Warsaw Embassy Cable, Poland Looks to President Bush

President George H. W. Bush visited Poland and Hungary in July 1989, following a series of speeches he had made that defined the direction his administration would take in its relations with the Soviet Union. On April 17, at Hamtramck, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit heavily populated by Polish-Americans, Bush had devoted a speech—referred to in the excerpt below—to the future of Eastern Europe in which he blamed tensions between East and West on “the imposed and unnatural division of Europe.” Bush announced, “We share an unwavering conviction that one day all the peoples of Europe will live in freedom.” The Hamtramck speech came ten days after Round Table agreements were signed in Poland resulting in the legalization of Solidarity and the holding of open elections in June. In the ensuing elections on June 4 and June 18, Solidarity candidates won 160 of the 161 seats in the Sejm that were available to them and 92 of the 100 seats of the Polish Senate. In addition, many leaders of the Communist Party failed to secure enough votes to be elected to the parliament they had controlled for four decades. Following the elections, the US Ambassador in Warsaw, John Davis, drafted the following memorandum to Secretary of State James Baker that outlined the unstable political, economic, and strategic situation in Poland and the region and offered recommendations concerning the details and tenor of Bush’s public statements, ending on a definitively upbeat note.