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NATO membership and to keep the door open for other Central and Eastern European nations that aspired to future NATO status by reassuring them of America’s continuing support. I was asked to represent Bill in a region he thought needed U.S. encouragement and a show of solidarity.

For part of the trip I teamed up with our United Nations Ambassador and later Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, whose family had first fled Nazism in her native Czechoslovakia only to return after the war and flee again when communism took over.

They eventually settled in the United States. Madeleine was herself an emblem of the opportunities and promise that democracy represents.

My trip began in Bucharest, Romania, once among the most beautiful capitals in Europe. Bucharest had been compared to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century but had lost much of its elegance and luster during forty years of Communist rule. I could see remnants of an earlier cosmopolitan era in the neglected fin de siècle buildings along broad boulevards once lively with cafés. Now the dominant architecture was Soviet-style Socialist realism, visible even in the empty carcasses of giant buildings that were never completed.

No one could possibly quantify the horrors suffered in Romania before the violent downfall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Communist dictator who, along with his wife, terrorized the nation for years until he was ousted and executed on December 25, 1989. My first stop was the Square of the Revolution, where I placed flowers at the monument honoring victims of the uprising that finally toppled the Ceausescus. I met with representatives of the December 21 Association, named for the first day of the uprising, who described the history of their revolution. A crowd of three thousand Romanians had gathered to greet me in the city’s main square, a lovely setting marred by the bullet holes in the walls of adjacent buildings. I was surprised by the packs of wild dogs roaming the streetssomething I hadn’t seen in any other city―and I asked our guide about them. “They’re everywhere,” he told me. “People can’t afford to keep them as pets, and there’s no system for rounding them up.” The dogs proved to be an omen of far greater neglect in Romania.

Among the horrific legacies of the Communist regime was a swelling population of children with AIDS. Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortion, insisting that women bear children for the sake of the state. Women told me how they had been carted from their workplaces once a month to be examined by government doctors whose task was to make sure that they weren’t using contraceptives or aborting pregnancies. A woman identified as pregnant was watched until she delivered her baby. I could not imagine a more humiliating experience: lines of women undressing as they waited for medical bureaucrats to examine them under the watchful eyes of police. When I defend my prochoice position in the debate over abortion in our country, I frequently refer to Romania, where pregnancy could be monitored on behalf of the state, and to China, where it could be forcibly terminated. One reason I continue to oppose efforts to criminalize abortion is that I do not believe any government should have the power to dictate, through law or police action, a woman’s most personal decisions. In Romania as elsewhere, many children were born unwanted or into families that could not afford to care for them. They became wards of the state, warehoused in orphanages. Often sick or malnourished, they were treated with blood transfusions, which Ceausescu promoted as government policy. When the Romanian blood supply became tainted with the AIDS virus, the country had a pediatric AIDS catastrophe. At an orphanage in Bucharest, my staffers and I witnessed children, some covered with tumors, others visibly perishing, as AIDS ravaged their small frames. While some of my staff retreated to a corner of the building, sobbing, I steeled myself against tears, knowing that if I lost my composure, it would only confirm the hopeless situation borne by these children and by the adults who cared for them.

The new Romanian government worked tirelessly with the help of foreign assistance to improve the children’s care and to permit more adoptions by families outside the country.

Yet the adoption system was plagued with corruption. Charges that children were being sold to the highest bidder resulted in a ban on international adoption in 2001 after the European Union criticized Romania’s practices. Work is still needed to clean up the corruption and modernize the child welfare system, but since my visit, Romania, which has made impressive progress against heavy odds, has become a member-elect of both NATO and the European Union.

Poland had already made impressive economic and political progress by 1996. President Aleksander Kwasniewski spoke excellent English and had traveled throughout the United States before entering politics as a member of the Polish Communist Party. Taking office in 1995 at the age of 41, he represented a generational contrast to Poland’s first democratically elected President, Lech Walesa, the heroic leader of the Solidarity labor union strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdarisk in 1980. Solidarity was instrumental in toppling communism in Poland, and Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, had been President during the first visit Bill and I made to Warsaw in 1994. At the state dinner he hosted for us with his wife, Danuta, a lively argument broke out between the Walesas, who defended the fast pace of economic changes, and a representative of farmers, who argued for slower change and greater economic protection. Many of Poland’s hard economic decisions, inevitable in a shift from a state-run economy to a free market, were made on Walesa’s watch. His party lost the next election in 1995, and he was replaced by Kwasniewski, who successfully broadened his party’s post-Communist base to include young people.

Jolanta Kwasniewska, the new president’s wife, joined me in Krakow, where Gothic towers and gray spires grace one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval cities. She and I are