Few, if any, developments in Billy Graham’s ministry were more surprising or controversial than his success in penetrating the iron curtain. It was not surprising that he would want to preach in Communist-dominated lands. He wanted to preach everywhere, and he had at least a modicum of confidence that, aided by the Holy Spirit, his preaching could achieve wondrous results in even the most unpromising of environments. It was, however, a notable turn of events when first one and then another and another Warsaw Pact country not only allowed him to visit, but progressively extended privileges to him that no other churchman, including the most prominent and politically docile native leaders, had ever received. Graham had, after all, been described in America as “Communism’s Public Enemy Number One” and touted as an effective force for warning neutral and left-leaning nations against the perils of collaborating with the Russians. The Communist press had also depicted him as a threat, calling him a charlatan and a warmonger and claiming he was an active and not-so-covert agent of American foreign policy. But as early as the mid-1950s, Graham began to express interest in preaching behind the iron curtain, as long as no restrictions were placed on what he could say. During his tourist trip in 1959, he knelt in Red Square and prayed that he might one day preach the gospel on that very site and also at Moscow’s great public stadium. The Polish government’s cancellation of its 1966 invitation disappointed him, and his brief trip to Yugoslavia did not have the same cachet, since that country had cut its ties with Moscow and was regarded as a Communist renegade. Graham was stymied. He wanted to add Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to his life list of preaching venues, but he could not just barge in and set up a tent or hire a hall. Lyndon Johnson had approved of the proposed visit to Poland but made no effort to push it, and neither the Nixon nor Ford administrations volunteered to intercede on his behalf with any Communist government. It seemed unlikely that the tiny Evangelical minorities in any of the Soviet bloc countries would have sufficient influence to persuade their governments to permit an American evangelist to propagate a message explicitly challenging the official atheism of the Communist system. In short, it appeared that a ministry behind the iron curtain, if it ever came at all, might have to wait for a political upheaval of the magnitude of what eventually occurred in 1989. And then came Alexander Haraszti.
In a milieu peopled mainly with good old southern boys, sobersided midwestern Evangelicals, a phalanx of brisk young sales-executive types, and a sprinkling of witty British clergymen, Alexander Haraszti, M.D., Ph.D., stands out. Rumpled and gruff-looking in a setting where neatness and smiling are the rule, cannily calculating in the midst of men whose stock-intrade is disingenuousness, authentically well educated (a master’s degree in Latin and Hungarian literature, a seminary degree, a doctorate in linguistics, and a medical degree with specialties in gynecology and general surgery) in an environment abounding in honorary doctorates conferred by friends, and equipped with apparently inexhaustible energy, monomaniacal tenacity, and virtually total recall, he has left an indelible mark on a ministry that would scarcely acknowledge he existed for the first five years he labored on its behalf.
Born and reared a Baptist in Hungary and married to the daughter of a Baptist minister, Haraszti supported himself as a pastor and theological professor from 1944 to 1956 while he and his wife completed medical degrees. In the mid-1950s, he began to learn of Billy Graham’s ministry from typewritten pages passed from hand to hand in Hungarian Baptist circles. In 1955 he obtained an English copy of Peace with God and, with the help of a German edition, translated Graham’s best-seller into Hungarian. Since he saw little chance of obtaining government permission to publish the book through regular channels, he distributed mimeographed copies to his students at the Baptist theological seminary in Budapest on the pretense that its chapters were examples of sermons and suitable for homiletic instruction. Soon afterward, this pirated edition of Peace with God, which he subtitled Lessons in Homiletics for Students of Theology, made its way into the Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic seminaries in Hungary.
Haraszti’s talent for accomplishing his goals without running afoul of the authorities had already shown itself a few years earlier. The Communist government had long and correctly viewed the Catholic Church as a formidable opponent, but Catholics were not the only perceived enemy. Because the Ministry of the Interior, which oversaw all religious affairs, knew the United States was a stronghold of Baptist religion, it regarded the Baptist Church in Hungary as little more than a front for an American-inspired, antigovernment political association. By chance, during a preaching tour that took him through the little village of Korosszakall in eastern Hungary, Haraszti met an elderly Baptist couple who told him that their son, now the minister of the interior, had grown up in the Baptist church in the village. A few months later, at the request of his fellow churchmen, Haraszti met with the minister in an effort to persuade him that Baptists were politically harmless and should not be persecuted. When the bureaucrat raised the familiar charge that “Baptists are American agents,” Haraszti was ready. First, with great politeness, he asked if the minister had grown up in Korosszakall and if his parents still lived there. When the minister acknowledged this to be the case, Haraszti told of having met them and of knowing he had attended the Baptist church before moving to the capital. “I cannot imagine,” Haraszti said, “that you would ever go to a place that has any American contacts. You would not go to people who are American agents or who have in any way some secret contacts with American agencies.” His apparent gruffness dissolving into gleeful delight at the memory, Haraszti recalled that “the man became red up to the top of his head. He was most embarrassed—most embarrassed—and the entire collection of data [about Baptists] was stopped immediately. If they continued presenting Baptists as American agents, what happens to His Excellency?”
