The shadows of Harry Hopkins' first evening in Italy were falling on sad, eternal Rome when he drove to the somber Palazzo Chigi. There, in a dun-walled room once used by Benito Mussolini and Count Ciano, President Roosevelt's sour-faced emissary had a chat with Italy's pale Foreign Minister, gap-toothed Alcide De Gaspari.
U.S. Ambassador Alexander Kirk, smartly correct in dress and speech, was with them. Catholic Mr. De Gaspari's Communist Under Secretary, Eugenio Reale, was not. In halting English, Minister De Gaspari asked when his stricken country would get economic relief, whether there...
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