Boy Clinton in Prague
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Boy Clinton in Prague" Remember that mysterious trip Bill Clinton took behind the Iron Curtain during his Oxford years? An excerpt from RET's new biography introduces the hard-line Communists who hosted Clinton...
...The stories simply died...
...Sacrifice his life for politics...
...After my battered Skoda taxi dumped me on the sidewalk and coughed back up Czech Army Boulevard, a weathered old man in a threadbare black suit with a white shirt open at the wattle of his throat approached me and weakly offered his hand, while his insouciant dog waved its stupendous, flowing tail back and forth in lordly hauteur...
...Yet here we were decades later: the Berlin Wall but rubble, no more dissidents in jail, no more barbed wire at the border, no more "complications...
...Thank you so much for having me into your home and for taking the time to talk with me and show me around Prague...
...One was the suave, clever charmer with a lewd delight in capitalism's abundance...
...Communism had a way of conferring bogus academic degrees on true believers whose chief talent was merely to intone the party line...
...I have recalled his smile and the distinctive charming way he moved his head up and down in conversation...
...Of the thirty-two Rhodes Scholars in his class he was one of only six who failed to complete their prescribed course...
...I join you in your sorrow...
...Kopold went on, her dog alternately yowling and barking from the sitting-room carpet...
...My deepest sympathies to your family...
...By the time I returned to Prague in October 1993 the grime was being scrubbed away...
...That summer, accompanied by two American girls and a European friend, he went to Turkey to see the ruins of Troy...
...Having mellowed from the Stalinism of his youth, Dubcek by the late 1960's was leading moderate Communists in efforts to render their regime as The insult, so typical of the Communists, laid bare their essential barbarism with its contempt for something as decent and harmless as the Boy Scouts...
...Certainly life under Communism was riddled with compromise and intrigue...
...People were still wondering where he had gotten sufficient funding for the trip...
...Yet here in the Kopolds' flat he found himself with Progress's closed minds...
...They had an enthusiasm for ideas and culture that was appealing back in the 1960's...
...On that walk the young American confided to the old Red that upon returning to the United States he intended to "sacrifice" his life for politics...
...Why not," Clinton replied...
...It was a series of soft courses notably devoid of history's hard messages and free from the more rigorous versions of economics...
...At University College Clinton was studying politics, philosophy, and economics—PPE, as it was called...
...Amid all the anti-American propaganda and international espionage of 1969 the Democrats' 1992 presidential nominee sided with the anti-Americans...
...down...
...Of all the Times' revelations, the one that appeared most portentous was news that late in 1969 Clinton embarked on a "4o-day train trip through Sweden, Finland, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia...
...He pointed to some monstrous space-age tower way off on one of Prague's tree-lined hills and offered to take me there the next day—"the highest point in Prague," he asserted...
...To Evans-Pritchard, himself a Cambridge graduate, these Rhodes Scholars have remained "charming dreamers...
...Even now the dangers of Prague's totalitarian past still seemed to lurk in every dark passageway...
...Jan, despite his expulsion from the party, hoped his father would secure funds from the Czech government so that he could travel...
...Friedrich Hayek was a god...
...Improvident Communist economics had left the city dilapidated and grimy...
...His papers were in gay disorder...
...As to what precisely he was a professor of, his family's erratic translation of his scholarly line of work defeated me...
...The old Communist might even admire me for it...
...Inquiries I made about his trip to Moscow turned up little that was new...
...But the most damaging revelation was that, at the height of the Cold War, Clinton had engaged in continuous anti-war activities...
...Then he visited Prague, the capital of one of the Soviet Bloc's most repressive regimes...
...Her mother, Marie Svermova, a founder of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party and once a member of the Party's Central Committee, took a liking to him...
...Kopold said wistfully, "You see...
...So would the envy and essential nihilism of Chomsky, who then called himself an "anarcho-Marxist...
...One evening they passed the American embassy, and a happy Mr...
...He had been housed by another of the improbable creations of left-wing theorizing, a Stalinist evolving into a Noam Chomsky...
...In fact I was beginning to like Boy Clinton...
...Our soldiers were facing death in Vietnam while the war protesters shouted such verse as "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh / NLF Are Gonna Win...