From that point forward, the Ministry of the Interior began to give Baptists and other Evangelicals greater license to carry out normal church activities. Though it granted these rights rather grudgingly, Haraszti noted that “this was the price they had to pay for peaceful people who otherwise were not dangerous, who were reliable, and actually, who were very good workers. In the government’s view, they were a little odd. They believed in their Jesus Christ. They liked to read the Bible and sing their hymns and so on—a little strange, but otherwise good people.” Gradually, the government softened its resistance to all religion as part of a larger effort by János Kádár’s Communist regime to polish its image and gain most-favored-nation trade status with the United States. Regular church meetings and some special events could be held, though not advertised, as long as the Ministry of the Interior was informed about them. Ministers could preach and teach Christian doctrines, but could not preach against the government. The churches, in turn, were expected to encourage workers to work hard and refrain from stealing from their factories, and to support the government’s position on such key issues as peace. The established religious bodies—Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and Jewish—received financial support from the state in return for their acknowledgment of the state’s authority in world matters and their pledge of political allegiance to it. Free churches neither sought nor received such assistance, but they did receive equal standing at the Ministry of the Interior, and they were protected from harassment at the hands of the numerically dominant Catholic Church so that in many ways their situation was better than it had been prior to the Communist takeover.
In 1956, shortly after the beginning of the Hungarian uprising, the Harasztis emigrated to America with the intention of becoming medical missionaries to Africa for the Southern Baptist Convention (it was this lifelong ambition, he insists, not political dissent, that led them to leave their homeland). However, by the time they completed their training and received citizenship status, both were over forty and too old to be accepted as new missionaries. Learning of the situation, Albert Schweitzer sent Haraszti a seven-page letter inviting the family to join him at his hospital at Lambarene. Haraszti was flattered, but wrote back to ask the famed humanitarian, “Do you do a soul-winning service?” When he received no answer, he resigned himself to working with Hungarian Baptists in America and to opening channels to facilitate Evangelical preaching in his homeland. After he and his wife established their medical practice in Atlanta, they met several members of Billy Graham’s team who had begun to use that city as the central staging base for both domestic and foreign crusades, but he made no effort to contact Graham himself, not even to tell him of his use of Peace with God. (He had reason to lie low on that score. Shortly after coming to America, he had notified Doubleday of the warm reception his translation received in Hungary, naively believing Graham’s publisher would be pleased. Doubleday was not amused and instructed him sternly in the ways of American publishing.) He did not meet Graham until sixteen years after he arrived in the United States.
In 1972, Haraszti, now an American citizen, used contacts with fellow Atlantans Walter Smyth and BGEA public relations director Don Bailey to arrange a meeting between Graham and two prominent Hungarian Evangelical leaders, Dr. János Laczkovszki, president of an organization of 20,000 Baptists in Hungary, and Seventh-day Adventist clergyman Sandor Palotay, president of Hungary’s Council of Free Churches, an association representing eight Evangelical denominations. Both men were well known to Haraszti from earlier days. Both were shrewdly skilled at dealing with Hungarian authorities. And largely because of this skill, both were widely regarded as Communist agents by American Baptists who knew anything about them.
In the midst of a crusade in Cleveland, Graham received Haraszti and his two friends warmly, and Palotay invited the evangelist to come to Hungary under the auspices of the Council of Free Churches. Graham announced and accepted the invitation from the platform that same evening but found himself in a bind when Palotay later admitted he had no authority to issue the invitation without government approval and when critics, including some of the evangelist’s most trusted confidants, warned against dealing with suspected Communist agents. When Smyth informed Haraszti that a news release confirming the meeting and the invitation might be canceled to avoid embarrassment and criticism, Haraszti leveled with him. Aware that Palotay’s considerable ego had been bruised by his perception that Graham and Smyth doubted he could make good on his invitation, Haraszti said, “All right. Since he is an agent, we do not accept an invitation from him. Therefore, we shall not go to Hungary. Period. Because we cannot get an invitation from anybody else.” The only plausible strategy for a Graham visit, he insisted, was to go “above ground,” with the full knowledge and approval of the Communist government. If they rejected the assistance of Laczkovszki and Palotay, the only possible source of an invitation would be “some not-respected, not-acknowledged, little bitty underground Baptist leader, who will be happy to give us an invitation,” but whose lack of clout would result in Graham’s having to dig an underground tunnel, emerge secretly in some forest, “and there [he] will preach to the birds.” Even to get a visa, he pointed out, it would be necessary to contact the Hungarian ambassador to the United States. The ambassador would contact his government, the government would contact the churches, and the churches he contacted would be those cooperating with the government. If the leaders of those churches were not involved, Haraszti said, “we will continue where we have been so far: nowhere.” The two Hungarians, he insisted, were not Communists, but pragmatists. When he had preached and taught in Hungary, he had done so with government approval. That did not make him a Communist agent. Laczkovszki and Palotay, he assured Smyth, were no more Communist than he.
