Almost everybody who had contact with him — or had no contact at all — during the first period of his presidency noted his aloofness. Some pointed out that he’d always been coldly calculating when it came to keeping company. Others confessed their nostalgia for the old ‘dissident’ times when Havel seemed always to be available — and always willing to talk, drink and be merry. Stories began to circulate about how he had changed, and about how he seemed even to be embarrassed by the great Chinese walls of power that had come between him and his former friends and working colleagues.
A typical version ran something like this: During the first weeks of his presidency, Vašek is invited to a flat for drinks and political discussion. He arrives, dressed in blue jeans, looking crumpled and withdrawn, and is instantly greeted with hugs and kisses — and a barrage of laments about how nobody ever sees him any more, except on television. He seems to hang his head in embarrassment, reaches for a drink, wedges his tired body on to the arm of a chair or on to a bare patch on the crowded living-room floor, rolls a cigarette, and sits quietly as others speak, others looking on. Later the guests begin to mingle, laugh and dance. He receives another barrage of laments about how distant he has become. He again hangs his head and rolls another cigarette. And then another — as if rolling tobacco into paper is an involuntary defence reaction against guilt. Almost everybody then gets drunk with the President — partly because that’s what always used to happen, partly because a revolution is taking place, and partly because everybody is thrilled to have a loved political actor back in their midst.
Then there were those who complained that his aloofness — the aloofness of the monarch of the crowned republic — hampered their job of trying to establish links between the emerging structures of government on the hill and the world beyond the Castle walls. This was a more serious objection, for it touched on the whole question of his accountability before the public, as well as his personal responsibility for the hundreds of decisions of consequence that he was now making on a daily basis. A strong version of this political type of objection came quickly, and almost spontaneously, from within the ranks of Civic Forum. The Forum had been his power base up until his election as President. It began to work hard to prepare and fertilize the soil out of which free parliamentary elections were to grow by the summer of 1990. Civic Forum thought of itself not as a party — the word was anathema to its many activists — but as a potentially country-wide para-political structure, run directly by citizens, whose aim was to institutionalize, as quickly as possible, the procedures and institutions of an electoral system that had been destroyed long ago by the coup de Prague. Civic Forum was a catalyst network geared to driving the revolution towards parliamentary democracy. Its activists were interested in the Polish and Hungarian examples of ‘government by round table’, but as an improvised citizens’ initiative it was based on no political theory or thinker. It deliberately worked against the Machiavellian rules that state power should be sought after, that official politics was everything, that it was imperative, if only for the sake of survival, to fill power vacuums with strength wherever they existed. Civic Forum instead worked to change the rules of state politics from the outside. Wherever possible, subject to finding sources of funding, it tried to set up ‘election centres’ as well as teams of advisers supplied to local groups trying to form themselves into pressure groups or ‘democratic’ political parties. It was of course a tactic designed to benefit Civic Forum, but at this stage it was to be neither a social movement nor a political party — nor even a future government. ‘Parties are for party members!’ ran one of its posters for the forthcoming elections. ‘Civic Forum is for all!’
Given Havel’s stated commitment to free elections, it was indeed odd, his critics said, that from the outset he broke off virtually all contacts with Civic Forum. ‘From the beginning there was a constant problem,’ said Jan Urban, who later became chief spokesperson and convenor of Civic Forum. ‘Havel and the rest of the Castle became totally separate, and very secretive. Their links with the outside world were uncoordinated. They contacted others only on their own terms.’356 Many within Civic Forum sensed that Havel’s aloofness was politically undesirable — there were even occasions when the Castle seemed deliberately to be giving out contradictory information and advice, for the purpose of playing off the federal and two national governments, perhaps (so some within Civic Forum suspected) with the ultimate — unconstitutional — aim of creating a ‘fourth government’, a crowned republic rotating around President Havel.
The key players within Civic Forum were initially reluctant to blow the whistle publicly on Havel. The basic rule of ‘dissident morality’ — that individuals and groups refrained from screaming at each other publicly after sitting in prison with them — was observed, especially since everybody within Civic Forum remained scared of secret-police provocation and infiltration, and continued as well to treat the shadowy Communist Party as enemy number one. So there were efforts, from the last week of January 1990 onwards, to create a private ‘pipeline’ between Civic Forum and Havel. An informal, private meeting held regularly on Sunday evenings at Jan Urban’s house was set up to exchange views and information — to act as a damage-limitation exercise. Havel’s spokesman, Michael Žantovský, regularly attended and later so did others, like Ivan Gabal, Jan Ruml and Vladimír Mlynář. The pipeline meetings continued after the summer parliamentary elections, indeed they survived until the end of 1991, when a row with the Castle about its proposed constitutional amendments ended in acrimony.
