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Zealous idealists rarely get a chance to lead, and when they do, they rarely show much aptitude for the give-and-take of politics, the careful timing, the restraint. Yet in an irony more exquisite than any he ever envisioned for the stage, Vaclav Havel became not only the conscience but also the commonsense leader of the mass movement that led to Czechoslovakia's orderly ouster of its communist leaders. Having inspired fellow citizens by his rhetoric and unrelenting example, he heard them demand that he take over as head of state. That was not for him, he said. He was a writer. In fact, his work so depended on being an outsider that he joked about asking the new government to put him back in jail two days a week. But the more he denied interest in the presidency, the more insistently his fellow citizens marched and sloganeered on his behalf.
Last Thursday the Parliament amended the presidential oath of office to eliminate the customary pledge of loyalty to socialism, a vow that the nonsocialist Havel likely would have refused to take. In the same session, Parliament honored Havel's determination to have "close by my side" another revered ghost from 1968. Alexander Dubcek, the former leader who launched the Prague Spring, was restored to a post of power, after two decades of internal exile, by being elected the legislature's new presiding officer. The stately transition was completed on Friday, when Prime Minister Marian Calfa, whose Communist Party colleagues so long denounced Havel as a slanderer of the state, praised him as "a man who is faithful to his beliefs despite persecution." After Havel was unanimously elected, he emerged to tell supporters, "I will not disappoint you, but will lead this country to free elections. This must happen in a decent and peaceful way so the clean face of our revolution is not sullied. It is a task for us all."
Havel insists he will serve only until elections for a new Parliament are held, probably in June. Like the political figure he is increasingly compared to, Poland's Lech Walesa, he seems to prefer being kingmaker to being king. But in the brave new world of Eastern Europe, all axioms have been reduced to theorems and all vows rendered interim. Many Czechs think Havel will seek a more permanent role in politics, a pursuit he seems to love -- at least for this heady period of symbolizing freedom and basking in praise, before the hard task of transition sets in. He acknowledges that he does not know much about the intricacies of international economics or the Warsaw Pact, and some skeptics see him as susceptible to manipulation by other leaders of the Civic Forum revolutionary movement. But in times of philosophical upheaval, Plato may have been right: the philosopher makes the best king. Havel has written acutely about the psychological and metaphysical impact of the communist years and about how the change to a free, capitalist society requires the restoration of a sense of individual responsibility. Without that lesson's being learned, details of governance will not matter.