GREECE: Three-Headed Baby

Greece’s tall, blond King Paul and Greece’s common people were fed up with military defeats, with Communist terror, with the fumbling and venality of Greek politicians. Hard on the heels of the rape of Naousa came news that Karpenesion, a heavily defended provincial capital in central Greece, had fallen to the rebels. The cabinet of doddering old Themistocles Sophoulis resigned. Sophoulis, 88, is lucid for only about an hour a day.

When the politicians went to King Paul with a list of old names in a new arrangement, they found the monarch in a stern mood. He told them that they must form a really effective and representative government; otherwise, he would install Greece’s most venerated soldier, General Alexander Papagos, as Premier. Papagos, who had driven the Italians back into Albania in 1941, would not come out of retirement unless he was given a free hand.

The politicians withdrew. They knew that a Papagos government would be a military dictatorship, that the U.S. and Britain would disapprove. Lord Mountbatten, who was commanding a British cruiser squadron in the Mediterranean, went ashore and gave his cousin, King Paul, some family advice.

The result was a compromise. Papagos was in as generalissimo, free to act without interference from the politicians. Sophoulis would head the new government as titular Premier, but the work of holding it together would be entrusted to a younger deputy Premier: 74-year-old Alexander Diomedes, economist, Byzantine scholar, novice in politics. Some Athenians professed to see a portent in the fact that, on the day the new government was formed, a two-headed baby was born in Piraeus.