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Olof Palme (full name Sven Olof Joachim Palme) was born on January 30, 1927 in Stockholm, Sweden, to a well-established middle-class family, belonged to a postwar generation. He was the son of businessman Gunnar Palme, who died when Olof was seven. Lawyers, bankers, and top government officials were common in his aristocratic family.
Palme was sent to a top boarding school in Sigtuna, Sweden, where he was groomed as a lawyer and expected to follow one of the family's established patterns. He planned to enroll in law school, but before beginning classes he decided to spend a year in the United States. In 1948 he went to Kenyon College in Ohio. Perhaps because of the education he had received up to that point, he finished all the requirements for a bachelor's degree in just one year of coursework, and was granted a degree in 1948. In 1951 Palme received his law degree from the University of Stockholm.
In 1948 Palme embarked on a four-month hitchhiking trip around the United States, visiting 34 states and seeing for himself the racial segregation and the vast income disparities that left millions of people mired in poverty in the country that to the rest of the world had seemed a beacon of democracy. Those experiences instilled in Palme the desire to use government as a tool for the elimination of inequality.
Palme returned to Sweden and took personal action in opposition to the Communist Party takeover of the government in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1948. In 1950 he visited Prague for an International Union of Students conference where he, along with other students from Western countries, received a chilly reception. With the world hardening into political spheres of influence dominated by American capitalism and the Communism of the Soviet Union, the ambitious young Swede would come to imagine a national course unaffiliated with either of those models.
An active member of the Social Democrats from the early 1950s, Palme became Prime Minister Tage Erlander’s personal secretary and his speechwriter in 1953 and entered the Swedish Parliament in 1958. In 1963 Palme was elevated by Erlander to the rank of Cabinet Minister without portfolio, and from 1965-1967 he served as Communications Minister. Moving to the position of Minister of Education, he promoted the inclusion of Marxist thought in school curricula and stirred international controversy for the first time when, in 1968, he marched along with North Vietnam's ambassador to Sweden in a demonstration against U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He evolved into an outspoken opponent of U. S. foreign policy, later comparing that country's bombing of Hanoi, Vietnam, to the Nazi German bombing of Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. Relations between the United States and Sweden deteriorated as a result, and for a time the two countries came close to a diplomatic rupture as the government of U. S. president Richard Nixon refused to legitimize Sweden's ambassador and recalled its own ambassador to Stockholm.
In 1969 Palme became the leader of the Social Democrats and succeeded the retiring Erlander as prime minister. He was Europe's youngest head of state at the time. Continuing to antagonize the United States, Palme forged an alliance with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He also emerged as an early leader of the effort to topple South Africa's apartheid regime.
The 1976 general election resulted in the defeat of the Social Democrats after 44 years in power. Between terms in office Palme continued to be active in his party and maintained his strong pacifist stance.
He served as president of the Nordic Council from 1979 to 1980, chaired the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security in Geneva, and acted as UN special envoy to mediate in the war between Iran and Iraq.
The nuclear accident in 1979 at Three Mile Island in the United States had a great impact in Sweden, and Palme contributed to a referendum (passed in 1980) to remove all nuclear reactors in Sweden. After being elected prime minister again in 1982, Palme tried to reinstate socialist economic policies in Sweden, and he continued to be outspoken on matters of European security. Palme was assassinated by a gunman in 1986.
During his time as prime minister, Palme was one of the politicians who led Sweden perhaps closer than any other Western democracy to a socialist political system, financed by a large tax bureaucracy. He was a consistent voice in favor of peace, democracy, and economic equality. He led Sweden to a place on the world stage that was notable in view of the country's small size.
In 1948 Palme met Jelena Rennerova, a Czech girl whose position in her homeland was precarious, he married her so that she could join him in Sweden, whereupon the two divorced. His second wife was Lisbeth Beck-Friis, a barones. They married in 1956 and had three sons: Joakim, Mårten, and Mattias.
