Revolution!
The Hungarian uprising 50 years later; how it changed the Cold War
So when anti-Communist riots broke out that summer in the Polish city of Poznan, the tone of the debates in Budapest grew even more heated. The government tried to appease the demonstrators by "rehabilitating" former enemies of the state, but the concessions were not enough. By the fall, students were demanding 16 reforms-most of them seeking incremental changes to the existing Communist government but one of them calling for multiparty elections.
Deep freeze. On the eve of the uprising, the map of the world was hopelessly frozen into Soviet and western camps. Nevertheless, American policy under President Dwight Eisenhower was aimed at freeing Communist-ruled peoples, a goal that fed an extensive propaganda campaign. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued in the 1952 election that the Democrats'strategy of simply containing communism was a sign of weakness and should be replaced by a policy of "liberation." Dulles was also a strong proponent of brinksmanship: "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art," Dulles once said. "If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."
Yet when push came to shove-and the Soviets were exceptionally good at shoving-the United States was conspicuously, some would say shamefully, timid about fighting the battles it helped provoke. In Hungary, it provided neither arms nor troops nor financial aid, only humanitarian supplies. To have been more aggressive against the Communist enemy, the thinking went, would have been to invite a thermonuclear apocalypse.
Despite, or perhaps because of, those stakes, American leaders showed a startlingly cynical pragmatism when first faced with a series of small uprisings in East Berlin, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s-revolts for which U.S.propaganda was at least partly responsible. In July 1956, shortly before the Hungarian revolution began, CIA chief Allen Dulles shared that frank viewpoint with a colleague: "The horrible thing in that Czechoslovakian thing was that nobody got killed. I'd have felt much better about that, and the Czechoslovakian people would have stood much higher in the world's estimation, if there had been a thousand or 10 thousand people killed," he said, according to documents in historian David Barrett's recent book, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story From Truman to Kennedy. "You've got to take some risks," Dulles said, "and you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Surely the CIA director was not hoping for bloodshed; rather, he was bowing to a political reality that was widely shared among fervent anti-Communists in the government. That is, that any show of Communist force against "the captive peoples of Europe" would be a moral victory for the West. Indeed, newly released documents show that then Vice President Richard Nixon told a top-secret meeting of the National Security Council just nine days earlier that "it wouldn't be an unmixed evil, from the point of view of U.S. interest, if the Soviet iron fist were to come down again on the Soviet bloc."
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