Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (14 page)

Thatcher and Joseph took comfort from the result of the surprise Conservative victory in the 1970 election. Some pollsters suggested that Powell’s diversions from orthodoxy—and in particular his controversial remarks about the need to limit immigration—had actually drawn many working-class voters to the Conservatives (a
feat that Thatcher would later strive to repeat, on her own terms, in 1979). The 1970 Conservative Party meeting in Selsdon that resulted in the markedly free-enterprise policy document so derided by Harold Wilson may have also played a role.

Thatcher joined the new government as the secretary of state for education and science. Although she did manage during her term to boost the budget for schooling, she failed to make much headway on her declared objective of curbing the growth of comprehensive schools (which are supposed to take in all pupils regardless of their previous academic achievements). In keeping with her strong beliefs in competition and personal responsibility, she preferred the more traditional grammar schools, regarding comprehensives as a classic example of left-wing egalitarianism that held back talented pupils. The problem was that comprehensives were just too popular with the public. (And Thatcher, ever the realist, ended up inaugurating a record number of them on her watch.) This was not the last time she would have to square her views with tricky political facts.

If the economic liberals in the party had hoped that their ideas would guide Heath’s actions as prime minister, they were soon disabused by the notorious “U-turn.” Though Thatcher publicly supported her leader, she clearly felt little personal investment in his policies. She later complained that her role in the government was primarily to act as the “statutory woman” who was consulted in the event of any issue likely to matter to the female electorate. In any event, she had little opportunity to push for implementation of the 1970 Conservative manifesto in the cabinet, and few paid attention when she did. Her disillusionment reflected a broader dissatisfaction with Heath that soon made itself felt among many other Tories.

In the event, Heath’s government did not survive the general election of 1974. The defeat triggered considerable soul-searching among Conservatives. Heath himself saw little reason for second thoughts and made it clear that he intended to continue leading the party in opposition. But not all of his colleagues agreed. Keith Joseph, who had served as Heath’s secretary of state for social services, had undergone a conversion to the free-market gospel and launched a series of speeches in which he proposed a radically different direction for the party that presaged much of what would later come to be known as “Thatcherism.” He soon become a lodestar for Heath’s right-wing critics. But Joseph—a nervous character with a marked self-questioning strain to his personality—followed in Powell’s self-destructive path by holding a speech in which he warned against rising teen pregnancies in terms that evoked early-twentieth-century theories of eugenics. His bid for the leadership of the party was over before it really began.

Thatcher decided to pick up the gauntlet. She was an unlikely candidate for the leadership, even with Heath in a relatively vulnerable state after his election defeat. A parliamentary veteran named Airey Neave managed her campaign for the leadership (after having asked three other prominent party right-wingers, including Joseph, to go after Heath). Shrewdly assessing that Heath’s camp did not take her challenge seriously, Neave aggressively wooed party backbenchers disgruntled by Heath’s imperious style of government, driving home that Thatcher was the candidate of genuine change. It proved exactly the right approach for a deeply demoralized party. To his astonishment, Heath lost the first ballot to Thatcher. He resigned immediately. But he never got over his resentment toward the woman who, he felt, had behaved disloyally.

Thatcher, however, had a memory of her own. In April 1979, when that year’s general election was drawing to its close, an anxious aide pressed her to let Heath join her at a press conference to appeal to wavering voters. Thatcher categorically refused. The old paragon of “consensus” remained on the back benches, an impotent symbol of the old order, throughout Thatcher’s eleven years as prime minister.
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T
o non-Catholics, the procedure for choosing a new bishop of Rome has always been something of a curiosity. By the late twentieth century, when many Westerners increasingly seemed to be dismissing religion as mere superstition, papal elections seemed to hark back to an outmoded world. The cardinals who participated in the conclave resided temporarily in the Sistine Chapel, made their deliberations in absolute secrecy, and revealed the outcome with a puff of smoke. While the process entailed plenty of drama, the person chosen at the end was usually more of an anticlimax. Popes were always male, and usually elderly and Italian as well.

