Lambros Papantoniou a Washington D.C. based journalist and correspondent for almost four decades, going back to President Nixon, passed away last May, at the age of 63, from a stroke.
Mr. Papantoniou, known to officials as "Mr. Lambros," was the Washington diplomatic correspondent for the Greek daily newspaper Eleftheros Typos, Radio Thessaloniki, and the U.S. weekly newspaper Greek News. Famous for his wit, humor and benevolent character, Lambros was passionate and relentless when it came to extracting news during White House and State Department briefings. His barrage of questions to then State Department Spokesperson Nicholas Burns, in the aftermath of the Turkish invasion of the Greek Imia islets, was vintage Lambros. Besides, over the years, he managed, before the dawning of the blogosphere, to develop a pioneering style of journalistic writing. Perhaps his most important legacy was the courage to come up with his own style in an era when the “wooden language” of press releases and political correctness had come to replace the journalism of Hemingway and other legendary writers.
Far from serving as a vehicle for American officials to pass messages or policy line to Greeks, Lambros as a correspondent repeatedly spearheaded the effort to get real news from those people (often paving the way for other less assertive colleagues to follow. As a real fighter he wouldn’t mind being used, he cared mostly about the big picture.)
He was born on July 4, 1945 in Mandra Xanthi, a village in Greece's Western Thrace region. His parents were refugees, who fled from Asia Minor in 1922 to settle in Greece. He studied law at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, and arrived in the United States in 1973. He studied international law and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained his Master's Degree and Juris Doctorate.
In 1975, after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, he began working as a journalist, specializing in U.S. foreign policy issues relating to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and the Balkans. Over the course of a prodigious career, he was correspondent to many Greek and Greek-American Media, and participated in numerous foreign policy conferences and panels in the United States, Greece, Cyprus and Australia.
