"1848 and
Beyond"
posted
August 4, 2005
"An
African Queen"
posted August 11, 2005
"Near Hit"
posted August 16, 2005
"Orko
Gold"
posted August 18, 2005
"Mr.
Smith Goes To Hungary"
posted September 1, 2005
"A
Letter To
President Bush"
posted September 8, 2005
"Mr
Clarke -
Call In The Boys"
posted September 12, 2005
"Orezone"
posted September 23, 2005
"U.S.
Gold Corp."
posted September 29, 2005
"Mr.
Prime Minister"
posted October 13, 2005
"The
Business of Hungary is Business!"
posted October 31, 2005
"Then
And Now"
posted November 9, 2005
"50
Relatives Worse Than Yours"
posted November 14, 2005
"Bunker
Hunt-Silver-China"
posted November 28, 2005
"The
Currency of Mass Destruction"
posted December 5, 2005
"Sonesta
International Hotels Corporation"
posted December 29, 2005
"Northern
Star Mining"
posted January 16, 2006
"Other
People's Money -Enron & Martin Siegel, Esq."
posted January 28, 2006
"Your
Money Is Not Yours"
-Enron & Martin Siegel, Esq.
posted February 9, 2006
"A
Tribute to
Rudy Giuliani"
posted February 15, 2006
"Interview
with
Robert McEwen-
U.S. Gold Corporation"
posted February 22, 2006
"Sparton
Resources"
posted March 1, 2006
"Harvest
Gold"
posted March 2, 2006
"Midway
Gold
Corporation"
posted March 23, 2006
"Pocketful
Of
Miracles"
posted April 8, 2006
"J.P.
Morgan Offers Advice To Ken Lay"
posted April 11, 2006
"The
Principal Guest Was Missing"
posted April 25, 2006
"Ken
Lay's Legacy"
posted May 8, 2006
"Gateway
Gold:
It's A Gold Story"
posted May 15, 2006
"Northern
Star
Mining Corp."
posted May 19, 2006
"I
Am An Immigrant!"
posted June 7, 2006 |
|
I AM AN IMMIGRANT!
Garbo and
Racz both came to America
with burning ambition, and nothing else.
God gave Garbo beauty and talent.
God gave Racz a telephone. |
|
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.
(Article
30 - posted June 7, 2006)
e-mail: mlikar@aol.com
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