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Chapter 4 The New York Book Center Books, Books, and More Books… During the long lifespan of the book project under the short directorship of Sam S. Walker Jr., and the much longer directorship of George Minden, a fairly small group of dedicated people were involved with its practical implementation in the so-called New York Book Center. Many of them have since passed away, and most of those still alive have reached a ripe age. This chapter will both reveal the identities of these unknown and unsung actors of the long ideological Cold War, and examine what their tasks were in the framework of the secret book project. In July 1956, at the age of 25, I became the youngest member of the Hungarian section of the Press Division of the Free Europe Committee (FEC) in New York. Born in the Netherlands of Hungarian parents and educated in Paris and Geneva, I waited almost two years in Canada before getting my permanent U.S. immigration visa. Since 1951, Count István Révay (1899–1989) had been heading the Hungarian section of the Press Division, and he was looking for a young analyst who was fluent in both English and Hungarian. An MA in International Relations and the knowledge of several foreign languages , as well as no involvement in Hungarian émigré politics, were my entry cards to the FEC. Révay was a distinguished gentleman born in Czechoslovakia. He moved to Hungary in 1941, and became an MP and head of the Pál Teleki Institute in Budapest until he left Hungary in 1949. He was also an excellent violin player and even had his own small orchestra in New York. The Hungarian section comprised a number of prominent and talented individuals, all of whom had to leave Hungary i5 Cold War.indb 55 2013.03.04. 13:37 56 Hot Books in the Cold War after the communist takeover and most of whom I would know and befriend for a long time to come, a few to this day. Among my new colleagues were Imre Kovács (1913–1980), a leading pre-World War II populist writer made famous by his 1937 book A néma forradalom (The mute revolution), and who was, after 1945, leader of the National Peasant Party until his escape from Hungary in 1947; László Varga (1910–2002), a jurist and politician who returned to Hungary in 1992 and became an MP and doyen of the National Assembly (1998–2002); Professor William (Vilmos) Juhász (1899–1967), a highly educated writer, editor, and cultural historian, with whom I would work later for almost eight years; the economist Robert Gábor (1919–), a former member of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, who later held a high position with the AFL-CIO; the jurist György Páll (1892–1975); and the much younger István Deák (1926–) who joined the FEC in Munich in 1951, was transferred to New York in 1956, and resigned in 1959 to pursue a brilliant academic career as a historian and Columbia University professor. All of them have since passed away except Gábor and Deák, who still reside in the United States. After the Revolution broke out in Hungary on October 23, 1956, and was quickly crushed by the Soviet army in early November, Révay assigned me to conduct in-depth interviews with a selected number of newly arrived Hungarian refugees in a Manhattan hotel. My assignment was cut short in May 1957, when the U.S. Army chose to draft me and assigned me first to the Psychological Warfare School at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, then to a tactical psychological operations unit near Stuttgart, Germany. When I returned to New York in 1959, the FEC had gone through yet another reorganization. The Hungarian press section no longer existed, and Révay had been terminated (he moved to Austria in 1967) together with all my former colleagues but one. The lone survivor was William Juhász, who was now in charge of the Hungarian section of a new and very secret book project launched in the second half of the 1950s. When Deák decided to leave for Columbia University, Juhász asked me to become his assistant. He took me to the office of a man I had never met before, George Minden. The division was located on the 26th floor of 2 Park Avenue in Manhattan, one floor above the offices of the...

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