The Man Who Wasn't There

On April 7, a United Press International reporter in Warsaw placed a telephone call to a 39-year-old electrician in Gdansk, Poland, and exploded one of the most spectacular schemes Harvard officials have concocted in several years.

The plan had been unveiled that very day: Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland's outlawed Solidarity labor union, had accepted an invitation to speak at Harvard's 332nd Commencement exercises. The University had received a formal letter of acceptance from Walesa in March, administrators said, and they had confirmed his intentions through secret conversations with a journalist who had been in touch with Walesa.

Harvard planners announced the news with pride and fanfare. "As the leader of and spokesman for millions of working men and women in Poland, Lech Walesa has demonstrated extraordinary vision and courage," stated David A. Aloian '49, executive director of the Harvard Alumni Association, on whose behalf Walesa was formally invited. "The message he will bring to Harvard will undoubtedly be timely, important and of interest to the University community and people around the world."

But later that afternoon, UPI quoted Walesa as saying "No, I am not going." In a telephone interview with the service's Warsaw bureau, he explained that "this situation is so unstable that I cannot go without being sure whether I can come back or not."

In many respects, the young labor leader would have been an ideal choice to give the principle address of today's festivities. For one, he is a rare public figure whose political views would hold enormous appeal to virtually every member of the hodgepodge Commencement audience, from the most outspoken student radical to the stodgiest reactionary alumnus. Moreover, his very presence on campus would be an international event, marking Walesa's first trip outside Poland since Communist authorities there imposed martial law in December 1981, and his first visit to the United States ever.

And for Harvard, the incident would have restored prestige to the sagging reputation of the University's Commencement address. When Gen. George Marshall took the Tercentenary Theater podium in 1947, he used the occasion to announce the European recovery plan that came to bear his name. Alexsander I. Solzhenitsyn, the expatriate Russian novelist, spoke at the 1978 ceremonies, issuing a ringing and internationally publicized decrial of the West's decline. His two successors were scarcely less illustrious: Helmut Schmidt, then Chancellor of West Germany, and Cyrus Vance, who had only weeks before left the Carter Administration in protest of its handling of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Then came the lean years for the University's most prominent public forum. In 1981, Harvard tapped Thomas J. Watson Jr. to give the address. Watson was hardly an obscure figure, having made headlines as president of IBM and then ambassador to the Soviet Union. But when the news of his selection was announced, more than a few students heard the name and wondered what a world-class golf pro would say to a crowd of graduates and dignitaries.

Watson's visit itself did not do much to help the industrialist distinguish himself from his dusty-haired namesake: Just moments after he began, a powerful downpour sent most of the audience fleeing for cover.

The following June, even more eyebrows raised when the speaker's identity was revealed: John H. Finley '25, the revered Eliot Professor of Greek Literature Emeritus and former Master of Eliot House. During his years on the Faculty, Finley was one of the College's best-loved lecturers. But to many members of the Class of 1982, the choice was disappointing, almost as if Harvard were a little boarding school inviting its old headmaster to speak to a gathering of old grads.

Finley's speech did little to dispel this image, and at times it proved downright embarassing. Speaking of life in the Houses before they were coeducational, the classicist declared that today, by comparison:

the more fetching sex, among its many superior gifts, heeds life's enticing summons. In this pre-medical era, a girl of course takes chemistry and biology but, life being beautiful, does some fine arts and acquires a picture or two. She reads, and her bookcase shows some Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. In deference to modernity, she even does some sociology. Then when a member of my obsessive sex who simple-heartedly looks to the Business School Via economics seeks to make headway with her, she starts educating him--needless to say, a lifelong process.

The selection of Watson and Finley seemed especially lackluster compared to the international giants Harvard had invited unsuccessfully in both years. In 1981, the University asked President Reagan to deliver the Commencement address, after the White House had sent out signals that the chief executive might be interested in making such a speech. The next year Harvard offered the platform to Jihan Sodat, the widow of the recently claim Egyptian leader. Both sent rejection letters.

So when President Bok wrote Walson in early February, he hoped to snap a two-year streak of turndowns. The Walesa invitation was initiated, as it is with each Commencement speaker, by a trio of administrators: Aloian, Fred L. Glimp '50, vice president for alumni affairs and development; and the acting president of the Harvard Alumni Association--a post held this year by Dunbar Carpenter '37.

One of the strongest influences in their decision, Aloian said earlier in the spring, was a New York Times interview with Walesa in which he expressed his abiding desire to visit the United States. He hoped to make such a trip "perhaps in May, June or July," to see relatives in the country, he told the Times. America, he said, was his "second homeland."

Once Aloian's troika had gained the approval of a number of Harvard figures, including Bok, other alumni leaders, and Eastern Europe specialists at the university, the president went ahead with the letter to Walesa.

