Wojciech Jaruzelski had sent Eugeniusz Molczyk to confer with Vice President George H. W. Bush and Bush had agreed with Molczyk that martial law was the lesser of two evils. Whether this meeting with the American vice president occurred is disputed. While it is erroneously cited, Harvard historian Mark Kramer has pointed out that no documents support Jaruzelski's claim. Jaruzelski was chiefly responsible for the imposition of martial law in Poland on 13 December 1981 in an attempt to crush the pro-democracy movements, which included Solidarity, the first non-Communist trade union in Warsaw Pact history. Subsequent years saw his government and its
Wojciech Jaruzelski appearances. However, Wałęsa persuaded the Communists' two allied parties, the United People's Party (ZSL) and the Alliance of Democrats (SD), to break their alliance with the PZPR. Accepting that he would have to appoint a Solidarity member as prime minister, Jaruzelski then asked Wałęsa to select three candidates, one of whom he would ask to form a government. Ultimately, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who had helped organize the roundtable talks, was selected as first non-Communist prime minister of an Eastern Bloc country in four decades. Jaruzelski resigned as president in 1990. He was succeeded by Wałęsa, who had won the presidential election