The President and his entourage had arrived the evening before - a sweltering, humid night, recalled the US National Security Advisor, General Scowcroft. ‘The air conditioning system in our hotel was not up to the demands of the weather. The inside temperature was worse than outdoors and with the windows not designed to open, we had a real problem. I finally managed to get a window propped open and I pulled the bedding on to the floor where there was . . . a wisp of a breeze. The hotel explained that there was simply not enough . . . power for the system to run properly - a painful reminder of how backward the Polish economy was.2
After a sleepless night Bush saw Jaruzelski at the Belvedere Palace soon after 9 a.m. They had met two years earlier when Bush was Vice President and briefly passed through Poland. He had advised the General to legalise Solidarity and negotiate with it, but Jaruzelski baulked at the suggestion and declared that it would ‘be suicidal for the Government’. Nevertheless Bush liked Jaruzelski, respected him and thought he was astute. He described him to his advisers as ‘a real class act’. Now that the General had struck a deal with Solidarity, the US President did not want to see him and the Communist regime suddenly swept aside. Bush was convinced that Jaruzelski could ‘be a force for stability’. The irony was obvious. The Americans had for nearly half a century wanted to free the satellite states from the Soviet orbit. They had spent many billions of dollars on defence, espionage and propaganda with that objective. Now some of these regimes, loathed by their subjects, were teetering on the edge of destruction. Barely a month ago, in their first taste of democracy for sixty years, Poles had resoundingly voted against their Communist rulers. Yet the American President wanted to keep them in power - at least for a while. The ultra-cautious Bush thought it was a way of preventing anarchy in Eastern Europe.
His conversation with Jaruzelski on this morning was bizarre. The General said he had thought long and hard but was now reluctant to stand for President and face possible humiliation. Defeat, he said, was ‘unacceptable. I can’t win without Solidarity support, and I don’t think that will come. What role do you think I should play?’ Bush replied instantly that he should seek the nomination: ‘I told him his refusal to run might inadvertently lead to serious instability and I urged him to reconsider.’ Bush admitted it was a strange feeling trying to persuade a senior Communist to run for office. ‘But I felt that Jaruzelski’s experience was the best hope for a smooth transition in Poland.’ For the next day and a half he continually praised Jaruzelski’s patriotic efforts to transform his country. The opposition was deeply disappointed. Most of the intellectuals in Solidarity were instinctively pro-American. Yet they showed their displeasure at the words they were hearing.3
They were yet angrier when they heard the details of a US$ 100 million aid package Bush had brought with him. The President was aware how meagre it was. Secretary of State James Baker, Condoleezza Rice and General Scowcroft had all urged much more generous assistance as a way of encouraging the democratic changes in Poland. But the UST reasury Secretary, Nicholas Brady, said the cupboard was bare. ‘We can’t throw good money down a Polish rat-hole,’ he had said, and the President listened. Bush announced the aid at a speech to Solidarity parliamentarians, along with an additional offer of US$ 15 million to help clean up the pollution around Kraków. He was heard in silence. Government leaders and the opposition were united in their fury when they discovered that John Sununu, the President’s Chief of Staff, had been telling reporters that more money for Poland ‘would be like a young person in a candy store . . . [who] lacked the self-discipline to spend it wisely’.4
The next day Bush flew to Gdask to meet Lech Wałsa. The Presi dent disliked and distrusted the Solidarity leader, in contrast with his growing sympathy and fondness for Jaruzelski. He thought Wałsa was too quixotic, too radical and not solid or reliable enough. When they had met two years earlier Bush was taken aback by Wałsa’s answer when he asked if Solidarity would be legalised. Wałsa had said that if such an unlikely event occurred it ‘would cause a lot of trouble for us’ because Solidarity might then be blamed for the economic disaster in Poland. Bush and his wife Barbara had an uneasy lunch in the Wałas’ modest flat - prepared by Danuta - which ended in a near-shouting match. The Pole complained about the ‘pathetic, paltry’ aid offer and declared that Poland deserved far more generous treatment. He demanded US$ 10 billion over three years to get the Polish economy moving. When Bush replied that it was impossible the union leader angrily said that there could be mass poverty and unemployment in Poland and then ‘we will have civil war. We’re at the end of our rope.’5
Glad to be out of Poland, the President received a rapturous welcome in Budapest. Air Force One landed in a tremendous thun derstorm. Thousands of people turned up to greet him, which buoyed him after his difficult time in Gdask. Bush rarely played the showman, but he sensed a good photo opportunity on this occasion and after he walked down the steps in the driving rain he offered an elderly woman his overcoat.s He was drenched after a walkabout, shaking hands on the tarmac. But when he settled down to business, as in Poland, he got on well with the conservative voices in the Communist regime, rather less so with radicals in the opposition. When he was handed a small piece of the barbed-wire fence, the Iron Curtain, which the Hungarians had dismantled in May, he declared himself moved to tears. He praised the government, which had ordered the fence removed, not the opposi tion, which had put pressure on the regime to remove it. Németh, Grósz, and the economist Rezsö Nyers, the trio now at the helm in Hungary, impressed him and he promised American support. Bush told them: ‘We’re with you. What you’re doing is exciting. It’s what we have always wanted. We are not going to complicate things for you. We know that the better we get along with the Soviets, the better it is for you too . . . We have no intention of making you choose between East and West.’6
Later the same day he met leading opposition figures at the residence of the American Ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer. The party did not go well. When Imre Pozsgay told Bush that the Communists would lose power the moment free and fair elections were called - ‘My Party is doing too little, too late,’ he said - Bush looked worried. Palmer had built good contacts with the dissidents and reform Communists over the last three years but the ‘extreme caution’ of his President and his boss at the State Department frustrated him. ‘Bush and Baker kept cautioning these people . . . in my living room . . . not to go too far, too fast,’ he said. When Bush told the former dissidents that their Communist government ‘was moving in the right direction. Your country is taking things one step at a time. Surely that is prudent,’ they did not pretend to hide their amazement. There was a culture shock, as Palmer described it. The godfather of underground dissident activity in Hungary, the philosopher János Kis, was at the Ambassador’s reception. He was a highly influential man in opposition circles throughout the Communist world, and he looked precisely what he was: a Central European intellectual. ‘When I introduced the President and Jim Baker to János Kis,’ said Palmer, ‘it was, like, “who is this strange man with a beard who looks like Woody Allen?”’ Bush told his aides afterwards: ‘These really aren’t the right guys to be running the place. At least not yet. They’re just not ready.’ He thought the Communists he had met were far better placed to introduce democracy and free markets to Hungary.7
Bush’s influence was powerful with Jaruzelski, who announced soon after the Americans left Poland that he would run for President after all. The US Ambassador, John Davis, was influential in persuading Solidarity to help elect him. Wałsa believed that the Soviets, as well as the Polish army and security forces, would accept no other candidate. So he made a deal with Jaruzelski that would guarantee the General’s victory. But it was a close-run thing. Wałsa had to strong arm newly elected Solidarity MPs into abstaining during the vote. Many simply refused: they could not support the man who had jailed them and caused their families to suffer. But finally he persuaded seven of them to agree. ‘Vote with your consciences,�
�� he told them, and then explained that Solidarity needed this ‘vital’ deal. ‘We held our noses, but went through with it in the end,’ one Solidarity legislator declared. At a point during the voting when it seemed possible that the General might lose, Solidarity activists had to scour the bars looking for MPs to go through the lobby for Jaruzelski. He scraped home by just one vote. On 19 July General Jaruzelski, the man who had turned Poland into a military dictatorship, became the democratically chosen President of the country.8
