ITALY: Man of the Mountains

Until he reached middle age, he persisted in his favorite sport of mountain climbing. Then one day, as he was descending a dangerous peak, his rope jammed, and he went plunging downward to dangle helplessly over a deep chasm. "For 20 minutes I could not move," Alcide de Gasped recalled later. "Then I swung over to a ridge and was safe. Well, I was 54 then, and I decided I had better give up climbing. But looking back, it had been a good school for political fighting."

Both politics and mountain climbing seemed unlikely pursuits for a man like De Gasperi. Tall and lanky, he was plagued by bad health. He was an inept organizer, a rambling, self-conscious speaker. He had chilly, blue eyes and a wide mouth that even in repose seemed compressed in grim disapproval. But underneath, De Gasperi had a mountain man's flint-hard resolution and a devout Christian's sense of integrity. These qualities made him the greatest man in postwar Italy and helped him revive a nation that had almost died from an overdose of political bombast.

His birthplace in the Tirol made him first an Austrian, then (by the border rearranging at Versailles) an Italian. But first and last he was a European. As an Austrian during the Habsburg decline, he was an M.P. in the Austrian Parliament, an editor, a labor organizer. As an Italian, he was one of the founders of Italy's dominant Christian Democratic Party, and an enemy of Fascism. In 1926 Mussolini clapped him into Rome's infamous Queen of Heaven prison on the banks of the Tiber, where he languished for a year and a half until the Holy See was able to negotiate his release.

The Survivor. De Gasperi spent the next 14 years in the quiet of the Vatican library, filing index cards and acting as a receptionist. He stretched his $80-a-month salary by doing German translations at a nickel a page. Surreptitiously, he also kept in touch with his fellow Christian Democrats. When Mussolini fell, a small but well-organized Christian Party was ready. In December 1944 De Gasperi became Italy's Foreign Minister. A year later he was Premier. The first thing De Gasperi did was to get a salary advance so he could buy a new blue suit.

De Gasperi's tenacity in holding on to power became one of the amazing political feats of postwar Europe. Industrial production was at an alltime low; Italy had 3,500,000 jobless or partially employed. The Reds controlled one-third of Italy's 2,735 communes. In those perilous postwar years, De Gasperi was a genius at compromise. His Cabinet had Communists and right-wingers; seven times it fell, and seven times he patiently rebuilt another coalition. Not until May 1947 did he finally rid his Cabinet of Communists. His smashing triumph in the 1948 elections (with powerful backing by the U.S.) was widely recognized as a significant cold-war victory. A passionate believer in Europe, he was convinced that Italy could only achieve itself as part of a united Europe.