15 December 1948, he played an important role in the PSP. He then was elected as part of the Politburo of the Polish United Workers' Party. During his term as the Minister of Shipping, he focused mainly on rebuilding and expanding the trading fleet. He was Minister of Higher Education (Higher Education and Science to 1951) from 1950 to 1956. From 1956 to 1968, he was the foreign minister in the cabinet of Józef Cyrankiewicz. As a Foreign Minister, he was especially close to the director-general of the Foreign Ministry, Przemysław Ogrodziński, a man whose background as a socialist turned communist was precisely as same as his. Ogrodziński served as his principal adviser. As Foreign Minister, Rapacki was considered be one of the leaders of the liberalising wing of the United Workers' Party that was known for favouring an ease of repression and censorship, which gave him a certain popularity. Radio Free Europe, a radio station owned by the American government had making claims throughout the 1950s that the US stood behind the "rollback" of Communism and promised the peoples of Eastern Europeans that if they rose up against their communist regimes, the Americand would intervene with military force. In 1956, the Hungarians followed the advice of Radio Free Europe and rose up, only to be crushed by the Red Army: the US did not intervene for fear of causing a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. From the Polish perspective, the hollowness of the claims of Radio Free Europe, together with crushing of the Hungarian uprising, showed there was no point in trying to overthrow the communist regime, and the best that could be done at present was to improve the it. At the same time, the Polish October uprising, which seen the Stalinist leadership in Warsaw overthrown by a reformist faction of the United Workers's People over the face of Soviet objections, gave hope that Poland would become more independent. The principal concerns of Polish foreign policy in the 1950s was the rejection by the West German government of the Oder-Neisse line as Germany's eastern frontier and the claim that all areas of Poland that had been part of Germany in 1937 were being illegally occupied by Poland. In 1955, at a meeting of the NATO Council, the West German government requested for the Bundeswehr to be armed with nuclear weapons, a request that caused much alarm in