But while this American aid was helpful, the role of John Paul II was monumental. On the Pope’s role, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who himself was important, stated: “We involved the Pope directly; and I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t go into details…. [T]o sustain an underground effort takes a lot in terms of supplies, networks, etc. And this is why Solidarity wasn’t crushed…. This is the first time that communist police suppression didn’t succeed.”21 Russia historian and Librarian of Congress James Billington emphasized that in addition to Reagan’s political support, John Paul II spiritually inspired the movement.22
Despite the involvement of many figures, few did more to help the Polish people than Reagan, and his impact was felt by Poles throughout the country. In early 1990, Arch Puddington, who worked for RFE, did a series of interviews with Eastern European émigrés and visitors. He asked their opinion of various U.S. presidents. He found that almost all had a highly favorable view of Reagan and his role in the fall of Communism—some even dubbed him “Uncle Reagan.” He left a great impression on Poles.23
This was obvious to men like Colonel Henryk Piecuch, a high-level official in the Polish Interior Ministry in the 1980s, who said that, “Ronald Reagan was considered a god by some in our country. This pertains especially to the lower ranks of Solidarity.”24 This book could be filled with testimonies to Reagan’s importance, whether from ordinary Polish workers to members of the Communist government and Solidarity to Polish academics now teaching in the United States, as well as men like Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent twelve years in the gulag.25
By the 1990s, free to speak, Lech Walesa spoke for many of these individuals, saying that he was thankful for Reagan’s “very strong backing.” He praised Reagan’s devotion to “a few simple rules: human rights, democracy, freedom of speech” and his “conviction that it is not the people who are there for the sake of the state, but that the state is there for the sake of the citizens.”26 Reagan had indeed said exactly this many times, and apparently Walesa listened.
Once out of prison and in the presidency, and given a chance to thank Reagan directly, Walesa said to the American president: “We stood on the two sides of the artificially erected wall. Solidarity broke down this wall from the Eastern side and on the Western side it was you….Your decisiveness and resolve were for us a hope and help in the most difficult moments.”27 He said that Reagan “emboldened” and “encouraged” him, and was an “inspiration.”28 Walesa saw Reagan as essential not just to Solidarity’s survival but to the end of Communism, and went on to reference the Reagan radio gaffe that back in 1984 had enraged the Soviets and many liberals: “People thought it was unfunny, but I’m of the opposite opinion, that it was not only a good joke, but the words were also prophetic.”29
Poles had needed a friend, said Walesa, “and such was Ronald Reagan.” He said Reagan challenged rather than avoided problems and was “favored” by the “muse of history”; that muse liked Reagan “so much” that she whispered in his ear and told him what to do. “We owe so much to Ronald Reagan,” concluded Walesa. “We Poles owe him freedom.” Teary-eyed, he said Reaganesquely: “God bless America.”30
POLAND WAS THE WEDGE
Ronald Reagan had long felt that Poland and Solidarity held the golden key. Recall that he had written in his diary on December 15, 1981, two days after martial law was declared, that at the NSC meeting that day he had taken a stand that “this may be the last chance in our lifetime to see a change in the Soviet empire’s colonial policy re[garding] Eastern Europe.”31 Less than three weeks later, Bill Clark arrived to help ensure that the president’s policies to make that happen were in fact carried out.
After his presidency, Reagan wrote in his memoirs: “The events in Poland were thrilling…. [T]he first break in the totalitarian dike of communism.” He had “wanted to be sure we did nothing to impede this process and everything we could to spur it along. This was what we had been waiting for since World War II. What was happening in Poland might spread like a contagion throughout Eastern Europe.”32 The splinter could be a contagion to the body of the Soviet empire. As Reagan said at Eureka College in May 1982, the Soviets feared the “infectiousness” of the threat of freedom posed by Solidarity.33
In sum, Poland was the domino that catalyzed the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe during the fall of 1989. And yet, despite its significance, the Poland story barely registers in the two preeminent biographies of Reagan; in fact, incredibly, Lech Walesa is not mentioned even once in either book.34
But while the biographers missed the importance of Solidarity (somehow even after the fact), Ronald Reagan never did. As it turned out, the labor movement—as well as the Polish pontiff—was every bit as influential as he had always estimated. Together, these factors inside Poland were the wedge, the splinter in the bloc. Once the wedge was hammered deep enough into the crack, the fissure spread, and the entire block (or bloc) came apart. As Bill Clark put it, in Poland, the Soviets lost an empire.35
NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER 1989
With Poland gone, it did not take long for the remainder of the Eastern bloc to break away, and less than six months later, many of them had started to fall. By November 1989, the Berlin Wall was rubble. The “March of Freedom” strolled into East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and, somehow, even to Romania, where, in December, Eastern Europe’s most brutal dictator, Nicolai Ceausescu, was put on trial by the Romanian people, convicted, sentenced to death, lined up against a wall, and shot on Christmas Day—a day he tried to ban. That evening the news anchor on Romanian state television cheerfully announced his country’s liberation: “Good news this Christmas Day: the Anti-Christ is dead!”36
Aside from Ceausescu’s violent death, the end of Communism in Eastern Europe occurred with complete tranquility, without shooting, without a war, and certainly without World War III—the “DPs” were at long last free. As these events unfolded around the world, one could not help but think of Reagan’s line from his Westminster Address, in which he had seven years earlier hoped that Eastern Europeans would “choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” (Emphasis added.) That was in fact surprisingly the way the revolution unfolded in Eastern Europe in the fall of 1989. Who would have guessed that if and when the Berlin Wall came down, it would fall peacefully as celebrants stood atop it cheering and toasting with champagne glasses? In Czechoslovakia, the revolution was so smooth that it was dubbed the Velvet Revolution.
MR. REAGAN GOES TO WARSAW
In September 1990, as most of Eastern Europe was approaching the first year anniversary of Communism’s demise, Ronald Reagan visited Gdansk, home of the shipyard in which Solidarity was born.
There, the former president received what both UPI and Reuters described as a “hero’s welcome.” Despite a torrential rain and punishing hail, seven thousand braved the storm to greet Reagan in front of the shipyard gate where they sang “Sto Lat,” which means “May He Live 100 Years,” a Polish anthem sung only to honor the nation’s heroes. They chanted “Thank you, thank you!” In a gesture Reagan must have loved, Lech Walesa’s parish priest handed him a sword and explained: “I am giving you the saber for helping us to chop off the head of communism.”37 In turn, Reagan told them: “You have triggered fast changes in the political map of Central and Eastern Europe.” Referring to the other dominoes that subsequently fell, Reagan said: “One might say that [this] was the shipyard that launched a halfdozen revolutions.”38