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.