The United States, Italy, and the Opening to the Left, 1953–1963

TheNuti United States, Italy, and the Opening to the Left The United States, Italy, and the Opening to the Left, 1953–1963 ✣ he elections in Italy in 1953 did not provide the Christian DemocratsT (DC) with the absolute majority that their leader, Alcide De Gasperi, had been trying to secure through a vigorous campaign and, more important, through a reform of the electoral law. This partial failure of Italy’s largest pro-Western party and of its minor allies ushered in a period of uncer- tainty and closed the early phase of the country’s postwar history, which had been shaped by De Gasperi’s strong personality. For the next ten years De Gasperi’s successors strove with limited success to recapture their party’s dom- inant position in Italian politics. The coalition governments they set up, however, usually lasted no more than a year. The succession to De Gasperi was complicated still further by the heterogeneous nature of the DC, which was supported by diverse sectors of Italian society and therefore included a number of quarrelsome factions with divergent orientations and priorities. De Gasperi had been able to keep these factions under his control most of the time, but his followers failed to do so and exercised much feebler leader- ship, allowing internal strife to grow so bitter that it often paralyzed the party’s capacity to devise and implement coherent policies. The search for stability in the Italian political system gradually moved toward the crucial option of an “opening to the left,” that is, the formation of an alliance between the DC and Pietro Nenni’s Italian Socialist Party (PSI), the country’s third largest party, which until the mid-1950s was closely allied with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In 1947 Nenni had chosen to align his party with the PCI because he believed that only the unity of the left could prevent a victory of the reactionary forces that had supported Fascism in the past. The common experience of the anti-Fascist resistance, combined with a sincere faith in the Soviet Union as the standard-bearer of socialism, created a strong bond between the electorates of the two leftist parties and seemed to make their alliance an irreversible feature of the Italian political land- Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 2002, pp. 36–55 © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 36 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039702320201067 by guest on 26 September 2021 The United States, Italy, and the Opening to the Left scape. When it became clear, however, that a continued alliance with the PCI would relegate the PSI to the role of a sterile opposition party for many years to come, opponents of the alliance struggled to regain control of the PSI and to explore a possible compromise with the DC. The revelations asso- ciated with Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet intervention in Hungary in November 1956, acceler- ated this process and spurred the PSI to move toward disengagement from the PCI. Both the DC and the PSI, however, remained sharply divided about a possible agreement between their two parties, and it took more than a decade to sort things out and reach a solution. Throughout the 1950s, therefore, the DC cautiously sounded the Socialist alternative, and the PSI oscillated between loyalty to its erstwhile allies (and their strong pro-Soviet stance), on the one hand, and the temptation to join a pro-Western government, on the other. Amove away from the PCI would clearly entail concrete beneªts for the PSI, but it would also necessitate revisions of the party’s core ideological beliefs and the possible loss of some support. The dilemma was not solved until December 1963 when the PSI, having almost completely severed its ties to the PCI, ªnally entered a coalition government with the DC. Throughout these years, the complicated and sometimes byzantine dialogue between the DC and the PSI was closely monitored in Washington and was strongly inºuenced by the policies of two different U.S. administrations, those of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. The purpose of this article is to examine U.S. policy toward Italy from 1953 to 1963 and to draw some general conclusions about the nature of U.S.-Italian relations during the Cold War. The ªrst part of the article provides a general survey of U.S. policy toward Italy from 1953 to 1963, focusing on issues that have been neglected or misinterpreted in the existing literature on the subject. The second part of the article discusses some of the lessons that can be learned from a study of U.S.-Italian relations in the 1950s and 1960s, showing how it pertains to the long-standing debate about the role and inºuence of the United States in Western Europe after World War II. The United States and the Opening to the Left: A Reappraisal The scholarly literature on U.S.-Italian relations during the Cold War has fo- cused mostly on the late 1940s, particularly the birth of the Italian republic and the crucial choices that anchored Italy to the Western bloc by the end of 37 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039702320201067 by guest on 26 September 2021 Nuti the decade.1 For subsequent years, and the 1960s in particular, there is no dis- tinct body of academic historiography. Instead, the main thing we have is a sub- stantial number of memoirs and journalistic reconstructions that are of mixed reliability. They offer a general outline of U.S.-Italian relations but were writ- ten on the basis of very few primary sources and thus fail to provide solid back- ground.2 According to this literature, U.S. policy vis-à-vis the opening to the left can be clearly divided into two stages. In the ªrst phase the Eisenhower administration staunchly opposed any dialogue between the DC and the PSI until the end of the 1950s because of the deep mistrust it nurtured toward Nenni and his party’s neutralist stance in international affairs. In the second phase the Kennedy administration found itself divided between those who wanted to stop interfering in Italian politics and give Italy broader autonomy in its do- mestic political choices and those who wanted to prevent any opening to the left. The split within the Kennedy administration continued until 1963 when the hardliners’ inºuence waned and the ofªcials who supported a DC- PSI rapprochement won out. This latter group, consisting mostly of strongly ideological Kennedyites, saw in the dialogue between the DC and the PSI a chance to lift Italian politics out of the perilous conservative stagnation of the 1950s and to encourage a reprise of the dynamic reformism of the early postwar years. This version of events is not entirely incorrect, but it includes quite a number of inaccuracies, and it does not tell us anything about the effect, if any, of Washington’s policies on the evolution of Italian politics in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ªrst task of this article will be to correct some of the most common misunderstandings about the relationship between the United States and the opening to the left. 1. See Ennio Di Nolfo, Vaticano e Stati Uniti, 1939–1952: Dalle carte di Myron C.Taylor (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1978); David Ellwood, L’alleato nemico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975); Ronald Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943–1953: A Study of Cold War Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); John Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and James E. Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940–1950: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1984). Marco Fini and Roberto Faenza, Gli americani in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979) is slightly less reliable. On some more speciªc topics, such as the Marshall Plan, the peace treaty, or the reconstruction of the Italian armed forces, see Elena Aga Rossi, ed., Il Piano Marshall e l’Europa (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1983); Ilaria Poggiolini, Diplomazia della tranzisione: Gli alleati e il problema del trattato di pace italiano, 1945–1947 (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990); and Leopoldo Nuti, L’esercito italiano nel secondo dopoguerra, 1945–1950: La sua ricostruzione e l’assistenza militare alleata (Rome: Ufªcio Storico dello Stato Maggiore Esercito, 1989). 2. See Ennio Caretto e Bruno Marolo, Made in USA: Le origini americane della repubblica italiana (Milan: Rizzoli, 1996); Roberto Gatti, Rimanga tra noi (Milan: Leonardo, 1990); Michael Ledeen, Lo Zio Sam e l’elefante rosso (Milan: Sugarco, 1987); Mario Margiocco, Stati Uniti e PCI, 1943–1980 (Bari: Laterza, 1981); Leo J. Wollemborg, Stelle, strisce e tricolore: Trent’anni di vicende politiche tra Roma e Washington (Milan: Mondadori, 1983); and Sergio Romano, Lo scambio ineguale: Italia e Stati Uniti da Wilson a Clinton (Bari: Laterza, 1995). Scholarly works on the 1950s include Alessandro Brogi, L’Italia e l’egemonia americana nel Mediterraneo (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1996); and Mario Del Pero, L’alleoto scomodo: Gli Usa e la Dc negli anni del centrismo (1948–1955) (Rome: Carocci, 2001). 38 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152039702320201067 by guest on 26 September 2021 The United States, Italy, and the Opening to the Left The Role of Clare Boothe Luce One of the main targets of the literature on U.S.-Italian relations in the 1950s is the U.S.

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