Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Pella offered to discuss this with De Gasperi and leaders of parties supporting his government. Listening to him, Clare did not yet know that downtown, an estimated twenty thousand nationalist and neo-Fascist demonstrators were overturning and burning any cars that looked British. But by the time she left the Palazzo Chigi, the mob had swelled and was moving up the Via del Tritone into Piazza Barberini, heading toward the United States Embassy. When her limousine turned onto the Via Veneto, she found her way blocked by a vast crowd pushing against a thin line of reparto celere—a flying squad of riot police deployed just twenty yards from the Palazzo Margherita. The protesters were hurling insults, stones, and bottles in the direction of the ornamental gates, amid a defensive barrage of high-pressure hoses and tear gas. Wounded carabinieri, their faces streaming with blood, were being given first aid in the embassy courtyard.62

  Having in her time dodged bombs in China, Burma, Belgium, and the Italian front, Clare was unintimidated. She elected to get out and walk. Durbrow was waiting for her inside the gates, which were guarded by U.S. Marines. He said Italian army reinforcements were on their way, and begged her to hurry indoors. She insisted on finding out what had enraged the protesters. Michael Stern, an American foreign correspondent, approached.

  The U.S. Embassy gates where Clare confronted rioters, November 6, 1953 (illustration credit 35.1)

  “Who is in charge there?” she asked him. Stern indicated a burly officer in a tight uniform.

  “I would like to talk with him.”

  Stern brought the man over and watched with amusement as, to the sound of screaming sirens, he kissed the Ambassador’s extended hand.

  “Ask him who the leaders are,” Clare said to Stern.

  “He says they are Communist agitators.”

  “I’m not afraid of them. Tell them I will meet a committee of their leaders in my office now.”

  Stern did, although the police chief said it would seem that she was giving recognition to radicals.

  “I don’t care. I am ready to listen to anything they have to say.”

  At this point, a CBS-TV man Clare recognized as a former war reporter came up, saying, “It’s dangerous for you to remain here.”

  Stern was struck by Clare’s saintly smile as she replied, “Remember, I too was a war correspondent.”63

  By now it was lunchtime, and the demonstrators had begun to move off.64 The following day, Ambassador Luce won kudos in the press for her fortitude.

  The day after her encounter with the Rome rowdies, ongoing riots in Trieste reached their climax when panicky Allied MPs fired randomly at protesters, killing six people and injuring forty.65

  Pella’s government tried to present the outbreak as italianita—nationalist passions run amok—a result of Allied foot-dragging over the October 8 Declaration. “The sky of the Fatherland is, in this hour, covered with clouds of sorrow,” the Prime Minister publicly mourned. Other politicians were outraged, and a Monarchist deputy challenged General John W. Winterton, the Allied commander in Trieste, to a duel in the square where the fatalities occurred.66 As unrest spread to other towns, Pella blamed Winterton for having refused an offer of twelve hundred carabinieri to keep order.67

  Meanwhile Tito grew more statesmanlike by the hour, compared with his Italian counterpart. In Belgrade on November 15, he suggested a peaceful solution to the whole vexed question. Yugoslavia would give up its claim to the city of Trieste, he said, since “there is no good will to give it to us on any side.” All he wanted was an amicable separation of powers along the borders of the two outer zones, and he hoped Italians would not continue to spoil conference prospects by insisting on the prior occupation of Zone A.68

  Three days later, a somewhat shamed Pella agreed to a full five-power conference. Yet he still wanted advance control of Zone A. Insulted, Belgrade replied on November 24 that in view of continuing Italian provocation, Yugoslavia was withdrawing its acceptance of Dulles’s latest initiative. Pella thereupon declined to move any further, redoubling pressure on Clare and the State Department to find a way out of the impasse.69

  Although she had handled the embassy riot with grit and aplomb, Clare still felt a lack of achievement on Trieste. Durbrow reminded her that diplomacy was a slow business, and could not be forced, partly because of the need to consider local pride, traditions, and mores. “In other words,” she replied, “I must take for my motto that old Italian saying, ‘Pazienza e coraggio.’ ”70

