by Jim Newton
Andropov’s recommendations were not known to the students or their allies, much less to Nagy. In the long days of Hungary’s warm summer, passions intensified. In July, the Hungarian Writers’ Union openly criticized the Hungarian Workers’ Party; the head of the party resigned eight days later and fled to Moscow. A group of dissidents executed in 1949 after a show trial were posthumously rehabilitated and reburied in October—100,000 people attended the funeral.
How distant those tribulations seemed to Americans in 1956, as “peace, prosperity and progress,” Eisenhower’s reelection slogan, dominated the national discourse. This was the year of “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg’s rollicking announcement of America’s bohemian culture, not to mention the mounting urgency of civil rights and the incipient force of Betty Friedan and the women’s movement, whose foundations Friedan laid in 1957. Still, there was a surface ease about American life that summer.
In October, exhilaration flared around the World Series, an epic contest between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. The series that year lasted seven games, and Eisenhower traveled to New York to attend as a fan. In game 5, the Yankees’ Don Larsen pitched his perfect game. Don Newcombe, the Dodgers’ great ace, had won twenty-seven games that year, but lost two, including game 7, in the series. Eisenhower rooted for the Yankees but felt for Newcombe. “I think I know how much you wanted to win a World Series game,” the president wrote upon returning to Washington. “I for one was pulling for you. But I suggest that when you think over this past season, you think of the twenty-seven games you won that were so important in bringing Brooklyn into the World Series.” Newcombe, no doubt flabbergasted to receive a note from the president, touchingly replied: “I don’t think you’ll ever know what [your letter] has done for my confidence, which was at a very low ebb. I was very pleased to learn that you were pulling for the Dodgers and me personally, and I’m very sorry I didn’t do better, and through your letter I think I understand more clearly about the bad breaks in sports.”
Events in Europe moved with gathering speed. Nagy succeeded in convincing the Hungarian Workers’ Party to readmit him. Three days after that, students formed the Hungarian Association of University and College Unions. In Poland, Gomulka was named first secretary of that nation’s Communist Party, and one week later Hungarian protesters released the “Sixteen Points,” a blueprint for the nation of their imagination. The first demand was for withdrawal of all Soviet troops; the twelfth was for “freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, a free press and radio and a new daily paper.”
The Sixteen Points rallied Hungarians, and marches the following day demonstrated the depth of animus toward Soviet rule. A crowd of some 200,000 people gathered in Lajos Kossuth Square, a grand set of monuments on the banks of the Danube, named for the man who proclaimed Hungarian independence from Austria; elsewhere in Budapest, other assemblies grew and turned increasingly confrontational. That evening, Hungarian secret police fired into a crowd, estimated at twenty thousand to thirty thousand, assembled in front of a local police station. Three died. Another band of protesters knocked over a statue of Stalin (partially fulfilling one of the Sixteen Points, which called for removal of that hated artwork and replacement of it with a monument to Hungary’s war of independence). Dissidents evolved into rebels, attacking government buildings and police. Authoritarians took stock. At 11:00 p.m., Khrushchev met with his inner council in Moscow. Twelve men attended; eleven favored immediate deployment of Soviet troops to restore order. The first units of the Red Army rolled into Budapest the following morning.
Washington watched, transfixed but paralyzed, as Hungarian freedom fighters confronted Soviet tanks. At first, the struggle went shockingly well for the Hungarians. Some Soviet tank commanders sympathized with Hungarian rebels who desperately argued that they, too, were Communists, fighting only to practice Communism in their own national fashion. Hungarians boarded a few of the tanks and paraded through Budapest. But Hungarian nationalism, encouraged by the United States and other Western powers, now met the real Soviet might. Shots were fired—to this day, it is disputed who fired first—and a tense but festive face-off descended into a bloody melee. Some one hundred people were killed, another three hundred wounded. Over the next several days, Soviet and Hungarian forces wrestled for control of the capital and surrounding cities and countryside. “Within Hungary,” Dulles told Eisenhower, “the revolt has become widespread.”
Then, with the world’s attention focused on this extraordinary challenge to Soviet power, Israel stunned that same world by pivoting away from Lebanon and attacking Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula. Overnight, Israeli forces penetrated seventy-five miles into Egypt and by daybreak were just twenty-five miles east of Suez. The day before, Eisenhower had urged the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to “do nothing which would endanger the peace.” Now Israeli forces parachuted into position and out-maneuvered the Egyptians. Not believing that Britain was behind this assault, Eisenhower asked Britain’s UN ambassador to consider UN action against Israel. “We were astonished to find that he was completely unsympathetic,” Eisenhower wrote to Eden. In fact, Britain’s ambassador was openly hostile, “virtually snarling,” in Lodge’s words.
