Exceptional by Dick Cheney Page A

death. . . . When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with the faith of man. . . . There is therefore no need to fear.
    So I beg you: never lose your trust, do not be defeated, do not be discouraged. . . . Always seek spiritual power from Him from whom countless generations of our fathers and mothers have found it. Never detach yourselves from Him. Never lose yourspiritual freedom.
    Poland’s communist authorities were helpless against the power of this pope, a son of Poland, delivering God’s blessings to millions of his fellow countrymen. In a nation where faith was outlawed, every time John Paul II spoke, urging his people not to lose their “spiritualfreedom,” not to detach themselves from God, not to be defeated or discouraged, he was committing the most radical—yet completely unobjectionable—act. The very foundations of Poland’s communist regime began to crumble.
    Thirteen million Poles saw John Paul II in person during those nine days in June. His biographer George Weigel explained the lasting impact of his visit: “By giving his people an experience of their individual dignity and collective authority, John Paul II had already won a major victory from which there could be no retreat. He had begun to exorcise the fear . . . and the sense of hopelessness.”In an interview with journalist Peggy Noonan years later, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said, “We knew . . . Communism could not be reformed. But we knew the minute he touched the foundations of Communism it would collapse.” In 1980, when Walesa signed the charter creating Solidarity, the first labor union in a communist country, he did it with apen bearing John Paul II’s picture.
    In December 1981, the Soviets had had enough. They ordered Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski to impose martial law and arrest the leaders of Solidarity. When they came for Walesa, he told his captors, “This is the moment of your defeat. These are the last nails in thecoffin of Communism.”
    IN THE UNITED STATES, Ronald Reagan was providing the hammer. Reagan had ended the policy of détente and replaced it with a determination to confront and defeat communism. In a speech to the British Parliament on June 8, 1982, Reagan spoke directly about the “failure” and “decay” of the Soviet system:
    It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. . . . The dimensions of this failure areastounding: A country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people.
    President Reagan spoke of “the march of freedom and democracy,” which would “leave Marxism-Leninism on theash-heap of history.”
    A few months later, Reagan addressed those who argued that there was a moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union. In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, the president reminded his audience that totalitarian leaders who “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth . . . are the focus of evil in the modern world.” He warned against ignorance where the nature of our enemy was concerned. “If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, thesquandering of our freedom.”
    Finally, knowing that religious leaders had been active in the nuclear freeze movement, Reagan cautioned:
    I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label [ ing ] both sides equally at fault. [ It is an error ] to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses