He Dared to Hope

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reading a speech—not even when addressing the Pope—and never speaking too long, stabbing the air with his oversize hands, making all the right gestures with almost flawless timing. His real strength as a speaker was an ability to reduce complex issues to simple words and images that everyone could understand. Said one Solidarity official: "He knows his audience. He can sense what they want, and almost always he is right."

Walesa showed little patience for the details of union organization or the niceties of parliamentary procedure. He loved to barnstorm the country, arguing, cajoling, sitting up half the night with workers while the air turned blue with cigarette smoke. At the podium, and at the bargaining table, where the arguments with government officials stretched wearily on for hours, he was quick and voluble, and guided by sure instincts. As his fame and power grew, he was amused and sometimes delighted by his celebrity status, whatever his disclaimers. There was, in fact, more than a touch of the demagogue in him. When his policies were opposed by other union leaders, he would sometimes threaten to take his case directly to the rank and file, or even to quit. "He is like De Gaulle of France in that regard," says former Solidarity Spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicz.

There was something to that. Like De Gaulle, Lech Walesa was a man guided by faith in himself and his destiny: he had no qualms about speaking for the 10 million members of Solidarity. He was certain that he knew what they—what the country—wanted. "We eat the same bread," he would tell the crowds. An urban worker with rural roots, he was, as he claimed, a son of the people. Lech Everyman. Reflecting on his leadership role last month, he told TIME: "As a believer, I think this was my mission. This is the way fate threw me into it."

The son of a carpenter, he was born in a clay hut during the Nazi occupation in the village of Popow, between Warsaw and Gdansk. His father, Boleslaw, was conscripted by the Nazis to dig ditches during the war and died in 1946 from the exposure and beatings he suffered. His mother, Feliksa, seemed to have the most effect on Walesa. The parish priest remembers her as "the wisest woman in the parish. She always had to be the most important person around and was a fantastic organizer. Lech is an extension of his mother and even looks like her. He has the same face, size, build and smile."

Walesa was only an average student at his parish grammar school. Ironically, he got his worst marks in a subject that now deeply concerns him: history. One schoolmate remembers him as a showoff, "always swimming out to the farthest point of the lake." At the state vocational school in Lipno, where he learned the electrician's trade, Walesa was reprimanded several times for smoking in the dorm, but he is also remembered as a good organizer. By his own account, Walesa early had a knack for taking command. "I had something in me that made me the leader of the gang," he says. "I was always the leader of the class, I was always the leader of the hooligans, the leader of the choirboys. I was always on top."

In his treatise on heroes and hero-worship, Thomas Carlyle wrote that "Universal History is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here." A lowly worker