How to Hang On

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It was as though history's heart had skipped a beat. For a brief, illusory moment, other struggles between Communism and the West seemed suspended--as if the contestants paused to watch the outcome of the stirring battle being fought in Italy. At dawn this Sunday, Italians will go to the polls to choose, in a democratic election, between Communism and the West.

On all the stormy battlefields of peace, the pause was noticeable. In Germany, the squabble over Berlin, a diversionary action in the deeper struggle for Germany and Europe, trailed off in angry mutterings; Finland had a breathing spell . In France, the Communists were hanging back, not sure what to try next. Even Greece was relatively quiet. The most exciting action in which Communism (allegedly) had a hand occurred far from the battle zone, in Bogota (see LATIN AMERICA) .

What happened in Italy in the days just ahead would answer one vital question: Can Communists capture a nation where there is neither Red army nor Red police? The result would decide whether Italy would take her place with Western Europe (and Western Union) or with the satellite East. And that decision, in turn, would affect the worldwide question of war & peace. For it was a simple fact that Italy formed a precarious bulge in the West's defenses: if this battle of the bulge were lost, Communism would stand at the Alps and reach deep into the Mediterranean.

Those, in addition to the immediate fate of 50 million Italians, were the stakes involved in the Italian elections.

That the result could even for a moment be in doubt was a bitter comment on the West's terrible uncertainty. It was in the Italian peninsula that the West's Christian faith, bearing a cross and strange new hopes, had begun its conquest of the world. Was it to be defeated now, on the soil on which it had been strongest, by the new tyrannical faith of Communism?

The Cream-Puff Contrast. How was the battle of Italy going? A TIME correspondent cabled some impressions:

"Rome's aged brown walls are heavy with garish tapestries--purple, green, red, black election posters, shrieking at the people. (If you want jobs and bread, some land to till, some peace to enjoy, vote Communist; if you believe in God, fear Communisn, hate tyranny, vote Christian Democrat.) I drove to the imposing stone building which houses the U.S. Embassy, talked about the bread and pasta from America which alone have saved Italians from starvation; of the American coal which alone has kept Italy's railways running and its blast furnaces roaring. Would not all these things, for which the U.S. asked neither thanks nor service, be enough to persuade the Italian people to vote for their own freedom, against Communism? We knew it was possible--but far from certain.

"A few blocks away, along the Via Vittorio Veneto, in Rome's most luxurious cafes, aristocrats were discussing, over cream puffs, how to get out of Italy in a hurry. In front of the cafes, crippled children on crutches hobbled in a pathetically grotesque dance, hoping for a few lire from wealthy passersby. It is such contrasts, an expression of the fact that Italy's upper classes still live in luxury while two million unemployed must worry about their daily bread, that help Communism most in Italy."

The Enemy. In four years, Communism had established its own Vatican (a shiny, modern office building), its own Pope (Palmiro Togliatti), its own hierarchy of spiritual and secular servants. One of the most important was Luigi ("The Cock") Longo, a man with a sharp, beaked face, who is generalissimo of Italian Communism's army. His partisans, who never surrendered the arms with which they fought the Germans, are estimated at 150,000. Daily, Italian police were finding more of Longo's arms caches; no one knew how many they failed to find. Longo's men face 400,000 government soldiers and policemen, who are believed overwhelmingly loyal to the government. If the Communists lose at the polls and decide to "correct" their defeat through open violence, Longo would be the key man.

Another Communist servant who symbolized Pope Palmiro's strength even better was Giuseppe di Vittorio, brassknuckled labor leader, who controls most of Italy's labor unions; through them he can cripple Italy's entire industry. This week, as a small sample of what he could do, he led a one-hour nationwide general strike. If the Communists decide to use strikes and sabotage rather than open violence, Di Vittorio would be the key man.

And Communism had fervent working allies: the left wing of Italian Socialism, under Pietro Nenni, had joined the Reds in a formidable Popular Front.

The Hungry Angels. Against these men and their human machine stood great forces. One was the force symbolized by the U.S. Embassy. Italians like America; they have at least an inkling of what American democracy is about. How, then, were the Communists able to stand up against American influence? Partly it was America's own doing. The U.S. had never effectively advertised the nature or the extensive amount of its help, or the peaceful intentions of its purpose. Above all, the U.S. was remote and rich. The Communists adroitly played on these facts, and on Italy's fears. A remark which one Italian woman made last week told a good deal about the difficulty of getting through to Europeans. Said she: "If there is a war, what is left of our homes and towns will be utterly destroyed. Then America will say 'Have courage!'"

Then there was the force symbolized by the Vatican's majestic citadel. Perhaps the most significant political event of recent times was the Vatican's decision, while waiting for the City of God, to fight once more for the City of Man. It had openly entered politics. Italian priests issued a solemn warning: Communism is sin. Could the Communists stand up against such a moral thunderbolt?

The Reds were replying, to Christians who would listen, that they were not atheists at all. They had all but dropped the hammer & sickle as a party emblem, used pictures of Garibaldi instead. To others, they simply promised houses, land, food; many Italians could not understand why voting for such things was a sin. They had developed the egotism of misery, like the sufferers in the Inferno whom Dante described as "that caitiff choir of the angels, who were not rebellious, nor were faithful to God; but were for themselves."

