Not usually seen as a naif

Whatever is Vaclav Havel thinking?

The fair haired boy of the Velvet Revolution is launching the Havel Library, and talking about it as though no one east of Little Rock had thought of the idea before.

A by no means exhaustive list of Presidential Libraries built in imitation of the US would include Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, The Philippines’ Joseph Estrada, Mexico’s Vicente Fox, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, and Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung in Korea. We haven’t heard much on it lately, but Saddam’s relatives said they’ll build a presidential library around his grave.

Havel plans the now standard lists of his papers elsewhere, archives of what documents he still controls, and “Multimedia,” what many call photographs. The web site already contains a classic Havel channeling Nixon moment, jacket and shoes in the surf.