My American Story: Kati Marton

In September, 2019, Kati Marton sat down with The Common Good to tell us her American Story, and give us some of her insights into the lives of immigrants, journalists, and activists behind the Iron Curtain and today.

[Kati, center,with mother Ilona and sister]

TCG: This is Zeena recording for The Common Good podcast, My American Story. Today we have Kati Marton, and she’s going to be telling us about her American story. As you know the project and the aim of the story is to celebrate our diversity as a nation of immigrants and the great American melting pot. And to collect stories from individuals, and recognize where we all came from; all of the journeys, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the sad, all of it. So I’ll just start off with a very, you know, looming question which is, where are your ancestors originally from? And what do you know about their roots?

[Newspaper clipping announcing the arrest of Kati’s parents in 1955]

Kati: Well, I’m a refugee. I came here with my parents as a little kid, and had no connection or roots or history in America. No one in my family did, so we were complete strangers to this land. I did not speak any English. I was 8 years old, and in fact, it was 8th birthday when we landed in a special refugee camp set up on the New Jersey Turnpike. An army base called Camp Kilmer, that was set up as an emergency measure because there were so many of us fleeing the Soviet occupation of my homeland of Hungary. We were given refugee status, because my mother and father had both just been freed from jail. They were in prison on fake charges of being CIA agents. Their crime was that they were good reporters covering a lot of bad news as the Soviets occupied and then slowly took complete control of my homeland of Hungary. This was in the aftermath of the second World War. We’re in the fifties now and the coldest days of the Cold War. And I was a witness to my parents’ arrest, which was a fairly traumatic event.

TCG: How old were you?

Kati: Six years old. I did not see my father for two years, and my mother for a year. The worst thing was that no one talked about what happened to them, because it was a rather common occurrence for people to disappear who the government deemed to be enemies of the people which is the title of my book. It’s sad to say that is a phrase that has reentered our language these days, as the press, which my parents were a part of, is deemed to be the enemy of the people. Only the people now are Amricans, so that would come as a total shock to my parents who considered America to be our last best hope. They had survived the Nazi Occupation of Hungary, which my grandparents did not survive. My grandparents perished in Auschwitz, so I have never even seen photographs of them.

But they considered America to be our sanctuary and our last stop, so that’s why we made that long journey which ended on the New Jersey Turnpike on my birthday! It was a wonderful day, and I’ll just tell you because I can’t resist. That day when the first Marine saw that it was indeed my birthday, he from somewhere produced a silver dollar. By the time I was a fully processed little refugee kid, I had collected 6 silver dollars, which my mother kept for me for years. And I wish I knew what happened to them. But it was just such an amazing welcome to this country. And I thought, ‘hm I’m going to like it here.’

TCG: Would you say that from arriving, kind of, how long did it take you to feel like that you were a part of this country? Did you automatically embrace the American spirit?

[Hungarian refugees arrive at Camp Kilmer]

Kati: I wouldn’t, you know, I was in a complete daze. I would say shock, because so many things happened that year. My parents were restored to me, they were free. They had been sentenced to very long prison terms. Then came the Hungarian Revolution and they were free. And they went right back to work as reporters. So again they disappeared, covering the biggest story of their lives, which was the freedom fight that got rid of the Russian occupation. But that freedom lasted ten days and then the Soviet troops came back. And so, I was a kid who saw tanks in my hometown which was a pretty traumatic thing to see. And strange soldiers patrolling my neighborhood. my parents did not want to leave our country until they were tipped off that they were going to be arrested again. And my mother simultaneously discovered that she was pregnant with my younger brother.

So, they started finally making plans to escape. And we had several misadventures. My parents over the years, in fact, I didn’t know this until I was older, had spent a small fortune on guys who were going to smuggle us out of Hungary through Yugoslavia into Austria and something always happened. So finally, we did succeed and it was a year of such turbulence I didn’t go to school for a whole year. And I didn’t speak any English, so I proceeded to start watching American TV. My first English lesson was memorizing all of the commercials.

TCG: Do any commercials stick out in particular?