And then, in the fall of 1978, John Paul I died of an apparent heart attack after a mere thirty-three days as pontiff. The conclave that formed to choose his successor was almost identical to the one that had picked him. The shock of his sudden death made the College of Cardinals reassess the inscrutable will of the Almighty. Perhaps, some of them wondered, this was a sign. Perhaps they were being urged to make a dramatic break with the past, to take a leap of faith. The most likely candidate, another in a long line of well-established Italians, suddenly encountered reservations. The other favored candidate was unable to muster enough votes for a challenge. The members of the conclave found themselves considering an improbable way out of the impasse.

On October 16, 1978, a puff of white smoke emerged from the Sistine Chapel chimney. When Pericle Cardinal Felici stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to announce the choice of a new pontiff, the crowds grew confused.
Carolum?
Who was Carol? Felici continued: “Cardinalem Woi-ty-wa.” A young American newscaster stumbled over the peculiar name:
Wojtyła
. Who was that? A foreigner, someone said. “E il Polacco,” someone said. “It’s the Pole!”
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Then, at 7:42 p.m., the new pope emerged into view, charming them with his accented Italian as he commiserated with them over the loss of his predecessor. It was in his honor that the Polish pope, the first non-Italian to assume the post in 456 years, chose the same regnal name as his predecessor.

Age fifty-eight at the moment of his election, John Paul II was the youngest pope in well over a century. As a correspondent from
Time
put it, the College of Cardinals had “done not merely the unexpected but the nearly unthinkable.” They had chosen a pontiff from behind the Iron Curtain.

Many Poles did not believe the first rumors. Finally, a special announcement on television brought confirmation: some thought they detected a note of pride in the newsreader’s voice—distinctly unlike the bland tones with which he announced the usual record harvests or steel production figures. In Kraków, where Karol Józef Wojtyła had spent most of his life as a priest, the news spread fast. The British journalist Mary Craig, who was there, records how joyous crowds filled the streets to celebrate the news:

            
No one went to bed that night. Young and old stayed in the Rynek Glowny, the historic market place which many say is the most beautiful in Europe, with its enchanting medieval Cloth Hall (the Sukiennice), and the splendid Gothic and Renaissance churches which surround it. “The drawing-room,” they call it in Cracow, and in the daytime it is ablaze with flower stalls and a-flutter with pigeons, while the townsfolk gather in groups under the arches of the Sukiennice. This evening the square was floodlit, and all night long the crowd swayed and seethed, making emotional impromptu speeches, singing religious and national songs (often one and the same), reverting again and again to what often seems like an alternative national anthem—”
Sto lat, sto lat, niech zyje zyje nam
”—the Polish equivalent of “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”
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The new pontiff’s election was cause for joy in those quarters that still saw an intimate connection between Catholicism and the long struggle for national sovereignty. For precisely the same reasons, Polish Communist Party officials were quick to comprehend the magnitude of the challenge that the new situation in the Vatican presented to them. Party chief Edward Gierek couldn’t help himself when he heard
the news, exclaiming, “Oh, my God!” One of his aides, hearing about the spontaneous celebrations in Kraków, stated that “he would prefer to deal with a different nation.”
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If anything, the leaders of the Soviet Union—a country whose official ideology was grounded on strict allegiance to atheistic “historical materialism”—reacted to the news with even greater anxiety. As good students of history, they knew how religion had served in the past as a force for the mobilization of Polish national feeling, and they understood that a revival of such sentiments could easily direct itself against the Kremlin. The KGB station chief in Warsaw quickly dispatched a character study of the new pontiff to his masters in Moscow. The contents of the memo had been supplied by the SB, the KGB’s Polish sister service:

