Finding it interesting, he finished the Ludovika Military Academy in the top 5% of his class, and was commissioned a second lieutenant 20 August 1935.

Communist officials warned him against his 1947 marriage to the widowed niece of far-right former prime minister Gyula Gömbös, who was, for much of his career, anti-Semitic.

In September 1956 the government of Ernő Gerő paroled him along with other prisoners, a measure intended to soften public unrest.

Soviet troops, unprepared for the strength of the revolutionary forces, arranged a ceasefire on October 28, and began to retreat from the city.

The violence subsisted, however, as pro-Nagy communists and various nationalist factions engineered purges of pro-Soviet party members in the city.

Király, sensing a chaotic fragmentation of the revolutionary forces, sought to unite various anti-Soviet factions into a National Guard.

As Nikita Khrushchev lost confidence in the ability of the Hungarian communists to suppress the uprising, he directed the Soviet army to invade Budapest on November 4.

However, he resented Soviet ambassador Yuri Andropov's concealing of the imminent invasion, which Nikita Khrushchev had officially decided upon 3 days prior.

He was absolutely calculating.After the Soviets successfully suppressed the revolution, Király fled to the United States through Austria to avoid capture.

He was, however, sentenced to death in absentia back in the Soviet Union (a fate which other revolutionary leaders like Nagy did not escape).

The supervisor for his dissertation was Robert A. Kann, an Austrian-born historian at Rutgers University who spent several years as a visiting professor at Columbia.

Stanley B. Winters and Joseph Held (Boulder: East European quarterly; distributed by Columbia University Press, 1975).

He moved back to Hungary later that year, and was elected to the Hungarian National Assembly, representing his birthplace Kaposvár.

He served from May–November 1990 as an independent deputy, then joined the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ) parliamentary group,[2][6] later assuming the role of a government adviser.