The Neck, Not the Heart

When Jan Papanek, friend of Benes and democracy, walked out of his United Nations post in 1948 in protest against the Communist rape of his homeland, the new Red bosses of Czechoslovakia picked a successor who was more appreciative of the virtues of Communist-style democracy. Within a few days, Vladimir Houdek, a lumpish, round-shouldered Communist with an acute allergy to hard work, arrived at Lake Success spouting epithets at his predecessor. Papanek, he trumpeted, was a traitor to his country and a tool of the Western warmongers.

Out of Favor. Houdek settled listlessly into parakeet row at U.N. He spoke only what Moscow told him to say, voted the way Moscow told him to vote, stomped out of council chambers when Moscow's delegates stomped out. It was not a demanding life, it paid well ($12,000 a year, tax free) and it put Houdek into position to enjoy the bourgeois pleasures of Long Island.

It was not until a few months ago that he began to feel uncomfortable. First, Houdek learned that Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, his influential friend at court, had been booted from office and marked for trial for the crime of "Westernism." Then Houdek himself was summoned back to Prague for "consultation."

Last week 37-year-old Vladimir Houdek, fallen from favor and apparently facing a Moscow-style purge trial back home, announced a discovery: Soviet Russia had robbed Czechoslovakia of her independence. Houdek sent his $1,100 passage money back to the Czech delegation and issued a long statement of resignation at U.N. headquarters. Insisting that he was still a "socialist", he sent Joseph Stalin a cablegram, quoting Lenin at him to prove that Stalin really shouldn't be so beastly to Czechoslovakia. He also dispatched a third message, to President Truman, asking asylum in the U.S. for himself, his wife and two daughters. "I [do] so," he wrote, "in order to protest to the whole world against the methods which are being used in Eastern European countries . . ."

Over the Air. Pleased at another display of Titoism in the Communist ranks, State Department officials beamed Houdek's words to Eastern Europe on the Voice of America and indicated that ultimately they would let Houdek remain in the U.S. But no one thought he had changed his mind or his heart; it was his neck he was thinking of.

Gaunt and nervous, Houdek holed up in his unpretentious suburban home at Great Neck, N.Y., just across the street from a police station, and contemplated the necessity of working for a living. Cocking his ear toward Prague, he said dolefully: "They will . . . declare me a traitor, but I do not regard this as a personal thing."

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