Somewhat calmed by this discussion and by additional material Haraszti produced in Palotay’s defense, Smyth authorized the physician to travel to Hungary to finalize the plans. Haraszti smiled at such naïveté. “They thought it was just like in India or Japan or Australia. If it is agreed upon between church leaders and Dr. Graham, then the rest is just a matter of letter writing. Little did they know.” In Hungary he met not only with leaders of the Council of Free Churches but with the presiding bishops of both the Lutheran and Reformed churches—Graham had expressed a strong hope that all Protestant groups would support a visit—and, most importantly, with Imre Miklos, the secretary of the Ministry for Church Affairs and the government official who would give final approval to any visit by the evangelist.
Miklos made it clear the Hungarian state had deep misgivings about Graham’s coming, alleging that he was “a burning anti-Communist”; that his evangelistic techniques were alien to Hungary; that he did not understand Eastern European political, religious, or social life; and that he was a war monger. Haraszti took exception only to the last of these charges. On a subsequent visit with the secretary, he produced photographs and other documentation of Graham’s visits to the troops in Korea and Vietnam. He pointed out that while the evangelist had indeed been critical of communism, he urged American soldiers not to exploit or behave arrogantly toward native people in the lands where they were fighting, and he had prayed not only for America and the nations they were defending but for North Korea and North Vietnam as well. “Your excellency,” he said to Miklos, “if this is warmongering, please teach me how to do peace mongering.” Miklos made no promises, but he smiled broadly and told Haraszti, “I see Dr. Graham in a different light now than I did before. I am very grateful to you for bringing this information.” Then he added, “We, as the State, could order the churches to accept [Dr. Graham], and smile at his coming, and be happy. We could order it, but we don’t want to. We have to discuss this matter with the churches. And we must get their consent. If the leading churches agree, and if the Hungarian government agrees, and if the governments of other Socialist countries agree—there are no independent actions—then we can speak about Dr. Graham’s coming.”
For the next five years, Haraszti dedicated himself to gaining an official invitation for Graham to visit Hungary. Never in that time did he meet with the evangelist again, and BGEA paid for none of his numerous trips to Hungary or for telephone bills that ran into the thousands of dollars, though it did supply him with whatever publications and other documentary materials he needed. “If I came to Dr. Smyth and said, ‘Would you agree that I go to Hungary and speak with Palotay?’ he said, ‘No objection.’ But he would never mention [paying for the trip].” Haraszti attributes this stance not to stinginess on the part of BGEA but to the simple fact that no one in the Graham organization thought he could produce an invitation. “They knew what I was doing. If I succeed, OK. If not, it’s just another attempt that backfired. Haraszti’s an independent agent. If he has this obsession that he wants to take Billy Graham to Hungary, [let him try,] but who can believe that it is ever possible?” Haraszti insisted he does not resent having to spend his own money, but the memory of dealing with the unspoken skepticism was obviously still fresh and, viewed from a position of success, rather delicious.
Working closely with Palotay, whom he characterized as a “daredevil” with a superior talent for public relations and governmental relations, Haraszti fed Miklos with a stream of materials to use in his conversations with his counterparts in Moscow and in other Eastern bloc capitals. He stressed that Graham had long ago moderated his virulent anti-Communist rhetoric and convinced the minister that the 1967 trip to heretical Yugoslavia had been an innocent response to an unexpected opportunity, not a willful attempt to embarrass orthodox Communists. “This was very suspicious,” Haraszti recalled. “It weighed heavily against Dr. Graham. He has not gone back to Yugoslavia since, and not because he has not been invited.” More importantly, he was able to demonstrate, by chronicling the evangelist’s past behavior in countries troubled by political tension, that a visit would create no public embarrassment or subsequent strain for the government.
Haraszti did not limit his lobbying efforts to Palotay and Miklos. In Hungary he continued to court the Lutheran and Reformed bishops, informing them of Graham’s ecumenical approach and assuring them that a visit by the evangelist would, at worst, do their churches no harm. He also established contact with Hungarian Jews and managed to forge a friendship with Roman Catholic bishop Jooeef Czerháti. Aware that Haraszti was prominent in the American Hungarian community, Czerhati asked for his help in getting U.S. permission for Hungarian priests and nuns to serve in churches catering to people of Hungarian descent in the United States and Canada. Haraszti agreed, but on the condition that as bishop of Hungary’s largest religious body, Czerháti drop the church’s well-known opposition to Graham’s proposed visit. “The bishop grabbed my hand,” Haraszti recalled, “and said: ‘I will welcome Dr. Graham in my chancery when he comes. I will also support his coming at the Ministry for Church Affairs.’” With obvious satisfaction, Haraszti said, “Bishop Czerháti kept his word.” In addition, because of his work with the Hungarian-American community and his many trips to his homeland, Haraszti became well acquainted with the Hungarian ambassador and embassy personnel in Washington, where he pressed the case for Graham at every opportunity. And whenever his travels for the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board took him to countries with a Hungarian embassy, he made a point of visiting the ambassador and mentioning what a fine thing it would be for Billy Graham to visit Hungary.
