Newsgroups: bit.listserv.slovak-l
Date:         Tue, 26 Jan 1993 09:34:57 EST
From:         "Owen V. Johnson, REEI/Journalism" <JOHNSONO@UCS.INDIANA.EDU>
Subject:      For those who did not see the earlier wire story on Clinton's
              visit to Prague

From:   PRISM::HAMMERL      26-OCT-1992 10:24:24.81
To:     JOHNSONO
CC:
Subj:

From:   PO1::"MIDEUR-L@UBVM.BITNET" "Discussion of Middle Europe topics"
 25-OCT-1992 17:04:18.92
To:     Multiple recipients of list MIDEUR-L <MIDEUR-L@UBVM.BITNET>
CC:
Subj:   clari.news.hot.east_europe #6643

An interesting article that has appeared on the ClariNet wire today.

I know that many people on this list can and do read Usenet but this
article had an unfortunate Subject line and as such could have been
easily skipped. That's why I'm reposting it here.


In article <clinton-czechoslovakiaU2OP110pe@clarinet.com>,
 clarinews@clarinet.com
  (PETER S. GREEN) writes:

        PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia (UPI) -- When young Bill Clinton visited
  Czechoslovakia in 1970 -- on a trip destined to come under attack by the
  Bush campaign some 20 years later -- he stayed in Prague with the family
  of an Oxford schoolmate because he couldn't afford a hotel.
        But it wasn't until a reporter rang the bell of the elegant Prague
  apartment of Jirina and Bedrich Kopold, once high-placed communists,
  that the elderly couple realized their young American guest is now the
  Democratic candidate for U.S. president.
        ``There was a very nice and pleasant young American man here in 1970,
  but I don't remember his name,'' Jirina told United Press International.
        Leaving her visitors at the kitchen table, she returned with a
  picture book of Oxford. ``He sent us this when he returned to England,''
  she said.
        The inscription on the flyleaf read: ``Thank you for your wonderful
  hospitality and kindness to me. Bill Clinton, Oxford, 1970.''
        ``Oh, my,'' she said in mild surprise.
        Clinton was a schoolmate of the Kopolds' son Jan at Oxford. After a
  trip to the Soviet Union and on his way back to England, Clinton spent a
  week in Prague with the Kopolds.
        At the time, Prague was still reeling from the 1968 Soviet-led
  invasion that quashed the Prague Spring reforms of Communist Party
  leader Alexander Dubcek.
        But the Moscow-inspired ``normalization'' that saw tens of thousands
  of Dubcek supporters fired from their jobs, exiled from the country or
  even imprisoned had yet to begin in earnest.
        Visas for Czechoslovakia were still easy for foreigners to obtain,
  and thousands of young Westerners came to see what Prague had become.
        ``I sent dozens of my friends to visit Prague in 1970,'' recalls Jana
  Frankova, a Czech who studied at Oxford when Clinton was there. ``People
  were interested in Prague because this was something that was happening
  right in the middle of Europe,'' she said.
        Jan Kopold was not home when Clinton visited. Like many Czechs
  studying abroad after the invasion, he was afraid to return home until
  he had completed his studies.
        ``My friend Bill Clinton will come to Prague. If he cannot find an
  affordable hotel, he may stay with you,'' Jan wrote his parents from
  Turkey, where he died a few months later in a fall from an abandoned
  house near Smyrna.
        ``He has a wide knowledge of political systems and will come from
  Moscow,'' Jan wrote, in a letter his parents proudly read aloud.
        For six days Clinton stayed with the Kopolds, walking through the
  winding cobbled streeets of the old city, visiting museums and tourist
  attractions, and returning home every night for dinner with the family,
  they recalled.
        Jirina and her husband Bedrich called him a ``very nice and friendly
  young man,'' intensely interested in the Prague Spring reforms and how
  to help Czechoslovakia throw off the oppressive boot of the occupying
  Soviet Army.
        The Kopolds' daughter Bedricha spent some time accompanying Clinton.
  And on his last day in Prague, Jirina's mother Marie Svermova took young
  Bill for a stroll.
        ``I went with Bill to the Strahov library and the Loretta
  (monastery),'' Mrs. Svermova wrote in her diary.
        Marie Svermova must have been an interesting companion for young
  Clinton: from 1945 to 1951 she was a member of the politburo of the
  Czechoslovak Communist Party. In the show trials of the 1950s, she was
  purged from the party and spent six years in Communist prisons.
        In fact, the Kopolds rank among the grand old families of
  Czechoslovak communism.
        Jirina's father was a former editor-in-chief of the Communist Party
  daily Rude Pravo, and a top member of the Moscow-based Czechoslovak
  Communist Party leadership during World War II. He died in the Tatra
  mountains, fighting alongside the Soviets to free Czechoslovakia from
  Nazi rule.
        But the family was Jewish and had spent time abroad. In 1951, when
  the Stalinist purges of the Czechoslovak party leadership began, Marie
  Svermova and Bedrich Kopold were expelled from the party and sent to
  prison.
        Marie Svermova served six years in a Communist jail, and became one
  of Dubcek's most prominent supporters in the Prague Spring.
        Later, she was one of the first to sign the Charter 77 human rights
  document, along with such dissidents as Vaclav Havel, who in 1989 led
  the ``velvet revolution'' that overthrew Czechoslovakia's communist
  rulers.
        Even in 1970, Clinton seemed to be considering a career in politics:
  ``We often discussed how to help Czechoslovakia out of its terrible
  situation,'' Bedrich Kopold recalled.
        ``One day we walked past the American Embassy and I said to Bill,
  'Some day you will come back as ambassador or cultural attache,' and I
  laughed. Bill looked at me very seriously and said he well might,''
  Kopold continued.
        Sitting in their living room, with the works of Marx and Lenin on the
  bookshelf in front of them, the Kopolds say they never recognized
  Clinton on television. They said unless they had been asked about their
  nearly forgotten American guest, they never would have known he had
  stayed in their home.
        Looking at the thank-you notes Clinton and his mother Virginia had
  written the Kopolds, Jirina said: ``I hope Bill Clinton wins. He was
  such a fine young man.''

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