This month marks the centenary of the birth of the Hungarian American historian John Adalbert Lukacs (he died in 2019). He liked to say that he entered the world as two of his bêtes noires, Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, departed. His parents were Jewish converts to Catholicism. His mother was an Anglophile who passed her love for all things English to John, a trait he retained for the rest of his life.
John fled Hungary for the United States in 1946 because he saw the coming victory of communism in his native country. He arrived in America with two advantages: he had a Ph.D. in diplomatic history from the University of Budapest, and he spoke clear, almost idiomatic English. With the growing number of students flocking to college under the GI Bill, John was quickly teaching classes at Columbia. Soon his friend the Austrian scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was leaving a job at a small women’s Catholic college in Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill College, and recommended John for a permanent post. He taught there for forty years and as an adjunct at La Salle College (later University), where I met him in 1955 as a college sophomore in a senior course on twentieth-century European history. That event changed my life. I took all his courses and with his recommendation went on to get a master’s in history at Notre Dame and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Between 1952 and the early 1960s, many other Lasallians would get doctoral degrees in history, all through John’s intercession and recommendation. John and I became colleagues at La Salle and friends for the rest of his life.
While at La Salle, John revised and expanded his doctoral thesis on Hungarian–Russian relations after World War I into a major examination of the role that Central and Eastern Europe played in World War II. The Great Powers and Eastern Europe appeared in 1953 to mixed reviews, and John didn’t return to diplomatic history for the rest of the decade. He wrote widely for various magazines and journals during those years, including a few pieces for The Saturday Evening Post, which he was not proud of and never wanted to talk about. His best writing during the 1950s was for Commonweal, the Catholic intellectual weekly. John respected the literary quality of Commonweal, although he was not a liberal Catholic in any sense. He was an admirer of Pope John XXIII, who he believed returned the papacy to respect, but John was no fan of Vatican II, which the same pope launched—perhaps one reason why he stopped writing for Commonweal for years.
John’s reputation as a conservative arose because, unlike many intellectuals at the time, he was never taken in by the Soviet myth. He had, however, no time for Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist campaigns. For John the real threat was not communist subversion but Russian nationalism. He liked to describe himself as a reactionary in the sense that he reacted against the nonsense of the modern world. But he was a natural traditionalist, an admirer of the best of the past in art, literature, and music: Mozart, Jane Austen, the great artists of the Renaissance. Among moderns he was a fan of Evelyn Waugh—his comic novels, but not Brideshead, which he found a little too romantic for his taste.
In his classes John included on his reading lists works of fiction and relatively few academic histories. It was in his classes that I was exposed to Orwell’s essays, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, and Waugh’s Black Mischief. Those readings were formative for me and wound up on my syllabi for years also.
John’s classes were always packed, with outsiders often sitting in. He lectured standing, with his hands gripping his lapels, reminding me of pictures of Lincoln speaking. He made few gestures, spoke clearly and dramatically, and didn’t use notes but followed his syllabus closely. He drew freehand maps on the blackboard that were amazingly accurate, although his map of Europe always showed Ireland as a beer glass foaming over. His classes were not only fascinating, but there was always an atmosphere of fun. Once in class after lunch with some of his students, he asked, “what was the last thing I said?” Somebody shouted, “I’ll have another scotch and soda.” John laughed louder than any of us.
After his experience with the Great Powers book, John turned to the life and work of Alexis de Tocqueville. He organized a centenary program at La Salle in 1959 that was attended by some of the biggest names in Tocqueville scholarship. For his part he wrote an important essay on Tocqueville’s last years that appeared in the journal French History and edited a study of his relations with the racialist philosopher Arthur de Gobineau, The European Revolution & Correspondence with Gobineau, which showed the interaction between the two and how it influenced Tocqueville’s ideas on politics and history.
During my senior year at La Salle, John told me of his plan for a book he thought was needed, a history—really an analysis—of the Cold War. He had been corresponding with George Kennan for some time, and he believed that Kennan’s view of Russia’s future was correct: the system would break down of its own contradictions. John said he wanted to show how the Cold War developed, stressing the nationalism he believed had motivated Stalin. He also believed that the war state the United States had engineered in response to the Soviet threat was dangerous for America’s future, a thought similar to Eisenhower’s warning about the power of the military–industrial complex. (Interestingly, John was no admirer of Eisenhower, for whom he had voted in 1952. He believed America had lost an opportunity after Stalin’s death to moderate the Cold War and blamed Eisenhower for the failure.)