To deliver the invitation to Gdansk, Bok and Aloian enlisted the services of a number of intermediaries. First they gave the letter to Stanislaw Baranczak, an associate professor of Slavic Languages and Literature. Baranczak, himself a Solidarity member, whose arrival at Harvard came after several years of complex and delicate diplomacy, translated the communication into Polish.

Next the letter fell into the hands of a few unidentified go-betweens. Over the next four months, according to Aloian, two Western journalists with frequent access to Poland would carry messages between Harvard and Walesa, and at least one of them had a hand in getting Bok's letter to its destination. Another person actually handed the letter to Walesa. Aloian refuses to identify this last carrier, although he said in April, "It wasn't the Harvard Club of Gdansk."

At no point did Harvard notify the State Department, the Polish embassy to the United States, or any other official agency, according to Aloian. "We informed [the State Department] of the acceptance--until then, they were not aware of the invitation," he said after the news was publicized. "This is essentially a private invitation on the part of a university to a private individual."

Walesa responded to Harvard's offer in a letter dated March 5. Once again, Bok and Aloian called on Baranczak to serve as interpreter, and he told them that Walesa wanted to give the speech. The letter also stressed Walesa's uncertainty that he would actually be allowed to come to Cambridge, Baranczak recalled later, but overall, he said "it was very positive in terms of accepting the invitation and expressing his wish to come."

Harvard administrators say they also verified Walesa's acceptance through an intermediary with access to Walesa, apparently one of the two journalists.

Normally, the University does not disclose the identity of its Commencement speaker until the end of May, just as it does not announce the recipients of honorary degrees until the very moment they are called to the podium to claim them. "It's sort of like not opening all your birthday presents as they're bought for you but getting them all at once," one Harvard Overseer has explained.

But in Walesa's case, University officials suspected immediate publicity might be useful in clearing the way for Walesa to travel to Harvard. An early announcement, they reasoned, might cause pressure to accumulate against the Polish Communist authorities, making it increasingly awkward for them to deny Walesa the permission he would need to make the trip to Cambridge.

Aloian contacted one of the journalist intermediaries and asked him to float by Walesa the possibility of an early announcement. "He told us it would help the chances of his coming over if we released the news early." So in the first week of April. Harvard's news office issued a press release about Walesa's acceptance--"largely to accommodate his request," Aloian says.

The University took extraordinary steps to publicize the news. Before the release was sent out to the media, Robin Schmidt, vice president for government and community affairs, hand-delivered copies of it to two journalists spending the year at Harvard on Nieman Fellowships: Andrzej Wroblewski of the Polish monthly Organization Review and Charles Sherman of the International Herald Tribune. Sherman filed a story on the announcement that afternoon.

But only hours after the news was out, word of the UPI interview reached Harvard, and it stunned the administrators who had planned that day's announcement. Schmidt scrambled to track down Wroblewski--who was in the Crimson newsroom at the time trying to reach sources in Poland--to ask him what he made of the dispatch. Wroblewski told him the rejection sounded entirely plausible. "That report was a complete surprise," Schmidt recalls. "But you never know what will transpire between an acceptance and an announcement, when it's as politically charged as this one was."

A number of theories emerged to explain Walesa's new assertion. Many Poland specialists agreed that Walesa's own words in the UPI interview held the key to his reluctance to travel: "I cannot go without being sure whether I can come back or not." The real obstacle to Walesa's visit, experts said, did not center on obtaining a visa to the United States, however much the Polish authorities may have disliked the prospect of the labor leader decrying the Communist regime in a well-publicized Western speech.

Rather, in the long run, said specialists, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski's government was probably eager to see Walesa leave permanently, thereby weakening his still-powerful influence on the nation's leaders. Fear of being blocked from returning to his home country appeared to be the principal factor behind Walesa's resolve to stay in Poland.

Wroblewski speculated further that Polish officials had possibly struck a deal with Walesa, promising increased leniency towards Polish laborers--several of whom faced trial at the time--in return for a turndown to Harvard from Walesa.

But Baranczak disagreed, saying, "It seems very improbable he would enter an agreement with the authorities. He would rather not engage in such accords." A likelier explanation for Walesa's change of mind, suggested the scholar, was the mounting tension from two imminent events in which he had a crucial stake: a string of major demonstrations planned for May Day and the mid-June visit to Warsaw of Pope John Paul II, a former Polish cardinal.

One other person outside Harvard offered an explanation for the discrepancy between Harvard's announcement and Walesa's words. Walter S. Brolewicz, a cousin of Walesa's from New Jersey, said he was in Gdansk when Walesa wrote his response to Bok. The letter, while encouraging, constituted a firm turndown, Brolewicz maintained. "It was very clear," he said on the day of Harvard's announcement. "The letter was written in a light that sounded very affirmative, but at the end it makes clear that he couldn't come."

