COLUMN ONE : King Lech No Longer Royalty : Walesa paved the way for freedom in Eastern Europe. But where does that leave him now? As an ordinary union president.

The man who would be president, and who sometimes figuratively refers to the office as the “throne,” arrived for work as on most weekday mornings: in the back seat of a midnight-blue government Lancia, one of a consignment of sleek Italian cars ordered by the last Communist prime minister of Poland.

Lech Walesa popped out of the door, a cannonball with legs, at high velocity and a low center of gravity. His government-hired security man hurried up the steps and yanked open the door.

On the curb, a pair of rumpled handymen were having a smoke and admiring their work with the display of flags set out to welcome the president of West Germany, who was visiting Walesa that afternoon. They grinned with a mixture of admiration and amusement as the boss shot past them, a force of nature in a brown suit, on the way to hurl thunderbolts from his third-floor office.

The corridors of the Solidarity union headquarters, two blocks from the famous shipyards, smell of disinfectant, like a grim Polish hospital. Walesa sped along like a squat bear, slightly bowlegged, his shoulders rocking side to side, with a distinct tilt to the left. He managed to appear at once a bit overfed and yet ready to spring in any direction, take on any confrontation, physical or verbal. He looked embattled but ready. As his friends say, Lech is always embattled. He likes it that way.

But things had been getting rough lately, even for a man of Walesa’s scrap-iron will. In Warsaw, they were calling him “Lech the Tiresome.” In Warsaw, they were asking, “Why doesn’t he shut up?” In Warsaw, intellectuals were writing coy articles complaining that although a “painted bird”--Walesa--may be a wonderful phenomenon in its own territory, such a gaudy creature begins to wear on the eyes. Finally, in Warsaw, where they were trying to run the government as if it were a social-science experiment, they were publishing polls showing slippage in his popularity.

Walesa pushed through the frosted glass doors of his outer office, revealing three or four men, their timid queries capably fended off by a pair of secretaries, telephones in hand. Before any of them could say more than hello, Walesa was into his private office. The security fellow pulled the door shut after him.

Taped to the door was a poster, cut from a newspaper, depicting Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as Rambo. It was a characterization, his aides thought, with which their boss might identify. Walesa was preparing for war.

This seems like a strange turn of fortune, because for 10 years Lech Walesa easily has been the most admired figure in Poland. For the last decade--in jail, through martial law and the chill years of its aftermath--Walesa, now 46, has been the nation’s acknowledged, if not officially recognized, political leader.

Last year, after negotiating the Communists into an election defeat from which they would never recover, it was Walesa--against much cautious advice to the contrary--who dared to engineer Solidarity’s takeover of the Communist government, thus ending an era in Eastern Europe.

But the end of one era suggests the beginning of a new one, and that is exactly where Walesa’s discomfort began, and continues still. Despite the magnitude of his accomplishment in 1989, he has been left in a curious limbo.

The bargain with the Communists gave the presidency to Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former Communist Party leader and the man frozen in the minds of Poles as the poker-faced declarer of martial law in 1981. Walesa himself handpicked the prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, an old ally. And then he went back to Gdansk, triumphant, and in charge of . . . a labor union.

Few people who have watched Walesa over the years expected him to settle quietly into the role of a union chief and, predictably, it’s been a rocky six months in Gdansk since he returned to more routine duties.

From that vantage point, he has had the exquisite anguish of looking on as playwright Vaclav Havel became the president of Czechoslovakia, the toast of the world, the darling of intellectuals and the chic new representative of the brave and brilliant fighters for democracy in Eastern Europe.

Prime Minister Mazowiecki, radiating calm and dignity, soared in popularity. Utter unknowns--Leszek Balcerowicz, the Polish finance minister, for example--lectured him on the principles of market economics.

And now comes grave concern from all the degree-wielding professors, journalists, economists, statisticians, linguists, political scientists and historians who could not get a serious job without selling their souls until the arrival of this trade-school electrician, born in a shack on a Polish bog.

