The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019

58 NOVEMBER 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The View from Shirley Temple Black’s Residence Michael Hornblow Prague, Czechoslovakia I n November 1989 I was deputy director of the Eastern Europe/Yugoslavia office at State, responsible for Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. My wife, Caroline, and I were visiting the region, which was undergoing rapid change. We had been to Warsaw and Budapest, and it was quiet in the two capitals. Both Poland and Hungary had new democratic governments. The process had been undramatic—nobody had been killed, and there had been no large demonstrations. Czechoslovakia, still under communist control, was a different story. But how long would that continue given developments in neighboring Poland and Hungary? And Prague was filled with thousands of East German refugees seeking a route to West Germany. Shortly after arriving in Prague either on Nov. 8 or 9, we drove by the West German embassy. That week about 62,000 East German citizens had already left Czechoslovakia for West Germany, and thousands more were coming into Prague every day. When we drove by, the embassy garden was empty and the hundreds of refugees who had slept there in makeshift tents were gone, leaving behind a field of mud. But everything was peaceful at the extraordinary Petschek Villa, home of the American ambassador, Shirley Temple Black, and her husband, Charlie. Ambassador Black had been in Prague for four months and had become close to Vaclav Havel and his circle. She was constantly urging him to move faster toward freedom and democracy. The license plate on her official car read “STB”—her initials, but also an acronym for the Czech secret police. OnThursday, Nov. 9, we slept soundly in our room in the residence, the ambassador and Charlie at the other end of a long hallway. As we slept, the events in Berlin were unfolding. On Friday morning, we turned on BBC radio at our end of the hall. The announcer reported that the Berlin Wall had been breached. We thought nothing of it, believing that yet another truck had barreled through one of the checkpoints. But it soon became clear that it was something quite different. Then our phone rang. “Michael, this is Shirley. Come quickly. We have the TV on, and the Berlin Wall is falling.” We walked down that long hallway into the ambassador’s suite. The ambassador was lying on the floor in some sort of a sleeping bag, and Charlie was sitting in a chair, watching CNN. We stayed with them for several hours, eating breakfast in front of the TV while the ambassador shared her memories of the Prague Spring of 1968, when she was stranded in Prague after the Red Army invaded. We all knew we were witnessing a historic event but did not know what effect it would have on Czechoslovakia. The embassy had arranged for me to have lunch with four or five of Havel’s clos- est advisers, and we met in a local restaurant, all of us in a celebra- tory mood. The pilsner was flowing. Of course, the major question was what impact the fall of the wall would have in Prague. Surpris- ingly, each of the advisers insisted it would not have any impact, saying they were “years away” from anything like that happening. Their views were duly reported back to Washington. Less than a week later, the Velvet Revolution began. By the end of the year Vaclav Havel was president. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not affect Poland and Hungary directly, but sped up devel- opments in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia. By the end of the year, all of Eastern Europe was free. The wall’s collapse served as a historic exclamation point: there would be no turning back. After three years in U.S. Army intelligence, Michael Hornblow joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1966. He was the deputy director of the Eastern Europe/Yugoslavia office at State in 1989, and now lives in Fearrington Village near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Ambassador Shirley Temple Black in 1990. WIKIMEDIACOMMONS