The Bridge At Andau Part 14

"Everybody has gotten into the act. It is an Army operation from the moment the planes touch down, so that the very first taste of American life for the refugees is uniforms and regimentation all over again. The refugees are taken by Army buses to the barren, desolate acres of barracks at Kilmer, then cordoned off by military police. Their living quarters are as primitive as many a D. P. camp of Europe-numbered barracks. Though the great private and religious agencies, with their years of experience of handling refugees, have representatives at the camps, they have to work desperately against Army and bureaucratic red tape to find the families in their barracks, to welcome them, to give them some feeling of civilian America, even to interview them in order to find sponsors, homes and jobs for them.

"Why couldn't New Yorkers have found a more humane way to welcome the refugees?... What happened to New York's good intentions on the way? Why was this turned into a show for the Army and bureaucracy, instead of its being the great, voluntary, civic operation it should have been-and can still become?"

One story of the Camp Kilmer debacle caused much amus.e.m.e.nt in Europe. We were told that when the first refugees arrived, some of them after having fought Russian tanks for ten days, having walked over a hundred miles, and having crept through the swamps and swum the ca.n.a.l, an official stepped before them at the camp and said, in resounding tones, "Now I want to tell you a few things about freedom."

A Hungarian in one of the depots asked, "Did he speak from a balcony?"

In the first awed days after the revolution a Polish newspaperman reviewed what had happened. He was ashamed that his country had been able to do so little to help the Hungarians, and he was embittered that neighboring Czechoslovakia had actually tried to hamper the Hungarians and help the Russians. He wrote, "Sadly we must admit that the Hungarians acted like Poles. The Poles acted like Czechs. And the Czechs acted like swine." An observer added, "But the Americans didn't act at all."

At this point the American who had been following his nation's performance was bewildered, but he was saved by a fourth psychological s.h.i.+ft: the recovery of national self-respect. For the United States government finally came forth with a program both vigorous and generous. Legal restrictions which had hitherto impeded the flow of refugees into America were suspended or ignored. Our emba.s.sy in Vienna speeded up the flow of paper work required for emigration. Emergency relief organizations-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant and lay-reached a truce among themselves and worked literally twenty-four hours each day reuniting families and insuring them entry into the United States. Aid societies in America sent into Austria a torrent of blankets, money, medicines and food. Our educational foundations provided both scholars.h.i.+ps in American colleges and badly needed cash grants to overloaded Austrian inst.i.tutions which had offered haven to Hungarian scholars.

Then, when it seemed as if the United States had done all it could, there occurred the Christmas visit of Vice-President Nixon, who cut additional red tape, rea.s.sured the Austrians of our continued support of their efforts, and spurred our own government to further generosity in accepting refugees. A ma.s.sive air lift was organized; Camp Kilmer was transformed into a warm-hearted reception center, and across America thousands of families who had never seen a Hungarian before suddenly opened their doors and welcomed strangers to whom they could not speak a single word. When the United States finally got organized, it behaved rather well, and by mid-March, 1957, had accepted over thirty thousand Hungarian refugees.

So the emotional cycle was complete: initial shock, embarra.s.sment, rea.s.surance, and finally a modest pride in traditional American generosity.

But the fact that America finally accepted its responsibilities in a time of great crisis must not obscure the more important fact that originally we were befuddled. We have got to rethink our att.i.tudes in the cold war. A careful study of all messages broadcast by Radio Free Europe to Hungary fails to disclose any that incited revolution, but this radio did broadcast messages of freedom and is presumably still doing so. Are we now prepared to a.s.sume direct responsibility for these messages? How long can we broadcast such messages without a.s.suming direct responsibility for our words? Why should officials of the United States government abdicate their appointed responsibility for the selection of immigrants and turn that job over to accidental groups who are then free to set up quotas reflecting their private beliefs and to apply moral and religious tests of their own devising? When a man has given proof in blood that he loves freedom, how many further tests must he pa.s.s before he is deemed worthy of entry into America? And how much of the rare quality of contemporary American life is due to the contributions of the great revolutionists of 1848-many of them from Hungary-who brought to our rather tired Anglo-Saxon heritage a burst of fresh, bold blood and a tradition of gallantry? Maybe we do need another transfusion of Hungarian blood.

