Delano Lewis, a longtime determine in Washington enterprise and politics whose wide-ranging profession included main NPR throughout divisive funds battles and dealing with tough diplomacy in South Africa as U.S. ambassador looking for to increase the struggle in opposition to AIDS, died Aug. 16 at a hospice facility in Las Cruces, N.M. He was 84.
The demise was introduced in a household assertion. No trigger was given.
For many years, Mr. Lewis wielded affect in roles akin to adviser to D.C. Mayor Marion Barry and as chief govt on the former Chesapeake & Potomac Phone Firm (then a part of Bell Atlantic) from 1990 to 1993. Principally, nevertheless, he remained out of the headlines.
That modified when he took over at NPR in 1993, succeeding a former Carter administration official, Douglas Bennet, who had guided the broadcaster from the wake of a debt disaster in 1983 to relative stability on the daybreak of the web age. Mr. Lewis was quickly going through one other siege on NPR.
Republicans — emboldened after gaining management of the Home and Senate in 1994 — took goal at taxpayer assist for NPR, which acquired funding by means of the nonprofit Company for Public Broadcasting. For firebrands akin to Home Speaker Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), calls to defund NPR grew to become early salvos within the political tradition wars, claiming NPR was not attuned to conservative views and values.
Mr. Lewis was thrust onto the entrance strains. He mobilized NPR’s a whole lot of associates throughout the nation to foyer native representatives and senators to maintain funding. Mr. Lewis, who was educated in segregated faculties in Kansas and was NPR’s first Black chief govt, portrayed Gingrich and his allies as making an attempt to cripple affiliate stations with minority possession or serving rural areas with out quick access to cultural choices.
“It’s on public radio that folks hear public discourse in additional than 15-second sound bites,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a February 1995 opinion piece in The Washington Publish. “It’s on public radio that folks in rural areas hear a reside efficiency of a serious symphony orchestra. It’s on public radio that studying companies for the blind are discovered.”
In the long run, critics of NPR funding retreated. However the broadcaster’s funds took successful: $275 million for 1996, down from $425 million the earlier 12 months. Mr. Lewis dropped a number of the exact same packages he praised through the struggle with Congress — music exhibits together with “Afropop Worldwide” and “BluesStage.”
“It’s not a straightforward time,” Mr. Lewis informed the New York Instances.
The belt-tightening left the NPR newsroom uneasy about what might come subsequent. Discontent grew as Mr. Lewis started to sketch out monetary rescue methods, together with proposing extra direct company sponsorship of NPR and making a failed pitch to merge with a rival, Public Radio Worldwide. “Variety’s shade,” Mr. Lewis as soon as mentioned, “is inexperienced.”
The tensions stoked by Mr. Lewis metastasized into open hostility by newsroom leaders such because the vice chairman for information, Invoice Buzenberg, who believed Mr. Lewis and his administration crew “didn’t absolutely grasp the mission of public-service journalism or the enterprise of public radio,” wrote Michael McCauley in his 2005 ebook “NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of Nationwide Public Radio.”
But Mr. Lewis, who stepped down from NPR in 1998, additionally acknowledged the altering media panorama earlier than many others. He noticed how the web would change conventional media and open new alternatives in addition to threats. In a 1994 interview, he envisioned a then-futuristic world of podcasts and smartphones.
“As this info infrastructure develops, it’s key for radio to be concerned,” he informed Broadcasting & Cable journal. “The best way we store, financial institution, entertain, obtain information and educate our kids will all change. Know-how is exploding.”
As his farewell approached at NPR, Mr. Lewis vowed that his general work life was winding down, too. “I’m going to pursue enjoyable issues in life,” he informed NPR workers. However just a few months later, as Mr. Lewis and his spouse, Gayle, have been packing to maneuver to Las Cruces, the telephone rang. It was Vice President Al Gore.
“He says, ‘Del, that is Al,’ ” Lewis wrote in his memoir, “No Situation Is Everlasting” (2018), co-written together with his son Brian. “Then his voice turned very official and he continued, ‘Del, I’m calling on behalf of President Clinton and the president want to nominate you as the following ambassador to the Republic of South Africa.’ ”
The posting put Mr. Lewis in a rustic making a tough political transition. The hero of the anti-apartheid battle, Nelson Mandela, left the presidency in June 1999. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, rapidly unleashed a extra confrontational fashion with the US and allies. A serious break with the West got here when Mbeki questioned the scientific proof that HIV brought about AIDS, which on the time was ravaging sub-Saharan Africa.
Mr. Lewis was within the center: urging Mbeki to work with U.S. and Western researchers to fight HIV transmission, whereas advising the State Division on the right way to cope with South Africa’s mercurial chief. “The problem for U.S. officers,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a cable in February 2001, lower than 4 months earlier than leaving the ambassador publish, “will likely be to simply accept this essential, however hypersensitive, African determine as he’s, and construct a constructive dialogue.” (Mbeki stayed in workplace till 2008.)
Delano Eugene Lewis was born in Arkansas Metropolis, Kan., on Nov. 12, 1939, and raised in Kansas Metropolis, Kan. His father was a porter on the Santa Fe Railroad, and his mom was a homemaker.
Mr. Lewis graduated from the College of Kansas in 1960 and acquired a legislation diploma from the Washburn College Faculty of Regulation in Topeka, Kan., in 1963. Mr. Lewis arrived in Washington as a younger Justice Division lawyer who noticed public service as a strategy to advance the civil rights motion. However he was quickly abroad.
He was affiliate director for the Peace Corps in Nigeria and nation director in Uganda from 1966 to 1969. After returning to Washington, he served as a legislative assistant to Sen. Edward Brooke (D-Mass.), the primary Black senator popularly elected, and later labored on the workers of Del. Walter Fauntroy (D), D.C.’s consultant within the Home.
Mr. Lewis campaigned for the House Rule Act, which handed in 1973 and gave the District extra autonomy by means of a legislative council chosen by voters. Mr. Lewis made an unsuccessful run for D.C. metropolis council in 1974, shedding to Barry. (Mr. Lewis served on Barry’s mayoral transition crew after his election in 1978.)
After his ambassadorship, Mr. Lewis was a senior fellow at New Mexico State College and helped create its Institute for Worldwide Relations. Mr. Lewis’s first ebook, “It All Begins With Self,” was printed in 2015.
Survivors embody his spouse of 63 years, the previous Gayle Jones; 4 sons, Delano Lewis Jr., Geoffrey Lewis, Brian Lewis and Phill Lewis, a director and actor; 11 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.
Throughout his time in South Africa, Mr. Lewis had made a cease at Mandela’s house for a short assembly, he shared in a CNN interview. Mandela requested about Mr. Lewis’s household.
“The household’s high quality,” Mr. Lewis recalled telling Mandela. “As a matter of reality, my spouse and sister-in-law and two grandsons are within the automobile. And he mentioned, ‘Within the automobile?’ He mentioned, ‘Carry them in.’”
Mr. Lewis’s household and Mandela gathered within the lobby of his workplace. Mandela reminded the 2 boys that their grandfather was additionally “an essential man,” Mr. Lewis mentioned.
“I simply couldn’t deal with it,” he mentioned. “Nelson Mandela is saying that I’m an essential man?”