The first was a relaxed interview he had conducted with Barry Goldwater in mid-August during his Washington trip, a follow-up to the interview from a year earlier. The conversation, transcribed by Goldwater’s office, covered a wide range of international and domestic issues, including Goldwater’s apprehension over the Test Ban Treaty, skepticism over a NATO multilateral nuclear force, unconcern over the treatment of Negroes affecting the US image abroad, and high praise for “one of my closest friends” Tom Pappas, a leading Republican Party fundraiser, who, after success in the food business, was trying to build a second fortune as a Greek industrialist.51
Elias held publication until the Greek campaign was on full boil. Then, on October 13, the Athens Daily Post published the interview as a full front-page story, along with a photograph of the two men talking under the headline: “The Next American President?” In the ten-page transcript were the senator’s answers to some questions on Greek affairs, which might have seemed benign to an American audience. In one section, Goldwater responded forcefully to a question asking if a dictatorship might solve Greece’s problems by declaring: “I am against the establishment of a dictatorship anyplace…Oh, Lord, no. Greece is the most sophisticated civilized country in the world. Our democratic way of government came from Greece…It would be tragic if Greece, where democracy itself was first founded, were to go back to dictatorship. I can’t even imagine the Greeks thinking about it.”52 So close to an election, these remarks took on a different tone, and within the Greek political arena, this answer could be interpreted as veiled criticism of Karamanlis.
The interview included a follow-up to a question Elias had asked Goldwater the year before. “What has been the result of your US investigation into accusations by the Greek nationalistic parties against the role of the American Embassy in Athens during the last elections, and generally how do you feel about the question of free elections in a democratic society?” Though allowing how he hadn’t seen the “final results of the investigation about alleged US favoritism shown in the 1961 election,” Goldwater added, “We must take all necessary steps that this will not happen again…I certainly hope that the next elections will be absolutely free and that our embassy over there this time will stay completely neutral and out of them.”53
Elias had drawn blood. Publication of this and Elias’s other exclusive interviews, according to the State Department, had the net effect of raising the troublesome issue of American intervention in Greek politics. Elias had also injected questions regarding possible Yugoslav and Bulgarian designs on Macedonia, the answers to which exacerbated the long-festering Macedonia issue. Other Center Union–slanted newspapers used Elias’s articles to imply that the Karamanlis government had mishandled the country’s foreign affairs.
For his second blockbuster, on Sunday, October 20, 1963, Elias disclosed in all three of his publications the full text of a confidential aide-memoire on US assistance matters sent to the Greek government on August 7. It outlined Washington’s thinking on the scope and nature of military and economic assistance the US proposed to offer Greece after 1964 and had been personally approved by the President. Coupled with it was a “top secret” report prepared by American economist Richard Westebbe, who was serving as executive director of the Foreign Trade Administration of the Greek Ministry of Commerce, a vestige of the Marshall Plan that exercised great influence over major government procurements. Entitled “Background notes for discussion in Washington,” it had been prepared for the Greek minister of coordination’s recent visit.
Elias received his copy, in Greek, from a source in the Greek government and prepared an English-language version for the Athens Daily Post. Concerned that such a report be both authentic and translated correctly, he called a surprised Westebbe and told him what he was planning to publish, but that he first wanted Westebbe to verify the documents and his translation. Westebbe was a longtime friend of Andreas Papandreou and a fellow Harvard economist. He willingly complied, over dinner at now-divorced Persa Metaxas’s place.54
Ambassador Labouisse called it a “further bombshell.”55 Even competing papers gave the news front-page coverage, with Eleftheria headlining: “Americans discontinue all aid and demand increase of defense expenditures at expense of budget, fruits of Papaligouras mission to Washington.”56 The Center Union candidates and their supporting press hammered away at the idea that the Karamanlis government had failed to represent Greece adequately in negotiations and that the “discontinuance” of aid was the result of ERE consistently boasting about Greece’s prosperity. As Ambassador Labouisse scrambled to prepare a response, he worried in a confidential memorandum to the secretary of state about what else Elias might publish: “This series of mischievous and irresponsible articles…may well influence election results.”57 On November 3, Papandreou’s liberal Center Union party won a narrow victory, earning a 42 percent plurality and 138 seats. The ERE conservatives won 132 seats. The far-left EDA, with 28 seats, held the balance of power. This was not the ERE victory predicted by the CIA in its “top secret” analysis.58 A November 10 article in the Los Angeles Times declared “Goldwater Linked to Greek Premier’s Fall.”59 The Washington Post amplified this the next day on page one: “Taped Goldwater Interview Proves Factor in Upsetting Caramanlis [sic],” explaining that the senator had “unwittingly” helped change the expected outcome of “one of NATO’s most right-wing regimes.”60 An American observer commented, “Beware Greeks bearing tape recorders.”61
The Center Union victory, while personally pleasing, was a secondary matter to Elias. He was ecstatic that, in such a close election, his work might have tipped the result. Papandreou, not wanting to form a minority government dependent on Communist and far left support, resigned, gambling on a new election. On February 16, 1964, his party won a decisive victory—an absolute majority with 171 seats.62 A new era in Greek politics had arrived. But, Elias wondered, how long could it last?
