István Deák

White-tie Diplomacy

Tibor Frank, ed.: Discussing Hitler: Advisers of U.S. Diplomacy in Central Europe, 1934-1941. Budapest-New York: Central European University Press, 2003, 374 pp. Photographs, Appendix.

 

The hero of this story is a dairyman whom the peculiarities of the American political party system thrust into the heart of Europe at a time of that continent's fatal political and military crisis. As US Minister to Hungary from 1933 to 1941, John Flournoy Montgomery spoke only English: this restricted the circle of his acquaintances mainly to such Hungarians who spoke that language although even the latter had a hard time understanding his mid-western accent. He knew nothing of Hungary when accredited to Budapest, and what he learned later was often naive and weighed down by misunderstandings. Yet, as Tibor Frank demonstrates in his brilliant, 70-page-long Introduction, Montgomery was genuinely liked in high society, and he had access to the top-ranking Hungarians. The notes of the 182 official and semi-official conversations he held with the head of state, prime ministers, cabinet members, other politicians, businessmen, top bureaucrats, fellow diplomats in Budapest, and distinguished foreign visitors, show that his interlocutors were often no less wrong than he was in his analyses and predictions. At times, both he and his conversation partners, some of them outstanding experts of the Central European scene, proved to be prophetic, at other times both he and his partners engaged in speculations that today strike us as ridiculous.
Montgomery's conversations, which constitute the bulk of this book, formed the basis for his reports to the State Department and his later memoirs. Both the reports and the memoirs were guided by one basic consideration: a steadfast affection for Hungary. He approved of the country's ruling elite, and he hoped that one day the injustices committed against Hungary following the First World War would be righted. The trouble was, of course, that Hungary's traditional political and social system was facing its final decline at that time, and in March 1941, when Montgomery went back to his condensed milk business in Vermont, the Hungarian leadership had only three years left before its humiliation, expropriation and partial extermination.
Even before the publication of Tibor Frank's book, Montgomery was quite well known both in Hungary and abroad, mainly because of the memoirs he published in 1947 recounting his diplomatic experiences. Entitled, Hungary, the Unwilling Satellite (New York: Devin-Adair), the book argues exactly what its title says, namely that the Hungarians were at all times reluctant to serve the German Nazis, whose system and ideology Regent Admiral Miklós Horthy and most of the Hungarian leaders despised. In view, however, of Hungary's total wartime encirclement by the German Empire and its willing satellites, fascist Romania, Croatia, Slovakia and even the collaborationist Czech Protectorate, the Hungarians had no choice, Montgomery argued, but to try to get along with the Germans. Nevertheless, they gave the Nazis as little in terms of goods and manpower as they could get away with. What makes Hungary, the Unwilling Satellite such useful reading is that it reflects not only Montgomery's opinion but, as Tibor Frank so well explains, it is also an apologia pro vita sua of the old Hungarian political and social establishment which inspired the book. Incidentally, a second Hungarian edition of Montgomery's memoirs is about to be published, revised and edited by Tibor Frank.
The Unwilling Satellite, which also includes a brief history of Hungary, was absent from library shelves in Communist times, in part because of Montgomery's unbounded admiration for Regent Horthy and the wartime conservative elite, and in part because the vigour of his anti-Communism often surpassed that of his Hungarian counterparts. The memoirs show Montgomery as one of the earliest Cold War warriors. The book under review here revives the memory of this dedicated and hard-working amateur diplomat and his times.
Frank, who teaches American history and culture at Eötvös Loránd University, possesses vast experience in US affairs as a former visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Columbia University, and at other institutions. He has written many books, foremost among them are those that deal with Hungarian exile intellectuals, whether of the post-1849 or the twentieth-century emigration. The inspiration for the book under review came to Frank from his chance encounter with members of the deceased Montgomery's family, who generously lent him the papers of their diplomat relative. These documents are now at the Hungarian National Széchényi Library, while another collection of Montgomery's papers is at Yale University.
Somewhat surprisingly for his Mid-western background and his residence in Republican Vermont, Montgomery was a Democrat who contributed mightily to Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 electoral campaign. As a reward, he expected to be appointed at least to head the legation in Vienna but was sent, instead, to Budapest. He went there with the blessings of the new US president, who had some vague sympathies for Horthy as "a fellow-sailor". On December 31, 1937, Roosevelt wrote to Montgomery: "please tell him [the Regent] from me that we sailors must stick to-gether!" The sympathy was amply reciprocated: Horthy assured Montgomery that had the Hungarians been able to cast a vote in the US elections, they would have overwhelmingly endorsed FDR. Why this would have been so is somewhat of a mystery as, by temperament and political ideology, both Horthy and Montgomery were to the right of Roosevelt and his New Deal programme. Maybe it was simply that the Hungarians liked everything about the United States, a country which had refused to sign the ferociously punitive Trianon Peace Treaty with Hungary in 1920, and where more than a million Hungarian emigrants resided. There was also the memory of US General Harry Hill Bandholtz who, as US military representative in Hungary after the Great War, helped to rid Hungary of the Romanian occupiers and facilitated the entry into the capital, in 1919, of Horthy's minuscule counter-revolutionary forces.