  Tito came to her aid. Nudging Pella into a more conciliatory frame of mind, he declared in Jajce on November 29 that both Yugoslavia and Italy should stand down militarily, “so that the matter can be discussed without armies on the frontier.” On December 5, Pella and Pavel Gregoric, the Yugoslav envoy in Rome, formally agreed to a mutual withdrawal of troops within seventeen days. The Prime Minister demonstrated extra good faith by offering to relax trade sanctions against Yugoslavia that had been in place for three months.71

  From all points of view, especially Clare’s, the agreement was a major breakthrough: the two sides at last talking, the borders of Zone A soon to be demilitarized, eight years of escalating postwar tensions mitigated, and a high-powered conference in the offing sometime later that winter.

  36

  EVIL EYE

  A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.

  —WALTER LIPPMANN

  Clare spent the first week of January 1954 in Washington, D.C., having her first face-to-face meetings with the President and Secretary Dulles since going to Rome. As she reiterated her written warnings to them about the increasing Communist threat in Italy, a political upheaval was under way there. Prime Minister Pella’s grip had been weakened by a rift with right-wing nationalists over the proposed Trieste conference. Apart from the need to negotiate a legal formula for the exact partition of the FTT, a sensitive question remained: protection of ethnic minorities in both zones once the Allies withdrew. Pella was perceived as too inflexible on that subject to survive any equable settlement. His likely successor as leader of the Christian Democratic coalition was the left-leaning Amintore Fanfani, whom Clare feared would be susceptible to demands from the Popular Front for cabinet posts.1 She suspected Fanfani would fail, necessitating an election in which Communists might gain even more votes and seats.

  Dulles took her concerns seriously and had senior administration officials meet her for what became a two-hour discussion of ways to strengthen the bonds of Italian-American relations. Attendees included CIA Director Allen W. Dulles, Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, Director of Foreign Operations Administration Harold E. Stassen, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank C. Nash.

  Clare and President Eisenhower, January 1954 (illustration credit 36.2)

  An urgent subject before them was the fact that, unbeknown to the press, the Trieste Conference had already been postponed, due to renewed Italian opposition. The State Department’s recourse was to ask Yugoslavia if it would commit to a round of individual, supersecret talks with Allied diplomats, in the hope of arriving at a basic set of demands that Italy might separately approve by the same covert means.2

  The New York Times commented that there must be “an unusual dimension” to Mrs. Luce’s reports. Ambassadors returning stateside for consultations rarely encountered “such a reception.”3 The truth was that Italy’s problems extended far beyond Trieste and petty politicking. A major article in the New York Herald Tribune, headlined ITALY IS GOING COMMUNIST, reported that the Republic had an 85-billion-lire deficit. American aid, budgeted at $325 million for 1954, could hardly dent this shortfall. There were other alarming statistics. Out of a population of 47 million, 4 million Italians were unemployed, including many of the 250,000 youths who entered the labor market annually. The country needed to lose at least 500,000 emigrants a year to balance the birth of 825,000 babies.4

  Given the tendency of dire socioeconomic c
onditions to drive poor people into the arms of Karl Marx, Clare and her like-minded colleagues agreed that should further democratic coalitions fail in Italy, billions of dollars’ worth of American armaments given to that country since the end of the war might end up equipping a Red insurgency.5

  Reassured by Dulles that a Communist electoral triumph in Italy would not be tolerated by the United States, Clare made off-the-record remarks to a group of journalists at a Mayflower Hotel luncheon on January 5.6 Nevertheless, she spoke and answered questions with a frankness that, for a head of mission, bordered on indiscretion. She should have realized that reporters were inveterate note takers, and that one day her remarks might see print.