...About the time Clinton visited the Kopolds, Cherwell, Oxford's student newspaper, reported that io percent of the Oxford faculty claimed to be either Marxist-Leninist, or Trotskyist, or some other variation of Communist...
...Until the reporter knocked on their door they had not realized that their American guest of so many years past had become that fall's leading presidential contender...
...What about since the fall of Communism in 1989...
...Here we were, de codes later: the Berlin Wall but rubble, no more dissidents in jail, no more barbed wire at the border...
...He was late...
...Her husband walked the quiet streets of Prague with "our Bill," as the Kopolds now called him...
...Yet, apparently, no unpleasant experience was sufficiently unpleasant to awaken him from his dreams of a state-run utopia—not even the fact that here in 1993, after living his entire adult life in his family's Communist state, he could recall only two "good times," 1945 to 1946 and 1964 to 1968...
...When I told Kopold that my most recent books were The Liberal Crack-Up and The Conservative Crack-Up, he sighed, "Ah, you too believe in the Third Way...
...Clinton formed with his Class of '68 was akin to brotherhood...
...The report even refuted Clinton's gratuitous lie of the previous spring, his claim that he had never received an induction notice...
...His mind seemed elsewhere, perhaps it was recalling the Youth of 1968 and that far off Prague Spring...
...All of us at Oxford who were close to him recognized that and we were proud to be his friends...
...In Turkey he suffered a mysterious "accident...
...Such was his network of acquaintances that even behind the Iron Curtain he found himself in the company of the sentimental advocates of utopia...
...The city was comparatively open...
...While walking on the roof or the upper floors of a building he fell to his death...
...With his usual precision he assessed the influence Oxford had on the future president: "the bond Mr...
...He did not bother to register with the local police as the law then required...
...He was obviously brutal and a little stupid...
...Dust was everywhere, and the concrete stairs were bowed like those of an old European palace...
...N Remember that mysterious trip Bill Clinton took behind the Iron Curtain during his Oxford years...
...Nonetheless, the Kopolds remained opposed to Havel...
...What is clear is that young Clinton was not just another red-blooded American collegian...
...Its design was modern with a white stone facade that after years of neglect had become dingy...
...God knows what provoked that wintry undertaking, but obviously in 1969 Clinton was restless...
...But I took a rain check on his proffered walk...
...Both were soft-spoken and rather sweet...
...Clinton had arrived from Moscow on January 5, 1970, less than two years since Soviet tanks had suppressed Dubcek's reformist government...
...After the Sunday Times' reporter visited them, the Kopolds reread them with renewed respect...
...He was very much a part of the sentimental left...
...The trip to Moscow alone in those days could have cost as much as $5,000...
...In the past 24 hours I have relived many moments of my brief friendship with your son...
...Naturally he wanted to see everything and to talk and talk...
...He had not been arrested...
...Where did the money come from...
...Education...
...How do we account for the shared conclusions of a Czech Communist and an Arkansas apple-polisher in 1970...
...While in Oslo he had met with a leading international anti-war activist...
...and do you know where he planned to travel...
...He was very interested in politics," Mrs...
...Zoologically speaking, I could recall two types, neither of which was very pleasant...
...He was a typical American student...open and friendly...
...Others suggested the CIA, recollecting that liberal college students had accepted CIA funds in the 1960's, for instance Gloria Steinem and the National Student Association...
...Jan's parents advised their son not to return, fearing for his safety...
...They were really friends...
...Art...
...There is something touching about Clinton's stay with the Kopolds...
...The Times printed pictures of him grinning from beneath a disheveled mop of hair and behind a shaggy beard...
...Wandering through the ancient city is the swift-flowing Vltava, crossed by one of the handsomest bridges in Europe, the fourteenth-century Charles Bridge...
...Or "Rational...
...In one context it sounded very academic...
...Kopold sociology books, others from Clinton's mother thanking the Kopolds for their hospitality and expressing worry about her son's safety behind the Iron Curtain...
...True to the religion of Progress, Mr...
...The arrival of the big likable Yank at the Kopolds' door was about what we have come to expect of him...
...The enterprise was hopeless, in fact dangerous...
...Not so good," a weary Kopold replied...
