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The son of a poor government clerk, Togliatti now was building himself a villa among the rich near fashionable Porto Santo Stefano, and—politically—continued his do-gooder tactics. If filling-station attendants were underpaid, if a bridge fell down, if water was cut off from Rome, it was the Communists who led the protest. Faced with a milk shortage, Togliatti could be heard to say earnestly: "For a whole week now, there has not been enough milk in the cafes to make a cappuccino. That is terrible." He kept insisting that he had no intention of imposing Communism on Italy, that he only wanted benevolent socialism. "This means improving agriculture, raising the level of the masses and so on," he would say reassuringly. "In Italy, to nationalize everything would be madness." This soothing line brought about a resurgence of sorts at the polls. In Italy's last national election in 1963, the Reds won 7,700,000 votes, fully 25% of the total.
Undrummed China. In the Sino-Soviet schism, Togliatti strongly supported Khrushchev, and he had to deal with some pro-Peking splinters in his own party. But he believed it would be a tactical mistake to try to drum China out of the Communist bloc. That was perhaps what he hoped to talk about to Nikita Khrushchev when he started on a Black Sea vacation early this month. Near Yalta, two weeks ago, he suffered a stroke while visiting a Communist youth camp. Soviet doctors said he was too ill to be moved from the camp infirmary, and there last week, at 71, Togliatti died after exploratory brain surgery.
As an Ilyushin-18 plane brought his body home to Italy, amid national honors and prayers from the Pope, there was no doubt that Italian Communism had been weakened. His successor is tough, ex-Partisan Luigi Longo, 64, a fighter much less suave or plausible. Longo will probably be supplanted by younger "innovators," who in the past criticized Togliatti for being too subservient to Moscow, or too old-fashioned in his methods, but now have no very clearly defined policy beyond the fact that they want power.
The Italian Communist Party remains formidable, but it is not likely that Togliatti's heirs will succeed where he failed. To the end, he insisted that he was a democrat and a parliamentarian, and over a glass of wine he seemed convincing. But what he truly was Italians call "possibilista"—one who does whatever is possible. And no matter how hard he had tried, the seizure of power in Italy had not been possible to Palmiro Togliatti.