  The situation in Italy was serious, she said, and if strong measures were not taken in Rome, the country could become Communist “in two or three years.” It was imperative that a new Christian Democrat government be formed as soon as Pella resigned. She felt that the Catholic Church was “the only effective force” against the advance of the extreme Left. But Americans should understand that many Italians, for all their love of church rites, were anti-clerical, and not immune to a godless ideology. Should Pietro Nenni or Palmiro Togliatti ever gain power, “it is certain that the Church will become a clandestine organization.” In conclusion, she announced that “Congress does not intend to throw money into Italy, if the money should serve to better the position of the Communists.”7

  Her talk with Eisenhower the next day coincided with news that Pella was resigning. Clare pressed Ike to send Vice President Nixon on a goodwill tour of Italy, in order to combat left-wing propaganda. He promised to consider it.8 At a stag dinner soon after, he credited Ambassador Luce, “more than any other single person,” with the recent defusing of the Trieste war threat.9

  When Clare hosted a party in Manhattan for Harry’s staff on January 7, John Billings thought she looked “old and tired and haggard.”10 Adding to the pressure on her was the subject of that day’s front-page headline in The New York Times: MRS. LUCE TO RUSH TO ITALY IN CRISIS.

  Canceling speeches in Washington and Chicago, as well as a vacation in White Sulphur Springs, Clare flew back to her post. She arrived at Rome’s Ciampino Airport at 6:00 P.M. on January 11 to find Italy essentially leaderless. President Einaudi had not yet designated a permanent new Premier. Politicians expected extremist newspapers to claim that Ambassador Luce was bringing succession “orders” to the Palazzo del Quirinale. To deflect such rumors, Clare made a radio statement. She said nothing about the current uncertainty, but hinted that a new “mutually satisfactory” aid program might be negotiated between the United States and Italy, as soon as there was a lessening of Communist influence in both Parliament and industry. The following day, just as Amintore Fanfani was charged with forming a new government, The New York Times reported that Washington would award no defense contracts to Italian factories that had Red-dominated unions.11

  On January 14, Clare received a “Top Secret” cable from Secretary Dulles. He said that he and Eisenhower had been “particularly impressed” by her “vigorous” recent briefings in Washington. “The growth of Communist influence [in Italy] and the absence of any firm governmental measures to counteract it are matters of grave concern to us.” The aid package she had mentioned, he said, would be forthcoming, “if the Italian people and government could decisively reverse the present dangerous trend and reject Communism.”12

  Armed with this confirmation, Clare embarked on a series of meetings with leaders of Italy’s major political parties, with the exception of Nenni and Togliatti. Well versed by now in the labyrinthine ideologies of the Republic, she looked forward to dialogues that engaged her analytical faculties and love of argument.

  First she lunched with Giuseppe Saragat, Secretary of the moderate Socialist Democrats and a key supporter of De Gasperi’s former coalition. He was fluent in French, which was convenient for Clare, who had not yet progressed beyond “drawing room” Italian. Most of the Chigi officials she met spoke English, but when they did not she generally brought along an interpreter. Saragat surprised her by saying he had just received a letter from Fanfani, accepting two conditions the Socialist Democrats had laid down in exchange for their support in forming the new government: a formal declaration of republicanism, and the cessation of monopolistic practices by the Christian Democrat majority.13

  This led to a discussion of the Monarchists. Clare said that despite their name, she doubted they wanted to restore the House of Savoy, because if they did, “they might disappear as a party.” She asked about a rumor that the former Queen of Italy nurtured a fantasy of returning to power with Saragat as her Prime Minister. Coyly, he admitted that “there might be some truth in the story.”

  Getting to her main purpose, Clare said there was “a growing feeling of disillusionment in the United States” about the lack of results from the aid Italy had received to strengthen democratic trends. Since World War II, Washington’s investment had totaled $3.5 billion for economic development and $1.5 billion in military expenditure. In view of this generosity, she declared that her government wanted “positive action” to combat Communism.

