The Czech Connection : For Rita Klimova, Revolutionary Turned Ambassador, These Are Stellar Times

The new Czechoslovakian ambassador is perusing the vast expanse of products in the dairy case of the capital’s premier supermarket. There are eight kinds of milk: 1%, 2%, skim, low-fat, regular, buttermilk and chocolate- and strawberry-flavored.

“This is difficult,” the ambassador says as she reaches for carton after carton, examining the labels. “There are so many choices.”

Since coming to America on Feb. 12, choices have shaped every aspect of Rita Klimova’s life. She constantly must struggle to make up her mind, but once she does she stands by her decision.

After a few seconds at the dairy case she rejects the fresh products and goes searching for cans of evaporated milk. “It will last,” she says, and moves on to the tomatoes.

A woman in gold earrings and a designer suit is at the tomato bin vigorously squeezing to find a ripe one. “In Czechoslovakia we don’t do that,” Klimova gasps. Shoppers take what they can get.

And so Klimova, 58, the revolutionary-turned-ambassador, bustles through the supermarket overwhelmed by the opportunity that has befallen her. She buys cheese, fruit and bread for the streams of guests at the embassy residence. And for those rare occasions alone in the big house overlooking Rock Creek Park, she stocks up on one-portion desserts--a strawberry cheese cake, peach melba and chocolate fudge brownie.

From the day of her arrival Klimova--called Rita even by those who have met her only once--has been besieged by invitations. Yet while she has seen many faces and charmed many people to get money for the post-revolution, the trip to the Safeway is a return to her democratic self.

“I don’t think I’ve cooked a meal since Nov. 17,” she says, “and I’m not sure that’s such a good thing.”

On Nov. 17 everything in Rita Klimova’s life changed because everything in Czechoslovakia did. After a couple of mass demonstrations, the people ousted the Communists and the new democrats took over. Vaclav Havel, the shy playwright leading the opposition, immediately called upon his friend Rita to translate and she became known as the “voice of the revolution.” Her English was crisp; her love for all things American clear.

Klimova had learned the language as a child when her family, both Jewish and communist, had sought asylum for seven years in the Bronx to avoid Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Last fall Klimova’s New York twang made such an impression at daily press briefings at Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater she was as much master of ceremonies as translator. She would appear on stage every evening with the other dissidents. They would sit on folding chairs about two feet from the floodlights.

If a local reporter asked a question half in English, half in Czech, Klimova would switch immediately from one language to the other without missing a beat. She would translate and mediate in a strong voice. “Rita,” one correspondent recalls, “was as alive as the revolution.”

Throughout November and December the days were so bone-tiring that Klimova would later tell a friend that she did nothing but cry between press conferences.

Then the playwright became president, a coal stoker became foreign minister and the translator--an economist who wrote her doctoral thesis on the U.S. economy--became Czechoslovakia’s Ambassador to America.

Klimova is the first of the new breed of Eastern European diplomats to arrive in Washington. Like other Communist bloc representatives here, the Czechs have been in chaos since the outbreak of democracy last fall. For weeks no one would even answer the embassy telephones. But then again, the 50 Communists on the embassy staff were not used to dealing with the outside world. They had little contact with the press, almost none with Congress. Klimova will not comment on the “spies” around her, except to say, “I am dealing with them in a velvet yet, I hope, clear manner.” Already, however, she has sent for a half-dozen replacements.

Exactly one week after Klimova arrived in Washington, Vaclav Havel came too, and it seemed as if every American wanted to meet him. For help, Klimova turned to Madeleine Albright, a foreign policy expert and Democratic guru. Albright set up a command post in her Georgetown home relying on four telephones, a copy and fax machine and 25 former Dukakis campaign workers to orchestrate the Havel tour.

Although Havel easily charmed Congress and the country, Klimova was beside herself that 2,000 people had overrun an embassy reception planned for 600. “But what Rita didn’t realize was she had liberated the embassy,” Albright says.

After Havel left, Klimova continued at a break-neck pace, trying to see everybody who was disappointed at not meeting him, and to satisfy America’s need to know about Czechoslovakia’s gentle reformers.

Everything about the ambassador is so clear and to the point that it’s hard to imagine the complexities she must sift through to make decisions each day.

Some things are obvious: Her main purpose here is to change America’s image of Czechoslovakia as a closed society and encourage people to spend money there. To that end she regularly grants interviews to reporters and talks to businessmen about new opportunities.

But less obvious is which politicians to approach and how to deal with other diplomats. Her desk in the embassy office is cluttered with evidence of choices she is not ready to make. There are stacks of faxes from all over the country, inviting her to visit, imploring her to come speak. And there are stacks of other papers--newspapers, official reports, personal letters, visa applications.

“I’m having a definite problem with throwing away paper,” she says. “In Prague whenever I got a Western newspaper I would pass it on to somebody, I would never throw it away. Here I’m continually throwing away newspapers, unread often, which is really painful for me.”

As she discusses the dilemma there is an outburst of loud chatter outside her office. Czech voices are rising. Klimova apologetically slips out.

