The Persistence of Hope: Vaclav Havel

Heroism is essential to politics. We live for the moment when someone stands up in Teddy Roosevelt’s proverbial dusty arena and we recognize, with astonishment, that here is a person prepared to take risks, tell us what we don’t want to hear, face possible defeat for a principle, tackle insuperable odds, and by doing so, show us that politics need be not just the art of the possible, but the art of the impossible.

We appear bereft of heroes everywhere these days, but particularly so in the political world. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are sadly dispiriting in their conduct and example. The Arab Spring appears to have consumed (or forgotten) the leaders who rose up in the Cairo streets, with power now resting in the hands of yet another former military man, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. In Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi has learned that it may actually be easier to be a secular saint than a politician. There are political heroes aplenty in China, but many of them are in jail, and those who remain free are largely unknown or silenced, in the west. In Russia, heroic resistance to tyranny survives in a rag-tag collective of voices and nongovernmental organizations now suffering persecution; elsewhere, the political elites of Europe are riding in Putin’s Zil, even if they have no idea where he is taking them (back to the Cold War-inspired totalitarian future, it seems). Angela Merkel inspires respect for technocratic competence, not for courage; François Hollande struggles to convey authority, much less the shreds of credibility; and still more others seem content to be imitations of presidents and prime ministers, not actually be the, unyielding, decisive thing itself. As for Barack Obama, he appears to have had courage in abundance once, when he launched that “improbable” bid for the presidency all those years ago in 2008. Now, as his prudence and circumspection are occasionally evidenced, we also ask, where has his audacity gone? The 2016 model seems nothing more than a man struggling to secure a checkered legacy, eager to run out the clock of his final term.

To find courage in the public realm, to remember what it can do to transform our hopes for politics itself, we don’t actually have to go to go too far back in history to 1989 and 1990. The times demanded bravery, and leaders aplenty rose to the occasion. Gorbachev showed courage in not using force to hold the Soviet empire together. Mandela’s toughness and magnanimity guided South Africa from apartheid to black majority rule without the mass bloodshed that could have happened. In Poland, the shipyard worker Lech Wałęsa led his country to freedom. In Czechoslovakia, a playwright named Václav Havel defied imprisonment and intimidation to become the president of a free country – an almost romantic notion which seems concocted from one of his own surreal productions.

Relatively recent Havel biographies allows us to take the measure of his heroism in a new and complicated way. It helps us to contemplate the mystery of courage—why, in the case of Havel, bravery managed to take command of such a mild, unassuming, inward intellectual, and such a deeply flawed human being. The surprises in these depictions often includes a particular kind of photograph of the subject: Havel is disheveled, in rumpled clothing, with unkempt hair. He looks as if he has either just grumpily awoken from a nap, or has been roused from deep concentration at writing. Here is a man at bay, tired, disconsolate, at a loss for words—a man thinking, What the hell has happened to me?

Seeing a hero in disarray delivers a jolt. We’d much prefer to remember the triumphant images of a vanished era, when Havel spoke to a thronged Wenceslas Square in November 1989, when the “power of the powerless” propelled him from prison to the presidency. For those in my generation, who came of age in the 80’s and 90’s, he was among those who defined what it was “to live in truth,” as he put it—what it was to wield political power without, or so it appeared, being destroyed by it.

We tend to think of heroism as mysteriously individual, but Havel’s life teaches us that it can be a social virtue.

The curtain of officialdom must be withdrawn to reveal the Havel whom his closest associates knew and sometimes (in his low moments) had to endure. Gradually a portrait comes into focus of a chain-smoking, often hungover, sometimes debauched, frequently strung-out mortal who struggled with the demands of power and with an untidy personal life. We learn that he constantly betrayed his wife, Olga, the brave woman he considered his moral north star. He tried to square this circle by confessing everything, if not before then after his serial desertions. Olga endured his infidelities in silence, occasionally taking a lover of her own and ultimately forging an independent public persona as Czechoslovakia’s greatly admired first lady. Not long after she died in 1996, Havel shocked many admirers by marrying the young actress who had been his mistress all through Olga’s final illness.