One of the cleverest of the Communist chieftains in Poland was Janusz Reykowski, the former psychology professor from Warsaw and the chief negotiator for the Party at the Round Table talks. He said: ‘There are plenty of Marxist-Leninist textbooks about taking power; but there are none about giving it up.’ Over the next month of tortured negotiations, Poland experienced its first taste of real parliamentary democracy since the 1920s. It was not always a pretty sight. Jaruzelski was President, but he could not find a working government. He gave up his position as Party boss, but he had not abandoned the idea of ensuring that the Communists should retain power in Poland. On Tuesday 25 July he summoned Wałesa and asked him to join a Com munist-led Grand Coalition, as the General called it. The Party would hold the top positions, Solidarity could have four junior posts - Health, Environment, Housing, Industry. ‘Solidarity must grow into power,’ Jaruzelski said. Wałsa refused immediately and would not budge. A week later Jaruzelski appointed Kiszczak Prime Minister, but support for the Communists had drained away. The former head of state security could not form a government. Even some old Party stalwarts refused to serve with him or the other men in uniform, old familiar faces who he thought could lead Poland into a new democratic dawn.9
Wałesa had not intended to take Solidarity into government, despite long consideration of the electoral position following the second round of voting on Sunday 18 June. Solidarity had lost just one contested seat in which it fielded a candidate for the Sejm and took 99 per cent of the seats in the Senate. The bizarre exception in the Upper House was an Independent, Henryk Stokłosa, an ex-Communist-turned-millionaire entrepreneur, who claimed he spent US$ 100,000 on his election, a fortune in Poland at the time. Wałsa had said before the elections: ‘We are a trade union . . . What we want is autonomy and independence from the government. Let the Communists govern.’ That caution was partly for Soviet consumption. He was not sure the Russians would let Solidarity take power and he did not want to provoke them. Gorbachev had said all the right things, but Wałsa could not trust the Soviets. They still had thousands of troops on Polish soil. Also, he was not sure that Solidarity was yet ready for power. Wide splits were opening up within the union. As one of its leading figures said, not entirely as a joke: ‘Lech deserved a second Nobel Prize for keeping the peace within Solidarity.’ There had been factions in the union from the beginning, but seldom was the infighting as intense as now, when the Communists were on the verge of defeat.10
Some of the leaders who had been influential figures from the start in 1980 were opposed to Solidarity forming a government. They were championed by the mild-mannered, intense, thoughtful Catholic intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki. A widower now aged sixty-two, he shared a small and untidy Warsaw flat with his two sons. He had hardly slept since the election campaign had begun in May, living on cigarettes and adrenaline. He was convinced the time was not yet right for Solidarity. They should stay in opposition, learn the parliamentary ropes and prepare themselves to take over after elections in four years. He believed it would be a mistake to enter into a government in which ‘the police and the army are still in the hands of the ruling Party’, and he thought that if Solidarity joined an administration now it would be blamed for the mess of the Polish economy. ‘We had clever people with us, lots of them, intellectuals who knew a great deal about history, philosophy, literature, theology,’ he said. ‘But we didn’t have people who knew how to run anything, how to organise things, run local governments, departments of state. We needed time to learn how to do this. I thought we were not prepared.’ Always a moderate, sensible voice, he argued the case in the newspaper he edited, Tygodnik Solidarno (Solidarity Weekly) under the headline ‘Make haste, slowly.’11
Adam Michnik, one of the most creative voices of opposition in Poland, profoundly disagreed. He thought Solidarity should grab what they could while they had the opportunity. The Polish people, who for years had wanted to see the back of Communists in government, would expect no less. Inflation was now out of control at nearly 500 per cent and no decisions were being taken while the constitutional crisis continued. He knew Solidarity had some bright young economists, led by Leszek Balcerowicz, who said that urgent, radical and painful measures - ‘shock therapy’ - had to be taken immediately, within days, to stave off economic collapse. Michnik came up with a formula put simply in a headline - ‘Your President, our Prime Minister’. Solidarity should try to take the lead in a coalition and work with Jaruzelski as President. Wałesa finally came down on Michnik’s side. He knew too that the Pope was in favour of Solidarity taking the power they could. Pope John Paul thought it would send a message throughout Eastern Europe if the Soviet empire was defeated by peaceful, democratic means.
