Andreas Papandreou

Andreas Georgiou Papandreou was a Greek economist, a socialist politician and a dominant figure in Greek politics. He served two terms as Prime Minister of Greece (October 21, 1981, to July 2, 1989, and October 13, 1993, to January 22, 1996). In 1999, Papandreou was posthumously awarded the Swedish Order of the Polar Star.

Papandreou was born on the island of Chios, Greece, the son of the leading Greek liberal politician George Papandreou. His mother, born Zofia (Sofia) Mineyko, was half Polish. Before university, he attended Athens Experimental (Piramatiko) Lyceum, a leading public secondary education institution in Greece. He attended the University of Athens from 1937, and from 1938. The Greek Parliament approved Ioannis Metaxas as Prime Minister in April 1936. After a turbulent period of strikes and unrest, Metaxas by Royal Decree suspended the Parliament on 4 August 1936 and prepared Greece ultimately for World War II.

In 1942, Papandreou enrolled at Harvard University, where he completed a doctorate in economics. In 1943, Papandreou joined America's war effort and volunteered for the US Navy where he served as a nurse at Bethesda Hospital for war wounded, and became a United States citizen. He returned to Harvard in 1946 and served as a lecturer and associate professor until 1947. He then held professorships at the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley (where he was chair of the Department of Economics), the University of Stockholm and York University in Toronto, Canada. In 1948, he entered into a relationship with University of Minnesota journalism student Margaret Chant. After Chant obtained a divorce and after his own divorce with Christina Rasia, his first wife, Papandreou and Chant were married in 1951. They had three sons and a daughter.

Papandreou returned to Greece in 1959, where he headed an economic development research program, by invitation of Prime Minister Constantine Karamanlis. In 1960, he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors and General Director of the Athens Economic Research Center, and Advisor to the Bank of Greece. In 1963, his father George Papandreou, head of the Center Union, became Prime Minister of Greece. Andreas became his chief economic advisor. He renounced his American citizenship and was elected to the Greek Parliament in the Greek legislative election, 1964. He immediately became Minister to the First Ministry of State (in effect, assistant Prime Minister).

Papandreou took publicly a neutral stand on the Cold War and wished for Greece to be more independent from the USA. He also criticized the massive presence of American military and intelligence in Greece, and sought to remove senior officers with "anti-democratic tendencies" from the Greek military.

In 1965, while the "Aspida" conspiracy within the Army, alleged by the political opposition to involve Andreas personally, was being investigated, George Papandreou moved to fire the defense minister and assume the post himself. King Constantine refused to endorse this move and essentially forced George Papandreou's resignation. Greece entered a period of political polarisation and instability, which ended with the coup d'état of 21 April 1967.

When the Greek Colonels led by George Papadopoulos seized power in April 1967, Andreas was incarcerated while his father George Papandreou was put under house arrest. George Papandreou, already at advanced age, died in 1968.Under American pressure, the military regime released Andreas on condition that he leave the country. In Paris, while in exile, Andreas Papandreou formed an "anti-dictatorship organization", the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK), and toured the world rallying opposition to the Greek military regime. Despite his former American citizenship and academic career in the United States, Papandreou held the Central Intelligence Agency responsible for the 1967 coup and became increasingly critical of the U.S. Government.


In the early seventies, during the latter phase of the dictatorship in Greece, Papandreou, along with most leading Greek politicians, in exile or in Greece, opposed the process of political normalisation attempted by George Papadopoulos and his appointed PM, Spyros Markezinis. In August 6, 1974, Andreas Papandreou called an extraordinary meeting of the National Congress of PAK in Winterthur, Switzerland, which decided its dissolution without announcing it publicly.

Papandreou returned to Greece after the fall of the junta in 1974, during metapolitefsi, and formed a new "radical" party, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or PASOK. Most of his former PAK companions, as well as members of other anti-dictatorial groups such as the Democratic Defense joined in the new party. He also testified in the first of the Greek junta trials about the alleged involvement of the junta with the CIA.

At that year's elections, PASOK received only 13.5% of the vote, but in 1977 it polled 25%, and Papandreou became Leader of the Opposition. At the 1981 elections, PASOK won a landslide victory over the conservative New Democracy Party, and Papandreou became Greece's first socialist Prime Minister.

