A Tale of Three Cities
VIEWPOINT
by Sir Eldon Griffiths
George Bush’s burst of international travel provokes this ancient jet-setter to offer some personal reminiscences and a few comments.
Cracow, Poland. There is no more attractive small city in Milteleurope than this 1,000-year-old town on the banks of the Vistula River, where Mr. Bush gave the keynote speech of his European tour. Capital of Poland for 600 years, Cracow’s medieval center is a jumble of Romanesque and Gothic churches, Renaissance merchant homes and an arcade gallery that encloses Wawel Hill, with its royal castle and the grand three-towered cathedral where Pope John Paul served his apprenticeship as archbishop and cardinal.
I fell in love with Cracow when covering for Newsweek the Poles’ first brave attempts in the 1960s to throw off Soviet communism. Quaffing beer in its Market Square, I tapped out on a battered Remington typewriter dispatches about the extermination of Poland’s Jews by the Nazis and the impoverishment of its workers and peasants under the Soviet oppression that followed.
A poignant memory is of steel workers slogging away in the iron foundries of Nova Hutta, one of Stalin’s gigantic follies built outside the city. On payday they listened to the scriptures of Marxist Leninism recited by the local commissar, then headed off for Mass in the cathedral. Then there was the nearby chamber of horrors, Auschwitz.
George Bush was visibly moved as he visited Auschwitz last week. His presence was clearly intended to convey to the folks back home that his administration can be counted on to stand up for both Israel and Poland. But it was Bush’s Cracow speech about the U.S. and the EU that made the biggest impact. He rightly called for both sides of the Atlantic to put their differences over Iraq behind them but there was no mistaking his preference for what Donald Rumsfeld calls the “new” Europe of the liberated ex-Warsaw Pact nations over the “old” Europe of France and Germany.
I do not think this was wise. At a time when the EU is following NATO’s lead and integrating east and west Europe, it does the U.S. no good to be seen as separating, all over again, the two halves of a continent that was split for half a century by the Cold War.
Nor should the U.S. overestimate Poland’s strength. I love the Poles. But their economy is less than one-tenth the size of Germany’s, and their influence in world affairs as yet is marginal.
St. Petersburg, Russia. As President Bush watched in the rain, his “buddy” Vladimir Putin put on a spectacular show of music, dance and opera in this most magnificent of Russia’s tsarist cities. What a contrast with the shabby, rundown place I last visited in the late l990s with the former chairman of Unocal, a vice president of McDonnell Douglas and two OC developers. We arrived shortly after the city’s Bolshevik name, Leningrad, was changed back to the original name given it 400 years ago by Peter the Great, who opened up St. Petersburg as Russia’s “window to the west.” Its people still were suffering from the scars of the three-year-long siege during World War II (when one-third of its people died) and a half-century of Communism that followed. Cracking paint and peeling plaster leapt out at us from the walls, and the once-great harbor was clogged with rusting hulks of the Soviet navy’s laid-up nuclear submarines.
Not long afterward, the curator of St. Petersburg’s treasure house, the State Hermitage Museum, made a bold suggestion when he spoke at a World Affairs Council dinner in Irvine. Why not set up an exchange between the Hermitage, which lacks the space and funds to properly display the world’s finest collection of European art, and the underoccupied Getty in L.A? So far, nothing has come of this.
Today, thanks to its hometown boy Putin, St. Petersburg has been rehabilitated. Its industries still lag far behind those of the EU, but its public buildings shine, and the city once again symbolizes Russia’s desire to turn its face to the west.
Yet as I watched TV pictures of George and Vladimir bear-hugging one another, I could not help recalling how the trust that former President Franklin Roosevelt once placed in Uncle Joe Stalin led to a half century of grief for Eastern Europe. Mr. Bush would do well to heed Ronald Reagan’s motto when dealing with the Russians, “Doverai sed proverai”,”trust, but verify.”
Evian-les-Bains, France. Bush took a team of l50 White House advisers and diplomats to the G-8 Summit in this picturesque spa town on the southern shore of the Lake of Geneva in the French Alps but stayed there himself for less than a day and a half. Jacques Chirac, the host, was not amused, leading the media to concentrate on whether the two men had overcome the freeze in U.S.-French relations since Chirac led the opposition to the U.S. onslaught on Iraq.
Despite this, the eight world leaders did much useful work during a full-day session on the global economy, help for Africa and nuclear proliferation. Leaving for the Middle East, the American president took with him the unanimous support of the G-8 for a two-state settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Yet it’s sad that he was able to spend so little time in Evian, with its elegant marinas, lakeside villas and famous vineyards enclosing castles that date back to the counts of Savoy. Last summer, as my wife, Betty, and I drove to a restaurant not far from where the G-8 met, we stopped to check the water level in our car’s radiator. It was topped for free with some of the world’s oldest and purest water. Evian!
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
