On April 7, a United Press International reporter in Warsaw placed a telephone call to a 39-year-old electrician in Gdansk, Poland, and exploded one of the most spectacular schemes Harvard officials have concocted in several years.

The plan had been unveiled that very day: Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland's outlawed Solidarity labor union, had accepted an invitation to speak at Harvard's 332nd Commencement exercises. The University had received a formal letter of acceptance from Walesa in March, administrators said, and they had confirmed his intentions through secret conversations with a journalist who had been in touch with Walesa.

Harvard planners announced the news with pride and fanfare. "As the leader of and spokesman for millions of working men and women in Poland, Lech Walesa has demonstrated extraordinary vision and courage," stated David A. Aloian '49, executive director of the Harvard Alumni Association, on whose behalf Walesa was formally invited. "The message he will bring to Harvard will undoubtedly be timely, important and of interest to the University community and people around the world."

But later that afternoon, UPI quoted Walesa as saying "No, I am not going." In a telephone interview with the service's Warsaw bureau, he explained that "this situation is so unstable that I cannot go without being sure whether I can come back or not."

In many respects, the young labor leader would have been an ideal choice to give the principle address of today's festivities. For one, he is a rare public figure whose political views would hold enormous appeal to virtually every member of the hodgepodge Commencement audience, from the most outspoken student radical to the stodgiest reactionary alumnus. Moreover, his very presence on campus would be an international event, marking Walesa's first trip outside Poland since Communist authorities there imposed martial law in December 1981, and his first visit to the United States ever.

And for Harvard, the incident would have restored prestige to the sagging reputation of the University's Commencement address. When Gen. George Marshall took the Tercentenary Theater podium in 1947, he used the occasion to announce the European recovery plan that came to bear his name. Alexsander I. Solzhenitsyn, the expatriate Russian novelist, spoke at the 1978 ceremonies, issuing a ringing and internationally publicized decrial of the West's decline. His two successors were scarcely less illustrious: Helmut Schmidt, then Chancellor of West Germany, and Cyrus Vance, who had only weeks before left the Carter Administration in protest of its handling of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Then came the lean years for the University's most prominent public forum. In 1981, Harvard tapped Thomas J. Watson Jr. to give the address. Watson was hardly an obscure figure, having made headlines as president of IBM and then ambassador to the Soviet Union. But when the news of his selection was announced, more than a few students heard the name and wondered what a world-class golf pro would say to a crowd of graduates and dignitaries.

Watson's visit itself did not do much to help the industrialist distinguish himself from his dusty-haired namesake: Just moments after he began, a powerful downpour sent most of the audience fleeing for cover.

The following June, even more eyebrows raised when the speaker's identity was revealed: John H. Finley '25, the revered Eliot Professor of Greek Literature Emeritus and former Master of Eliot House. During his years on the Faculty, Finley was one of the College's best-loved lecturers. But to many members of the Class of 1982, the choice was disappointing, almost as if Harvard were a little boarding school inviting its old headmaster to speak to a gathering of old grads.

Finley's speech did little to dispel this image, and at times it proved downright embarassing. Speaking of life in the Houses before they were coeducational, the classicist declared that today, by comparison:

the more fetching sex, among its many superior gifts, heeds life's enticing summons. In this pre-medical era, a girl of course takes chemistry and biology but, life being beautiful, does some fine arts and acquires a picture or two. She reads, and her bookcase shows some Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. In deference to modernity, she even does some sociology. Then when a member of my obsessive sex who simple-heartedly looks to the Business School Via economics seeks to make headway with her, she starts educating him--needless to say, a lifelong process.

The selection of Watson and Finley seemed especially lackluster compared to the international giants Harvard had invited unsuccessfully in both years. In 1981, the University asked President Reagan to deliver the Commencement address, after the White House had sent out signals that the chief executive might be interested in making such a speech. The next year Harvard offered the platform to Jihan Sodat, the widow of the recently claim Egyptian leader. Both sent rejection letters.

So when President Bok wrote Walson in early February, he hoped to snap a two-year streak of turndowns. The Walesa invitation was initiated, as it is with each Commencement speaker, by a trio of administrators: Aloian, Fred L. Glimp '50, vice president for alumni affairs and development; and the acting president of the Harvard Alumni Association--a post held this year by Dunbar Carpenter '37.

One of the strongest influences in their decision, Aloian said earlier in the spring, was a New York Times interview with Walesa in which he expressed his abiding desire to visit the United States. He hoped to make such a trip "perhaps in May, June or July," to see relatives in the country, he told the Times. America, he said, was his "second homeland."

Once Aloian's troika had gained the approval of a number of Harvard figures, including Bok, other alumni leaders, and Eastern Europe specialists at the university, the president went ahead with the letter to Walesa.