Therein lies another facet of heroic mythology: heroes inevitably disappoint. What makes Havel so interesting is that he disappointed himself. No one was a more ruthless judge of his own foibles, both personal and political. The country he wanted to hold together shattered during his presidential tenure, irrevocably split into the Czech and Slovak Republics, and its political culture strayed far from his moral convictions about public life. Any reckoning with Havel’s trajectory is also a reckoning with an entire generation of Eastern European dissidents, the revolution they led, and the havoc that history has wrought on their dreams.

Born into the ruling elite of Masaryk’s pre World War Two’s Czechoslovakia, the son of a developer who built modern villas to the bourgeoisie, Havel always treated with upper class disdain his Communist persecutors, seeing them as callow usurpers. His privileged birth also helps explain his famous politeness, and something less obvious as well: his learned helplessness, which his biographers identify as the trait that Havel used - intentionally or not - to bind others to him

Whether this was his small, somewhat frail physique, his soft demeanor, his explicitly vocal and written acknowledgements of helplessness, ignorance, confusion, fatigue and despair, he seemed to be constantly in need of help, almost a semi-permanent “Help!” signal, causing a large number of people to rush to his rescue, to offer sympathy, help or tender care. Sometimes it seemed as though he came to embody the power of the powerless, a man who could achieve almost anything by making clear his utter inability to do it alone. Yet another bared characteristic virtually no conventional leader would admit to publicly.

We tend to think of heroism as mysteriously individual, but Havel’s life teaches us that it is in fact a social virtue, nurtured by loyalties to people you know you must defend if you are to live with yourself afterward. Havel, the defrocked bourgeois, found his first real home in Prague’s dissident theaters of the early 1960s. This was the artistic, bohemian, world where he forged the loyalties that made heroism possible, and where he wrote the plays, astute parodies of the surreal propaganda bubble in which the Communists tried to encase the people, such as The Garden Party, that made him a national and then a European celebrity.

Remarkably, the darkness that fell over Czechoslovakia from Alexander Dubček’s failed 1968 Prague Spring was the very period in which Havel slowly transformed himself into the leading figure of the Czech resistance. The evolution was neither immediate nor inevitable. Indeed, it took some strange twists and turns. In what looks like an attempt to refute the regime’s charges that he was a bourgeois parasite, Havel even took a job for nine months rolling barrels in a brewery, commuting in a black Mercedes. The work was cold, numbing, and mindless, but writing saved him, enabling him to turn deadening experience into a means to articulate resistance and revolt. Out of his stint in the brewery, he wrote a play called Audience, which, after its premiere in Vienna in 1976 (the Czech regime forbade Havel from attending), was hailed as a satire on the “worker’s paradise.”

In 1975, Havel wrote a defiant open letter to Gustáv Husák, the general secretary of the Communist Party, pointing out that the “normalization” of society after the Prague Spring had only resulted in the “calm of the morgue or the grave.” He went on, “In trying to paralyze life, then, the authorities paralyze themselves and, in the long run, make themselves incapable of paralyzing life.” From this moment, the regime made a concerted attempt to isolate him from the city’s theaters and from his friends. It was a preview of intimidation to come, when the police camped outside his Prague apartment and his country home, and he and his associates were repeatedly hauled in for questioning.

During this period, when no one could possibly imagine that a challenge to the regime would ever succeed, Havel discovered—in the words for which he is best remembered—that hope “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” These are the kinds of words one has to earn the right to say, and Havel did that, not just through endurance but also through failure and shame. Under pressure, he did not always stand up. Once, he broke—and the painful lesson he learned from his own weakness helped make him both a humbler and a more resilient leader.

