Capitol Hill Event Commemorates Vaclav Havel’s Historic 1990 Speech to a Joint Session of Congress

by Tom Dine, AFoCR President

In commemoration of newly elected President Vaclav Havel's memorable speech to  a joint session of the United States Congress on February 21, 1990, a group of prominent Czechs and Americans gathered in the U.S. Capitol last week to pay homage not only to Mr. Havel, but to the poetic vision of his speech, to comment on the state of US-Czech relations 20 years later, and to look at future challenges.

First the speech.  To reread it and remember the international context in which it was given is to glory in its beauty and inspiration at that moment in time.  Havel reminded his distinguished American audience that he had been arrested by his Communist detractors four months earlier in Prague; that the  playwright had been elected President a month after that last incarceration; that the Berlin Wall had come down in November; and the Soviet Union still existed with 18,000 of its troops occupying re-democratized Czechoslovakia.  The President recounted the bipolar terms of the world -- one a defender of freedom, the other a source of nightmares.  "(R)evolutionary changes will enable us to escape from the antiquated straitjacket of this bipolar world and to enter at last into an era of multi-polarity." The memory of that short historical period left the Capitol Hill audience last week breathless.

In his speech, Havel posed a most profound question to the Senators and Representatives—and to America: "I often hear the question how can the United States of America help us today?  My reply is paradoxical...You can help us most of all if you help the Soviet Union on its....complicated road to democracy."  The Russians today, as we know, have not gone very far down that road and it remains a complicated, indeed troubling place, this point made by each of the panelists participating in the program organized by the Czech Embassy in Washington DC.

Havel ended his 1990 speech promising that his nation would "face up honestly to its co-responsibility....for its reprehensible passivity" in years past.  The next time, he stated, we will fight for our freedom.  Never again!

Second the panels.  Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, calling the speech a "great moment," chaired two panels.  In the first panel former Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg recounted what it was like to have been in President Havel's traveling party to America.  It was close to chaos.  "We were amateurs, we were a gang of friends" who had suddenly thrown the Communists out of power.  Havel, he said, had no well-defined entourage; in fact he wrote the speech himself. After returning to Prague, Schwarzenberg became the new President's chef du cabinet.  Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor, dissected Havel's speech, particularly those parts having to do with the still visible Soviets, and called Havel's presentation to Congress "humanistic."

The second panel consisted of close Havel confidant and currently the Czech Republic's Ambassador to the United Nations Martin Palouš and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.  Palouš stressed what Schwarzenberg remembered, "On the trip to Washington, "we were blissfully ignorant of diplomacy and administration."  He mused that Havel would give a different speech today because the times have changed dramatically.  Albright recalled her earliest contact with Havel, in which he confusingly referred to her as "Mrs. Fulbright". 

Each of the panelists urged a revitalized NATO, more trans-Atlantic contacts between those living in Central Europe and the people of the U.S. today and in the years ahead.  Albright in particular advocated that Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and others see themselves as "Europeans," not from Middle Europe and not victims of their own history.