Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [486]
In my final meeting with General Jaruzelski that afternoon I kept my word to Solidarity. I told him that I was grateful that he had put no obstacle in the way of my visit to Gdansk — though it has to be said that the authorities had put on a total news black-out about it both before and afterwards. I said how impressed I had been by Solidarity’s moderation. If they were good enough to attend round-table discussions they were also good enough to be legalized. General Jaruzelski gave no impression of being prepared to budge. I repeated that I did not believe that Solidarity could be ignored, indeed any attempt to ignore them would court disaster. It was a chilly though good-tempered discussion. General Jaruzelski was in any case a slightly awkward interlocutor until you got to know him: his dark glasses and his oddly rigid posture (the result of back trouble) made him seem rather remote. But I did not underrate his intelligence — nor his connections, for I knew that he was close to Mr Gorbachev. The proof that the General was a Pole and not just a communist was that just before my aeroplane was about to leave, in an unscheduled appearance his car screamed to a halt beside the aircraft and the General leapt out with a huge bouquet of flowers. Not even Marxism could suppress Polish gallantry.
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
A fortnight later I was back in Washington as President Reagan’s last official guest. This gave me the chance of discussions with President-elect Bush. Mr Bush was slowly putting his Administration team together. On this occasion I also met Dan Quayle, the Vice-President-elect — who for all the cruel mockery to which he was subject I always found very well briefed and with a good political sense — and also future Secretary of State Jim Baker, whose views I shall mention shortly. Both the outgoing President and the President-elect spoke of the importance of dealing with the US budget deficit which had fallen for four years but which was still a problem. This inevitably raised a question mark over defence, so I was keen to restate to Mr Bush my views about SNF and the great significance I attached to the continuation of the SDI programme.
I had always found Vice-President Bush easy to get on with and I felt that he had performed good service to America in keeping the Reagan Administration in touch with European thinking. He was one of the most decent, honest and patriotic Americans I have met. He had great personal courage, as his past record and his resilience in campaigning showed. But he had never had to think through his beliefs and fight for them when they were hopelessly unfashionable as Ronald Reagan and I had had to do. This meant that much of his time now was taken up with reaching for answers to problems which to me came quite spontaneously, because they sprang from my basic convictions.
I later learned that President Bush was sometimes exasperated by my habit of talking nonstop about issues which fascinated me and felt that he ought to have been leading the discussion. More important than all of this perhaps was the fact that, as President, George Bush felt the need to distance himself from his predecessor: turning his back fairly publicly on the special position I had enjoyed in the Reagan Administration’s counsels and confidence was a way of doing that. This was understandable; and by the time of my last year in office we had established a better relationship. By then I had learned that I had to defer to him in conversation and not to stint the praise. If that was what was necessary to secure Britain’s interests and influence I had no hesitation in eating a little humble pie.
Unfortunately, even then the US State Department continued