Twilight of the Patriarch? : Despite Setbacks, Lech Walesa Is Still the Voice of Polish Working Man

He has gained weight, and there is more gray in the once-ginger-colored mustache. He complains sometimes of back problems and has been having trouble with his blood sugar, so he watches his diet to avoid spells of weakness.

But as events of the last two weeks in Poland have proved, Lech Walesa is alive and kicking.

And Walesa is never more alive than when he is in his natural element--with the workers of the Lenin Shipyards at Gdansk, where at the age of 44 he is still employed as an electrician, almost eight years after helping to found the free trade union Solidarity.

The spectacle of Walesa (pronounced vah-WEN-sah) surrounded by a crowd of rapt shipyard workers, in the midst of a growing crisis, is a fresh reminder of Walesa’s undiminished charismatic appeal to the workers of Poland, who hear in his jumpy, elliptical and not always grammatical speeches the authentic voice of the Polish working man.

Such a setting also provides a glimpse of Walesa’s value to Poland’s entire opposition movement. He is a leader who operates as much by instinct as by intellect, who seems to feel the shifting currents in a conflict at least as quickly as Solidarity’s intellectual advisers can think them through.

Command Post, Meeting Hall

“You have to excuse me,” he told reporters one day last week as he sat at a grimy table in the shipyard cafeteria, which the strikers had made their command post and meeting hall. “My education is not complete.”

This last strike at the Lenin yards, which began on May 2 and ended nine days later, was in some ways a failure. At the end, Walesa walked out of the shipyards with the strike’s last 400 or so participants, many of them too young to have been here in the dizzying days of 1980 when Solidarity burst from these same yards to rock Poland to its foundations.

This time the government backed them down, rejecting their wage demands and refusing to recognize their banned union. But the immediate disappointment for Solidarity on the limited issues of this strike must be measured in a wider context, and in this larger perspective both Solidarity as a movement and Walesa as its leader seem to have made distinct gains.

For Walesa especially, the strike seemed a tonic. In the nearly six years since Solidarity was outlawed, Walesa--who before 1980 was an ordinary working man, devout Catholic and devoted father of eight children--has been thrown into a role that, in fact, is probably best suited to a professional politician. The result is that, as many observers here note, there are two Lech Walesas.

It is the secondary role that has dominated since the union was banned, as the government has tried, with only limited success, to relegate him to the status of a “non-person.” But after leading Solidarity through its initial years and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, he has become a unique figure in Poland. Virtually every Western statesman and politician visiting Poland in the last six years has made the obligatory trip to Gdansk to meet with Walesa. His opinion is sought by visiting religious leaders and journalistic luminaries. New developments in Polish politics all require his comment.

Mixed Success in Role

He has performed in this role with mixed success, seeming to recognize it as a responsibility without really warming to it. Journalists who have covered him for years note with amazement how often his press conferences or interviews fail to yield the string of punchy, usable quotes that marked the earlier speeches given off the cuff to Polish workers. It is as if he were bored by the necessarily cautious political gamesmanship that goes on with an opposition locked in perpetual strategic battle with a resistant government.

In these interim years, Walesa has been surrounded by a corps of advisers--intellectuals, lawyers, academics--who, some Solidarity activists say, have had a dampening effect on what virtually all of them regard as Walesa’s instinctive intelligence and naturally spontaneous personality.

Throughout all this, however, Walesa’s popularity in the country remains high, surpassed only by the adoration for Pope John Paul II, the first Polish Pope. If asked to list their most admired world figures, Poles would probably list, in order, the Pope, Walesa and Ronald Reagan.

“You can see from this what Walesa needs,” said a Polish film maker in the shipyards recently. “He needs an army and a crisis. Then he is at home.”

Walesa, who joined the round-the-clock vigil in the shipyards after the strike had been going on for three days, denied a leadership role in the strike, but without question he was the spiritual force behind it. Although the strike committee of workers made the hour-to-hour decisions about what to do, it was Walesa who rallied the sometimes dispirited young strikers, and it was his instinct and advice that guided most of the other leaders.

Throughout, Walesa seemed to remain calm and unruffled, even when the strain was visibly etched in the expressions and manners of most of the other organizers.

