54 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Ambassador William Luers’ work in Cold War–era Prague demonstrates that pursuing the U.S. national interest and human rights need not conflict. BY STEPHEN R. GRAND Stephen R. Grand is a political scientist and foreign policy entrepreneur who served for many years as a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Atlantic Council. He is the author of Understanding Tahrir Square: What Transitions Elsewhere Can Teach Us About the Prospects for Arab Democracy (Brookings, 2014). In 1983 Ambassador William Luers—who died this May just shy of his 96th birthday—thought his next posting would be Madrid, but the Reagan White House decided otherwise. Instead of Spain, they sent him to be U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia during one of the darkest moments of the Cold War, as saber-rattling between the Reagan administration and the Soviets threatened nuclear war. At the time, Czechoslovakia was so far off the State Department’s diplomatic radar screen—“at the bottom of the heap of countries of interest to the United States,” in Luers’ words—that he was left largely to his own devices. The story of Ambassador Luers’ and his wife Wendy’s experiences in Cold War–era Prague bears retelling today. The kind of diplomacy that Luers found himself conducting in CzechoA Cold War Ambassador’s Lessons for Today FS HERITAGE slovakia is the laborious but important task of building relationships with foreign governments and publics in the hopes of moving them closer to U.S. interests and values. Prague Winter In 1983 the Czechoslovak government was among the most brutal Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. A Soviet military invasion 15 years prior had crushed the Prague Spring of 1968—a popular reform movement that had sought to create in the country “socialism with a human face” (a less repressive, more market-oriented version of Marxism-Leninism). In the aftermath of the invasion, the Soviets installed a largely Slovak government of communist hard-liners that dismantled the ’68 reforms, purged reformist elements from the ruling communist party, and suppressed any remaining political dissent within society. By the time the Luerses arrived in December 1983, this process of “normalization” was complete, and the situation in the country seemed as gray and bleak as the Prague sky in the dead of winter. Life had become so circumscribed for ordinary Czechs and Slovaks that some joked it had shrunk simply to three things: “You laugh, you drink beer, you make love.”
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