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Lanky, stooped and with an incongruous shock of white in his dark hair, Moro was the antithesis of the political emotionalism that had branded the Fascist years. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, he was a protégé of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy's first postwar Premier. In political style, he was a conciliator, dedicated to the art of the possible, with a gift for fashioning ambiguous phrases that could be used to cloak disagreement. One of his most famous was "parallel convergences," which he used to describe the center-left formula for the 1963 D.C.-Socialist coalition—even while laughingly noting that "geometrically this is impossible, but politically it is feasible." After the 1976 election, when the Communist Party vote spurted to 34% of the total—close behind the Christian Democrats' 39% —Moro promoted the gradual process of accommodation between the two. When many members of his own party rebelled against the present governing agreement that formally ushered the Communists into the parliamentary majority for the first time in 31 years, it was Moro who persuaded them to go along.
In the first shock of emotion after Moro's death, former Italian President Giuseppe Saragat lamented that "alongside the body of Moro lies the body of the first Italian republic." That judgment was excessive, but it reflected a common fear that in the wake of the Moro tragedy, Italy might be in for a bout of vengeful political overreaction, skirmishing between the far right and the fringe left, or vigilante justice. "We will all pay for this act, the high and the low," said Pietro Campagna, a Rome accountant.
Already under fire for failing to stop the brigatisti, Interior Minister Cossiga resigned the day after Moro's body was found. Many Italian legislators now contend that the need is to implement police reforms rather than draw up new anti-terrorist legislation.
Italy's police have not proved very effective against terrorism, largely because the various police organizations, especially the 68,000-man national public security force and the 99,000-man paramilitary carabinieri, lack coordination. In a country that is still uneasy about anything that smacks of authoritarian rule, that division was deliberate as a presumed guarantee against potential coups. Disclosures in recent years of political plotting in Italy's two secret services led to a fundamental reorganization of the intelligence agencies, which some officials charge has in turn handicapped them in the war against terrorism.
The problem of dealing with the threat posed by the Red Brigades is a difficult one. Even though the brigatisti's war against Italian society goes back more than a decade, little is known about the young, shadowy terrorists who operate under the vague revolutionary motto "Vogliamo tutto e subito (We want everything and now)." Estimates of their strength range up to 500 hard-core recruits organized into small cells, or "columns."