While in Budapest, Montgomery could not but feel that he was among friends. Such members of the Habsburg family who were living in Hungary were invariably kind to him as was the Regent, and as were the Count Károlyis, Apponyis, Sigrays, Széchényis, Zichys and other assorted magnates with whom he played tennis and golf and who charmed him at their parties. Not that he never saw through them; some of his diary notes are quite sarcastic, especially regarding the Habsburg archdukes and their quirks but, inevitably, he felt enormously flattered by the attention showered on him. Here was a small-town Babbitt, in his late fifties, wearing a white tie, a cut-away, or a tuxedo, whatever the illustrious event required.
Invariably, Montgomery gained the impression that hardly anyone in Hungary desired the return of the Habsburgs to the Hungarian throne; nor did he or his government want such a thing to happen. For a long time, neither Montgomery nor his masters in Washington understood how insignificant the "Habsburg Question" was in comparison with that of Nazi Germany. Besides, Otto, the Habsburg pretender, counted among the staunchest opponents of Hitler; Montgomery grasped this only after the war when he complained, in Hungary: the Unwilling Satellite, that even President Benes© of Czechoslovakia, personally a favourite target of the Führer, had preferred Hitler to the liberal and tolerant Habsburgs. According to Montgomery, Benes© deliberately hindered the Austrian leadership's effort to prevent the Anschluss in 1938. It is indeed remarkable to what degree Montgomery had become "Hungarian" in sharing the Hungarians' hatred for Czechoslovakia and their contempt for the Romanians, for instance.
Truly, it would have been difficult for Montgomery to see through the anti-Nazi protestations of his Hungarian interlocutors. Not that the Hungarians were lying, but today we know that their dislike of the Nazis did not always mean a dislike of the German alliance. Also, Mongomery did not always grasp that the Regent's hostility to the far-right Arrow Cross Party did not exclude an admiration for the German Army, for instance, or that the Regent's rejection of German racist anti-Semitism did not prevent him from approving of Hungary's anti-Semitic laws.
What may have misled Montgomery were events such as the one in the Budapest Opera House, on March 15, 1939, where both Horthy and Montgomery were present and where some far-right Arrow Cross youngsters in a box loudly protested the imprisonment of Ferenc Szálasi, their charismatic leader. Driven by curiosity, Montgomery rushed to the area where the demonstration was taking place and where he witnessed the curious spectacle of a furious Regent bolting up the stairs, shouting invectives, and slapping the protesters; this, before any of his guards could have arrived to help. Forever after, Horthy was grateful to Montgomery of whom the Regent mistakenly thought that he had been rushing to his aid. What the Regent most disliked about the Hungarian Nazis was that they were demagogues and plebeians, who had the cheek to adulate their own leader. Hungary was to have only one head, the Regent, whom the press consistently presented as a semi-God. In the apt words of Tibor Frank, Montgomery himself "invested his hero [Horthy] with quasi-mythological strength." (p. 61). It is also true, however, and Montgomery himself is categorical on this: Horthy was no dictator but came close to being a constitutional monarch.

