The 50th Anniversary
of Ronald Reagan’s First Crusade
By Dr. Paul Kengor
Center for Vision & Values
Grove City College
US
Fifty years ago this week Soviet tanks under order
from the Kremlin rolled into the Communist bloc
nation of Hungary and killed upwards of 30,000 citizens
—brutally dashing the aspirations of a reformer
named Imre Nagy, and viciously informing the Hungarian
people that they could not break free from the iron-fisted
tyranny of the USSR. The repercussions extended
far beyond the confines of the Iron Curtain.
Back in the United States, an actor named Ronald
Reagan watched carefully, and was outraged. Reagan
stood at a turning point in his professional-political
life: He was transitioning from liberal Democrat
to conservative Republican, from being (by his own
admission) “naïve” to the Communist
threat to becoming fully committed to confronting
global Marxism.
Reagan was also heading into his third year as host
of CBS’s GE Theatre, where he would
remain until August 1962. Reagan was already well-known
from his movie days. Now, his new post made him
(according to surveys) one of the most recognized
names in all of America. By the mid-1950s, two-thirds
of American homes already owned at least one TV
set, and millions of families sat perched in front
of “the tube” for hours on end. With
very few stations available on the dial, the typical
American could not turn on the TV on a given evening
without seeing Ronald Reagan’s face in their
living room. Adding to Reagan’s notoriety,
GE Theatre was a smash. The show took off,
eclipsing I Love Lucy only weeks into its debut.
It was the top show in the 9:00 PM slot for eight
years, and attracted the very best actors and musical
talent.
Those old enough recall all of this fondly and vividly.
What is generally, forgotten, however, and certainly
not known to today’s generation, is that on
several occasions Reagan made notable anti-Communist
statements during GE Theatre broadcasts
— one of them concerning the Soviet invasion
of Hungary.
At the close of a February 3, 1957 episode, in which
he played a boxing trainer, Reagan stepped back
into his host duty to give his customary goodbye
and plug for GE products. This time, however, he
put in a word for Hungarian refugees: Yes, reminded
Reagan, the Red Army had killed thousands of Hungarians,
but a large number had managed to escape —
though they were not out of the woods. “Ladies
and gentlemen, about 160,000 Hungarian refugees
have reached safety in Austria,” reported
Reagan to his huge audience. “More are expected
to come. These people need food, clothes, medicine,
and shelter. You can help.” He told his fellow
Americans to send donations to the Red Cross or
to the church or synagogue of their choice.
Those Hungarians were Reagan’s heroes: the
so-called “Captive Peoples” of the Communist
bloc suffering the sword of Soviet repression. This
was perhaps the Great Communicator’s first
use of the TV bully pulpit on behalf of Eastern
Europeans.
Ronald Reagan would never forget the bloodshed in
Hungary. He vowed that one day, if and when he was
in the shoes of then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower,
he would not allow a repeat of such a tragedy, whether
in Hungary or another Soviet bloc nation like Poland.
In that thinking, he would find sympathy from another
observer who was similarly appalled in 1956, a young
man from Krakow, Poland named Karol Wojtyla —
the future Pope John Paul II.
President Reagan’s closest aide, National
Security Adviser Bill Clark, witnessed Reagan’s
commitment to not allow history to repeat itself
in the 1980s, when Soviet troops sat poised on the
Polish border, ready to crush Lech Walesa and his
Solidarity movement — the heirs to those Hungarian
freedom fighters: “The Soviets and their proxies
in Poland declared martial law and started in the
summer moving troops up to the border,” recalled
Clark in March 2000, “which looked like another
situation as had occurred in Hungary…. The
President said this just simply cannot happen, even
if it means meeting force with force.”
That was the level of Ronald Reagan’s dedication
to freedom in the Soviet bloc: he actually considered
countering the Red Army in Poland with US military
force—America going toe-to-toe against the
USSR. Mercifully, it never came to that.
What happened in Hungary 50 years ago this week
was transformative, not just for Hungarians and
for the Communist world, but for a man named Ronald
Reagan, who would one day launch what he and the
Soviets both described as a “crusade”
— not a religious crusade, but a crusade for
freedom — to liberate not just Hungary but
all of the Captive Peoples behind the Iron Curtain.
Those 30,000 Hungarians did not die in vain.
(Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan
and the Fall of Communism (2006) and associate professor
of political science at Grove City College. He is
also director of the Center for Vision & Values
at Grove City College)
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