REAGAN, GORBACHEV & ME, (continued)

Studibert was speaking more and more about leaving D.C. to run for Governor of Utah. The Wall fell November 9th, 1989, and by Thanksgiving, Studibert was in his new home in Highland, Utah. This was quite a blow to Fred, because now he had no White House connection. He still had BYU football, however, and we had a couple of occasions to attend a game or two with the Studibert’s. After one of the games, we all went to dinner together at a nearby restaurant. We were having a lively conversation when Steve Young, the San Francisco 49-er quarterback came by to say “hi.” He knew Fred, of course, because Fred had made a point of haranguing all famous athletes who passed through the Salt Lake International Airport. Also, Steve wanted to meet Studibert, and so the evening went. Steve Young had been playing behind Joe Montana, and attending Law School at Brigham Young University. He remarked how he’d like to be anything besides a football player. We all had a chuckle, then Steve departed with his posse.

Studibert started in on how he was thinking of leading a trade mission in to Poland in March, with the possibility of meeting with Lech Walesa and Solidarity. Studibert went on to tell about when he was the Advance Man for Reagan, he had made the arrangements for President Reagan when he visited Gdansk July 18th, 1989. As the Presidential motorcade drove through the streets of Gdansk, the entourage began to notice an abundance of American flags being waved along the route: ”the open arms of the people of Poland; American flags waving in the square at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk; the faces of the people who lined the streets, greeting us with such joy." On closer inspection, they could see that some of the flags were from before WWII – only 48 stars – but most were homemade flags that didn’t have quite the correct number of stripes, or the field of blue was upside-down; some were painted on sheets, handkerchiefs, etc. Everyone did their best to replicate the flag of the country that they looked to for the freedoms they were denied. Reagan had been the first American President to ever visit that country, and his purpose was to draw attention to the injustices of Martial Law, and the outlawing of the Solidarity Trades Union.

Because the vision of being in Poland seemed so real to me, I looked at Studibert and said almost rhetorically: “I want to go to Poland.” Studibert stared at me almost stunned (I had never before seen him look stunned), turned and looked at his wife, Bethany, and then to Fred. With his hands folded in front of him on the table, without even glancing my way, and as if he had just closed the business deal of the century he proclaimed: “Then you shall go to Poland!”

The next day, a special messenger delivered our travel itineraries to us. We would be leaving in 2 weeks as special members of a quasi-White House Trade Mission sponsored by a newly formed tax-exempt foundation called, “The Freedom Foundation”. There was so much to do. My passport had expired, and so I not only had to expedite it’s renewal, but then we both had to make arrangements to get our Polish and Hungarian visas before we left the U.S. I had never traveled to a country where I had to have a visa – this was exciting.

The trade mission would meet in Washington D.C., where the White House, The Commerce Department, and The State Department would brief us. We would fly out of D.C., and into Frankfurt, Germany. From Frankfurt, we would catch a Pan Am flight into West Berlin. After a day in both East and West Berlin, we would go to Poland for a few days (including Warsaw and Gdansk), and then end the mission in Hungary where we would be able to observe the Hungarian elections.

For the next two weeks before the mission every day at 10:00AM, DHL would deliver classified and confidential economic information from the Department of Commerce and State, with Political and economic assessments of the places we would be visiting. The documents were mostly historical, since the fall of The Evil Empire was causing cataclysmic changes daily in all the Eastern Bloc countries. Capitalism was the only game in town, and we had all the cards. We were excited to go, armed with all the info any Political Science major, or Economic student would ever want to know.

I read and studied every single document that was delivered. At first I approached the material timidly, because I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it too well. But the more I read, the more I realized that all this “stuff” was a lot of fun for me. I loved learning just exactly how ridiculous the artificial market place imposed by the Soviets on the Eastern Bloc countries had proven the true worth of a Communist Society. I loved knowing that Monopoly money is and always will be worthless, even when it is assigned a value in countries that base their economics on lies. I could see that the whole experience was going to be more than a lesson in political economy. I knew it would come right down to truth vs. lies: good vs. evil. What I didn’t know at the time was that it would be embodied in the intentions and actions of Studibert, vs. me and every other well-intentioned individual in the world.