I Am An Immigrant!

June 7, 2006

On January 18, 1964, I entered the Young Democratic Club of New York. There were about 200 people, about my age, and I was twenty-five years old. After some speeches, there was a time for questions, and I put up some political issues of some international importance. There was a silence, and then the president actually stood up from his desk and personally gave an elaborate answer, which created some aura of respect for him. As he was turning back, he added with some curiosity, "I really want to thank you for your question, but I'm somewhat puzzled. I have never seen you in the club here before. Did I overlook you?"

The president of the Young Democratic Club, as I later learned, was John Samuels, III, an attorney at Shadburn Park, attorney for TWA and the Roosevelt family. Ten years later, due to his achievements in the coal industry, Fortune named him a centimillionnaire. In 1974 and 1975, he wanted to buy Peabody Coal for a billion dollars, which was owned by Kennecott, and I helped him, acting as an intermediary between Mr. Milliken, the chairman of Kennecott, and himself. It all happened in ten years.

Going back to the Young Democratic Club on the January, 1964 evening, I had a question posed to me: Why is it we haven't met? Well, I said, we couldn't have met because it was only yesterday that I immigrated to the United States of America. I never had greater applause in my life. I got some two hundred invitations in six days. Come to think of it, in terms of finding an appropriate girlfriend, that was probably the most successful evening of my life.

Then as a young securities analyst, I suddenly discovered that America was an open-ended opportunity for all. I met Mr. Wilson, a celebrated figure and president of Xerox, Mr. Peter Petersen, who then was the chairman of Bell & Howell and currently chairman of Blackstone. I actually met George Soros who was probably the biggest help I ever had in finding my way around Wall Street.

But the most glamorous and constructive figure who came into my life was Saul Steinberg. He was my age. He was chairman of the famous Leaseco, and he was twenty-nine years old, sitting not so far from me at a meeting when he was planning to make a tender offer for the Chemical Bank, the seventh largest bank in New York. Come to think of it, I never thought of knowing a man who aimed so high, but I was only a few steps behind him. With Saul came Bernie Schwartz, who in his colorful career, lit up the lights with Sirius Satellite, now in 20 million cars in the U.S.

And it all happened in the first five years. I was in the process of discovering what America could offer. I visited Beverly Hills, Arizona, and Dallas, Texas. My profession led me to all these places, but also my curiosity and the confidence of my colleagues. Many years later, I wrote an article about Dallas of 1963, with the title "The Car at Elm Street". Fifteen years after Kennedy was killed on Elm Street, sitting in the famous car, I pointed out that fifteen years after November, 1963, everybody who was in that car became my client. I felt I had traveled far into the American hinterland and I believed that in my lifetime, the American dream would come true. My dream was the car. Actually, Onassis said that after twenty years when he came back from the Argentine, he could buy up the Monte Carlo that he had seen from the bottom of a third-class ship twenty years before.

America is not only a country of unlimited opportunities for an immigrant. The opportunity comes in bits and pieces, in periodic chapters. There must be an opening every ten years. But it was a fast train and I feel I never got off. I moved in Texas, all through New York City, and very often I ended the day having coffee in the Plaza Hotel. The Plaza got me. It was owned by Sonesta International and the stock was so cheap that it's possible today at the market capitalization, the valuation of Sonesta in 1972 was one percent compared to its true value. I found people, including Edmund Safra, the chairman of Republic National Bank of New York, to give me money to buy up 8 percent of Sonesta, which also owned the Plaza.

The vistas and the opportunities in America are beyond the realm of even the American dream. My next chapter was Alaska. I always believed in oil shortage and gold, even before I came to the United States. I lived in South Africa for six months in 1961. Then I went up to Alaska to find the oil, the Trans-Alaska pipeline. I met Governor Hickel who showed me that there were no kangaroos, and agitated as a securities analyst in newspapers, in my reports, to build the Trans-Alaska pipeline. This was probably my first contribution to American history. I wondered at that time, and I wonder still, why some of our politicians, senators, congressmen, talk about an important subject like Alaskan oil without actually acquiring the facts. This issue bothered me all my life.

Now in the year 2006, when the debate all over the world is raving about uranium and almost every important country is building uranium plants, America hasn't done anything for thirty years. Of the fifty governors, only Governor Richardson of New Mexico is an energy expert, and we are supposed to be not only the most powerful nation in the world but the greatest country for immigrants. How can the Governor of New Mexico think about uranium when he's tied up with the mundane and uncreative aspects of immigration?

