Dictators' Five Points
Two years ago Adolf Hitler flew to Venice to clasp hands with Benito Mussolini. After a vegetarian lunch and a heart-to-heart the two Dictators found no matter of importance on which they could then cooperate. Meanwhile, Il Duce had conceived the project of making Italy, Britain, Germany and France the dominating hierarchy of Europe. These nations actually signed his Four-Power Pact only to quarrel over the Ethiopian war and Der Führer's tearing up of the Treaty of Versailles. Last week began a great new effort by Italy and Germany to erect a European hierarchy with or without Britain or France, but definitely against Soviet Russia. This was all the more fate ful because Benito Mussolini was the first dictator to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. Last week Il Duce was apparently ready to agree with Der Führer that the spread or curtailment of Communist influence in Europe has be come the cardinal question. To see about answering it, Mussolini sent to Berlin his recently-appointed Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, husband of the Dictator's favorite child Edda.
Edda, Countess Ciano once swam two miles out to a warship her father was about to inspect, climbed aboard and made for the Dictator in the guise of a dripping mermaid. For this unseemly conduct she at once received a vigorous verbal dressing-down. High-spirited Edda promptly did a dangerous high-dive off the bridge of the warship, swam, the two miles back to shore, and afterward in private was praised for her spunk by the delighted Dictator. She is the only real intimate of a man now lonely in his greatness. Al though from time to time Il Duce snorts "My successor has yet to be born!1', and although he probably believes there can be no successor to MUSSOLINI, he has, as a father, no objection to Daughter Edda's unconcealed ambitions for her Galeazzo. She believes that when her father in the fullness of time has laid down the cares of Dictatorship, she will be the wife of the new Dictator and the real boss of Italy.
Dynamic Edda this-summer went to Berlin, was feted by Realmleader Hitler as if she had been visiting royalty, and returned to Rome with a photograph of Der Führer inscribed to Countess Ciano in the most complimentary terms. Today, at 33, Count Ciano is the youngest Foreign Minister of any Great Power, six years junior to Great Britain's "handsome young" Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Just before leaving Rome last week he was made a general in the Fascist Militia, arrived at Berlin with a gold eagle on his cap and gold epaulets on his shoulders, to be greeted with deafening German hells and an imposing turnout of Wilhelmstrasse officialdom headed by Foreign Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath. Thus strikingly Count Ciano made his debut on the world stage last week as Europe's newest ranking statesman.