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ELIAS’S GOLDWATER INTERVIEW had also provoked a sarcastic remark at Kennedy’s last press conference before Dallas. On October 31, in response to a reporter’s question about the undeclared candidacy of GOP frontrunner Barry Goldwater, Kennedy jested that it would be “unfair” to assess the Arizona senator’s presidential prospects because he “has had a busy week selling TVA…suggesting that military commanders overseas be permitted to use nuclear weapons…[and] involving himself in the Greek elections.”63 The room erupted in laughter, but a week later many in Athens found the quip anything but funny.
News of Kennedy’s assassination shocked Elias. He reacted “sadly and horribly” and waited in the long line to sign the memorial book at the US Embassy. But he had never embraced the Camelot myth: if he had had to give Kennedy a grade as President, it would have been a charitable “incomplete.” Elias believed that “JFK was convinced, until the day he died in Dallas, that Burke and I were involved in a conspiracy against the Kennedys. In no way was that ever true.”
The day after the Greek election, Phillips Talbot, the head the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs, circulated a confidential memorandum with secret attachments seeking to deny Demetracopoulos future entry into the United States.64 Among the recipients was Pierre Salinger.
14.The Koumparos and the Star Reporter
IN THE GREEK ORTHODOX FAITH, a koumparos is the best man at the wedding who becomes the godfather to the first-born or all the children of the marriage. In business and politics, he is the leader who cements and wields his power through the provision of patronage and favors. Tom Pappas was proud to be a koumparos. To some he was a benevolent godfather figure, opening doors of opportunity to fellow Greeks and Greek-Americans. He was the civic-minded, public-spirited, generous philanthropist. He was the fixer providing much needed cash, advice, and connections to an expansive network of beneficiaries, reaching well beyond his ethnic or village kin to the highest reaches of political power in Greece and America. To others he was a manipulative, ruthless, and cunning operator, a braggart, robber baron, an amoral or immoral power-hungry narcissist.
Born Antonios Papadopoulos on October 24, 1899 in the village of Filiatra, in the Western Peloponnesian region of Messinia, near the Ionian coast, Thomas Anthony Pappas emigrated to Boston with his parents in 1903. The family, which later included a brother and two sisters, lived in an apartment in working-class Somerville, Massachusetts.
He first worked for nothing in the corner grocery store his father, Konstantinos, ran in Boston’s gritty North End, where poor immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe lived in a world of congested tenements, coarse coal soot, and manure-pocked streets. His first job was selling newspapers for pennies. Later his father paid him fifty cents a week.