Today it is hard to believe that, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hungary's main domestic political preoccupations were less with the Nazi danger or with the general poverty and the crying social inequities than with the Jewish question. There seems to have been a general consensus that Jewish economic and cultural activities ought to be restricted; that much of the Jewish wealth should pass into "Christian" hands, and that many if not most Jews should sooner or later leave the country. Some envisaged a gradual and peaceful emigration after the war; others wished to use legal coercion, and again others advocated violent, even lethal methods. Yet, if one is to believe Montgomery's memoirs as well as the notes he took of his conversations, his interlocutors were non-anti-Semites, almost without exception. When these political leaders adopted anti-Jewish measures, it was only to take the wind out of the sails of the Hungarian and German Nazis.
To give an example, Montgomery had a conversation, on April 7, 1938, with Philip (Fülöp) Weiss, one of Hungary's leading bankers and a member of the Upper House of Parliament, who was a Jew as well as with Viktor Bátor, a famous lawyer, also of Jewish origin. As Bátor recounted, he met with Prime Minister Kálmán Darányi and future Prime Minister Béla Imrédy, and together they went through the provisions of the first anti-Jewish Law. Montgomery noted that the unofficial Jewish representatives were content with the proposed law and the behaviour of Imrédy. (Mind you, Imrédy was hanged in Budapest in 1946 as a Nazi and a war criminal.) Montgomery argued in his Hungary, the Unwilling Satellite that the Hungarian government undertook only such measures against the Jews that were considered indispensable to prevent a forceful German intervention. In reality, however, the Germans did not ask for strong anti-Jewish measures until the year 1943, and Montgomery seems to have overlooked the fact that the alpha and omega of the Horthy regime's counter-revolutionary ideology was anti-Semitism. It is also true however, that more moderate members of the counter-revolutionary establishment, and often they were the ones to have the final say, were horrified by the popularity and fatal consequences of their own anti-Jewish propaganda. The Hungarians profoundly disagreed among themselves as to the severity of the anti-Jewish measures to be taken; Horthy himself and most of his ministers would not consider allowing the Jews to die; not at least until after March 1944 when the German army occupied Hungary. And even then, many Hungarian leaders carefully distinguished between good Jews and bad Jews, something that was anathema to racist anti-Semites.
Tibor Frank gives a few examples to prove that Montgomery himself was somewhat anti-Semitic, probably in the same gentlemanly vein as Horthy and his friends. What I find more disquieting, however, is the absolutely detached manner in which Montgomery took notes on what he not very delicately called the Jew bills. On December 19, 1938, for instance, he took detailed notes, without a word of disapproval, of the second, much more draconic and racist anti-Jewish law. Yet the law marked, among other things, the beginning of the expropriation of businessmen and industrialists like himself. Did he not guess that within a short time the expropriators themselves would be expropriated?
It would be good to know what exactly Montgomery reported to the State Department and what action, if any, the US government took in response to Montgomery's reports. All we know from Frank's account is that the State Department analysts tended to evaluate favourably the Hungarian situation. If Hungary was a reluctant satellite of Germany, then the USA was a reluctant enemy of Hungary.
Contemporary Western impressions of Hungary are best summed up in an oft-repeated anecdote, the origin of which can probably be traced back to an entry in Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano's famous Diary on May 11, 1942, some time after the Hungarian prime minister declared that Hungary was at war with the United States. Ciano wrote:
Hungarian uneasiness is expressed by a little story, which is going the rounds in Budapest. The Hungarian minister declares war on the United States, but the official who receives the communication is not very well informed about European matters and hence asks several questions: He asks: "Is Hungary a republic?" "No, it is a kingdom." "Then you have a king." "No, we have an admiral." "Then you have a fleet?" "No, we have no sea." "Do you have any claims, then?" "Yes." "Against America?" "No." "Against Great Britain?" "No." "Against Russia?" "No." "But against whom do you have these claims?" "Against Rumania." "Then, will you declare war on Rumania?" "No, sir. We are allies."

