In the fall of 1956, as Hungary exploded in revolution, John P. C. Matthews was working for Free Europe Press, the publishing partner of Radio Free Europe (RFE). Aware that the events he was helping to monitor were of historic significance, he saved almost every item that came out of RFE's central newsroom and collected a raft of journalistic reports. On the basis of these contemporary sources, memoirs written while memory was still fresh, and documents that have appeared in recent years, he has attempted, with success, to give readers a feel for what it was like to live through a bloody test of wills.

Matthews makes it clear that he writes as a “historical journalist” (xxv), not as a historian. He does not read Hungarian and was able (thanks to those who made translations for him) to consult only a small number of the primary sources and scholarly studies that have been published in Hungary since the fall of Communism. Moreover, he has a relatively limited knowledge of Hungarian history. He does, however, possess sound judgment, a talent for high-level journalism, and a fine writing style. Even though they know the revolution's outcome, his readers will be swept up in dramatic events, seemingly as they unfold, in Budapest and Moscow.

Matthews has dedicated his book to “the nameless and all-but-forgotten children of Budapest,” many of whom died while performing acts of heroism in the service of their country. He has for them and for all Hungarians who risked, and often lost, their lives a profound sympathy and respect. His indignation, like his account of their Calvary, is in the present tense. And it is worth noting that he reserves his most damning criticism not for the Soviet Union, or even for Hungarian Stalinists such as Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő, but for those in the West whom he accuses of betrayal. Among the guilty, he includes his former colleagues at RFE and Free Europe Press—and himself. One of his purposes in writing this book was to make the only amends he can.

Matthews dismisses the charge that RFE provoked and then deliberately prolonged the revolution, but he does call attention to a broadcast of 4 November, the date of the second and decisive Soviet intervention, that strongly suggested that help would be coming if the freedom fighters held out until the upcoming presidential election in the United States. More important, he regards as unforgivable RFE attacks on Imre Nagy. Although a lifelong Communist, Nagy presided over a reform government from 1953 to 1955 and returned as prime minister when the revolution erupted. A man who never fully cut loose from his moral moorings, he represented the only realistic alternative to despotic rule—and in the end, we know, he sacrificed his life for his countrymen.

Matthews also holds RFE responsible for having been taken in by American talk of “liberation” and “rollback” in Eastern Europe. As events were to demonstrate, it was all a sham; and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was the person chiefly responsible for the deception. Neither he nor President Dwight Eisenhower was prepared to risk a nuclear war, a threat that Matthews does not ignore but believes to have been exaggerated. His criticism is of their failure to do much of anything to aid the embattled Hungarians or to exert political pressure on the Soviets. To be sure, the Suez Crisis made matters more difficult, but the delaying tactics employed by UN ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge prove that Dulles and Eisenhower wished that the Hungarian problem would disappear. In the final chapter, Matthews lists a number of steps, short of war, that might have been taken, the most convincing of which is that the United States propose mutual troop withdrawals from the heart of Europe.

One of the principal merits of this book is that it follows the story of the revolution after 4 November. The freedom fighters did not immediately give up, but they did begin to lose heart, in part because they were running short of ammunition but primarily, Matthews insists, because they had been betrayed by the West. Nevertheless, the workers' councils continued to resist until the Soviet-sponsored government of János Kádár employed savage measures against them. And yet, Kádár eventually yielded to some of the revolutionaries' demands. Even more important, the revolution signaled the beginning of the end of Communist Eastern Europe. As George Kennan put it prophetically, “the Soviet Union will never recover” (529).