The republican monarch soon had his first taste of the maxim that elected political men who get mixed up in state politics are strongly pressured into playing by its rules, which means that they quickly learn the arts of manipulation, keeping matters secret, pulling strings, turning others’ weaknesses into sources of strength, even turning themselves into devilish creatures who stop at nothing to get their ways — and, in so doing, creating adversaries ready to cause ‘trouble’. Within the Castle, in accordance with this maxim, there was an immediate tendency for people around the elected Havel to act as if they themselves had been chosen by divine force. Not surprisingly, ‘trouble’ began immediately to come Havel’s way.
There were aides, Stanislav Milota for example, who openly criticized the working practices of the Castle.365 The rugged, good-looking Milota was a former cameraman with a sharp eye for people. He was a good organizer and an articulate and down-to-earth working-class man from Žižkov, the rough district of Prague in which Olga had also been born. He had been a close friend of Havel’s before and during the revolution and on 2 January 1990 he received a telephone call from the new President, inviting him to become Head of the Secretariat. ‘Do you want an easy retirement with a big pension, or do you rather want to help me?’ began Havel. According to Milota, the self-answering, either/or structure of the question was rather typical of how Havel manoeuvred people into making the decision he wanted. But Milota willingly agreed. Havel was pleased, and added, with a touch of irony. ‘Good. I need someone to be my opponent in the Castle.’
Critical opposition he certainly got from his friend. Milota’s instincts were proletarian, and he tried often to remind Havel that his own class background should not blind him to how most of the country lived. He was personally critical of Havel’s attempts to crown the republic with works of contemporary pop art. ‘I know you can’t force this nation to like Beethoven and Shakespeare. But then can you do the same with Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones?’ Milota pointedly asked him one day. ‘I have a different view from you of the wood from which this country has been hewn,’ he continued. ‘From your bourgeois background, you learned not to eat with your knife, and not to kiss the arses of comrade women. But I learned other things. Just as Olga did.’
These were rough and tough words. Milota was no friendlier towards what he dubbed the ‘amoral behaviour’ of senior officials during the first few months of the new regime. Havel’s helpers were inclined to behave in ways familiar under the Communist ancien régime. The backscratching, toe-sucking and breast-fondling efforts that used to go into obtaining a visa to France, say, were now potentially in evidence around a new President actively committed to ‘living in the truth’. It was not that Havel himself was becoming corrupted. It was rather that the Castle seemed to attract mindless profligates, said Milota. He was appalled by the heavy drinking on the first presidential flight to Moscow. ‘Have you seen yourselves through the eyes of the flight attendants? Do you know how you’re behaving?’ he asked a group of them on board the plane. The earthy Milota was frank with Havel about the need for a more spartan approach to protocol. ‘This is a nation that’s demoralized. You should set an example. Don’t take taxis and chauffeur-driven limos. Catch a tram up to the Castle. Have bread and a jug of water for lunch. You too need the occasional kick in the arse.’
Havel was normally a very precise person and would usually have kept excesses and amoral behaviour at bay, Milota later said. But during these early weeks, Havel was tired. He found it hard to keep control of the high-pressured dynamics of Castle life. Besides, he himself had an appetite for power and bohemian excess. He eventually told Milota to stop disrupting business with objections. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about all this,’ he said. Relations between the two men worsened, especially during the preparations for the first presidential visit to the United States. According to Milota, Washington’s fascination with Havel — ‘the cleancut bourgeois guy who looked different from his rough-tongued Polish electrician counterpart’ — served to overinflate the Castle’s sense of its own power in the world. The planned delegation, the second biggest ever (after De Gaulle’s) in the history of the United States, was too fat to fit into one aircraft. Milota told Havel that he was making the mistake of acting as if he were the President of a country like the People’s Republic of China. ‘Why do we need thirty bodyguards on this trip?’ Milota asked. ‘We’re a country of only 15 million people. What is all this going to cost?’ The reaction among Havel’s advisers ranged from puzzlement to frosty suspicion that Milota was trying to get rid of them. He decided to get out first, to leave behind what he considered to be an orgy of powermongering. One afternoon in mid-May 1990, after sixteen weeks as Head of the Secretariat, he quietly plucked his jacket from the office coat rack, said to his secretaries that he was just stepping out for a moment for some fresh air, and never came back again to the Castle. Later that day, he sent a message to Havel, explaining (as the Communists used to do) that for health reasons he was ‘taking early retirement’.
The message from Milota (he later heard) was received with stony silence. The notable exception was Olga, who not only liked and respected Milota, her fellow Žižkov radical, but also shared his feverish complaints, and said so loudly. She never found the Castle an especially hospitable place, and liked to dismiss it as ‘the submarine’. Here were scores of people trapped eighteen hours a day inside an airless, dimly lit space, cut off from the real world, way out of their depths in treacherous waters, deeply uncertain of either their mission or their machine. Her husband’s aides were mostly unqualified for the job, she told some of them to their face. Others were womanizers and drunkards. Still others were insecure narcissists who spent their time gazing at their own media images. Olga disliked fame. She was impatient with journalists who flattered her, or asked her such questions as what flowers or food she liked. She was not averse to telling them off, or interrupting them to say she had to empty her washing machine. She also disliked being trapped in the cage of Castle security. She often said to her bodyguards that she’d rather be playing bridge or walking in the countryside, and naturally got enormous pleasure from giving them the slip — as on the first American state visit, when unannounced she entered a lingerie shop, leaving her young male bodyguards standing pink-faced among bras and knickers and laced body gloves.
