Since 1990 Václav Havel has been for me endlessly fascinating. First, I heard him quoted in a lecture. A few months later I read Disturbing the Peace, which derives from an interview with him in the late 1980s. The clincher came when I read these remarks made to a joint session of the U.S. Congress a few months after his election to the presidency of Czechoslovakia:

The only genuine backbone of all our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

I was stunned. How long has it been since similar words were spoken by a head of state to a parliamentary body of another country? When did anyone publicly call our nation's politicians to be responsible to anyone but the particular interests of pressure groups or the more appropriate interests of the public? Responsibility to "the order of Being" that can and will judge them and us? Bracing stuff! I was hooked.

As I read more about who this president was and where he had come from, the mystery of his words became both more explicable and more obscure. Here was a man born into the utter confusion and tragedy of a nation under the heel of Hitler's boot, a nation that, when Havel was ready for university, would not allow him an advanced education because he was just a "bourgeois brat." But this brat with ingenuity and drive teamed with others his age in an informal group that called itself the Thirty Sixers (for their birth year), quietly talked radical politics, and hung out with older dissidents. In the army he wrote a humorous play that spoofed the military ...