Italy's Communist Party last week introduced to history one of its heroes: the man who shot Benito Mussolini. The tyrannicide turned out to be a tall (6 ft.), sallow, jowly bookkeeper called Walter Audisio. As he mounted the platform before a Communist mass meeting in the ruins of Rome's Basilica of Constantine, clutching a bunch of red carnations, he bit his lips to keep them from trembling.
"I did not have the impression that I was shooting a human being," said Audisio, as he launched into his story, which added little to previous reports of the killing (TIME, May 7, 1945). "When...