Because of a man who speaks Polish the way it’s heard on the factory floor or at the neighborhood tram stop, all this massed and judicious intelligentsia now has the luxury of saying that, perhaps, Lech Walesa is not exactly sophisticated enough to be president of Poland.

At least, that’s the way Walesa’s closest supporters see it.

On the other side is the argument of the Warsaw intellectual camp, as yet not forthrightly expressed by its diffident representatives. Although they mostly resist saying it aloud, to them Lech Walesa is a loose cannon.

Volatile, restless, as covetous of the spotlight as a grand opera diva, Walesa as president would be no mild ceremonial figure. The autocratic streak that even his allies have long complained of might be given its full, shoot-from-the-hip rein, just when continued order, calm and restraint are most needed.

This camp argues, so far only in its inner circles, that Walesa might have been just the heaven-sent man to lead Poland--and, indeed, the rest of Eastern Europe--in the long fight against the Communists. (And a strong case could be made that without Walesa, Czechoslovak dissidents would still be trying to lay their flowers on Wenceslas Square.)

But, they say, that does not necessarily mean he is the best man to lead the country from now on--nor should the country, which has already reserved a large place in its modern history for him, feel obligated to reward him with the presidency.

These are serious enough questions, dealing with Walesa’s suitability for the job. Even among his allies, Walesa can be, by turns, a populist demagogue or a careful listener to wise counsel. He professes his love of democracy, but acknowledges the usefulness of what he calls “a little manipulation on the fringes of democracy.” To friend and foe, he can be exasperating and often incomprehensible.

“Walesa is the only person I know who can say three different things on three successive days and get away with it,” said one colleague, in a comment he intended as praise.

But the debate so far has been obscured by a diversionary verbal squabble suggesting merely that Walesa has fallen out with the intellectuals who now populate the government ministries in Warsaw.

In the resulting comedy, one side complains that Walesa speaks less than perfect Polish and knows no foreign languages. Walesa, in response, advises audiences not to listen to “eggheads” who want a president who might speak “in a language you would not understand.” Even Walesa’s wife, Danuta, the mother of his eight children, seemed unwittingly drawn into the fray, describing her husband in a recent television interview as secretive and tough to get along with.

She added, “I don’t think any other woman could put up with him.”

The conflict, however, is fraught with real danger for Walesa. It could tempt him into adopting the role of a Polish “know-nothing,” making war with old allies and drawing into his camp the more virulent nationalist elements of the Polish right wing, which contains a full complement of anti-Soviet retributionists and hazy anti-Semites--graceless company for a man who in 1983 won the Nobel Peace Prize.

It could also lock him into a

head-on competition with Mazowiecki for the presidency, a contest Mazowiecki’s boosters are already urging.

Last fall, Walesa’s eventual role as president was virtually a foregone conclusion in Poland. At the time of his address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress last November, he held Poland in thrall. Heads of state, foreign ministers and U.S. representatives by the busload came to Poland and trekked dutifully to Gdansk, making sure photographers got the handshake with Walesa to add to the gallery of framed photos back home.

“So what is Walesa? A tourist attraction?” he asked his staff, referring to himself in the third person, as though he were explaining the motives of an alter-ego that just happened to share his body.

He had become the rhinoceros of Gdansk. The inner circle was already restless. The twin Kaczynski brothers, Lech and Jaroslaw, Walesa’s chief political operatives, got the message. Although national elections had been set for 1993 and President Jaruzelski’s term does not expire until 1995, there was already talk of moving the votes up to the spring of 1991, barely a year away.

Failing that, there was always the possibility of a constitutional revision, which could bring the same result. In early April, Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Krzystof Pusz, Walesa’s aides-de-camp, floated a trial balloon: Walesa was running, they told interviewers. Walesa first confirmed and then denied it.

In Warsaw, where they could see it coming, they were neither fooled nor pleased.

On the day that Walesa was to meet West German President Richard von Weizsaecker, the lines had been drawn already, and it was clear to his closest aides that Walesa, in his solitary way, was spoiling for the fight.