Walesa may even have gone so far as to state that he "accepts" Harvard's invitation, Brolewicz said. But, he insisted, "I spoke to him about it and I'm positive he was quite frustrated that he couldn't make it."

But for several days after the announcement, Harvard officials stood firmly by their original statement. Walesa's letter was quite unambiguous, they said, and in the absence of any further communication from him, they would continue to hold out hope that he would journey to Cambridge.

They also noted confidently that Walesa suggested in his letter that he might send a speech to read in his absence, in case he could not appear in person (As of last week, no such speech had arrived, although Aloian says he has been expecting one since the first week of May--based on word from Walesa via intermediaries).

All the same, says Aloian, to be certain Harvard had not misread Walesa's words, he passed along a copy of Beranczak's translation of the union chief's reply to Adam Ulam, Gurney Professor of History and Political Science and head of Harvard's Russian Research Center. Ulam pronounced it accurate--"It seemed fairly faithful to me," he remembers.

In addition, Aloian contacted one of the journalist envoys, who had planned to visit Gdansk later in the month, and asked him to clarify matters with Walesa.

Meanwhile, Walesa's involvement with the underground activities of Solidarity was growing increasingly intense. The day after Harvard's announcement, he met with a group of Solidarity leaders, the first such gathering since his release from internment in November. The meeting was not a secret one: Solidarity leaders publicized it thoroughly the following week.

In his first months of liberty, Walesa had kept a fairly low profile, but the April meeting and its subsequent wide publicity appeared to signal a new defiance on the labor chief's part. "It seems to indicated that Walesa is ready and willing to take a more active part in the resistance," observed Tadeusz Szafar, a Polish visiting scholar at the Russian Research Center. "I don't know what it achieves for him, but it's certainly not permission to go to Harvard."

During the following weeks, Polish authorities stepped up their surveillance of the restive labor leader. The day after the announcement of the Solidarity meeting. Walesa was forcibly taken from his home to a nearby militia station, where he was detained and interrogated for five hours. Later that week his wife and his chauffeur were also called in for questioning.

On April 25, Aloian heard from his journalist contact. He had met with Walesa during the previous week, the intermediary reported, and the union leader gave him definite word that he would not be coming to Harvard's Commencement. With that news, says Aloian, he and his colleagues began searching for a replacement speaker, and before long they had secured an acceptance--directly, unambiguously, and in English--from the Mexican author and diplomat Carlos Fuentes.

In the aftermath of the whole saga, observers of Eastern European affairs remain split about the implications of Harvard's invitation to Walesa. Some argue that the gesture, though fruitless, carried symbolic significance. "I think it's a very good thing Harvard invited him," says Jeri Laber, executive director of the Helsinki Watch Committee, a prominent human rights monitoring group. "It's important that there be as much support in the West as possible for anyone who's the subject of as much harassment as he is. The more invitations like this the better."

Szafar of the Russian Research Center concurs, saying. "This kind of demonstration shows Walesa's not forgotten, even if Polish affairs are out of the headlines--it produces a feeling of solidarity with the Polish workers' movement. I'm very glad Harvard did decide to extend the invitation, no matter what the outcome."

Other specialists express skepticism about the impact of Harvard's unusual correspondence with the Polish leaders. "Harvard really doesn't mean that much in Poland," says William E. Schaufele Jr., who served as the American ambassador to Poland from 1978 to 1980. "It may mean something in the broad European context, but not a lot in Poland."

Ewa Brantley, Solidarity's international legal counsel and currently a research fellow at the Law School, is even more dubious about the symbolism of Harvard's invitation. "I'm not sure Harvard intended to send out any implicit messages, especially in light of its own record of labor relations," she says.

Moreover, notes Brantley, also a professor of international law at Tufts's Fletcher School of Diplomacy, it is unlikely that the Harvard offer affected Walesa's stature simply because it went virtually unnoticed in the Polish press. "It received minimal, minimal coverage," she says, adding that even the underground newspapers "had more important things to cover."

But there was one notable exception to Brantley's statement, and it provides an extraordinary footnote to the story of Harvard's brief dalliance with Lech Walesa. In its issue of May 6, the Polish Communist Party newspaper Trybuna Ludu printed this piece of commentary.

A new affair exploded in April...the news that Walesa had accepted an invitation from Harvard University in the U.S., where he is to deliver a speech during a ceremony... at which academic degrees will also be conferred... . All the necessary ingredients were there--Walesan, a difficult situation in Poland, and a speech to those poor Harvard professors and doctors who crave knowledge.

By the way, I wonder what this learned group wanted to hear from Walesa, a man who had proudly announced in [an] interview with Orians Fallaci that he had...never read a single book from cover to cover.