In July 1989 President George Bush travelled to Budapest for a state visit, the first by an American leader to Hungary. For millions of Magyars his arrival put the seal on their recent liberation from the communist yoke, but for the sole Hungarian aboard Air Force One the journey carried added personal significance. In 1951 Charles Tasnadi had fled the regime in despair. Half a century later he was returning for the first time, as a US citizen and as a White House correspondent who had photographed six presidents.
Tasnadi’s escape had been dramatic and, he quipped in later years, “helped me put a better perspective on deadline pressure”. Under the cover of the first snows of that winter, he and his girlfriend, Maria, together with six other adults and two children, had made for the Austrian border. They had crawled through a minefield, Tasnadi carefully placing his knees and elbows in the tracks of the man in front, before eluding barbed wire and guard towers.
Tasnadi had carried one of the children on his back across the frontier, but the other had to be knocked unconscious to prevent its cries being heard by guards. Even so, one saw them, and turned his head away. The cold was intense, and twice Tasnadi fell through ice as far as his chest.
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Yet once inside Austria they were still not safe, for the first 50 miles of territory was the Soviet zone, and it was several more days before they reached Salzburg. There, in a refugee camp, Tasnadi and Maria were married.
The President knew Tasnadi’s story, and while the aircraft was in the air called him forward to tell him how fitting it was that he should return in such style. His hands shaking with emotion, Tasnadi punched the sky in elation as he felt Hungarian soil under his feet. Yet, colleagues recalled, characteristically he was then able to put his emotions to one side and get on with the job of photographing Bush’s own journey.
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Born Karoly Tasnadi in Ajka in 1925, as a child he moved to Budapest with his mother after his father’s death. At the end of the Second World War he was among those rounded up at random by the Soviets after their entry into the city, and avoided an uncertain fate by ducking through an open door off the street when being marched east. He found himself in a makeshift hospital, where a nurse disguised him with a bandage, allowing him to fool his pursuers.
Tasnadi was given his first camera by his mother, and had already worked for local news agencies when he left Hungary. Denied an American visa, he and his wife next made for Venezuela, where a cousin lived. There he began working for newspapers, and later for Time-Life. In 1964 he joined the Associated Press, and moved to the United States.
His first assignment was to cover the arrival of The Beatles in New York. Like most men over 20, he was baffled by the hordes of screaming girls that greeted the group, but took a memorable shot of the band surrounded by reporters.
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He then began to cover the White House, and in 1965 cemented his reputation with a shot of President Johnson lifting up his shirt to show a scar from recent surgery for kidney stones. Among other pictures of his that became familiar was that of President Nixon looking at his watch while shaking hands with well wishers in 1974 (he was late for lunch with the King of the Belgians, but the image seemed to encapsulate his air of insincerity).
Tasnadi travelled frequently to Cuba, gaining unusual access for an American to Fidel Castro, partly by dint of strategic presents of cameras to officials around el jefe. He was also aided by his gentlemanly manners and habitual smart dress, although he was known for always forgetting his umbrella whenever he left a job. In 1996, when he was photographing his last White House conference after 30 years in place, President Clinton led a spontaneous tribute of applause.
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Charles Tasnadi had been treated for colon cancer recently, but he died of a stroke in a Washington hospice. His wife and daughter survive him.
Charles Tasnadi, photojournalist, was born on March 1, 1925. He died on January 10, 2008, aged 82