[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 106 (Tuesday, June 27, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9192-S9194]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                              VACLAV HAVEL

 Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, earlier this month, Vaclav Havel, 
President of the Czech Republic, spoke at a luncheon in his honor at 
the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. President Havel spoke eloquently 
about President Kennedy's New Frontier and the hopes it inspired in his 
own country and among peoples throughout the world. He quoted the 
famous words of President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, ``Ask not what 
your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.'' He 
spoke as well of our failure to live up to those ideals, and of the 
importance of continuing to strive for them. ``What we can never 
relinquish is hope,'' he said.
  Present in the audience at the Kennedy Library to hear these 
inspiring words were many members of the Masaryk club in Boston, a 
nonprofit cultural and social organization for Americans of Czech or 
Slovak ethnic background. President Havel's own personal courage in 
leading his country to freedom and democracy after the fall of the 
Berlin Wall made his visit to Boston an especially moving occasion for 
them.
  I believe President Havel's eloquent address will be of interest to 
all my colleagues in the Senate. I ask that it be printed in the 
Record, along with Senator Kennedy's introduction of President Havel.
                  Remarks of Senator Edward M. Kennedy

       I want to thank Paul Kirk for that generous introduction. 
     Everyone in the Kennedy family and everyone associated with 
     President Kennedy's Library is proud of Paul and his 
     outstanding leadership as Chairman of the Library Foundation.
       I also want to thank John Cullinane for his effective role 
     in our Distinguished Foreign Visitors Program. John has been 
     a dear friend to our family for many years, and we are 
     grateful for all he's done for Jack's Library.
       Today is a special day for the Library, and we are 
     delighted that our guest of honor could be here.
       The ties that bind the United States and the Czech people 
     go back many years. We're proud to have with us today members 
     of Boston's Masaryk Club, named for the great founder of 
     modern Czechoslovakia.
       In 1918, at the end of World War I and the collapse of the 
     Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new independent nation of 
     Czechoslovakia was born. Thomas Masaryk drafted 