In one respect the United States has already begun to rethink its att.i.tude in the cold war, and for this clarification of our national policy we must thank the Hungarian crisis. The Eisenhower Doctrine puts the Soviet world on notice that communists cannot operate among the nations of the Middle East as they operated in Hungary. We still lack an announced policy covering similar contingencies in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania or Bulgaria, but no doubt one is evolving, and for this we must again thank Hungary, for the shock waves riding out from Budapest have affected America profoundly.

The hurricane that I spoke of as striking Asia could have far-reaching consequences. One of the main reasons why many Americans grew to feel, between 1948 and 1956, that any further effort on our part to co-operate with Asia was futile, was the way in which Asian leaders refused to accept facts. Common words were redefined out of their ordinary meanings, and intercourse became difficult, since no matter what the nature of a fact, it was always used to prove that Americans were scoundrels whereas Russians were the protectors of the weak and peace-loving nations of the world. The energy required even to keep up with such reasoning is immense, while the work required to combat it is herculean.

For example, recently an Asian student argued with me in impa.s.sioned words: "You must admit that America holds its empire together only by means of the imperialist hydrogen bomb, whereas Russia has united under her leaders.h.i.+p a large group of friendly and peace-loving nations whose bond of union is not fear of the hydrogen bomb, but justice for working people. What a difference!"

"What American empire are you speaking of?" I asked.

"j.a.pan," he replied. "Formosa, the Philippines, England."

"You're convinced that we tell j.a.pan and Britain what they must do?"

"Of course."

"And you're equally convinced that the iron-curtain countries are happy under Russian domination?"

"I won't answer that," he said. "You speak of iron-curtain countries. That implies that countries like Hungary and Rumania don't want to remain with Russia, whereas obviously they do. You speak of Russian domination as if it were a fact. Russia doesn't dominate any of its allies."

The Hungarian revolution not yet having occurred, I was rather short of ammunition, but I asked, "Wasn't the Russian occupation of Lithuania especially brutal?"

"That's a capitalist warmongering lie!" he cried. "Apparently you haven't read Stalin's statement on Russia's relations with its neighbors."

"What did it say?" I asked.

"Stalin said"-and here he read from a booklet published in Moscow-" 'If you think that the people of the Soviet Union have any desire to alter the face of the surrounding States, and to do so by force, you are badly mistaken. I fail to see what danger the countries surrounding us can see in the ideas of the Soviet people, if these States are really firmly established.' And that's how Russia has behaved toward her neighbors. How has America behaved toward hers? Hydrogen bombs raining atomic dust on j.a.pan."

"I thought that dust came from Russian bombs," I argued. "Don't you think that Russia is exploding such bombs, too?"

"Yes, but she explodes hers only for peace."

"Don't you think that Russia uses her bombs to keep her subject peoples enslaved?"

At this my Asian disputant laughed. "You capitalist warmongers always use words like enslaved. Russia enslaves no one. In election after election, through all her friendly nations, the people have said they wanted communism and friends.h.i.+p with Russia by votes of about ninety-five to five."

"And you believe those figures?" I asked.

"Of course," he replied, and after many such discussions I found that every item of data used by the Asian communists about Rumania or Poland or Hungary came from Moscow.

In time, I found myself exhausted by this frustrating business of trying to argue against skillful propaganda without any hard-core facts that I could make my adversaries accept. Always they had Russian-imagined statistics and I had only logic and common sense.

I remember saying once in real anger, after a baffling session with some young Chinese who were trying to drag Singapore into communism, "I wish I could take those kids to some communist heaven like Poland or Lithuania. I'd like to have them ask Poles and Lithuanians what they thought of Russian communism."

It is now possible to ask Hungarians. For Hungary exposes to the world's eyes and to the world's intelligence the way in which a total population rejected Soviet domination. The Hungarian evidence goes far beyond prejudice or clever deduction or wishful logic. It even transcends the reporting of individual witnesses. The Hungarian revolution says simply, "Nineteen out of every twenty Hungarians were nauseated by communism."