In January 1977, he and a tiny group of dissidents founded the human-rights organization Charter 77; the Soviets, in the Helsinki Final Act, had agreed to allow such groups in return for Western recognition of their hegemony in Eastern Europe. Charter 77 eventually grew into the movement that brought the regime to its knees, but in its early years its membership was minuscule and the repression it suffered was fierce. Havel was arrested later that January, and after some 20 interrogation sessions he pledged to concentrate on his “artistic activities” and refrain from “inspiring or organizing collective initiatives or public statements.” Having extracted this promise of good behavior, the regime let him go and, as Havel had suspected, made his promise public. Havel disavowed the promise, but he remained deeply ashamed of his weakness.

Havel left prison not only humiliated but also, and perhaps more important, humbled. He realized that for all his determination to resist evil, he was no superhero, but only a frail human being facing forces that might be beyond his power to withstand.

Havel was re-arrested in 1979, and after a show trial he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He endured his term with grim determination, as if to expiate his earlier lapse. His Letters to Olga, written from prison to his long-suffering wife, was a painful exercise in self-examination that left him tougher and less tolerant of his failings. To recover his political heroism, he had to say farewell to the parts of his personality that had led him to betrayal.

It was prison that prepared him for power. Upon his release in 1983, his personal life remained chaotic: he resumed affairs with at least two women, one of them the ex-wife of a close friend. But politically, imprisonment validated his moral authority against an ever more bankrupt regime. In his greatest essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” written five years earlier, he had given voice, for the first time, to an awareness that power was shifting remorselessly from those with the guns to those with the truth.

This seminal work's assertion that the human capacity to “live in truth ” is the ultimate weapon which gives power to the powerless. As soon as a political system is no longer able to compel ritual endorsement from its subjects, its ideological pretensions collapse as the untruths that they are.

By the 1980's, even before the advent of Gorbachev and glasnost, Havel sensed his growing authority. When the American Embassy in Prague gave parties, visiting writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Edward Albee, and Philip Roth sought him out. When Havel ran out of beer at a gathering in his Prague apartment, the cop assigned to shadow him volunteered to go to a nearby pub to refill his jug, in an eerie parallel of the small kindnesses captors visited upon Nelson Mandela. This kind of small, yet intensely human gesture gave Havel hint was that power was flowing his way.

From August 1988 onward, students and police clashed over control of Wenceslas Square. Everyone recognized that Havel was the man of the moment. In the chemical metaphor invoked by a fellow dissident, he acted like carbon, linking with all the elements of the movement to create “a compound of irresistible strength.” After more than 20 years, Havel had long since outgrown the characteristic vices of intellectuals in politics—prolixity and amateurism—and acquired a wily sixth sense about the strengths and weaknesses of his opponents and friends alike.

Six weeks after wondering aloud, in an interview, whether the regime would fall in his lifetime, he found himself triumphant on the balcony in Wenceslas Square, standing in front of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens as their putative leader. Here, too, he displayed uncommon heroism. On November 22, 1989, he did not tell those in the euphoric crowd what they wanted to hear. He neither indulged their more bloodthirsty fantasies nor offered up the incendiary polemics of what has today come to be known as "red meat" rhetoric. He proclaimed instead that their revolution should be different: “Those who have for many years engaged in a violent and bloody vengefulness against their opponents are now afraid of us. They should rest easy. We are not like them.”

“We are not like them” became, for a time, the slogan of the revolution. Even as Romanian revolutionaries were executing the Ceauşescus, Havel did not allow vengeance to bloody the politics of victory. Though the hated state security services had infiltrated deep into society, even into the ranks of the dissidents, Havel forbade a witch hunt to forcibly extract them. In his first address as president, he sternly told his listeners that they were as corrupt as the regime that had just been overthrown:

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves.”

Imagine those in power today anywhere making that kind of public assertion. It is rare for a leader to attack the moral illusions of his audience, and rarer still for him or her to resist the temptations of self-righteousness.