Olga had high but simple moral standards. She disliked snobbishness and despised prejudice, for instance against Romanies or the elderly. She insisted on frankness, simplicity, honesty, and no bullshit — and it is unsurprising that she clashed with some of the key Castle personnel. Mutual friends confirmed that she had a much better eye for people’s character than did Havel. She could spot daggers in castlemen’s smiles, and if she had her way, she told a friend during the first few weeks of the Castle under Havel’s leadership, she would rid the place of some of them by ‘hanging them with their own bloody neckties’.366 Some bit back at her for sentiments of that kind. Ladislav Kantor was among the targets of her criticism. She considered him a ‘red-haired cretin’, and several times tried to rap him over the knuckles — for instance when he queried, on security grounds, the proposed appointment of the great exiled Czech conductor Kubelík to the National Theatre. She said openly that Kantor was a flatterer of her husband, and that he was in danger of falling for it. Kantor responded by trying to draw Havel into such disputes, even on one occasion offering to get rid of the cuckoo in the nest. ‘I can get you a divorce,’ Kantor said.367
Olga, as dignified and tough as polished old boots, was unmoved. At an early stage after the revolution, she made up her mind to turn her back on the Castle and instead of playing the hollow role of First Lady she devoted her energies to the fledgling civil society. She considered it a more meaningful option with credible precedents. As a young teenager, just before the coup de Prague, she had been involved in running a Žižkov club-residence called Milíčův dům. Set up by a Christian pacifist, Přemysl Pitter, it functioned as an alternative community for young people whose family life had been shattered by poverty, war, bigotry. The club-cum-residence had sheltered Jewish children during the Reichsprotektorat, while during the years Olga was there many children came as refugees from the Sudetenland pogroms and concentration camps. The refuge offered tastes of other worlds. The children were encouraged to live as equals within a community; they were taught how to resolve their conflicts non-violently; and they were offered access to a big library, courses in art-appreciation and theatre, and generally to join in group activities like singing, gardening, sewing, knitting and ping-pong.
The director of the community centre fell out with the Communists, and in 1951 narrowly escaped to Switzerland after refusing to be drafted to the uranium mines at Jáchymov. Olga never forgot him or his bold initiative. Immediately after Havel went to the Castle, she began to wonder whether a similar kind of experiment could be made in defence of the fledgling civil society. She had had some thoughts of setting up an organization to protect animals or the environment, but her dream began to come true after making a state visit to Canada in February 1990. There she was approached by a rich Czech émigré, a Montréal manufacturer of nuclear-reactor equipment named Karel Velan. He wanted to donate money to a Czech hospital, especially for the purpose of showing Czech doctors how things were done in the West. Olga soon spotted the advantages to be won from appealing to others to pool funds to help the disabled victims of Communism live in dignity. And so upon her return from Canada she set to work founding an organization called the Good Will Committee.
It was the first of its kind in post-Communist Czechoslovakia. Olga wanted it to be small, and to serve mainly as a clearing house for sponsors’ and donors’ money. Things turned out differently, in part because as each day passed the new organization attracted dozens then hundreds of letters seeking support. There were also hundreds of offers of financial support from post-’48 and post-’68 emigrants, Czech and Slovak businesses, and older citizens, especially poor women who sent 100-crown notes through the post. In its first phase, it was decided that the primary goal of the Committee was to re-equip and humanize the prison-like institutions of incarceration inherited from the ancien régime — large institutions like borstals for children and centres of confinement for the disabled. Later, after a change of law covering the work of charities, the Good Will Committee — despite Olga’s original desire to keep the initiative small — grew much larger and was renamed the Olga Havlová Foundation. She left the day-to-day management to her staff, instead concentrating on lobbying members of parliament and the social-welfare ministries, fund-raising, and — above all — visiting groups and individuals with the aim of deconstructing the old institutions and setting up new, smaller, civil-society institutions with a human face.
Václav Havel reacted supportively. Although at first he was ‘a bit amused that his wife had found a hobby’368, he quickly grew proud of its intrinsic merits — so much so that he set up his own foundation, The Václav Havel Foundation, which until 1995 served to fund projects like the refurbishment of the Castle library and guided tours through the Castle for the blind. The desire for emulation was understandable, but the effects were different. The Good Will Committee proved that it was possible to pose a different — hopefully complementary, but potentially contradictory — understanding of politics, power and empowerment than that of the Castle. The President’s big house on the hill: the seat of state power, wrapped in its imagery of flags, ornaments, guards, arms, courtiers. Its role: to draw upon tax revenues to issue orders, sanction laws, issue prepared statements, grant amnesties, provide symbolic and moral leadership, to bind the country to the outside world by means of diplomatic missions, meetings with heads of state, trade agreements, troop deployments, or (in the last instance) force of arms. By contrast, a charitable organization: a small and independently funded organ not of the state, but of civil society. Its role: to address the self-defined needs of its clients, to provide some stability and justice in their lives, to shield and protect them from the inconveniences resulting from state neglect, market forces, or social bigotry and discrimination — overall, to help the disempowered to feel stronger in the world by encouraging them to see and feel the importance of what the ancient Greeks called the metaxu. Through the charitable organization, in other words, the disempowered can come to sense the importance of nests in which they are warmed and nourished and gain self-confidence. They are encouraged to rely less on ‘distant’ and ‘inflexible’ governmental institutions. The powerless come to learn that power is not synonymous with large-scale organizations like states and corporations. They learn, on the contrary, that lines of power run through every nook and cranny of our lives, that large-scale organizations rest on these foundations of ‘micro-power’, with the implication that amendments and reversals of these same local relations of power — the empowering of the powerless — can be a counterweight to ‘macro-power’, and can have wider effects upon the overall structures of the state and civil society.