Then my two sons, Gregory and Justin, came about. Living in a home with two boys who got bored with my stories, except my bravery in the Belgian Congo, they basically shut me up and laughed when I talked about how their father was a penniless Hungarian immigrant. They were not interested. I enrolled them in one of New York's most famous private school, the Ethical Culture School, and I discovered that nobody knew much about Hungary and my immigrant past, or my being an immigrant, was totally unimportant. I began to be afraid that I was slowly passing into Bernard Shaw's character, "middle-class mediocracy".

When you have children, you cannot play history. One day Gregory came to my office and saw the buy and sell tickets, and he remarked, "Dad, you promised Mom you would not buy garbage like junk bonds of Drexel. Follow Mr. Belzberg or Harold Simmons. After all, I have to go to college and so does Justin."

Then I made every effort to get involved with politics. In 1979, I was convinced that Governor John B. Connolly of Texas would be the next President. I wrote him ten letters offering to be a speechwriter, and then I got a reply: Send $1,000 to the New York Stock Exchange Club and the Governor will make an election speech ten days later. I struck up a friendship with the Governor and worked with him for ten years. I did write some speeches but after that it turned to commerce. I formed his oil company, Chapman Energy, which became great history all through Texas. He still appreciated my desire to write and work on speeches, and one day he told me that had I been born in America, I could have become one of the America's most famous political speechwriters.

Well, twenty-five years later after I came to New York, I had to devote my energies to mundane matters, the task of an immigrant, to become a middle-class citizen with some political and intellectual leanings. This was reinforced when in 1981, I met President Richard Nixon. We discussed a number of topics, but the most important was an idea that I put forward to him. Can American use its financial power and particularly its immense gold reserves, to break the Soviet Union? It was the most fascinating topic I have ever tackled, and I learned in discussing it with the President that orderly thinking is the best way to carry out a major intellectual project.

America only ten years after I came here as an immigrant, began its most turbulent part in history. Even the almighty dollar and our financial integrity was questioned. There was a crisis in the air. Interestingly, I really stopped thinking of myself as an immigrant and I became in a time of trouble a true American. When gold was legalized in Congress, I was asked to speak on the subject after Secretary Simon. My initial statement was reproduced in many places. I said, "This is not the America I immigrated to. I immigrated to America when people were happy and Doris Day was still a star." Then and there I began to feel that maybe the greatest reward for a spirit of an American was to become emotionally, intellectually and practically an American. In the 1970s, I felt that what every American felt -- the energy crisis, financial crisis, the problems we were facing in Africa when Castro entered a number of countries. I visited Entebe in Uganda, South Africa, and everywhere I thought that America was stretched but I began to feel proudly as an American, that all over Africa they liked the Americans, particularly Dean Martin.

My younger son Justin became a writer. He calls himself a satirist. He wrote eight book by the age of thirty-two. The best I thought was Fifty Relatives Worse Than Yours. The book had many interpretations, but for his immigrant father it had probably a different one from anybody else. I reflected that the Racz family lost probably 50 percent of its members during the war, and so did my twenty or so Hungarian classmates who were all over the world. When fifty years later, we hold regular reunions in America, in Budapest, in London, it is like uniting another family. My son's book sort of covers many of these feelings. The twenty or so become a family, but those boys like myself are immigrants, and now that there are jet planes, Hungary again comes back into our lives. Justin says he is a self-made man. He can afford it. I have always been a daily worker, and like Greta Garbo -- an immigrant.

However, my friends and I will never go back. To some extent there is no turning back from immigration. I am an immigrant. My life, which is already long, has not been entirely unexciting. America has been good for me, and I in return have done a great many things which helped the United States of America, like discovering the silver crisis and later many complicated, hidden aspects of the Enron case, and the finances of the Enron principals. I have always turned with my knowledge openly to the American government.

One day I wrote an article which I summed up with an expression that I'm still proud of. I am not only an immigrant, I am an American patriot. If my wife would permit, I would go and explore the problems in the Belgian Congo or in the Sudan.

Now, at the age of sixty-eight, I am still looking for new opportunities. I get up at five in the morning and I cannot stop even for a minute before breakfast from thinking about the intricacies of international finance and gold. I still have the habit of writing to senators, prime ministers, and governors, the way I did twenty-five years ago. I met both President Richard Nixon, Governor Connolly and Bunker Hunt simply by picking up the telephone and calling them.

I am an immigrant. I arrived with two old suitcases at dock 49 on the West Side of New York in 1964. I checked into the YMCA with a hundred dollars in my pocket. Then and there I started to contact people on the telephone. For an immigrant, what is the alternative? To step back would mean stepping into the water. If I had done that, I would have missed the exciting life of an immigrant.