Prague Journal; Shirley Temple Black Unpacks a Bag of Memories
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY, Special to The New York Times
Published: September 11, 1989
PRAGUE— Shirley Temple Black is the last person you would think to find in Prague these days. But she has just become the American Ambassador to Czechoslovakia.
As she says herself, her movie career lasted 19 years, a shorter period than her career in public service, which has now lasted 20. In 1987, George P. Shultz, President Reagan's Secretary of State, made her the first honorary United States Foreign Service officer in the State Department's history.
If Prague were Rome or Paris, it would be easy to see George Bush's decision to ask her to be Ambassador to Czechoslovakia as simply a political reward for long, loyal service to the conservative Republican cause.
But Prague is a difficult post that has usually been held by career diplomats with a background in Eastern European affairs. Asked what her interest in Czechoslovakia was, Mrs. Black, now 61 years old, said she had been in Prague at the crucial moment - Aug. 21, 1968, when Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled in and brought to a premature end Alexander Dubcek's effort to remodel the Communist system. She was there as a representative of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies. A Meeting With Husak
Gustav Husak, the man who replaced Mr. Dubcek, is almost certainly not going to be the one to try to remodel Communism again, but he is still Czechoslovakia's President. It was to Mr. Husak that Ambassador Black presented her credentials on Aug. 23.
''I mentioned that I had been here in 1968,'' she said, declining on diplomatic grounds to report what his reaction had been. When she spoke the formal diplomatic phrases of the accreditation ceremony in Czech, she said, she asked Mr. Husak if she had wounded his ears, and he answered, ''Not very much.''
He had seen her in her old films, Mrs. Black said, and, using the Czech language diminutive, said that his late wife and he had both enjoyed ''Shirleyka.''
The still-proud star of ''Little Miss Marker,'' ''Heidi'' and ''Stowaway'' is aware of the uses, personal and diplomatic, of each one of them. ''Shirley Temple opens doors for Shirley Temple Black,'' she said in an interview in the embassy.
On how she got this job, she said, ''I have always told anyone who would listen that I was available for more public service.''
''President Bush did not know I had been here,'' she said, recalling his telephone call to her in Seattle on Feb. 28 to ask her to take the job. ''I said yes so loudly and quickly that Charlie asked me what it was I had agreed to do,'' she said, referring to her husband of 39 years, a California businessman. ''It means a great deal to me.'' Delegate to United Nations
Mrs. Black's diplomatic career began in 1969 when President Richard M. Nixon made her a United States delegate to the United Nations. President Gerald R. Ford made her Ambassador to Ghana in 1974, and later the first woman to hold the position of White House Chief of Protocol. That ended when a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, took over the Presidency in 1977.
''I remember telling President Carter on his first night, when I was escorting people around, that I was interested in continuing public service and that politics didn't matter - but it does, doesn't it?'' she said with a laugh.
Mrs. Black brings many surprisingly apposite qualities to the new job. She has, as she described in her 1988 autobiography ''Child Star,'' published by McGraw-Hill, an actor's almost photographic memory, the instinctive feel for the ways of professional diplomats (saying today is ''31 August'' instead of ''August 31,'' for example), and the skills of personal diplomacy that put her young Marine guards, who may have heard about her movie career from their grandmothers, if at all, as much at ease as Mr. Husak is with her.
What she says she wants to do now is improve United States relations with Czechoslovakia and urge the changes here that are necessary to bring about that improvement - an end to restrictions of human rights, the freedom of speech and assembly. One-Way Ticket to Prague
She said she recognized that it would not be easy. Mr. Husak and his colleagues are in power because they clamped down on those rights at Russian insistence in 1968, long before Mikhail S. Gorbachov had allowed the winds of change to blow from Moscow and through Eastern Europe.
''I was in Vienna in August 1968 for a meeting of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, of which I was co-founder, and we wanted a 20th country to join,'' she said. ''They asked for a volunteer to go to Prague to get Czechoslovakia to do it, and my hand always goes up first.''
''I got a visa and bought a one-way ticket to Prague on the train, and got here on 17 August,'' she went on, remembering how a delegation of journalists and officials escorted her to the Alcron Hotel on Stepanska Street. Things went well, and by Aug. 20 the Czechs were about to join.
''I was having a meeting with the rector of Charles University, and at 4 P.M. a secretary came in and told me, 'Your meeting with Mr. Dubcek in 15 minutes is canceled - he is all tied up.' Those were the exact words.''
Unaware of what was happening, Mrs. Black said, she returned to the hotel, where she gave a news conference that lasted, as those things do in this part of the world, for five hours. By the time she finished, it was too late for dinner and she went to bed. 'We Have Been Invaded'
''At 11 I got a strange phone call from a gentleman speaking mostly Czech,'' she said. ''I understood 'airport' and 'you must come down to lobby,' and of course I didn't. At 10 minutes to midnight, I began hearing shelling, shooting, and I think a bomb, but I thought it was a drill.
''It wasn't until the next day that my guide came back and told me: 'You will not see Mr. Dubcek, and you will not leave from the airport today. We have been invaded.' There were tears in her eyes.''
''I was hungry, and on the way up to the roof of the hotel to try to see what was happening, I took some of the leftover hard rolls from the breakfast trays people had put outside their rooms,'' she said. ''I looked down and saw tanks all around the hotel, and their guns were pointing up.
''That night, after curfew, in the lobby looking out at the street, I saw a Czech middle-aged woman shaking her fist at the soldiers. She was shot in the stomach and went down. That was a bad sight.''
''Nothing crushes freedom as substantially as a tank,'' she observed. She was here for the subdued anniversary observances, marked by quiet demonstrations by a few thousand people and the police arrests of 350 of them.
''I wasn't officially accredited yet, so I took a two-and-a-half-hour walk near the park near the residence and told my staff where I could be contacted,'' she said.