Unhealthy Future

Two years ago, Czechoslovakia's Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk jumped or was thrown to his death from a third-floor window. Last week, Czechoslovakia's President Gottwald "accepted the resignation" of Masaryk's successor, Vladimir dementis, who now faces the unhealthy future of a Communist purgee.

Clementis' fall from grace was no surprise to the West. Though a steadfast Marxist of many years standing (he was a Communist member of Czechoslovakia's Parliament in 1935), Clementis had aroused the Kremlin's ire several times. In 1939, he denounced the Nazi-Soviet pact; ordered to Moscow to explain this, he refused to go. Instead, he spent the war years in London with Jan Masaryk and the liberal Czech government in exile.

When Clementis, apparently back in the good graces of the party, was chief of the Czech delegation to the U.N. at Lake Success last fall, rumors that he was'about to be purged began to circulate. He was warned by friends not to go back. Last week when the purge rumor became fact U.S. friends of amiable, stocky Vladimir Clementis thought that he had returned to Prague because i) he thought he could straighten out his relations with the Russians and 2) he was too proud to admit that he had been wrong in becoming their puppet.

To succeed Clementis,Gottwald named Vilem Siroky, son of a Slovak railway worker, who had the good fortune to spend the war years in Moscow. Siroky is expected to heat up the Czech government's hostility towards the West.

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