Word: walesa
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...Year because he stands at the end of 1980 looking ahead, while the year behind him smolders in pyres. The events of any isolated year can be made to seem exceptionally grim, but one has to peer hard to find elevating moments in 1980. Only Lech Walesa's stark heroism in Poland sent anything resembling a thrill into the world. The national strike he led showed up Communism as a failure?a thing not done in the Warsaw Pact countries. Leonid Brezhnev, a different sort of strongman, had to send troops to Poland's borders, in case that country, like...
...towers; his wardrobe has grown from one to five suits; friends keep him supplied with a seemingly endless stream of domestic and imported cigarettes. "You're going to get the way all the big bureaucrats get-mark my word," scolded a woman delegate at a recent union meeting. Walesa smiled and passed out Benson & Hedges cigarettes to the other delegates. As they started to light up, he asked mischievously: "How come they can smoke...
Some observers detect in him a touch of demagogy and personal vanity. One photographer who has followed Walesa notes that he never passes a mirror without stopping to pat his hair into place. In interviews, he sometimes seems flippant to the point of arrogance. In private conversation, he has a marked fondness for first-person pronouns. In public appearances, however, he can exhibit flashes of deep humility. A crowd of miners in Jastrzebie last October asked Walesa who could teach them democracy. His answer: "Who? Not Lesio [a diminutive of Lech], for he is too small, too stupid. Yourselves. Everybody...
...Walesa takes criticisms of his contradictory manner in stride. He sees himself as a peacemaker among Solidarity's moderate and radical factions. Says he: "My job is to unite them. I scale down the militants and raise up the mildest...
...claims to be a simple "union man." But his political goal seems to be an amalgam of Christian socialism and Polish nationalism. He has read Alexander Solzhenitsyn and shares his views of both Communist and capitalist shortcomings. "No system must make people forget that they are human beings," says Walesa. Then he adds enigmatically: "My own plans are far-reaching, but it is too early to reveal them...