Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a Greek Democrat and Political Maverick by Stan Draenos (review)

As political dynasties go, the Papandreou dynasty in Greece must rank as one of the most significant and long lasting. Grandfather, son, and grandchild have all been prime ministers, and a Papandreou has been an active part of Greek politics for what will soon be a hundred years. Of these three, however, the most significant political figure must certainly have been the son—Andreas Papandreou. A key figure in the critical events of the 1960s that led to the military coup of 1967, a resistance leader in exile during the military dictatorship, and the man who would dominate Greek politics in the 1980s and beyond, Andreas could reasonably be considered the most important Greek politician of the twentieth century—and perhaps the most divisive, with public opinion largely divided between his fervent admirers and bitter critics.

Yet, despite the towering figure of Andreas in modern Greek history, Stan Draenos’s new book, Andreas Papandreou: The Making of a Greek Democrat and Political Maverick, is the first comprehensive political biography of the man in English. As such, it is an incredibly welcome addition to the English- language literature on modern Greek politics and a text that will whet the appetite for what one hopes will be future volumes.

Draenos’s book is both a personal and a political biography of Andreas, beginning with his birth on Chios in 1919 (where his father was serving as governor of the Aegean islands) and concluding in the days immediately after the coup of 21 April 1967. While the book gives some interesting insights into Andreas the person—from his upbringing as the scion of a prominent political family to his education in Greece and the United States and his distinguished US academic career—the main focus of the book is Andreas the politician: the political ideas, motivations, philosophy, and tactics that, once he made the leap back into the Greek political arena, defined his political life.

And what a political life it was. As Draenos lucidly details, Andreas and his father were two of the key characters in the political melodrama that engulfed Greece from the early 1960s to 1967. Giving up his academic career and entering Greek politics for good in 1963, Andreas returned to a Greece very different from the one he left in 1940. The country was in the throes of a remarkable transformation—from a largely agrarian, poverty- stricken country deeply divided by the hatreds and animosities of the civil war and still under the influence of an outside patron (first Britain, then the United States) to the modern, independent, fully democratic, and largely affluent country it would become in the 1980s and 1990s. The pivotal decade, Draenos vividly argues, was the 1960s, and, in many ways, the person often at the center of it was Andreas.

The bulk of the book, then, is spent analyzing in wonderful and lucidly written detail seemingly every twist and turn in Greek political life in the 1960s. In this saga, Draenos rightly highlights the struggle between the Papandreous and their Center Union (CU) party, on the one hand, and the monarchy, the right, and disaffected centrists, on the other. This conflict, which began with allegations of fraud and intimidation in the Right’s 1961 election victory and took on renewed force with the CU’s election victories in 1963 and 1964, came to a head with the 1965 resignation of George Papandreou as prime minister following a dispute with the young King Constantine. The governments that followed, made up of rightists and CU “apostates,” became the focal point of the Papandreous’ “unyielding struggle” against what they claimed had been a royal coup. Andreas, in particular, became progressively more vocal in his denunciations of the monarchy, the Right (and its control of the military), and the “foreign element” (understood, of course, to be the United States). It was in this atmosphere of ongoing crisis...