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Bureaucratic Horror in 1956 and Today Barry Farber In football it's called "piling on" - jumping into a tackle when the ball carrier is already splayed out nicely on the ground. In football, piling on can hurt your team a lot. In real life, piling on may help the team a little. You might think every negative assault against the "Arabs-Work-the-Ports" deal has already been launched. May I jump in? Horror doesn't gush from vampires and Frankenstein monsters alone. I've experienced real horror from American bureaucrats. Once in 1956, and now twice. Let me return to that earlier horror. It was Vienna, Austria, in late December of 1956. Two months earlier, heroic Hungarians next door to the east had erupted against their Soviet oppressors, and for ten glorious days Hungary was in Hungarian hands. The Kremlin feared that one satellite turned into a shooting star could infect and unravel their whole communist empire. The Red Army rolled back into Hungary with 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks and flattened the uprising. Hordes of Hungarians fled west to freedom in Austria.
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I was headed for the border from the west, through Austria, as a special correspondent for the Greensboro (North Carolina) Daily News. In Vienna I stopped off at a student refugee camp set up by the Austrian government. It was Christmas Eve and the Austrians had provided beer and sausages for the young Hungarians, many of whom had crossed the border only hours earlier. The crowd was far from festive, but they were free. Suddenly I noticed a young man with Asian features across the room. I figured he was a Japanese newsman or a Thai Red Cross worker until the Hungarians sat in a circle on the floor and began singing one of those European student songs which calls for linking arms and swaying back and forth. The Asian man sat on the floor, linked arms, AND SANG RIGHT ALONG WITH THEM IN HUNGARIAN. Either a hallucination, I thought, or that man had just escaped from Hungary with them. I bounded across the room and grabbed him by the shoulders and asked, "China?" "Korea," he replied.
"America!" I said pointing to myself. Three years earlier we'd been fighting each other in Korea. Now we were embracing each other on the other side of the world. His Hungarian friends who spoke English helped us communicate. He was a veteran of the North Korean communist army that had invaded South Korea in June 1950. The best soldiers, the best students and the best communists from North Korea were sent to Hungary for training in subjects like engineering. Those slightly below the best went to the Soviet Union and Communist China. Hungary, along with Czechoslovakia and East Germany, was the most technicologically advanced country in the communist world. After two years at the University of Budapest this young "enemy" soldier began to view communism not as a submissive North Korean but more as a repressed Western European. When the fighting started, he and 200 other North Koreans helped the Freedom Fighters. Hungarian youths had not yet had military training. The North Koreans knew how to work every piece of captured and donated communist ordnance, from a hand grenade to a tank! After the Soviet putdown of the uprising, special squads of Soviet troops helped the Hungarian communist police round up every Korean in Budapest. It's hard to disguise a Korean in Budapest. Of the 200 young Koreans, only four made it to freedom. The others were shipped back to certain doom in North Korea. This young man wanted to come to America, get on the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia and tell the world what he'd seen of communist brutality in Hungary and continue the freedom fight on American college campuses. You can't buy propaganda that powerful. You can't confect it. It has to fall into your lap. And I was so thrilled that it fell into mine. When he and I and a young Hungarian woman interpreter went to the American Embassy the next day, I would have bet even money that President Eisenhower would send the Columbine (His presidential plane, before they thought of Air Force One) over to Vienna to take him and me both back to America. I was stomp-down certain they'd find a quick way to let him into America. We were led into an upstairs office at the Embassy and I started telling the story to the official behind the desk. Do you know how a comic feels when the laughter doesn't come through early in the act? Or when the young woman arranges for her hand to be unholdable when you reach out? That's the feeling I got early in the narrative. The Embassy official looked on like a zombie. No comments. No questions. If there'd been a little strip-screen across his forehead, it would have read "Non-Reacting!" Even absent the euphoria of the Hungarian Revolution, as you read this I expect you to feel what I felt. When I finished this incredibly fortunate story for our side, the diplomat-zombie impassively opened his desk drawer and pulled forth a little booklet. "Your friend can't come to America as a Hungarian refugee," he intoned, leafing to a page of rules, "because he's not Hungarian. And he can't come in as a North Korean because we're at war and there's no quota!" At least the 200,000 Hungarian refugees in Vienna would be processed and admitted to a free country. My Korean friend was now diplomatically stateless and weightless. (Thanks to the subsequent intervention of broadcaster Tex McCrary and the supposedly villainous immigrant-hating Congressman Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, we got that young man into America with a scholarship to Syracuse from which he graduated with honors and became a millionaire architect and builder. His name is Zang Gi Hong. Most of the homes in West Hampton's North Quarter are his work. He became my best friend in life and is living in happy retirement now in New Jersey, frequently regaling his children and mine with tales of the Korean War from the North Korean side!) I thought that scene in the American Embassy was a once-in-a-lifetime bureaucratic horror story. Thanks to the Dubai Debacle and a CNN interview with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, it's become a TWICE-in-a-lifetime experience. I don't think I could handle a third. The grotesquerie of turning American port management over to a firm owned by the emir of Dubai puts the affair into one of those Coney Island carnival fun houses whose myriad of warped mirrors makes straight images impossible and limitless distortion inevitable. Ted Kavanau, iconic TV news producer and the owner of a treasury of common sense, said: "Don't talk to me about Dubai doing a good job weeding out terrorist elements. America has never been able to get the Mafia out of our own ports. And when the Mafia wants you to make certain unusual things happen, they just threaten YOU. The terrorists threaten you, your wife, your family and your extended family. Even assuming that the Dubai-owned firm meant well, a lot of unnoticed history is made by allies who meant well but were unreliable, weak, worthless or worse. Italy was an unreliable ally of Adolf Hitler that made defeating him easier. Romania was worse; Soviet forces sliced through the two Romanian divisions guarding the German flanks at Stalingrad like a hot knife through soft butter. Ask American veterans who were there about our well-meaning allies in South Korea and Vietnam. Can anybody offer one shred of evidence that Dubai might be better? And now to the bureaucratic horror of the hour. When CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Michael Chertoff why we should trust the Dubai deal, the camera framed Chertoff's face just right. I could feel his confidence grow and glow as he rhapsodized about the twelve governmental agencies on the committee that has to approve such arrangements and how confident we can all afford to be if after such scrutiny the deal is ultimately approved, as this one was. There you have it. The poet loves the Arizona sunset. The art lover loves the correctly lit Rembrandt. The hair fetishist loves long, soft, fragrant hair. The North Carolina barbecue lover loves marinated pork shoulder in its twelfth hour of cooking over hickory wood.
And the bureaucrat loves the beautifully constructed committee of twelve agencies that meets around prestigious tables to declare a deal – even ceding port secrets and access to an Arab government – sound, worthy and wise. And now the president himself jumps into the fray, not to invoke some of Ted Kavanau's common sense, but to put his credibility on the line even against massive bipartisan outrage! If the president were a boxer and I were his fight manager, I'd never sign him up for this one. If he brushed me out of the way and took it on anyhow, I think I'd fake a gout attack and limp away from the press conference. Is the president afraid that to oppose the deal might reflect poorly on his faith in the twelve committees? Mr. President: An old Irish proverb teaches us that it's better to be a coward for a minute than to be dead for the rest of your life. If, Mr. President, your objective were to take our minds off the Cheney shooting, you have succeeded – literally – wildly. So: My first bureaucratic fright was in 1956. My next was in 2006. Tell me. Do you think I'll have to put up with this every fifty years?
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