...Given the ubiquity of left-wing thought among the university faculty, it is not surprising that this congenital apple-polisher would become a sentimental acolyte of Progress...
...Communist Czechoslovakia had long been associated with world-wide Communist intrigue: secret police, international espionage, munitions running, the production of semtex, the plastique explosive favored by terrorists...
...The Kopolds I met in 1993 did not even have a good word for Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became the Czech Republic's first president...
...Moscow...
...Reporters were not offended by the lies Clinton had been laying on them for years...
...To a woman whose politics could have cost her her life, and who thought the United States a fascist stronghold, this must have come as a courageous statement of solidarity...
...For that quality I admired him very much...
...Months after the election, I decided to look into Clinton's travels behind the Iron Curtain...
...Clinton had stayed at the home of Bedrich Kopold...
...Kopold: Only yesterday did I receive the sad news of Jan's death...
...Prague's new intelligentsia favored the free market and democracy...
...The Times' revelations appeared to be devastating...
...Sincerely, Bill Clinton There were other letters, one promising to get Mr...
...Yet here the Kopolds' reminiscences lapsed into the barely believable...
...and then only because, en route to a summit with Russian president Boris Yeltsin, Clinton stopped off in Prague and invited the Kopolds to have a beer with him and Czech president Vaclav Havel...
...An excerpt from RET's new biography introduces the hard-line Communists who hosted Clinton during the Czech leg of his sojourn...
...Dated Friday, 23 January, it reads: On that walk the young American confided to the old Red that upon returning to the United States he intended to "sacrifice" his life for politics...
...In the late 196o's the Kopolds' home had been a hopeful place...
...By this time, things had quieted 33 Given the ubiquity of left-wing thought among the university faculty, it is not surprising that this congenital apple-polisher would become a sentimental acolyte of Progress...
...Sweet as he was, his values had doomed this historic city...
...He had cashiered his preppy look for the black and olive drab of protest...
...When Clinton plopped himself down, probably on the very couch where I now sat, enlightened people throughout the West shared the Kopolds' enthusiasm for collectivism, believing, of course, that they could dispense with the secret police...
...And why would one go there when one's security from the secret police could not be ensured even in Prague...
...Cold Warriors had always suspected that the international peace movement was controlled by Moscow...
...Like Bill Clinton and those other Coat and Tie Radicals who came out of Oxford with him, the Kopolds were hard-wired...
...The Czechs were regaining their feel for commerce and artistic expression, relearning the role that free citizens play under limited government...
...I was feeling melancholy...
...Kopold remarked, "Bill, it would be nice since you are so much interested in Czechoslovakia that you will in a few years come back to us as a cultural attach...
...Obviously, those who hosted Clinton back in 1969 were neither Communists of the suave roué variety nor of the brutish sort...
...Clinton's election prospects flickered and dimmed...
...I approached my interview with the Kopolds apprehensively...
...prague is the little Paris of what has been known to history as Central Europe, though during the Cold War we knew it as Eastern Europe...
...Unmasked as a counterculture stalwart, an anti-war protester, and a draft dodger, Clinton was even denied the defense of high principle...
...And there was that very sad letter from Clinton after he had enrolled in Yale Law School...
...Kopold adds that he underestimated "Bill's political talents...
...During the Cold War Kopold had been locked up and denied advancement...
...Oh no," the Kopolds said in choric response...
...If he had his way, they would again...
...A clever student, Clinton could have gotten by with ease...
...What about the present," I asked...
...Then in the winter he took off for Oslo, Moscow, and Prague...
...Kopold, "he didn't see good in the dark...
...Then, as his staff pondered how to salvage the campaign, something amazing happened...
...The Kopolds' flat had become their own private museum to 196o's Protest...
...From 1950 to 1956 he landed the dullest job of all, a cell in a Communist prison...
...They have dwelt in melancholy...
...It would be fifteen more months before the press showed any interest in the Kopolds...
...After Clinton returned to Oxford and to the Kopolds' son, Jan, the Kopolds were again in hot water with the newly repressive regime...
...In an Oxford lecture hall he heard a left-wing prof rhapsodize on the class struggle against Franco, and off he went to Spain to blubber at the historic markers to the Spanish Civil War...