Even that brusque dismissal was not enough to jolt Ike into realizing Britain’s complicity, though the actions of both Britain and France were tellingly suspicious. The two nations urged a cease-fire and suggested that Israeli and Egyptian forces back up ten miles each, leaving a safe zone around the canal. “Anglo-French” forces would then fill in the gap and secure the peace—while, coincidentally, wresting control of the canal from Nasser, as they had been attempting to do since July. The French-British communiqué was backed by a threat: if Israel and Egypt did not agree, the joint forces would attack Suez. Israel predictably agreed—the proposed withdrawal still left its troops deep in Egyptian territory—and Nasser just as swiftly refused. Ike urged Eden and Prime Minister Guy Mollet of France to reconsider what he described as “drastic action,” advising instead that the nations pursue “peaceful processes.” On October 31, without so much as a warning to Eisenhower, British bombers attacked airfields in Egypt. The United Nations convened in emergency session.
Eisenhower was stunned and despondent: his most dependable allies, two nations whose destinies he had played a weighty role in shaping, double-crossed him. They had taken advantage of his preoccupations with Hungary and his reelection, then just a week away. Why the deception? As Mollet later acknowledged to Eisenhower, “If your government was not informed … [it was because of] our fear that if we had consulted it, it would have prevented us from acting.”
With the crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East now overlapping and the presidential campaign suspended, Eisenhower acceded to his aides, chiefly Sherman Adams, who insisted he needed to address the nation. Preparing such a speech occupied the tense corridors of the White House on October 31, which began with a frustrated Eisenhower searching for ways to halt the fighting in the Sinai. “Let’s call it a ‘Bomb for Peace,’ ” he exploded at an emergency session that morning. “It’s as simple as this: Let’s send one of Curt LeMay’s gang over the Middle East, carrying an atomic bomb. And let’s warn everyone: We’ll drop it—if they all don’t cut this nonsense out.” Aghast, aides let the remark pass in silence.
Having blown off that steam, Eisenhower sent Dulles off to prepare a text for the national address. Dulles did not deliver a draft until 3:15 p.m., and Eisenhower was dismayed. It was rambling and didactic, “with no force of argument,” as Emmet Hughes put it. Eisenhower and Hughes shelved the Dulles draft and pounded out a new one. Hughes called for Dulles, who came to the White House, so that he could read and edit while Hughes wrote and camera operators laid cables and put up lights. The address was scheduled for 7:00 p.m. Hughes handed the last edited page to Ike at 6:56. Eisenhower enjoyed the pressure. He grinned as he took the sheets from Hughes. “Boy, this is taking it right off the stove, isn’t it?”
The
speech that night captured the strange duality of the week: the “dawning of a new day” in Hungary, or so it appeared; the “somber” situation in Egypt, which, while not the cause for “extravagant fear or hysteria,” nevertheless did demand “our most serious concern.”
The hope for Hungary and Eastern Europe reflected an astonishing set of reports from the region. That morning, Eisenhower had been startled to receive word that the Soviets appeared to be backing down from a full-scale war. In Poland, Khrushchev had allowed a new government to be seated, and the October 31 edition of Pravda featured a government proclamation that appeared to signal an abrupt change in the Soviet response to the unrest in Hungary. It announced a new set of relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites—“a great commonwealth of socialist nations”—emphasizing “the principles of complete equality, of respect for territorial integrity, state independence and sovereignty, and of noninterference in one another’s internal affairs.” As Ike addressed the American people that night, he imagined a reborn nation, wrenched from Soviet control by the force of popular will. “Today, it appears, a new Hungary is rising from this struggle,” Eisenhower stated, “a Hungary which we hope from our hearts will know full and free nationhood.”
A stupefied Allen Dulles tried to make sense of the news. The morning after Eisenhower’s speech, Dulles briefed the National Security Council on the Pravda announcement, which he described as “one of the most important statements to come out of the USSR in the last decade.” The force of public opinion, he said, had overpowered military might. “The impossible had happened,” Dulles announced. It was, he said, “a miracle.”
It was, however, a short-lived miracle. Four days later, Russian tanks and armor rolled through Budapest, this time without sympathy for the rebels. Artillery fire commenced at 4:15 a.m. on November 4. The Hungarians were denounced as fascist usurpers. Negotiators for the Hungarian government were arrested at the table where talks with the Soviets were under way. Nagy sought asylum at the Yugoslav embassy. By nightfall, the rebellion had been broken. Eisenhower, his own alliance badly strained by the events in Egypt, now watched in dismay as Soviet tanks imposed their forbidding authority on a brave and abandoned people, encouraged to rise up by his own rhetoric of liberation, now left to fight for themselves. Bodies lay strewn throughout Budapest. “I have noted with profound distress,” Eisenhower wrote to Bulganin, “the reports which have reached me today from Hungary.” His note almost pleaded: “I urge in the name of humanity and in the cause of peace that the Soviet Union take action to withdraw Soviet forces from Hungary immediately.” Bulganin accused Eisenhower of meddling in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, though Hungary was nominally an independent country. He baited the president, suggesting that the United States and the Soviet Union should jointly send forces to Egypt to repel British and French invaders there. The New York Times’s four-deck headline on Sunday, November 4, captured the complexity of the world that day: “Soviet Attacks Hungary, Seizes Nagy; U.S. Legation in Budapest Under Fire.” Beneath it, the other crisis: “U.N. Assembly Backs Call to Set Up Mideast Truce Force.” And beneath that: “Stevenson Holds President Lacks ‘Energy’ for Job.”
