56 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Soviet evening news on television in 1985, Luers marveled at the informality and candidness of the new Soviet Communist Party leader, who seemed unlike any Soviet apparatchik that he had seen before. Curious to learn more, he asked Czechoslovak Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal, with whom he had developed a relationship, if he could come to see him. The two had worked out an arrangement: Luers would come by Strougal’s office to talk after hours; Strougal would send his driver to transport Luers so no one would know who was visiting. Alone with him in his office, Luers asked the prime minister what to make of Gorbachev, and the latter responded with a story. He claimed that in 1983, Gorbachev, who was then the youngest member of the Politburo, had visited his mentor Yuri Andropov on his deathbed. There Andropov told him that Konstantin Chernenko would become the next party leader but that he, Gorbachev, would be next in line after Chernenko, who was also very sick. Andropov further instructed Gorbachev that he needed to be ready to make major changes when the time came, because the Soviet system could not keep pace economically or technologically with the United States in another arms race, and urged him to use the time to consult extensively with the experts who had designed Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms in the 1960s. Luers cabled this bombshell back to a State Department that still regarded Gorbachev as just another Soviet bureaucrat. Engaging Through the Arts While Ambassador Luers was building relationships within Czechoslovak officialdom, he and Wendy were also reaching out to the country’s disaffected artists and intellectuals. Six years earlier, in January 1977, several hundred of them had bravely issued a public manifesto, known as Charter 77, calling on the Czechoslovak government to abide by the human rights provisions contained in the Helsinki Accords that it had signed. The regime responded harshly, dismissing many of the signatories from their jobs and throwing the apparent ringleaders in prison. By the time the Luerses arrived in 1983, the Chartists were coalescing into the country’s main dissident movement, even though they were still little known at home or abroad. And the most prominent of these dissidents, the playwright Vaclav Havel, had recently emerged from four years in prison (his weekly letters home to his wife provided the basis for his famous book Letters to Olga, which was already circulating clandestinely in the country). Bill and Wendy hosted myriad cultural events at the embassy, beginning with a vernissage (a private art viewing) of American contemporary paintings, at which they first met Havel. Many of the events were built around the cavalcade of American luminaries—from Frank Stella and Richard Diebenkorn, to Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike, to George Kennan and John Kenneth Galbraith—whom the two invited to visit Czechoslovakia. In all, the now-public secret police files record a remarkable 287 overnight guests at the ambassador’s residence during their tenure. Having been starved of access to the West since 1968, the Czech artists and intellectuals invited to these events lapped it up. On these occasions, they circulated around the embassy in awkward proximity to the high-level Czechoslovak officials the Luerses also invited—who had been their jailers in some instances. In this outreach to artists and intellectuals, Wendy proved to be Bill’s secret weapon. Having worked previously for Amnesty International, she was able to establish an immediate rapport with many of the dissidents. She also could move around more freely than Bill. As Wendy explained, “They [the Communists] were such chauvinist pigs that they assigned a third-rate StB [secret police] agent to follow me.” So, she took the lead in traveling around the country and introducing herself to the country’s cultural figures, inviting them into their social circle. Where they could, the pair also tried to engage directly with the Czechoslovak public. They made an annual pilgrimage to the town of Lany to pay their respects at the grave of Tomas Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president. Each year they Bill and Wendy Luers at their home in New York City, 2015. DON HAMERMAN/HAMILTON COLLEGE
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