Return to Reason?

A tall, stoop-shouldered man with a mighty tongue and a little mustache took office in Cairo last week as the third Greek Premier within a fortnight.

George Papandreou (rhymes with hey you) had left occupied Athens less than a month ago (TIME, April 24). Premier Sophocles Venizelos had turned out to be a stopgap, bedeviled with mutiny, and he stepped down the minute he caught sight of the dynamic newcomer. Unable to form a cabinet right away, energetic, 56-year-old Mr. Papandreou ruled alone. He uttered such firm, authoritative commands that Cairo Greeks first blinked, then cheered. Said the man from Greece, a one time disciple of Sophocles' father, the late, great Eleutherios Venizelos: "Our watch word shall be one nation, one government, one army. ... I have no doubt at all that after the ignominy of recent weeks there will now be a general return to reason."

Backstage. British diplomacy sighed with relief; three weeks of frantic antics in the cabinet, a nervous treble to the ominous bass of mutiny in wartime, had almost wrecked the careful plans to keep the Greeks in London's orbit. Winston Churchill thought it wise to put his stamp on Papandreou, stress once more that Britain is not irrevocably wedded to King George of Greece. Said Churchill: "His Majesty's Government will give you all support. . . . The Nazi tyrant must be destroyed. . . . After this ... the Greek nation, free from foreign interference, will choose the form of democratic government under which they wish to live. The King is the servant of his people. I am sure he has no wish to force himself upon the Greek nation. . . ."

Greeks were not so sure; they recalled the last time (1936) that George had found himself without support. He fastened the Hitler-aping Metaxas dictatorship upon the land.

Box Office. One riddle remained: would the men of the mountains, the guerrillas of the Communist-led EAM and the middle-road EDES, linked now in a committee of liberation that might become a government any day, accept Papandreou as a genuine member of the resistance movement? Or would they say that he had knuckled under to the King to get himself the premiership? Papandreou had dropped a puzzling remark: "Greek politics have changed. We are no longer royalists or republicans. Just nationalists or extreme left-wingers." The committeemen of the mountains were in touch with Tito of Yugoslavia, a man with a strikingly similar problem, and they gave evidence of being attuned to suggestions from Moscow.

Against all this stood a stubborn fact of power politics: Greece is in the British sphere and Moscow knows it. The Kremlin can plan to cast a spell on Yugoslavia, but it cannot hope to manage Greece--unless the British so misplay their cards as to force the Greeks to join a Balkan Federation, cued from Moscow.

Last week three representatives of EAM and one from EDES were reported in Syria, on their way to Cairo. They were also reported having trouble getting permits to enter British-managed territory. Their visit will determine whether Papandreou: 1) achieves a cabinet of national unity, 2) joins his predecessors in an overcrowded limbo.

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