Lech Walesa: Obama Couldn’t Accomplish What I Did

Lech Walesa is one hell of an obdurate man; his stubborn leadership of Poland’s Solidarity movement punched the first cracks in the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain almost ten years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Three decades later, there’s no sign of him mellowing. In London to promote Walesa: Man of Hope, a new biopic, he was on the warpath. He had “a tantrum” in front of The Times of London, accused the Polish embassy of conspiring against him, and stormed back to his hotel instead of sitting for a scheduled interview with The Daily Beast.

Eight hours later he was running late for a re-arranged meeting. After conducting a television interview, he suddenly decided he’d had enough and began barreling towards the exit. Only after another round of protestations, did he agree to sit back down and talk.

He used that same impatient passion to galvanize Poland into becoming the first Soviet Bloc nation to stand up against their masters in Moscow. The strikes he led, which began in the Gdansk shipyards and reverberated throughout the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, were the first sign that communism would eventually crumble from within....