Warm Cold Warrior

WHERE were you when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope? The question is not a flippant one because if you remember, you may also recall what a very different world you were living in. The differences went far beyond bell-bottom trousers and those curious male hairstyles that looked like melting helmets. Our assumptions about the world had been set by events such as OPEC’s oil-price hikes, the conquest of South Vietnam by the North, the sudden presence in several African countries of Cuban troops, and the “stagflation” that was enfeebling Western economies. It definitely seemed like-in Cyril Connolly’s phrase-“closing time in the gardens of the West,” which was reeling under attacks from Communist guerrillas, oil monopolists, and Middle Eastern terrorists. Soviet leaders and theoreticians speculated confidently that the international “correlation of forces” had shifted against the West decisively. What realist would then have thought that a pope-a pope!-could make a difference to these decisions by the God of Historical Inevitability?

Not me, I will confess. As it happens I saw the emergence of Pope John Paul II on a television set in a Hong Kong hotel. If I was slow to recognize that something of great historical significance had happened, that was perhaps because of the drama of the previous pope’s election and sudden death. Italian friends had told me he was a strong anti-Communist. His death suggested that even that slender source of resistance to the general European drift leftward had been removed by fate.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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WHERE were you when Karol Wojtyla was elected pope? The question is not a flippant one because if you remember, you may also recall what a very different world you were living in. The differences went far beyond bell-bottom trousers and those curious male hairstyles that looked like melting helmets. Our assumptions about the world had been set by events such as OPEC’s oil-price hikes, the conquest of South Vietnam by the North, the sudden presence in several African countries of Cuban troops, and the “stagflation” that was enfeebling Western economies. It definitely seemed like-in Cyril Connolly’s phrase-“closing time in the gardens of the West,” which was reeling under attacks from Communist guerrillas, oil monopolists, and Middle Eastern terrorists. Soviet leaders and theoreticians speculated confidently that the international “correlation of forces” had shifted against the West decisively. What realist would then have thought that a pope-a pope!-could make a difference to these decisions by the God of Historical Inevitability?

Not me, I will confess. As it happens I saw the emergence of Pope John Paul II on a television set in a Hong Kong hotel. If I was slow to recognize that something of great historical significance had happened, that was perhaps because of the drama of the previous pope’s election and sudden death. Italian friends had told me he was a strong anti-Communist. His death suggested that even that slender source of resistance to the general European drift leftward had been removed by fate.