William H. Luers, Diplomat Who Backed Czech Dissident Leader, Dies at 95

New York Times

11-05-2025

In 1983, William H. Luers, a new American ambassador to Czechoslovakia, bet on a long shot for its future: Vaclav Havel, the often-imprisoned poet-playwright and enemy of the Communist state. But after leading a peaceful revolution to oust the regime, the long shot cultural leader became the democratically-elected last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of its successor, the Czech Republic.
The ambassador's contribution to Mr. Havel's very survival in the last years of Communist rule, and his subsequent political successes were, in his own telling, results of maneuvers as gentle as the so-called Velvet Revolution that extricated Czechoslovakia from the Communists in 1989.
To spare Mr. Havel from an assassin's bullet, a poison pill or a return to prison — where he might have been snuffed out quietly — Mr. Luers enlisted dozens of American cultural celebrities, mostly friends of his, to visit Prague, meet the playwright and then, at news conferences outside the reach of the government-controlled Czech news media, recast him in a protective armor of global publicity.
'I spent a lot of my career with artists and writers, promoting the arts,' Mr. Luers said in a 2022 interview for this obituary. 'I was worried that the Communists might poison him or put him back in prison. My strategy was to shine as much light on Havel as possible. So I brought in John Updike, Edward Albee and many other people to talk about how great an artist and cultural leader he was.'
The recruited celebrities, Mr. Luers said, included the novelists E.L. Doctorow, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron; Philippe de Montebello, the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art; Joseph Papp, the producer-director who created Shakespeare in the Park; the California abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn; and Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post.
The secret police filmed and photographed the visitors, but they were hardly people who could be intimidated. Indeed, Mr. Luers said, it was ultimately the Communist authorities who were cowed by the worldwide attention accorded to Mr. Havel. The underlying message, he said, was that harming Mr. Havel might risk incalculable international consequences for the Czech government.
Mr. Luers, who retired from the Foreign Service in 1986 and became president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 13 years, died on Saturday at his home in Washington Depot, in western Connecticut. He was 95. His wife, Wendy Luers, said the cause was prostate cancer.
In a 29-year Foreign Service career, Mr. Luers was a blend of diplomat and showman who cultivated friendships with artists and writers while seeking solutions to Cold War problems for five presidential administrations, from Dwight D. Eisenhower's in the 1950s to Ronald Reagan's in the '80s. It was an era of nuclear perils, regional conflicts and fast-moving economic and political changes.
Specializing in Soviet and East European affairs, and fluent in Russian, Spanish and Italian, Mr. Luers worked at embassies in Moscow, Rome and other capitals of Europe and Latin America. At his career's end, he was ambassador to Venezuela (1978-82) as well as Czechoslovakia (1983-86).
On his last and most important diplomatic assignment, Mr. Luers arrived in Prague months after Mr. Havel, the scion of a wealthy Czech family noted for its cultural accomplishments, was released from four years in prison, the longest of his several sentences for political activities in defiance of the government.
Mr. Havel's absurdist plays ridiculing Moscow's satellite state had already raised him to international prominence, but had left him an official pariah and his works blacklisted at home for years after Soviet tanks crushed the brief Prague Spring uprisings of 1968.
Mr. Luers set his leadership sights on Mr. Havel for his artistic talents and magnetic personality, and contacted him through dissident intellectuals in the Civic Forum, a notable opponent of the Communist Party. His American celebrity friends burnished Mr. Havel's name as a writer, but not as a statesman, which might have increased Mr. Havel's perils. Inside Czechoslovakia, only the underground samizdat press circulated the encomiums to him.
Long after Mr. Luers left Prague and retired in 1986, the protective effects of his stratagem lingered, and Mr. Havel played a major role in the peaceful revolution that toppled the Czech puppet government in 1989.
Weeks after that revolution, Mr. Havel was named president of Czechoslovakia by a unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. In 1990, his presidency was affirmed by a landslide in the nation's first free elections since 1946. And when the Czech Republic and Slovakia were created as successor states in 1993, Mr. Havel became the republic's first president. Re-elected in 1998, he left office at the end of his second term in 2003.
