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The Man Who Wasn't There

The Story of Harvard's Invitation to Lech 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.

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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."

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