...I laid immediate plans to interview them, arriving precisely a year after publication of the fall 1992 revelations about Clinton's 1969 pilgrimage...
...In the late 1960's the Kopolds were devoted adherents to the same religion that had fetched Clinton...
...After twenty-three years they still had his letter...
...and Mr...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.'S latest book is Boy Clinton: The Political Biography, to be published later this summer by Regnery Publishing and from which this essay is adapted...
...high spirits, simpatico," Mrs...
...I asked the Kopolds if possibly Czech secret police had a hand in this...
...The thought occurred to me as I listened to the Kopolds rumble on about their last years under Communism and their memories of Clinton's visit...
...It was a convergence of political nitwits...
...In fact, he had received two...
...Though a student on a modest budget (his Rhodes scholarship provided only $2,760 annually for tuition, room, and board) he journeyed to Moscow and "stayed in one of Moscow's more expensive hotels—the National, much favored at the time by the Soviet elite...
...The American Spectator • July 199 6 There was more...
...The stories had absolutely no effect on the election...
...They say Mozart loved Prague, but recent history has not...
...He was even a long way from Oxford...
...Its recent history had left its people somber...
...That he never was to change his essential faith in government is The American Spectator • July 199 6 more surprising, though admittedly there is something about the left's criticism of normal life and its promise of a better future that is enduringly alluring...
...On Clinton's final walk in Prague he and Mrs...
...For a day or so after the appearance of these two reports Washington was resonant with rumors...
...He looks well and was glad to get news from you...
...The Czech interpretation of his work brought in a heavy dose of Catholic morality...
...The majority of the profs were socialists...
...The American Spectator July 199 6 35...
...and Mrs...
...Kopold was neither...
...When I looked into Clinton's trip to Prague, however, I made an interesting discovery...
...Who knows...
...From Milford, Connecticut, on October 4, 1970, he wrote: Dear Mr...
...few news organizations even picked them up...
...It would be, he vowed, the same walk that he had arranged for Bill Clinton twenty-three years earlier...
...The interior of his building was as tired as its exterior, the functional stainless-steel railings all inexplicably stained, the once-contemporary wood veneer now torn and peeling...
...Given my politics I decided that a request to interview members of Communism's "ruling class" would best be cloaked in strictest perfidy...
...In the late 1960's and early 197o's there were a lot of progressive profs like Kopold on both sides of the Iron Curtain...
...For members of Communism's elite, this place had been the Ritz...
...He lived in a large contemporary flat that would have been brilliantly out of character with the blocks of gray to olive drab pre-war apartment buildings in the neighborhood, except that it too was now drab...
...The sitting room held a wealth of pictures featuring the Kopolds with former Communist party celebrities, among them Alexander Dubcek...
...Kopold assured me...
...As I looked around at the fading pictures of Communist grandees, it occurred to me that nothing had changed, not for twenty-three years...
...The so-called Prague Spring, meant to liberate Czechoslovakia from hard-line Communists, had been crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968...
...A hand-written letter at the end of January relieved their anxiety...
...32 July r 9 9 6 The American Spectator humane as their revolutionary forebears had promised...
...That journey took place in the spring of 1969...
...In Prague, Boy Clinton was a long way from home...
...Citizens' groups did not demand an honest account of his draft record, his anti-war activities, his visits to Communist countries at the height of the Cold War, visits that seemed to have the support of Communist governments...
...Evans-Pritchard concludes that essentially their views were unchanged right up to 1993: "Their view of the world seems to be a refinement, updated but not substantially altered, of the prevailing orthodoxies at Oxford in the late 1960's...
...Possibly his son, Clinton's campus friend, was murdered, as we shall see...
...When he discussed young Clinton's departure from Prague, Mr...
...The hard-liners thought it a good joke: the idealist Dubcek suddenly reduced to the sylvan pursuits of a Boy Scout the insult, so typical of the Communists, laid bare their essential barbarism with its contempt for something as decent and harmless as the Boy Scouts...
...It also had a habit of depositing the truly learned into menial labor for some ideological lapse...
...Others demur, and describe him as a sheer opportunist...
...The irrefutable fact is that while at Oxford Clinton was deeply involved with the counterculture—contrary to years of campaign propaganda...