'Bill Luers had a remarkable career — in fact many careers,' James L. Greenfield, a former State Department colleague who later was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times, said in a 2022 email for this obituary. (Mr. Greenfield died in 2024.) 'He was the ambassador to Venezuela, but more importantly to Czechoslovakia. While there he became the main supporter, defender and protector of Vaclav Havel.'
William Henry Luers was born on May 15, 1929, in Springfield, Ill., the youngest of three children of Carl and Ann (Lynd) Luers. William and his sisters, Gloria and Mary, grew up in Springfield. Their father was president of a local bank and their mother was an avid bridge player. William attended Springfield High School, where he played basketball and golf and was the senior class president; he graduated in 1947.
At Hamilton College in upstate New York, he majored in chemistry and math and earned a bachelor's degree in 1951. He studied philosophy at Northwestern University briefly, but joined the Navy in 1952, according to an oral history. He graduated from officers' candidate school, became a deck officer on aircraft carriers in the Atlantic and Pacific and was discharged as a lieutenant in 1957. He then joined the Foreign Service, and in 1958 earned a master's degree in Russian studies at Columbia University.
In 1957, he married Jane Fuller, an artist. They had four children: Mark, David, William and Amy, and were divorced in 1979. That year he married Wendy (Woods) Turnbull, the founder and president of the Foundation for a Civil Society, who had two daughters, Ramsay and Connor Turnbull, from a previous marriage.
His son Mark died of esophageal cancer in 2020. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his other children along with five grandchildren and five step-grandchildren.
After 16 years in the Foreign Service at lower ranks, Mr. Luers became an aide to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in 1973 (and personally delivered to him President Richard M. Nixon's 1974 letter of resignation in the Watergate scandal.) He became deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs in 1975, and for European affairs in 1977.
Retiring from the Foreign Service, he joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as president in a leadership-sharing arrangement with Mr. de Montebello, who as director presided over artistic matters and was the Met's spokesman. Mr. Luers, as chief executive, handled finances, fund-raising and outreach to government agencies. The dual leadership, at times tense, lasted until 1999.
His strong suit was fund-raising. 'He's indefatigable,' Carl Spielvogel, a trustee, said of Mr. Luers. 'I don't know many people willing to be out at breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week, but he was. And he's very good at it.'
Mr. Luers doubled the museum's endowment, modernized its financial systems, enlarged its staff to 1,800 full-time employees, secured the $1 billion Walter Annenberg collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings for the museum, and oversaw the construction of new galleries, wings, exhibitions and public programs. When he stepped down, the museum had a $116 million budget, and crowds that often exceeded 50,000 visitors on weekends.
In 1990, Mr. Luers arranged for Mr. Havel, who was conferring with President George W. Bush on a state visit to the White House, to make a side trip to New York to visit the museum. It was a touching reunion for Mr. Luers, who returned many times to the Czech Republic for meetings with old friends and Mr. Havel, who died in 2011.
After the Met, Mr. Luers was chairman and president of the United Nations Association of the U.S.A., which provides research and other services for the U.N. For many years, he also directed the Iran Project, a nongovernmental organization that supported United States negotiations with Iran.
Mr. Luers, who had homes in Manhattan and Washington Depot, wrote scores of articles for foreign policy journals and newspapers, including The Times. He lectured widely and taught at Princeton, George Washington, Columbia and Seton Hall Universities, and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Last fall, he released a memoir, 'Uncommon Company: Dissidents and Diplomats, Enemies and Artists.'
'My greatest satisfaction was the success of Vaclav Havel,' he said in the 2022 interview. 'Havel proved my point that culture makes a difference, especially in international relations. The Communist system was deeply flawed. It underestimated cultural leaders' influence on the people.'