With Christmas only two days away, Reagan connected the spirit of the season with Poland: “For a thousand years,” he told his fellow Americans, “Christmas has been celebrated in Poland, a land of deep religious faith, but this Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government.” Using words like “terror tactics,” “tyranny,” and “crime,” he described the actions of the Communists in stark detail, weaving his frustration and anger into his carefully chosen words.72
Working his way through the text, Reagan then made an extraordinary gesture, one that defined the speech and produced quite a ripple effect. The idea itself was simple, but its ramifications were profound: The president asked Americans that Christmas season to light a candle in support of freedom in Poland. Stemming from a private meeting that Reagan had with the Polish ambassador, Romuald Spasowski, and his wife, Reagan felt that the symbolic action would unite America and show Poland that the people of the country were behind them. At the meeting with the president the previous day, both the ambassador and his wife had resolved to defect to the United States. Michael Deaver witnessed the moving meeting:
The ambassador and his wife were ushered into the Oval Office, and the two men sat next to one another in plush leather wingback chairs. Vice President Bush, and the ambassador’s wife, sat facing them on a couch.
The ambassador had in his hand a pocket-sized note pad with wire rings and lined paper, and he was obviously referring to notes he wanted to give to the president of the United States. Meanwhile, his wife, a tiny, delicate-looking woman, kept her head in her hands the entire time, while George Bush put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her.
The ambassador said, “It is unbelievable to me that I am sitting in the office of the president of the United States. I wish it were under better circumstances.”
He begged the president never to discontinue Radio Free Europe. “You have no idea,” he said, “what it meant to us to hear the chimes of Big Ben during World War Two. Please, sir, do not ever underestimate how many millions of people still listen to that channel behind the Iron Curtain.”
Then, almost sheepishly, he said, “May I ask you a favor, Mr. President? Would you light a candle and put in the window tonight for the people of Poland?” And right then, Ronald Reagan got up and went to the second floor, lighted a candle, and put it in the window of the dining room.
Later, in what I still recall as the most human picture of the Reagan presidency, he escorted his guests through the walkway and out to the circular drive on the South Lawn of the White House. In a persistent rain, he escorted them to their car, past the C-9 Secret Service post, holding an umbrella over the head of the wife of the Polish ambassador, as she wept on his shoulder.73
That candle might have brought to mind those lit after Mass by a young Karol Wojtyla. Then and now, they burned bright for Russia’s conversion.
Of course, the Communist press was not quite so sentimental. Enraged by the religious symbolism, even the slightest American invocation of God sent the Soviets seething. “What honey-tongued speeches are now being made by figures in the American administration concerning God and His servants on earth!” fumed a correspondent from Moscow’s Novoye Vremya. “What verbal inventiveness they display in flattering the Catholic Church in Poland. Does true piety lie behind this?”74
Unable to grasp the sincerity of this display of faith, the Soviet press doubted that piety was the motivation for Reagan. The next day, on Christmas Eve, commentator Valentin Zorin dashed before the TV cameras to question the “rather doubtful Christmas gift” Reagan had just given to Americans. The president had delivered a speech that “flagrantly distorted” events in Poland and the Soviet role.75 Zorin spoke for the collective state’s collective judgment: Reagan had yet again egregiously lied about the Soviet role in Poland, and had lied at Christmas time no less! Zorin apologized that he could not be cheerful on such a holiday occasion.
This speech by Zorin was restrained compared to the large Polish Army daily, Zolnierz Wolnosci. The newspaper of the Communist military said that the Christmas address by Reagan could not be regarded “as anything else than a blatant interference in the internal affairs of independent and sovereign Poland”—the standard line in press accounts from Moscow to Prague, usually accompanied by the ever-present Communist claim that there was no Cold War, but instead only nonstop Reagan belligerent attempts to restart one.76
Titled, “Blatant Interference in Our Affairs,” the Zolnierz Wolnosci piece found hypocrisy in the Christmas candle, and was especially vicious toward Ambassador Spasowski. Moscow’s TASS news agency heartily enjoyed this angle; it eagerly re-circulated the Zolnierz Wolnosci article, but only after padding it with additional inflammatory agitprop. Here is an excerpt from the TASS write-up:
Speaking of the dirty role of traitor Spasowski, who played a role in determining the United States’ present stand with regard to Poland, the newspaper [Zolnierz Wolnosci] says further, it is worthwhile quoting his impudent slanderous verbiage in front of U.S. television cameras, the verbiage which testifies to that man’s moral degradation. The traitor asked the President that a candle be lit in a White House window on Christmas Eve….
Undoubtedly, there should be a candle burning in a White House window, Zolnierz Wolnosci points out, and not only on the Christmas but every other evening as well—in memory of those hundreds of thousands of victims of military intervention and U.S. bombing raids in Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos…in honor of tens of thousands of victims of different forms of U.S. interference in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and in honor of the Palestinian women and children killed by U.S. weapons being used by Israel.77
While scathing critiques of Spasowski such as these were broadcast throughout the Communist press, inside Poland the Polish people took Reagan’s candle gesture to heart: “When he did this, it was quite a special moment for Poland,” said one Polish woman of Reagan’s action, once she was free to speak two decades later. This was a wonderful symbol that Reagan was going to help us until we could be free like the United States. He was going to end this.78 Similarly, Jan Pompowski, a Solidarity member from the city of Wroclaw, reciprocated the gesture: “Most of us Catholics saw the future with hope. We prayed for Reagan, that God would give him wisdom.” To Poles, said Pompowski, Reagan was “a man of truth, who acted according to his beliefs, which were the same as ours. We knew he would not betray us.”79
At the time, Radek Sikorski, who later held high office in the Polish government in the 1990s, was a political refugee living in England, where he attended graduate school at Oxford. Today, he speaks of that White House candle as a major symbolic action. He remembers well the vitriol from the Polish Communist press, from Zolnierz Wolnosci to the principal party organ Trybuna Ludu. In Polish, the latter meant Tribune of the People; the former meant Soldier of Freedom, a laughable title that, as one Solidarity member told me, reflected “typical Communist mendacity.”