The conviction that Havel had withdrawn into the Castle to become a power unto himself was quite at odds with his former self-image as a man who lived openly before others, in the truth. Although it shocked a good many former friends and political acquaintances, those who knew him well were less than surprised. Something like Havel’s Law of Oligarchy was at work from the beginning. This was no ‘iron law’ of the kind outlined earlier this century by Robert Michels, for whom oligarchy springs up wherever there is organization.357 That so-called law rested upon faulty premises — including its supposition that ‘the masses’ are naturally docile and gullible, and its claim to be a universally applicable law. Havel’s Law of Oligarchy was quite different. It grew out of a specific revolutionary context and nourished itself on the efforts to build a crowned republic.
To begin with, communication with anybody and everybody was generally difficult. There were few phones, no photocopiers, no fax machines. Even paper was in short supply. The presidential office also inherited from the ancien régime an immensely large workload that simply had to be dealt with. Raison d’état had to be followed, or so it was said. A new foreign policy had to be negotiated. Laws had to be reviewed and signed. New ministries had to be constructed. More staff had to be recruited, brought to the Castle and trained. New ambassadors had to present their credentials, and foreign delegations of government, business and civic organizations had to be received officially. The decision to switch over to the forms of protocol that operated during the Masaryk presidency of the First Republic was time-consuming, and also off-putting to would-be visitors to the Castle. Then there was the profoundly intimidating security system operating at the Castle. Not even Havel himself initially knew how it worked — at least not until the day that an alternative surveillance system provided by the American Embassy, and dubbed ‘the refrigerator’, was set up. Even that did not make it any easier for individuals and groups to make appointments, or (as some had hoped) to drop by for a quick chat and a coffee or brandy with the new President.
The absurd time pressures on Havel worked to prevent that in any case. Not only locals, but contacts from the four corners of the earth often had the experience — and do so still — of being squeezed out by a bureaucratic schedule which was strict and inflexible. After five or fifteen or thirty minutes, if the callers have been lucky, time is up. There is a firm knock at the door. ‘Mr President’, says the faintly smiling but businesslike assistant with a craning head, ‘would you be so kind as to prepare for your next appointment, who is now waiting.’ The distancing effects of such treatment were reinforced, from the outset, by the privileges affixed to the presidency. ‘I find myself in the world of privileges, exceptions, perks, in the world of VIPs who gradually lose track of how much a streetcar ticket or butter costs, how to make a cup of coffee, how to drive a car and how to place a telephone call’, he soon observed, adding: ‘I find myself on the threshold of the very world of the Communist fat cats whom I have criticized all my life.’358 Havel’s urge to have guaranteed access to the mass media inflated the privileges he enjoyed. The elbowing ratpack of newspaper and radio and television journalists began to take up valuable appointments. They in turn required minding, lest they said the wrong things, which in turn necessitated spokespersons, watchdogs who guarded the sovereign power carefully, at all times. Soon, it seemed as though hardly anybody, or that even nobody, could ‘get’ to the President.
No contemporary head of state can live without media coverage, it is true, but from early January 1990 it was obvious that a special dynamic, one traceable to his preferred role as a political Ichspieler, provided crucial nourishment for Havel’s Law of Oligarchy. Those from outside the Castle who tried to deal with him during this period found that he strongly preferred to operate outside institutional forms and procedures and to handle things personally. He no doubt found a certain freedom in presidential power. There were times when he found it a stimulant. ‘I worry about him,’ said his good friend, playwright Josef Topol, to Olga over coffee one morning, a year into his presidency. ‘You shouldn’t,’ snapped Olga, rolling her eyes. ‘He adores it! He’ll never give it up!’359
The role of Ichspieler meant making decisions by personal wheeling and dealing, the art of which he had mastered from the time of the group of Thirty-Sixers. Especially before the revolution, in apartment meetings for instance, Havel had been admired for the way he would listen to many opposing or contradictory opinions, then take the floor for a few minutes to formulate a statement or a position that was acceptable to everybody present. Combined with his courageous struggle against imprisonment for two decades, it made him into a moral authority within the opposition. After the revolution, he continued to practise this art, but mainly within his immediate circle of trusted advisers. So when it came to dealing with outsiders, in encounters with members of the public for instance, Havel resorted to ad hoc personal negotiations.