Walesa likes to arrive early for meetings, and he was ready at the head table in a meeting hall in the union’s headquarters 10 minutes before the starting time of a session of the union’s national commission, held three weeks after its national congress.

His table was on an elevated stage, in front of a brown curtain, and he sat there alone, shuffling papers, silent except for an occasional word to a delegate sitting at the rows of tables below him. About 150 men were jammed into the room, from all over the country, most of them veterans of the union’s earliest days. Despite the crowd, the hall was quiet, like a college classroom before the lecture begins. The delegates were dressed casually, mostly in jeans.

Walesa had a clear plan for this meeting--to install two top deputies to run the union’s day-to-day affairs. For one of them, he had picked Lech Kaczynski, his light-footed political aide. The other was a unionist from Katowice, well respected but no maverick. Walesa looked at his watch, huffed into the microphone and started.

Two days earlier, Walesa had held what has come to be known as his “weekly press conference,” an event that in recent weeks had drawn only thin attendance from reporters. That session had been held before a gathering of disgruntled public transport workers at a tram yard in Gdansk, and the pattern Walesa adopted there was the same he would employ here. He invited questions from the floor, called for a discussion, then answered.

The workers stood up, one by one, and, rather than simply ask questions, they made what amounted to short speeches, generally a five-minute litany of complaint: Their last strike had not been supported, the workers’ demands were not being heard, prices were going up, times were hard, the government was not listening, the public did not care about their troubles.

Walesa listened, with a manner that suggested both patience with their problems and an impatience that the workers seemed to be blaming him. The answers were characteristic Walesa--simultaneously understanding, aggrieved, cajoling, pleading and placating.

“Don’t ask Walesa to solve all your problems,” he said. “Don’t treat me like an enemy. Treat me like one who wants to present your problems to the world. Walesa did not come here to pacify you.”

In the end, it was like a town meeting in which the inhabitants got a chance to ventilate their grievances, if not find a solution to their problems. At last, when Walesa got back in the blue sedan and left, it was hard to say that the workers had been satisfied, but they had been heard.

Walesa opened the national commission meeting by making it clear that he had not chosen his deputies as possible successors, but as his assistants. He asked for discussion. He used the word “democracy” five times in his first three sentences.

As usual, Walesa took a shotgun approach to speaking: sentences running up the back of sentences not yet started, elliptic, full of shorthand references to the union’s history, to past accusations of his roughshod manner of running things, to his love of Poland, his respect for democratic method, his hope of being understood.

As with the workers before, the stance was at once placating and argumentative. It was the standard Walesa way: Invite attack, read the mood, turn it around. His audience, like a roomful of trained lions, rose to the whip.

The first assault was on procedural grounds. Walesa said he wanted a democratic process, and after settling the issue of deputies, “then we’ll immediately start democracy. . . .” He was attacked at length for trying “to subjugate the interests of the national commission to Lech Walesa.”

He listened, his microphone at the ready, as though looking for an opening to leap into the discussion. He took off his jacket, revealing white suspenders. He picked up the microphone and held it to his lips. He was talking before his antagonist’s backside hit the chair.

“Different myths are created about me in different places,” Walesa said. “Mind you, from the very beginning, from the very first day, at the congress, I didn’t take the floor, not one time.

“Did I not have anything to say? If I had nothing to say, then the people coming to visit me in the union would not be coming to see me. But I truly believe in democracy, I truly believe that together we are wiser than the best minds.”

Another question:

“Are you going to stay head of the union, or be president of the country? Because if you are going to be president of the country, we don’t want to be the instrument to help you do it. Could you give us a clear statement on this?”

“How am I to prove to you that truly I don’t want to be the chairman and I don’t want to be the president? Because I have been repeating it a thousand times, and you still don’t believe me. So I repeat, I didn’t want to be the chairman. . . .

