Word: union
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Later Kissinger turned his fire on the Pentagon and contributed to Gerald Ford's decision to replace James Schlesinger with Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. It was a Pyrrhic victory. In 1976 Rumsfeld undermined Kissinger's attempt to negotiate an arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union. Why? Because detente had become a political liability to Ford in an election year...
Suddenly last week, the inconceivable happened. After a spate of parliamentary maneuvering by the Solidarity trade-union movement, President Wojciech Jaruzelski, who smashed Solidarity in 1981 and interned its leader, Lech Walesa, along with more than 6,000 other members, was forced to turn to his foes to form a government. Jaruzelski asked Tadeusz Mazowiecki, 62, a Solidarity lawyer and journalist, to become the first non-Communist Prime Minister in the Soviet bloc since 1948 and to head up a ruling coalition...
...turning point came in June, when Solidarity won an overwhelming victory in Poland's most open elections in four decades. The trade-union movement took all 161 seats it was allowed to contest in the Sejm, and 99 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Even so, the Communist Party and its allies, principally the United Peasants' Party and the Democratic Party, retained 299 seats in the 460-member Sejm through a reserved list...
...Poland reverberated from Moscow to Washington and beyond. The Kremlin said Jaruzelski's decision was Poland's business, but the success -- or failure -- of a government led by a & non-Communist in Warsaw is bound to have an impact on Mikhail Gorbachev's political reforms in the Soviet Union. The West applauded carefully, wary that too hearty a response might be considered meddling that could unbalance the delicate experiment. "We would encourage a non-Communist government in the process of pluralism, of course," said presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. But George Bush "would not want to do anything or say anything...
...courage to say what is unpopular." Born in the central Polish town of Plock, Mazowiecki (pronounced Mah-zoh-vyet-skee), 62, is a devout Roman Catholic with strong ties to church activists who oppose Communist ideology. A close adviser to Lech Walesa, Mazowiecki helped form the union in 1980 and was jailed for a year after the government crackdown in 1981. Trained as a lawyer, he is editor of the union weekly, Tygodnik Solidarnosc, and was a key negotiator in the round-table talks that led to legalization of Solidarity and opposition participation in last June's elections...