis of mis-reporting and an advocacy of objective reporting as a replacement. Reed Irvine persuaded Wiley to join Accuracy in Media speakers bureau, a position he had for over thirty years.
As a combat reporter, Wiley was also concerned with getting accurate news reports in front of defense and security leaders in the United States and its allies. He played major roles in international conferences in Great Britain and Italy. He lectured at the Ministry of Civil Defence Academy in New Zealand and at London University at the Institute of Civil Defense.
Wiley frequently addressed military audiences – in the USA and abroad – including the Naval War College, the Defense Intelligence Agency school, an Air Force school for its top Non-Commissioned Officers, the Navy Postgraduate School, United States Pacific Fleet command, the Coast Guard Academy, the United Kingdom intelligence school, the Spanish Army War School, and many others. He lectured at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford. He was the keynote speaker at a two-day Washington conference on homeland security — organized by Jane’s, a premier international authority on defense, strategy & intelligence issues.
Closest to Wiley’s heart was teaching high school and college students how to discern truth in media reports and political debates. Every year, he spoke at dozens of colleges, high schools, and young adult gatherings throughout the country. Some of his favorite perennial audiences were those at his annual talks, since 1991, at the biggest political science class (800) of University of California Berkeley and to the annual gathering of 2000 of the nation’s top high school seniors every June at Boys State in both New Jersey (22 years) and Wisconsin (18).
With an incredibly complex and rich life experience, he was also in demand to teach lessons on how to handle one’s life, which he regularly did at life-experience seminars at five colleges and, most recently, at a college in Texas.
Wiley was born on November 17, 1926 in Flushing, Queens, and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He learned loyalty to friends and lessons of life by being part of a small nonviolent kid’s gang that hung out on 95th Street, shouting out to each other’s appearance, “Yamoo!” His parents, Charles F. and Fay Wiley, were not religious, nor was the son–his mother would sometimes take him to Catholic church for the big holidays. However, as a kid, he hung out with the Unitarian Church’s West Side youth group and even preached a sermon for them. He always liked and respected religious people and often talked at their gatherings.
With his first wife Tina, he had three children: Scott of Sayreville, New Jersey, a daughter Chris of Los Gatos, California, and a son Cliff who passed away at age 19. He has two grandchildren: Adrian (21); and Katya (11). After his wife died, he remarried to Alice Bell. Friends say that it was a marriage made for the ages, and they often traveled together in his reporting and speaking tours.
He started as a child star on Broadway and ended as a lodestar in the hearts of freedom-loving peoples around the world. To all his friends, Wiley would say, “Yamoo!” And goodbye.
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