Word: vaclav
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...joke making the rounds in Prague has a group of people, among them Czechoslovak Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus, asked to identify an upturned bottle top. All except Klaus give the expected answer. The Minister, who proposes radical reforms that would cut deeply into living standards, pauses only briefly before answering: "It's a pan for frying steak...
Where CSCE might go from there is a matter of intense debate in foreign ministries and think tanks. Last April Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel was among the first to propose that it become the core of a new all-European security organization replacing NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Moscow found the idea appealing because CSCE is the only organization that links Eastern and Western Europe -- and the U.S.S.R. belongs to it. German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has been pushing a strengthened CSCE for a similar purpose: to keep the Soviets from feeling isolated and resentful...
...Wiesel's moral authority that brought together Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela; Jimmy Carter and Francois Mitterrand; the authors Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer; Chai Ling and Li Lu, leaders of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square -- an astonishing collection of Nobel prizewinners, professors, rectors, saints. A man could not make his way through the SAS Scandinavia Hotel in Oslo without ricocheting off one paragon or another. Such saturations of virtue and celebrity gave me a jolt of anxiety: this is a perfect target for a bomb. But the choice of Oslo was canny. Norway has its immunities...
...hair, the man enveloped in utter stillness, the most thorough self-possession I have ever beheld. Does 27 years in prison make a man so calm? As I listened to Gunter Grass (a stolid German with some huge gravity pulling him earthward) discussing the Nazis, my mind drifted to Vaclav Havel, who I decided is an alert woodland creature. Jimmy Carter shines with a likable sweetness, but he is tougher than you may think...
...Vaclav Havel began by confessing an incapacity to hate -- a suspect claim from most other men. "I look at hatred only as an observer," he said, and then proceeded to look at hatred as an artist does. He began with the psychology of individual hate: "It has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them and in fact the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them . . . The hater longs for the object of his hatred...