This fact is incontrovertible, and if it could be reported to the people of Asia it could have a profound effect upon the history of that continent. For Asians pride themselves on their adherence to logic. They have penetrating minds and know how to handle facts when they are made available. An overwhelming majority of Asians wish their homelands well, for they are patriots, and it was largely due to this intense patriotism that Russia had an easy job planting, nurturing and reaping a propaganda harvest against the United States. Russia argued, "You Asians saw British colonialism in India, French colonialism in Indo-China and Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. Well, America is twice as large as those three nations put together, and her colonialism is twice as bad." How great the Russian propaganda victory was, only those who had to combat it year after year can know. The intelligent people of Asia, having little other data to go by, often accepted the Russian logic.

Now there is a superior logic, the logic of Hungary, and it is imperative that the facts of Hungary reach Asia and penetrate to the farthest bazaar. And the facts that we must hammer are these: it was the intellectuals who led the revolution, because they had been defrauded by communism; and it was the workers from Csepel who supported it, because under communism they not only made no gains, they lost what they had previously enjoyed; and it was Russian tanks, crudely interfering in the government of a neighboring nation, that could make a difference.

But unfortunately, the effect of the Hungarian revolution in Asia cannot be determined, for just when it seemed as if Russian propaganda about her friendly relations with neighboring nations was punctured, Asia was looking elsewhere and the lessons of Hungary did not penetrate even to the capital cities, let alone the remote bazaars. For it was at this untimely moment that the democracies invaded Egypt.

Of course this action nullified any moral values the Hungarian revolution might have enjoyed in Asia. In the first flush of the Budapest revolt I wrote to several of my Asian friends and said, "I hope you have been reading what Hungarians honestly think about communism. Now do you see what I meant?"

But before my letters could reach their targets, Egypt was invaded and in their replies my friends never even mentioned Hungary. Something much bigger was on their horizon and they asked, "Now do you see what we meant by imperialism?"

When the history of the Egyptian adventure is finally written, the apportionment of blame will surely be much different from what we now see it to be. But surely, a.s.sessors of that extraordinary act will have to point out that the Egyptian crisis involved two unforeseen losses to the democracies. First, Egypt diverted the world's spotlight from Hungary and condemned that brave nation to expire both in darkness and in silence. The moral precepts which could have been deduced from her heroic action were largely lost, and lost to those who could have profited most. Second, the repet.i.tion of cla.s.sic imperialist invasion completely blinded Asia to the suddenly revealed characteristics of a greater imperialism to the north.

That these great losses should have been the consequence of a gesture that failed is bitingly ironic. I remember the summary of America's role in this dual crisis made by a friend who was saddened by the moral collapse of his world. "When our secret agents can't discover what our enemy Russia is going to do in Hungary," he grieved, "it's regrettable. But when our diplomats can't discover what our allies have already done in Egypt, that's appalling."

It is possible that out of this catastrophe America may evolve a sounder foreign policy, and although the automatic values that should have accrued to us in Asia as a result of Hungary's bold action were dissipated, we can nevertheless start patiently to talk with our Asian friends about the lessons of Hungary. We can say, with honest humility, I hope, that whereas we had to learn the hard way, we trust they will do the same. And we must never allow the main object lesson to be obscured: after eleven years, most Hungarians abhorred communism; but the Soviets, refusing to accept this judgment, sent in their tanks and destroyed a country.

There was another fact about the Hungarian revolution which applies to Asia, but it is of such staggering implication that I wish merely to mention it without according it the detailed discussion which it merits. I suppose that all nations concerned in any way with Asia are asking themselves these momentous questions.

If ninety-five per cent of Hungarians hated their brand of communism, what per cent of Red Chinese hate their brand? If Hungarian troops deserted communism almost to a man, what percentage of Chinese soldiers would remain loyal? If communism could be maintained in Hungary only by the exercise of brute force, is not a similar force required in Red China, and must not the people hate it? And, to extend the scope of the question somewhat, if one of the most striking facts about the Hungarian revolution was the number of North Korean visiting students who volunteered to fight the Soviets, how secure is communism in North Korea?

For the present these remain rhetorical questions, but we do not know when they may explode into real situations requiring national answers. For in such matters the entire world is interrelated and the answers we apply in Europe will commit us in Asia.

