The Downing Street Years (134 page)

Later that evening I met a number of opponents of the regime and learnt a little more about its shortcomings. I knew that the communists had never managed to achieve the scale of collectivization of agriculture in Poland which they had elsewhere and that this — alongside the influence of the Catholic Church — had given the Poles a degree of independence which was unique in a communist country. I said to those present that since they at least had the land they must be doing quite well. No, they said, this was not so. Did I not realize that the state directed most of the seed, fertilizer, tractors and other equipment — not least spare parts — to the collective farming sector? The authorities also controlled prices and distribution. Under these circumstances the benefits of ownership were limited. In effect, socialism, which is only a less developed form of communism, was doing its usual work of impoverishment and demoralization. I later raised the subject with Mr Rakowski, who did not seriously dispute the facts.

On Thursday afternoon I had my first real taste of Poland — the Poland which the communists had tried and failed to destroy. I visited the church of St Stanislaw Kostka in the north of Warsaw where Father Jerzy Popieluszko had preached his anti-communist sermons until in 1984 he was abducted and murdered by members of the Polish Security Services. (I also went to talk in their home to Father Popieluszko’s parents, who were grief stricken but immensely proud of their son.) The church itself was overflowing with people of every age who had come out to see me and on my arrival they broke into a Polish hymn. In Father Popieluszko they had evidently found a martyr, and I came away in little doubt that it was his creed rather than that of his murderers which would prevail in Poland.

I said as much to General Jaruzelski when I met him for talks later. The General had spoken for one and three-quarter hours without interruption about his plans for Poland. In this, at least, he was a typical communist. He even said that he admired the trade union reforms I had put through in Britain. When he finished I pointed out that people in Britain did not have to rely on trade unions as a means of expressing their political views because we had free elections. I had just experienced the power of the Solidarity movement in that church in northern Warsaw. I said that, as a politician, all my instincts told me that this was far more than a trade union — it was a political movement whose power could not be denied. The Government was right to recognize that it had to talk to Solidarity and I hoped that the Solidarity leaders would accept its invitation.

The next day, Friday, was one I shall never forget. I flew up to Gdansk in the early morning to join General Jaruzelski in laying a wreath at the Westerplatte, which saw the first fighting between the Poles and the invading Germans in 1939. It was a bleak peninsula above the bay of Gdansk and the wind was bitter; the ceremony lasted half an hour. I was pleased to get aboard and into the cabin of the small naval ship which was to take me down the river to Gdansk itself. I changed out of my black hat and coat into emerald green and then went back up on deck. The scenes at the arrival of our boat at Gdansk shipyard were unbelievable. Every inch of it seemed taken up with shipyard workers waving and cheering.

After a walkabout in old Gdansk itself I was driven to the hotel where Lech Walesa and his colleagues came up to see me in my room. He had a somewhat ambiguous status at this time, being under a sort of liberal house arrest, and had been brought to the hotel, ironically enough, by Polish Security Police. I gave him the present I had brought with me — some fishing tackle, for he was a great fisherman — and
we departed again for the shipyard. Again there were thousands of shipyard workers waiting for me, cheering and waving Solidarity banners. I laid flowers on the memorial to shipyard workers shot by the police and army in 1970, and then went to the house of Father Jankowski, Mr Walesa’s confessor and adviser, for a meeting followed by lunch.

The Solidarity leaders were a mixture of workers and intellectuals. Mr Walesa was in the former group, but he had a large physical presence as well as a symbolic importance which allowed him to dominate. He told me that Solidarity was disinclined to accept the Government’s invitation to join in round-table talks, believing — probably rightly — that the purpose was to divide and if possible discredit the opposition. Solidarity’s goal he described as ‘pluralism’, that is a state of affairs in which the Communist Party was not the sole legitimate authority. What struck me, though, was that they did not have a specific plan of action with immediate practical objectives. Indeed, when I said that I thought that Solidarity should attend the talks and submit its own proposals in the form of a detailed agenda with supporting papers my hosts looked quite astonished.

Over lunch — one of the best game stews I have ever tasted — we argued through together what their negotiating stance might be and how in my final discussions with the Polish Government I could help. We decided that the most important point I could make to General Jaruzelski was that Solidarity must be legalized.
De facto
recognition was not enough. Throughout I was repeatedly impressed by the moderation and eloquence of Mr Walesa and his colleagues. At one point I said: ‘you really must see that the Government hears all this.’ ‘No problem’, replied Mr Walesa, pointing up to the ceiling; ‘our meetings are bugged anyway.’

After lunch it was suggested that I might like to look around the nearby church of St Brygida. To my delighted astonishment, when Mr Walesa and I entered I found the whole church packed with Polish families who rose and sang the Solidarity anthem ‘God give us back our free Poland.’ I could not keep the tears from my eyes. I seemed to have shaken hundreds of hands as I walked around the church. I gave a short emotional speech and Lech Walesa spoke too. As I left there were people in the streets crying with emotion and shouting ‘thank you, thank you’ over and over again. I returned to Warsaw with greater determination than ever to do battle with the communist authorities.

In my final meeting with General Jaruzelski that afternoon I kept my word to Solidarity. I told him that I was grateful that he had put
no obstacle in the way of my visit to Gdansk — though it has to be said that the authorities had put on a total news black-out about it both before and afterwards. I said how impressed I had been by Solidarity’s moderation. If they were good enough to attend round-table discussions they were also good enough to be legalized. General Jaruzelski gave no impression of being prepared to budge. I repeated that I did not believe that Solidarity could be ignored, indeed any attempt to ignore them would court disaster. It was a chilly though good-tempered discussion. General Jaruzelski was in any case a slightly awkward interlocutor until you got to know him: his dark glasses and his oddly rigid posture (the result of back trouble) made him seem rather remote. But I did not underrate his intelligence — nor his connections, for I knew that he was close to Mr Gorbachev. The proof that the General was a Pole and not just a communist was that just before my aeroplane was about to leave, in an unscheduled appearance his car screamed to a halt beside the aircraft and the General leapt out with a huge bouquet of flowers. Not even Marxism could suppress Polish gallantry.

