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Son of Liberty. Eduard Benes grew up in a search for freedom. He was born, the last of a family of ten children, under a peasant's roof.
From the time he entered the Kozlany village school through his Gymnasium and university years in Prague and Paris, Benes was a dervish for study. At 16, the once pious Catholic boy had turned into an unkempt dogmatist. By the time he was 19, he had run the gamut of the philosophies of extremism, from Sorelian violence to Marxian materialism. Then he encountered Thomas Masaryk.
The late, great Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was Czechoslovakia's George Washington. He and Benes first met at Prague's Charles University, and thereby began one of history's notable partnerships in thought, politics and statesmanship. Masaryk's influence turned the didactic radical into a tolerant democrat and eclectic rationalist. Eduard Benes began to practice the blending "art of synthesis." In his Charles University thesis, he essayed a prophetic conclusion: mankind must find a synthesis of its ideals in order to form a working formula for progress. Democracy, in particular, must find the correct compromise between individualism and socialism.
Conspirator & Statesman. World War I plunged young Dr. Benes from university teaching into political conspiracy. His objective, fathered by Masaryk: to form an independent republic amid the dissolution of the Habsburgs' crumbling Dual Monarchy.
At Prague, on Oct. 28, 1918, the National Council proclaimed the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic. As secretary-general of the National Council, Benes had striven for Allied recognition, helped recruit a Czechoslovak army abroad, served as the workhorse of his cause. "Without Benes," said President Masaryk, "we never would have had the Republic."
For almost two decades, first as Czechoslovak Foreign Minister and Masaryk's heir-apparent, then as President after the aging Masaryk's resignation in 1935, Dr. Benes labored at a synthesis that would ensure Central Europe's security. He built what he called a "temple of peace," based mainly on an alliance between France and Czechoslovakia, buttressed by the League of Nations.
That policy failed. Naziism could not be synthesized. One night in October 1938, a plane whisked Dr. Benes into exile. He was lecturing on democracy at the University of Chicago when word came, five months later, of Hitler's march into Czechoslovakia. For a day he lay on a couch in a darkened room, in a stillness as of death. Next morning, resolute and reinvigorated, he plunged into the task of keeping the Republic alive in exile.
For six years Benes' homeland knew the tearing strains and compromises and moral storms of occupation. As in other lands of the New Order, not all Czechs and Slovaks were heroes; some made their reluctant peace with serfdom, some had even welcomed the conqueror. But many fought and many died. In exile, Benes won Allied support for his refugee government, organized a new Czechoslovak army, kept close contact with the homeland's hopes and fears, and planned a new synthesis. "Ideas do not stand still," he said. "We accept the catch phrase of the last war: 'The cure for democracy is more democracy!' ":