The Besieged King

In Athens, the birthplace of democracy and often the site of its suffering, the floodlit Acropolis looked down upon a peaceful city preparing to retire for the night. Late diners strolled through the Plaka district of restaurants and tavernas, and traffic thinned to a trickle in the city's center. Then, only moments after midnight, moving so fast that it all seemed over in minutes, shadowy figures in battle dress began to appear everywhere. From barracks in Athens and all over Greece, troops slipped quietly out and took up battle stations in every key town, at every major intersection, at every railroad station, airport and radio transmitter. From the lovely plains of Lakonia to the forbidding hills of Macedonia, Greece quickly found itself last week under the grip of a new master: the army.

All radio stations faded off the air. Then the armed forces station broke the silence to announce a curt and chilling bulletin: in the name of the King, the army had seized power. Tanks and armored personnel carriers stood at every intersection, five of them with pointed barrels taking up posts outside Parliament. Greece's borders were closed, and its communications with the outside world stopped. No planes could land or take off, and arriving ships were turned away from ports. Suddenly, a land of 8,550,000 people, roughly the size of the state of New York, found itself totally cut off from the rest of a puzzled world, in the first military takeover in Free Europe since the 1930s.

Barricade. In Athens' Kolonaki district, three soldiers and a captain called at 2 a.m. upon Premier Panayotis Kanellopoulos, who had heard of trouble and barricaded his door. The officer explained that they had come to protect him. "I need no protection," cried Kanellopoulos. "I am the Premier of Greece." The soldiers broke down the door. "Why don't you kill me here?" the Premier asked. The soldiers hustled him swiftly into an army truck and drove him off to a detention center.

In his suburban home at Kastri, a political foe of Kanellopoulos, former Premier George Papandreou, was dragged out of bed and marched off without even being given time to put on his shoes; he had to carry them along. His leftist son Andreas, sleeping some miles away, was a particular target of the military; they sent eight soldiers and a captain to fetch him. They overpowered his bodyguard, smashed a glass door while breaking into the house and dragged Andreas off in his underpants, his feet bleeding from the glass.

The scene was much the same all over Athens. By 3 a.m., practically all of Greece's leading politicians, of almost every persuasion and leaning, had been rounded up and herded into detention centers in downtown Athens. The military suspended key clauses of the constitution, banned strikes and all public gatherings, imposed censorship on the press, closed schools, banks and stores, did away with the need for search warrants and set up special military courts to try violators. Troops patrolled the streets with orders to shoot anyone who broke the dusk-to-dawn curfew. The seizure was such a model of military precision that no one had time to organize a protest. Despite some rumors of shooting in Athens and Salonica, the coup was virtually bloodless.

Royal Refusal. When morning came, the soldiers also came to call on the man in whose name they had seized power: young King Constantine II, who was at his home in Tatoi Palace 16 miles north of Athens, where he lives with his beautiful Danish-born wife Anne-Marie and a baby daughter. When the officers told the King what they had done, he protested angrily, refused to sign a proclamation praising the coup and calling for the public's cooperation. He also refused to agree to the formation of a new government. Later that morning, Constantine drove to the defense ministry building in Athens that Greeks call the Pentagon (even though it is oblong). There he spent the rest of the day trying to persuade officers loyal to him that the coup was in no one's interest and that it was a betrayal of all the things modern Greece stood for. He failed, and returned despondently to Tatoi Palace to consult with his advisers and receive visitors.

As the head of government, Constantine still reigned over Greece, and without his consent no governmental action could legally be taken. Yet the palace coup that had occurred without the palace's consent offered him a cruel choice: either to fight the coup openly and risk being toppled from his throne or go along reluctantly in the hope of being able to influence the military later. For the time being, he chose the latter course.

Right v. Left. A solid, handsome man who, at 26, is the world's youngest monarch, Constantine thus became a besieged king, caught between the demagoguery and displeasure of Greece's leftists and the impetuous action of the rightist military. The dilemma was all the more ironic because the military is strongly promonarchist. It constantly invoked the royal name for every action during the coup, and moved to seize power chiefly because it feared that the King's enemies would win the parliamentary elections scheduled for May 28. The generals feared that victory would go to George Papandreou, 79, and his son Andreas, 48, the King's archenemies. The elder Papandreou, who resigned as Premier in a dispute with the King almost two years ago, had made it clear that he would interpret the election outcome as a plebiscite for or against the monarchy. His campaign slogan was: "Who rules Greece? The King or the people?" By the people he meant, of course, himself.