When he finished A History of the Cold War (“A,” not “The,” because he said it was interpretation), he asked me to proofread it. I was thrilled when John took my comments to heart. I thought the narrative part was superior to his analysis of how the Cold War unfolded. Our friendship dated from those days. I was always gratified when he discussed his latest project, serious or frivolous, with me. He enjoyed the give and take, and in fact loved to argue historical issues.
Throughout the 1960s John’s main interest was a massive historiographical study that he called Historical Consciousness (1968). It went through various titles and was inspired by his understanding of Werner Heisenberg’s theories of indeterminacy and the related observer effect; John had corresponded with the physicist. John believed that history was a form of thought, not just an academic study, and he was convinced that the historian, the observer, altered the topic he studied.
For John this was his most important contribution to the study of history. He was outraged when the book was neglected by the historical profession and failed to receive serious reviews. This treatment went far in alienating John from his field. He had little contact with the academic side of the history game thereafter and devoted himself to the American Catholic Historical Society, of which he served as president in 1977.
In the 1970s John returned to his first interest, diplomatic history, and especially the onset of World War II. His book 1945, Year Zero: The Shaping of the Modern Age (1978) was a long, reflective essay on the impact of the war, especially on Germany, written in a vivid narrative style that increasingly became part of John’s repertoire. It was The Last European War: September 1939–December 1941 (1976), however, that marked the beginning of John’s greatest contribution to our understanding of the Second World War. The Duel, 10 May–31 July 1940: The Eighty-Day Struggle between Churchill and Hitler (1991), along with Five Days in London, May 1940 (2001), saw John develop his argument for the centrality of Churchill as the man who could have lost the war if he had given in to peace terms with Hitler in the summer of 1940. Churchill was the nearest thing to an idol that John had, and he returned to him again and again in his writings over the years. His thesis about how close England came to making a deal with Hitler in late May 1940 is now an accepted part of World War II studies.
He regarded his historical study of how Hitler was understood by historians, The Hitler of History (1997), as one of his more meaningful works. He believed that you could come to a clear understanding of a historical figure by analyzing how they were interpreted by various historians. The book blended bibliography with sharp historical analysis and for John confirmed his view that Hitler was the most significant revolutionary figure of the twentieth century.
John maintained a continued interest in World War II—he wrote short books about Churchill and his “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech as well as a portrait of Stalin—but also found time to pen an appreciation of George Kennan. That friendship dated back to the early 1950s, and their correspondence and lunch meetings lasted almost to the end of Kennan’s life.
John’s approach to historical studies was capacious. Two books that were favorites of his demonstrated a breadth of interest rare among those writing serious history today and were paeans of praise to the two cities that shaped him: Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900–1950 (1981), and Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture (1988).
John loved his adopted city and knew its quirky characters. It is typical that in his Philadelphia book the discussions of the rogues and philistines produce the best chapters. (Consider Senator Boies Penrose, nicknamed “Big Grizzly” and the last of the old-guard Republican barons, and William Bullitt, the Wilsonian liberal who turned against Wilson and in Lukacs’s view became one of our best ambassadors to the Soviet Union.) It amused John to write in his chapter on Albert Barnes and his art foundation of how the chemist outwitted the arts establishment and produced one of the greatest collections of Impressionist art in world.
His Philadelphia book received good reviews and sold well, but his Budapest book was too esoteric for American tastes. It was respectfully reviewed and sold poorly, but that didn’t matter to John. It was his beau geste, his labor of love. I understand it is thought of highly in his native Hungary.
John never gave up writing, even as his health became more precarious. He published his last book, really an extended essay, We at the Center of the Universe, three years before he died in 2019. His last essay, a piece for Commonweal on Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler, appeared two years before he died.
Visits became difficult for me—John lived an hour away, near Valley Forge Park, and the roads seemed too fast and dangerous to drive. In my last visits he was in poor physical condition but mentally as sharp as ever. We couldn’t go out to lunch but sat around his beautiful home overlooking a lake and talked history. He was rereading Barchester Towers during that visit, for the fifth or sixth time he said. Trollope was a favorite, and he was fond of repeating the line of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, also a Trollope fanatic, who had said: “There is nothing I like better than to lie in my bed with my favorite Trollope.”