True to the eclectic form of his life and career, Havel's denouement did not quite match the promise if his more triumphant moments. Not all of his early moves as president were well advised. He turned out to be a meddling micromanager, clucking over minutiae like the furniture and curtains in the presidential castle, even the uniforms of the guards. His first trip was not to Bratislava to keep the Slovaks (unwilling partners in the Czech federation) on his side, but rather to Germany, which did nothing for national unity. Before long he went to the United States to bask in the adulation of his foreign friends. Among other tributes, he was given a ceremonial pipe by the chief of an American Indian tribe—and he had the curious idea, on arriving in Moscow to meet Gorbachev, that they should smoke the pipe together. A nonplussed Gorbachev could only stutter, “But I … I don’t smoke.”

Havel proved an erratic president, farsighted yet distracted by his global celebrity. He committed real strategic errors, particularly in his dealings with the Slovaks, who began, under his presidency, to move quickly toward the exit. In July 1992, just five and a half months before the Czechs and Slovaks formally divorced, Havel resigned in a humiliating admission of his failure to keep Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia together.

He might have retired then and there, and used his moral authority to advise and criticize from the sidelines, but, convinced that he was still needed, he ran again for president and won. The trappings of the office—the cars, the security detail, the presidential plane—had little appeal. The more subtle temptation was existential—the confirmation that he still mattered.

Here his otherwise courageous lucidity let him down: he appears to have believed that being honest about the temptations of power somehow gave him permission to succumb to them. Once he did so, his later terms as president—from 1993 to 2003—were an exercise in tragicomedy. His health began to fail. A lifetime of smoking caught up with him. He spent nearly two years in the hospital or recuperating. He stumbled through his duties in what his friends describe as a state of chronic depression and self-doubt, precipitated by recurrent humiliations at the hands of prime minister Václav Klaus, his streetfighing nemesis and eventual successor as president.

Havel was ill-prepared for the economics of transition, while Klaus wasted little time, selling off state enterprises and privatizing public services in a precipitous embrace of capitalism that left the president deeply alarmed. He was reduced to giving moralizing speeches to his fellow citizens, begging them to hold on to their ethical compass in the midst of the consumerist and capitalist hurricane sweeping through the country. Few listened to him, and when he married the young actress after Olga’s death, the Czech tabloids made his life a misery. His gospels about living in truth were dismissed with laughter as the shrill calls of a hypocrite.

Klaus may have stymied Havel at every turn in domestic matters, but in foreign affairs Havel held his ground. He used his personal prestige to help secure admission for the Czech Republic into NATO and the European Union, thus anchoring his country permanently in the architecture of the West whilst Slovakia fell into quasi-backwater status. Havel’s basic geo-strategic instincts were sound. He was one of the first to warn that the Putin era kept the most nefarious elements of the old Communist regimes alive under the veneer of democratization.

After leaving office in 2003, Havel continued to be hounded by the Czech press and suffered recurring bouts of poor health. Less happy with his new wife than he had hoped to be, and too honest to bask in the remembered glow of his own achievements, he could only mourn his waning reputation.

Havel died at Christmastime in 2011. This complex man, who had the courage to seek a public life, and thus the unforgiving judgment of the media and his fellow citizens, could not have anticipated how they would judge him at the end. They had grown impatient with his presidential lectures. They had derided the failures in his private life. They understood that in grubby politics, Klaus had bested him. But when Havel lay in state, they came by the thousands to pay their respects. It was as if they recognized, in the disillusioning reality of post-Communist life—which unhappily blended the most vulgar aspects and inequities of capitalism with the corruption and conspiracy of Communist political culture—that at least Havel had dreamed of a more uplifting and moral politics. If they had mocked his sermons, if they had not listened, it had not been his fault. Many who were there wept at their loss, as if realizing, once again after a long interval of doubt, how exceptionally lucky their country had been to have him as their all too human president.

Would that we will see his like again.

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