In Greece, the military is so closely tied to the monarchy that any threat to one is a threat to the other. The Greek army's loyalty to the crown has long been the chief underpinning of the monarchy, and the King's close ties to the military are symbolized by the army uniform--with decks of medals--that he wears on formal occasions. In turn, the top echelons of the army become restive whenever the King's prerogatives come under attack. Men of position who are a firm part of the Greek Establishment, they know that attacks on the monarchy threaten the system that grants them their privileges. Thus they were even willing to act against the King's will while protesting that they only sought to protect the monarchy.

Political Gap. Constantine, despite his legendary name, is not King of an ancient Greece, inheritor of the land of Minos and Alexander the Great. His is a new nation, almost 140 years old, that is still healing its wounds after centuries of foreign invasion and occupation, slavery and civil war that left the land and the people weak, drained of resources and with only their spirit for consolation. That spirit is at the heart of the present trouble, for Greece today has not retained much of its ancient legacy of moderation and temperance. The Greeks are a volatile, hotheaded and individualistic people whose political factions fight each other with the fierce ardor of the wars of the ancient city-states. The monarchy, by raising national leadership above the slings and arrows of Greek-style politics, is a needed umbrella in whose shade Greeks of every political stripe from Trotskyites to fascists wrestle for attention and control.

As royalty goes, King Constantine and his Queen, who is about to present him with their second child, are popular with the mass of the people. Schooled by his father since childhood in the art of kingship, Constantine ascended the throne at 23. But, for all his youth, he has proved to be an able leader. Until last week at least, he had kept Greece on the path of constitutional monarchy in the face of heavy pressures from both ends of the political spectrum. He has kept the country closely tied to NATO. In recent years, Greece has become an associate member of the European Common Market, and its economic growth rate has risen almost 8% annually. Constantine's handsome good looks, enlightened ideas about government and athletic prowess (he won an Olympic gold medal for sailing) have made him in the world's eyes a symbol of all that modern, progressive Greece stands for.

At home, nonetheless, the monarchy has recently come under increasing attack by many Greeks who question its relevance to the task of solving Greece's deep problems. The criticism has intensified as the political gap between the King and the Papandreous has widened. The King himself is protected from excessive public criticism by the penal code, but members of the royal family who were not protected by this law have come under heavy fire from the press.

A major target of the criticism is Queen Mother Frederika, who is blamed by the leftists--and by many others--for practically any action of the King's that they do not like. A tough, strong-willed woman who hotly defends royalty's every prerogative, she lives in retirement in a small villa at Psychiko outside Athens, frequently sees the King and his wife. Last winter, the criticism of the Queen Mother became so strong that in December the government introduced a special law in Parliament extending the lese majesty protection to all members of the royal family, including Frederika. On her part, Frederika voluntarily asked the government to cancel plans to award her a $100,000 annuity lest the action provoke another press storm.

Politicians of the Papandreou stripe accuse Frederika of pushing her son to mix actively in Greek politics instead of counseling him to stay above the battle. Whenever the King's shiny Rolls-Royce is seen outside his mother's villa, the press almost invariably reports it as cloak-and-dagger news. Last week, just before the coup, King Constantine and his wife celebrated Frederika's 50th birthday at a private lunch at the villa, where she lives with Princess Irene, 24. Her other daughter, Sophia, is married to Juan Carlos, son of the pretender to the Spanish throne, Don Juan.

Liking for Rule. The monarchy in Greece was established in 1833 soon after the Turks were driven out and Greece achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire after four centuries in its bondage. The three protecting powers--England, France and Russia--decided that the Greeks should have a non-Greek king on the throne. Oddly, the Greeks readily agreed, giving rise to the later saying: "No Greek will ever tolerate another Greek for his sovereign." The first was a Bavarian, who was dethroned after a revolution.

The Gluecksburg dynasty, to which Constantine belongs, was started in 1863. During a period of near-anarchy in Athens, a Greek delegation went to Denmark to beg King Christian IX to allow his son, Prince William George, to become their king. George I lasted on the throne for 50 years--until an assassin's bullet ended his reign. His son, Constantine I, had equally bad luck, was twice deposed by the politicians. Then came George II ("the unsmiling King"), who lost the throne to a republican coup in 1924, remained in exile for eleven years before returning, and went into exile again shortly after the Italians and Germans invaded Greece in World War II.

Unlike such dynasties as the Windsors in Britain and the Bernadotte kings of Sweden, Greek kings in this century have never been content to reign as figureheads; they like to rule too. Resentment over the Greek King's penchant for mixing in politics boiled over at the start of World War I, when the first Constantine exerted his influence on behalf of Greek neutrality. Constantine was forced into exile by a Cretan political wizard named Eleutherios Venizelos, and the feud went on for decades. The monarchy's popularity plummeted even further when George II backed the military dictatorship of General John Metaxas, who ruled Greece from 1936 until the Germans and Italians overran the country.

