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  But the accords were being overtaken by events and the sentiments of the Polish people, who were fed up with the communists and Moscow’s yoke. Everyone hoped that the communists might hold on with just enough votes, counting, of course, their coalition partners, to fulfill the terms of the agreement. That too was not to be.

  On the second day of the president’s trip, the American ambassador held a lovely lunch in his spectacular garden to honor George Bush and members of the Polish government. Lech Wałęsa was not present, having overseen the dramatic events of the president’s visit to Gdańsk the day before. But there was significant representation from Solidarity as well as from the Polish government. The only observably odd note came during the toasts. President Bush toasted the Polish and American people: nothing strange there. But Jaruzelski toasted “the ladies.” What was that? I thought. The Polish legislator sitting next to me explained that President Jaruzelski did not want to risk being rebuffed by his countrymen if he dared raise a glass to “the Polish people.”

  But the real drama was unfolding in hushed conversations on the sidelines of the lunch. The American delegation, including the president, did not know that a deal was being struck that would nail shut communism’s coffin.

  The Polish Communist Party had, since the rigged elections of 1947, had non-communist coalition partners. The actions of the Peasant Party and another small party (the so-called Democratic Party) didn’t really matter, since the communists were in complete control. They were in no sense independent, voting compliantly with the party for forty years. It was a coalition in name only.

  In the new circumstances, though, these “minor” parties suddenly found a new role. A month after their consultations at the American ambassador’s residence that day, they defected to Solidarity’s side and agreed to take part in a non-communist coalition proposed by Wałęsa. It was, in fact, a kind of constitutional coup d’état. That is what the Poles were doing while most of us dined on a scrumptious meal on a warm Warsaw summer day.

  The communists would have to accept the inevitable: They could no longer govern Poland alone. On August 19, one of the founders of Solidarity, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was asked to form a government. Jaruzelski agreed to become president but was effectively without power.

  The world held its breath to see what Moscow would do. Mazowiecki had been careful to reaffirm Poland’s obligations to the Warsaw Pact and to leave the communists in charge of both the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry. In several interviews, he made clear that he wanted good relations with Moscow.

  He did not have cause for worry. Mikhail Gorbachev, not Leonid Brezhnev, was in charge in the Kremlin. In his UN speech in 1988, Gorbachev had disavowed the Brezhnev Doctrine that defended the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in the internal affairs of countries of the socialist bloc—by force if necessary.

  When Izvestiya published a statement on August 20 saying that Moscow would “wait and see” in relations with the new Polish government, it was clear that Gorbachev would keep his promise. For good measure, the Soviet government newspaper added that the communist party of Poland was now associated with crisis and failure and would have to rebuild itself.

  Two days later, Mieczysław Rakowski, the outgoing communist prime minister, reportedly called Gorbachev for advice and was told to allow the Solidarity-led coalition to go forward. Poland was free.

  Democracy Prevails

  There was palpable excitement that September in Washington as we anticipated the visit of Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s deputy prime minister. Balcerowicz was highly respected in the West and serving simultaneously as the finance minister. The new government was coming to terms with the challenges it faced. The communists were gone, and the economic woes, accumulated over decades, now belonged to the new democratic government.

  Several weeks before the meetings were to begin, Jan Nowak, an iconic Polish American leader who had headed Radio Free Europe for Eastern Europe, came to see me. He had just returned from Warsaw, where he had met the Mazowiecki government.

  Jan was one of my favorite interlocutors. He was small in stature and more than eighty years old. But he was a giant to me, one of those extraordinary men, like my mentor and professor, Josef Korbel, who had survived both the Nazis and the communists by fleeing to the United States. Yet, like Korbel, he had never really left his country or his countrymen behind. Jan was a fierce fighter for their liberty and dignity.

  That August afternoon on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building, Jan pleaded for resources for the Solidarity-led government. He used a hard sell. The United States had stood by Poland during all those years of captivity: Now we had to stand by his native land in freedom. Those words were so powerful and resonated with me. The Poles had powerful friends in the U.S. Congress too. Senators George Mitchell and Bob Dole were just two who represented the bipartisan support that Poland enjoyed.

  Both American politics and faithfulness to American values were on Poland’s side. But I knew that we had budget limitations and worried that we could never live up to the Marshall Plan–like expectations that East Europeans would have. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I prepared for the National Security Council meeting that would take place to finalize the offer that President Bush would make to the new Polish government.

  I held a meeting of the assistant secretaries from around the government to review the bidding. The State Department proposed a series of visits and perhaps a donor conference for Poland; Agriculture proposed more food aid; Treasury took a hard line, insisting that, at most, Poland might receive several hundred million dollars from the IMF after a long series of negotiations; and the Commerce Department proposed to take a trade mission to Warsaw. That’s right: at this moment of historic change, a trade mission made up of CEOs.

