HUNGARY: Next!

Apparently the anti-Communist fathers of the Hungarian Republic never heard of what Ben Franklin said about hanging together. In any event, they did not, and so they were, in a political sense, hanging separately.

Instead of making a united stand against Communist domination or refusing to take office as long as the Red Army dictated government policies, they allowed themselves to be cut down one by one. President Zoltan Tildy, for instance, hung on even after Premier Ferenc Nagy was exiled in a coup that combined ideology with kidnapping (TIME, June 9). Tildy’s reward was that he was called up next.

A Communist-sponsored Government White Paper last week implicated Tildy in “the conspiracy against Hungarian democracy.” At the same time it accused the British of encouraging a Habsburg restoration. Tildy still denied any uneasiness; he was quietly fishing in Lake Balaton last week, and telling callers: “I will not resign, I never intended to resign, I never attempted to resign.” In spite of these protestations, he was, in fact, trying to flee the country of which he was President.

If he made it, one of the few prominent non-Communists left in Budapest would be Arpad Szakasits, the Social Democratic leader. Nobody tried harder to get along with the Communists than Arpad. He even called a meeting of Eastern European Socialists last month for the purpose of making Red faces at Western European Socialists.

Last week Arpad was not even waiting for Tildy to get out of the barber’s chair. Arpad was making discreet inquiries at a Western European legation in Budapest. He wanted to know if the legation would give him political asylum in event of “a radical deterioration of the situation.”