Gifted Greek: The Enigma of Andreas Papandreou

Gifted Greek is a reflection on twentieth-century Greek history and politics, as well as a character study of its first socialist prime minister, Andreas Papandreou. Monteagle Stearns witnessed the transformation of Papandreou from an affable American economist to a stormy, anti-American Greek, over Stearns’s three diplomatic assignments to Athens, the last as a U.S. ambassador.

The unresolved dispute over how and by whom Greece should be governed parallels the equally unresolved issues bet...