(2 of 4)
After Czechoslovakia became a nation, he entered his father's government, first as a civil servant (secretary to then Foreign Minister Eduard Benes), later as a diplomat. His post was London, where he was enormously popular. In a crowd he sparkled, but sometimes among small groups and after a few drinks he became deeply, almost tearfully melancholy. Near war's close someone asked Jan Masaryk what his postwar plans were. Said he simply: "I want to go home."
He told a friend: "I do not know whether I shall be Foreign Minister after the war. But I am a man of limited ambitions. All I need is a living room large enough for a piano on which to play, enough books on the shelves, a kitchen in which to prepare my favorite dishes and a bedroom with a bed large enough for entertaining."
Thomas Masaryk had written:
"Modern man wants only to live and to let live, but it is very often because of this that he takes his life"
Something for the Nation. Eduard Benes and Jan Masaryk certainly had no leanings toward Communism. But they were convinced that they must snuggle up to Stalin and try to take the middle path between East and West; they would be "realists." In Moscow they made the Soviet-Czech pact on Dec. 12, 1943. For the next four years Czech Communists, who now had the might of Russia behind them, jostled, maneuvered and crowded until they took over.
Last week, the 98th anniversary of Thomas Masaryk's birth occurred. At his grave in Lany, Gottwald & Co. assembled for a propaganda field day. They said: "If Thomas Masaryk were alive he would approve us." Jan Masaryk was not among them at the grave, but the fact that he was in the Communist Cabinet lent validity to the Communist use of his father's name.
The dust of Gottwald & Co.'s departure from Lany had not settled when Masaryk's black Packard pulled up at the little white-fenced cemetery. His grey Homburg in his hand, Jan Masaryk stood staring at his father's grave, at the clusters of farm buildings that dotted the countryside, and suddenly he bent over and began to sob. For 45 minutes he wept. On his way back to Prague he muttered over & over: "For me nothing matters now. I only wish I could do something for the nation."
Thomas Masaryk had said:
"As a rule, in politics men take up a position either to the left or right. Then the wiseacre comes along and combs his beard with his hand and says: 'Children, neither to the right nor to the left: the golden middle way.' This man with the beard has no outlook of his own. The right and the left have their definite opinions; the tactical gold-seeker slips or creeps in between them. He needs the radical oppositions so that he can skip to and fro. . . . The modern era . . . is the age of permanent revolutions. Reaction itself is a form of revolution . . . whence the high comedy of the golden middle path."