[Hungarians fleeing the country in 1956]

Kati: Oh Gosh, don’t get me going! Yes! Brusha brusha brusha use the new Ipana! It’s dandy for your teeth. So, that was Kati, the refugee. And, by the way, I didn’t want to be called Kati. I wanted to be called Katie. So that lasted for about a year. I was Katie Marton.

TCG: Very American.

[One of Kati’s first English lessons was memorizing the commercial for Ipana toothpaste]

Kati: Nevertheless, every September in my elementary school the teacher would ask me to stand up and say ‘Class, this is Kati our Hungarian refugee.’ And I would immediately be beet red, I was so embarrassed. Then I would stand up and take a bow. It was meant lovingly and people were just so kind to us! We were kind of the modern refugee family, with the two little girls as pictured on the cover of that book. And the pregnant mom and the very handsome reporter dad who soon became the Associated Press’ Senior Diplomatic Correspondent.

And my mother who decided she was going to start a new career in her mid forties. She had been a reporter too, for a rival news agency. My father was [Associated Press] and my mother was [United Press International] in Budapest which was why they had to be jailed because they were the last independent press behind the Iron Curtain. She decided that with a little baby due and two little kids who were traumatized, which was myself and my sister. She would start a more, shall we say conventional, life as a teacher of French in high school. A high school French teacher. So everybody was extraordinarily busy with acclimating ourselves. But we had nothing, I mean nothing. We came with four suitcases. My parents let my sister and I pack our own suitcase, and of course I filled mine with toys and a couple of choice and entirely impractical items of clothing. But I thought that was very sweet of my parents to let us bring something of our life and of our former homeland with us. But all of which to say, we were bringing nothing to this country. We were not nuclear physicists, we were not Norweigan, we didn’t speak English, and yet we have collectively managed to live very, without beating my own drum, very productive lives. My father and mother both got a bunch of journalism prizes for their work, subsequently. And you know, America really took a chance with us because we did not bring wealth, we did not bring any type of technical background. We were just very eager to Americanize. And to, you know, finally breathe easy.

TCG: And did you find, I know you mentioned everyone was very kind to you and your family, growing up here as a refugee, what kind of challenges did you personally face and did you ever encounter anyone who was not so kind to you? And what was that like?

[Kati, 10, left, with her family in Vienna, 1957]

Kati: You know kids can be nasty. And I spoke with an accent and I particularly didn’t want to bring kids home, because my parents were so European. They were very old world and rather formal. My father, when I was a teenager and first started getting interested in guys, you know none of them looked right for my father. They all wore jeans that looked like they had fresh paint on them and shoes without socks. He would give them the once over and they would wither in terror and never come back. So, I started meeting people elsewhere. But, in fact, it turned out that my friends, because they now tell me that so many years later, loved coming to my home and loved hearing my parents’ stories. And history, because my parents had lived such full lives. And had so many interesting tales to tell and [my friends] loved the exotic atmosphere in this Hungarian home. I [had] lived most of my life in America by now but I was raised in a little separate world, a little Hungarian world and it didn’t seem to in any way disturb my Americanization. I had this other part of me that became over the years even more important as I grew to be a more confident American woman. I really began to draw, strangely enough, closer to my origins. And once I became a reporter for NPR and then with ABC News, I started weaving my own story into my reporting. And I remember when I became a foreign correspondent for ABC News, I was Bureau Chief in Germany. I did a five part series from Hungary. It was the first time they sent a reporter, it was still the Cold War, it was in the late eighties right before the wall fell. And ABC News sent me to Budapest to do my own story. And every night on World News Tonight, there I’d be standing in front of my old house, my school, like that. And so, it became very much apart of who I am. And I think that as a result, it feels strange to say, I feel more grateful to this country. [Then I would] if I would have to just slam the door on my own personal history and on my parents’ history. I wove it into the fabric of my new identity and I think that’s what America is really about. You get permission to do that, to be proud of what you bring here. And in fact, I think that it made me who I am.

[Endre and Ilana Marton, right and center, receive the George Polk Journalism award for their work covering the Hungarian revolt shortly after arriving in the U.S. in 1957]

TCG: So, let’s transfer over a bit to Kati the adult. So, you moved here as a young child, you Americanized with your own identity intertwined with it. How did that intertwined identity affect you going forward with your jobs, with your various paths in life? What was that like?

