Ex-Greek Leader Andreas Papandreou Dies

Former Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, one of the most colorful, controversial political figures of post-World War II Europe, died early today, news media reported. He was 77 years old.

Athens radio stations interrupted their broadcasts to announce that Papandreou died of heart failure at 2:30 a.m. at his home in the northern Athens suburb of Ekali.

There was no immediate official announcement, but the radio stations reported that Prime Minister Costas Simitis, who was elected to lead Greece’s Socialists in January because of Papandreou’s ill health, was returning immediately from a European Union summit in Florence, Italy.

Papandreou returned to Greece from exile in 1974 to help restore democracy to its birthplace after the collapse of military rule only to preside over many of its more questionable moments during his years as prime minister.

He rejected overtures from others and founded his own political party--the Panhellenic Socialist Movement--and went on to dominate the politics of his country for the better part of two decades, serving as prime minister between 1981-89 and again from 1993 through the beginning of this year.

Still, he accomplished little of his declared agenda to transform Greece into a modern social democratic state and an influential third force in the global arena.

But his populist appeal, personal magnetism and his governments’ liberal spending sustained his popularity among both the down-trodden and the intellectual left.

“One of the most courageous and committed politicians I have ever met,” commented one of his former Cabinet ministers, actress Melina Mercouri.

Papandreou’s world view was heavily influence by a powerful love-hate relationship with the United States, where he lived for nearly 20 years. He became an American citizen, served in the U.S. Navy and taught economics at four American universities, including UC Berkeley.

It was there that he reshaped his existing leftist ideals amid the anti-establishment radicalism that stemmed from college campuses in the 1960s.

“People try to search for his roots here, but there are none,” said Thanos Veremis, director general of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. “They can be found in a kind of Berkeley-style of radicalism.”

His deep mistrust of American foreign policy became a guiding principle through much of his time in power. He denounced Washington as “a metropolis of imperialism.”

Papandreou’s vision of Greece as an important international player, his election slogans such as “Greece for the Greeks” and contempt for the United States led admirers to think of him as a kind of Hellenic Charles de Gaulle.

In fact, he was far less.

In foreign affairs, he practiced Greek policies more rife with gesture than substance. He flirted openly with Moscow at the height of the Cold War and reached out to international pariahs of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Libya’s Moammar Kadafi, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Poland’s martial law leader Wojciech Jaruzelski. He snubbed the United States by opening a Greek Embassy in Cuba.

But he never followed up threats to pull Greece out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the then-European Community or to close American military bases in Greece.

At home, his politics were not so much European socialist as a thinly disguised populism in the tradition of former Louisiana Sen. Huey P. Long. Papandreou built roads, schools and hospitals in poor areas when and where votes were needed but never undertook the comprehensive reforms so desperately needed to modernize the country’s infrastructure.

His last years in power were clouded both by a steadfast refusal to stand aside despite failing health and by his controversial relationship with an Olympic Airways flight attendant, Dimitra Liani--a woman one critic described as half Papandreou’s age and twice his size.

She eventually became Papandreou’s third wife and Europe’s most unlikely first lady. The image of the frail, aging Papandreou shuffling alongside his much-photographed wife gave a diminished, tragicomic dimension to a man who many had thought of as a political giant.

Accounts of their life in the sprawling pink villa they built together in a leafy Athens suburb, and the group of hangers-on--including three hairdressers and an astrologer--that held forth there merely added to the image of decadence and decline. “A flawed Ionian Caesar,” concluded a commentary in the London Financial Times as early as 1989.

It was Papandreou’s efforts in 1995 to launch Dimitra into politics that finally unplugged his personal popularity and brought comparisons with a less flattering historical figure, Argentine dictator Juan D. Peron. “He’s one of the most fascinating characters [modern] Greek history has produced, but after all the sound and fury, he signifies nothing,” said Veremis of the Hellenic Foundation.

Andreas George Papandreou was born Feb. 5, 1919, the only child of Sophia and George Papandreou, himself a future Greek premier and then the governor of the Greek island of Chios in the Aegean Sea. Papandreou became a top student at the American College in Athens and followed that with law school. But as leader of a Trotskyist group, he quickly ran afoul of the Greek military dictatorship.

In 1939, he was arrested, tortured and released only after signing a statement renouncing his Communist ideals. Demoralized, he left Greece in May 1940 and, at 21, sailed for the U.S. He attended Columbia University and in 1943 earned a doctorate in economics at Harvard University. He met and married his first wife, Christine Rassias, a Greek-American.

He became an American citizen and served with the U.S. Navy in the final years of World War II.

In 1946, Papandreou returned briefly to Harvard as a lecturer in economics before joining the faculties of the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University and, in 1955, UC Berkeley, where he became a full professor and, later, chairman of the economics department.

He was respected by peers and popular among students for his lively lectures. He was an intelligent, charismatic figure who could spellbind large groups or charm individuals at a quiet dinner--qualities he later converted into tools of political power.

He also had a way with women. His second wife, Margaret Chant--who would become a respected first lady of Greece and the mother of Papandreou’s four children--recalled in a 1982 New York Times Magazine interview how she met Papandreou in a dentist’s waiting room in 1948. “We went from the dentist’s office to have a drink, and within an hour I was very impressed with his mind and, what strikes everyone about Andreas, his immense charm. By the end of the evening, I was in love with him.”

Papandreou made his first trip back to Greece in 1953 and six years later returned permanently, accepting an offer from then-Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis to form a Center for Economic Research in Athens.

In 1964, Papandreou renounced his U.S. citizenship to run for the Greek Parliament from his father’s home district of Patras. He won decisively and became chief aide to his father, who had become prime minister. He was also named deputy minister of economic coordination.

When the April 1967 coup erupted, Papandreou and his father were among 6,000 political prisoners rounded up by the military; only pressure from influential friends in the United States won his release and the freedom to leave the country. Returning home after the junta collapsed, Papandreou formed a new political party, which he saw more as a vehicle to exercise personal power than a democratic institution.

He failed in his first two electoral attempts, but amid growing voter dissatisfaction with the Old Guard and the desire for change, Papandreou finally rode to power in 1981 elections as Greece’s first socialist leader.

Critics and admirers alike acknowledged that his rise to power had ushered in a new era in Greek politics. He lowered the voting age to 18, ended film censorship and permitted divorce and civil marriages. He pushed legislation that made adultery no longer a criminal offense and challenged the power of the Greek Orthodox Church.

But for the most part, he nibbled at the edges of the nation’s biggest problems, failing to carry through much-needed health and educational reforms or to place the country’s battered economy on a sound footing.

Papandreou’s Pasok party was returned to power in 1985, but toward the end of his term he became entwined in a massive embezzlement scandal that resulted in the arrest or dismissal of dozens of senior officials in his government. Weakened by scandal and the effects of triple-bypass heart surgery in 1988, Papandreou lost national elections in 1989 and was himself put on trial; he was acquitted in January 1991.

After almost four years in opposition, a physically and politically weakened Papandreou managed to win reelection to a third term as premier but accomplished little. His government drifted aimlessly as he devoted his remaining energies almost completely to clinging to power.

“Each leader has the privilege of choosing the way he will leave” the political scene, noted Constantine Simitis, a onetime Papandreou Cabinet minister. “Andreas Papandreou chose to deny reality.”

Marshall was recently on assignment in Athens.