            
Wojtyła holds extreme anti-communist views. Without openly opposing the Socialist system, he has criticized the way in which the state agencies of the Polish People’s Republic have functioned, making the following accusations: that the basic human rights of Polish citizens are restricted; that there is an unacceptable exploitation of the workers, whom “the Catholic Church must protect against the workers’ government”; that the activities of the Catholic Church are restricted and Catholics treated as second-class citizens; that an extensive campaign is being conducted to convert society to atheism and impose an alien ideology on the people; that the Catholic Church is denied its proper cultural role, thereby depriving Polish culture of its national treasures.
⁴

Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, immediately dispatched a cable to his
rezident
in Warsaw that berated the man for allowing this debacle to happen. To his credit, the KGB officer wrote back to his boss that Andropov might be better advised to direct his ire to the station chief in Rome.

U
ltimately, however, Andropov and his Polish comrades were unsure about precisely how John Paul II would choose to approach relations with his home country’s rulers and the rest of the Communist world.

His past offered some useful clues. Few other world leaders could claim the same degree of familiarity with the excesses of twentieth-century totalitarianism—in both its National Socialist and Soviet flavors—as Karol Wojtyła’. He had studied for the priesthood in an underground seminary during the Nazi occupation, then
came of age as a priest during the most brutal period of postwar Stalinism. From the very beginning, his religious vocation was bound up with the challenge of defending spiritual values against the overweening state.

Wojtyła was born in the small town of Wadowice in 1920. His father, who had risen to the rank of captain in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was a fervent Catholic. Karol, the youngest of his two sons, inherited his piety—which offered vital consolation during a tragic family history. The Wojtyłas had much experience with death in the family. Karol’s mother, Emilia, died in childbirth when he was nine. Her daughter, who would have been her third child, was stillborn. Karol’s older brother, Edward, died two years later from scarlet fever, which he had caught from his patients while he was working in a hospital during an epidemic of the disease. So Karol spent his formative years living alone with his father, who instilled in his son a deep attachment to the teachings of the church.

From an early age Karol showed both an avocation for sports as well as a passion for poetry and the theater. In 1938 he and his father moved from Wadowice to Kraków so that Karol could enter Jagiellonian University, an institution that dates back to the fourteenth century. He studied languages and literature.

Karol’s second year at university was preempted by the start of World War II and the German invasion. The university, like all others in Poland, was shut down. To avoid being deported to Germany, Wojtyła took up a series of manual jobs, working in a stone quarry and a chemical factory. His work immersed him in the life of the Polish working class and also gave him many opportunities to witness firsthand the brutalities of German occupation. In 1941 his father died, leaving Karol orphaned and alone. “I was not at my mother’s death, I was not at my brother’s death, I was not at my father’s death,” he later told a biographer. “At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved.”
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His father had already instilled in him a strong personal faith, and now the loss of his loved ones, experienced against the background of war and general deprivation, drove Wojtyła into an even deeper exploration of his relationship with Christ, which helped him to make sense of the reality of human suffering. His belief acquired an additional dimension from Jan Tyranowski, a lay mystic who helped show the way toward a more immediate experience of the divine.

Even before his father’s death, the young Wojtyła’s deeply felt faith had led him to wonder about the possibility of pursuing a vocation within the church. It was a question that assumed greater intensity against the backdrop of the German occupation. The Nazis, who were determined to eradicate all the sources of Polish national selfhood, soon began a campaign to destroy the Polish church. They dispatched priests to concentration camps or had them summarily shot for activities
deemed hostile to the occupation. So Wojtyła joined an underground seminary run by Adam Stefan Cardinal Sapieha, a formative influence on the future pope and an extraordinary figure in the long history of Polish Catholicism. As the head of the church in German-occupied Poland, Sapieha gained fame for his uncompromising stance. When Hans Frank, the head of the Nazi occupation government, invited himself to dinner, the archbishop of Kraków served him black bread (partly made from acorns), jam made from beets, and ersatz coffee, served on the elegant silver service of the cardinal. Sapieha explained to his guest that this was all the food that he could offer according to the rations set by the Nazis.
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