Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
the USSR was vastly superior. He wrote sarcastically in his memoirs about Gorbachev’s attempt to persuade the West that it ‘need not wait for concrete actions by the Soviet Union before lowering its guard and military preparedness’.[61]
That said, Bush did not want his European trip to be about scoring points off Gorbachev. The president had already laid down his own ideological principles in the spring and, far from wishing to mount a ‘crusade’, he was sensitive both to the volatile situation in Eastern Europe and to Gorbachev’s delicate political position at home. He did not intend to ‘back off’ from his own values of freedom and democracy but was acutely conscious that ‘hot rhetoric would needlessly antagonise the militant elements within the Soviet Union and the Pact’. He even worried about the impact of his own presence, regardless of what he said. While wanting to be what he called a ‘responsible catalyst, where possible, for democratic change in Eastern Europe’, he did not want to be a stimulus for unrest: ‘If massive crowds gathered, intent on showing their opposition to Soviet dominance, things could get out of control. An enthusiastic reception could erupt into a violent riot.’ Although he and Gorbachev were jockeying for position, the two leaders agreed on the importance of stability within a bloc that was in flux.[62]
Bush and his entourage arrived at Warsaw’s military airport around 10 p.m. on 9 July. It was a humid summer evening as they descended from Air Force One to be greeted by a large official welcoming party. Jaruzelski was in the forefront but, for the first time ever during a state visit, representatives of Solidarity were also present. No spectators were allowed near the plane, but en route from the airport to the government guest house in the city centre, where George and Barbara Bush would be staying, thousands of people lined the streets, three or four deep, waving flags and giving the Solidarity ‘V’ for victory symbol. Others leant from the balconies of their apartments, throwing down flowers onto the passing motorcade. The mood, contrary to Bush’s fears, was that of a friendly welcome, not a political demonstration.[63] In fact, this was typical of the whole trip. There were no massed throngs cheering in adulation – nothing like Pope John Paul II in 1979 or Kennedy in Berlin in 1963. The public mood seemed uncertain, characterised by what American journalist Maureen Dowd called a mixture of ‘urgency and tentativeness’ as Poles contemplated a strange future in which the ‘jailors’ and those they had jailed would now have to try to govern together.[64]
Bush and Jaruzelski managed to turn their scheduled ‘ten-minute cup of coffee’ in the morning of 10 July into an extended and frank conversation that lasted almost an hour. Their tour d’horizon spanned Polish politics and economic reforms, US financial aid, superpower relations, the German question and Bush’s vision of ‘a united Europe without foreign troops’.[65] The president’s meeting with Prime Minister Mieczysław Rakowski – a veteran communist journalist until he was suddenly appointed premier the previous September – was similarly businesslike and also opened up some of the complexities underlying the glib word ‘reform’. Poland’s ‘chief problem’, Rakowski explained, was to ‘introduce reforms while avoiding serious unrest’. Privatisation would be an important step but he warned it would take ‘a full generation’ before Poles accepted the Western-style ‘stratification of wealth’ that would necessarily follow. What Polish people did not need, he added, was an American ‘blank check’ – in other words ‘untied credits’ from the West. Instead he hoped Bush could encourage the World Bank and IMF to display flexibility about the staggering of debt repayments. Rakowski conceded his party’s ‘economic errors of the past’ but insisted that these ‘constitute a closed chapter’ and that Polish leaders now understood the need to turn the page. Bush promised that the West would help but stated that he had no intention of supporting the radical, indeed frankly utopian, demands by the labour unions that would ‘break the Treasury’. In that way Bush stood closer to the aims of Polish communist reformers including Jaruzelski and Rakowski, who sought managed economic cooperation with the USA and the West, than to Wałęsa and the opposition, who wanted immediate and large-scale direct aid to ease the pain of transition and thus maintain popular support.[66]
The president did talk about economic aid when he addressed the Polish parliament on the afternoon of the 10th, but what was grandly described as his ‘Six-Point Plan’ received a mixed reception. To be sure, the need was clear: Poland’s debt to Western creditors in summer 1989 stood at around $40 billion, with the country’s growth rate barely above 1% while inflation was running at almost 60%. But although Bush promised to ask the US Congress for a $100 million enterprise fund to invigorate Poland’s private sector, he hoped that the rest of the aid package he proposed ($325 million in fresh loans and a debt rescheduling of $5 billion) would come from the World Bank, the Paris Club, the G7 and other Western institutions.[67] It was all a bit vague and certainly nothing like the $10 billion that Wałęsa, for one, had requested. Nor did it even come close to the $740 million in aid that Reagan, at the height of the Cold War, had offered the communist government before martial law was declared in December 1981.[68] That, of course, was prior to the USA’s foreign debt going through the roof as a result of Reaganomics – from $500 billion in 1981 to $1.7 trillion in 1989.[69] Certainly the public reaction in Poland was almost openly critical. ‘Very little concrete material’, a government spokesman complained, and ‘too much repeated emphasis on the need for further sacrifices by the Polish people’. So much for popular hopes in Poland of a ‘mini-Marshall Plan’. While Bush saw himself as being ‘prudent’, Scowcroft told journalists defensively that the value of the aid was ‘political and psychological’ as much as ‘substantive’.[70]
Next day Bush flew to Gdańsk to meet Wałęsa for lunch at his modest but cosy two-storey stucco house on the outskirts of the city. This was a deliberately informal, down-home affair. George and Barbara chatted with Lech and Danuta as ‘private citizens’, because the Solidarity leader had not stood for election and therefore had no official political role now. Looking around the rooms, the president was struck by the ‘lack of modern appliances and furnishings that most American families take for granted’. ‘Stylish waiters’ borrowed from a nearby hotel and a ‘fancy’ Baltic meal served on silver salvers did not cover up those realities. After more of what Bush described as Wałęsa’s ‘uncertain and unrealistic’ financial requests, backed by lurid warnings of ‘a second Tiananmen in the middle of Europe’ if Polish economic reforms failed, the president was happy to escape from their uneasy get-together and drive to the Lenin Shipyard to address 25,000 dockworkers. He considered standing outside the factory gate in front of the monument commemorating the forty-five workers killed by the security forces during the 1970 strikes – three anchors nailed to giant steel crosses – the ‘emotional peak’ of his Polish trip. Bush felt ‘heart and soul, emotionally involved’ as he spoke, with a ‘heady sense’ that he was ‘witnessing history being made on the spot’.[71]
Trumping Lenin in Gdańsk – Bush with Wałȩsa
His trip to Poland had been brief (9–11 July) but it underlined the magnitude of the political and economic problems that had to be surmounted. One presidential adviser told the press, it would ‘take hundreds of millions of dollars, from us and lots of other people, and even that won’t guarantee success’.[72]
That evening Bush arrived in Budapest during a heavy thunderstorm. He and Barbara were driven straight to Kossuth Square – named for the leader of Hungary’s failed revolution of 1848 and one of the centres of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule. As the motorcade pulled into the square in front of the Parliament building it was greeted by a huge mass of people, some