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One of Jaruzelski's first acts after assuming power was to call out the army. Using a sure touch that foreshadowed what was to come, he sent some 3,500 officers and enlisted men to 2,000 towns and villages scattered across the country during the last week of October. Their ostensible mission: to help clear up food distribution bottlenecks and tackle other economic problems. But the officers were also filling their notebooks with information on the corruption and negligence of local party officials and, presumably, on the activities of Solidarity. The operation was generally popular with the people, who welcomed the soldiers as harbingers of efficiency and order. In retrospect, the deployment seems to have been a rehearsal for the military crackdown.
Before he resorted to that extremity, however, Jaruzelski appealed for national unity. He asked Solidarity and the church to join with the party in a "front of national accord" that would cooperate on economic recovery. The overture raised hopes that Poles might at last find a way out of the impasse by forging the vital element that had been missing from their body politic for more than three decades: a true social compact.
On Nov. 4 a potentially historic meeting took place at the government's Parkowa guesthouse in Warsaw. There the bemedaled boss of Poland's Communist Party received the head of a 10 million-member labor union and the spiritual leader of more than 30 million Polish Catholics. For two hours and 20 minutes, Jaruzelski, Walesa and Archbishop Jozef Glemp, the Polish Primate, discussed the state of their troubled nation. Walesa came away with Jaruzelski's offer to open negotiations with Solidarity on a wide range of social issues. The three leaders also discussed the general's plan to involve the union and the church in the government's recovery effort. Glemp pronounced himself "a little more optimistic" after the meeting.
Before Walesa went to the summit meeting, Solidarity's ruling body had chastised him for presuming to represent 10 million workers on his own. "We want democracy, not a dictatorship!" one angry union official had shouted. "All right, let's vote that we don't want talks with the Primate and the Premier!" yelled Walesa, tears of frustration running down his cheeks. "But then you go out and explain your vote to the nation." Now that the Warsaw meeting was over, Solidarity grudgingly endorsed the tripartite dialogue. It threatened, however, to call a general strike if the negotiations brought its members no satisfaction within three months. The commission also refused to endorse Walesa's call for an end to wildcat strikes around the country.
Though Walesa and Jaruzelski continued to talk of entente and national unity after their meeting, the idea was not gelling. As always, the union was suspicious of government motives, and with good reason. The government wanted Solidarity to support an economic plan to raise prices, but it had