Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011

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I fleetingly met Vaclav Havel on June 10,1990. It was the morning after Czechoslovakia's first free elections in decades. At breakfast in our Prague hotel, my friend Marie Winn, who had translated some of Havel's plays, and her husband, Alan Miller, who was making a documentary film on Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, introduced us. The exuberance was contagious inside the hotel and out on the old town square.

After all, the voting had sealed the events of November '89. Timothy Garton Ash, chronicler and historian, arriving in Prague at the height of those events, recalls saying to Havel, "In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in …