The only person I knew in Moscow was Nikki Alexis, who had given me the two friendship cards I loved when I went home from Oxford the previous summer. She was an amazing woman, born in Martinique in the West Indies, living in Paris because her father was a diplomat there. Nikki was studying at Lumumba University, named after the Congolese leader who was murdered in 1961, apparently with the complicity of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Most of the students were poor people from poor countries. The Soviets obviously hoped that by educating them they’d be making converts when they went home.
One night I took a bus out to Lumumba University to have dinner with Nikki and some of her friends. One of them was a Haitian woman named Helene whose husband was studying in Paris. They had a daughter who was living with him. They had no money to travel and hadn’t seen each other in almost two years. When I left Russia a few days later, Helene gave me one of those trademark Russian fur hats. It wasn’t expensive but she had no money. I asked her if she was sure she wanted me to have it. She replied, “Yes. You were kind to me and you made me have hope.” In 1994, when, as President, I made the decision to remove Haiti’s military dictator, General Raoul Cedras, and return the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, I thought of that good woman for the first time in years, and wondered if she ever went back to Haiti.
Around midnight, I rode the bus to my hotel. There was only one other person on it. His name was Oleg Rakito and he spoke better English than I did. He asked me lots of questions and told me he worked for the government, virtually admitting he was assigned to keep an eye on me. He said he’d like to continue our conversation at breakfast the next morning. As we ate cold bacon and eggs he told me he read Time and Newsweek every week and loved the British pop star Tom Jones, whose songs he got on bootlegged tapes. If Oleg was pumping me for information because I had had a security clearance when I worked for Senator Fulbright, he came up dry. But I learned some things from him about the thirst of a young person behind the Iron Curtain for real information about the outside world. That stayed with me all the way to the White House.
Oleg wasn’t the only friendly Russian I encountered. President Nixon’s policy of détente was having noticeable results. A few months earlier, Russian television had shown the Americans walking on the moon. People were still excited about it and seemed to be fascinated by all things American. They envied our freedom and assumed we were all rich. I guess, compared with most of them, we were. Whenever I took the subway, people would come up to me and say proudly, “I speak English! Welcome to Moscow.” One night I shared dinner with a few hotel guests, a local cabdriver, and his sister. The girl had a bit too much to drink and decided she wanted to stay with me. Her brother had to drag her out of the hotel into the snow and shove her into his cab. I never knew whether he was afraid being with me would guarantee her a grilling by the KGB, or he just thought I was unworthy of his sister. My most interesting Moscow adventure began with a chance encounter in the hotel elevator. When I got in, there were four other men in the car. One of them was wearing a Virginia Lions Club pin. He obviously thought I was a foreigner, with my long hair and beard, rawhide boots, and British navy pea jacket. He drawled, “Where you from?” When I smiled and said, “Arkansas,” he replied, “Shoot, I thought you were from Denmark or someplace like that!” The man’s name was Charlie Daniels. He was from Norton, Virginia, hometown of Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who had been shot down and captured in Russia in 1960. He was accompanied by Carl McAfee, a lawyer from Norton who had helped to arrange Powers’s release, and a chicken farmer from Washington State, Henry Fors, whose son had been shot down in Vietnam. They had come all the way to Moscow to see if the North Vietnamese stationed there would tell the farmer whether his son was dead or alive. The fourth man was from Paris and, like the men from Virginia, a member of the Lions Club. He had joined them because the North Vietnamese spoke French. They all just came to Moscow without any assurances that the Russians would permit them to talk with the Vietnamese or that, if they did, any information would be forthcoming. None of them spoke Russian. They asked if I knew anyone who could help them. My old friend Nikki Alexis was studying English, French, and Russian at Patrice Lumumba University. I introduced her to them and they spent a couple of days together making the rounds, checking in with the American embassy, asking the Russians to help, finally seeing the North Vietnamese, who apparently were impressed that Mr. Fors and his friends would make such an effort to learn the fate of his son and several others who were missing in action. They said they would check into it and get back to them. A few weeks later, Henry Fors learned that his son had been killed when his plane was shot down. At least he had some peace of mind. I thought of Henry Fors when I worked to resolve POW/MIA cases as President and to help the Vietnamese find out what had happened to more than 300,000 of their people still unaccounted for.
On January 6, Nikki and her Haitian friend Helene put me on the train to Prague, one of the most beautiful old cities in Europe, still reeling from the Soviet repression of Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring reform movement in August 1968. I had been invited to stay with the parents of Jan Kopold, who played basketball with me at Oxford. The Kopolds were nice people whose personal history was closely entwined with that of modern Czechoslovakia. Mrs. Kopold’s father had been editor in chief of the Communist newspaper Rude Pravo, died fighting the Nazis in World War II, and had a bridge in Prague named for him. Both Mr. and Mrs. Kopold were academics and had been big supporters of Dubcek. Mrs. Kopold’s mother also lived with them. She took me around town during the day when the Kopolds were working. They lived in a nice apartment in a modern high-rise with a beautiful view of the city. I stayed in Jan’s room and was so excited I woke up three or four times a night just to stare at the skyline. The Kopolds, like all the Czechs I met, held on to the belief that their chance at freedom would come again. They deserved it as much as anyone on earth. They were intelligent, proud, and determined. The young Czechs I met were especially pro-American. They supported our government in Vietnam because we were for freedom and the Soviets weren’t. Mr. Kopold once said to me, “Even the Russians cannot defy forever the laws of historical development.” Sure enough, they couldn’t. In twenty years, Václav Havel’s peaceful “Velvet Revolution” would reclaim the promise of Prague Spring. Ten months after I left the Kopolds to go back to Oxford, I received the following notice from them, written on simple white paper with black borders: “With immense pain we want to inform his friends that on July 29 in the University Hospital in Smyrna, Turkey, died at the young age of 23 Jan Kopold…. For a long time it was his great desire to visit what remains of the Hellenic culture. It was not far from Troy that he fell from a height and succumbed from the injuries he sustained.” I really liked Jan, with his ready smile and good mind. When I knew him, he was tortured by the conflict between his love of Czechoslovakia and his love of freedom. I wish he had lived to enjoy both. After six days in Prague, I stopped in Munich to celebrate Faschingsfest with Rudy Lowe, then returned to England with renewed faith in America and democracy. For all its faults, I had discovered that my country was still a beacon of light to people chafing under communism. Ironically, when I ran for President in 1992, the Republicans tried to use the trip against me, claiming that I had consorted with Communists in Moscow.