As that last headline suggests, the final weeks of the campaign brought out the worst in Stevenson, who sacrificed grace and honor as he grew increasingly desperate. He advanced his reckless proposal to unilaterally halt American nuclear testing, picking up the unfortunate support of Bulganin—hardly a favorite ally in the fall of 1956. Then, on the campaign’s final weekend, at precisely the moment when Eisenhower was most engaged in a crisis, Stevenson suggested that the president was feeble.
“The Chief Executive,” Stevenson told a Democratic audience in Chicago, “has never had the inclination and now lacks the energy for full-time work.” The president’s “age, his health and the fact that he cannot succeed himself make it inevitable that the dominant figure in the Republican Party under a second Eisenhower term would be Richard Nixon,” he added. It was easier to run against Nixon than Ike, but Stevenson’s message not only offended Eisenhower; it strained credulity, especially since it appeared the same day that Ike was dealing with the dual crises in Hungary and Suez. Ike did suffer through those weeks—his blood pressure was jumpy, and aides described him as drawn and tired. But he persisted and maintained a steady command. Ike was more disappointed than angry at Stevenson’s line of attack, writing off his opponent’s charges as “moves of desperation by a candidate who realizes he can’t win,” as the president confided to Ellis Slater.
Those chaotic weeks of October and November 1956 tested Ike as few others had. By the end of the presidential race, he was fed up, convinced that Stevenson had advanced the test-ban proposal for political gain without thought to national security. Stevenson and Kefauver, he complained to his old friend Al Gruenther, “are the sorriest and weakest pair that ever aspired to the highest offices in the land.” Against such opponents, Eisenhower would only be satisfied with a resounding victory. Anything less, and “I would rather not be elected.”
It was, Adams recalled, the worst period Eisenhower had ever experienced in the White House other than the days following his heart attack. The campaign was distracting, the world crises real and forbidding. To Gruenther, Ike admitted the strain. “Life,” he wrote, “gets more difficult by the minute.” The toll on Dulles was even greater. Drawn and ashen on the night of Ike’s address to the nation, he rallied to spearhead the U.S. diplomatic effort at the United Nations. Just after midnight on November 2, he awoke with severe abdominal pains; he checked into Walter Reed hospital, where doctors found cancer and performed a three-hour operation to remove part of his large intestine. Dulles did not return to work for more than two months.
Eisenhower was then, as in those crucible weeks after D-day, a strategic commander, determined and stalwart, patient and clearheaded. His friends were astounded at his calm. “Here were … the ten most frustrating days of his life, and yet there was no evidence at all of pressure, of indecision or of the frustration he mentioned,” Slater wrote in his diary. “Actually, he seemed completely composed.”
Eisenhower’s objective was the long-term preservation of democracy and American leadership; he calibrated his responses accordingly. To the amazement of the Third World, Eisenhower stood solidly behind Egypt. He demanded that his wayward allies end hostilities around Suez and pressed his case with the United Nations despite British and French fury. The administration’s armistice proposal, advanced by the still-ailing Dulles, was approved by a vote of 64–5—the no votes came from Britain, France, and Israel, as well as Australia and New Zealand. When the British and French—as well as Israel—still resisted leaving, Eisenhower applied economic pressure, denying his allies oil and refusing British access to capital during a run on the pound. Eventually, Eden succumbed; he left office in near-collapse, and Britain at last withdrew along with its allies in that misadventure.
“It really was a tough one,” Eisenhower said years later, “but I thought we had to stand on principle.”
In Hungary, Eisenhower’s options were fewer, but he resisted the temptation to escalate. Time, he was convinced, was on America’s side in the long struggle against the Soviets. He had sacrificed lives before in pursuit of grand objectives. These lives were brave Hungarians, misled into believing that Ike would come to their aid and resentful that he did not. Eisenhower allowed them to suffer for believing in his rhetoric of liberation, but his nation won through peace what it could not have secured through war. Hungary today is free in no small measure because Eisenhower allowed its revolution to fail. That is a bitter truth, but such were many victories of that perilous era.
For his part, Khrushchev showed the wear of those weeks as well. At a reception in November for Gomulka, Khrushchev was bellicose, rude, and inept. “We are Bolsheviks,” he boasted to Western diplomats attending the event. “About the capitalist states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don’t like us, don’t
accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” Khrushchev intended the remark to underscore his view of the eventual end of peaceful coexistence—that socialism was historically determined to outlive capitalism. But he had rattled his weaponry too menacingly to be taken lightly.
Dwight Eisenhower was reelected president on November 6, 1956. He won by a smashing margin, more than 9 million votes out of 61,607,208 cast, 457 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 73. Nearly 60 percent of Americans cast their votes for Ike. His only weakness ran along the band of the Deep South, where Brown rankled and Southerners were still voting against Lincoln. And yet this most triumphal political moment must also stand as one of this nation’s least climactic. It paled beneath the carefully constructed peace in Egypt, the smoldering cease-fire in Hungary. At the end of 1956, Eisenhower was president again, and the world remained, remarkably, at peace. His reelection was a point of pride; his peace a mark of statesmanship.
