Charles Gati, E.E. Cummings, and Hungary 1956

In a newly released paperback, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, Charles Gati relates new facts about the Hungarian revolution and its suppression by the Soviet Union in a political thriller that combines the immediacy of an eyewitness account (the author was a 22-year-old reporter in Budapest during the uprising) with the experience and expertise of a scholar. Gati points out, “The Hungarians need to hear what happened 50 years ago--and Americans need to hear that in the future we will not say we seek clearly unattainable goals abroad for political ends at home.”

Denying neither Hungarian heroism nor Soviet brutality, Failed Illusions fundamentally alters our picture of what happened during the 13-day uprising that began on October 23, 1956. Gati finds that the young revolutionaries were brave but their expectations unrealistic, and their leader, Imre Nagy, a reform communist who headed the revolutionary government, could not rise to the occasion by steering a realistic course between his people’s demands and Soviet interests.

Gati’s account exposes a crucial gap between words and actions in U.S. policy. In his view the United States was all talk, no action, and offered mixed signals at best. It encouraged the revolutionaries with promises of “liberation” and the “rollback” of Soviet power from Eastern Europe. The book exposes Washington’s ambivalence by citing Vice President Nixon, who said at a top-secret NSC meeting in July 1956 that “it wouldn’t be an unmixed evil” for the U.S. if the Soviets were to invade Hungary. Interestingly, U.S. failure to aid the Hungarian revolutionaries is also the subject of a poem by E.E. Cummings, Thanksgiving 1956.