Czech Hero: Remembering Havel

Each year at Christmas, my wife and I reserve special pride of place for the "official" Charter 77 ornament that Olga Havlova, Vaclav Havel's wife and fellow dissident (who died of cancer in 1996) gave me one December afternoon in 1986, when I was visiting the Havels in their closely watched apartment overlooking the Vltava River in Prague.

I was there to get one of my periodic updates on the imprisonments, trials and acts of oppression which the Stalinist Husak regime continually perpetrated against democratic activists, human-rights advocates, Catholics, Baptists, Jews, jazz composers, painters and just ordinary citizens who exercised independence in anything whatever. The "chartists" were distributing the ornament that year in hopes that its widespread presence in Czechoslovakia would manifest in a quiet way "the power of the powerless," which was for Havel both a doctrine and a literary accomplishment (his 1979 essay by that name will be, I predict, his most lasting work).

My family and I spent six years of our Foreign Service career in Prague, from 1977 to 1980 and from 1985 to 1988. During both of those tours of duty, I came to know Havel well.

I first visited him at his country hideaway during one of his brief respites from imprisonment in 1978. The house was surrounded by those bulbous old Tatra limousines, known as "roaches," which the Statni tajemni bezpecnost (the Czechoslovak equivalent of the KGB) habitually drove. We discussed the formation of the Výbor na obranu nespravedlivì stíhaných (VONS, as it came to be known) — the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, which documented each act of oppression and injustice that the Charter and its allies could discern and brought to the attention of a wider world.

Neither prison nor police could quiet the voices of Havel and his many friends, and I continued to encounter him and to work with him. Occasionally, the police would slash my tires or gently ram my car from the rear. Often, they would leave muddy footprints on our carpets or cigarette butts in our toilets to let us know they could penetrate our house.

Havel, Father Vaclav Maly (now a bishop but then a forced-labor coal stoker), reform-Marxist Jiri Dienstbier (later Czechoslovak Foreign Minister), Shakespeare scholar Zdenek Urbanek (who had broad ties among the country's academic and Jewish populations) and many others held together a coalition of the oppressed with civil libertarian, religious, reform-Marxist and cultural wings. (For Czechoslovak purposes at that time, "reform Marxist" often meant the heirs of the Dubcek era, of the "Prague Spring" of 1968.)

This broad alliance of persons and interests, who disagreed on at least as much as they agreed upon, gave the Czechoslovak dissident movement breadth and staying power. It forced the regime to do more than chase and imprison, because it was large enough that Western governments, which needed also to deal with the regime, could themselves not ignore it.

During the late 1980s, after Havel had effectively been released from prison, our extremely well-connected Ambassador, William Luers, invited American luminaries at frequent and regular intervals: Kay Graham, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen Spender, Pat Moynihan, Walter Cronkite. At the vast ambassadorial residence, former home of the Jewish Pecek family whom Hitler drove from the country, Luers would engage the party elite and officialdom in dialogue with these visitors.

Because he could not invite dissidents to the residence, my wife Karla and I would hold what we called "the real dinner" at our edge-of-Prague home the succeeding evening, inviting Havel, Maly, Dienstbier, Urbanek and many others — along with an outside contingent of secret police. The word about human rights got out.

Havel's death caught us by surprise. In the midst of much else in life, it was profoundly saddening. A particular light went out. It was a light that burned best when it was not imprisoned by ideology, not enslaved by structure or partisanship. That was its staying power. The other day a friend sent me a piece by a protagonist of the American left decrying Havel's continuing work with Catholics and American politicians while he was the Czechoslovak and then Czech President. The blogger clearly adhered to the view that an ideologically correct Havel would have disassociated himself from such moral blackguards as Bush, Clinton or John Paul II.

I reflected how skeptically American conservatives, including high officials, viewed Havel's insistence on the rights of minorities, small countries and the poor. Havel had no truck with ideology. He championed the spirit and the rights of the individual, especially of the individual conscience.

That is why we at the First Freedom Center honored him in 2006 with our International First Freedom Award. (Unable to travel because of his frail health, he was with us at the dinner via video.) We, who operate on the basis of Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, saw in Havel's bright beacon on the rights of conscience a kindred endeavor.

As much as the connection may be apt, however, I find myself this week reflecting on how different are the worlds of Virginia and Prague. Havel was aware that it is those whose rights have been denied who most feel the call of freedom. We are so fortunate that, for hundreds of years now, our rights of conscience have been so safe.

To be sure, African slaves in Virginia had no access to the pulpit and were denied even the sacrament of marriage. But there is little comparison between Richmond in 2011 and the dark, terrifying beauty of Prague in the late 1970s. Can people who have not tasted oppression, one often asks, ever really understand how important it is to protect and enliven the fabric of rights?

Whatever the challenge of our advantageous precincts, it remains the First Freedom Center's mission to keep the beacon of freedom bright. Our own and others' efforts will be the poorer, however, because a great light went out in a tiny town in the Giant Mountains of northern Bohemia on December 18.