Little is known of Tom Pappas’s childhood other than his driving ambition, eager participation in all parts of the family business, and steadfast devotion to his church. While his younger brother John attended public and private schools, college and law school, Tom was tutored privately by a neighbor, then took night classes at Northeastern and Boston Universities to hone his business skills. In 1916, after taking over C. Pappas Co. Inc., his father’s import-export operation and a small grocery, he steadily grew the business into a chain of thirty neighborhood food stores, then forty-nine supermarkets, which he sold in 1954. Along the way he converted the operation from one servicing retail stores into a leading food- and liquor-importing and distribution business.1
The interlocking businesses, operating under the names of C. Pappas Company, Gloria Food Stores, and Suffolk Grocery Company, did well from the start. But the accelerant for his early success was the cache of alcoholic beverages he stockpiled before Prohibition, along with his skill at securing additional inventory during the dry years. The brothers reportedly lost nearly $2,000,000 (more than $27 million in today’s dollars) in the Wall Street crash, and saw much of their fortune destroyed, but they treated it as merely a “temporary annoyance.”2 Embracing the attitude that they “always get what [they] want,” their business recovered and flourished better than ever.3
Pappas kept his Greek citizenship when he became an American citizen in 1924. This dual connection proved invaluable when he diversified into shipping and built an empire in overseas investments during the 1950s and 1960s. The brothers Pappas saw community and political participation as essential ingredients to successfully growing their core business before branching into real estate and horse racing. In politics, Tom Pappas cultivated relationships with Republicans. His brother John became an active and quite conservative Democrat, rewarded in his twenties with a part-time political appointment that allowed him the lifetime honor of being called “judge.”4 For decades the brothers hosted weekly private luncheons in a back room at their company warehouse in South Boston.5 Later their expanded Summer Street corporate headquarters included a dining room that could accommodate two dozen politicians, public officials, lobbyists, and favored journalists for good fellowship and lavish two-to-three-hour midday meals of Greek food and alcoholic beverages. Smoke from fine cigars hung in the air. Political gossip and insider business information were always on the menu.
Participants came from both political parties. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was probably the top draw. But the place was also a favorite hangout for Democrat John McCormack, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, whenever he returned to Boston. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy visited several times during his spectacular rise and fall, as did Senators Leverett Saltonstall from Massachusetts and Styles Bridges from New Hampshire. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Nixon crowd came too.
The brothers served on for-profit boards that furthered their strategic business interests. Tom also joined non-profits, serving not only as board member, but also as trustee, chairman, president, and fund-drive leader for a diverse group of organizations, especially the Greek Orthodox Church. To some organizations, Tom Pappas was known as a “ten-percenter.” This meant he would typically pledge large amounts at big public charitable events, get his photo taken for the accompanying newspaper story praising his generosity. Then, when the organization tried to collect, he would play hard to get, finally donating only 10 percent of his original pledge. A business partner recalled another trick Pappas would pull at fundraising events: forcefully advocating a particular cause and immediately writing a large check on its behalf. Announcing his contribution with great fanfare, he would then publicly pressure others to do the same. At the end of the evening, while the organizers were tallying their haul, Pappas would quietly take back his check.6
Tom worked his way up the ranks of the Massachusetts Republican Party and attended his first national convention as a delegate to the 1944 Republican Convention in Chicago. At the 1948 Convention in Philadelphia he met and bonded with thirty-five-year-old freshman California congressman Richard Nixon, sharing stories of growing up with fathers who operated small grocery stores. Moving to a national stage in 1952, Pappas became a state chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower and joined the Republican National Finance Committee. Tom worked hard, and during the next eight years was rewarded for his fundraising successes. Soon Vice President Richard M. Nixon became simply “Dick.”
Not long after the inauguration in 1953, Pappas arranged to bring business associates to the White House and federal agencies, demonstrating his access and clout. He also met during the day, privately, with the President for “off the record” meetings and in evenings at White House stag parties.7 He was a guest at state dinners, providing Eisenhower a steady stream of personal gifts, solicitous notes and telegrams, and fundraising opportunities.8
Just as brother John was known as “The Judge,” Tom was deferentially referred to as “The Ambassador,” often erroneously thought of as having served as United States Ambassador to Greece.9 The reality is something else. Shortly after the Eisenhower inauguration, Tom Pappas’s friends in the new administration sought to make him ambassador to Greece, but FBI background checks revealed some unsavory aspects of his past, including tax delinquencies and underworld gambling connections.10 The most odious revelations concerned Pappas’s time as the chairman of the World War II Greek War Relief campaign, from which he funneled charitable funds to pet Republican causes.11 Pappas probably would have had enough White House support to overcome these damaging FBI reports except that, during the frenzied anti-Communist atmosphere of the time, other uncorroborated misinformation found its way into his FBI file that confused him with a same-named supporter of a Greek umbrella group monitored by Senator Joe McCarthy’s committee for its Communist activities.12 That was enough to derail his nomination.
Pappas continued to be a White House presence, and in February 1955, Eisenhower aides wrote to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that the President would appreciate the Secretary’s “willingness to consider Pappas for some embassy.”13 Within days, Pappas was appointed “special ambassador” to Uruguay in connection with the second-term inaugural ceremonies of President Luis Batlle Berres, scheduled for two weeks later in Montevideo. This brief March trip gave him the right to be called “ambassador” for the rest of his life, although Uruguay was hardly an area of business interest to him.
Eisenhower’s heart attack in late September 1955 shocked the nation and caused the convalescing President to consider replacing Nixon on his reelection ticket with someone he believed had the gravitas to be Commander in Chief.14 Tom Pappas joined a group of Republican regulars who appreciated Nixon’s red-meat rhetoric and were outraged at the idea of Eisenhower distancing himself from his vice president. When Eisenhower ran unopposed in the New Hampshire presidential primary of 1956, Pappas and his allies organized and funded a stealth write-in campaign for Richard Nixon instead.15 Pappas continued to block various efforts to “Dump Nixon,” even one at the convention that would have replaced him with a longtime Pappas ally, Massachusetts governor Christian Herter.16 He also convinced his brother to work for a Democrats-for-Nixon group.
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THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION year of 1960 dawned optimistically for Tom Pappas and Richard Nixon. “Dick” sent “Tom” a note thanking him for his expression of friendship and gushing over the “generous supply of pistachio nuts.”17 Pappas offered to do all he could to ensure victory and underwrote the cost of sending copies of Nixon’s book, The Challenges We Face, to all delegates at the Republican National Convention.18 He involved his friend Spyros Skouras, president of 20th Century Fox, in the production of a flattering campaign film biography. He hosted a major fundraiser. But in November his candidate lost to John F. Kennedy.
At the beginning of 1961, Pappas was invited to join the series of meetings concerning Nixon’s future.19 He supported his move to New York and plans to practice law. Pappas stayed in regular communication with Nixon during his wilderness years, urging him, for example, to defend his movie mogul buddy Skouras against the Hollywood 10 blacklisting lawsuit brought by “those 10 Communist lawyers.”20
Throughout Richard Nixon’s career, he made use of clandestine contributions, though when exposed, they would plague him. Eisenhower almost dropped Nixon from the ticket in 1952 because of his history of cultivating sleazy financial connections.21 Disclosure of a deceptive $205,000 loan from tycoon Howard Hughes in 1956 played a decisive role in Nixon’s 1960 defeat.
Over the years, Nixon acquired many wealthy patrons, but few proved as longstanding, powerful, and steadfast as Thomas Anthony Pappas. In the early 1960s, however, Pappas’s primary focus was his own investment opportunities in Greece. Recent changes in Greek law designed to attract foreign investment provided Pappas with an opening. The Greek economy was booming. At the time, Shell and Mobil were the dominant oil-producing multinationals in the country, with BP, Fina, and Caltex lagging behind, and the otherwise mighty Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso) on the outside looking in. According to a former Esso executive, his company “never could develop the government relations that were essential to the issuance of the permits that were required.”22 That all changed in 1962, when Esso Executive Vice President Bill Stott turned to his fellow Republican and friend Tom Pappas. Aware of Pappas’s frustrated goals, Stott proposed a strategic alliance, asserting: “You’re going to get us into Greece.”23 Pappas took the $166-million challenge, pulled the necessary strings, and made the right payoffs. His reward was an equity interest in a new venture called Esso-Pappas—the first time an individual had received equal billing with Esso.