[[Page S 9193]]
     its Declaration of Independence, and he used America's Declaration of 
     Independence as his model. He adopted the red, white and blue 
     colors of our flag for the Czech flag and he declared the 
     birth of the new nation. At the time, he was in Pittsburgh, 
     Pennsylvania, seeking support for his native land, a true 
     patriot for his people.
       Masaryk's Declaration of Independence had a fascinating 
     subsequent history. Masaryk died in 1937, and left the 
     document to his private secretary, who gave it to the Library 
     of Congress for safe keeping, until it could one day be 
     returned to a free Czechoslovakia
       When I first met President Havel in 1990, the Berlin Wall 
     had been down for several months, and I mentioned to him that 
     it might
      be time to return the document to Czechoslovakia. But 
     Czechoslovakia's democracy was still very new, and it's 
     future was uncertain. So President Havel thought is best 
     for the document to remain at the Library of Congress a 
     little longer. In 1991, with democracy firmly established, 
     it was a great honor and privilege for all of us in 
     Congress to return that historic document to President 
     Havel and the people of Czechoslovakia.
       As all of us know, our guest of honor has had an 
     extraordinary and very inspiring career. As a student in the 
     1950's in Prague, he was attracted to the theater. After 
     completing his compulsory military service, he started work 
     for an avant-garde theater company as a stagehand and 
     electrician. With his talent for writing and his strong sense 
     of the stage, he quickly rose to the position of manuscript 
     reader, and then resident playwright.
       His rise coincided with the increasing political thaw in 
     his country in the 1960's, and he became well-known for his 
     vivid plays about the dehumanizing and repressive bureaucracy 
     of communist regimes.
       President Havel's relationship with the Kennedy family goes 
     back to 1968, when he visited the United States in connection 
     with the first American production of one of his most famous 
     plays. Due to restrictions on visitors from Iron Curtain 
     countries at the time, his visa limited him to New York City. 
     His friends in the literary and theater community contacted 
     Senator Robert Kennedy, and, with Bobby's help, President 
     Havel was given permission to visit Washington.
       But the thaw in Czechoslovakia was only temporary, and the 
     Soviet invasion of 1968 ended the famous Prague Spring. 
     President Havel's works were banned and his passport was 
     confiscated.
       Repression and harassment followed. In 1975, after his 
     production of ``The Beggar's Opera,'' even the members of his 
     theater audiences became targets of police harassment.
       But President Havel never wavered. He did not remain silent 
     or flee the country during the repressive Communist rule. He 
     was forced to take menial jobs, but he continued writing, 
     speaking out for human rights, and standing up against the 
     Communist dictatorship.
       In 1977, he became a leader of Charter 77, a manifesto 
     signed by hundreds of artists and intellectuals protesting 
     the government's refusal to abide by the Helsinki Agreement 
     on Civil and Political Rights. For his continuing courage, he 
     was jailed several different times, and spent five years in 
     prison.
       In his visit to this country in 1990, President Havel told 
     me that during those dark years in prison, the most important 
     and
      most sustaining book he had read was ``Profiles in Courage'' 
     by President Kennedy.
       After the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Havel became 
     the leader of the Civic Forum, an organization of groups 
     opposed to the Communist Government. In November 1989, 
     massive crowds gathered in Wenceslas Square to challenge that 
     government and there was real dangers of violence. President 
     Havel showed great leadership in bringing about a peaceful 
     transition. It was called the Velvet Resolution, and in 
     December he became the first president of the new, free 
     Czechoslovakia.
       In 1993, when Czechoslovakia peacefully split into two 
     independent nations, he became the first President of the new 
     Czech Republic.
       During President Havel's earlier visit, we happened to be 
     together at a large dinner party in his honor. As it was 
     ending, I mentioned that one of the most beautiful and moving 
     places to visit in Washington was the Lincoln Memorial at 
     night. He was intrigued, and so we drove over there together. 
     I read out loud the beautiful words inscribed on the walls--
     the text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and his Second 
     Inaugural Address--and his interpreter translated them for 
     President Havel.
       It was a deeply moving few moments. He wrote down several 
     of the great phrases, and he turned to me and said, ``I am 
     not able to understand the language, but I can understand the 
     poetry.''
       Finally, I want to quote briefly from some of President 
     Havel's own words, describing his life. Here is what he said: 
     ``You do not become a `dissent' just because you decide one 
     day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into 
     it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a 
     complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of 
     the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict 
     with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and 
     ends with being branded an enemy of society.''
       But that label could not stick. No friend of freedom can be 
     an enemy of society. President Havel's heroic opposition to 
     repression won him many admirers throughout the world, 
     including the great Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett. In 
     1982, in a unique political action, Beckett dedicated a play 
     to Havel, about the suffering of a martyr in an oppressive 
     country.
       I know that President Havel regards that as one of the 
     finest tributes he has ever received, and he eminently 
     deserved it. Through many years of hardship and repression, 
     he kept the idea of freedom alive, and he successfully led 
     his people to it.
       As Robert Kennedy said, ``Each time a man stands up for an 
     ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out 
     against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and 
     crossing each other from a million different centers of 
     energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can 
     sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and 
     resistance.''
       Those words eloquently describe the extraordinary life of 
     our guest of honor and the ripples of hope he has set forth 
     across the world. He is a symbol of the aspirations of 
     peoples everywhere for liberty and an end to oppression.
       I am honored to introduce him now, a man for all seasons, 
     an inspiring leader for our times, President Havel of the 
     Czech Republic.
                                                                    ____

