The Bouncing Czech
The Czechoslovak Embassy in Washington, in a beautiful setting in Rock Creek Park, is nonetheless a forbidding, unfriendly building. The iron bars enclosing it are a vestige of the Cold War days before Czech patriots retook their country.</br></br>But inside, superimposed on a still-creaking Eastern European bureaucracy, there is a new perpetual motion machine-Rita Klimova, the 58-year-old American-educated ambassador whose rise to the top couldn't have been better scripted by Hollywood.</br></br>Klimova, an economist, was a dissident keeping one step ahead of the Czech dictators before Vaclav Havel assumed the presidency on Dec. 29, and he sent her to Washington to help in the process of "returning Czechoslovakia to Europe."</br></br>In a sense, Klimova has come home. She arrived here with her parents in 1938 after they escaped from Hitler, but returned with them to Prague as a teenager in 1946. She ditched her commitment to communist doctrine sometime in the early 1960s and became enamored of Western free-market economic theory. "I'm a great believer in the invisible hand of the market," Klimova told me.</br></br>The ex-Girl Scout from Manhattan's upper West Side, a bit breathless after a dawn-to-dusk round of appointments and interviews, is disarmingly candid. "The Czech economy," she says flatly, "is not functioning now, and people know that things have to get worse before they get better. The environment is a complete and total disaster. And I think we are the only country in Europe where life expectancy has gone down in the past 10 years."