Debate began late in the day on August 14, the Hungarian representative speaking first. He painted a depressing picture of the suffering already being visited on his kinsmen in Slovakia, including the loss of property, jobs, schools, pensions, and voting privileges. Although acknowledging that his country had supported Germany during the war, he denied that it had played a meaningful role in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia or in triggering the conflict. He argued that Hitler’s cynical prewar manipulation of minority rights did not justify their elimination, citing, as an example, the need to safeguard Jews. Summing up, the Hungarian urged the conference to avoid hasty action and send, instead, an international team of experts to review the situation. As an added jab, he drew a contrast between the narrow-minded policies of the current Czechoslovak government and the noble ideals of T. G. Masaryk. When, after speaking for three hours, he finished, the conference adjourned for the night.*
The Czechoslovaks had to prepare a response. Clementis was better versed in the issue than others in the delegation but, as a Slovak, might appear biased. My father and his colleagues decided that the answer should be given by our most persuasive orator, Jan Masaryk. The drawback was that Masaryk had not studied the details of the subject and, to the extent he had, voiced private sympathy for the Hungarians. The delegation met with him at 9 p.m. at the Hotel Athenée to underline the points for emphasis the following morning. A committee was constituted to prepare a draft. My father remembered:
At two a.m. Masaryk entered our room. “Well, boys,” he said, “let’s have a look at what you have produced and what you order me to say.” He glanced through our painstakingly prepared text, paused for a second or two, and then said, with a disarming smile, “It’s wonderful; you are all political scientists of great caliber; the whole delegation is composed of Talleyrands. But for God’s sake don’t ask me to use all these highbrow terms. I could not pronounce them. I would blush. Why don’t we speak straight from our shoulders?”
He retired to his room and started to write. He finished at five; the text was retyped and mimeographed. At ten Masaryk took the floor. Members of the delegation pulled out their copies in order to follow his words. To their amazement, Masaryk left his text in his pocket and delivered one of his greatest speeches.
This anecdote says more about Masaryk (and my father’s admiration for him) than it does about the goal of expelling Hungarians from their homes. The foreign minister did indeed serve up a fine speech, but he neglected to articulate the Czechoslovak position. Instead, he said, “Like my country, I am a very poor hater,” and expressed his desire for peace. He asked the delegates to remember that the Hungarians had complained constantly even when, under the republic, they had enjoyed the rights they were now upset about losing. The Czechoslovaks, said Masaryk, had done their best to champion minority protections and been betrayed for their trouble. No one could fairly blame them for being angry.
Surprisingly, the foreign minister stopped there. He made no effort to defend the involuntary expulsion of Hungarians and, as to the statistics cited by the opposing spokesman, said only that “I am not going to deal with them today.” When the Czechoslovak amendment came up for decision five weeks later, the Americans asked that it be referred to a subcommittee “for further study,” a polite way of killing it. Rather than push the matter to a vote, Masaryk surrendered in what the ordinarily neutral U.S. note taker referred to as “an extremely moving speech.” Once again, Masaryk lamented how difficult it was for him to hate.
The peace conference was not a total success for Czechoslovakia, but there were some benefits for the Korbels. My father and Clementis returned from France with a pair of identical black cocker spaniel puppies. We named ours Era. I don’t know why—perhaps my parents felt that we were entering a new one.
JAN MASARYK FLEW directly from the peace conference to Long Island to participate in the second session of the United Nations, held at Lake Success, its temporary headquarters. While in New York, he kept company with a lady friend, the American author Marcia Davenport, who appealed to his interest in music (her mother, Alma Gluck, was a famed lyric soprano), his appetite (she was a superb cook), and his intelligence (she had, after all, graduated from Wellesley). The two had been together off and on since their first meeting, at a New York dinner party in 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbor. As a writer, the forty-three-year-old Davenport was best known for her favorably reviewed biography of Mozart and for a novel, The Valley of Decision, just made into a movie with Gregory Peck.
She wrote of that time that Masaryk felt torn apart by Cold War politics, the social demands of his position, and the burden of trying to live up to his father’s name. She credited her friend with “intuitive diplomatic skill” but acknowledged that he derived no pleasure from the hectic interplay of politics. “Left to himself,” she said, “he would have been happy just to play the piano.” The couple spent the holidays between 1946 and 1947 at a borrowed farm in Florida, amid a grove of citrus trees and the barnyard chatter of what Masaryk referred to as “dooks.” The period gave the foreign minister a rare opportunity to escape from the conflicting advice he had been receiving and from the pressures that were building both around and inside him. One day, in a conversation with Davenport, he vented his contempt for the kind of nationalist cant that had dominated the Paris Peace Conference and that had been so present in nearly every stage of his country’s history:
You’re no more full-blooded what you think you are than I am. I must be Jewish somewhere, though the presentable story doesn’t say so. And you! How the hell do you know who you are?
I don’t.
And neither does anyone else who comes as far back as he can tell, from the parts of Europe that were the battlegrounds of the Napoleonic wars. You think you have no Czech ancestry. You’re wrong. Some forefather of yours came through there as a conscript in the Russian armies, and if he didn’t leave a souvenir on some local slečna, then it was the other way round and some Czech in the Austrian army had a bit of fun with some pretty girl in Galicia whom they married off to your great-grandfather. You’re like everybody else whose people fled to America in the eighties and nineties—all the villages and synagogues with the family records were burnt up in the pogroms. Nobody knows anything. . . . As for the nobility, with . . . their thousand-year genealogies; there you get into the fun-and-games department. . . . My father was the son of a Slovak coachman and a Moravian housemaid, who were serfs. I can’t prove what the blood of their parents was and neither can anybody else.
27
Struggle for a Nation’s Soul
Spring 1947. The elections the previous May had given the Communists hope that they could indeed put an end to democracy through democratic means. What better way to answer Western critics than to show that Marxism actually did mirror the popular will? Gottwald insisted that the Russians would abide by their promise not to interfere in the country’s internal affairs—but then, so far there had been no need.
To Beneš, the paramount goal was preserving his country. If that meant deferring to the Soviets on foreign policy, it was a burden he would bear. Like T. G. Masaryk before him, he knew that time would be required for political institutions to mature and for party leaders to learn how to submerge their differences for the common good. He expected the months ahead to be a period of testing as candidates prepared for the next round of elections, planned for the spring of 1948. The Communists sought to claim an absolute majority. The democrats were determined to prevent that and to do better themselves.
As so often happens, well-laid political plans had to be adjusted in light of unforeseen economic changes, in this case provoked by the weather. Weeks of hot, rainless days caused panic among farmers, drove food prices up, and created the prospect of a harvest of less than half its normal abundance. Help was needed, so America’s announced plan for the reconstructio
n of all Europe was greeted with enthusiasm. The outlines of the program were described by U.S. secretary of state George Marshall during a commencement speech at Harvard. He put forward not an aid package so much as a generous and coordinated system of loans to help Europe recover its footing. Invitations were sent to capitals in every part of the continent, including the Soviet Union. A preliminary meeting took place at the end of June at which the Russian foreign minister, Molotov, was present along with some one hundred advisers. The French government then asked twenty-two countries to attend a follow-up conference in mid-July. The question of the moment became: would the nations of Central Europe take part in America’s grand scheme?
In a cabinet meeting on July 4, Jan Masaryk argued that U.S. loans could help to refloat the economy until farm conditions improved and Czechoslovak industry recovered. He foresaw no diplomatic obstacles; the Poles and Romanians intended to participate, and the Soviets hadn’t objected. He suggested that the country send an ambassador to the Paris briefing to find out what the Americans were offering and with what conditions. Even Gottwald agreed with this recommendation; the vote was unanimous.
While the cabinet was deliberating in Prague, my family was vacationing in Slovenia, where Tito and his senior advisers were relaxing as well. In that casual setting, my father compared notes with the Yugoslavs, who said that their country—which was also hurting economically—would send a delegation to the Paris conference. Two days later, my father was informed that the decision had been reversed; Yugoslavia would not participate. Why? According to Tito, Soviet pressure had had nothing to do with the switch; he simply didn’t trust the Americans. My father thought the second half of that statement might be plausible, but the first half was plainly false.
By this time Gottwald, Masaryk, and Drtina were in Moscow to consult on a proposed treaty between Czechoslovakia and France. The trio was a fair representation of a divided government: Gottwald, the committed Communist; Drtina, the fervent democrat; and Masaryk, the soulful humanitarian with little taste for confrontation. The meeting began in the middle of the night, as sessions with Russian leaders typically do. Stalin was amiable but unyielding. The Marshall Plan, he declared, was not a program to rebuild Europe but a device to attack him. “If you go to Paris,” he warned, “you will prove that you wish to . . . isolate the Soviet Union.” Masaryk said that he saw nothing in the plan to harm the USSR and that his own country was highly dependent on imports from the West. “We need financial credits to reinvigorate our industrial base.”
The Soviet leader rose and motioned for the others to follow. He pointed to a map of Europe spread out on his desk. “Look at your country and look at Germany,” he said. “We are the only ones who can protect you from the resurgence of German power. Why would you want to break your treaty with us, the treaty Beneš made in 1943?” That question, with its thinly veiled threat, made further discussion academic. Postwar Czechoslovakia had nothing to fear from Germany, but the country’s people, barely two years after V-E Day, feared little else. No politician could stand against that tide. To salve any hard feelings, Stalin offered to sell the Czechoslovaks a large quantity of desperately needed wheat.
That night in Moscow, Drtina went to the theater while Masaryk retreated glumly to his room. Both men knew that the real issue had little to do with economics and everything to do with power politics. Stalin was determined to keep the United States out of what he considered to be his sphere of control. Neither Czechoslovakia nor any other country in Central or Eastern Europe could participate in Secretary Marshall’s plan without defying the Kremlin; that they felt unable to do. Reluctantly, the two men awoke the next morning and called the cabinet in Prague to recommend a reversal of the decision to send a representative to Paris.