I am convinced of this interrelations.h.i.+p by the observations of a wise Hungarian who pointed out, "Some people argue that our revolution started in 1848 with Kossuth and Petofi and that it is destined to continue forever. Others reason that it began on October 6, 1956. That was the day when two hundred patriots marched past the grave of Laszlo Rajk. He was the nationalist-communist who was executed as a traitor by Stalin. His memory was cleansed by Khrushchev and his honor restored. But how? His widow was taken, on October 3, to a ma.s.s grave that had been filled in years before. The communist leaders said, 'We are going to restore your husband's good name. Pick out a set of bones that we can call his.' It was these make-believe bones that we marched past, muttering in our hearts.

"It's possible," he continued, "that the emotionalism of the Rajk purification rites might have deteriorated into civil riots, but it seems more likely that our revolution started in 1953 when the East German uprising showed us what a civilian population could accomplish against an iron dictators.h.i.+p. Then our determination grew when the Poles at Poznan proved the same facts. You see what I'm driving at? The East Germans who threw stones at tanks died without any reasonable hope of success, but they inspired the Poles, who did achieve success. I'm sure the Poles acted only as Poles, but their greatest effect was on us Hungarians. Now who can say where the lesson that we gave the world will end? We can't foresee in what land our seed of revolution will mature, but it will grow somewhere. Even Russia is now liable to explosion. For we Hungarians, acting upon what the Poles taught us, who based their knowledge on what the Germans proved ... we have shown the way."

As we Americans contemplate our future responsibilities, we could well remember the women of Budapest. It was a cold sunny day in the ruined city. For six agonizing weeks the revolt had been under way, and still boys on the street and workers in Csepel defied the Russians. Budapest was known as "the suicide city," since it seemed that the entire population was determined to resist communism to the death. The world marveled at such courage.

Then, on December 4, a full month after the overpowering return of the Russian tanks, the women of Budapest, dressed in black, marched to the tomb of the unknown Hungarian soldier to place flowers at his grave. Russians with machine guns and tanks tried to stop them, but they came on, waving small bunches of flowers and crying, "You have guns, we have only flowers. Why are you afraid?"

A Russian soldier panicked and shot one of the women through the leg. It had no effect on the women in black; they continued their solemn march. Another Russian soldier started shouting at the women to stop. When they ignored him, he grabbed one of the women by the arm. She pulled herself loose, stared at him in contempt, then spat in his face.

11.

Could These Things Be True?

In two respects I was, perhaps, an appropriate writer to deal with this story. I am cautious in my evaluation of contemporary problems, and I have learned to be suspicious of anyone who tells me a good story about himself.

I am cautious because of my education. In 1925 I entered a small liberal Quaker college whose faculty was deeply chagrined that one of their graduates, A. Mitch.e.l.l Palmer, had gained some notoriety as Woodrow Wilson's wartime attorney general. Mr. Palmer, a good Quaker, had believed all he heard during the war and had allowed himself to be stampeded into certain unwise postwar actions which the government and the people of the United States later regretted. I have never forgotten the caustic rea.s.sessment that his legal moves suffered, not the least critical being the comments of his own former professors.

While in college I made a personal study of the servile work done by the George Creel committee on wartime propaganda, and again I was shown the perils into which a writer can fall if he accepts without using his own cooler judgment all that is told him in wartime. I followed this with an a.n.a.lysis of the Belgian horror stories and became one of the first American undergraduates to undertake a study of the revisionist theories of the historians who were beginning to cast honest doubt on some of the things we were told during World War I.

It was with this background that I approached the Hungarian story. If I have accepted lies, if I have unknowingly repeated them, and if I have been played for a fool by clever propagandists, I have only myself to blame. Both in knowledge of history and in awareness of precedents I have been forewarned, and if some superior critic should later prove that I was duped, I ought to be severely reprimanded if not publicly disgraced.

As to my suspicious nature where personal stories are concerned, I have found that most people are dubious sources when they speak of themselves. A favorite expression of mine, acquired from having checked a lot of likely stories is this: "I wouldn't believe him if he told me what day it was." The translators who worked with me can testify with what patience we went over and over the same ground, not only with one Hungarian but with dozens. Four or five of us would sit around a big table in Josef s.m.u.tny's restaurant near the opera house in Vienna and we would pursue only one problem for about four hours at a time. Then we would get another four refugees, and another, and we would endlessly go over the same material.