  My colleague and the head of my directorate, Bob Blackwill, a strong proponent of robust aid, was out of town. I knew that Bob would have been furious at the pittance that we were about to propose, and frankly I was just embarrassed. So I broke ranks and went to see Bob Gates, the deputy national security adviser. “Bob,” I said, “the Cold War is ending and we are proposing to hold a trade show in Warsaw.” I knew I had Bob’s support when he chuckled. He too was a Soviet specialist and didn’t want to let the historic moment pass. He encouraged me to come up with something bigger—outside of the “interagency” process.

  One of the ideas floating around Washington was to have the IMF grant Poland a “standby” loan of $1 billion. The number needed to be very large because the Poles would use the confidence that it implied to go ahead and “float” the złoty (in other words, let the currency find its true market value) as a crucial first step to market reform. But if Polish people panicked and made a run on the banks in an effort to protect their savings, there would be widespread chaos.

  Jeffrey Sachs at Harvard had been a strong advocate for standby loans and had used our academic connections to get in touch with me. We talked through the mechanism and the likely resistance from the Treasury Department, which would, at the very least, argue that this could not be done quickly. The U.S. Treasury would say it could not support the loan before the IMF concluded negotiations. That would take months. We had a few days.

  I knew well that I didn’t have the credibility to put an economic proposal before the president that Treasury would oppose. But I knew someone who did, my colleagues from Stanford: Michael Boskin, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and John Taylor, a senior member of the council.

  Armed with Bob Gates’s permission to circumvent the process, I went to see Mike and John. “Is there any evidence that these standby facilities work?” They agreed that they could in some cases. Israel had been one such example. I explained that I needed a paper for the president to that effect. Thanks to Mike and John, President Bush had the argument before him prior to the NSC meeting.

  I thought, though, that I had better inform the secretaries that the president would want to raise th
e idea of a standby loan. Secretary James Baker at State was delighted. I tried to reach Secretary Nicholas Brady, but his staff failed to connect us. When the meeting took place, the treasury secretary was not prepared for the argument. He said that he was not in principle opposed, citing the fact that he himself had mentioned the possibility of a standby loan. But it just couldn’t be done quickly. If we broke process here, he argued, “we would have to do it for everyone, including Argentina!”

  Secretary Baker spoke next, and he was prepared. “The Cold War didn’t begin in Argentina and it won’t end there,” he countered. That was the winning argument and the United States settled on a kind of compromise. We would make the announcement before Poland’s negotiations were complete, but disbursement would await final agreement between the IMF and Warsaw. The U.S. portion was to be $200 million in an internationally supported package. (The money, by the way, was never needed because the currency float was orderly and successful.)

  Poland would receive further aid too. Congress seemed to try to outdo the president by offering an aid package several times larger than his original proposal. Given the nation’s budget difficulties, this set off a confrontation between the White House and Capitol Hill. Jim Baker accused the Congress of politically motivated efforts to embarrass the president. To say that the response of the United States to this great historical moment was messy is an understatement. As Brent Scowcroft, then the national security adviser, has noted, most of us agreed more with the Congress than with our own administration. But we did what we could, and the Poles received significant help. And the aid provided a strong signal of support from Europe and the United States. It was not exactly the Marshall Plan, but it did help the new government pursue economic reform in a timely fashion.

  In fact, one of the most successful endeavors was actually quite small in absolute dollar terms. The idea, which took root just as the changes in Poland were beginning to unfold, was for an enterprise fund to provide seed grants to small businesses across the country. It was intended as a kind of venture capital investment to bypass the communist government and help loosen the reins of the centrally controlled economy. In essence, the U.S. government would provide capital to private bakeries, auto shops, hair salons, and other entrepreneurial activities for a small stake in the enterprises. An independent international board of Poles and distinguished Americans would oversee the program.

  President Bush first mentioned the idea in a speech in April 1989, and he reiterated it during his address to the Polish parliament in July 1989. But in a sign of how quickly events were changing on the ground, by the time the proposal was approved by Congress, Solidarity had already taken control of the government. The Polish American Enterprise Fund was nevertheless granted $240 million to begin making investments, and it continued to operate throughout the 1990s.

  Years later when I was back at Stanford, I received a call from an NSC staff member in the Clinton administration. The United States, it seemed, had a dilemma. The Enterprise Fund had not only not lost money, it had made money: The original $240 million investment was worth nearly $300 million. Should the Poles repay it?

  I asked President Bush and Brent Scowcroft. They said that we hadn’t really expected to be repaid. (Brent said, “Who makes money on foreign assistance?”) We should probably just consider the “profits” to be a grant. The bulk of the principal should be repaid to the U.S. Treasury, and the rest should go to the Poles. President Clinton agreed. Warsaw graciously used the funds to continue its work and venture enterprises in other, less fortunate East European countries.

  U.S. assistance and that of the European Union (EU) certainly played a role in stabilizing the Polish economy and ultimately its political system. Poland’s story reminds us that targeted international assistance can ease transition. But without committed and competent indigenous leaders and a favorable institutional landscape, success can be elusive.

