Of providence and policy: three assassination attempts failed, and an evil empire fell.

DID the attempted assassinations of John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher change history? Were these leaders spared by God for the great purpose of bringing about the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union? Did God's hand, as John Paul believed, "guide" the bullets and the bomb those crucial inches and feet from their targets? And did the failed assassinations rebound on their perpetrators?

Just as the scientist seeking truths of nature must examine only natural phenomena, so the historian seeking truths about the human past has to limit himself to investigating human actions. Miracles are beyond his professional capacity. But what the historian may legitimately conclude and what the survivor of an attempted murder may believe are two very different things. And what the survivor believes may give rise to historical actions of the first importance. So what did Reagan, Thatcher, and the pope believe about their survival?

John Paul and Reagan told us very plainly: They believed that God had spared them for some great purpose. John Paul seems to have believed in particular that his devotion to Our Lady of Fatima helped save his life. A young pilgrim in St. Peter's Square held up an image of the Virgin Mary, and the pope, by leaning forward to see it better at just the moment Mehmet Ali Agca fired, may have ensured that the bullet missed the point on his body where it was aimed. Yet the pope's gratitude to Our Lady of Fatima may not have greatly affected his policies or Vatican diplomacy. Long before May 1981 John Paul believed that "in the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences." His survival may have given him a more dramatic sense of that truth, but it did not change his conviction. His policies toward the Soviet Union--his call for religious freedom and human rights in the Eastern bloc, his support for Solidarity in Poland--were set in place two years before the Agca attack, and were not significantly altered for another six years. Then the pope's reason for adopting a softer approach was that Gorbachev--whom John Paul sometimes described to his friends as "a providential man"--was dismantling the repressive apparatus of state atheism in the Soviet Union with his policies of glasnost and perestroika. In the interests of "reconciliation," John Paul would have sought better relations with the Soviet Union at any point when it was willing to extend greater freedom to believers.

It is unlikely therefore that Agca's attack caused a major change in the pope's outlook or in Vatican policy. Its failure, of course, meant that John Paul's powerful support for religious and other freedoms in the Soviet bloc not only continued but was reinforced by his near-martyr status.

Thatcher's narrow escape too reinforced rather than changed her existing policies. The Brighton bombing, executed by the Irish Republican Army, occurred five years into her premiership, when the government's policies on almost all issues were firmly set and were even bearing fruit. American missiles were being installed in Europe, the Falklands War had been won, the British economy was recovering fast from the recession of the early 1980s, the "peace movement" had been successfully seen off, and inflation had been brought under control. The Anglo-Irish agreement was still being negotiated, but the bombing's consequence was the opposite of what the IRA had intended: It impelled the British government to toughen its negotiating stance temporarily to show that the bomb had had no effect. It had even less effect on British policy toward the Soviet Union. Two months after Brighton, Thatcher held a meeting at Chequers, the prime minister's country residence, with Mikhail Gorbachev, then tipped as the likely successor to the ailing Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. She pronounced Gorbachev a man she could "do business with," recommended him as such to Reagan, and began a new course in East-West relations.

Thatcher was then at the height of her powers as a self-confident national leader making an impact on the world stage. But her self-confidence was a very matter-of-fact one rooted in hard work, mastery of detail, experience, and firm conviction. When a teacher at school suggested that the young Margaret Thatcher had been lucky to win a prize, she replied indignantly, "I wasn't lucky. I deserved it." Her self-confidence, though it sometimes bordered on arrogance, coexisted with real humility. She knew that she was bright and worked hard and so "deserved" to succeed, but she was also aware of her deficiencies and unafraid to admit ignorance or to take instruction from those with the knowledge or skills she lacked. When preparing for a major meeting with someone like Gorbachev, Prime Minister Thatcher would summon a seminar of Kremlinologists to brief her. When she realized that she was a poor television performer, she asked the TV producer Gordon Reece (and on one occasion Sir Laurence Olivier) for advice on improving her appearance, voice, and acting skills. (Reece became one of her most important advisers.) Indeed, she has never stopped improving herself. To the end of her premiership there was a small measure of insecurity in the clever provincial scholarship girl moving in the great world. It was simply conquered daily by hard work and great dedication.

But her survival at Brighton did not seem to change her. As far as others can judge, it gave her no greater sense of historical destiny, no messianic conviction. And when I directly asked her whether, like Reagan and the pope, she believed that God had spared her for some great purpose, she said simply, "No." She seemed to think that it would be vainglorious to believe so. This should not surprise us. Her religious upbringing, which shaped her throughout her premiership, was a very practical Methodist one. It encouraged good works more than introspection, and concern for others before oneself. Her first actions after the bombing reflected this: She prayed, she visited the injured to see how she could help them, and she got on with work. She believed that government policy should reflect the moral commonsense of a Christian culture (and famously differed with the liberal Anglican bishops on what that implied). But she thought more in terms of trying to do what the God of her (much underlined) Methodist catechism wanted than in terms of God's having a special purpose for her. And there was a personal factor. Several of her closest friends and advisers--notably her leadership campaign manager, Airey Neave--had been murdered by the IRA. That alone would have deterred her from dwelling too much on her survival as an example of providence in history.