Kati: My refugee history was always a big piece of my identity. And my dream as early as my teens was to become a journalist, because that’s what my parents did and I so admired their lives and their courage in reporting under pretty dangerous circumstances. I mean, they paid a huge price. They went to jail for reporting the news. That was not a part of my ambition, to go to jail covering the news. But I did want that life of constant changing of environments and adventuresome life. I couldn’t imagine a different life. I kind of toyed with the idea of becoming a diplomat, because that too would have taken me out into the world. But the news business was the most tempting thing. So even while I was in George Washington University getting my Master’s, I heard about this new network that was coming into being: National Public Radio. And so, I applied and I was one of six people that put All Things Considered on the air, while I was still a grad student - so that would have been 1973. And so that was my launching pad, and it was kind of wonderful because it was just a small group of us and everybody did everything.

[Kati, center, with her parents and sister in Hungary]

I learned to cut tape, edit film- I was NPR’s first diplomatic correspondent as well which meant I had zero experience. Somebody one day handed me a giant tape recorder and said “Cover the briefing at State, the noon briefing.” And, to my enormous embarrassment, my father (who’s beat this was), as the senior guide in the diplomatic press core, was so excited that his little girl was going to be part of the team. He would always sit in the front row and save me a seat and it was the last place I wanted to be. I wanted to prove that I was doing this on my own, which I was, but everybody assumed [it was] “oh daddy’s girl getting her way.” So I would always wait until the briefing started and creep in and sit in the back and not sit next to my father. But, yes definitely, my personal history shaped my identity. I was not held back, we’re now in the late seventies, and girls were still meant to get married and I mean, young women were supposed to get married and become mothers and homemakers. I wanted that, but it was never going to be the main event. The main event was going to be self-fulfillment and a family too. I didn’t see why those two were in conflict, because my mother, who had been a reporter and been a jailed reporter, had been a very good role model.

TCG: Did your parents, in their time coming to the states, do you think they identified with the American identity as much as you did? Could you expand a bit upon their experience?

Kati: I think it was tough for them. They were in their forties, so middle-aged. And the toughest thing for them was the culture and the music. And we, the kids, as soon as there was a brother too, tried to get them to listen to our music and explain why The Beatles were better than Beethoven. They weren’t buying. They were willing to put up with a lot, in terms of having noisey American kids. Because they had a tremendous sense of gratitude about the second chance they were getting here. And these days I have to admit that as much as I miss my parents, who passed away a decade ago, I am kind of relived that they’re not here because this is a passage in our country that would shock them. And I can’t even imagine what they would think of the way the press is treated now - [the] “enemies of the people” thing. And about the nastiness of the conversation between and among Americans, because we lived in a fairly ordinary Washington suburb where I am sure that it was roughly 50/50 Republicans and Democrats. Nobody either cared or knew who voted for Kennedy or who voted for Nixon. It was just a part of the American deal that you have your party, and we were welcomed into this neighborhood.

[Ilana and Endre Marton in Washington D.C., 1970’s]

I remember my sister and I used to put on plays for all of the neighbors because we had frankly come from a family where culture was hugely important. My uncle was the conductor of the Hungarian Opera, for an example. We were a little bit ahead of our peers in terms of, you know, literature and art and so on. We would put all the neighborhood kids in lesser roles. We would save the bigger roles for ourselves. But everybody in the neighborhood would come and bring their chairs to our backyard and we would put on Shakespeare. We would put on operas and[things] like that. And there was no sense of this great divide that’s opened up. I never felt that we were either better or worse than anybody else. We were just all Americans. And yes my parents, until the very end of their lives, there was no mistaking that they were not native born Americans because they had heavy accents. But I don’t think that they were ever made embarrassed by that. I remember my mother’s frustration [when] we were getting gas at a gas station in Montgomery County, Maryland. And the guy who was pumping gas said, “Where are you from?” having detected an accent. And my mother said, “Washington.” And the guy said, “No, no. Where are you really from?” And so my mother said, “Chevy Chase.” And the man, about to give up said, “No, no. Where are you from originally?” And so my mother, kind of fed up and giving up, said, “Budapest.” But her first inclination was to say “I am from Washington.”