In the course of these visits, Haraszti picked up two valuable pieces of information. Near the end of World War II, the Crown of St. Stephen, named for Hungary’s patron saint and regarded as the nation’s most precious symbolic treasure, was given to the U.S. Army to avoid confiscation by the Russians. After the Communist takeover, the United States declined to return it, on the grounds that the government was a Soviet puppet rather than a legitimate representative of the Hungarian people. Secondly, the Kádár regime still fervently sought most-favored-nation status for Hungary. In July 1977 Haraszti raised both of these issues with Walter Smyth, suggesting that a few words in the right places would be viewed favorably by the Hungarian government. Smyth bridled at the suggestion. “Alex,” he said, “Billy is not going to get involved in politics!” Having monitored Graham’s career for twenty years, Haraszti shot back, “Dr. Smyth, since when has he not been involved in politics?” Haraszti sensed an invitation was close at hand and pressed his case: “Billy wants to go. You want him to go. I want him to go. We cannot turn back. We must deliver something. We must look into this matter.”
With approval from Smyth, Haraszti visited the Hungarian ambassador in Washington to learn exactly what Hungary wanted. Frenetic back-corridor negotiations then began in earnest. Late in July the physician arranged a brief meeting in Paris between Graham and Palotay, who gave the evangelist a written but still unofficial invitation, stipulating that he must not make it public until the official state-sanctioned invitation came through. The visit was tentatively scheduled for the first week of September, less than six weeks away, but Graham still had no tangible assurance the invitation was bona fide. A week later Smyth contacted Haraszti in Atlanta and implored him to go to Hungary immediately to obtain an official invitation. A trip Graham regarded as one of the most momentous of his entire ministry needed some planning and publicity. It simply would not do for him to show up in Budapest, preach to a handful of Baptists, and come home with no tales of triumph or pictures of victory over Satan. Scrubbing a full schedule of surgery, Haraszti made the trip, helped Palotay word an invitation that both Graham and the government could approve, got it signed, sped back to the United States, and delivered it in person to Montreat.
A man with a keen sense of deference and protocol, Haraszti was impressed that Graham had personally driven to the Ashveille airport to meet him but surprised to find the famous evangelist filled with trepidation about the whole Hungarian venture. He remembered that Graham “was shaky, trembling, worried.” He desperately wanted to go, but just as desperately feared the adverse reaction that might descend upon him if he were seen to be a willing dupe of Communist manipulation. Content to let others talk with Haraszti for the previous five years, Graham now pressed the man who had become his unofficial spokesman to Eastern Europe. “Why would they invite me, Alex? What is behind it?”
Haraszti leveled with him. “I will say it straight, Dr. Graham. It is not for your big blue eyes. And they have not invited you because they want to hear the Gospel.”
“Then why am I going?” Graham asked.
“To preach the gospel,” Haraszti said.
“But you said they don’t want to hear the gospel.”
“They don’t want to hear it, but they will. There is a purpose. You go to preach the gospel. They invite you because they would like to have the crown back and to get the ‘most-favored-nation status.’”
“Then this is a swap? A quid pro quo?”
At that, the Hungarian physician-diplomat gave the southern evangelist a lesson in obliqueness. The Hungarians had demanded nothing, he said. “The invitation is in your hands. I have delivered it. They have already acted in faith in generously giving you something which no Communist government ever gave. This is an all-time first, and even if there is no continuation, you still have it.” Then he held out a carrot Graham could not resist. It was true that other Western religious leaders had spoken at a church in Moscow or sung at a gathering in Poland, but no evangelist from East or West had ever toured a Communist country, speaking in crowded churches and addressing open-air meetings. He would be the first. Haraszti then produced a photocopy of his 1956 translation of Peace with God—the first time Graham had heard of that particular enterprise. “In this book,” he told the amazed evangelist, “I described you as an evangelist to five continents. In my next preface, I will call you Billy Graham, ‘Evangelist to the World.’ In my opinion, this is the beginning of things to come: first, the approval of the Hungarian government; second, the approval of other Communist governments; third, the approval of the churches—the organized, established churches in Hungary, not just little bitty Baptist churches. They will spread what they have seen and heard and experienced. And so, after Hungary, there shall be another meeting.”
“I would not accept if there were any conditions,” Graham protested mildly.
