and senators, and urging its members to write letters to federal officials. The MFC remained active until the end of the 1970s. Another example was the Save Cyprus Council of Southern California, chaired by Professor Theodore Saloutos (1910–1980) of UCLA, the noted historian of the Greek immigrant community.
Saloutos left a detailed diary of these early days of organization and protest, providing an intimate look at the inner workings of the Greek American lobbying effort. It covers his various activities on both coasts during the critical period from August 30 to September 17, 1974. He eagerly assumed his new role, helping to organize meetings and protests against the Turkish invasion. He corresponded regularly with the offices of Congressmen Edward Roybal (D-CA) and Thomas Rees (D-CA) and Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA). He also established contact with Mike Minashian, an Armenian activist; they shared an antipathy toward the Turks, and their respective organizations cooperated in the defense of Cyprus. Representatives of their two groups met with Congressman Roybal at his Los Angeles office on September 4. They had been advised beforehand that the congressman was particularly concerned about Turkey’s cultivation of the opium poppy, having traveled to Turkey with a group of his colleagues to study the problem. Thus, Saloutos and the others emphasized that issue in their meeting. Roybal, who served on the House Appropriations Committee, thought that opposition to poppy cultivation provided the best point of attack for curtailing aid to Turkey. A number of committee members already supported such a move, and others could be persuaded, he thought. Roybal urged them to publicize their activities. Saloutos came away with a view of Roybal as “a modern, unassuming man of integrity who speaks for the common people.”36
Of course, not everything went as planned. On September 3 Saloutos complained about an atrocity story, accompanied by a picture of slain Turkish Cypriots, that appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. He viewed this as an unfair allocation of space and a form of “yellow journalism.” A rally on September 6, on the south lawn of city hall, turned into a fiasco. It was poorly organized; there was no spokesman to meet with the media, and prominent personalities had never been invited. It was a disaster, according to Saloutos. That evening, however, things began to look up. Saloutos participated in a meeting at St. Sophia Cathedral, where John Brademas was the principal speaker. The congressman was visiting California to raise money for his reelection campaign. The Cyprus committee also raised $600 at the event. Brademas impressed Saloutos with his sophisticated presentation.
Four days later, Saloutos arrived at AHEPA headquarters in Washington, DC. There, he met with Eugene Rossides, who was then in the process of creating the American Hellenic Institute “to serve as a round-the-clock office on all legislation present and future dealing with the Cyprus question.” Rossides planned to send information to AHEPA and church-based organizations, hoping to line up their public support. Saloutos read over the draft proposal and made a few suggestions. He recommended that, for academics at least, the AHI membership fee should be reduced from $500 to $100. He also met Rossides’s assistant, a Cypriot who told him that most Greek Cypriots opposed enosis. The Greeks, he said, could not govern themselves, so “why should they seek to govern Cyprus 500 miles away.” It seemed that no one knew for certain how many Greek Cypriots favored union with Athens and how many wanted to maintain independence.37
On September 11 Saloutos lunched with his good friend George C. Vournos, a Washington-based lawyer and former supreme president of AHEPA (1942–1945). Vournos asked Saloutos to read a draft article he had written for a scholarly journal in which he criticized the National Herald of New York, a leading Greek American paper; AHEPA leadership; and even Archbishop Iakovos and the Greek Orthodox Church for their earlier support of the junta, which, he argued, had contributed to the Cyprus tragedy. Vournos also suggested that academics should do more research and publish more work on internal Turkish issues such as the opium trade, the Armenian genocide, and Turkish militarism. Saloutos told him that it was a good piece of writing but too polemical.
On Friday, September 13, Saloutos met with Dr. Hratch Abrahamian, an associate professor at the Georgetown University School of Dentistry and a leading Armenian activist. He also served as head of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). The two men had lunch together, and Abrahamian shared his family history, telling Saloutos how his parents had fled to Iran from Smyrna to escape the violence and chaos there in 1922. Later, Saloutos took Abrahamian to AHEPA headquarters and introduced him to the organization’s executive secretary, George Leber, who arranged for them to visit AHEPA’s Cyprus committee, which was meeting at a nearby hotel. When they arrived, the ambassador of Cyprus, Nicos G. Dimitriou, was speaking, and he left the impression that Archbishop Iakovos was the head of the Cyprus relief program in the United States. A number of AHEPA members took exception to this interpretation, explaining that the church had played a very limited role in Greek war relief during World War II. “Iakovos seems to think he is an ethnarch,” wrote Saloutos, “and more or less operates as such.” Former supreme president John Plumides, who served on both the AHEPA committee and the Archdiocesan Council, was not clear on the dividing line between their different spheres of activity.38
Finally, Saloutos introduced Abrahamian to the committee. He had earlier mentioned to Rossides that it would be a good idea to join with the Armenians in commemorating the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of the Armenian genocide of 1915. The Cyprus committee voted unanimously in favor of this recommendation. Saloutos then spoke individually with some committee members about happenings on the West Coast and the role of actor Telly Savalas in supporting their cause. Saloutos was very satisfied with the day’s work.
On September 15 Saloutos was pleased to read two editorials that were favorable to Cyprus in leading newspapers, one in the New York Times and the other in the Washington Post. Another brief visit to AHEPA headquarters brought more criticism of Iakovos’s attempt to take command of Cyprus relief. AHEPA would not disband its efforts to follow the archbishop.
After almost a week in Washington, Saloutos traveled to New York City on September 16, where he discovered a number of groups willing to aid Cyprus. He talked at length with representatives of the Emergency Food Aid Committee for Cyprus at Cyprus House; they were collecting and shipping food and clothing under the auspices of the seventeen clubs of the Cyprus Federation of America, founded in 1951. They too expressed strong suspicions of Iakovos, noting that the archbishop “had never displayed great concern over Cyprus in the past. Why now?” They also questioned whether sending relief funds to the Cypriot embassy in Washington was a good idea. They wondered aloud whether such donations went to refugees or toward the operating costs of the government of Cyprus. On his last day in New York, Saloutos visited the Cyprus mission to the United Nations.39
This trip provided Saloutos with ideas about how his committee in Los Angeles could best contribute to the relief effort. He returned to California well informed about the various movements—and tensions—within the Greek American communities on the East Coast.
Congress Becomes Engaged
During the brief hiatus between the two Turkish incursions (July 20–August 14), Congressman Brademas focused more intently on the crisis. He continued his frequent contacts with Iakovos. At a State Department meeting on August 2, he expressed his deep concern to Undersecretary Sisco about Turkish troops on Cyprus and later introduced a resolution in the House urging the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops, both Turkish and Greek, from Cyprus. He and his four Greek American colleagues considered introducing an amendment to the foreign aid bill that would cut off aid to Turkey unless it removed its troops from the island. He knew the State Department would not be pleased, but Senator Walter Mondale had already proposed an amendment aimed at doing the same thing owing to Turkey’s decision on the opium poppy. Reasoned Brademas, “An amendment to cut off aid to Turkey given the opium and troop build-up on Cyprus might well be successful.”40
On the day of the second attack, the five Greek American congressmen sent a letter to their House colleagues urging them to support a resolution to cut off aid to Turkey. Here, a new argument began to emerge. “It is an outrage,”
