Havel's chancellor on how the president grew close to Zeman

Václav Havel switched to first-name terms with Miloš Zeman after former culture minister Pavel Dostál brought him to the Hrádeček cottage without warning — and later regretted that decision, recalls Ivo Mathé, the last head of the presidential chancellery, who ran it from 1999 to 2003. According to Mathé, Havel had been on first-name terms with Václav Klaus since the late 1960s, but with Zeman everything happened spontaneously, and the president's conscience troubled him for a long time afterward.

Growing up among dissidents

Mathé grew up in Prague's Smíchov district, on Matoušova Street, in a house next door to the writer and dissident Pavel Kout. He essentially grew up together with Kout's children, and later worked in the same newsroom at Czechoslovak Television as his daughter Anna (Andulka). It was through her that he met Havel: in the 1970s Andulka was the girlfriend of the future president, even though he was married to Olga, and according to Mathé, it was she who used to visit Havel in Ruzyně prison and play his favorite music for him from the car.

Getting to know Havel and other opponents of the regime, among them the dissident Jiří Dienstbier, did not come without cost: Mathé had his military exemption revoked and was drafted into the army at the age of thirty, even though by then he had already graduated from university and had two children. He was released back into civilian life only seven months later.

From television to Hradčany

In early 1998 Mathé was not re-elected for a second term as director general of Czech Television. The very next day, Havel offered him the post of head of the presidential chancellery — the previous head, Ivan Medek, who was in his seventies, wanted to retire. The situation turned into something of a farce: Mathé was at the same time still vice-president of the European Broadcasting Union, and in Geneva he was told that the post was tied personally to him, not to Czech Television, and that he could not simply walk away from it.

Soon after his appointment, Mathé faced his first serious test: while on holiday in the Austrian Alps, Havel suffered a ruptured colon and had to undergo surgery in Innsbruck in critical condition. The chancellery set up a sort of "forward camp" in Austria: Mathé even held up a plane and paid for a Czech doctor's ticket with his own credit card, and then flew to Austria himself several times to organize the president's transport home.

The era of the "bad mood"

By the late 1990s the public mood was shifting: the revolutionary enthusiasm of the early 1990s had faded, criticism of those in power was growing, and the leader of the Social Democrats, Miloš Zeman, took advantage of this, becoming in 1998 the first left-wing prime minister since Václav Klaus. The criticism also touched Havel himself — part of society disapproved of the fact that he had remarried, to actress Dagmar Veškrnová, fairly soon after the death of his first wife, Olga. At the end of 1997, in the Rudolfinum, Havel delivered his famous speech to both houses of parliament about the "bad mood" in society — and the only person who did not applaud afterward was the then prime minister, Václav Klaus. Then in 1998 the ODS and the ČSSD struck an "opposition agreement" on tolerating Zeman's minority government, which Havel strongly disliked.

The friction eventually turned into open conflict: in 2000 Havel wanted to appoint Zdeněk Tůma as head of the Czech National Bank, a move opposed by everyone, including Klaus and Zeman. While Klaus at least tried to argue his case, Prime Minister Zeman began being openly rude to the president, and later even filed a constitutional complaint against Havel over the appointment — and lost.

The only film, and the last day

According to Mathé, Havel was an excellent judge of character and saw through both politicians: he considered both Klaus and Zeman vain and self-absorbed men who put their own interests above the public good, and Zeman, on top of that, rude. Mathé himself, unlike many chancellery staff who had known Havel since his dissident days, never switched to first-name terms with the president and believes that staying on formal terms was the right decision.

The only film that Havel not only wrote but also directed himself was "Leaving," based on his own play — it premiered in March 2011, and its broadcast on Czech Television fell on the day of the author's death, 18 December 2011. Despite nominations in all the main categories of the Czech Lion award, the film won only for best screenplay and editing, and the reaction from critics and audiences alike was rather lukewarm.

Mathé learned of Havel's death by phone from his son while driving back from Bratislava in his then role as rector of the Academy of Performing Arts, and later confirmed the news with Vladimír Hanzel, the president's longtime secretary. Mathé admits that sometimes it seems to him that death came as a kind of release for Havel — even in his lifetime the president felt bewildered by the country's political development, although in Mathé's view he would not have had to witness today's situation at all. He recalls informal discussions at the Amálie hunting lodge in Lány, where politicians, economists, journalists and historians would gather: Havel stayed silent and listened almost the whole time, but at the end he always managed to sum up the conversation brilliantly — a skill, Mathé says, he never encountered in anyone else.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz