PROFILE, Page 42Norway's Radical DaughterGRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND, the Prime Minister, is a Postmodern GreenNeosocialist Philogynic Philosopher-Queen. But just call her GroBy Nancy Gibbs
It had been a long day of campaigning, and the Prime Minister
had a cold. Wrapped in a violet overcoat, she leafed through stump
speeches as the 1953 Convair turboprop plane bounced around over
the stubby mountains of the Norwegian coastline.
Toward the back of the plane, one of the press photographers
was sliding lower in his seat, clutching his stomach, turning gray.
His worried colleagues were at a loss to help him until someone
remembered there was a doctor on board -- and summoned the Prime
Minister.
Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland dropped her paperwork, moved to the
back of the plane, and for the next 45 minutes tended the victim.
She swaddled him in blankets on the floor of the narrow aisle,
administering oxygen, monitoring his pulse, ordering the pilots to
radio Oslo for an ambulance. When another photographer tried to
shoot the scene, her aides waved him off. This was not a photo op.
"I didn't want to overdramatize things," she told the patient
gently, once she had settled him into the ambulance, "but you
showed signs of going into shock." The following day, as he
prepared to undergo surgery for gallstones, a bouquet arrived from
the Prime Minister's office. Red roses. The symbol of her Labor
Party.
"There is a very close connection between being a doctor and
being a politician," Brundtland observed the next day, speaking in
the earnest, faintly academic style that betrays both her Harvard
degree and her Calvinist roots. "The doctor first tries to prevent
illness, then tries to treat it if it comes. It's exactly the same
as what you try to do as a politician, but with regard to society."
Which may help explain why this physician offers such a radical
prescription for running a country and restoring its health, and
why last week's national elections, in which her Labor Party
dropped 6.5%, stirred such interest.
During her three years in office, Gro Brundtland has succeeded
in creating the most feminine, not to say feminist, state anywhere
in the world. After a decade in power, the more conspicuous Mrs.
Thatcher has named not a single woman to her Cabinets. In Norway
it is scarcely newsworthy anymore that every other member of the
Cabinet is a woman, and more than a third of the parliament.
Brundtland even toys with the idea of changing the country's system
of hereditary monarchy to allow princesses as well as princes to
inherit the throne. And in the privacy of her own home, this
socialist crusader is married to a prominent conservative scholar
and columnist, who raised their four children while she sat in the
Cabinet.
"It was very tough in 1981," recalls Brundtland of her first
brief eight-month stint as Prime Minister, when it seemed sometimes
that the entire country was waiting for her to fail. "In the worst
times I always thought, If you get through this, it will be much
better for the next woman." As it turned out, she was the next
woman, and by 1986, when she returned to power, her gender was no
longer much of an issue. The collapse of oil prices had left Norway
high and dry and deep in debt: Brundtland dazzled both friends and
foes with a perilous high-wire act. On one hand she capped wages,
devalued the krone and clamped down on consumer credit in an effort
to restore Norway's export markets. But at the same time she kept
her promise to shorten the workweek to 37 1/2 hours, extend paid
maternity leave to 24 weeks, and maintain generally Norway's
fine-weave "safety net."
Her domestic policies guaranteed her a larger audience than
Norway's 4.2 million people. But what really hurled her center
stage was her appointment as chairman of the U.N. commission on
the environment in October 1984. Nine hundred days later, the
commission released what has come to be known as the Brundtland
Report, a document so blunt and sobering that it abruptly forced
the issue of global responsibility onto the international agenda.
Since then she has shuttled around the world, addressing