TCG: And do you think that, all of your family who are here, that they feel part of the American experience? Do they feel like they had provided anything that kind of intertwines to this American story? To this American, I don’t want to say dream because it varies, but they felt a part of all of that?

Kati: I think they most definitely felt that they were making a contribution. My mother became a beloved teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland. By the end of her career there as a teacher, she was setting the language curriculum. Having started without any experience, but she went off. She would leave every summer, leaving us unhappily with our father, who didn’t know how to cook. But that forced us to learn how to cook at a very young age. My mother went off to various colleges to be certified as a public school teacher. [She was] always improving on her status until finally she had a PhD, she was Dr. Marton who set the curriculum. So, for sure, she felt as a very proud American. And my father became a very respected journalist. My father actually met my future husband, Richard Holbrooke, at the State Department long before I did. In those days Richard, who became Ambassador to the United Nations and the peace maker in the Balkans, was a young diplomat. He and my father knew each other in the corridors in the State Department. So, I think both my parents felt extraordinarily fortunate in our ability to restart and remake our lives. And in retrospect, I think that the going was good.

TCG: You are quite a renowned author yourself, you’ve written a lot of this down. What do you think the importance is of hearing these stories, of other people hearing your story, reading your story? What kind of impact do you think that can make and why should we keep listening?

Kati: Well, I have never thought of myself as any type of role model for anybody. My children will tell you that I will not place myself on any kind of “look at me” pedestal, because I think that we’re all human and we’re all figuring stuff out for the first time. And I don’t know anybody who’s got it all figured out. I know that at my stage in life I am still trying to get my barrings and trying to make the most out of my good fortune that I have. And I do feel extraordinarily fortunate despite losses in my life. And if there’s something that I’m proud of, that I like to encourage young people to follow, it is to just be very stubborn about what you want to achieve. And not care particularly about winning everybody’s approval to achieve your dreams because it’s not going to happen.

And obviously for a woman in the news business, which I set my sites on early, there were a great many hurdles and sexism was so rampant. It was just assumed that I was going to cover consumer affairs and stories about the wives of great men, and not the great men. And I wasn’t having that. When there was an opportunity I would say “send me” and they did. But it was always stressful. And I would always say that it was more the sexism than the refugee thing that held me back in the news business. It was more that you were stereotyped but I think I had an advantage in that. I was a refugee and already, I was a survivor. And already, I had experienced separation at a very young age - now we call it tender separation, I was a victim of tender-aged separation. Because my parents were arrested when I most needed them, as a little kid at the age of six. I survived that. And so I knew that I could survive pretty much anything.

If i had a leg up on this whole business of getting where I wanted to go, it was that early hardship, which didn’t break me. And coming here and having to remake our lives in a situation where everything was unfamiliar, everything. My friends were all in a different country. My dog was in a different country. And [I had] extremely distracted parents who were trying to figure stuff out, trying to pay the rent too, because we had no savings. We had no furniture. We had to start like my parents were a couple of newlyweds- we all went shopping for a couch. So it was not easy, but I feel lucky in retrospect, when I consider people who were raised in more privileged circumstances, who just don’t know how to cope when things go south, as ultimately they do because in real life there’s loss and deprivation. We’re going through a hardship now as a nation and it’s upsetting but I’m not going to crack under it. And I’m going to keep on writing my books and speaking out. And I think we all have to do that and I do have that singular advantage that I came here and there was no choice. We arrived [in America] in the spring and by September I was in a public school learning a language that I had no background in.

TCG: You mentioned the hardships that we’re going through as a nation. A lot of it, the immigrant rhetoric. Could you comment on what it means to be American today? And what do we as Americans need to do, to bear in mind when we think about our own history and the histories of immigrants coming to our country now?