Returning home, Masaryk was asked by Marcia Davenport how he had been treated by Stalin. “Oh, he’s very gracious,” came the reply. “He’d kill me if he could. But very gracious.”
AMERICAN DIPLOMATS OFTEN expressed their frustration that Beneš and Masaryk, though genuine democrats, made little visible effort to wriggle free of the Soviet hook. Beneš countered that the United States had made the job more difficult by siding with Hungary at the Paris Peace Conference. Masaryk claimed that the only goal that mattered was preventing the Soviets from interfering in Czechoslovakia’s internal affairs. Why should Washington care if his government cast anti-U.S. votes at the United Nations? Such votes rarely affected the outcome, while his country would need time if it were to outlast the Communists and regain its status as an independent democracy. He expressed sorrow that, due to budget cuts, Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt was not making a more vigorous effort through aid, cultural exchanges, and propaganda to compete with the Soviets for popular affection.
The State Department did not agree that Czechoslovakia’s hostile voting pattern was meaningless, nor was it impressed by the government’s knuckling under with respect to the Marshall Plan. Cables from Steinhardt show an embassy primarily concerned with curbing anti-American press coverage and securing compensation for U.S. investors who had a financial stake in nationalized properties. The ambassador opposed providing economic assistance because it might help the Communists and because he thought that a hard line would cause the “Czechos,” as he called them, to recognize their need for the West more fully. Steinhardt acknowledged Czechoslovakia’s vulnerability to a long list of Soviet pressure points, including control of strategic ports, media dominance, influence within the trade unions, and the fact that the country was almost surrounded by Communist regimes. But instead of developing a plan to bolster the moderates, the embassy was content to sit on the sidelines and snipe.
This lack of initiative was doubly regrettable because Steinhardt had considerable clout in Washington. Once a successful Wall Street lawyer, his generous financial contributions had paved the way to a second career as a diplomat, where he had acquired a reputation as a hard-driving troubleshooter. His attitude toward the Czechoslovaks, however, was condescending; he described them as “little people, inclined to double-talk [and] more adept in opposition than when . . . in charge.” To his credit, he made two useful suggestions: that the United States—like the USSR—establish a consulate in Bratislava; and that it publish the messages between Eisenhower and Soviet military leaders prior to Prague’s liberation, thus showing that it was at Russian insistence that U.S. troops had remained in Plzeň. The Truman administration responded to these ideas with inexcusable tardiness. The Bratislava consulate did not begin operating until March 1948, after the Communist coup. The exculpatory military documents were released in May 1949—far too late to make a difference.
MY BROTHER, JOHN (officially Jan), was born in Belgrade on January 15, 1947. He was a handsome child with a round, ruddy face and, when very young, longish hair. In the spirit of true confession, I can now admit that I used his baby picture in my high school yearbook, because whatever pictures there might have been of me had failed to survive all the packing and unpacking of our family luggage.
John Korbel
In the spring, I went with my father to Czechoslovakia, where he would participate in the twentieth anniversary of his high school graduation. We traveled by car, just the two of us. I loved having him all to myself, listening to stories about his school days and how he had courted my mother; I didn’t mind that the trip seemed to last forever. It was the first time that I had seen Kyšperk and Kostelec nad Orlicí, the villages where my parents had been born, enjoyed their ch
ildhoods, and fallen in love. I was surprised to see how small the towns were, even compared to Walton-on-Thames. We visited the house in which my father had grown up, his old high school, and the stationery store where he had purchased notebooks and pencils long before. There was also a candy shop whose sign proclaimed proudly, “Serving Kostelec and the Whole Vicinity,” which was not, in truth, much of a boast. We stayed in Kostelec at the house of a family friend on the same street where my mother had lived; our host offered me a glass of goat’s milk that I was too polite to refuse—good training for the afternoon in 1998 when, as secretary of state, I would be treated in Mongolia to a bowl of fermented mare’s milk.
My time in Belgrade felt like an adventure but was, on occasion, a lonely one. The Jankovics, whom we had known before the war, were the only Yugoslav family with whom we spent time regularly. They had a little boy, Nidza, who was a few months older than my sister, then four. Mr. Jankovic was a journalist who was lively company and who helped my father to stay informed about what was going on in Belgrade. We took weekend hikes with them to Kalemegdan, the massive ancient fort perched on a bluff where the Sava flows into the Danube. The Jankovics came to our house for Saint Nicholas Day and our Christmas, and we went with them to the Greek Orthodox holiday services. Those celebrations took place despite the fact that, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, there were no decorations in the streets, no carols on the radio, no days off for workers, or any official acknowledgment of the season. In Czechoslovakia, the Communists did not yet feel strong enough to kill Christmas; in Yugoslavia, they had already tried.
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