The non-Communist foreign minister who lent Gottwald's government legitimacy, found dead under Černín Palace window two weeks after the coup
Returning from Moscow in July 1947 after being forced to reject the Marshall Plan, Masaryk said: 'I left as a minister of a sovereign state and I have come back as Stalin's servant.'
Son of Czechoslovakia's founder-president Tomáš Masaryk, he served as minister-plenipotentiary to Britain from 1925, resigning in protest at the Munich Agreement. As foreign minister of the London government-in-exile, his weekly BBC broadcasts to occupied Czechoslovakia made him a national symbol. In July 1947 Stalin forced him to withdraw from the Marshall Plan; Masaryk returned saying he had left 'as a minister of a sovereign state' and come back 'as Stalin's servant.' When non-Communist ministers resigned in February 1948, Masaryk stayed on as Gottwald's only non-Communist minister, lending the coup a veneer of legality: two weeks later he was found dead beneath his bathroom window at the Černín Palace, and the shock of his still-unresolved death helped drive the Marshall Plan through Congress.
Career Timeline
- 1919–1922Chargé d'affaires, Czechoslovak legation in Washington
- 1922–1925Counselor to the Foreign Minister
- 1925–1938Minister-plenipotentiary to the United Kingdom
- 1940–1945Foreign Minister of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile
- 1945–1948Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia