Rita Klímová

Rita Klímová, née Rita Budínová (10 December 1931 – 30 December 1993) was a Czech economist and politician. She was Czechoslovakia's ambassador to the United States before Czechoslovakia's dissolution during the Velvet Divorce in 1992.

Early life Klímová was born in Romania. Her father was Stanislav Budín (née Bencion Bať), a prominent Communist writer who used the pen name Batya Bat. Due to their Jewish ancestry, her family fled to the United States not long after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. She settled in New York City in 1939, returning to Czechoslovakia in 1946 to finish her education. As a result, for the rest of her life she spoke American English with an "industrial-strength" New York accent. She joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1948.

After graduation, she rose high in the academic world, becoming an economics lecturer at Charles University. Initially a strict Stalinist, she helped purge many of her more liberal colleagues from Charles University during the 1950s and early 1960s. However, during the Prague Spring of 1968, she was very attracted to Alexander Dubček's reform program and helped supply inside information to the Western media. She continued to support reform after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and was fired from her university post and expelled from the party in 1970.

She became a household name during the Velvet Revolution, when her longtime friend Václav Havel asked her to translate for him. Havel was looking for someone who could convey Civic Forum's message to English-speaking audiences. Havel believed that since Klímová spoke American English, she'd play very well with American audiences. Havel himself spoke very good English, but thought his accent would be too thick for English speakers to understand. She was actually the first person to coin the term "Velvet Revolution."

Ambassador to the United States Just months after the collapse of the Communist government, newly sworn in Foreign Minister Jiří Dienstbier, another longtime friend, asked Klímová to become the new government's ambassador to the United States, even though she had no diplomatic experience.

During her tenure, she did much to win support for the democratizing regime. She resigned in August 1992, four months before her country's breakup.

Death Klímová was diagnosed with leukemia not long after taking up her ambassadorial post. She finally died of the disease on 30 December 1993. She is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Telč.