Word: schmidts
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Though no restrictions were placed on travelling, except in border areas and near the uranium mines, Schmidt found it almost impossible to get information when he did go anywhere. "Generally, government officials wouldn't talk to you, and private people were afraid to," he said...
...last May 30, when most students in the University had nothing more serious than impending final exams to worry about, Dana Adams Schmidt was in a somewhat more critical situation. Schmidt, then New York Times correspondent in Prague and now a Nieman Fellow here, had just had his name mentioned in an indictment that was to result in the biggest single political trial in Czechoslovak history...
...Schmidt was accused of acting as a courier for two of the defendants name in the incitement, one of whom was later sentenced to death and the other to 15 years imprisonment. He filed his story of the indictment, in which he gave himself an interview had denounced the charges against him as unfounded, then decided that it would be best for him to leave the country immediately before the Communist government decided to use him as a witness. On the chance that border guards would not yet have been alerted to prevent his departure, he loaded his wife...
...Schmidt first went to Czechoslovakia for the Times in April, 1949, and during the year that he spent there he noticed that there was a "gradual tightening" or restrictions on foreign newspapermen and a persistent campaign to eliminate all "Western influences" form the country...
Czechoslovakia, Schmidt things, is a forced transition for Western to Soviet Russian forms of existence." In that transition, everything Western in condemned, and during the latter part of Schmidt's stay, the only information he received form official government sources was an occasional press conference devoted solely to castigation of Western countries...