When I perceived what a staggering fact the Hungarian revolt was, I asked that a highly trained research expert, who spoke five languages, be sent to help me, and he without ever duplicating any of the Hungarians with whom I had talked, reviewed the same ground in a similar way with refugees whom he picked at random from the camps. Wherever my final account differed from his, we a.s.sembled four or five new Hungarians and put the differences before them. Each point was argued out to a final conclusion, and in almost every instance we wound up with specific photographs or doc.u.ments proving that a given individual had been where he said he was, or corroboration from a third party. The most dramatic example of this came in my two-week search for proof of the incredible Major Meat Ball story. The most rea.s.suring was to find, after a seven-week delay, verification of Mrs. Marothy's extraordinary claim that Imre Horvath's son had decided to escape with her.

When my final version of each incident was finished, it was reviewed by two fresh teams of Hungarian experts, working independently and checking each word written. Each such critic had been in Budapest during the time the events here described were taking place and in several instances was able to identify to the day and the hour both the occurrences and the people about whom I was writing.

Let me explain my personal estimates of the validity of each of these stories. Young Josef Toth represents the combined experiences of three eighteen-year-old freedom fighters whom I met at the Andau border. They had fled Budapest at the request of their mothers or fathers, and each boy was not only deeply implicated in the revolution, but each left behind him brothers and sisters who could be picked up by the AVO. These three boys made up the name Josef Toth in honor of two boys their own age killed in the revolution. I have described only small parts of their amazing adventures in Budapest, but those parts were checked endlessly. The boys knew that I would have preferred to use only one boy, only one real name, but they were afraid of retaliation, so this was their compromise.

Istvan Balogh and Peter Szigeti were individuals of great courage. Each name is completely masked; in the case of Szigeti even incidents had to be changed lest he implicate others. Each story was corroborated by other intellectuals, who supplied some of the masking materials.

Csoki, Little Chocolate Drop, was a very brave young man, and he said, "Sure, put my real name in the book! I want them to know what I did to their rotten system!" When after hours of discussion I learned that he had a mother and brothers remaining in Budapest, I prevailed upon him to change his mind; but he insisted on inserting one telltale incident, "which," he said, "will let the gang know I got out all right, and they'll tell my mother." I think most of what Csoki told me was true, and I used only the Kilian Barracks part of his wild days. But the facts of that attack, and General Maleter's part in it, have been substantiated by four other soldiers who were there and by one of the critics. I was glad when Csoki told me he thought he would go to America. He'll fit into a Boston jitterbug hall or a chili parlor in Dallas without any difficulty, and ten years from now he'll own a garage and vote Republican.

Zoltan and Eva Pal were composites made up by three attractive young couples, two of whom I had met at Andau. Each of the six young people was terrified lest he be identified in Budapest and cause the torture of his parents. I spent many hours with these couples and feel sure that all of what they said was true, but the most poignant story they told me I did not use. At the end of one long interview with two of the couples I happened to notice that neither of the young wives was wearing a wedding ring, so with no embarra.s.sment, because one suspects such tricks, I said, "You really aren't married, are you? You just came out together and made up these stories, didn't you?"

All four looked at me in amazement and said, "We ... we can't prove that we're married. But we are." Then one of the wives said to her husband, "Oh, yes! You have that paper." And he produced an official paper of some kind which at least referred to him and his wife as a married couple.

"Why did you ask such a question?" he inquired.

"Because I notice that neither of you girls has a wedding ring," I said.

"In communism," the girls explained, "young couples like us can't afford wedding rings."

But later I saw that the third couple, which I used for another part of the story, had a wedding ring, and the wife said, "Well, a couple could manage to buy a ring if they were very religious ... and gave up other things." So some couples have rings.

Imre Geiger, the dead-end kid with the cigarette and the rifle, I picked up just after he had crossed the border at Nickelsdorf. I saw him come swinging down the middle of the railroad tracks, and why he was not shot I do not know. He was a delightful boy to talk to, and he wanted me to use his real name, but he too had parents and friends who could be hurt, and since he was so deeply implicated in the latter days of the fighting, we both agreed that maybe he should remain anonymous.

