Ordinary Treatment for Extraordinary Czech Leader

The rusty front doors of the Third Surgical Clinic on London Street here look anything but presidential. But that is exactly the point.

For the last month, the no-frills hospital has been home for Czech President Vaclav Havel, who had a cancerous tumor removed from his right lung several weeks ago and is now recuperating from pneumonia and other complications.

The neighborhood clinic has also been home to hundreds of ordinary Czechs--some even bedding down in Havel’s intensive care unit--as the everyday medical emergencies of central Prague pack its corridors and operating rooms.

“He is such a great humanist that he just wants to be treated like the rest of us,” said Ema Polodnova, an ashen gallbladder patient resting on a wooden bench in the admissions lobby. “We love him so much because of the way he is.”

At his own insistence, the president is eating ordinary hospital food (breakfast of bread, chopped liver and coffee with milk), is staying in ordinary hospital quarters (the fifth-floor intensive care ward) and is being treated by ordinary hospital physicians (his surgeons, one Czech newspaper calculated, were paid less than his car mechanics).

When Havel was rendered speechless two weeks ago by an emergency tracheotomy, he took to jotting down notes. His requests to nurses, according to hospital reports, have never been without “please” and “thank you.” Unable to deliver his regular weekly radio address, he penned a gracious letter of gratitude to television viewers.

Havel has always been a different sort of politician, a thoughtful playwright turned courageous dissident who led the struggle against totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia, becoming its first post-Communist president. He prefers discussions about human decency and virtue to debates over budgets and taxes.

Though time has tarnished the luster of many heroes of 1989, Havel’s standing at home and abroad remains unparalleled among his contemporaries. Opinion polls consistently show that he is viewed favorably by about three-quarters of his countrymen.

“I would give my life so that you could get healthy,” a Prague woman recently wrote to him.

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Yet for all his aura, it has taken Havel’s sudden and serious illness for many Czechs to make a disturbing realization: Their extraordinary president is irreplaceable.

“He is the only politician who has introduced moral concepts into his work, and that is not only here in the Czech Republic, but everywhere,” said Jiri Dienstbier, a fellow Communist-era dissident and former foreign minister. “There are others who share his views, but none has his authority and stature.”

Speculating about life after Havel is considered bad manners, even among political commentators. Havel, 60, is on the mend, and his prognosis for recovery is good.

“The president now needs peace and good news,” said spokesman Ladislav Spacek, addressing the nation last weekend.

But beneath the official quiet is unofficial disquiet.

The office of president is mostly symbolic, but Havel’s practical worth as a political mediator proved crucial this fall when the ruling coalition lost its parliamentary majority and a deal with the opposition had to be struck.

Though no-nonsense Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus has been one of idealist Havel’s biggest detractors, he submitted to presidential arbitration, and the biggest political crisis since the breakup with Slovakia nearly four years ago was resolved.

Would such a scenario be possible without Havel? Could Parliament, which chooses the president every five years, even settle on a suitable successor? Answers have not come easily.

“It is increasingly apparent that our political parties are selfish and unable to achieve any consensus,” said Ivan Fisera of the Czech-Moravian Chamber of Trade Unions. “It is absolutely necessary that someone of undoubted moral authority stand between them. We all need Vaclav Havel to get well soon.”

Murphy, Warsaw bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Prague.