Lech Walesa Quotes
I have always been and will be an enemy of communism, but I love all people.
The Red Scare had already reached most conservatives and Truman and most others had not yet been affected by the fear of Communism that so many people had through the 1970s.
This quotation was obtained via an FBI wiretap on Dr. King’s telephone. What makes it historically important is that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI steadfastly maintained that King and his movement were philosophically communist in their reports to the President and others. For example, a CIA memo of the time reported that “According to the FBI, Dr. King is regarded in Communist circles as a genuine Marxist-Leninist who is following the Marxist-Leninist Line.” However, Hoover had this and other evidence of King’s antipathy to communism but suppressed this leading the administration and others to believe that the Civil Rights Movement, to which Hoover was unalterably opposed, was Communist influenced. See {603873}, {603891}, {603872}, and {603889} showing Hoover’s view of King and Blacks.
Lech Wałęsa is a Polish statesman, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as the first democratically elected president of Poland from 1990 to 1995. A shipyard electrician by trade, he became the leader of the Solidarity movement, and led a successful pro-democratic effort which in 1989 ended the Communist rule in Poland and ushered in the end of the Cold War.
