By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Charles Tasnadi, 82, who escaped communist oppression in Europe by crawling to freedom and who ended his career as an Associated Press photographer covering the White House, died Jan. 10 at Community Hospices at the Washington Home. He had colon cancer and died from a stroke.
Mr. Tasnadi arrived in the AP's Washington bureau in 1964 after working as a photographer in Caracas for Time-Life and a Venezuelan newspaper. A year later, while covering President Lyndon B. Johnson, he snapped one of his most memorable images.
Over Labor Day weekend in 1965, Johnson underwent gallbladder surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. While recuperating, Johnson met with a few reporters and photographers on the hospital's helipad and pointed to the scar across his abdomen.
"All of a sudden, LBJ just held up his [shirt], with his scar," Dennis Brack, president of the White House News Photographers Association, who was standing next to Mr. Tasnadi, recalled yesterday. "You never knew what LBJ was going to do. Charlie made the first frame, and probably the best."
Mr. Tasnadi (pronounced tass-NADD-ee) went on to have a 32-year career in Washington, during which he covered seven presidents and countless historic events around the world before his retirement in 1996. He photographed a 1980 meeting between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and, in 1974, captured President Richard M. Nixon shaking hands with bystanders while checking his watch.
Aside from his photographs, Mr. Tasnadi was remembered for his gentlemanly manner and his kindness toward colleagues.
"I don't think you can find a photographer in Washington who did not love Charlie," said Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer Ron Edmonds. "I've been in this town 30 years, and I don't know another person like him. He was the greatest human being I've ever worked with."
Mr. Tasnadi, a skiing champion in his youth, was known to ski from his Northwest Washington home to his office during blizzards. He once joined President Gerald R. Ford on the slopes in Colorado -- and got a shot of the laughing president after he had taken a tumble.
Mr. Tasnadi was among the first U.S. journalists to visit Cuba and made more than 40 trips there. His fluent Spanish -- and his generosity in sharing film and photographic equipment -- put him on good terms with President Fidel Castro and others in his regime.
In Cuba and elsewhere, Mr. Tasnadi never divulged his political views, which were strongly colored by his experiences in Hungary, as his country fell under the control of the Axis powers and, later, the Soviet Union.
At the end of World War II, he and other young Hungarians were lined up and marched down a Budapest street by Soviet soldiers. Fearing that he would be sent to a labor camp, Mr. Tasnadi dived into an open door and ran through a courtyard. A Hungarian nurse wrapped a bandage around his arm and poured red ink over it, saving Mr. Tasnadi from an unknown fate.
Mr. Tasnadi was born in Ajka, Hungary, and moved to Budapest with his mother after his father died. He was a Boy Scout and began taking pictures as a hobby.
After a snowstorm in January 1951, Mr. Tasnadi told his mother he was going on a skiing trip. He and his girlfriend paid a smuggler to help them escape. They crawled across a snow-covered minefield and under barbed-wire fences when they reached the border.
"It was so miserably cold," Mr. Tasnadi said in 1989. "Twice I fell through the ice up to my chest."
A border guard saw Mr. Tasnadi and the six other people in his group but turned and walked away. Mr. Tasnadi and his girlfriend eventually reached a safe house in Austria and were married in a refugee camp.
After being denied entrance to the United States, Mr. Tasnadi went to Venezuela, walked into an English-language paper and found a job as a photographer.
Life in the Americas took some adjustment. At his first baseball game, he noticed that much of the action took place at second base. He found a prime spot behind the base until the umpire asked him to leave the field. It was one of the last times in his career that Mr. Tasnadi found himself on the sidelines.
In 1989, while covering President George Bush's visit to Hungary, Mr. Tasnadi made a belated return to his homeland. Bush invited him to the front of Air Force One to watch the landing in Budapest.
On the ground, Mr. Tasnadi's colleagues greeted him with a simple "Welcome home, Charlie."
Survivors include his wife, Maria Tasnadi, and daughter, Diana Tasnadi, both of Washington.