Valdas Adamkus
Valdas Adamkus was president of Lithuania from 1998 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2009, the American environmental official who had left Lithuania at seventeen in 1944 ahead of the Red Army, spent twenty-seven years in the Environmental Protection Agency in Chicago, rising to run its Midwest region, and came home at seventy-one to win the presidency by a single per cent in the run-off of January 1998, having lived in the country for less than the constitution required, which the parliament changed for him. The two terms took Lithuania into NATO and the European Union in the spring of 2004, between his defeat by Paksas in 2003 and Paksas's impeachment for ties to a Russian businessman in April 2004, after which the country elected Adamkus again in June. They made him the elder statesman of the Baltic and of the colour revolutions, mediating in Kyiv in December 2004 with Kwaśniewski between Yushchenko and Yanukovych. He stood in Tbilisi in August 2008 with the presidents of Poland, Estonia and Ukraine while the Russian army was forty miles away. He was born in Kaunas in 1926, the son of a founder of the Lithuanian air force, fought the Soviets in 1944 in a local defence force, studied in Munich, and emigrated to Chicago in 1949, where he worked in a car plant and a draughtsman's office and took an engineering degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He was a champion sprinter at the émigré games. He joined the new EPA in 1970, where he ran the Great Lakes clean-up and visited Soviet Lithuania on environmental exchanges from 1972 that let him keep a foot in the country. The presidency is weak in Lithuania's constitution and he used it for the foreign policy, the vetoes and the moral voice, in a country whose governments changed nine times in his ten years. The economy grew at eight per cent until the crash of 2008 took a fifth of it in his last year. He left office in 2009 to Grybauskaitė, and was given the Charlemagne prize for the enlargement. He lives in Vilnius at ninety-nine, the oldest living former head of state in Europe, having outlived his wife Alma, who came with him from Chicago, by three years.
- Lived: 1926 CE – ?
- Nationality: Lithuanian
- Roles: president, politician