“The Hungarian government would not invite you if you set any conditions,” Haraszti countered. “This was in faith on both sides, because the Hungarian government knew that I was close enough to you that you would accept my advice, and you know that I am close enough to the Hungarian government that it accepts my advice. The government of Hungary did not ask me to do this, but I did tell them I would call these matters to your attention. And they were happy to hear it. They were very happy to hear it. Therefore, I take it upon myself to ask you to please use the services of your good office to see that Hungary gets the crown and the most-favored-nation status.”
Graham sputtered, “But Alex . . .” But Alex could not be dissuaded. He knew from his contacts that President Carter already had both matters on his desk and could act on his own without legislation if he felt concessions to Hungary would not cause problems in America. He also knew that János Kádár was willing to take a softer line toward religion. For a year his government had been making public and well-received concessions to Catholics and had recently restored diplomatic contacts with the Vatican. Kádár was aware that Jimmy Carter was a Baptist and thought it plausible that a gesture of goodwill toward Graham might be looked upon with favor in the White House. He also knew that Carter was a zealous advocate of human rights and that Eastern bloc restriction of Jewish emigration was a key obstacle to improved relations between the two countries. Kádár faced a ticklish dilemma on this issue. If Hungary applied for most-favored-nation status, Washington would insist that it allow Jews to emigrate freely, a provision the Soviet Union did not observe. If Hungary openly agreed to this demand, it would offend the Soviet Union, something it did not wish to do. If, however, the United States were to offer the desired status without making an explicit demand, Hungary would voluntarily but without fanfare allow Jews to leave the country.
Now in too far to back out and at some level doubtless enjoying the reunion with power, Graham relayed this information to old friend John Sparkman, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who wrote a letter to his counterpart in the Hungarian government, Deputy Premier Gyorgi Aczel. Graham also spoke with Jimmy Carter, who told him he was aware of his plans to visit Hungary and asked him to express his warm greetings to the government and all the people of Hungary, especially the Christians he would be visiting. When Haraszti informed the Hungarian government that Graham had been fully briefed on all matters of concern, and that he had made some “high contacts” and would be coming “with certain things in his pocket,” the government was pleased. As word spread that the Foreign Ministry, which far outranked the Ministry for Church Affairs, would welcome Graham warmly, the Lutheran and Reformed bishops, both of whom had been quite cool toward his coming, suddenly decided it would be marvelous if the evangelist would consent to preach in some of their churches as well as in the Evangelical churches that were his ostensible hosts. That, of course, pleased Billy Graham and Alexander Haraszti. It did not please Sandor Palotay and his colleagues in the Council of Free Churches.
Palotay had gotten state approval of the invitation by convincing Imre Miklos and other government officials that the meetings at which Graham would preach would be small and meaningless, heartening to Evangelical Christians but of no consequence to anyone else. Palotay’s ego also entered into the picture. It might not be a glorious tour, but it would be his tour, and he was not anxious to have it taken from his hands. Billy Graham, on the other hand, had no intention of letting his first real foray behind the iron curtain fall flat. “He does not say, ‘I don’t go,’” Haraszti recalled; “but he asked me, ‘Alex, if only two hundred people will be there, I just don’t see how I can do it. What shall I tell people in America?’”
Working feverishly over an eight-day period in Montreat, Graham, Haraszti, and John Akers, former dean of Montreat-Anderson College, fashioned a several-ends-against-the-middle approach to the problem. Haraszti informed the Hungarian ambassador in Washington of the evangelist’s concern over the modest agenda the Council of Free Churches had set for him. If at all possible, Graham wished to broaden the scope of the visit just a bit; specifically, to include preaching appointments at major Reformed and Catholic churches and a meeting with key leaders of the Jewish faith. Unless such additions could be made, Haraszti told the ambassador, “Dr. Graham will not come.” Graham’s concern, he said, was for Hungary. If Americans read or saw on television that he preached only to small crowds in tiny churches, they would believe that the government prohibited the people from attending. That would be bad propaganda, Haraszti pointed out—“just the opposite of what the government hopes to achieve.” The ambassador, who had come to hope Graham’s visit might produce solutions to some of the key problems he was charged with solving, immediately informed Palotay and Imre Miklos that it would be a serious mistake if Graham’s visit were conducted at a low level. On the heels of this ploy, Graham cabled a message to Miklos. Cooing warm greetings with the innocence of a dove, but making his points with the wisdom of a serpent, Graham asked for more information about his itinerary. Would he be preaching in the Reformed church in Debrecen, the center of Calvinism in eastern Hungary? And were any plans being made for him to preach at the large Roman Catholic cathedral in Pecs, in southern Hungary? And just one other thing: Had any provision been made for him to meet with Hungary’s Jewish leaders?