At night he slept calmly and peacefully on a piece of foam insulation on an office floor. He would remove his tie, folding it carefully over the back of a chair, and fold his tweed jacket, adorned with a Solidarity button and a small picture of the Black Madonna of Czestahowa, to use as a pillow. He woke each moring apparently refreshed, and took care to shave and brush his short hair. He ate the same soups and bread and bean gruel as the rest of the strikers, and talked easily with them. Whenever he began to speak, they drew around him and listened intently.

Offered More Inspiration

As the week wore on and the likelihood of victory receded steadily, the tone of his talks turned more serious and more distinctly inspirational. He would begin slowly, sometimes joking, starting a thought and then dropping it, picking it up three sentences later. The workers would lean forward in their chairs, circled around him, seemingly as taken by his mood as by his words.

“This is the only place we can fight,” he told the workers on the strike’s second day. “Not in the streets. Do not be misled by provocateurs in the streets. We have fight enough here. Of course, it is a man’s fight, and you must be strong. You must be determined. I did not ask you to do this. But if you start it, you have to stay with it. We must remain in solidarity in this.

“I believe the eyes of the country are on the shipyard, and I believe the authorities know that. . . . I will be here whenever you need me. I will be the first victim if the police come in, and the last to leave. . . . Together with the management, we will put the country on the road to reform. . . . But be wise. . . . I appeal to the bureaucracy: ‘We don’t want to throw you out. We don’t want to govern, and it would be a mistake if we did. We want to build Poland, but a better Poland, a Poland based on pluralism, and this Poland will not be the beggar of Europe.’ ”

In the first days, such optimism was enough to bring forth the familiar chant, “No freedom without Solidarity.”

Five days later, though, the situation was grimmer, with a heavy concentration of riot police sealing off the shipyard gates and a siege mentality beginning to affect the strikers, who were isolated and, even more worrying, failing to rally the rest of the nation behind them.

One morning, as the mood of the strikers hit a particularly low ebb, one of the youngest men seemed to lose control, hurling himself against a window, crying that he wanted to go home to his wife.

Walesa immediately called the workers together. It was a grim lot that stared back at him.

“There was an accident,” he began. “A person was sick.” He paused for a moment, looking at the men, then went on: “However, if we continue to act the way we have been, and sometimes are, this kind of accident, based on stress, can occur again.

“That’s why I make one big request of you. . . . Until now, we (the older Solidarity leaders) have tried not to jump with our shoes into your affairs. You are a bit younger, and we are a bit older. We have tried to do things that are necessary, such as (writing) communiques, so as to interfere as little as possible with your thinking things over, your resting, your contemplation. We are only entering this long chain of events. Please tell us what we have to do to spend the time we have better.

“My second request is personal. You know solidarity means taking care of the person next to you. Every one of us has 1,000 problems, each different. One has a problem because he loves his wife and must stay here. . . .

“You have to look into (your neighbor’s) eyes, and if there is a strange look, you have to ask, ‘What is your problem? Can I help?’ . . .

“We have to come on ahead, especially when we know things are dangerous. I could lead the affair in 1980. I could do it; I could even amuse myself doing it. The generation of youth wants to lead the strike in a different way and express itself differently. Tell us what you need, and we will fill your time so fully that you won’t have time to play cards.”

Acknowledged the Dilemma

He acknowledged the dilemma of those men who need time with their families, but he suggested that Solidarity is a family as well.

“I don’t want anyone putting on a sad face around here,” he said. “And if you have to go to your wife--if you love her, if your heart is so troubled--you can go. And if you have the strength, you can return.”

The transformation was remarkable. The mood lightened and the men began cleaning up the area and telling jokes. A sense of spirit had returned.

There was, of course, a limit to the force of Walesa’s personality. It could not, of itself, change the mood of an entire country, which is now self-absorbed, fearful and in many ways still worn out from the experience of Solidarity’s first incarnation and the crushing disappointment of the martial-law crackdown that followed it.

Walesa had said all along--and spoke frequently of it to the strikers in the shipyard--that the strike had come too early, that the country was not ready for another upheaval.

But he had solace for the strikers.

The day after the strike ended, Walesa, still wearing the same tweed jacket, told them he was ready to try again, if necessary.

“Nothing ended,” he said. “Nothing is finished.”