Wendy Luers

„The other story, actually, was 1985, 4th of July, our national day. We had brought out white ice cream carts that former ambassadors' wife had had build. We had all the embassy kids serving American ice cream and we had the ballons tied to the fingers of the putti on the roof flying up. We had 2000 people, on our lawn. We invited every Charter 77 spokesperson: Hájek, Havel and everybody else. Johanes, who was a deputy for foreign minister, came in and our number two in the embassy, Bill Farrand, was now standing in line, because my hands have gotten so swollen from people shaking, so Bill and I went out to talk to people, and Johanes said: ´We´re leaving. You invited them.´ Bill Farrand looked at him and said: ´But it´s a free country, isn´t it?´ So, we had some extraordinary moments.“

„When we arrived here in 1983 in a dark December afternoon, I had never been here before. My daughters were 11 and 13, or 9 and 11 at that point, and we arrived from New York to Frankfurt to change planes with two dogs except the dogs didn´t arrive. So I had two weeping daughters who didn´t want to go until the dogs arrived and they knew they were coming on a later plane. But the communist people were waiting at the airport, at Ruzyně airport, to greet the new American ambassador. So after we checked out the glistening vererinary hospital in the basement of the Frankfurt airport and the girls have decided the dogs would be OK, we got on the plane and came to Prague. It was dark, it was dirty, it was grim. As we came down Leninova street, now Evropská, and we got to this beautiful Petschek palace and crunched up the drive way and there were all the staff lined up waiting to greet us and I thought: ´Well, maybe this is not gonna be so bad.´ That´s how we arrived.“

„As you can imagine, I am probably not a typical spouse of an American ambassador or any ambassador, really. I don´t play bridge, I don´t do a lot of those things that a lot of ladies do. Along with Bill, our main goal was of course to do cultural diplomacy which is what we have done in Venezuela as well. Even though the StB and the communist government knew that I was a journalist and that I worked for Amnesty International, they were still so chauvinistic that they sort of put the third grade StB agents following me as opposed to the number unos who were following Bill or driving him, actually. So I went out and met some of the people that Michael Žantovský introduced us to, and I asked them again if we would get them in too much trouble. That's when they said: ´We´re in such trouble already and you´ve got whisky and you´ve got cigarettes.´ And we filled the house with these wonderfull people who were the far the most interesting people in Prague, and at the same time we did what we had to do officially.“