Hungarian Revolution, 1956, by Randy Summers

From MemoryArchive

Who: Randy Summers
What: World News
When: 1956
Where: Hungary

Fifty years ago I was just turned eleven and was beginning to be old enough to follow the news. Back then on TV the two national news programs were NBC and CBS. It was John Cameron Swayze who was the newsman for NBC, and perhaps Douglas Edwards for CBS, although Edward R. Murrow certainly was still active. It seems like there was the Suez Crisis back in ’56, and Ike handily won reelection over Adlai, and the Yanks took back the World Series from the Brooklyn Dodgers, and somewhere in there was Ike’s first heart attack.

But what I remember the most from the fall of 1956, as the nights got longer and the weather colder, was the world news from a little country in Europe called Hungary. I learnt a geography lesson back then. The capital city is Budapest, but it is actually two cities, with Buda on one side of the Danube River and Pest on the other. Those were my stamp collecting days, so I already knew some geography. I remember the inscription “Magyar” on lots of Hungarian stamps.

The news I remember which John Cameron Swayze reported on every night those weeks is known to history as the Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet rule over this country behind the Iron Curtain. For a time there, courageous men and women in Hungary stood up to the repressive rule of the USSR, and these were the heroes and heroines of the world inside and outside the Soviet bloc. Eventually the Soviet tanks rolled into the city and the uprising was put down.

In the USA one clear indication of newsworthiness is whether or not a person has ever made the cover of Time magazine. Now, more than fifty years later, it is good for me to remember those brave men and women of Hungary who were shown on the US national TV news every night. By the way, the Hungarian Freedom Fighter did make the cover of Time magazine – once – as Man of the Year for 1956.