One hour later both men held a press conference at the Magic Lantern. As they disagreed with one another about the future—Dubcek still regarded communism as salvageable in his sense of “socialism with a human face”—the news broke across the entire country: the Communist Party leaders were all resigning. Garton Ash had joked to Havel, “In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!”[dlxxxv] Ten days was a ridiculously optimistic estimate—and, it turned out, an overly conservative one. Instead of ten days it had
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