Palotay was understandably livid when he learned of the cablegram. He had worked five years to arrange the invitation. Now, what he had regarded as a signal triumph the Foreign Ministry was calling a potential disaster, and Billy Graham was complaining about the itinerary. When Haraszti returned to Hungary in late August with Walter Smyth to make final preparations for Graham’s visit, the Council of Free Churches summoned him to what amounted to a kangaroo court, demanding that he give a full report of his activities following his receipt of the official invitation from Palotay. Haraszti, who relishes a battle of wits, expressed surprise that he was facing an inquiry, when what seemed appropriate was some expression of appreciation. When Palotay pushed him further, Haraszti played his trump. “I am not sure it is proper,” he said, “that I give a report to a lay gathering about the action of Hungary’s official representative to the United States, and also a report about my discussions with the U.S. State Department. Also, I am not sure if it is proper that I divulge here letters of which I am privy through the confidence of Dr. Graham, from the highest-ranking official in the United States to the highest-ranking official of Hungary. But if I am forced, I will do it under protest, but then somebody must be responsible for forcing me to divulge state secrets of both Hungary and the United States.” Haraszti smiled broadly at the memory of the occasion. “State secrets,” he said with a chuckle. “They called off the meeting. This was the end.” Frustrated by Haraszti’s cleverness, Palotay badgered him in private for a few days, but the two men soon reconciled their differences and became a formidable team in presenting Graham’s case in Eastern Europe. “Palotay was in an embarrassing situation,” Haraszti admitted years later, but “[like] something comes up from underwater, he emerged fine and dandy. He was able to make the best out of it. He realized that he could not have done it without Haraszti. At the same time, Haraszti also realized that without Palotay I could not do it. So we had to make peace. Palotay [did] the groundwork for me in Communist countries. He [was] a man of energy and dynamism and contacts, contacts, contacts. He [was] a mediator for me in many, many cases. He did a tremendous pioneer work for me.”
The tour, though modest when compared to Graham’s standard crusades, was an unqualified success. When he and his team arrived at the Budapest airport, they were met by Palotay, the protocol chief from the Ministry for Church Affairs, and American ambassador Philip Kaiser, then whisked away to the lovely and secluded Grand Hotel on Margaret Island in the middle of the Danube in downtown Budapest. At his first public appearance, hundreds who had packed into the city’s largest Baptist church heard him acknowledge that the anti-Communist message he had preached was out of date. He had come to Hungary with “an open heart and an open mind,” he declared. “I want to learn about your nation, I want to learn about your churches, I want to learn about your Christian dedication and sense of responsibility within your own social structure. But most of all, I want both of us to learn together from the Word of God.”
In keeping with his wishes, Graham spoke in Hungary’s largest Reformed church in Debrecen and melted the resistance of both the Reformed and Lutheran bishops. At Pecs, Bishop Czerháti not only welcomed him to the chancery but expressed a hope that he would return someday to preach from the cathedral steps. As requested, he met with Hungary’s key Jewish leaders, who also received him warmly and confirmed their government’s claims that Jews enjoyed impressive religious liberty, marked by the presence in the capital of thirty synagogues, including the largest in the world, and the only Jewish seminary in an Eastern European country. Ambassador Kaiser, himself a Jew, confirmed the accuracy of their account.
Not all the stops on the tour were under the aegis of religion. At a government-arranged visit to a lightbulb and appliance factory, Graham accepted a souvenir lightbulb with the promise that it would shine in his home in North Carolina as a bright reminder of one of the most unforgettable experiences in his life. He then noted that “I have also brought a souvenir to you, my dear friends, something that shineth much brighter than this lightbulb. I have brought to you the light of the world, Jesus Christ.” According to Haraszti, many of the workers began to weep openly and unashamedly, aware that “this was the very first time in Communist Hungary that any minister would preach about Jesus Christ in a state-owned factory.”
The high point of the ten-day visit came when Graham addressed a large open-air meeting at a Baptist youth camp in Tahi, in the mountains along the Danube. The most conservative estimates of the size of the crowd placed it between 5,000 and 15,000. Haraszti noted that reliable informants, using automobiles parked along the river as an index, estimated the number to be closer to 30,000. Whether one accepts the low or high figure, it was apparently the largest religious meeting in Hungary’s history. Like all the other meetings, there was no advance notice in either the secular or religious media, but word-of-mouth advertising, much by long-distance telephone, brought Evangelical Christians streaming into the camp from all over Hungary and from at least six other Eastern bloc countries as well. A decade after this notable event, Haraszti is careful to point out that Graham had not been invited to address a large public gathering. Hungarian Baptist youth meet at the camp every year. Graham was present “to watch how the Baptist youth camp hold their closing service. . . . I hope you hear clearly what I said. It was not an evangelization rally; it was a closing service. Now, of course, some people might say, ‘If this is the closing service, how does an evangelization [rally] look?’ I don’t know the difference between the two.” No one, of course, was fooled by this semantic ploy. Ambassador Kaiser and his wife sat in the front row alongside ranking officials from the French embassy, and the thousands of people who traveled hundreds of miles and sat on blankets throughout the night just to have a good view of the closing services were not surprised when Billy Graham was asked to make a few remarks. At the same time, the government was not forced either to grant or to deny permission for him to address the crowd.