Unlike the pope, Thatcher was not vividly aware that God had intervened to save her for a purpose; like him, however, she maintained her existing political intentions.

Reagan, however, was changed within moments of his shooting. While still in the hospital, he told his daughter Maureen that God had spared his life for a purpose. When he returned to the White House on April 11, 1981, he wrote in his journal that night: "Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve Him in every way I can." Four days later, he asked staffer Michael Deaver to arrange a meeting with a senior cleric. Deaver invited Terence Cardinal Cooke to the White House. After a meeting in the private quarters upstairs, the weakened president told the cardinal, "I have decided that whatever time I have left is left for Him." And in public, the president said exactly the same thing in more Reaganesque terms: "Whatever time I have left belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs."

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In terms of policy, that did not mean any great change of direction. Reagan had only just arrived at the White House when he was shot. Very few policies had been established firmly enough to be altered. And the policies that were pursued after the shooting, in particular the domestic tax-cut program and the defense buildup, had been clearly foreshadowed both in the campaign and in the four years of radio broadcasts and speeches Reagan had given prior to his election as president.

The first effect of Reagan's survival was his greater clout with Congress. This brought him not only a standing ovation when he addressed both houses two weeks after leaving the hospital but also the defection of 63 Democrats to support his Program of Economic Recovery. It passed the Democrat-controlled House by a margin of 253 to 176. A much more important effect, however, was Reagan's greater determination to pursue the policies he favored and, no less vital, to articulate the moral arguments behind them against all opposition, including that of the Democrats, the government bureaucracy, and even some within his own party. He thought he knew the great purpose for which God had spared him. It was to hasten the collapse of Communism.

That did not mean, as many critics and the Soviets themselves speculated, war or nuclear confrontation with Moscow. Reagan intended to compete the Soviets into bankruptcy, when they would be ready to make the compromises that signaled a genuine peace. But he began by offering them a chance to avoid that competition. He drafted a personal letter to Leonid Brezhnev. It coupled a lifting of Carter's grain embargo (promised by Reagan in the 1980 campaign) with a personal appeal to Brezhnev to join him in shaping a lasting peace in which ordinary people on both sides of the Iron Curtain could raise their families without fear.

Brezhnev responded with a reply from Agitprop Central blaming the United States for the Cold War in terms that Reagan later described as "icy." Even Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the U.S., wrote in his memoirs that the official Soviet reply was a "standard polemical" response that "underestimated the psychological aspects" of Reagan's letter. With that response the Soviets threw away an opportunity to end the Cold War on terms acceptable to them--and confirmed Reagan's view that they would have to be brought to the point of defeat before they would consider compromise.

From then onward, Reagan carried out the strategy of economic and military competition intensified by rhetorical honesty. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's military buildup was the most visible expression of that strategy. But Reagan's truthfulness about the nature of Communism and the Soviet Union was almost as important--notably, his prediction in his 1982 Westminster speech to the British parliament that Communism was destined shortly to be "on the ash heap of history," and his description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" in his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals.

We now know that those speeches had a vital effect in weakening Soviet morale and encouraging dissidents throughout the Soviet bloc. At the time, however, Reagan seemed intellectually isolated. Henry Steele Commager, a distinguished presidential historian who claimed to have read every presidential address, called the "evil empire" speech the worst in history. The Soviets called it "lunatic anti-Communism." Allies were either silent or condemned "megaphone diplomacy." But Reagan ploughed on with his defiant truth-telling. He believed that the great purpose for which he had been spared by God did not include sugarcoating the reality of totalitarianism. When poor deluded John Hinckley pulled the trigger that day, he inflicted a mortal wound on the Soviet Union.

Like all the events in his life, the attempted assassination became for Reagan the basis of a good anecdote. On one such occasion, in 1982, he told the story just as his aides were trying to hurry some conservative activists out the door after a "stroking" session about taxes. When Reagan finished, one of them spoke up sympathetically.

"Yes, Mr. President, that was a terrible day, a terrible day. When I heard the news, all I could think of was--this means that George Bush is going to be president."

Everybody froze as the ruthless implications of this remark sank in. The activists looked at their shoes, the aides at their boss.

Reagan let the suspense hang in the air for a moment. Then he laughed. That allowed everybody else to laugh as well.

"What makes God laugh?" goes an old joke. "People making plans." With God making the plans, Reagan could afford to laugh.

Mr. O'Sullivan, an editor-at-large of NATIONAL REVIEW, is the author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister (Regnery), from which this essay is adapted.