American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [208]
Unlike Ellen Knauff, Mezei did not elicit a great deal of sympathy from the public, the press, or Congress. Knauff had seen her family die in the Holocaust, had served in the British military during the war, had worked for the American military after the war, and was married to an American GI. Mezei, on the other hand, had arrived in the United States illegally, had lived in the country for twenty-five years without becoming a citizen, and had married Julia Horvath, an American citizen, while in Hungary under suspicious circumstances, most likely in hopes of easing his entry back into the country. “But when we come to this guy,” wrote one of Justice Jackson’s clerks and future Supreme Court chief justice, William Rehnquist, “I have some trouble crying.”
While there was not a great deal of public sympathy for Mezei, much had changed in the United States by the summer of 1954. The new president, a Republican war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower, successfully sought an end to the unpopular stalemate in Korea. Though the new president had been cautious in his public comments about Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was clear that Eisenhower wanted to cool the domestic anti-Communist fires of the past few years. His new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, would set a new tone in the Justice Department. Mezei would receive his first hearing in February 1954, nearly four years after he was initially detained.
In an unusual move, Brownell created a three-man board to hear Mezei’s case, which consisted not of immigration officials but of outside lawyers, including law professors from Columbia University and New York University.
The government had a strong case against Mezei. The evidence against Ellen Knauff was scant and she could not be directly tied to any espionage. Mezei, however, had been a member of the Hungarian Workers’ Sick Benefit and Education Society, which later merged with the International Workers Order, which the government considered a Communist organization. Mezei admitted to being a leader in his local lodge, but denied being a Communist.
Unfortunately for Mezei, the government had a number of witnesses who contradicted his story. Two former Communists testified that they had seen Mezei at Communist Party meetings and one told the hearing that he had personally recruited him for the party. Three other witnesses told officials that they had heard Mezei making proCommunist statements. In addition to his political problems, Mezei had also been convicted of petty larceny and fined $10 in his earlier stay in Buffalo. While the crime was rather minor, having to do with his possession of bags of stolen flour, this did mean that Mezei could be excluded under the moral turpitude clause.
Whereas Knauff was articulate and made an excellent case for herself, the same could not be said for Mezei. “His testimony was riddled with inconsistencies, and he seemed to have great difficulty understanding and answering many questions,” according to one sympathetic account. “Several of his statements lacked credibility.” Mezei had also repeatedly lied on government forms about his place of birth.
Not surprisingly, the board unanimously voted to exclude Mezei as a security risk in April 1954. He appealed the decision to Washington, but a board of immigration appeals upheld the decision to exclude him in August. Just two days later, however, the government reversed itself and announced that it had released Mezei on parole.
The special three-man board that had affirmed Mezei’s exclusion also recommended in private to Attorney General Brownell that he use his authority to release