But in times of trouble, Greeks have always looked to their king for spiritual unity. Such was the case after World War II, when the country faced economic ruin and a bloody civil war between the Greek government and Communist guerrillas supplied from neighboring Red-ruled countries. Greeks voted 2 to 1 in a plebiscite to call back George II from his wartime exile in London and to restore his throne. Though George died in 1947, his brother Paul, who succeeded him, traveled the breadth of the peninsula with his German-born wife Frederika, rallying support for the government. They went to the battlefront in Jeeps, crossed mountains on muleback and even took meals with the peasants in the countryside. The U.S. poured in $300 million in aid under the Truman Doctrine, and General James Van Fleet went to Greece to advise the military. Thus, it was in the Greek hills that the West first blew the whistle on the spread of Communism.

Kingly Profession. King Paul felt that he had not had sufficient training for his duties; when his son Constantine was born in 1940, he spoke of preparing him for the specialized profession of "kingship." When he was six, young "Tino," as the family called him, was sent off to a spartan private school. He later spent time at each of the nation's three military academies and tasted the medicine of army discipline. "I bitterly cursed it at the time," he said later on, "but you're grateful for it all." At home, Constantine got more royal treatment, was even allowed to listen when his father talked with the politicians. "I used to sit in the corner," he remembers. "During the time the visitor was there, I was not allowed to say a word. When he left, my father would explain to me what they had been saying."

When Paul died in 1964 and Constantine graduated to the throne, many feared that the young King, who has said about his family that "we always used to work as a team," would be under the sway of the Queen Mother. But young Constantine soon showed that he had considerable toughness. He decided that his job was not for a puppet or a figurehead, and that he would have to reign as his family had before him--within the constitutional rights of the monarchy but with the strength and determination of a modern king. In fact, the Greek King has considerably more constitutional powers than most kings. He is the supreme authority of the state and commander in chief of the armed forces, concludes treaties and declares war, convokes and dissolves Parliament and appoints and dismisses ministers.

Mass Transfer. It is these powers that started the chain of trouble in which King Constantine found himself enmeshed last week. It began with the downfall of the conservative government of Constantine Karamanlis, who brought considerable stability to Greece for eight years even though his foes claimed that his elections were shams. A sweeping electoral victory in 1964 brought to power George Papandreou, the velvet-tongued leftist who has carved his image in Greek political life for a half century.

Papandreou's Center Union Party won an unprecedented 53% of the vote in national elections and carried 171 seats in the 300-seat Greek Parliament. Greece seemed about to enter another period of stable government under the new Premier. But no sooner had he taken over than Papandreou started a mass transfer of pro-palace military officers to the hinterlands, shuffling off no fewer than 2,350 officers to outlying districts away from the army nerve centers in the cities. Since the King must turn to the army when in trouble, Constantine did not like to see his loyal officers so dispersed.

Soon afterward charges by General George Grivas, the Greek army commander on Cyprus, shook the Papandreou government like a row of fig trees in a thunderstorm. Grivas said that he had uncovered a plot on Cyprus in which a group of junior officers were plotting to overthrow the monarchy, purge the army of royalists, and install an army brand of socialism. Their code name, he said, was Aspida (shield), but his most damaging statement was that their leader was none other than Papandreou's son Andreas, onetime chairman of the department of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and for a while a naturalized U.S. citizen. Andreas' ambitions, his brash style and socialist leanings make him nothing less than a political outlaw to the royalists.

When the King asked for "an administrative investigation" of the Aspida plot, the elder Papandreou tried to fire the Defense Minister, who was to conduct the inquiry, and attempted to take over the job himself. In his first big political test a mere 16 months after ascending the throne, King Constantine held firm. He told Papandreou that he would allow any member of the Center Union Party to conduct the investigation but, since it primarily involved Papandreou's son, he would not allow Papandreou to be the final judge of what action to take. Papandreou accused the King of unconstitutional meddling in politics, and resigned. His supporters went surging through the streets, rioting. It was the summer of 1965--the tensest time in Greece since the Communist insurgency of 1946-49.

Since Papandreous forces in Parliament remained a majority, the King thereafter had to appoint feeble caretaker governments. Papandreou's eventual successor, Stephan Stephanopoulos (who was also arrested last week), succeeded in whittling the Papandreou majority to a bare plurality by forging a coalition of parties. At the same time, the whole country anxiously awaited the opening of the Aspida trial, in which 28 officers were charged with high treason. The raucous proceedings, which began last November and lasted for four months in an Athens court room, finally resulted in March in conviction and prison sentences for 15 of the defendants. The royalists hoped to embarrass the Papandreous even further, but Son Andreas could not be brought to trial because he enjoyed immunity from prosecution as a member of Parliament.