  In this, Poland was blessed with both. Poland’s agriculture was never collectivized, giving farmers an early stake in feeding the country as economic freedom took hold. Small political parties that had meant nothing under communism switched sides at a crucial moment in 1989. Due to the depth of religious conviction among the population, the Catholic Church remained powerful even in Stalinist times. At the moment of the opening this provided John Paul II with the metaphorical “divisions” of village priests that he mobilized on the ground. And Solidarity emerged from events after martial law intact and ready to take up a political mantle when the time came.

  The country also had formidable leaders, many of whom had cut their political teeth as members of Solidarity. As such they enjoyed the admiration of the population, reinforcing their willingness to move quickly and decisively on reform. It is no exaggeration to say that Poland’s founding fathers were an extraordinary collection of people whose values and patriotism created the country’s democracy.

  Lech Wałęsa will deservedly go down in history as the inspiration for Solidarity and in many ways the father of democratic Poland. A simple man who started out as an advocate for bread-and-butter issues as a labor leader, Wałęsa would become the symbol of freedom for Poles. What he lacked in political sophistication, he made up for in sincerity and authenticity. When I first met him in Gdańsk, I wondered if he could corral all that he had unleashed. It was easy to underestimate him, and early on the communists clearly did. In one of the memorable events in a decade of memorable moments, the party arranged a televised debate between Alfred Miodowicz, the head of the official trade union and an accomplished speaker, and Wałęsa. The ratings were through the roof: A poll in Warsaw found that 78 percent of the population watched as Wałęsa kept Miodowicz on the defensive throughout. That night, Solidarity emerged as a legitimate contender for power—not at all what the party had intended.

  And Solidarity would produce other key leaders who did not enjoy Wałęsa’s deep moral authority but nonetheless simply knew how to get the work of the transition done:

  Leszek Balcerowicz, the author of the economic reform plan, had been an economics professor and member of the communist party. He joined Solidarity soon after its founding in 1980 as an adviser. His commitment to rapid market reform and tight monetary policies is widely regarded as having smoothed Poland’s economic transition.

  If Balcerowicz was the father of Poland’s market economy, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a journalist, was a fierce defender of individual liberties and a multiparty state, leading to a constitution that protected these basic democratic rights.

  Adam Michnik founded Gazeta Wyborcza, which had become Poland’s largest newspaper and a voice for Solidarity, even under martial law. He was a powerful advocate for a free press.

  Bronisław Geremek founded in 1987 the Commission for Political Reforms of the Civic Committee, which drafted a plan for Poland’s democratic transition, taking advantage of the breathing space accorded by Mikhail Gorbachev. A quiet and scholarly professor of medieval Polish history, Geremek was in many ways an unlikely father of social and political reform.

  These and others like them were deep believers in liberty. They had suffered what seemed to be an irrevocable defeat with the imposition of martial law. But they took advantage of that time to deepen their understanding of democracy’s requirements and to develop uniquely Polish responses to them. As such, Poland was ready to make the transition in 1989 in ways that few countries have been.

  A New “Special Relationship”

  When President Bush took his first trip to Europe in 2001, one stop was an absolute must—Warsaw. Everyone knew of the “special relationship” with Britain. Poland seemed poised to be a special ally in its own right. America had remained devoted to the country in the darkest days, and now celebrated a bright future with its friend. Poland’s story was quite simply a story of freedom’s triumph.

  We seemed to see eye-to-eye with Poland on everything. Sitting in a meeting between President Bush and his Polish counterpart was stress-free and productive. In NATO, Poland br
ought new energy to the aging alliance, reminding its members to support those still living in tyranny in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. Poland’s special forces, along with those of Australia and Britain, joined Americans in the initial phase of the invasion of Iraq. The Poles agreed to host missile defense deployments despite Moscow’s resistance. In any meeting with the European Union, whether on climate change or trade, Poland was a friendly voice. The Poles took on hard tasks like trying to help the Ukrainians solve their multiple governance crises. I told President Kwasniewski on one occasion that Poland had become one of America’s most important allies and a real power in European politics.

  That assessment of Poland’s foreign policy was accurate. But at home, the democratic political system was struggling to govern. In a sense, the problems were to be expected and were ones that bedevil almost every new democracy. Poland was experiencing political fragmentation, electoral volatility, and fissures in society.

  How Many Parties Does a Country Need?

  A year after the extraordinary events of 1989, Solidarity, a movement, gave way to the creation of political parties. Fissures emerged within the labor movement as the threat from a common foe, the communists, receded. The splits followed predictable lines: social and religious orthodoxy versus more liberal views; intellectual elites against workers and “common people”; rural interests against those of urban dwellers. Parties were founded representing all of those interests and many more. Former communists who had sufficiently reformist and nationalist credentials found their place in Polish politics, repackaging themselves in center-left parties.

  There was even a Polish Beer Lovers’ Party, founded in 1990 by a television star. It had ten thousand members devoted to a philosophy of “live and let live.” The party would eventually attract people with an economic agenda for consumerism. Not surprisingly, this was resented by the original membership that just wanted to enjoy life, and a split ensued, with twelve deputies leaving to form a new parliamentary association.2