Gyorgy Szabo, the man from Csepel, is one of the finest human beings I have ever met. He had doc.u.ments to prove most of his story and a stamp of authenticity on his face that humbled all of us who talked with him. Others corroborated his story in all details, except the conditions of his leaving, but many of those details have been altered purposely in my account.

The Hadjok family, of course, were a tremendous family of that name. I met them at the bridge, then at the restaurant where Mrs. Lillie Brown rescued them. I saw them later in Vienna and was so suspicious of any children nine and thirteen who knew as much as they did that I questioned them in private. There can be no question of the authenticity of this story.

Mrs. Marie Marothy is also a real name, at her request. The coal miner, whose story of his American suit appalled everyone who heard it, dared not use his name for family reasons, but he had satisfactory credentials and his story was corroborated by others.

That leaves the tragic characters who appear in the account of the AVO man. Ferenc Gabor was so terrified by the retaliations he had witnessed in Recsk that we avoided his real name even in our notes. His particular story of Recsk could have been an invention; Recsk itself was not. It existed and in the form that I relate. The story of the world-champion athlete was to me particularly doleful because it was delivered so simply. I insisted upon a doc.u.mentation of his athletic record, upon seeing the bullet wounds, checking his story of slave labor, and further evidence on his report of Major Meat Ball. Unfortunately for him, it was all true. Tibor Donath, the AVO man, is, as I stated earlier, a reconstruction for which I am solely responsible. He is founded upon a great deal of research, some confidential papers, and the question that I asked every Hungarian who mentioned the AVO: "You tell me the young people of Hungary were so patriotic and brave. But here are pictures of fifteen AVO men. They're all young. And they're all Hungarians. What about them?"

Patiently we would then build up a portrait of the AVO men that this Hungarian himself had known-the AVO man at the corner police box, the AVO man in the factory, the AVO man who checked residential blocks, the AVO man at Recsk, the AVO man who would beat and kick a coal miner for thirty-three days because he didn't like the man's suit, and the AVO man who would set out to break a woman's hand and knock her teeth out. I think I can visualize an AVO man.

I would point out one additional fact. Many of these people I personally helped lead out of Hungary. I met them on the wintry ca.n.a.l bank at Andau, I helped them across the bridge. There was no selection operating in my choice of the Hungarians with whom I talked. For example, I met my finest interpreter standing a hundred feet inside the border a few minutes after he reached freedom.

I found my stories by the operation of pure chance, and after I had talked with hundreds of Hungarians, after I had painstakingly discovered that their stories interlocked and substantiated one another, I came to two conclusions.

First, it is entirely possible that everyone I met told me nothing but lies, but there is a rule of probability which says that an investigator should accept a plausible theory if its rejection entails an obvious absurdity. If you want to say, as the Russians will, that all these stories were inventions, then you must also say that nearly two hundred thousand Hungarians who fled to Austria convened somewhere along the way and agreed upon a monstrous lie, which they all remembered in exact detail. And that is an absurdity.

Second, when I had studied the evidence, and when I had carefully reminded myself of A. Mitch.e.l.l Palmer and the Creel committee, I decided that perhaps I was taking a risk, but that if I didn't-in view of the risks my Hungarian informants had taken-I would henceforth be ashamed to walk among free men.

TO ALBERT ERSKINE..

BY JAMES A. MICHENER.

Tales of the South Pacific.

The Fires of Spring Return to Paradise.

The Voice of Asia The Bridges at Toko-Ri Sayonara The Floating World The Bridge at Andau.

Hawaii Report of the Country Chairman Caravans The Source Iberia Presidential Lottery The Quality of Life Kent State: What Happened and Why The Drifters A Michener Miscellany: 19501970 Centennial Sports in America.

Chesapeake The Covenant.

s.p.a.ce Poland Texas Legacy Alaska.

Journey Caribbean The Eagle and the Raven.

Pilgrimage.

The Novel James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook Mexico Creatures of the Kingdom.

Recessional Miracle in Seville This n.o.ble Land: My Vision for America The World Is My Home with A. Grove Day.

Rascals in Paradise with John Kings Six Days in Havana.

About the Author.

JAMES A. MICHENER, one of the world's most popular writers, was the author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Tales of the South Pacific, the best-selling novels Hawaii, Texas, Chesapeake, The Covenant, and Alaska, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America's highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.

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