In Vojtěch Jasný and Miloš Forman’s film Why Havel?, he confessed that among the most enjoyable things about the presidency ‘are these surprise visits, where I unexpectedly arrive at factories, offices, pubs, discos. All of a sudden, the President’s there. It’s unheard of. A woman sits in her office pretending to work while she munches on a roll. Someone knocks — ‘Come in’ — and in I walk. She’s in shock. The roll feels like a rock in her throat. She starts babbling and the truth spurts out. Two minutes after I’ve left, she realizes she should have lied.’360 Exactly the same habit of acting as if he were the deus ex machina, as a figure who personalized everything in order to resolve everything, was obvious to those who dealt with him daily through Civic Forum. ‘Havel never understood the value of institutions, negotiations, and the need for compromise,’ concluded Jan Urban, who found that negotiations were often fraught and frustrating, because for Havel Castle policy-making was ‘always about making direct deals, personal compromises and, above all, manipulation. These tactics work perfectly well in small groups within a small opposition. But it would never have worked within a large opposition like that of Solidarność in Poland. And it most certainly never worked during the first months of his presidency, when power was seen simply as manipulation.’361
Havel’s propensity to manipulate others was nourished by his skill at playing the role of Ichspieler before adoring audiences bubbling and throbbing with praise. During the first year of office, he joined the ranks of ‘the world’s great leaders’.362 Celebrity was a great aphrodisiac. He was blessed with a special kind of power — the power of charisma — whose mechanics were daily lubricated by his air of divinity before enthusiastic crowds devoted to his every move, his every word and gesture. Those individuals who want to believe should kneel, said Pascal, and kneel down they did. Projecting themselves outwards towards the Leader, individuals introjected him into their souls. He began to seem like a mortal endowed with immortality. Many were smitten by his theanthropic qualities. Public expectations of the extraordinary followed him everywhere. The humdrum routines of everyday life vanished in his presence. Like a prophet endowed with premonitions of a better world, he seemed to have the knack of inventing new ideas, of getting things done, of being in the right place at the right time. There were moments even when individuals felt driven to be near him, to talk to him, even to touch his body. In the industrial town of Opava — the following story was typical — a young teacher dashed from her classroom at the end of the school day to try to catch a glimpse of him as he attended an official function at the municipal hall. Gripping a bunch of bright flowers, she nudged her way through an excited crowd. A policeman caught sight of her and kindly cleared a path for her to present the flowers to His Royal Highness — at exactly the moment that he was descending the steps of the municipal hall. The schoolteacher was ecstatic. There he stood, smiling at the teacher, who curtseyed before showering him with flowers. Her heart fluttered, head dizzied, and mind went completely blank. She later recalled that he was shorter than her — she had not expected to look down on him — that his nose was yellowed by pollen from a previous bunch of flowers — he looked like a happy clown — and that he smiled warmly and said in a hoarse statesman’s voice, ‘Thank you very much.’363
‘Charisma’ is originally a theological term (from the Greek kharis, favour or grace) meaning the gift of grace. It now refers to the apparently superhuman powers of a single individual to magnetize others like iron filings. The charismatic personality is as magical as it is unstable. For a time, charisma is blessed with the capacity to dignify the mundane, to glorify the obvious. Yet charismatic power usually doesn’t last long. It fades with time and sometimes (as Shakespeare’s character Antony discovers while lying in his tent, abandoned by the god Hercules) it can disappear overnight. Immediately following the Velvet Revolution, Havel seemed to be an exception to the rule of fading charisma. His habit of playing the role of charismatic Ichspieler caused sensations, which made life hard for his critics. Whenever confronted with objections, concerning matters of style or policy, he would if necessary cut off the personal negotiations and go silent on his opponents. Several times he told his aides: ‘Don’t bring me messengers bearing bad news.’ He could well have been uttering the words of a messenger in the company of the Queen of Egypt: ‘Though it be honest, it is never good / To bring bad news / Give to a gracious message / An host of tongues; but let ill tidings tell /Themselves when they be felt.’364 So during the first months of his presidency — the habit continued throughout his political career — Havel worked hard to cultivate people who bore him good tidings. His appointment of Saša Brabcová as his personal translator was a case in point. Everybody working on the fringes of the Castle, and even some within, found her a puzzling woman in the Prague sense. Nobody really knew who she was and where she had come from — except that before the revolution she had been the personal aide of Miroslav Štěpán, the last First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Now working with Havel in the innermost circles of Castle power, she was party to the most confidential discussions and decisions. Some people within Civic Forum and within the Castle objected. Havel initially reacted with deaf ears. When pushed, his reaction was curt. ‘She brings positive vibes to the Castle,’ he said. And that was that.