"He Gave Us Hope"

In the modestly furnished living room of a Gdansk apartment, the little man with a flowing reddish-brown mustache chain-smokes Polish cigarettes as he chats with a group of visitors. His slender, brunette wife is in the kitchen preparing Sunday dinner as his six children, ranging in age from eleven years to four months, scamper about the flat. At one moment he glances briefly at a flickering TV screen, chuckles as Laurel and Hardy fall out of bed, then resumes his conversation. Six months ago, Lech

Walesa (pronounced Va.h-wen-sah) was an unemployed electrician. Today, as leader of the Communist world's only independent labor union, he is one of the most powerful men in Poland, a folk hero not only to millions of his countrymen but to much of the world. His achievement all but defies description; in effect, he single-handed rallied his fellow workers to stand up against the will and the might of the Soviet Union. Walesa looks ill-suited for such eminence.

He is 5 ft. 7 in. tall and a trifle overweight. His face is an elfin caricature, the pale cheeks almost submerged under a wide mustache, the profile dominated by a prominent nose and an outthrust jaw. Yet he radiates an unmistakable air of authority, along with an infectious good humor. Working a crowd, he displays the charisma of a natural leader. Said a Gdansk woman worker after hearing him speak last week: "He is the right man at the right tune. He was able to give us hope."

Walesa, 37, was born during the Nazi occupation in the village of Popow, between Warsaw and Gdansk, and attended a state vocational school in nearby Lipno. After his father died, Lech's mother married her brother-in-law, Stanislaw Walesa; she was later killed in an auto accident while visiting the U.S. The stepfather, a lumberman, now lives in Jersey City, N.J.

Walesa became a strike leader at the Lenin Shipyard during the 1970 food price riots. Fired for his attempts at labor organizing in 1976, he found work in a machine repair shop and helped found the underground Baltic Free Trade Unions Movement. He was sent as a delegate to the official union elections in 1979, but was outraged to find the local party secretary controlling the vote. "Why have I come here, to elect or to applaud?" he demanded. The answer: an unceremonious sacking.

But Walesa's fortunes changed astonishingly when he scaled the gate of Lenin Shipyard last Aug. 14 to seize the helm of an angry strike movement. He became the workers' natural choice to head the independent union that emerged from that historic confrontation. Looking back over his long struggles, he remarks: "They have been tough years, tough on my wife and children. But I couldn't give up."

Walesa is a devout Roman Catholic who rarely misses morning Mass. A wood-and-silver crucifix is prominently displayed wherever he speaks. On his left lapel he always wears a badge depicting the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the revered symbol of Polish nationalism. He wrote a widely reproduced prayer that begins, "Virgin Mary, I come to you in the total modesty of my heart."

His unionizing mission has brought a few temporal rewards. He now draws a union salary of $333 a month --roughly equal to a shipyard worker's. He was able to trade his former two-room flat for a new six-room apartment in a suburban row of bristling concrete 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 and I can't?"

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." Yet he can be remarkably highhanded when chairing union meetings, often interrupting speakers in mid-sentence and imposing his own views.

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."

Intentionally vague about his political ideas, he 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 now."

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