NOW THERE IS ONE

We only recognize giants when they are gone, heroic ages when they are past. The day will come when America’s children will learn that the 1980s was such an age, bestrode by three giants who together rid the world of one of the great evils of history, the Soviet Union. They were Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. Now, only one is left.

We mourned the passing of Ronald Reagan last year, Pope John Paul’s this, so before we mourn Lady Thatcher’s, who turns 80 this October, let us acknowledge the incalculable debt those who live in freedom today owe to this triumvirate of truly extraordinary human beings.

It is easy to believe the hand of Providence set them on history’s stage one after the other in the short space of two years, exactly at the time America and the West was on the verge of surrender to the seeming inevitability of Soviet power. The strangest arrival of the three was the first.

You may never have heard the name Albino Luciani. Back in 1978, he was a 65 year-old Italian who had spent his entire life working his way up through the Vatican hierarchy to become a Cardinal. When the Conclave met after the death of Pope Paul VI on August 6, they selected this thoroughly ordinary and unaccomplished man as the next pontiff. Luciani was invested on August 26, adopting the papal name Pope John Paul I. 33 days later he was found dead in his bed. He had hidden his heart trouble from his fellow Cardinals.

So it was in an atmosphere of shock and confusion that the Conclave selected Karol Jozef Wojtyla, the former Bishop of Krakow, to be the first non-Italian pontiff since the Dutch Pope Hadrian VI in 1522. And not just non-Italian, but from Communist Poland. It was Providence’s first sign that history was about to go in a different direction. Cardinal Wojtyla was invested as Pope John Paul II in honor of his predecessor on October 16, 1978.

Seven months later in May of 1979, England proceeded to elect its first woman Prime Minister, the daughter of a shopkeeper to run a nation of shopkeepers, Margaret Thatcher. And eighteen months after that in November of 1980, a former movie star defeated a sitting president in America, sending Ronald Reagan to the White House.

A Polish priest, an English woman commoner, and an American movie actor were about to confront the most evil power in the world. How off the wall do you want history to get? Truth is not simply stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic and awe-inspiring.

It would keep getting more so. Seventy days after Reagan was inaugurated President, March 30, 1981, a crazed kid fired a .22 caliber bullet at him which ricocheted off the Presidential limo and into his chest lodging a fraction of an inch from his heart. Six weeks later, May 13, 1981, the Soviet KGB, using a Turkish Moslem trigger man named Mehmet Ali Agca, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II.

Both men were convinced that they were saved by the Almighty for a purpose. They met in the Vatican Library on June 7, 1982. Reagan proposed they conduct a clandestine effort to support the recently-outlawed Solidarity movement, destabilize the Communist government of Poland, and attempt to bring freedom to all of Soviet-colonized Eastern Europe. It was an incredibly audacious proposal – which the Pope accepted.

The very next day, June 8, 1982, Reagan flew to London to speak to the Members of the British Parliament assembled in the Royal Gallery of Westminster Palace. He first met with Prime Minister Thatcher, told her about the agreement with the Pope, and she enthusiastically joined in the effort. He then delivered one the great speeches of the 20th century.

The speech’s most famous line was Reagan declaring: “The march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” Careful listeners noted that he repeatedly mentioned Poland (such as “Poland is at the center of European civilization”), and the “struggle” and the “strength” of Solidarity. (I encourage you to read it entire, right here .)

Reagan tasked CIA Director Bill Casey to organize a smuggling network working with British MI6 and Vatican Opus Dei agents to get tons of things like fax machines, printing presses, photocopiers, shortwave radios, computers, on and on, secretly into Poland – plus millions in cash, much of which was used to bribe corrupt Communist Party officials (remember, the only thing worse than a corrupt dictatorship is an uncorrupt dictatorship). Intelligence intercepts between Warsaw and Moscow were provided to Solidarity leader Lech Walensa. The Polish government became riddled with spies reporting to Polish priests.

The US Radios – Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, and Voice of America – transmitted a steady stream of freedom messages to the peoples of Poland and every other country in Eastern Europe. As Solidarity’s strength grew, and with it the threat of Soviet intervention, the Radios broadcast the Pope’s declaration that should Soviet troops enter Poland, he would go to Poland himself and personally stand with the Polish people against them.

The explicit goal of Reagan, Thatcher, and the Pope was to reverse Yalta, the infamous division of Europe agreed to at Yalta between Stalin and FDR on February 11, 1945 that created the Iron Curtain and eventually the Berlin Wall. Reagan, of course, wanted to go far beyond that and liberate the entire Soviet Empire, not just Eastern Europe. This entailed such activities as providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan Mujahaddin and arms to the Contras, in which the pacifist Pope could not participate.

The Stingers were necessary to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, from where they retreated with the last Soviet soldier crossing the Hairatan (Friendship) Bridge across the Amu Darya River into the USSR on February 15, 1989. That sight was the signal for the Polish and other captive peoples of Eastern Europe to cast off their Soviet shackles – and they were prepared to do so thanks to the Heroic Alliance of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher with Pope John Paul II. Less than nine months later, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

It was the three of them working together that achieved the removal of Soviet evil from history. This uncannily unlikely coalescence of a Pope, a President, and a Prime Minister should assure us that Providence is indeed on the side of freedom. Can’t you see Pope John Paul II with a gentle smile and nodding his head in agreement?