What Biden Can Learn from Eisenhower’s 1957 State of the Union

When President Joe Biden ambles to the podium at a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, he will be at an odd place for an American president. His country sits transfixed by a war more than 4,500 miles to the east, rooting openly in solidarity for the hopelessly outgunned underdogs fighting bravely for their homeland against a ruthless invader from Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees have already poured out to the West, while the young men back home fashion Molotov cocktails to hurl at tanks. The United States, unusually, is not a central protagonist in this military conflict, to the disappointment of both the ragtag rebels and some overenthusiastic hawks back home.

U.S. history being long enough, the above description fits another State of the Union address: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s somber message to Congress on January 10, 1957, two months after the dramatic and bloody Soviet putdown of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, an event seared into the memory of the Americans who lived through it. Time had declared the “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” its 1956 Man of the Year; Elvis Presley hawked donations for refugees on The Ed Sullivan Show. Even Jean-Paul Sartre broke with his longtime communist comrades (as did many fellow travelers in the West).

Ike’s rhetorical and policy response in that tumultuous season gives Biden and the rest of us plenty to ponder about what Washington should—and should not—do in 2022. It also reminds us that the belly-gnawing anxieties of the present can look almost manageable compared to the globe-rattling challenges of the past.

Like many authoritarian tragedies, the Hungarian Revolution began with a liberatory hope. Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 kicked off a comparatively reformist era in Soviet politics, culminating in Nikita Khrushchev’s shocking denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality and brutal internal purges at the February 1956 Communist Party Congress. The speech was secret but obtained by Israeli intelligence and shared with the Eisenhower administration, which leaked it to The New York Times in June. Then Radio Free Europe beamed a reading of it behind what Winston Churchill had christened a decade before as the “Iron Curtain.”

Churchill himself had some fingerprints on that continental divide, via his participation in the February 1945 Yalta Conference (in Crimea, as irony would have it) with Stalin and then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at which the three great soon-to-be-victorious opponents of Nazi Germany sketched out postwar plans for small-country Europe. While the two democratic leaders deluded themselves into believing they had meaningfully codified principles of independent self-determination for the long-abused peoples of Central Europe, in fact, Churchill and F.D.R. ceded political veto power over Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria to the U.S.S.R., which promptly ignored the agreement’s promises to allow for free and fair elections, and then cemented military/political control over East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Albania, and elsewhere.

News of Khrushchev’s destalinization speech emboldened Central Europeans to challenge their satellite-state governments. First came the June 1956 Poznań strike, protests, and riots in Poland, which were viciously suppressed by Polish and Red Army soldiers and tanks that killed more than 50.

The clash nonetheless led to that year’s Polish October, in which newly elected Polish leader Władysław Gomułka, a reformer, successfully stared down Khrushchev (who had mobilized two armored divisions toward Warsaw) in removing various pro-Soviet toadies from the senior ranks of the Polish government.

Radio Free Europe broadcasted news of Gomulka’s success into Hungary, touching off demonstrations of sympathy and student-led demands for their own reforms. On October 23, 1956, some 20,000 protesters gathered in Budapest to demand independence from the Kremlin. Police opened fire, protesters battled back, the Hungarian government called for assistance from the Red Army, rebels attacked the Parliament, leaders of the puppet government fled to Moscow, and for the next three weeks (during which Eisenhower won re-election in a landslide) the world stood riveted at the conflict.

A new rebel government headed by Prime Minister Imre Nagy emptied political prisons, executed pro-Soviet political leaders, and declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military alliance. Khrushche