Embassy Row

REAGAN AND ROCK

One of Andras Simonyi’s earliest memories growing up in Hungary was watching Soviet tanks crush the anti-communist revolution in 1956. He was 4 years old.

By the 1980s, he was already a secret democrat behind the Iron Curtain, inspired by Ronald Reagan’s crusade for freedom and by Western rock ’n’ roll. He still treasures a photo of Mr. Reagan the White House sent to his office, where he was working for a youth group run by a hard-line communist.

The envelope was emblazoned with the White House seal.

“I was scared to death about what would happen if they opened it,” Mr. Simonyi told Embassy Row in an e-mail from Hungary.

He still has the photograph hanging on a wall of his home.

Mr. Simonyi would later join a fresh wave of diplomats from Eastern Europe, promoting the new democracies of former communist countries and thankful to be the benefactors of Mr. Reagan’s freedom agenda. They recalled their personal memories of the 40th president of the United States, as they prepare to remember him on his 100th birthday on Sunday.

Mr. Simonyi served as Hungary’s ambassador in Washington from 2002 to 2007, where he became famous for a rock ’n’ roll band of diplomats that included Alexander Vershbow, a career U.S. ambassador, on drums.

“Rock and roll was the means of communications for me to the free world,” said Mr. Simonyi, explaining how he learned to pay guitar while listening to banned broadcasts from the Voice of America and other Western radio stations.

“It didn’t matter whether the communists built walls, they couldn’t stop the music.”

Another child of communism, Simona Miculescu, would come to Washington in the mid-1990s as press secretary at the Romanian Embassy and then go on to represent her country as ambassador to the United Nations.

“Ronald Reagan will always represent for Romanians a symbol of the strong and firm U.S. support for the struggle meant to free Romania from communism and for promoting the values of democracy in our society,” she said.

“He helped Romanians fulfill their dream of bringing their country on the right track.”

The new Latvian ambassador in Washington, who was 18 when the Cold War ended in 1989, praised Mr. Reagan for declaring Baltic Freedom Day on June 14, 1982.

“He was bold to publicly denounce in the strongest terms the oppressive ideology of the Soviet Union and was a visionary to predict its demise,” said Ambassador Andrejs Pildegovics. “To this day Europe remembers his forceful words, ’Tear down this wall,’ that eventually led to freedom in Central Europe.”

However, when Mr. Reagan entered in the White House in 1981, reaction was different.

“When Ronald Reagan became president, it sent a shock wave through Eastern Europe, both in the negative and the positive sense. He was ridiculed by official propaganda at first, discarded as ’just an actor from Hollywood,’ but not for long,” Mr. Simonyi said.

“I understood only years later what a Great Statesman he was; and that Great Statesmen are not necessarily the smartest, they are just great statesmen, in a league of their own.”

While in Washington, Mr. Simonyi attended Mr. Reagan’s funeral in 2004 at the National Cathedral.

“It was a great honor to be bestowed upon me to represent Hungary,” he said.

“I learned from him that only a foreign policy that sticks to its values is a credible foreign policy.”

• Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297 or e-mail jmorrison@washington times.com.