A fortnight later I was back in Washington as President Reagan’s last official guest. This gave me the chance of discussions with President-elect Bush. Mr Bush was slowly putting his Administration team together. On this occasion I also met Dan Quayle, the Vice-President-elect — who for all the cruel mockery to which he was subject I always found very well briefed and with a good political sense — and also future Secretary of State Jim Baker, whose views I shall mention shortly. Both the outgoing President and the President-elect spoke of the importance of dealing with the US budget deficit which had fallen for four years but which was still a problem. This inevitably raised a question mark over defence, so I was keen to restate to Mr Bush my views about SNF and the great significance I attached to the continuation of the SDI programme.

I had always found Vice-President Bush easy to get on with and I felt that he had performed good service to America in keeping the Reagan Administration in touch with European thinking. He was one of the most decent, honest and patriotic Americans I have met. He had great personal courage, as his past record and his resilience in campaigning showed. But he had never had to think through his beliefs
and fight for them when they were hopelessly unfashionable as Ronald Reagan and I had had to do. This meant that much of his time now was taken up with reaching for answers to problems which to me came quite spontaneously, because they sprang from my basic convictions.

I later learned that President Bush was sometimes exasperated by my habit of talking nonstop about issues which fascinated me and felt that he ought to have been leading the discussion. More important than all of this perhaps was the fact that, as President, George Bush felt the need to distance himself from his predecessor: turning his back fairly publicly on the special position I had enjoyed in the Reagan Administration’s counsels and confidence was a way of doing that. This was understandable; and by the time of my last year in office we had established a better relationship. By then I had learned that I had to defer to him in conversation and not to stint the praise. If that was what was necessary to secure Britain’s interests and influence I had no hesitation in eating a little humble pie.

Unfortunately, even then the US State Department continued to put out briefing against me and my policies — particularly on Europe — until the onset of the Gulf crisis made them hastily change their stance. To some extent the relative tilt of American foreign policy against Britain in this period may have been the result of the influence of Secretary of State James Baker. Although he was always very courteous to me, we were not close as the admirable George Shultz and I had been. Yet that was not crucial. Rather, it was the fact that Jim Baker’s many abilities lay in the area of ‘fixing’. He had had a mixed record of this, having as US Treasury Secretary been responsible for the ill-judged Plaza and Louvre Accords which brought ‘exchange rate stability’ back to the centre of the West’s economic policies with highly deleterious effects. Now at the State Department Jim Baker and his team brought a similar, allegedly ‘pragmatic’ problem-solving approach to bear on US foreign policy.

The main results of this approach as far as I was concerned were to put the relationship with Germany — rather than the ‘special relationship’ with Britain — at the centre. I would be the first to argue that if one chose to ignore history and the loyalties it engenders such an approach might appear quite rational. After all, there was some danger that Germany — first under the spell of Mr Gorbachev and later with the lure of reunification — might have moved away from the western alliance towards neutralism. Once Germany was reunified there was another argument — propagated by the French, but swallowed by the US State Department too — that only a ‘united Europe’ could keep German power responsibly in check and, more positively,
that a German-led ‘united Europe’ would allow the Americans to cut back on the amount they spent on Europe’s defence.

Each of these arguments — the sort I could imagine being generated by our own British foreign policy establishment — was false. The risk of Germany loosening its attachment to the West was greatly exaggerated. A ‘united Europe’ would augment, not check, the power of a united Germany. Germany would pursue its interests inside or outside such a Europe — while a Europe built on the corporatist and protectionist lines implicit in the Franco-German alliance would certainly be more antipathetic to the Americans than the looser Europe I preferred. Finally, the idea that the Europeans — with the exception of the British and possibly the French — could be relied on to defend themselves or anyone else for that matter was frankly laughable. In fact, the ties of blood, language, culture and values which bound Britain and America were the only firm basis for US policy in the West; only a very clever person could fail to appreciate something so obvious. But this was the range of personal and political considerations which affected US policy towards Britain as I tried to pursue my threefold objectives of keeping NATO’s defences strong, of ensuring that the Soviet Union did not feel so threatened as to march into eastern Europe and of managing the effects of German reunification.

At the end of 1988 I could foresee neither the way in which Anglo-American relations would develop nor the scale of the difficulties with the Germans over SNF. My basic position on Short-Range Nuclear Weapons was that they were essential to NATO’s strategy of flexible response. Any potential aggressor must know that if he were to cross the NATO line he might be met with a nuclear response. If that fear was removed he might calculate that he could mount a conventional attack that would reach the Atlantic seaboard within a few days. And this, of course, was the existing position. But once land-based intermediate-range nuclear weapons were removed, as the INF Treaty signed in Washington in December 1987 took effect, the land-based short-range missiles became all the more vital. So, of course, did the sea-based intermediate missiles.

At the Rhodes European Council in early December 1988 I discussed arms control with Chancellor Kohl. I found him quite robust.
He was keen for an early NATO summit which would help him push through agreement within his Government on the ‘comprehensive concept’ for arms control. I agreed that the sooner the better. We must take decisions on the modernization of NATO’s nuclear weapons by the middle of the year, in particular on the replacement of LANCE. Chancellor Kohl said that he wanted both of these questions out of the way before the June 1989 European elections.

By the time of the next Anglo-German summit in Frankfurt the political pressure on the German Chancellor had increased further and he had begun to argue that a decision on SNF was not really necessary until 1991–2.