Word: masaryk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What happened early that morning of March 10, 1948 in the third-floor, right-wing apartment of the Foreign Ministry in Prague? Afterward, when the body lay in the morgue, the new Red regime made its announcement: Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was so depressed by letters from British and U.S. friends denouncing him for collaborating with the Communists that he climbed through the small window of his bathroom and plunged 60 feet to a stone-flagged courtyard...
...Many of Masaryk's friends in the West were convinced that it was murder-that he had been shoved out the window. But they had no proof: the Reds controlled the evidence. Last week, almost four years later, C. L. Sulzberger, chief of the New York Times's foreign newsmen, concluded that Jan Masaryk "was murdered after having been cruelly beaten." Sulzberger's source: a document reportedly dictated by a Dr. Teply, eminent Prague criminologist and police surgeon, which Sulzberger said has recently been checked by Western intelligence officers and at least one Western foreign minister...
Office? Upon arrival, Teply was taken to the courtyard, where he saw a body sprawled out under a blanket. A security agent pulled back the cover, and Teply, with a shock, recognized the pajama-clad corpse of Dr. Masaryk. "I ordered one of the policemen to open the pajamas, and noticed all over the body traces of blows and scratches that appeared to be marks of violence. I saw in the nape of the neck the mark of a wound, probably made by a projectile of 7.65-mm. caliber. I thought: 'This is infamous, a bestial assassination...
...first big chance as a sculptor came in World War I, when he got the notion of modeling a "plastic history" of the times. Masaryk, Pershing, Foch, Clemenceau...
...traditional diplomatic hope that he would be able to help make relations between the two countries more cordial. The President sharply replied that the best way to do that was to release Reporter Oatis. "The President said further that relations between our two countries had deteriorated ever since Jan Masaryk [Czech Foreign Minister at the time of the Communist coup] was murdered." (No other government has ever before officially challenged the Communist story that Masaryk committed suicide. Short, in his account, stressed the word "murdered.") It looked as if U.S.-Czech relations would not be what they once had been...