As it happened, I had a connection to Michnik. Many years ago, our fathers had shared a prison cell in Lvov. Since he was in prison when I arrived I was unable to meet him but I sent him a message -- my first gryps - and I met his friends. Then when he came out I saw him and met more of his friends and associates. From the start they had my sympathies. They were energetic, talented, engaging and far more interesting to talk to than any government bureaucrat or party hack. I was impressed with their moral arguments, but that was not enough to wean me entirely from geometric journalism. That did not take place until Flora Lewis, the Time's foreign affairs columnist came to Poland. She knew the country and had covered the Poznan uprising of 1956 and wrote a fine book about Polish yearnings for freedom. She was in Warsaw after a reporting trip in the Soviet Union and asked me if I could introduce her to Michnik and Jacek Kuron. At dinner she congratulated the men for what they had achieved but then said that unfortunately nothing of the sort was going to happen in the Soviet Union. Kuron protested. She was wrong, he said, insisting that the Soviet Union would soon fall apart. It would begin with the nationalities, he said and he even bet her a bottle of Scotch that there would be violence within 6 months in the USSR. He won the bet when a few months later rioting broke out in Alma Ata.

But for me that evening had a profound impact. Kuron who had never left Poland seemed so certain. The point of his arguments were no longer based on moral claims so much as on his views of Government weakness. He convinced me. The PRL was weak. It had tried to inspire, to intimidate, and even to raise salaries of industrial workers but all these tactics failed. They could repeat these approaches but with each turn of the wheel, state power weakened. In personal terms this meant that I too did not need to feel even mildly intimidated by the PRL. It soon occurred to me that the tougher my questions were at the weekly televised government press conference the greater access I was getting to government leaders. Perhaps. I thought, the authorities felt that being challenged by a Polish speaking reporter for the New York Times would enhance their claim to reform and legitimacy. Or else, in a time of sanctions and international ostracism, those questions showed that at least the international press was taking them seriously. I assumed I was being watched and that my phone was tapped but aside from frequent legitimacya on the streets I was not bothered very much.

I even felt bold enough to disregard suggestions from my paper that I pay more attention to the Central Committee and less to the dissidents. In one such message an editor wrote that he knew I was a romantic and had friends among the dissidents but wasn't the Solidarity period over? I knew he was wrong and that the future would not be shaped by the old party structures. So I kept writing mostly about those seeking to repudiate and change the ruling system. Eventually these stories led to a book I wrote in 1988 (Mad Dreams, Saving Graces), the first book in English to report the end of Communist rule in Poland. But more than any story, the event that came to symbolize my venturing beyond geometric journalism was Adam Michnik's 40th birthday party, which I was privileged to host at my house.