William Winter; Foreign Relations Commentator

William Winter, veteran radio and television commentator and the first “Voice of America” who became an expert on international affairs, has died at the age of 92.

Winter died Wednesday in Woodland Hills, his wife, Peggy, said Monday.

After decades as a war correspondent and network news analyst, Winter channeled his experience into becoming a sought-after speaker on international affairs at campuses and conferences around the world and an instructor in UCLA extension courses. In later years, he also organized the William Winter Study Tours, leading various groups to far-flung venues from Africa and the Soviet Union to India and the Philippines, where he was revered.

In 1956, Winter became the only American to receive the Philippines’ designation as Commander of the Legion of Honor for his work during World War II. A special military parade was staged in Manila and then-Filipino President Raymon Magsaysay said:

“The voice of William Winter is part of our history. Without his daily reassurance, which we heard on our secret radios, Philippine resistance would not have been possible. It was William Winter who kept alive our faith, our hope, our confidence in America, our belief in democracy.”

Magsaysay had been a guerrilla leader in the Philippines when Winter was broadcasting daily from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Leyte headquarters and other Pacific islands.

Winter arrived at the curious duty by an unusual career path. Born in Newark, N.J., he grew up in North Carolina and studied law privately while working in a law office. Four months before he turned 21, he passed the state bar exam and became the youngest attorney in the United States at the time.

After working as a trial lawyer for an insurance company in New York, Winter returned to North Carolina, where one of his clients was a radio network. Because of his grasp of international law and current events, he was asked to become a radio news analyst, and by 1935 he had abandoned law for the air waves.

In 1941, CBS Radio relocated Winter to San Francisco, where he offered a daily network news analysis, focusing on America’s international relations. After the director of the Malaya Broadcasting Corp. of Singapore asked to relay Winter’s commentaries throughout Asia via shortwave, the United States decided in September--only months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II--to make Winter its first State Department-sponsored “Voice of America.”

In daily broadcasts, Winter reassured Asians that the United States, although not in the war, was (despite Japanese broadcasts to the contrary) concerned about protecting Asians. He also offered even-handed explanations of democracy and freedom of expression, supporting his comments with quotations from American interventionists and isolationists alike.

During the final two years of the war, when Winter accompanied MacArthur, the broadcaster became so reviled by Japan’s Radio Tokyo that it aired a play featuring three men barred from heaven because of their wickedness--Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Winter.

The former lawyer covered the United Nations Charter Conference in San Francisco in 1945 for the State Department and later the Korean War for the United Nations. In 1955 he was named television news analyst for ABC.

Ironically, Winter’s moderate speeches and commentaries during the Cold War about promoting democracy over communism sometimes landed the speaker in hot water. When Winter was engaged to address the 5,000-delegate PTA California Congress at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium in 1961, critics picketed and waged a telephone campaign to block his appearance. They complained to conference organizers that Winter was controversial and a liberal, and said they would prefer to hear from “a real patriot.”

“The major job for us and for the next generation is to outsell the communist idea,” Winter told the PTA as well as business organizations and many other groups. “In business, we study the competitors’ product and its packaging. Then we go out and make a better product, package it better and outsell him. We do that all the time in business. I think it’s high time we did it in our government.”

In addition to the Philippines, several other governments, including Australia and Morocco, honored Winter for his wartime broadcasts.

He is survived by his wife; two daughters, Diane Durkin of Woodland Hills and Dita Wolanow of Ventura, and one grandchild.

The family has asked that memorial donations be made to the William Winter Tribute at any of four local PBS stations: KCET of Los Angeles, KCRW of Santa Monica, KPCC of Pasadena or KUSC at the Los Angeles-based university.