Wałsa resolved the problem by looking at the parliamentary arith metic. He acted in typically bold, unilateral fashion away from his advisers and aides, who he said sometimes confused him. He returned to his flat in Gdask and on the evening of 7 August made a statement to the Polish news agency inviting the two junior partners of the Communists, the Peasant Party and the Democratic Party, to break with forty years of slavish support for the Communists and to join Solidarity in forming a new government. Together, they would constitute 55 per cent of the Sejm. Wałsa’s announcement was a shock to the rest of the Solidarity leadership. He had talked the idea through with almost nobody in his entourage, but the dramatic coup worked. At first the Peasants’ leader, Roman Malinowski, and Jerzy Jozwiak of the Democratic Party were highly dubious. Two grey old bureaucrats, they had been puppets of the Communists for years, obeying orders out of habit. They were unused to thinking independently. But their members persuaded them to accept the arrangement. They realised they would soon be sidelined entirely if they turned the offer down.
Jaruzelski did not like the deal. Rakowski, now Communist Party chief, advised him to reject it. The General’s spokesman for years, the unpopular Jerzy Urban, told him that if the Communists went into opposition they would lose power ‘altogether and forever’. But the General, a realist, knew he had no choice. ‘Solidarity has burst over our life like a typhoon,’ he had told the other Warsaw Pact leaders barely a fortnight earlier.
We must attempt to solve the current crisis, without the use of violence, without bloodshed. We can’t forever take a path that brings us into conflict with the working class . . . that tears open a rift which can be healed with great difficulty. The Party has been the guarantor of the strength of socialism. But the Party is no absolute monarch. I have to admit that is what we became, that is how we behaved, an absolute monarch, who was always right, who gives commands and orders. Yes, we have commanded the military apparatus, but we have suffered a political defeat.12
On the afternoon of Friday 18 August he told Wałsa that he would agree to a Solidarity government on two conditions. ‘Our anxiety, and that of the Soviets and the other Warsaw Pact countries, is that . . . you will leave the socialist bloc and then we don’t know what may happen,’ he said. The General also insisted that Communists must retain the Interior and Defence Ministries. Wałsa agreed. That evening on tele vision he declared, in a message directed at Moscow: ‘Poland cannot forget where it is situated and to whom it has obligations. We are in the Warsaw Pact. That cannot be changed.’ It was not the most ringing endorsement, but he had been assured by Jaruzelski that it would be enough to assure him of the Kremlin’s blessing.
Wałesa then dropped a bombshell. It had been assumed, during most of these negotiations, that he would become head of the new g
overnment. Mazowiecki, Kuro and most of the Solidarity leadership urged him to become Prime Minister. When Solidarity legislators met to approve the new coalition, they thought they were voting to anoint him as Premier. But he announced he had no intention of taking the job. ‘I wish to remain a worker . . . a man of the people. I stay with the masses, I am one of them,’ he said with faux naïveté. The principal reason was probably that he knew that whoever led the new government was unlikely to be thanked or remain popular within a year or two. He did not wish to be directly associated with the pain that would inevitably be accompanied by ‘shock therapy’, which he could foresee would be closed factories and unemployment for many already badly-off Polish workers. Even the Lenin Shipyard was scheduled for partial closure under an austerity package being discussed by economists from Solidarity and the Communists. He would handpick a Prime Minister to take the difficult decisions in the first non-Communist government in the Soviet bloc for forty years. Then he could pretend to be above politics. He did not need a formal title. Lech Wałsa was now the most powerful man in Poland - and everybody knew it.13
Revolution 1989 Page 38