Prior to the visit, Haraszti impressed upon Graham the critical importance of telling the truth about what he found in Hungary. It would be simple, sensational, and gratifying to his American supporters to make a whirlwind tour, then return to decry the lack of religious freedom behind the iron curtain. If he expected to be invited back, however, it would be wiser to acknowledge the degree of religious freedom that in fact existed in Hungary. Graham understood the point. In his public statements and in interviews with Western reporters, he steadfastly refused to criticize the Hungarian government or even to comment on East-West relations, except to urge greater effort to achieve world peace. Instead, aware that the government was permitting the Council of Free Churches to sell tapes and transcripts of his sermons, he noted that “things are far more open than I had supposed. There is religious liberty in Hungary. . . . The church is alive in Hungary.” To reporters aware of his early anti-Communist tirades he explained, “I have not joined the Communist Party since coming to Hungary, nor have I been asked to. But I think the world is changing and on both sides we’re beginning to understand each other more.” He added that key leaders of the Communist party were calling for and practicing greater cooperation between Church and State.
This approach paid rapid dividends. In a conversation near the end of the tour, Imre Miklos warned Graham that he would be accused of having been brainwashed by the Communists but consoled him by saying, “I shall also be accused of having joined the Christian church.” He indicated clearly, however, that he was prepared to take the heat and that Graham’s gracious tact would be rewarded. This visit, he assured the evangelist, would be only the beginning of his ministry to the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe. He also made it clear that another visit to Hungary would be welcomed. “For friends,” he said, “it is not enough to meet only once.” The friendship was doubtless sealed more strongly when, not long after Graham returned home and stopped by the White House to give his report, the Crown of St. Stephen was returned to its homeland and the United States welcomed Hungary to most-favored-nation status. Graham makes no claim that his was the sole or even the pivotal role in the return of the crown, but does acknowledge that he discussed the matter with “the proper authorities.” Politically, it was not a cost-free gesture; expatriate Hungarians in America, who tended to be staunchly anti-Communist, bitterly resented the return of the crown to a Communist government and subjected Haraszti to a torrent of criticism for collaborating with the enemy.
Haraszti stayed on in Budapest a few days to tie up loose ends. Curious to learn if the visit made any impact on “the everyday man,” he asked a waiter at the Grand Hotel, “Do you know who is Billy Graham?” The man snapped to attention—“straight, strict, stiff”—and said, “Yes, sir. He is second only to the Pope.” Haraszti neither smiled nor offered a correction. “Thank you for your answer,” he said. “I know now you know who he is.”
Imre Miklos was correct in predicting that Graham’s visit to Hungary was only the beginning of a ministry in Eastern Europe. In 1978 the long-delayed visit to Poland finally became a reality. Once again, Alexander Haraszti played a decisive role. The Hungarian experience had convinced Graham and his colleagues both that Haraszti knew what he was doing and that a man from the United States who had contacts within a Communist country’s government could often accomplish more than Evangelical brethren within that country. Perhaps still not certain Haraszti could be equally effective outside his native Hungary, Walter Smyth authorized him to submit his expenses for reimbursement but still held back from giving him the right to act as Billy Graham’s official representative.
Haraszti’s visit to Warsaw in January 1978 went smoothly. Graham’s tactful behavior in Hungary had calmed any misgivings the free churches or state officials might have, and an official invitation for an October visit was arranged with minimal difficulty, but Roman Catholic authorities, far more powerful in Poland than in any other Eastern bloc country and far more antagonistic toward the government than the Hungarian Catholic Church, had strong reservations about the American evangelist. During the spring of 1978, an envoy of the Polish primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, traveled to Atlanta to inform Haraszti that the cardinal resented his having started negotiations with the government before coming to the head of the Church. With an arch show of surprise, Haraszti indicated that the cardinal had not invited him to be in contact and that, in any case, the cardinal’s record on influencing his government was not superb. “He did invite the pope, but he never got him. But I did get Dr. Graham to Hungary, and the cardinal did not get anybody of importance to Poland.”
Recognizing that Haraszti could not be bullied, the envoy warned that Graham’s visit would be an embarrassment, since Catholics would not attend his meetings and the small number of Protestants in Poland would not make much of an audience. Haraszti called the bluff. Handing the man a copy of a new BGEA publication, Billy Graham in Hungary, he pointed out that wherever Billy Graham went, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, Time, Life, AP, UPI, Reuters, U.S. television networks, the BBC, West German television, and Graham’s own television crew followed. Hundreds of thousands would see pictures of the trip in a book like the one he was now holding. Millions would watch a television program like the one about the Hungary tour, which had just aired on 326 stations in prime time. If the envoy’s prediction was accurate, Haraszti said, “then the world will see that under the wise leadership of Cardinal Wyszynski, Roman Catholicism has been wiped out in Poland, because not even a cathedral remained—not one. Because on our films, which we will present to the Canadian and American public, there will be only Jews—not many, unfortunately—a large number of communists, a few Baptists and other Protestants, but not a single Roman Catholic church or priest or professing Catholic. So the world will see that Roman Catholicism has disappeared from the face of Poland.” The envoy, gaining appreciation for the surgical precision with which Haraszti had dissected his threat, said in German, “Sie sind schlau” (“You are shrewd”). The physician demurred: “I am not shrewd, and this is not even a threat. This is a promise. If the cardinal wants this, I cannot help. This is not my doing, not my making; this is his making. And if you are honestly the representative of the cardinal, you will report this to him.”
