Honoring William Luers
- Kde: Knihovna Václava Havla, Ostrovní 13, Praha 110 00
- Kdy: 18. květen 2026, 16:00 – 18:00
Friend of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, and many other Czech and Slovak fighters for democracy, William Luers, who passed away a year ago, would have turned 97 on May 15th. During his more than thirty-year-long diplomatic career, Bill Luers held, among other positions, the positions of Assistant Secretary of State for Europe (1976-1977) and US Ambassador to Venezuela (1977-1982). After leaving the Foreign Service, he served as the President of the American Association for Cooperation with the United Nations, engaged in diplomatic efforts for the restoration of US-Cuba relations, and, until his death, functioned as the Director of The Iran Project, which aimed to resolve conflicts between the two countries through diplomatic methods. In the years 1986-1999, he served as the president of the world-renowned Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
Bill Luers played a particularly significant role as the United States Ambassador to Czechoslovakia during President Reagan’s administration. With the help of his wife, Wendy Luers, he initiated a cultural diplomacy program which enabled the greatest American writers and artists, like William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, or Edward Albee, to visit Czechoslovakia. He made the intimate environment of the American Embassy residence into a place that fostered meetings and discussions between his American visitors and prominent Czech and Slovak opposition intellectuals, like Václav Havel, Jiří Dienstbier, Ivan Klíma, Zdeněk Urbánek, among others. It was thanks to these meetings that a vast cultural front of support for persecuted Czechoslovakian dissidents was created in the United States.
The Luers continued to support the Czechoslovakian democratic transformation even after November 1989. They contributed to the success of the first visit of President Havel to the US and founded the charitable association Friends of Civil Society, which provided scholarships for talented young Czech men and women to study in the United States. Wendy Luers became one of the founders of what is now the Vaclav Havel Center in New York.
These events and other unforgettable stories will be recounted and remembered by the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy in Prague, David Wisner, Michael Žantovský, Alexandr Vondra (online), Martin Palouš (online), Cameron Munter, Jolyon Naegele, Jiří Bárta, Lenka Surotchak, Ambassador Katarina Mathernová, and, in-person, Wendy Luers.
The event will be conducted in English without interpretation.