In office, Papandreou backtracked from much of his campaign rhetoric and followed a more conventional approach. Greece did not withdraw from NATO, United States troops and military bases were not ordered out of Greece, and Greek membership in the European Economic Community continued. In domestic politics, Papandreou's government carried through sweeping reforms of social policy by expanding health care coverage (the "National Health System" was instituted), promoting state-subsidized tourism for lower-income families, and funding social establishments for the elderly. In a move strongly opposed by the Greek Orthodox Church, Papandreou introduced, for the first time in Greece, the process of civil marriage. Prior to the institution of civil marriages in Greece, the only legally recognized marriages were those conducted in the Greek Orthodox Church. Couples seeking a civil marriage had to get married outside Greece, generally in Italy. Also, under PASOK, the Greek State also appropriated real estate properties previously owned by the Church.

Papandreou introduced various reforms in the administration and curriculum of the Greek educational system, allowing students to participate in the election process for their professors and deans in the university, and abolishing tenure.

A major part of Papandreou's allagi (change) involved driving out the "old families" ("tzakia" literally: fireplaces using the traditional Greek expression for the genealogy of families), which allegedly influenced Greek politics from behind the scenes and belonged to the traditional Greek Right.

Papandreou was comfortably re-elected in 1985 with 46% of the vote, but, in the years to follow, his premiership became increasingly clouded by controversy and scandal. In 1989, he divorced his wife Margaret Papandreou and married Dimitra Liani, while in the same year he was indicted by Parliament in connection with a US$200 million Bank of Crete embezzlement scandal, and was accused of facilitating the embezzlement by ordering state corporations to transfer their holdings to the Bank of Crete, where the interest was allegedly skimmed off to benefit PASOK, and possibly some of its highest functionaries. Following the many repercussions of the so-called Koskotas scandal, the 1989 elections produced a deadlock, leading to a prolonged political crisis. Papandreou's PASOK's won 40% of the popular vote, compared to the rival New Democracy's 46%, and, due to changes made in electoral law one year before the elections by the then reigning PASOK administration, New Democracy was not able to form a government. In the wake of three consecutive elections between 1989 and 1990, the New Democracy leader, Constantine Mitsotakis, eventually received sufficient support to form a government. In January 1992, Papandreou himself was cleared of any wrongdoing in the Koskotas scandal after a 7-6 vote in the specially convened High Court trial, ordered by the Greek parliament, with the support of both main parties, New Democracy and PASOK.

Papandreou confounded his critics by winning the next general elections of October 1993 ; however, his fragile health kept him from exercising firm political leadership. He was hospitalized with advanced heart disease and kidney failure on November 20, 1995 and finally retired from office on January 16, 1996. He died on June 23, 1996, with his funeral procession producing an outpouring of public emotion.

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget was a Swiss philosopher and natural scientist, well known for his work studying children, his theory of cognitive development and for his epistemological view called "genetic epistemology."

The very great importance he attached to the education of children made him declare in 1934 in his role as Director of the International Bureau of Education that ‘only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual’.

In 1955 he created the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."

Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world, particularly molluscs, and even published a number of papers before he graduated from high school. In fact, his long career of scientific research began when he was just eleven, with the 1907 publication of a short paper on the albino sparrow. Over the course of his career, Piaget wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles.

Piaget received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel, and also studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent work. His interest in psychoanalysis, a strain of psychological thought burgeoning at that time, can also be dated to this period. He then moved from Switzerland to Paris, France, where he taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles street school for boys run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test. It was while he was helping to mark some instances of these intelligence tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently gave wrong answers to certain questions. Piaget did not focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children kept making the same pattern of mistakes that older children and adults did not. This led him to the theory that young children's thought or cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. (Ultimately, he was to propose a global theory of developmental stages stating that individuals exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of cognition in each period in their development.) In 1921, Piaget returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, one of his students; together, the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau of Education and remained the head of this international organization until 1968.

Admiral John M. Poindexter, USN (retired)

John Marlan Poindexter is a retired American naval officer and Department of Defense official. He was Deputy National Security Advisor and National Security Advisor for the Reagan administration. He was convicted in April 1990 of multiple felonies as a result of his actions in the Iran-Contra scandal. His convictions were eventually reversed on appeal in 1991. More recently, he served a brief stint as the Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office for the administration of George W. Bush.

