Exceptional by Dick Cheney

obligations as leader of the free world? Who does not feel rising alarm when the question in any discussion of foreign policy is no longer, “Should we do something?” but “Do we have the capacityto do anything?”
    Six months later, on January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan began to restore America’s strength, confidence, and capacity to lead. He’d been elected in a landslide—489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49. Shortly after Reagan took the oath at noon, the Iranians released the American hostages.
    ON OCTOBER 16, 1978, the papal conclave elected Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla to be bishop of Rome. History would know him as Pope John Paul II.
    On hearing of Wojtyla’s election, Yuri Andropov, who was then head of the KGB, angrily inquired of the KGB chief in Warsaw, “How could you possibly allow the election of a citizen of a socialistcountry as pope?” The Soviets were right to be afraid. Shortly afterbecoming pope, John Paul II made clear the role he intended to play. The church behind the Iron Curtain was “not a church of silence anymore,” he said, “because itspeaks with my voice.”
    Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to his homeland in June 1979. Millions of Poles turned out to greet him as he made his way across the country. On June 2, his first day in Poland, he was received at the Polish White House by President Henryk Jablonski and Communist Party leader Edward Gierek. In his public remarks at the occasion, the pope spoke of the importance of freedom for the church in Poland. He reminded his hosts that they would be responsible for their treatment of people of faith “before history andbefore your own conscience.” He also told them that he would continue to care as deeply about the well-being of the Polish church as he had when he was archbishop of Kraków.
    In sermon after sermon in this nation where communists had outlawed religion, John Paul II spoke of the “thousand-year-right of citizenship” of the Christian church in Poland. He said, “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude.” And he said, “Without Christ it is impossible to understand thehistory of Poland.” Not only was Christ the past, the pope declared, he was “our Polish future.” Millions of voices lifted in response chanting, “We want God!”
    Communist Party signs posted on walls across the country read “The Party is for the people.” During the pope’s visit a handwritten addendum appeared on thousands of the signs: “But thepeople want the Pope.”
    John Paul II’s last stop was his hometown of Kraków. He stayed in his old room atthe archbishop’s residence. For each of the three nights he was there, thousands of young people gathered in the streets and on the roofs of adjacent buildings, cheering and singing. When the pope appeared on the residence’s small balcony, the chants roseup, Sto lat! Sto lat! (“May you live a hundred years!”) Instead of delivering a sermon,the pope sang, each night, with the Polish students and workers gathered outside his window.
    His final mass was on June 10 on theKraków Commons. The largest crowd in Polish history gathered to hear him. There in the fields of Kraków, the pope proclaimed:
    As a bishop does in the sacrament of Confirmation so do I today extend my hands in that apostolic gesture over all who are gathered here today, my compatriots. And so I speak for Christ himself: “Receivethe Holy Spirit!”
    He spoke of “this Kraków in which every stone and every brick is dear to me,” and he urged his fellow Poles to be strong:
    You must be strong, dear brothers and sisters. . . . You must be strong with the strength of faith. . . . Today, more than in any other age you need this strength. You must be strong with love, which is stronger than