Andreas Papandreou - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Papandreou was born on the island of Chios, Greece, the son of Zofia (Sofia) Mineyko and the leading Greek liberal politician George Papandreou. His maternal grandfather was Polish-born public figure Zygmunt Mineyko and his maternal grandmother was Greek. Before university, he attended Athens College a leading private school in Greece. He attended the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens from 1937 until 1938 when, during the Fascist Metaxas dictatorship, he was arrested for purported Trotskyism. Following representations by his father, he was allowed to leave for the US.

In 1943, Papandreou received a PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Immediately after getting his PhD, Papandreou joined America's war effort and volunteered for the US Navy, serving as an examiner of models for repairing warships, and as a hospital corpsman at the Bethesda Naval Hospital for war wounded becoming 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), Stockholm University and York University in Toronto. 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 from Christina Rasia, his first wife, Papandreou and Chant were married in 1951. They had three sons and a daughter. Papandreou also had with Swedish actress and TV presenter Ragna Nyblom a daughter out of wedlock, Emilia Nyblom, who was born in 1969 in Sweden.