The Age of Eisenhower by William I Hitchcock

Author:William I Hitchcock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

VII

Just as Eisenhower began to despair about the Middle East, terrible news arrived from Hungary. The Soviets were invading again, and this time they meant to win.

The Soviet Union had installed Imre Nagy in power on October 24 with the intention of using this moderate and reform-minded leader to quell the Hungarian uprising. Instead Nagy had been captured by the euphoria of the anti-Soviet rebellion and declared Hungary’s intention to leave the communist bloc, setting off a panicked reaction in the Kremlin. Khrushchev and his colleagues worried that if Hungary could slip away from communist control just when Egypt, a potential client state, was being invaded by the Europeans, the West would have delivered a dual blow to Soviet prestige. In a secret meeting on October 31, Khrushchev and the Soviet Presidium ordered the preparation of Operation Whirlwind: the repression of the Hungarian Revolution by over 60,000 Soviet troops.48

The blow fell savagely at 4:00 a.m. on November 4. Artillery shells slammed into the center of Budapest. Soviet troops moved swiftly into the city, capturing the radio broadcasting stations and munitions depots. They surrounded the Hungarian Army barracks and disarmed the troops. They occupied all the bridges across the Danube, and then seized the Parliament building. Soviet troops were met with fierce but sporadic and uncoordinated resistance. Prime Minister Nagy went on national radio to declare, “At daybreak Soviet forces started an attack against our capital, obviously with the intention to overthrow the legal Hungarian government. Our troops are fighting. The Government is in its place.” But that was not the case, for Nagy himself then fled to the Yugoslav Embassy, leaving his government in disarray. By noon most of the city was under Soviet control. The Hungarian Revolution, which had electrified captive peoples across Europe, lay crushed beneath Soviet tank treads.

These events shocked a confused and anxious world. At the United Nations, Ambassador Lodge rose to denounce the Soviet invasion; he was met with a sneering, dismissive rebuttal from the Soviet ambassador, who asserted that the Western powers merely wanted to divert attention from the fiasco at Suez. The State Department hastily drafted a message for the president to send to the Soviet leadership, declaring his “profound distress” at reports of Soviet brutality in Hungary. The ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce, an outspoken hawk and Eisenhower’s friend, wrote Ike a private cable calling for action to rescue the Hungarians: “Let us not ask for whom the bell tolls in Hungary today. It tolls for us if freedom’s holy light is extinguished in blood and iron there.” But Eisenhower understood there were no measures the United States could take to halt Soviet aggression. Hungary was landlocked and surrounded by Warsaw Pact countries. Any intervention there would certainly lead to a wider war. As he candidly wrote later in his memoirs, “We could do nothing.”49

On the Suez matter, however, Eisenhower did have some leverage. But had he waited too long to use it? When he arrived at the Oval Office on

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