The trouble with this anecdote and with contemporary public opinion is, I believe, that Hungary was not really a satellite of Germany; nor were the Nazis' other allies, namely Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Slovakia, and Bulgaria. These countries, or rather, their governments, were generally able to determine the extent of their collaboration with the German Reich. They entered the war if and when they decided to do so; they withdrew most or all their troops from the Russian front when they had enough of the fighting; they enjoyed considerable autonomy in the treatment of their own Jewish citizens, and every single one among the allied powers eventually turned against Germany, only that some, like Finland and Romania, were successful, whereas the Italian and Hungarian attempts to change sides in 1943 and 1944, respectively, turned into disasters.
When Montgomery arrived in Budapest, in 1933, Hungary had just begun to orient itself toward Hitler's re-born Germany that promised to become an increasingly important political and trade partner. Besides, the Führer served as one of the inspirations of Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös's budding fascist ideology. But Gömbös's real model was Mussolini, and for several years to come the Hungarians expected assistance mainly from fascist Italy. Unfortunately for them, Italian help amounted to very little in terms of armaments, economic help, or support on the international scene, especially with regard to Hungary's territorial ambitions. Because the Western democracies were far away and unhelpful, whereas Soviet Russia was beyond the pale, Hungary's close relations with Nazi Germany became inevitable, the question was only how close these relations should be. Only in June 1941 did Hungary become Germany's military ally, and even thereafter it undertook repeated measures to mitigate the force of this alliance. All this Montgomery observed, although it does not seem that he understood the essence of the dilemma. Nor did his main conversation partners, the Italian, the Romanian, the Czechoslovak ministers, or the Hungarian prime ministers, or some lesser Hungarian politicians, such as the semi-opposition figure Tibor Eckhardt, indicate that they knew the country and the region were on the brink of the precipice. Eckhardt, a colourful figure, seems to have been informally delegated, or assigned himself the task to inform Montgomery. He himself was sent to the United States in 1941 to represent unofficially the Hungarian government, particularly in case of a feared German occupation.
But in conversations with Montgomery, Eckhardt does not seem to have conveyed any dramatic messages intended for official American ears.
Some of the wisest Hungarian politicians, such as Foreign Minister Kálmán Kánya, gave Montgomery valuable information. For instance, in a conversation on June 19, 1940, Kánya correctly predicted that the German-Soviet alliance would not last, and that Germany would go to war against Russia. But Kánya also said in the same conversation that this would happen only after England had been conquered, and he added that if the United States entered the war, then it would last 15 or 20 years. If some of Kánya's prophecies could be so wrong then how much worse the predictions of such lesser lights as, for instance, Kánya's successor, Foreign Minister Count István Csáky, whom Montgomery cordially disliked. It was indeed because of a quarrel or a misunderstanding with the unconditionally pro-German Csáky that Montgomery's situation became untenable in Budapest. He was recalled to Washington and left Budapest with his family in March 1941. We do not know how he travelled through war-torn Europe; nor do we learn much about his family either from the conversations or from his memoirs.
Following Montgomery's departure, his place was taken by Herbert Claiborne Pell, who had to evacuate the Legation after Prime Minister László Bárdossy stated, on December 12, 1941, that Hungary was now at war with the United States. We know that secret contacts between Hungary and the United States continued thereafter, and that by 1943 the Hungarian government was ready to surrender to the British and American armed forces. Unfortunately, those forces were nowhere near the Hungarian frontier. Instead, on March 19, 1944, the German army marched into Hungary. Despite Regent Horthy's and many other Hungarian politicians' confident assurances to Montgomery that, if attacked, Hungary would strongly resist the Germans, there was no armed resistance. Hundreds of Montgomery's former conservative and liberal interlocutors were immediately arrested with several among them ending up in concentration camps. Soon thereafter, nearly half a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz and the Hungarian army was mobilized to fight the Russians who were now near Hungary. Only gradually did Horthy accept the idea of surrendering to the hated and despised Soviets. But all this is another story.
Tibor Frank's excellent editing and his Introduction, the Conversations, and the informative lists and tables in the Appendix wet one's appetite for more, especially for the publication of Montgomery's reports to the State Department; at least a part of his diaries and the more than one thousand Montgomery letters concerning Hungary that are also at Frank's disposal. One wonders what kind of information his subordinates were feeding him. Why did this American Democrat want to associate only with high society Hungary and why did he meet only with such cultural figures who were favoured by the regime? What was the spiritual make-up of this diplomat who, in a poor country, seemingly never addressed a poor person, even if through an interpreter; who never inquired whether the ordinary people liked or disliked his own country, and who never wanted to know what was driving the right-wing and left-wing critics of the establishment. Yet, within a few years first the Far Right and then the Far Left would come to power in Hungary, both acting in the name of ordinary people. President Roosevelt could surely have sent a more inquisitive and more astute envoy to his fellow-sailor.

 

István Deák
is an American historian born in Hungary. He teaches modern Central and East European history at Columbia University. His books on Weimar Germany's left-wing intellectuals,
the 1848 Revolution in Hungary and the officer corps of the Habsburg Monarchy have
appeared in English, German and Hungarian.