                        Remarks of Vaclav Havel

       Dear Mr. Senator, dear guests, the name of the President 
     for whom this library is named, your name, Mr. Senator, and 
     the name of your family, evokes as powerful an echo as few 
     other names do. For several generations, this name has been 
     inseparably linked with the history of Boston, the 
     Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the United States of America 
     and, indeed, of the whole world.
       For me and many others, this name is primarily linked with 
     a period which had profoundly influenced a whole generation 
     in various parts of the world, a period whose aftereffects we 
     are still feeling today. I am speaking, of course, about the 
     sixties. I will never forget my sense of elation at the 
     election of President Kennedy. I will never forget my sense 
     of shock at the news of his assassination. It was then that I 
     realized that there are dark forces operating in the human 
     nature and in the world at large. And I will never forget the 
     few weeks I spent in the United States at the end of the 
     sixties, my own taste of the unrepeatable atmosphere of the 
     times in this country.
       The historical dimensions of a decade do not always 
     coincide with its chronological dimensions. The sixties began 
     right on time in 1960, on a wave of hope with the election of 
     your brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the 35th President of 
     the United States. The same sixties, however, ended 
     prematurely in the chaos and disillusion of 1968, with the 
     student riots in Paris, the assassination of your brother 
     Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, the demonstrations against the 
     war in Vietnam in Washington, and with the invasion of 
     Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact. What remained of the 
     sixties chronologically after that, did not really belong 
     there. Even the last joyful moment of the decade, the landing 
     of Man on the Moon ``before the decade was out,'' seemed to 
     be a mere legacy of the late President who had turned the 
     eyes of the nation toward the New Frontier but was murdered 
     before he could witness the breakthrough.
       Few decades in the history of mankind have been the focus 
     of so much energy, joy and hope as well as of so much pain, 
     bitterness and disappointment. It is then no wonder that few 
     decades have left behind a legacy so controversial. It is 
     hard to imagine a more suitable place for a small reflection 
     on this legacy and what it might mean today than the Kennedy 
     library.
       From the very beginning of the sixties we hear the great 
     call of the dead President for a new step forward, for 
     courage and personal responsibility: ``Ask not what your 
     country can do for you--ask what you can do for your 
     country.'' In the course of the sixties the civil rights 
     movement triumphed and eliminated much of the heavy burden of 
     the past. The turmoil of the sixties destroyed the barriers 
     between the sexes and opened a new realm of freedom--sexual 
     freedom. The creative impulse of the sixties produced an 
     unprecedented number of original works in literature, music 
     and arts. The technological progress, accelerated by the 
     effort to conquer the space, set off an information 
     revolution whose fruit we are in full extent reaping only 
     today. In the communist part of the world the end of the 
     decade witnessed an outburst of popular will against the 
     absurdity of the totalitarian dictatorship in Czechoslovakia.
       If it all stayed at that, we would now be remembering the 
     sixties as a golden age of mankind. However, the hope that 
     had ushered it in remained largely unfulfilled. The removal 
     of barriers did not automatically bring about universal 
     prosperity or universal harmony. A large part of the creative 
     impulse of the times dissipated in disillusion or succumbed 
     to commercial interests. The newfound individual freedom 
     spent itself in hedonism, arbitrariness and in drugs. 
     Technological progress also helped to build a new generation 
     of ever more destructive weapons which were prevented from 
     being used only by the certainty of mutually assured 
     destruction. And the Czechoslovak rebellion against 
     totalitarianism collapsed, in part because of the ambivalence 
     of its efforts, under the avalanche of half a million troops 
     of occupation while the rest of the world could only stand by 
     and watch.

[[Page S 9194]]

       It would be too simple to attribute the failure of our 
     hopes at the time only to unfavorable circumstances, to 
     assassins or to the military might of the totalitarian 
     regime. It would be equally simple to say that our hopes had 
     been false from the very beginning, that they were nothing 
     more than a result of the euphoria of youth or inexperience.
       Our hopes did not come true because, as many times before 
     in history, we failed to heed that call for personal 
     responsibility and for a service to common interests. The 
     opportunity to work together for the common good gradually 
     degenerated into a service to group interests, sectarian 
     interests and ultimately purely individual interests. The 
     loving sixties were followed by the selfish eighties.
       I do not think we should tear our garments here as if this 
     were some exceptional and unforgivable failure. The service 
     to one's own interests, the tendency to use one's own 
     potential for one's own good is an inseparable part of human 
     nature and the motivation which ultimately drives the world 
     forward. At the same time it is equally an inseparable part 
     of human nature to love and be loved, to be capable of 
     solidarity, altruism, even of self-sacrifice. Some scientists 
     like E. O. Wilson and some theologians think of both these 
     tendencies as being a part of a single elementary life force. 
     The question of a talmudistic scholar: ``If I am not for 
     myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, who 
     am I?'' still demands an answer.
       Today we are all thirty years older and hopefully--though 
     this is far from certain--wiser. Much of that crazy decade we 
     remember with a smile and sometimes even with some 
     embarrassment. Much of that decade we can relinquish as 
     unrepeatable, mistaken or misconceived. What we can never 
     relinquish is hope.
     

                          ____________________