Jan Masaryk falls from a Czernín window

JAN 01 1948 · 12:00

Jan Masaryk, son of the founder-president, who fell from the Czernín Palace window on 10 March 1948. Place: Inner courtyard of the Czernín Palace, Hradčany Figures: Jan Masaryk, Foreign Minister, son of TGM · the investigating policemen of 1948, 1968, 1993, 2003 Jan Masaryk, sixty-one, son of the founder-president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, has remained at the Foreign Ministry through the February coup, the only non-communist of consequence to stay. He explains, to friends who ask why, that he wants to keep one Czech face in the cabinet that the West will still recognize. He has flown to London, Washington, Paris through the war as foreign minister in exile; he is half American (his mother was Charlotte Garrigue of Brooklyn); he speaks the English of P. G. Wodehouse. The communists need him for the same reason he says he stays. On the night of March 9, his apartment on the top floor of the Czernín Palace, the foreign ministry, is locked from inside. At 6:25 a.m. his body is found in pyjamas in the inner courtyard, forty feet below his bathroom window.