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• Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, and the Holy Crown of Hungary in Bilateral Relations

  Tibor Glant

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  156

  The Holy Crown of Hungary spent thirty-three years in American custody between the end of World War II and its repatriation in January 1978. Open hostility between the US, the leader of the Free World, and Hungary, a Soviet colony in the middle of Europe, prevented any discussion about its return between 1947 and 1970. The normalization of bilateral relations (1969-78) opened up new possibilities, and the Nixon White House considered the return of the Hungarian coronation regalia briefly in 1970-71. Spirited protests by Congressmen and East European immigrants convinced National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Nixon that they could lose more by returning the Crown than by keeping it in American custody (in Fort Knox, KY), so the issue was dropped. Yet the press continued to discuss the possibility of its return and the White House had to deny any such plans again and again. As normalization ground to a halt after 1973, Budapest exerted more and more pressure and the matter was on President Ford’s desk one last time in December 1976, right after he had lost the election. Ford accepted the advice of his foreign policy team and “sleeping dogs” were left alone. It was the next president who decided to “face the goulash hitting the fan” and the Holy Crown of Hungary and the assorted regalia were returned by the new Carter administration on January 6, 1978. (TG)

• Killing the Canard: Saint Stephen’s Crown, Nixon, Budapest, and the Hungarian Lobby

  Máté Gergely Balogh

  Views:

  113

  With the question of the return of the Holy Crown in the focus, the essay describes how certain leaders of the Hungarian-American community attempted to influence American foreign policy towards Hungary during the détente period. Whereas certain members of the Nixon and Ford administrations, as well as the State Department, had already considered returning the Crown to the People’s Republic of Hungary, many of the émigré groups were strongly opposed to this action, and voiced their protest whenever speculations surfaced in the press. With the help of certain American and Hungarian-American politicians in Congress as well as in the Republican Party, the decision to return the Crown could be presented as potentially too risky politically and postponed during the Nixon and the Ford administrations. But with the election of President Carter, the Hungarian-American groups seem to have lost their leverage, and as soon as the political decision was made they could no longer prevent the return. (MGB)

• Kindred Spirits: Lajos Gulácsy and Oscar Wilde

  Éva Péteri

  Views:

  159

  Lajos Gulácsy (1882-1932), the acknowledged Hungarian painter of the early twentieth century, was a kindred spirit to Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), sharing his love of beauty, his escapism, and his belief in the superiority of art over mundane reality. Gulácsy’s art cannot be easily described in relation to the artistic groups and tendencies of his age; however, the literary portion of his oeuvre reveals definite affinities and parallels with dominant artistic trends of the millennium. Gulácsy wrote a number of essays, short-stories and tales, and even a novel, Pauline Holseel (1910), which all give evidence to an aesthetic similar to that of Oscar Wilde. Pauline Holseel, in particular, shows close correspondences with Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Besides displaying the typical features of the Künstlerroman of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, such as the lack of a plot, artists as protagonists, or a heavy reliance on sensual experiences, they also share more particular parallels concerning structure and attitude to art. (ÉP)