  Clare reported to the State Department that Saragat “was content, as are many Italian leaders, in the belief that in the saying is the doing.”14 Two days later, she had lunch with Alfredo Covelli, General Secretary of the Monarchist National Party. He refused to support Fanfani if the latter made a coalition-building deal with Nenni. The Socialist Party was completely in Communist hands, Covelli said, but a fair number of its three million voters could be wooed away, should Nenni ever step down.

  Sounding him out, Clare suggested that his party, despite its name, had little interest in restoring the monarchy. Covelli said that was not true. But since his followers believed in constitutional government, the House of Savoy could be reinstated only “through the will of the people, and not through any political machinations.”

  She emphasized that the United States did not wish to interfere with the composition of any Italian government, but did want to see a stable regime installed, one “capable of combating Communism on both the social-economic and political fronts.” If these aims were not met, she stressed (repeating her instructions from Dulles), future American aid to his country would be cut.15

  Later that afternoon, Clare saw the septuagenarian Bruno Villabruna, Secretary of the Liberal Party and an old anti-Fascist with a lawyerly mind. He said he would probably support Fanfani, but as a believer in free enterprise he worried that any free-spending social program would worsen Italy’s inflation. Clare asked why he could not cooperate with both Saragat’s and Fanfani’s parties to produce, at least, a program acceptable to the moderate Left and moderate Right. Villabruna replied that he could not compromise with Socialist Democrats, because they were even more free-spending than Christian Democrats. He preferred to work with Covelli’s Monarchists, having voted in favor of the House of Savoy as recently as 1946—even though he had doubted it could be restored.

  Clare said the Monarchist question resembled an iceberg—“little on the surface, but a great deal more … hidden from sight.”

  When she followed up with her authorized warning about cutting aid, Villabruna replied candidly. He said the United States should tell Italian leaders that aid must be spent to achieve specific democratic ends, or it would be withheld. When Clare said that this would be seen as “intolerable interference in Italian domestic affairs,” he said that Washington should not flinch at making “moves which are unpopular.”16

  At the end of the day, Clare heard that Fanfani had put together a fragile, monocolore government consisting only of Christian Democrats. The chatter in the diplomatic community, she was told, was that the leftist Fanfani was already “tapping the wires,” and would “probably make a police state.”17

  An exhausted Clare checked into the San Domenico Palace Hotel in Taormina, Sicily. Her room overlooked the bay, and had a view of the snowy bulk of Mount Etna. But a cold wave that held a
ll of Europe in an icy grip affected the usually sunny resort as well, so after enduring five days of rain that kept her cooped up, she returned to Rome and its freezing fountains.18

  The governmental crisis was unabated, threatening her with many challenges in the coming weeks. She was at least relieved to hear that Yugoslavia had agreed to secret Trieste negotiations in London. Tito’s representative was Dr. Vladimir Velebit, a hard-line Slovene. His counterparts were Geoffrey W. Harrison, an undersecretary in the British Foreign Office, and Llewellyn E. Thompson, the U.S. Ambassador to Austria. It was probable that several anticlimactic months would pass before Manlio Brosio, Italy’s Ambassador to Great Britain, would be able to make his case.19

  On January 29, the Italian Chamber of Deputies debated whether to give Fanfani a vote of confidence. Palmiro Togliatti stood up and said acidly that the new Premier’s liberal agenda was guided by a foreign power. “The things you, Honorable Fanfani, have said against us have already been said by the American Ambassador on her peregrinations. My advice is, don’t run after her. She is a porta sventura.”20

  Everyone in the Chamber knew that this phrase, meaning a bringer of bad luck, also connoted malocchio, “the evil eye,” a sinister power that in popular belief brought disasters, from crop failures to volcanic eruptions to the death of the Pope.

  Signora Luce’s Milan speech last June, Togliatti went on, with its threat of aid reduction, had weakened the Christian Democrats. And her meddling in the Trieste question had inflicted trouble on Premier Pella. “Beware of all advice that comes from that quarter,” he warned.