“The question about the presidency: What else could I say? I don’t want to be the president. But what happens in Poland if some 500 parties emerge? You already see the chaos, and the chaos will be still bigger, whereas I am able, with everybody, to talk, to make compromises, with practically everyone. I am able, and I am proud of it, to reconcile with those no one else is able to reconcile with. If Poland demands this, if the pluralism demands this, if the anarchy demands for me to take this role, then what am I to say?

“Listen, I am a Pole. If a situation like this occurs, I will stand anywhere, even against you, to serve Poland. But I don’t want it, just as I didn’t want to be the chairman.

“I am living through all these things like a simple man. But, of course, besides all these small games of mine there is Poland, and then I start thinking, what is better? But you don’t believe me, even if I took my heart and showed it to you, you think I want to make a business here, or I want to be the president.

“You think it is going to be ‘easy bread’ to be a president in this country with 500 parties? I have tasted this bread already. I was very honest saying to you, ‘Go to my office and see how many propositions I have’--traveling, saying it was me who toppled over communism in Eastern Europe.”

Walesa leaned forward on the table, his face thrust into the room, his voice rising an octave with each accent, punching it at them:

“So I am not here for the money. You fought for my position. It was not me. Everyone of you contributed to it, here in this room and outside this room. I simply cannot take my suitcase and go. I am living through these dilemmas. So stop asking me questions, if I am not going to run. If the country requires it, I will run. I won’t say, ‘No, thank you, I’ve done enough.’ ”

It went on after that, but with a decided shift in the tension, as though a great sail had fallen limp in the wind.

Walesa had not necessarily convinced anyone except, perhaps, of the futility of out-talking him. In a few minutes, there was laughter. Walesa said that anyone who voted would get a free plastic watch, a gift to the union from recent Japanese well-wishers.

As the men stood up to file out of the room, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk, the Wroclaw Solidarity activist who is often at odds with Walesa, nudged one of his colleagues, the one who had asked Walesa to give back some authority to the national commission.

“You made a fool of yourself, Jan,” Frasyniuk said. “You don’t ask Walesa to please give back some of his power. You have (guts) enough to take it from him, or you let it be.”

As much a master of symbolism as any Polish politician, Walesa concluded that Richard von Weizsaecker was not a man who needed to be met at the front steps of the building. Without undue ceremony, the West German president, whose countrymen opened World War II by shelling and invading Walesa’s adopted hometown, could walk up the three flights of stairs by himself to meet the head of Solidarity.

A German television producer, informed of the arrangement, said she assumed this was the first time in his presidential career that Von Weizsaecker had not been met by his hosts at the limousine door.

About 30 seconds before Von Weizsaecker, a handsome, silver-haired figure in a trim gray suit, bounded up the stairs, smiling warmly, Walesa came out and stood before his open office doors.

“Welcome to the home of Solidarity in Polish Gdansk,” Walesa said, shaking hands for the cameras. The two men, their aides and translators met privately for half an hour, then left to lay a wreath at the shipyard monument.

At the towering steel crosses, erected by Solidarity to commemorate shipyard workers who died in a 1970 uprising, Von Weizsaecker paid his respects, stood in silent tribute with Walesa and listened as translators explained the inscriptions surrounding the memorials.

There seemed to be little else to say. Walesa shook hands with Von Weizsaecker. “Do widzenia,” Walesa said. “Goodby.” He walked away with his aide and security man and headed back to the office, while Von Weizsaecker’s party looked for their cars.

On the way back, Walesa was induced to compare the heads of state he had met.

“Well, Weizsaecker’s OK,” he said. “I invited him to come back to visit, once a month, if he can. He’s a good man. He’s very well respected in his country. Heads of state, they’re all different. How can you say who is best? It’s like comparing a boxing champion and a checkers champion. Who is best? A boxing champion or a checkers champion? Which one, you tell me? You see? You can’t say. Bush is very good. Thatcher is very good. It’s like that. Champions.”

Walesa was back at the Solidarity building then, and hurried up to his office. It was now almost 5 p.m. Within two minutes, he was out the door, down the steps and headed home.