After 20 minutes of loud discussion in the outer office, Klimova returns slightly out of breath. Yet “another” new government minister is arriving soon and she must make plans for this state visit. “He has a big future,” she says. “He must be treated right.”

“I have to learn what to delegate and what to do myself,” she adds. “It is this part of the job that I am least comfortable with.”

Yet she is quite at ease a few nights later at an embassy reception for the Minister With a Big Future.

She stands casually at the head of the receiving line in the embassy drawing room as if she were awaiting guests at the landing of her fourth-floor walk-up in Prague. “This is Dr. Jan Carnogursky,” she says, introducing a baldish man in a gray check suit. “He is first Deputy Minister of (the Interior) and the most prominent Slovak politician in Prague.”

Indeed, Carnogursky is expected to become Czechoslovakia’s prime minister after the June elections, and, during a brief visit here, he is getting the royal treatment, including breakfast at the State Department and lunch with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

Right now Eastern Europeans are hot. The crowded reception on a rainy Monday night is testimony to that. Even the embassy staff is in a good mood, although many of the Communists are smiling perhaps a bit too broadly. One Third Secretary grumbles that Madame Ambassador has unfortunately revamped the embassy fare. The Old Regime may have hosted only five receptions a year (there have been eight since January) but at least there was hot food like goulash and noodles. Tonight the spread is standard American grazing--canapes and tiny hot dogs.

One of Klimova’s first acts at the embassy was to get rid of the drab art. Paintings of grinning proletariat in folk costumes were replaced with contemporary Czech art. Now a pair of plaster hands riddled with bullet holes hangs on the wall behind the bar.

Although Carnogursky is holding court in one corner of the reception room, there is a much larger crowd around Rita Klimova.

One by one people wait to talk with her--a Czech American student, a North Carolina gallery director, a Congressional underling, a priest, a girl with an Instamatic. Klimova seems genuinely pleased to meet all these people yet divorced from her role as ambassador. When a woman asks about an upcoming embassy reception, Klimova exclaims, “Why don’t you just crash it!”

James B. Milliken has been dispatched to the party by his boss, the president of the University of Nebraska, to try to lure Klimova to the Midwest for a visit. “There are a large number of Czechs in Nebraska,” Milliken explains as he nervously awaits his audience with the ambassador. “I even think the Czech capital of America is in Nebraska.” He cannot remember where in Nebraska but he knows people there want to see Klimova.

Finally it is his turn.

Klimova looks up at the tall Midwesterner and smiles. She radiates enthusiasm. She is wearing a hip-length black blouse threaded with gold and a long skirt. She wears no makeup except a dab of pink lipstick.

After Milliken introduces himself, she remembers the invitation from Nebraska, or was it Idaho? “Oh yes, I did receive your fax,” she recalls.

“Yes,” he says, “you already turned us down but I thought maybe. . . .”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve never been to Nebraska and I’d love to come. Maybe in the fall? Maybe I’ll come then?”

Milliken can’t believe his luck and presses a business card in her hand. Later, he has second thoughts: “Is it all right to dump a business card on an ambassador?”

After the reception, Klimova attends a private dinner for 30, including the Zbigniew Brzezinskis, at the home of Meda Mladek, a Czech-American who is the widow of the founder of the International Monetary Fund.

In terms of Washington society, Klimova has arrived. She has been to many similar exclusive dinners and sat next to many important people--Henry Kissinger, Speaker of the House Thomas Foley, socialite Muffy Brandon.

But for Klimova these social events present a special irony. For while she is not used to “dressing” for dinner or being served champagne by a butler, she is an intellectual in good standing. She grew up among the Czech elite and was a contemporary of the rising stars of the Communist Party.

Her father, Stanislav Budin, was editor of what at one time was the most important Communist newspaper in Czechoslovakia. Klimova also was married to Zdenek Mlynar, also a prominent party member and classmate of Mikhail S. Gorbachev during their student days in Moscow. But both her father and husband felt betrayed by the party and became disengaged after the Soviet invasion in 1968. Mlynar, a deputy to communist reformer Alexander Dubcek, was eventually expelled from his country.

Klimova also became disenchanted.

As a youth she had joined the party--even taking a year off from school to work in a factory to get closer to the proletariat. But her commitment to communism began eroding in the early 1960s and it was while she was teaching economic history at Charles University that she saw Communism’s practical failings. “For me it was over long before the tanks rolled in just because of the economic performance we had in Czechoslovakia,” she says. “I realized Communism just could not work.”

When she would not renounce the reforms known as the Prague Spring, she was expelled from the party and later was dismissed from the university. By the 1970s she was divorced from Mlynar (she was later widowed after a brief marriage to a diplomat) and supporting her father and two children by translating. In 20 years she figures she probably translated 15,000 pages of technical texts, mostly dry medical documents. “It was terribly boring but it was much better than being a waitress or a cashier in a self-service.”

Yet there are those in Czechoslovakia who still question Klimova’s alignments from the past.

That the American media often bring up her Communist and Jewish heritage may become a problem for extreme democratic reformers in her country, says Alex Benda, the Washington bureau chief of the Czechoslovak News Agency. He explains this at the embassy reception, looking around to see if anyone is listening.

