On This Day
1821: The Turks executed Archbishop Gerasimos of Crete in retaliation for the breakout of the Greek War of Independence on the island.
1922: Alexandros Papanastasiou was sentenced to three years imprisonment for publishing his “Democratic Manifesto”. His defense lawyer was George Papandreou.
Births: Spiros Zagoreos (1928), singer; Costas Simitis (1936), politician and Prime Minister
Deaths: Andreas Papandreou (1996), politician
Andreas Papandreou dominated the political life of Greece, whether in or out of office, for much of the second half of the century.
Andreas George Papandreou, politician: born Chios 5 February 1919; Founder and Chairman, Pan-Hellenic Liberation Movement 1968-74; Founder and President, Pan-Hellenic Socialist movement 1974-96; Prime Minister of Greece 1981- 89, 1993-96; Minister of Defence 1981-86; married first Christina Rassias (marriage dissolved), secondly 1951 Margaret Chant (three sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1989), thirdly 1989 Dimitra Liani; died Athens 23 June 1996. He was 77.
His symptoms “were compatible with a heart attack, which finally caused his death at 2:30 A.M.,” his doctors said in a statement.
Open heart surgery in 1988 had left Mr. Papandreou weakened, although it did not stop him from entering and winning elections for the third time in 1993.
But during 1995, his failing health prevented him from performing the normal duties of Government, leaving Greece flailing. He worked at home for just a few hours a day and rarely appeared in public. Yet even as his fiery voice, which could mesmerize the nation, had thinned to a near whisper and he walked with great difficulty, Mr. Papandreou refused to step aside or name a deputy to run the Government.
The only son of Sophia and George Papandreou, who was himself twice prime minister, Andreas George Papandreou was born on Feb. 5, 1919, on Chios, while his father served at the time as governor general of the Aegean Islands.
When Andreas was 5, his parents were divorced, and he and his mother moved to Athens. But he stayed in touch with his father, who rose in politics and became a powerful and popular leader, eventually becoming Prime Minister.
In 1937, when Andreas entered Athens University Law School, Greece was ruled by a right-wing dictator, Gen. Ioannis Metaxas, and his father and other liberals were banished to the island of Andros. Andreas, by then a Trotskyite, joined a resistance group that distributed underground newspapers and pamphlets, for which he was arrested and tortured.
Shortly before Mussolini’s troops entered Greece, Andreas Papandreou left for New York, where he arrived in May 1940 with $14 in his pocket. He enrolled at Columbia University and took odd jobs to support himself. He married a Greek-American, Christine Rassias, in 1941 and earned a doctorate in economics at Harvard University in 1943. The marriage ended in divorce a decade later.
After becoming an American citizen, Mr. Papandreou joined the Navy for two years of wartime service, much of which he spent as a clerk in the Bethesda Naval Hospital. When World War II ended, he started his career as a lecturer in economics, first at Harvard then at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University. He eventually became a professor and the chairman of the department of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, until he resigned in 1963.
A graduate of Harvard University and a prominent economics’ professor, he started his political career started in 1964 when he was elected MP of the “Center Union” (Enosi Kentrou) party, becoming deputy minister in his father’s government (1964-65).
In 1967, when the military dictatorship was established in Greece, Andreas was arrested by the regime and a year after he was released and left the country. On February 1968 he founded “PAK” (Pan-hellenic Liberation Movement) through which he developed political activism fighting the Greek Junta.
In a 1972 article in The New York Times, he wrote that the United States approved prime ministers, interfered in elections and in military promotions and “controlled the Greek Intelligence Service.”
After the fall of the dictatorship, Papandreou returned to Greece where on September 1974 he founded PASOK (Pan-hellenic Socialist Movement), that changed Greece’s political landscape. It brought him — and the left — to power in 1981. Describing himself as a “nondogmatic Marxist” he quickly introduced social reforms that benefited low-income groups, promoted workers’ councils and farmers’ cooperatives, abolished censorship, lowered the voting age to 18.
In the elections of October 18, 1981, with the slogan of “Allagi” (Change) Papandreou became Prime Minister of Greece, winning a landslide victory over the opponent party. In 1982, he took active part in the ‘Initiative of the six’ – along with Mexican president Miguel de la Madrid, Swedish PM Olof Palme, India’s Indira Gandhi, Argentinian PM Raul Alfonsin and Tanzania’s president Julius Nyerere – promoting Peace through pressing towards the reduction of nuclear weapons testing. In 1985, Papandreou was re-elected Prime Minister remaining in the position until 1989 when PASOK lost the elections.
Critics wrote off the 1980s as the “lost decade” but Papandreou did introduce some long overdue reforms. Civil marriage was introduced; changes in family law improved the status of women; the wartime resistance was recognised; Communist refugees who had fled to the Eastern bloc at the end of the civil war were allowed to return (even if the Slav Macedonians remained out in the cold). In general those who had been marginalised by the post-civil war anti-Communist state ceased to be second-class citizens. These were by no means negligible achievements. Papandreou also established a national health service but, like many of his compatriots, himself preferred to seek medical treatment abroad.
By late 1989, he could no longer withstand the cascade of scandals and he lost the elections. Parliament indicted Mr. Papandreou and ordered him and four of his former ministers to stand trial on charges including bribery and embezzlement. He repeatedly protested his innocence, saying that American agents were trying to “destabilize” Greece and that his opponents were out to destroy him politically.
Mr. Papandreou was narrowly acquitted in 1992, but two of his ministers were convicted.
Yet on Oct. 10, 1993, Mr. Papandreou made an astonishing comeback. Though he had recently had a heart operation, taken Ms. Liani as his third wife, built a mansion costing more than $1 million and never quite shaken off corruption charges, he won election for the third time, winning 170 seats in the Greek Parliament.
In 1994, Andreas Papandreou met with the then U.S. President Bill Clinton during his first visit as Prime Minister of Greece in the United States and a year after, in 1995, with his health being fragile, he was hospitalized having advanced heart disease. He died in his home in the northern Athenian suburb of Ekali, on June 23, 1996 and three days later his funeral was attended by thousands of Greeks in central Athens.