Kati: I think that we’re more humble people now, we should be because we’ve demonstrated that we’re not the exceptional nation. We’ve been patting ourselves on the back for such a long time that we’re an indispensable nation, we’re a model nation, we’re better than everybody. Well, guess what? We’re not. We’re just as prone to the nasty side of the human experience as any other nation. And that, hopefully, our present political situation will change, but we can’t undo that because the administration that is in office now, we put them there. And we’ve demonstrated to the world that we’re willing to empower people who have so little respect for their fellow man and woman. So, we can’t undo that. That train has left the station. It’s the end of our innocence, if you will. I think that with our new found humility, we should, if anything, embrace new arrivals now more than ever because they have a lot to teach us. I think that my parents were great models for how to be a good American. And I learned a lot from them and I’m hoping that my kids will learn from me. My kids, who have no self-importance and no sense that “I’m an American, so therefore I’m cool”. I think that humility that we passed on to our kids, which my parents passed on to us, is really important for Americans now.

To learn from others and to accept that we’re all in this together and if anything, the planet has gotten so much smaller and the problems cannot be walled off one from another. And the idea that you can solve anything by building a wall is so crazy. When we share the air, we share if there’s hate in the land, no wall is going to protect us. So it takes ownership of what America has become. This is not [just] a bad dream, it is a bad dream, but it’s our current reality and we can’t wish it away. We, and particularly the next generation of Americans, have got to find a way back to our original values so that families like mine will continue to want to come here. But right now, I know people who don’t want to come here because they’re afraid. They’re simply afraid that this country has lost its bearings. We’re even debating what Emma Lazarus said, which is on the pedestal of the State of Liberty. We’re debating whether or not that was added later or did she really mean that? “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”, we’re debating that. This is a moment for us to really pause and reflect and embrace new arrivals.

You know, I don’t want to give the impression that I am in a state of despair about America because I’m not. I just think that we have lost our innocence and I think that it’s a moment for a reality check. We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves that this will all go away. We’re going to wake up and this will be over because we’ve revealed a side of ourselves that I wish we wouldn’t have been confronted with but we have been. And we have to talk about it honestly and openly. We can’t wish it away. That is now our most important task is to figure out how to talk to each other in a more civil way and to accept our differences. If we accept our differences, then families like mine will keep coming because this is still the most spectacular land in the world with the most to offer. I will always be grateful that my parents brought me here on my birthday to restart our lives, because it is still in my view the last best hope of mankind.

TCG: You’ve devoted so much of your career as a journalist and telling your own stories through storytelling. Do you think there’s a benefit to looking back and hearing each other’s stories?

Kati: We absolutely have to tell stories. I think that telling stories is what separates human beings, Homo Sapiens, from all the other species with which we share this planet. We tell stories and we have to continue to not only tell stories, but to learn from our stories. If we don’t, if everything in this world strikes us as “Oh my God, this is happening for the first time!” then it means we’ve learned nothing. It means that we haven’t been paying attention and that means we’ll just keep going around and around the hamster wheel. If we don’t listen to our stories, and by that I mean if we don’t pay attention to our history, we’re just going to be thrashing around uselessly and repeating the same ad infinitum. The same mistakes will keep blundering. The same never ending wars and not learn from the terrible, some of the terrible mistakes of our history. So history, storytelling, paying attention to each other’s differences and learning from each other is frankly the only way we are going to get out of this huge mess we find ourselves in now.

I do a lot of human rights stuff and work with refugees. And of course, foremost, work on free press advocacy through the committee to protect journalists. It’s very challenging to go to countries where I used to go for Human Rights Watch and for the Committee to Protect Journalists, and meet with the bad guys who would meet with me, because I was representing an American organization. And to say to them, “Look, you can’t do this. You can’t jail journalists! You can’t muffle the voices of opposition.” I mean, they look at me now like, “You’re telling me? You guys are telling us how to behave? Look at yourself!” So we’ve lost a tremendous amount in this current environment. We really have lost more than our innocence. We’ve lost our ability, really to make others uphold values that we hold dear. How do we do that? We’ve lost our credibility. That is a loss.

About Kati:

Kati Marton is an acclaimed journalist and author, as well as an activist advocate for human rights and the freedom of the press. She is an award winning former NPR and ABC News Correspondent, the former chairwoman of the International Women’s Health Commission, a director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and a member of the Council on Forign Relations. Marton has published eight books, which have been translated into five languages. Her Cold War Memoir Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in 2009.