He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958, where he was first in his class, and among his fellow graduates was Senator John McCain. National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane graduated the following year. From 1961 to 1964, Poindexter studied as a graduate student and earned his PHD at Caltech, where he conducted laboratory research to further develop a model for understanding the Mossbauer Effect with Nobel Laureate Rudolph Mossbauer.

While commander of a destroyer squadron, he was Surface Warfare and Anti-submarine warfare Commander of battle groups in the Western Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, and he developed new tactics and battle management procedures under the Composite Warfare Commander concept. As the commanding officer of USS England, he pioneered the shipboard use of computers to manage the ship's force portion of yard overhauls.

He was also an executive officer and a chief engineer of destroyers.

As Deputy Commander of the Naval Education and Training Command, his duties included commanding the US Navy's extensive education and training programs, for which he initiated a project to develop a distributed data management system for more efficient management of training pipelines.

His significant staff assignments included: Executive Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and Special Assistant for Systems Analysis to the Secretary of Defense. He reached the rank of Vice Admiral, but was retired as a Rear Admiral in 1987.

Poindexter went on to serve in the Reagan Administration as Military Assistant, from 1981 to 1983, as Deputy National Security Advisor from 1983 to 1985, and as National Security Advisor from 1985 to 1986. From 1983 to 1985, Poindexter was responsible for leading and managing the National Security Council staff as chairman of the Crisis Pre-planning Group. As National Security Advisor, Vice Admiral Poindexter was responsible for providing recommendations to the President on national security, foreign policy and defense policy.

Major events in which he played a significant role for the Executive branch included: the Strategic Defense Initiative, Operation Urgent Fury, the Achille Lauro incident, Operation El Dorado Canyon (in response to Libyan terrorist attacks), the Reykjavik Summit with the Soviets.

Poindexter was convicted on multiple felony counts on April 7, 1990 for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury, defrauding the government, and the alteration and destruction of evidence pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair. The convictions were reversed in 1991 on the technical grounds that the prosecution's evidence may have been tainted by exposure to Poindexter's testimony before the joint House-Senate committee investigating the matter, in which Poindexter's testimony was compelled by a grant of 'use immunity'. The prosecution was not able to re-try the case.

From 1988 to 1989, Poindexter was senior scientist at Presearch, Inc., which had primarily been involved with defense studies and analysis. Faced with anticipated defense budget reductions, Poindexter joined the firm to develop new commercial enterprises. He designed and developed hardware and software for the prototype of a digital real-time, imaging system to be used for physical security of high value facilities. It was used to obtain a contract for a nuclear power plant security system.

From 1990 to 1996, Poindexter served as co-founder of TP Systems, Inc., a software development firm specializing in commercial software for the IBM PCs and compatibles; Poindexter was the chief designer and programmer. Development included a symbolic debugger for multi-tasking environments, a BBS communications program, and numerous utility programs.

From 1993 to 1996, Poindexter served as a consultant to Elkins Group. Elkins was a business alliance with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), which has developed the Elkins Interactive Training Network (EITN); a satellite based training delivery system. Poindexter was the chairman of the Maritime Advisory Committee and a member of Elkins' board of directors. He also provided advice on strategic planning.

From 1996 to 2002 Poindexter served as senior vice president for SYNTEK Technologies. SYNTEK is a small high technology firm with contracts in domestic and international defense and commercial business. Poindexter was responsible for high-level advice on management and direction of information systems projects (for example Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Project Genoa).

From December 2002, to August 2003, Poindexter served as the Director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO). The controversial mission of the IAO was to imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components, and prototype closed-loop information systems that will counter asymmetric threats (most notably, terrorist threats) by achieving total information awareness: enabling preemption; national security warning; and, national security decision making.

Poindexter also faced immense criticism from the media and politicians about the Policy Analysis Market project, a prediction market that would have rewarded participants for accurately predicting geopolitical trends in the Middle East. This was portrayed in the media as profiting from the assassination of heads of state and acts of terrorism due to such events being mentioned on illustrative sample screens showing the interface. The controversy over the futures market led to a Congressional audit of the IAO in general, which revealed a fundamental lack of privacy protection for American citizens. Funding for the IAO was subsequently cut and Poindexter retired from DARPA on August 12, 2003.