COLLECTIONS

Richard T. Davies Papers

Ambassador Richard T. Davies with Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, Cracow, 1974.

Description

The Hoover Institution has added another important archival collection to its world-renowned holdings on Poland: the papers of Richard T. Davies, U.S. ambassador to Poland from 1973 to 1978, who died March 30, 2005 in Washington. Davies, who joined the Foreign Service in 1947, spent his first two years in Poland as a consular and political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. His later assignments included counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, director of the U.S. Information Agency for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs.

During his five years as ambassador to Poland, Davies worked on trade issues and helped arrange state visits by Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. He also met frequently with members of the nascent democratic opposition movement against the communist-led Polish government, as well as with Catholic cardinals Stefan Wyszynski and Karol Wojtyla. The special relationship with Cardinal Wojtyla of Cracow, the future pope John Paul II, that Ambassador Davies helped establish turned out to be particularly valuable for the United States in the waning years of the cold war, during President Reagan's showdown with the Soviets. Ambassador Davies's tenure in Warsaw also coincided with a successful penetration of Soviet defenses by U.S. intelligence, the result of the services rendered the United States, the West, and NATO by Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, who during 1972–81 turned over to the Central Intelligence Agency some 30,000 Soviet documents containing the plans of the Warsaw Pact for the invasion of Western Europe and, in 1980–81, its plans for the invasion of Poland to suppress Solidarity. The Davies's papers document Kuklinski's achievements and the ambassador's efforts to assist him after his escape to the United States. Richard Davies retired as director of the State Department's human intelligence office in Washington in 1980. An extensive transcript of an oral history interview, included among the papers, covers his entire Foreign Service career.

After retirement, Ambassador Davies chaired the Solidarity Endowment, a U.S. group supporting the Polish workers' movement. From 1990 to 1998, he participated in Partners for Democratic Change, an international organization founded to foster civil societies and institutions in Central and Eastern Europe. He also contributed frequently to op-ed pages.

The Davies's papers are a gift of the ambassador's widow, Jean Stevens Davies, of Washington, DC.