As it happened, both parties were unsure of the other’s motives. Graham wanted an invitation from the Catholic hierarchy but did not want the Church to control the visit. Haraszti and Walter Smyth made it clear that although the evangelist fully understood that generally speaking “to be a Pole is to be a Roman Catholic,” he felt that Christ is also present in other churches, and he wanted to preach the gospel in those churches as well. Furthermore, the official sponsors of the visit would continue to be the Polish Baptist Union and the Polish Ecumenical Council, the inclusive Protestant body. For its part, the Church was willing to cooperate but did not want to be embarrassed by offering an invitation that might be refused. Cardinal Wyszynski also feared that as a Protestant on friendly terms with the Communist government, Graham might say things that would harm the Catholic Church’s relationship with the state. After a further bit of stalking and fencing when Haraszti returned to Poland in July, Graham’s and the cardinal’s representatives decided they could trust one another and reached an agreement that the evangelist would speak at four cathedrals (he was invited to seven) and visit the shrine of the Black Madonna at Czgstochowa. At each meeting, Smyth explained, the service would consist of a solo, a prayer, a Bible reading, another solo, and a sermon by Billy Graham. The cardinal’s men agreed, clearly aware that this format left no room for a Catholic mass. Haraszti assured the bishop (Dabrowski) serving as secretary of the Polish episcopate that Graham fully understood the status and problems of the Polish Church. From that point forward, Graham and his team enjoyed “the utmost cooperation of the Polish Church.”
The Polish tour (October 6–16, 1978) went smoothly. The official state press accorded it little attention, but religious publications were permitted to provide extensive advance promotion and thorough coverage. In Warsaw Graham spoke to an overflow crowd of nearly 1,000 and led an evangelism workshop for more than 450 clergy and other religious workers, including several Catholic seminary professors and teaching nuns. From that beginning visible signs of ecumenical warmings, in a climate Protestant leaders typically described as unfriendly, accompanied Graham’s appearances. At Warsaw’s Catholic seminary, the dean of theology introduced Graham by recalling how, during a sojourn in Chicago a few years earlier, a black woman on a bus had asked him if he was saved. He had responded, “Can’t you see my collar?” The woman, a Baptist, had been unimpressed. “I don’t care about that,” she had said. “Have you been born again?” The dean related that, stunned by this challenge, he had gone back to his room, read the third chapter of John once again, and had a new experience of Christ that led him to rededicate his life. He was grateful to Baptists, he said, and he welcomed the most famous Baptist of all to Poland.
Graham’s first sermon ever in a Catholic church occurred at Poznah in western Poland, where he prayed that the Holy Spirit would unite the hearts of the Roman Catholics and Protestants worshiping together on that occasion. In Krakow his host was to have been Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, but because the cardinal was, as a Graham staffer put it, “out of town getting elected pope,” the forging of that particular crucial ecumenical bond would have to wait awhile. In the Communist-dominated city of Katowice, where nearly 6,500—a high percentage of them young people—jammed into the cathedral, a corps of approximately 300 priests and nuns sitting together in a high balcony watched skeptically. As Graham rose to speak, a priest said to a colleague, “Now the show is to begin.” When the evangelist finished his sermon on Galatians 6:14 (“Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ”) and asked those who wished to recommit their lives to Christ to raise their hands, all three hundred priests and nuns did so.
As part of what he later described as the busiest ten days of his entire ministry, Graham paid a visit to Auschwitz, where the sight of crematorium chimneys and baby shoes and hair shorn from Jewish prisoners bound for the gas chambers profoundly affected his tender conscience and, according to aides, played a major role in stiffening his growing resolve to work for peace and reconciliation. Warning that the mentality that had produced Auschwitz could resurface, he repeatedly urged his audiences to work for “unity, peace, and the spread of God’s love” and stressed his willingness to cooperate with church and government leaders in efforts to achieve world peace. By all the standard criteria, the tour was a smashing success. Protestant pastors soon began to report that Catholics continued to show warmth toward them after Graham left, and Graham’s standing with Catholics was epitomized when Bishop Herbert Bednorz asked him to autograph a stack of copies of the Polish translation of How to Be Born Again, offering the simple explanation, “I want to give them to my friends.”