It was not a simple transaction. Prime Minister Karamanlis wanted Serres, his hometown prefecture, in the Macedonian region of northern Greece, to be a substantial beneficiary of the investment. In exchange for his approval, he demanded that Pappas build not only a large-scale oil refinery, but a chemical plant and a company to promote local interests. He also wanted a fertilizer plant and a mill to produce rolling steel, all located in Thessaloniki. It was this ambitious overreach that had caused other potential refinery developers, such as Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos, to back out of the competition.
While working on the Esso deal, Pappas was also developing parallel interests in shipping, a tomato-paste plant, and the establishment of a Greek Coca-Cola operation. To him, if not Esso, these different deals were mutually reinforcing.
In return for accepting Prime Minister Karamanlis’s conditions, Pappas demanded sweetheart contracts heavily weighted in the company’s favor. Karamanlis readily acceded, but for years the deal was hotly debated in Parliament and in the Greek press. Its supporters trumpeted what was described as a $200-million investment that would create as many as 7,000 jobs. At the same time George Papandreou excoriated the transaction as “colonialist exploitation,” giving Pappas exclusive monopoly rights to twenty-nine products plus the right to supply oil to Greece at prices well above market value.24
When Papandreou and his Center Union Party mounted their challenge to Karamanlis in 1963, they made this “colonial treaty” giveaway a leading issue and pledged to revise the agreements as a campaign promise. It helped Papandreou win the election. Taking charge in 1964, the new prime minister brought in a foreign consulting firm that confirmed the grossly inflated price of the crude oil Pappas was selling and a long list of monopolies he controlled on synthetic products.25 The next step was assembling a renegotiation team of Andreas Papandreou, his father’s chief economic advisor; George Mavros, a moderate member of the Center Union Party (and longtime Demetracopoulos friend); and Richard Westebbe, the American head of the Greek Foreign Trade Administration (and a reliable Demetracopoulos source).26
The negotiating triumvirate sought five revisions, all of which reduced the power of Pappas in the Greek economy.27 The Greek-American tycoon tried to parry the government demands, dragging out the conversation as he sought ways to avoid giving in, recalled Westebbe. But in the end Pappas blinked. Mavros had used Pappas’s desire to have the King and Queen participate in his highly publicized cornerstone-laying celebration as a “lever to get the last concessions from Pappas in the revised contract. He paid a heavy price,” Westebbe reflected.28
Pappas was delighted by the large turnout and all the praise heaped on him at the ceremony but quietly seethed at the outcome of the negotiations. Shortly thereafter, he stepped up his hiring of personnel with American Embassy experience, including former covert CIA operatives. He also added employees from his ancestral village and took a closer look at Greek politics. He didn’t sweat the political details himself, instead hiring those who did. He was always ready to make generous cash payments to smooth his way. This Esso setback, he made clear, was only one battle in an ongoing war, which he intended to win.
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THERE WAS NO question on which side Elias Demetracopoulos stood in the struggle between Tom Pappas and the Papandreou regime. Elias thought George Papandreou’s two-year “relentless struggle” campaign had been melodramatic, but politically effective. Now the elder statesman had to deliver, not just give stirring speeches. Elias looked favorably on the Center Union’s Keynesian reformist economic agenda and the reorientation of domestic policies to further education and public health and increase social services, even if the agenda risked being inflationary. The new government programs were shaped in no small part by the prime minister’s son Andreas, whose years in American academia brought him personally close to New Frontier insiders in Washington and, like them, advocated a “liberal awakening.”29 He entered politics in 1964, first winning his father’s old seat in parliament and then getting appointed by his father as “minister to the prime minister.” Elias was not close to Andreas, but regarded George Papandreou with fondness and respect, unlike many US Embassy officials, who snickered that he was an old “fool.”30
Elias’s positive sentiments toward George were reciprocated. On March 18, 1964, the Papandreou government cancelled Karamanlis’s 1960 order declaring Elias persona non grata, calling it a “violation of press freedom and our democratic regime.”31 Greek ambassadors around the world were instructed to provide the journalist “every possible assistance.”32 Elias took advantage of these courtesies to travel more broadly, taking trips underwritten by non-Communist foreign governments and corporations. At home, the Papandreou team granted him access, even as the American Embassy did not. It gave him clout, which he didn’t hesitate to use to his advantage.
