Stan Draenos holds a PhD in Political Science from York University in Toronto. A political analyst, historian and consultant, his articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Historical Review, Salmagundi, Ta Nea and the Los Angeles Times. He served for several years as Historian at the Andreas Papandreou Foundation and has been a Contributing Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC and a Research Fellow at Princeton University, as well as a guest lecturer at the University of Michigan, City University of New York, the Greek National Research Foundation and the University of Macedonia.
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For Theo Kleomeni
The cause of the victors was favored by the gods, but the cause of the vanquished was favored by Cato.
Cato the Elder
Acknowledgements
During eight years of research and writing, I incurred debts of gratitude difficult to repay. Without the encouragement and support of Rick Dyck, Margarita Papandreou and Stanley Sheinbaum, I simply could not have begun. In particular, Margarita and Nick Papandreou were steadfast in supporting my determination to produce a serious study, free of partisan or personal agendas. Their generosity of spirit enabled me to persevere, whatever their disagreements with the results. Sophia Papandreou also made available important correspondence. Julia Clones, by giving me access to her husbands papers, played a unique role in deepening the analysis. Countless discussions with my Greek historian colleagues Vasilis Panagiotopoulos and Leonidas Kallivretakis, as well as Sotiris Rizas, have enriched immeasurably my understanding of the countrys modern history. I also profited from the critical intelligence and support of many far-flung friends and colleagues, including Cliff Cobb, Theodore Couloumbis, David Beers, Alkman Granitsas, Tula Kafiris, Dimitri Kerides, Greil Marcus, John Kysela, Emmanuel Lambrakis, Jim Miller, Nick Skoulas, Ted Stathis and Bob Tostevin. My cousin Panagiota and the villagers of Kiveri, Argolida provided the hideaway I needed to get the writing underway. For much of the period, the Andreas G. Papandreou Foundation provided a base of operations in Athens and enabled numerous research trips to the USA and within Europe.
Support for the research, as well as the opportunity to try out my ideas, also came from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston; the Kokkalis Foundation, Athens; the Program for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University; and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC. Also invaluable were the invitations to deliver lectures at the Modern Greek Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the Balkan, Slavic and Orient Studies Department, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki; the Seminar on the Modern Greek State, City University of New York at Queens; and the Ermoupolis Seminars, Institute of Neohellenic Research, National Research Foundation, Athens.
PREFACE
In Search of Andreas Papandreou
Sixteen years after his death, no monument adorns Andreas Papandreous simple gravesite at the First Cemetery of Athens. This puzzling absence exemplifies the enigma surrounding the man who was arguably the most remarkable, and certainly the most controversial, Greek politician of the post-World War II era. Venerated by his admirers and despised by his detractors with equal passion, the Harvard-educated Papandreou left in his wake no secure, clear-cut answer to the question of who he was and what he stood for. In these pages, I attempt not so much to resolve the Andreas enigma than to stake out its dimensions and understand its dynamics. Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a Greek Democrat and Political Maverick recounts the volatile interplay of character and circumstance that generated Papandreous powerfully consequential politics.
My focus is on the passions and prospects that incited Papandreou, at the height of the Cold War, to leap from the USA into Greek politics as an exemplar of John F. Kennedys New Frontier. It tracks the tortuous course of those passions and prospects when, in the aftermath of Kennedys assassination, Papandreou emerged as the central protagonist in a crisis that ended in calamity with the pro-American Greek military coup dtat of 21 April 1967. The significance of his fateful trajectory extends beyond the man and the borders of Greece. His meteoric rise and the coup that cut it short also represent a neglected episode in the collapse of American liberalism under Kennedys successor, Lyndon Johnson. Riven by internal conflicts over US intervention in Vietnam, Johnsons liberal presidency came under the assault of a resurgent conservatism that, in 1968, would bring Richard Nixon to power. Papandreous Greek venture affords a unique perspective on this watershed period in US politics. At once a Greek and an American story, this book narrates an untold tale in the annals of the Cold War as it transpired on the European front. More broadly, Andreas Papandreous political odyssey exemplifies the strange fate that befell progressive forces in the West which emerged from the devastation of World War II, only to find themselves caught up in the perplexities of a deadly, nuclear-armed rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union.
Released from prison by the Greek Junta, Papandreou would go in exile to organize resistance against the dictatorship, returning to Greece, after the Juntas collapse, to mobilize a popular movement for domestic reform that also questioned Greeces ties to the West. In 1981, Greek voters would sweep him to power with almost messianic expectations, at last giving voice to forces that had been repressed and marginalized in the aftermath of the countrys post-World War II civil war. After two tumultuous terms, Papandreou would go down to defeat amid scandal, only to find vindication when, near the end of his life, the Greek people again chose him as their Prime Minister. This book ends before Papandreou would finally realize his quest for power. But it was written in the conviction that, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the issues at stake in history-making events never appear with greater clarity than at their origins. To gain insight into the dimensions and dynamics of the Andreas enigma, it is to these origins that we must turn.
Athens, Greece
April 2, 2012
CHAPTER 1
A Prodigious Youth
Andreas Papandreou was born on 5 February 1919 to a cultured but emotionally insecure mother and a fiercely political father. His place of birth was the island of Chios, where his father, George Papandreou, served as governor of Aegean islands recently fallen to Greece from the crumbling, multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. A lawyer by training, Andreas father was a rising figure in the political ranks of Greeces great republican statesman, Eleftherios Venizelos. A vocal anti-monarchist, George Papandreou was imprisoned for four months for an article he had published criticizing the King. Andreas was two years of age. It was the first of numerous imprisonments and banishments his father would suffer during his long and tumultuous political career.
