WHAT ABOUT IRAN-CONTRA?:

The Vatican and Westminster: June 7-8, 1982: On Monday, June 7, 1982 Ronald Reagan was in Rome. He was there as part of a brief trip to Europe. It was a straightforward trip lacking many stops, but in its simplicity, it contained unparalleled steps in the rhetorical and symbolic war against the Soviet Union. (PAUL KENGOR, Chapter Ten in The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism)

For two seminal days in June 1982, Reagan made some of his strongest gestures to date, signaling to America and to the world his belief that Communism's days were running out.

With a media crush outside, as reporters jockeyed for position and at times literally tripped over one another, Reagan and the pope met at the Vatican, a little over a year after assassination attempts that almost took their lives. The day he was shot the pope had received a cable from Reagan, in which the president expressed his shock and prayers. Since then, the staffs of the two men had worked diligently to arrange a meeting between them. "It was always assumed the president would meet with the Holy Father as soon as feasible," said Bill Clark, among those most excited about the prospects, "especially after they both took shots . . . only a few weeks apart. I don't know if any one person said 'we have to see the pope.' It was just assumed because of their mutual interests that at some point the two men would come together and form some sort of collaboration."

Reagan had long coveted such an idea, and the events in Poland the previous December merely reinforced the importance of such a meeting. Not only had he long viewed the pope as the key to Poland's fate, but among his earliest goals as president was to officially recognize the Vatican as a state "and make them an ally."

Now, for the first time, the men spoke face to face inside the venerable Vatican Library. The subject of the shootings was broached. Pio Cardinal Laghi said that Reagan told the pope: "Look how the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence intervened." Bill Clark said that both men referred to the "miraculous" fact that they had survived; indeed, only later did we learn that both men had come perilously close to dying.

The Protestant and Catholic, said Clark, shared a "unity" in spiritual views and in their "vision on the Soviet empire," namely, "that right or correctness would ultimately prevail in the divine plan." That day, each shared their view that they had been given "a spiritual mission — a special role in the divine plan of life." Both expressed concern for "the terrible oppression of atheistic communism," as Clark put it, and agreed that "atheistic communism lived a lie that, when fully understood, must ultimately fail."

Together they expressed a common vision to end the Cold War. As Reagan said, "We both felt that a great mistake had been made at Yalta and something should be done. Solidarity was the very weapon for bringing this about." It was an important unity, and in his dramatic 1992 story for Time magazine, Carl Bernstein reported that it was at this meeting where Reagan and the pope secretly joined forces not only to strengthen Solidarity and pressure Warsaw "but to free all of Eastern Europe." In that first meeting, wrote Bernstein, they consented to undertake a clandestine campaign "to hasten the dissolution of the communist empire." The two men "were convinced that Poland could be broken out of the Soviet orbit if the Vatican and the United States committed the resources to destabilizing the Polish government and keeping the outlawed Solidarity movement alive after the declaration of martial law in 1981." Reagan told the pope: "Hope remains in Poland. We, working together, can keep it alive."

Both leaders were convinced that a free, non-Communist Poland would be, in Bernstein's words, "a dagger to the heart of the Soviet empire." They were certain that if Poland became democratic, other Eastern European states would follow. A cardinal who was one of John Paul II's closest aides put it this way: "Nobody believed the collapse of communism would happen this fast or on this timetable. But in their first meeting, the Holy Father and the President committed themselves and the institutions of the church and America to such a goal. And from that day, the focus was to bring it about in Poland." [...]

The day after his historic meeting with the pope, Reagan left the Vatican reinvigorated with a spiritual zeal to undermine Communism. Filled with a sense of grander purpose, he flew to London, where on June 8 at Westminster he gave the most prescient speech of his presidency.

Amidst all the Blair post-mortems, it's useful to recall that Reagan and Thatcher left office having "failed," according to the punditocracy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2007 12:00 AM