“You people,” Benda whispers, “put too much stress on Communist and Jew. She has enemies and that could hurt her at home.”

Yet in America there are so many friends.

To many Americans who visited Prague over the last 20 years Rita Klimova was the first stop, the Czech connection. She would introduce visitors to important dissidents and translate at discreet meetings.

“She was who you went to see when you arrived,” recalls Philip Roth, the author who has been an impassioned devotee of Czech writers since the 1968 invasion. It was Klimova who introduced Roth to Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima.

Often, visits to Klimova turned into a pilgrimage. In the early 1970s, Klimova, her father and children were forced by the authorities to live an hour’s bus ride from Prague in a cheap high-rise in a mud flat. They were not allowed a phone nor other services. But the tougher restriction was on Klimova’s daughter and son--they were not allowed an education.

Yet Barbara Sproul, Roth’s former companion and a professor of comparative religion in New York, says father and daughter remained upbeat. “Budin was tremendously important in the intellectual life of Czechoslovakia--a gruff man with a deep voice,” Sproul says. “Yet he was wonderfully warm and funny. And Rita was devoted to him. We had lively visits; sometimes we even got silly.”

Sproul recalls the first meeting between Roth and Kundera at Klimova’s apartment. “The guys started to talk quite racy and there was Rita getting progressively pink. It was her pleasure to translate these interrelations but when the guys were talking dirty, well, if her father was around it would be worse. She would be too embarrassed.”

Visitors would bring gifts and Klimova says she appreciated “every roll of Scotch tape and every issue of the New York Review of Books.”

One of the last gifts Klimova received was a copy of SHOAH, an 9.5-hour documentary about the Holocaust. On four separate occasions Klimova invited friends over and translated the documentary from beginning to end.

There are dozens of “Rita” stories in this town--dozens of stories of her warmth and humor and irony. Like the time just a few weeks ago that instead of taking the airplane or train to New York, the Ambassador came by car. Her young chauffeur had never seen New York so she insisted on taking the car and stopping at McDonald’s along the way.

But Philip Roth tells a story of Klimova that speaks to her quiet commitment and he tells it with a sense of wonder.

In 1973 Roth met the widow of a writer named Jiri Weil, a Communist and a Jew who had written a remarkable novel about a Czech Jew who survives the Nazis. “I had mentioned Jiri Weil to Rita and said I would like to read some of his work,” recalls Roth. “I asked her if she would translate some of his book ‘Life With a Star’ for me.”

Roth heard nothing about it from her after that. Until one day in 1986 a manuscript arrived by mail at Roth’s home.

“Rita never said anything, she just did it,” Roth says. “And it was a wonderful, truly a classical book. She did it.”

One afternoon Klimova addresses 200 rich Republicans in a plush hotel conference room. They each give $10,000 annually to the GOP and are rewarded four times a year with a “briefing” and reception with the President. While Klimova is not used to these circles--most of her friends in America are liberal Democrats--she shares many values with the captains of American industry. She, too, is an ardent free marketeer and conservative when it comes to industry.

Her speech about investment opportunities in Czechoslovakia is a big hit.

“She was sensational, a very down-to-earth person,” says David Koch, an oil executive from Wichita, Kan. But he is less enthusiastic about doing business in her country. “Their plants are old and unacceptable,” he says. “She’ll have to do better to convince people that will improve.”

Klimova hopes through force of personality to make her country seem inviting, but she feels it is up to Czech businessmen to do the rest.

“The invisible hand of the market, as Adam Smith said in 1776, will have its own way,” she says. “If there’s a good business opportunity people will find it.”

She is at ease with most principles of American capitalism. It is the realities of the government system--especially the Washington bureaucracy--that gives her trouble. “People keep telling me I have to ‘work the Hill’ but I haven’t quite figured how to do that,” she confesses.

She has, however, pursued politicians.

Several high-level U.S. officials promised to give Czechoslovakia $750,000 to run its first general election in June but the government has yet to cut the check. In the meantime Klimova keeps pressing for the money. Again last week she was told it would be forthcoming--perhaps in 10 days.

“I keep explaining in Prague that Americans are generous but on the other hand they are rich precisely because they don’t go giving away money,” she says. “I would have been better off asking for $750 million than $750,000. “

Back at the supermarket, Klimova reflects on the future. “I think we have a few months to go,” she says, leaving the market with $40.25 worth of food. “In a few months Americans will be done discovering us and we can get back to normal.”

But what is normal?

Six months ago Rita Klimova was by her own description “a pensioner involved in dissident activities and telling myself I should be more involved with my grandchildren.”

Since then she has been moving at a pace far too fast to control, and while sometimes she is overwhelmed she also is delighted by the notion of her mission--that someday, if she keeps crisscrossing America, meeting people, talking about her country, Czechoslovakia also will have eight varieties of milk and its people also will be overwhelmed with choices.

And so she is frantically mapping out her agenda on a black leather Filofax, and returning every call left on her home answering machine, which must be the only one in diplomatic Washington with such a folksy message.

“Hello,” it begins, “this is Rita Klimova. I’m not here right now but if you want to leave a message do so after the beep.”