Could Italy's anti-Communist forces redeem these hungry angels? Could they cut the Red tentacles which, gripping every part of Italy's land and life, choked both bodies and souls?

Much of the answer depended on one man: Alcide de Gasperi, Premier of Italy, and head of the Christian Democratic Party. Around him, whether they liked him or not, whether he liked them or not, all anti-Communists were rallied. This tall, lanky man with chilly blue eyes, aggressive nose, a wide, grimly compressed mouth, was the bearer of Christian Democracy's standard--a red cross on a white shield, with the legend: "Liberty."

The Champion. He was, in some ways, a strange champion. He was 67, and in frail health. He was born the son of a petty Austrian official and a subject of His Apostolic Majesty, Francis Joseph (his birthplace near Trento belonged to Austria until after World War I). He had been active in the Italian nationalism movement as a student at the University of Innsbruck. But he was a rambling speaker and a rambling organizer, and he had a lifelong reputation as a compromiser.

While studying for his Ph.D. (philology) in Vienna, he tried his hand as a labor organizer; he ran up against anarchists who tried to break up his meetings. "They had a technique," he says. "They'd gradually move forward as if absorbed by what I was saying. Then they would ask increasingly menacing questions. When they had you against the wall, you were in their hands. I developed a habit of talking from near a window, with the window at my back. That gave me two advantages: I could see the faces of my enemies, and I could jump out of the window if they reached for me."

For most of his political life, Alcide de Gasperi has been standing near windows.

After World War I, De Gasperi joined the Popular Party (Christian Democratic) founded by Don Luigi Sturzo. A Sicilian priest, Sturzo was convinced that Christianity, in order to survive in the 20th Century, must rely on "good deeds" of a new kind--social and political action.

De Gasperi succeeded Sturzo as leader of Italy's Christian Democracy, ran up against Benito Mussolini. Mussolini forced De Gasperi out of the window. His party was banned and he became, like thousands of his fellow Italians, an outlaw. He was jailed twice. His health broke. In 1929, Pope Pius XI gave him a post as Vatican librarian at $80 a month. To eke out his salary, he gave language lessons, occasionally worked as ghostwriter for foreign correspondents.

After more than a decade in the Vatican, Alcide de Gasperi returned to the world. During the war, he and his friends secretly began to organize, from Sturzo's old forces, the Christian Democratic Party. De Gasperi represented his party on the National Committee of Liberation, which fought a guerrilla war against the Germans; there he sat with Communists. At the 1946 elections, no one was more surprised than De Gasperi when his loose, ill-organized party polled 8,000,000 votes, and emerged as the largest in Italy. It seemed that a good many Italians wanted precisely what his party stood for--Christianity and Democracy.

In the coalition cabinet with the Communists, De Gasperi proved his depressing but important talent for compromise and parliamentary maneuver. After a year and a half of patchwork bargains with the Communists, who were clearly out to paralyze the government and wreck Italy's economy, De Gasperi again had his back to the window. But this time he did not jump. With U.S. help, he stood his ground. This time it was the Communists who were defenestrated--right out of his cabinet. The great compromiser had become one of Italy's most stubborn fighters.

The Man. Some of his unsuspected strength, it might be, came from mountain climbing. This perilous passion teaches its devotees many things: the smallness and insignificance of man; how to endure immense silence and loneliness. Above all, it teaches the art of hanging on. Once, De Gasperi slipped and hung for hours by a rope over a precipice. When one of his rescuers remarked that it must have been the worst experience of De Gasperi's life, he said: "Nonsense. It was not half so bad as life normally is under Fascism."

De Gasperi is a humble man. He lives in a simple apartment (the furniture is the same which he had bought, on the installment plan, when he was Vatican librarian). He sleeps in a small hard bed in a tiny whitewashed room, decorated only by a crucifix and a picture of a Madonna. The first thing he did when he became Premier was to get a salary advance and buy a good blue suit. He is economical and (like France's Premier Schuman) has a passion for turning off unnecessary electric lights. His wife Francesca is a plain, pleasant woman who bore him four daughters; one married a Milan butcher, another became a nun.

De Gasperi has achieved at least one thing notable in present-day Europe: he has governed his country without the "help" of the Communists. No brilliant organizer, he has a great admiration for experts; he has surrounded himself with able men. Chief among them:

P: Giuseppe Saragat, the leader of Italy's anti-Red Socialists; he is one of De Gasperi's Vice Premiers.

P: Marco Scelba, Minister of the Interior and energetic head of Italy's police. A policeman through & through, he trusts no one, even drives his own car to work.

P: Randolfo Pacciardi, leader of the Republicans, an almost legendary figure in Italy, who organized a youth movement against Mussolini, was hounded out of the country, brilliantly led the Garibaldi Brigade in Spain. In De Gasperi's government he is a Vice Premier in charge of public order. It is his special job to take care of the Reds if they start trouble on election day, or after.