Another Crisis. By the time the Stephanopoulos government fell last December, few Greek leaders were willing to take on the task of heading a government. "There is not a single politician around who would be an excellent Premier," said the King. The situation seemed saved again when Papandreou reached an agreement with the head of the National Radical Union, Panayotis Kanellopoulos. Both agreed to back a caretaker government that would carry the country through elections to be held late in May. But the Center Union Party sponsored a motion that would have assured Andreas his parliamentary immunity between the time when Parliament adjourned and the planned elections. The National Radical Union, unwilling to protect Andreas, backed out of the coalition. This time the King asked Kanellopoulos to form a government, touching off the upheaval that has led straight to the military takeover.

"People's Revolution." The Papandreous refused to back Kanellopoulos, claiming that the National Radical Union had rigged elections in the past and would do so again. Army leaders, on the other hand, were dismayed at the incredible knot tied by the politicians and were ever more fearful that Papandreou would once again reap gains at the polls. Moreover, they knew that Andreas Papandreou had been saying privately: "I am convinced that Greece must have a revolution."

The military's mood was not improved when placard-waving, pro-Papandreou forces took to the streets, battling right-wing students in Salonica and police in Athens. "This will be a constitutional deviation, a royal dictatorship," Papandreou predicted. "We have only one answer: a people's revolution." To this the King replied: "If Papandreou starts a revolution, I will start the counter-revolution." Unable to get enough votes to form a government, Kanellopoulos dissolved Parliament, set the elections for May 28--and thus, wittingly or unwittingly, cleared the stage for last week's coup.

Something for Everyone. The man who led the coup was Lieut. General Gregorios Spandidakis, 57, the army chief of staff, who announced that a "royal decree" had suspended eleven articles of the Greek constitution--even though Constantine was asleep in bed when the coup took place. The army won support from the navy and air force, and the military set out to form a new government. In a brief and simple ceremony, the new rulers were sworn into office by Chrysostomos, the Archbishop and Primate of Greece. To show his disapproval, King Constantine did not attend the ceremony, refused to take to the radio to address the people.

The new government was, of course, dominated by the military. The sole civilian, who will probably be used as a figurehead, is Premier Constantine Kollias, 66, the former chief prosecutor in the Greek Supreme Court, who is a supporter of the King and an enemy of the Papandreous. General Spandidakis became Vice Premier and Defense Minister. The important Ministry of the Interior and Security went to Brigadier General Stylianos Patakos. The post of Secretary of the Cabinet went to Colonel George Papadopoulos, the commander of the Athens garrison, who reportedly directed the force that seized the armed forces radio station, occupied the government buildings and arrested political leaders. The other ministries were distributed among senior army, navy and air force officers and a few compliant civilians. In an action that had a certain tone of the Red Guard to it, they ordered the Greek radio to play martial music and give forth tirelessly with such slogans as "Let us take our heroic ancestors for an example" and "Let the flowers of regeneration bloom over the debris of the regime of falsehood."

Premier Kollias, a bespectacled, mustachioed man who had a reputation as a conservative while a civil servant, spelled out the government's new program on radio. He promised something for just about everybody. Greece's government, he said, endorsed the ideals of the United Nations and would stand by its commitment to NATO. It would try and settle the dispute with Turkey over Cyprus in an amicable way, would work at home for better education and government services, for higher wages and better distribution of the country's wealth. Kollias also promised to reform the country's backbiting political system and restore parliamentary rule--but he did not say when; next month's elections will almost certainly be called off. In fact, the flaw in the speech was the lack of detail about how Greece's military masters intend to accomplish what other leaders, including King Constantine, have tried and failed to do.

Not so Normal. By week's end, the new government was solidly enough in control to relax some of the security precautions. Barricades and machine-gun emplacements were removed from downtown Athens and Piraeus. Tanks returned to their bases. Greece's borders were once more opened to travelers; ports and airports resumed normal operations. Premier Kollias called on businessmen to reopen banks, stock exchanges and factories so that the country's economic life would not be harmed. Still, Greece had by no means returned to normal. Though many conservative politicians were released from custody, hundreds of others remained behind the walls of army compounds. Newspapers were not allowed to publish; the only radio allowed to operate in all of Greece was the armed forces' station. Martial law was still in effect, and soldiers continued to patrol the streets.

In this tense situation, the King remained the one unifying force in the country. The new government had without a doubt reduced his power, but his defiant disapproval of the coup had enhanced his stature. For years, the monarchy has depended all too heavily on the Greek military for support. It would now be Constantine's task to influence the military toward moderation--if he can--in order to lessen the chance that his country will slip into civil war.

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