Hillary and Condi Do Budapest

One thing Condoleezza Rice should try to avoid is speaking at the same event as her successor as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. The study in contrasts does not work in Rice’s favor. Case in point: here in the Hungarian capital (of all places) recently, where officials had managed an extremely rare Condi/Hillary pairing—possibly unprecedented since the Obama election—to help inaugurate the Tom Lantos Institute, a tribute to the late, Hungarian-born congressman’s lifelong concern for human rights.

At the June 30th inauguration, the two secretaries, past and present, sat at extreme ends of the same row in the wedding cake building of the Hungarian Parliament, with conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Annette Lantos, the congressman’s widow, between them. Both women wore trousers for the occasion, but while Condi’s elegant trews were a fashion statement, Hillary’s were her uniform.

Even as secretary of state, Dr. Rice—as she was carefully referred to in Budapest—with her light, cultured voice and precise manner, always sounded more like a professor than the foreign policy architect of the world’s most powerful nation. Denouncing America’s enemies—Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il, Jacques Chirac—her voice would rise a pitch in asperity, but with no hint of any fire in the belly.

In Budapest, Dr. Rice, correct as ever, was careful not to stray too far into her successor’s domain, which limited the scope of what she had to say about Lantos. Hillary Clinton, as usual, launched into her address with the verve and voice of a fairground barker, filling the ornate chamber with her energy. And—typically—she was all over the place.

She began by describing herself as “a recovering former politician”—although in her discourse there was little sign of any recovery. Recalling that Congressman Lantos, a Democrat from California, was also a politician, she said he would visit her in her Senate office with “solicited and unsolicited” political advice, as she put it. She then took a swipe at African nations with poor human rights records and urged the international community to “show solidarity with those in the streets in Belarus and in Libya.” (Never mind that the United States has yet to recognize formally Libya’s liberation front, a step which the European Union, France, Italy, Qatar, and a handful of other states have already taken.)

Clinton also prodded the Hungarians to share with the activists of the Arab Spring their experience in shaping their post–Cold War democratic system. With its own credibility nearly zilch in Egypt and Tunisia, the United States is vigorously pushing nations that successfully transitioned to democracies, such as those in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as Chile, to help the Arabs on their road to stability.

Clinton even told a Jewish rabbi story, saying it was a favorite in Lantos’s repertoire. David Killion, a former Lantos aide and now US ambassador to UNESCO, told the same story in a speech he gave to pretty much the same audience that same week in Budapest. It’s the one in which the rabbi tells his students that the moment when the night turns to day is “when you see the face of a stranger and recognize him as your brother.”

The Lantos ceremony, attended by a dozen members of the US Congress from both sides of the aisle, was a celebration of US-Hungarian relations. But it was one of two curiously juxtaposed events in Budapest that week. Tom Lantos (Lantos Tomas, in the Hungarian style), a son of Hungary in whose life the old world and the new come together, is a hero here.

Another hero is Ronald Reagan, who never visited Hungary but who is revered by Hungarians as the man—in Prime Minister Orban’s words—“who changed, who renewed, this world and created in it a new world for us in Central Europe—a man who believed in freedom, who believed in the moral strength of freed people and that walls that stand in the way of freedom can be brought down.”

Orban spoke those words a day before the Lantos ceremony, when he and Condoleezza Rice unveiled a seven-foot-tall bronze statue of the Great Communicator striding through Budapest’s Freedom Square. Originally, the statue was meant to face Hungary’s Parliament and the Danube River that divides this historic city. But the Hungarians decided to turn it round 180 degrees so that Reagan now faces toward the center of the square where a tall obelisk commemorates the death of Soviet soldiers fighting the retreating Nazis in the closing phases of World War II.

To the citizens of Budapest, the obelisk is an emotional eyesore, and the symbolism of Reagan striding purposefully toward it is not lost on them. They would dearly love to consign the obelisk to some obscure part of the city, but that would break a commitment made with the Russians not to change its location. The symbolism would not be lost on Moscow either, but when this was put to Hungary’s Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi, he replied blandly, “You can’t please everybody. Besides, we have good relations with Russia.”

Reagan and Lantos were elected the same year—the former to the White House, the latter to Congress. Given that they stood at opposite ends of the political spectrum, staging the two events as a 24-hour package seemed to require some explanation, even if it was practical for the large group of visiting Americans. Richard Killion offered that “Like Ronald Reagan, Tom believed the United States was a shining city on a hill.”

Hillary Clinton said, “Tom believed that in our country there were partisan political differences, of course, between a President Reagan and a President Clinton, just to pick one. But Tom believed that regardless of our political party, we were fundamentally on the same side. We were for freedom. We were for democracy. And that through debate, sometimes contested, we would keep working toward what our founders set as the goal, a more perfect union.”

Ah, the good old days.