The Lost Years. The worst blot on De Gasperi's record is his failure to fulfill his promises of sweeping land reforms. Except for one important measure which he pushed through (boosting sharecroppers' shares), Italy's landowners, who form an important bloc in the Christian Democratic Party, have helped to prevent the reforms De Gasperi fervently wants. One night recently he attended a Christian Democrat reception in Caserta, a drab, conservative town 20 miles from Naples. De Gasperi faced priests, doctors, businessmen, lawyers and plump simpering matrons. Said he: "We don't like to speak of this in public squares--but now that we are among friends . . . remember that we must bring about large measures of social reform if we are to be at rest with our conscience. We must make up for lost years."

When De Gasperi does say these things in the marketplace, they often sound hollow for want of a specific program. He spends more time talking about what he is against than what he is for. Other party leaders follow suit. "We don't ask you to vote for us," cried Scelba last week. "We ask you to vote against the Communists." In the long run, De Gasperi would have to do more than just hang on to a cliff until help comes.

The Positive Approach. As the campaign drew to a close this week, it became more & more apparent that the force which might well decide De Gasperi's fate was not his own party, nor even his own stubborn courage. That force was Catholic Action. It had the zeal, the positive approach and the missionary skill which the Christian Democrats lacked. Its 3,000,000 lay members, probing into every village and every house, urged the people first of all to vote (a big turnout would be bad for the Reds), and secondly to vote for the Christian Democrats or other anti-Communist parties (but Catholic Action does not support Italy's budding neo-Fascists).

Catholic Action (originally launched for religious and social ends) had been turned into a brilliantly simple political weapon, largely under the guidance of its present head, a professor of medicine named Luigi Gedda. He was stunned by the notable Communist victory last February in once "safe" Pescara (TIME, March 1), then & there decided to do something about it.

Gedda's fervor is duplicated millions of times all the way down to the village level. A good example is the diocese of Poggio Mirteto, in the olive-clad Sabine Hills near Rome. There the chief organizer, Giuseppe Rossetti, a lawyer, tirelessly goes from village to village, calls on the parish priest, asks: "Who are the most zealous and trustworthy Catholics here?" Sometimes the stubbly chinned village priest resents intrusion; Rossetti persuades him by flourishing letters of endorsement from the bishop. The meeting with the leading Catholics may take place in the sacristy or in the stable. Rossetti says: "You know the importance of these elections. Go out and tell the people how the bureaucrats will come in from the town to order them what to plant, what animals to kill. Tell them that the bureaucrats will regiment their children."

The other day, a roughly dressed peasant shambled into Rossetti's law office. He wanted advice but he had no money. With a benevolent smile the lawyer gave him advice, then said: "What if there had been a Communist regime and I hadn't been here to advise you because I was somewhere in Siberia?"

The peasant was defiant. "I don't see why one shouldn't try something new." Said Rossetti: "Certainly. Vote for Saragat. He's new and he's safe. He's a true Socialist--not like Nenni."

Back in his village the peasant might forget about Saragat or the lawyer--were it not for the village committee workers who run from house to house, the women who inveigle themselves into conversations with busy housewives, the peasant volunteers who talk to workers "in the fields. Catholic Action was the first political force that knew how to best the Communists at their own game of zealously serving the people's simple, urgent needs.

Another Chance? As the fateful day approached, politicians were frantically trying to remember whether they had forgotten anything. The last new posters appeared (the Christian Democrats had one showing a skull with a red star on its forehead). In the last-minute game of favors, the U.S. maneuvered Russia into vetoing (for the third time) a U.S. proposal that Italy be admitted to the U.N. In Florence, Communist stooges staged public debates in a final attempt to change a few minds here & there. One of them was asked if he would vote for the Reds himself. Said he, mellowed by a glass of Tuscan wine: "Ma che! [not at all] Can't see into the voting booth."

No one, indeed, could see into the voting booths, but by week's end it seemed highly unlikely that the Communists would get a majority. When the new Parliament meets May 8, it will elect a President of the Republic, who will in turn nominate a Premier, who must obtain a confidence vote from Parliament. Without a majority in both houses, the Red deputies would be unable to block formation of a non-Communist government. But unless the Communists' defeat was overwhelming (which seemed also unlikely), they would probably make a grab for power. They could do two things:

1) Provoke violence and civil war (on the Greek pattern) between April 18 and May 8.

2) Permit a non-Communist government (i.e., De Gasperi) to take over, and then try to wreck it through strikes and sabotage.

Togliatti last week appealed to the people to accept any election result with "orderly serenity." But when De Gasperi, speaking at Pescara, predicted a Christian Democrat victory and scoffed at the possibility of a coup d'etat ("this is not a Balkan country, governments here are not improvised"), Togliatti fumed. "How can he be sure? He cannot be sure unless as head of the government he is actually preparing some big election intrigue." That charge might easily serve later to "justify" a Red coup.

In Rome passers-by heard a beggar cry: "Just for a few days more, please. After April 18, I will never need anything again." A good many Italians felt like the beggar, but they were wrong. A Communist defeat would not settle Italy's problems or eliminate the Communists from the Italian scene. It would merely give the West and Alcide de Gasperi a reprieve, another chance to do better.

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