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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.