The Colonels' Coup and the American Embassy: A Diplomat's View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece

Part Three: The Author Gets Involved

Three THE AUTHOR GETS INVOLVED ANDREAS’S MARCH 1 SPEECH Two embassy officers—John Day and Richard Helgerson, the USIS information officer—decided to attend a speech given by Andreas Papandreou to the Foreign Press Association weekly luncheon in Athens on March 1, 1967. For the convenience of the correspondents present, mimeographed copies of the speech were distributed to the guests during the luncheon preceding the speech. After according the text a quick perusal and consulting together, Day and Helgerson decided it was so anti-American that it would be improper for them to sit through Andreas’s speech. So they walked out of the luncheon and returned to the Embassy. Their departure did not of course go unnoticed—every move by the ‘‘foreign factor’’ becomes a major political event in Greece—and the story was the lead item in all the newspapers the next day, with a great deal of comment . It was rumored that the walkout had been intended as a deliberate provocation of Andreas to bait him and to show the public at large that the U.S. government disapproved of him. It was also rumored that Day and Helgerson had merely carried out the orders of Anschuetz, who was up to one of his usual ‘‘snake-like’’ tricks. I believe that Day and Helgerson, although they both personally had no use for Andreas, to put it mildly—they were, in fact, leading advocates of the anti-Andreas posture of the Embassy— were genuinely motivated by a feeling that they shouldn’t sit through that sort of speech. Diplomats have a habit of walking out of things to show their own sense of impropriety as well as their displeasure. I do know that they did not consult Kay Bracken by phone before walking out of the luncheon (she was available at her office in the Embassy), and she was quite annoyed with them for having failed to do so. She thought it was an action that unnecessarily involved the U.S. Embassy in the local political conflict and created unfavorable headlines (the columns of the rightwing press were of course filled with praise for the American diplomatic walkout). Since I was out of town on a trip, Mrs. Bracken asked my wife, Louise, to arrange a luncheon date for her with a journalist friend of ours who wrote a column for Ethnos, the leading pro-Andreas paper, to permit her to mitigate the damage to the extent that she could. (This columnist had earlier let us know that he planned to write a blast against Mrs. Bracken in his paper; we had dissuaded him and then arranged for them to meet, hoping that personal contact would defuse some of the hostility.) This March 1 speech by Andreas is worth summarizing, not because it provoked the walkout (although that incident was a major event of that political season in Greece, strange as it may seem in retrospect), but because it included the major themes then being injected into the pre-electoral political campaign by Andreas, with their specifically ‘‘anti-American flavor,’’ and a summary will therefore give a firsthand view of what it was that was frightening the Americans, without as yet offering a final judgment as to whether those fears were justified. Papandreou began by citing the February 24 disclosure in the Athens press of the testimony by General Tsolakas at the ASPIDA trial, which Andreas said confirmed the view of the democratic camp that the alleged ‘‘conspiracy’’ of ASPIDA had been a ‘‘frame-up.’’ This was followed, Papandreou continued, by a judicial request, processed through the Paraskevopoulos government, for the lifting of his own parliamentary immunity so that he could be brought to trial for high treason in connection with the ASPIDA affair. The Center Union deputies had unanimously decided to vote against the lifting of his immunity because the motivations were political rather than judicial, Andreas charged. In analyzing the significance of the ASPIDA case, he claimed it showed that in Greek political life ‘‘the cards are stacked, the deck is fixed. In this light it is not surprising that the Right has been almost continuously in government for over 30 years, even though it represents a minority of the Greek electorate. To achieve this remarkable feat it has employed a variety of methods.’’ andreas’s march 1 speech 45 After detailing these techniques, Andreas...