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 100,000 strong – a crowd in an ebullient mood, full of expectation, despite being drenched by the rain. Bush, too, was very excited. It was the first ever visit of an American president to Hungary.[73]
The rain continued to fall while Hungary’s president Bruno Straub droned on for a full quarter-hour of plodding introductions. When Bush finally got a chance to speak, he waved away an umbrella, dispensed with his notecards and made a few extempore remarks ‘from the heart’ on the changes taking place in Hungary and on its reform-minded leadership. Just as he finished, the evening sun broke through the dark clouds. There was another special moment. Out of the corner of his eye, Bush noticed an elderly lady near the podium who was soaked to the skin. He took off his raincoat (which actually belonged to one of his security agents) and put it round her shoulders. The spectators roared with approval. Then Bush plunged into their midst, shaking their hands and shouting good wishes. Scowcroft noted: ‘The empathy between him and the crowd was total.’[74]
Next day, 12 July, Bush followed a similar script to his Warsaw visit. He was careful not to be seen associating with any opposition-party officials too closely. Indeed his meetings with both opposition and Communist Party figures were behind closed doors while in public he expressed his support for the communist reformers who now ran the government. Still, the difference in overall atmospherics between Budapest and Warsaw was clear: Hungary had enjoyed for two decades ‘more political freedom – nightclubs feature biting satirical sketches about the government – and more economic energy, with food markets piled high with fruits and vegetables, than the other Warsaw Pact countries’.[75]
In his talks with Bush, Prime Minister Miklós Németh emphasised his firm belief that the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (HSWP) could ‘renew itself and will be able to, through electoral means, gain a dominant position in the coalition. The danger is that if the HSWP is defeated, the opposition is not yet ready to rule.’ Bush agreed. As regards the ‘political system for Hungary’, the president stated that ‘the principles articulated by the prime minister are ones that Americans support’ and promised that he would ‘do nothing to complicate the process of reform’. Being inclined toward stability, Bush believed that it was the reform communists who were uniquely equipped to successfully engineer a gradual exit from Moscow’s orbit.[76]
In Hungary – unlike Poland where the political situation was rather precarious in the wake of the elections – the question was not whether reform would proceed but how fast and on whose terms. Currently the reform communists were driving the transformation, and they did so with confidence. Internationally Hungary had more room for manoeuvre than Poland, a strategically more pivotal country for the Soviet Union. And Budapest also knew that it benefited from following in Warsaw’s slipstream. Poland had clearly managed to get away with its reform course by staying within the Warsaw Pact, and the Hungarian reformers also saw this as the best path – especially after Gorbachev had held firm to his non-interventionist position in the Bucharest summit. (Leaving the Warsaw Pact had been the step too far by