...By the summer Jan had been "expelled" from the Czech Communist party...
...Svermova visited the twelfth-century Strahov Monastery now housing the Memorial of National Literature...
...I am very grateful for the opportunity to have spent a few days with you, days which gave me vivid memories that will last for years...
...Supposedly State Department files contained evidence that Clinton had given up his citizenship to avoid the draft, that he had committed treason, and that while in Moscow he slipped away for a clandestine trip to Hanoi...
...Prague is a city of artists and musicians...
...Clinton had been an Oxford acquaintance of their only son, Jan, and a guest in this sparsely furnished apartment in January 1970...
...Indeed, Communist Czechoslovakia had been a training area for international terrorists...
...Nonetheless, the Kopolds remained stubbornly opposed to Havel, to my Czech friends who had tipped me off to Kopold's background, and to all the other democrats governing the Czech Republic...
...Kopold was spooked by all the bugaboos his religion decried: the rich, the clergy, aristocrats...
...The press had missed another fascinating Clinton story...
...Kopold was banished to another obscure job...
...Even after the threat of the draft passedhe could not settle down, and so he made pilgrimages to Europe's shrines to Progress...
...Before that, Communists of various degrees had ruled...
...Clinton stayed through January 12...
...In his flat Kopold introduced me to his wife and daughter...
...They offered me coffee in their sitting room and fruit from a large bowl...
...He had attended meetings of Group 68, an organization of American peace activists supported by the pro-Soviet British Peace Council...
...Gleams still sparkled in Kopold's watery old eyes when such words as "modern" or "idealism" danced forth across his tongue...
...The cosmopolitan Kopolds had been consumed by politics their entire lives, yet in 1993 they remained political idiots...
...Kopold mentioned "complications" at the border...
...The Clinton who emerges from these years is a personable young hustler with few fixed ideas...
...Apparently he was as unprincipled in protest as he would be in politics...
...The Kopolds suffered similarly though less dramatically...
...in the next it sounded as though he might have run the local high school's driver-education program...
...They had long ago invested total trust in the state, though in life the state had imposed on Mr...
...34 July 1996 • The American Spectator Dear Mr...
...The American Keynesian Robert Solow was visiting Oxford at the time, and his ideas were to echo for years in the writings of Ira Magaziner and Robert Reich, Clinton's fellow Rhodes Scholars...
...Years after Clinton and his fellow Rhodes Scholars returned to America, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in London's Sunday Telegraph described their Oxford staging ground...
...The Kopolds were of the true believer variety, but Kopold had been deposited into many dull jobs...
...Then one day we went and met for dinner and talked for a long time...
...The Times quoted Lincoln Allison, a politics lecturer at Oxford's University College, who recalled that Clinton's anti-war activity was "purely selfish," arising upon no serious ethical pedestals at all, just cowardice or, perhaps, impatience over the inconvenience a stretch in the military would impose on his well-planned political career...
...Demoted from general secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist party, he was sent to a Slovakian boondocks and made a forester...
...His enthusiasm and charm had sozzled them, as it would later sozzle America's true believers...
...Preceding the Communists had been Nazis, who had been freed to overrun Czechoslovakia after the British and French sold the Czechs out at Munich...
...Marx's designers of multi-storied file cabinets...
...At precisely this point in history, as these Stalinists evolved toward the religion of Progress, Western progressives were evolving toward a vaguely Marxist world view...
...But most clearly I have remembered the persistent way of searching for the truth of a matter that he had...
...They worried about his departure, fearing that his unsigned travel documents would cause him problems at the border...
...Nazi and Communist lawlessness had shown the Czechs the brutal side of man's nature during long years that must have stretched out into an eternity for the ordinary citizen...
...He was obviously pleased...
...Naturally, they, too, "talked and talked...
...How did an American student acquire such clout with the Soviets...
...Surely the KGB or some propaganda arm of the Soviet government was involved...
...Clinton had grown panicky about being drafted...
...Sincerely, Bill Clinton After I read the letter aloud into my tape recorder, Mr...
...Many of the Kopolds' sentences did that, no matter what they might be discussing...
...His naïveté should have tipped me off that this member of Communism's "ruling class" was unlike the other Communists I had known...
