by Donald Kursch
Budapest in July of 1971 was an exciting assignment for a young second tour officer assigned to head the embassy’s small but active consular section. In addition to the usual duties of visa issuance and assisting Americans encountering difficulties in then-communist Hungary, I had one additional special responsibility not set forth in my work requirement statement. This was periodically to walk with and prepare the weekly bath for the embassy’s special long-time guest, Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, the prince primate of Hungary. This was a responsibility that rotated among all the embassy’s male diplomats (the cardinal would not permit a female colleague to perform this duty). It came up with some frequency. The ambassador and deputy chief of mission were exempted, leaving only 5 or 6 of us available given the small size of the embassy’s staff in an era when the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was still recent history.
By the time of my arrival the cardinal had been a resident of the embassy on Szabadság Ter (Freedom Square) for almost 15 years, having sought refuge in November 1956 as Soviet forces closed in on the nearby Parliament building in the process of crushing the Hungarian uprising. His living space consisted of the corner office on the third floor, which since his departure has been occupied by the ambassador. In addition, there was a small adjoining room that served as his sleeping quarters, and a washroom with a shower, which also had an exit into the embassy’s 3rd floor hallway.
Photo from the author’s personal collection of the chancery building, where Cardinal Mindszenty lived in the corner office next to the upper balcony.
Our walking duty began after the close of the business day around 6:00 p.m. when one knocked gently on the door of the main room. The cardinal responded saying “please” after which one asked in the third person if “his Eminence wished to take his walk this evening?” After receiving an affirmative reply, I would meet him at the rear door of his quarters and we would proceed out of the embassy’s secure area to an elevator that took us to the building’s ground floor and a small outdoor courtyard that was surrounded by the embassy and what was then the Hungarian National Bank, where we assumed that the communist security services had installed listening devices to pick up our conversations. And while the cardinal might have used these meetings in earlier years to get a bit of outdoor exercise, he now preferred to spend this time together sitting in an aluminum chair and speaking his mind. Learning that my previous Foreign Service assignment had been in Switzerland, he proposed that our conversations take place alternately in German and in Hungarian, which I was trying to learn.
After he had asked a few personal questions about my background, my “conversations” with the cardinal generally ended up with extended monologues in which he decried the historical injustices that had been afflicted upon Hungary, most specifically the post-World War I Trianon Treaty that had awarded more than half of historic Hungary to its neighboring states. Although Mindszenty had been widely and justly lionized in the US for his courage and steadfastness during the communist show trial of early 1949 (at which he was convicted of treason and espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment), it quickly became clear to me that a restored monarchy with a central role for the Catholic church, rather than American style democracy, was the alternative to communism he preferred for his country. His skepticism regarding US democracy and American society in general, as well as a longing for the past was reflected in remarks such as “your last good president was Roosevelt the First.” He had a particular animus toward Woodrow Wilson whom he blamed for Trianon and had consigned to the bottom circle of his personal version of Dante’s hell. My most animated exchange with the cardinal came after I attempted to note Wilson’s achievements as president, including the establishment of a Central Bank and his effort to create a League of Nations. Mindszenty thundered at me, blaming Wilson’s lead role in dismembering the Christian bulwark of Hungary–not Austria-Hungary–for the subsequent successes of both fascism and communism. I beat a hasty retreat from this conversation.
In addition to our “walks” embassy officers took turns preparing the cardinal’s weekly bath on Saturday morning. A special bathtub had been installed in an area on the embassy’s first floor several years earlier after Mindszenty, who had already been in residence for many years, remarked that “it would be nice to have a bath.”
After filling the bathtub, one knocked on the cardinal’s door, then opened it a little bit and asked, “Would his Eminence wish to take his bath?” Once a positive answer was received, the duty officer met the cardinal at the rear entrance of his quarters where he emerged in his clerical cassock and red hat with a towel and a soap dish. Both then proceeded together via the elevator to the first-floor facility. The duty officer was expected to remain seated in the anteroom to guard against possible intrusion during the Cardinal’s time in the tub, and was told to have something to read, which I did.
I recall having bath duty immediately before the cardinal left the embassy permanently in September 1971 following a prolonged process involving the Vatican and the Hungarian government, and accelerated by the then US Ambassador Alfred Puhan, who saw little prospect for moving bilateral relations forward as long as our “guest’ remained in the chancery. Arranging this departure had been painful as Mindszenty continually found reasons to postpone his departure. He left most reluctantly and only after receiving a message from Pope Paul VI which he interpreted as an order. On the morning of his departure, I lined up with the other American staff members in the embassy’s 3rd floor corridor to say farewell, following which Ambassador Puhan escorted him to the front door and to the car of the papal nuncio in Austria, which was waiting to take him to Vienna. I quickly went to the outdoor balcony of my spacious consul’s office on the first floor to take some pictures of this historic moment. The Hungarian policeman in the guard booth in front of the embassy took a much better one which appeared in (and was presumably sold to) the French magazine Paris Match. And the two unmarked secret police cars which had sat at the front and rear embassy doors 24 hours a day for 15 years drove away, never to return.
Donald Kursch was a career Foreign Service officer from 1966-2003. He served as DCM in Budapest, Bonn, and at the US mission to the European Union, as well as in Moscow and Zurich. After retiring, he worked for the Institute for Defense Analyses and as a senior advisor to the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism. He served in the US Marine Corps Reserve from 1964-1967. He lives in Washington DC and is the principal coordinator for the Foreign Affairs Retirees of Maryland and DC.