The King Wants to Travel

The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said . . . It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.

Thus, in just about the shortest story he ever wrote, Ernest Hemingway 40 years ago described King Constantine and Queen Sophia as they were clinging to the unstable throne of Greece. Last week Constantine's son, King Paul, was also in his gardened palace at Tatoi, outside Athens, and the whiskey was still good. But unlike his father, Paul did not want to go to America. He wanted to go to Britain, and his Premier would not let him, thereby precipitating a first-class political crisis.

Private Refuge. The petty-seeming issue of the trip is actually part of a wider, more complex problem. Premier Constantine Karamanlis, 56, is a tough, staunchly antiCommunist, pro-NATO politician who in his eight years in office (the longest tenure for any Greek prime minister) has given his country stable government and a considerable measure of economic progress. But leftists and liberals attack him for allegedly having rigged the 1961 elections, which returned him to power for a fourth term, and for keeping about 1,000 political prisoners jailed who were arrested more than 15 years ago during the country's bitter and victorious war with Red insurgents.

Communists and well-meaning liberals outside Greece, particularly in Britain, this year started a concerted campaign against the Karamanlis regime, and against the royal family--notably Queen Frederika, who was accused of Nazi connections. Bertrand Russell's ban-the-bombers joined the fray, and last April, when Frederika was in London for the wedding of her third cousin Princess Alexandra, she was set upon by a crowd of demonstrators and forced to seek refuge in a private house. Britain's anti-Greek chorus was swelled by Lord Beaverbrook, who, for reasons of his own, scurrilously attacked her in his newspapers for her German background.

With all this in mind, Karamanlis advised the King--belatedly--against a planned state visit to Britain in July. There might be similar incidents during the trip, he said, and the Greek rightists, resenting left-wing attacks abroad, might make trouble, too, as they did in Salonika recently, where a left-wing member of the Greek Parliament was killed. The King's plaintive rejoinder was that he had accepted the invitation long ago and it would be ungentlemanly to back out now. The British had promised adequate security. Besides, he did not want to appear to give in to pressure from the left. King Paul was reinforced by pert Queen Frederika who, like her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, strongly feels that she knows better than her ministers what is good for her country.

Embarrassing Reds. Rebuffed, Karamanlis handed in his resignation. Usually known as loyal to the King, he was nevertheless trying to put the royal family in its place, because of widespread feeling in Greece that they have taken a somewhat-too-active part in politics of late. At the same time, Karamanlis was trying to bring about new elections, confident that his National Radical Union, which holds 180 of 300 seats in Parliament, would be victorious. Instead of calling elections, however, King Paul at week's end was attempting to patch up a coalition of present parties in Parliament--the 20 Communist members, out of dislike of Karamanlis, are embarrassingly behind the King.

But the attempt is doomed to failure unless some of Karamanlis' Deputies join the coalition. Karamanlis seemed undisturbed by the royal maneuvering. "They are trying to break up my party," he said scornfully. Snapping one finger across his palm, he added: "But I have got my party like that."

Meanwhile, without a government, the King and Queen quite literally did not know whether to stay in their garden at Tatoi or start packing for their trip. Under the Greek constitution, the monarch cannot leave the country without the consent of his government.

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