...The sentence lilted from the hopeful to the melancholy in what the poets call a "dying fall...
...and Mrs...
...and after Soviet tanks rolled in Dubcek was hustled into obscurity...
...inPRAGUE ON OCTOBER 25, 1992, LESS THAN TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE presidential election, the Washington Times reported that, contrary to Bill Clinton's prior claims to being just another red-blooded American boy during his Rhodes Scholar days at Oxford, he was in truth a counterculture protester of admirable industry...
...Only after he was back in Oxford did those whom the Kopolds called the "hard left" or the "Sovietika" clamp down...
...Whatever the case, Jan Kopold had little time left...
...I liked old Kopold...
...Something had disturbed him deeply...
...His stay in Moscow was booked through Intourist, the state travel agency...
...BY R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Kopold many "complications...
...Kopold: I returned to Oxford four days ago and delivered all the things you gave me for Jan...
...Kopold, palming myself off as a 196o's idealist engaged in writing a book testifying to that era's noble protests...
...He had in him the best promises of man...
...Progressive...
...Kings and emperors, cardinals and monks, burghers and craftsmen, have for centuries garnished its hills and slopes with a glorious salad of architectural delights: palaces, churches, public buildings, a castle here, a bell tower there, all in a melange of architecture from the Gothic to the Baroque to the Neo-Classical...
...The Kopolds did...
...The other was the thick-necked bully, always peremptory and accustomed to sycophants at his side...
...During the late Marxist-Leninist period the commissars put down just enough steel and glass monstrosities to demonstrate that history's most feeble-minded Habsburg or lunkheaded cardinal was a Christopher Wren by comparison with Dr...
...Was Clinton's friend, Jan, entangled in international intrigues beyond the ken of the naive Kopold Pere...
...The dog barked and thumped his incomparable tail...
...Your notification was sent from England and it took a long time to reach me...
...Philip Hodson, now a London psychologist, testifies that at social gatherings Clinton's eyes would be scanning the room for bigger fish to charm...
...Even at the end of the Cold War Kopold remained a Marxist...
...It even contained Clinton's letters from 1970, neatly filed away in scrapbooks...
...Observers who knew him at Oxford report that he would argue on either side of the great issues of the day—even on either side of the race issue and the Vietnam war...
...Bill Clinton and Robert Reich would linger after dinner in hall at University College, sometimes joined by Strobe Talbott (Magdalen, '68), "and talk for hours about how they would change the world...
...I never brought up the name of Clinton...
...London's Sunday Times filed a similar report, detailing still more of Clinton's counterculture activity...
...Some of Clinton's instructors interviewed in the 1990's, for instance Zbigniew Pelczynski, who taught Clinton politics, insist that he was a conscientious and promising student...
...There is no evidence that Clinton's trip was arranged for by Soviet intelligence...
...That was the euphemism he reflexively employed in alluding to the many occasions when an individual came into conflict with the Czech state...
...How like those other charming dreamers whose views remained frozen in the late 1960s, the Kopolds...
...all very good things, these...
...Still, it was out of character for him to fail to finish his degree...
...Dubcek had been the hero of the Prague Spring...
...It was the draft...
...Some still suspected a KGB front...
...I telephoned Mr...
...the friendly voice of the boy who would in eight years be elected governor of Arkansas and, in twenty-two, president, was there even then...
...It radicalized him temporarily...
...The mix startled me, though perhaps it should have been anticipated...
...How does one get "expelled" from the party and still assume that funds can be procured for a trip to Moscow...
...This was the Communist Kopold...
...The pictures of the apartment contained the very same contemporary furniture that now was so worn and faded...
...After our interview he escorted me to the metro, accompanied by his dog...
...My contacts in Prague, all former dissidents, tipped me off that the Kopolds had been members of what they called the Communist party's "ruling class...
...To my surprise I was the first Western journalist to interview the Kopolds since that Sunday Times 31 reporter...
...When I first visited, shortly after Communism's collapse, the city's many charms were hidden beneath the drabness of Communist life...
...It was dark," explained Mr...
...His overbearing hound conformed more with my idea of a proper Communist Kopold had been waiting for me on the sidewalk because the elevator to his top-floor apartment was 1990's Communist unreliable...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
