“He was listening to you”: Alexandr Vondra remembers Václav Havel

Václav Havel would have turned 90 on October 5. Politician and diplomat Alexandr Vondra first encountered him as a young underground publisher in communist Czechoslovakia and later became one of his closest collaborators and his foreign-policy adviser. Speaking to Radio Prague International, he recalls Václav Havel’s unusual charisma, his painstaking approach to speeches and the price the presidency exacted from him.

When Alexandr Vondra first began reading Václav Havel, meeting the dissident playwright in person still seemed a distant prospect. It was the 1980s, Czechoslovakia was under communist rule and Alexandr belonged to a younger generation searching for alternatives to the official culture around them. “It was like when you are walking in the forest looking for mushrooms,” Alexandr recalls. “We were walking around looking for voices of freedom. And certainly Havel was the first pick.”

Alexandr Vondra|Photo: Barbora Navrátilová, Radio Prague International

He read works published during the relative liberalisation of the late 1960s and later texts circulating underground as samizdat. Eventually, Alexandr and a group of friends decided that reading underground publications was not enough. They began producing their own magazine, Jednou nohou – “With One Foot”, meaning one foot in prison – which later became Revolver Revue.

Their ambition was not merely to reprint Václav Havel’s existing work but to persuade him to write something specifically for them. That led to Alexandr’s first personal meeting with him in the mid-1980s. Alexandr subsequently became increasingly involved with Charter 77 and in 1989 became its youngest spokesman. By then he and Václav Havel were meeting regularly.

“He was listening to you”

Alexandr remembers being nervous when he first approached the already famous dissident. The nervousness, he says, quickly disappeared. “Václav Havel had an ability not to speak to you from high above, but like an equal guy,” he says. “He was not behaving like some former Politburo member, but as an artist, intellectual and friend.”

Alexandr Vondra in the 1980s|Photo: Post Bellum

That quality was central to the kind of charisma Václav Havel possessed, Alexandr says. It was very different from the commanding presence often associated with political leaders. “He had no charisma of the bulldozer or tractor type,” Alexandr says. “His charisma grew out of a much softer approach. He was not abrasive. He was not lecturing you.” Instead, Václav Havel listened.

Alexandr Vondra remembers leaving discussions thinking that the older dissident had managed to formulate precisely what he himself had wanted to say but could not express so clearly. “He was little in physical strength or height, but big in the ability to project certain ideas in an understandable way.”

A writer who found speeches “a torture”

Paradoxically, the man who could express complex ideas so effectively in writing was not, in Alexandr’s view, a natural public speaker.

Václav Havel was a playwright rather than an actor and lacked the instinctive ease before a crowd possessed by some politicians. Alexandr also remembers him as someone without excessive self-confidence. “He was a courageous man who, if he decided to go against the current, went against it and paid the price. But it was not generated by some excessive self-confidence. It was rather generated by a sense of responsibility and internal conviction.”

“He was a courageous man who, if he decided to go against the current, went against it and paid the price. But it was not generated by some excessive self-confidence. It was rather generated by a sense of responsibility and internal conviction.”

Writing major speeches could therefore become an arduous process. “Public speeches were a torture for him,” Alexandr Vondra says. Václav Havel approached them as an author. He wanted every important address to be original and carefully written – almost the opposite, Alexandr points out, of conventional political communication, where simple messages are deliberately repeated.

For a major address, such as a speech to the US Congress or at the Sorbonne, Václav Havel might retreat to his country house for several days to write. Drafts would then pass between the president and his advisers. “If we had a recommendation to correct something, to cut something or to add something, we always had to fight with the proud author and convince him that we were right and he was wrong.”

“You have to go with me”

After the communist regime collapsed in 1989, Alexandr initially had no intention of following Václav Havel into Prague Castle. He wanted to turn his underground magazine into a legal publication. When Václav Havel was elected president, Alexandr told him that his part in the revolution was finished and that he intended to become a publisher. The answer was unequivocal. “He said: ‘No. No way. You have to go with me, because I’m not going to be alone there in the Castle.’”

Vondra describes it as “almost an order”, although one delivered gently. He accepted and became the new president’s foreign-policy adviser, despite having no formal diplomatic training. “It was like being thrown into a swimming pool without knowing how to swim. You need to learn how to swim.”

Alexandr Vondra and Václav Havel (1989)|Photo: Archive of Alexandr Vondra

Alexandr Vondra remained close to Václav Havel through the crucial early years after the Velvet Revolution. Looking back, he believes the presidency took a considerable physical toll. Prison had already damaged Václav Havel’s health, and the workload and sense of responsibility added to the strain. But he rejects the idea that political power fundamentally changed him. “You can find examples where people are corrupted by power. That was certainly not his case.”

He believes future historians will inevitably examine Václav Havel critically and warns against turning him into a flawless national icon. Yet he has little doubt about the ultimate assessment. “His contribution to the well-being of this modern nation is absolutely as big as Masaryk’s,” Alexandr says. “Those two persons were the greatest Czechs of the twentieth century. I have no doubt about this.”