attempts were made on the lives of Pope John Paul II and himself. This gave him “occasion to realize that we must use what time we have to further those values which will last after we as individuals are gone.”2
Those wishful words applied to what he envisioned for Poland. In the last year, said Reagan, Poland’s workers battled bloodshed—to “edge their country closer to freedom.” The president denounced fascism and Communism and said that both deny the existence of God and those God-given liberties “that are the inalienable right of each person on this planet.”3 He closed with a wish of goodwill and offer of prayer.
All of this was a bellwether of the year to come; it was fitting that Reagan could not avoid Poland that first day. The year 1982 would be decisive, playing a crucial part in his strategies for Poland and the fall of the Soviet Union. While the year 1981 had given the president the opportunity to get the “domestic house in order,” he was ready to look beyond national policies to a broader international agenda. At the start of 1982, judging that the bricks and mortar were in place, Reagan called his foreign-policy staff into the Oval Office and, in Bill Clark’s words, told them, “Gentlemen, our concentration has been on domestic matters this year, and I want to roll the sleeves up now and get to foreign policy, defense, and intelligence.”4
BILL CLARK AND THE NSC
Bill Clark had been Governor Reagan’s chief of staff before Reagan began appointing him up through the various levels of the California court, eventually all the way to the California Supreme Court, where he remained in January 1981 when his old friend was sworn in as president. At the inaugural, Clark was one of Reagan’s special guests, and Reagan leaned on him to join the new administration. A rancher at heart, content with his wife, kids, and land near Paso Robles, Clark did not want to go to Washington. Reagan pushed, and eventually Clark relented.
Sensing that he would need an “America desk” at the State Department, Reagan asked Clark to become the number two at Foggy Bottom. There was no member of the administration more loyal and close to Reagan. Edmund Morris would dub Clark the “most important and influential person in the first administration,” as did Time, the New York Times Magazine, and any remotely knowledgeable source.5 Now, after a year as deputy secretary of state, Reagan needed Clark to run his national security policy, to head up his National Security Council, to help him win the Cold War.
Already devoted to the pope and Poland, the devout Catholic Clark seemed literally linked to both from the outset. On January 4, the first day on the job, Clark accepted a letter from John Paul II, a response to two Reagan letters written to the pope over the previous two weeks. The pope wrote to say that he supported the administration’s countermeasures against martial law in Poland, considering them complementary to the moral pressure he was willing to apply. Excited by the response, the new national security adviser wrote two memos (both not declassified until July 2000) to Reagan summarizing the pope’s reaction and happily reporting that John Paul II’s letter “makes it clear” that he backed Reagan’s policies and goals, seeing “his actions as complementary to ours.”
But there were limitations to what the pope could and could not do publicly, and Clark’s memos reflected this point. He cautioned that the pope said he could not be “as publicly forthcoming in expressing this support as we would wish.” This lack of public support created a problem with Western Europeans, notably the West German government, which in its push for a more accommodating policy toward the Poland situation had declared its stance in line with that of the Vatican. To the contrary, said Clark, the pope’s letter made it clear that the Vatican was closer to Washington than Bonn.6
In turn, Reagan replied to John Paul II’s January 4 letter. His response remained classified for nearly twenty years. He told the pope that the pontiff’s January 4 missive, in which John Paul II (in Reagan’s words) recounted the “tragic history” of the Polish people and their “unquenchable thirst for liberty,” had moved him deeply. Reagan lamented the “terrible crimes” and “unspeakable afflictions” borne by Poles over the years. Then, in a remarkable religious judgment not typical of Reagan—who was more apt to speak of God’s forgiveness than wrath—the president asserted:
Tragically, the leaders of the Western democracies were too often ready, even in the present century, to condone by their silence many terrible consequences in the political life of nations. I tremble to think of God’s verdict on those who acquiesced in these deeds, as well as on those who perpetrated them….
The ultimate responsibility of the Soviet Union for this tragedy is indisputable, however artfully the Russians may disguise their involvement. The Soviet action in Poland is not an aberration of policy. It is an act of brutality.7
Bill Clark had long known Reagan’s intense interest in Poland, and now he was in a position to feed that interest. Clark had a protocol to ensure Poland stayed on the front burner. To the PDB, the super-sensitive President’s Daily (Intelligence) Brief, a section was devoted strictly to Poland.8 Clark recalls how Reagan craved that regular morning update on Poland:
Bill Casey would, by courier, send the President’s Daily Brief [PDB] each morning at about 5:00 a.m. to our war room downstairs in our [National] Security Council. It was a very limited edition, five colors showing the activity across the globe for the preceding 24 hours. It would be delivered to the President in his residence before he came over [by 7:00 a.m.]. His first question for a long period of time was usually, “What is happening in Poland this morning?”
He’d write questions all over the margins about things that weren’t clear in the briefing. And, of course, the agency [CIA] would come down with further explanations. He called Poland the hub of the Soviet empire—of all of the seven adjoining countries, second in priority only to Russia itself. He watched closely John Paul’s activity….He followed Lech Walesa closely and that wonderful movement, realizing that once that hub began to unravel, the whole thing would come apart. He thought that when Poland would go, so would the empire. Poland was an opportunity for what he called “the unraveling of the empire.”9
Clark had no doubts as to Reagan’s intentions. “It certainly was his policy to undermine the USSR,” said Clark. “Without a doubt, as early as the gubernatorial days, that was his thinking: whether by undermining the Soviet Union or by helping the Soviet Union undermine itself. That’s a given. That was his policy. No question.”10 Reagan assuredly told Clark and his staff “several times both as governor and many times later as president,” that, “The wall around atheistic communism is destined to come down within the Divine Plan because it lives a lie.”11 So frequently did Reagan speak of this Divine Plan that Clark today casually abbreviates the two words as simply “the D.P.”
Thus, knowing what Reagan wanted, Clark said, “It was up to us as his cabinet and staff to convert the President’s early vision into underlying policy, policy into strategy, strategy into tactics, and on to implementation and ultimate success.”12 According to Clark, Reagan’s “strategy to accelerate the demise of the Soviet Union” consisted of five pillars: “economic, political, military, ideological, and moral.”13
While these were the general contours of Reagan’s strategy to undermine, it was up to Clark, as the new national security adviser, to corral the manpower and craft a series of policy directives to form this strategy to undermine. To execute this plan, Clark assembled a collection of NSC staffers, people like Tom Reed, Roger Robinson, Paula Dobriansky, Ken deGraffeinreid, John Lenczowski, Richard Morris, Sven Kraemer, David Laux, Norm Bailey, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, John Poindexter, and others.14
Also significant were the NSC members that Clark chose to retain. Chief among them was Richard Pipes, who since 1950 had been a highly respected Harvard professor of Russian history. In 1981 Richard Allen brought Pipes into the Reagan NSC to start a two-year leave from Harvard that would end in December 1982. Widely regarded as the NSC’s senior Kremlinologist, Pipes served as the NSC’s political affairs directorate and European and Soviet affairs directorate. His opinion was respected throughout the White House, and whenever Soviet subjects came up in the Oval Office, the president frequently asked, “What does Dick Pipes think?”15
