Bottom's Up

Italy's Communist Party has a new look these days: young. The average age of the Central Committeemen elected at the party's recent Bologna congress is only 43 -- and only eight of the 171 members are veterans of the days when the party was formed in 1921.

Of the 1,041 delegates to the congress, a fifth were less than 30 years old. In keeping with that youthful image is the man the congress elected deputy secretary-general and successor to aging Leader Luigi Longo. The heir apparent:

Enrico Berlinguer, 46. Longo's health is failing; a stroke victim, he can deliver long speeches only from a sitting position. The handsome, vigorous Berlin guer is therefore almost certain to take over the party's leadership well before the 1974 elections and play a large role in Italian political life for years to come.

Spanish Influence. Rome's Daily American describes Berlinguer as "a movie type caster's idea of an Italian radical." He is slight, wiry, crewcut, courteous but cool in manner. He has dark, piercing eyes and the swarthy color of a Sardinian (Catalan influence in his native Sardinia accounts for his Spanish-sounding name). He is served well at interminably long party meetings by another physical attribute: he can sit for hours without getting sore or restless. For this, comrades at national headquarters on Rome's Via delle Botteghe Oscure call him culo di ferro, which roughly translates into "Iron Bottom."

Central Casting would have to type Berlinguer as a white-collar Communist rather than a peasant. His lawyer grandfather was a Sardinian republican in the days of the Italian monarchy; his lawyer father was a socialist anti-Fascist during the Mussolini era. Berlinguer studied law before he decided "to fight for the profound transformation of all social assets" and at 21 joined the Communist Party. Jailed by the Fascists for activities in Sardinia, Berlinguer came to the attention of the party's leader, Palmiro Togliatti.

Foreign Minister. The boss summoned him to Rome, where Berlinguer has remained since. He was active in party youth movements until he was 34, after that served as an organizer and administrator. As a Central Committee member, Berlinguer has become the Italian party's "foreign minister." He speaks fluent French and reads English, understands a little Russian and usually represents Italy at international Communist meetings.

It was Berlinguer who last November led an Italian delegation to Moscow to inquire about the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. For two days. Iron Bottom resisted pleas and pressures by Soviet leaders to give Italian approval of their action. In an eloquent two-hour speech at the Bologna congress, Berlinguer once again called for "the principle of the absolute respect for the independence and sovereignty of each and every Communist Party." He added: "What we need is a new way of coming to terms with the reality of the U.S.S.R. and the socialist countries."

Some critics call Berlinguer an Italian Kosygin--a skilled party craftsman who lacks charisma. They could well be wrong. Running for a Chamber of Deputies seat for the first time in last May's election, Berlinguer won handily; his 150,000 votes were the highest total on the Communist slate and almost twice Longo's vote. One group that Berlinguer understandably appeals to is youth; he refers to them as a "new force" and calls for "new ideas" to satisfy them. He also undoubtedly gets the women's vote. Along with rugged good looks, he tends to an exemplary bourgeois private life that Italian women approve of: a wife, three small children and a middle-class apartment located in Rome.

In his Rome office last week, with a portrait of Italian Communist Party Founder Antonio Gramsci staring over his shoulder, Enrico Berlinguer talked like the postrevolutionary, evolutionary Communist that he is. "We are not in a hurry to come to power in Italy," he said. "The important thing is to see our program adopted. We can do a great deal in pushing our program as an opposition party." The new deputy secretary-general is also an astute assessor of the impact that men can have on events: "At the beginning of this decade, we had a happy period of relaxation of tensions--the era of Kennedy, Khrushchev and Pope John. Those were such unusual personalities that it is hard to imagine such an era returning. But we can hope for some kind of easing of tensions."

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