Aldo Moro

Social reforms

During Moro's premiership, a wide range of social reforms were carried out. The 1967 Bridge Law (Legge Ponte) introduced urgent housing provisions as part of an envisioned reform of the entire sector, such as the introduction of minimum standards for housing and environment. A law promulgated on 14 December 1963 introduced an annual allowance for university students with income below a given level. Another law, promulgated on 10 March 1968, introduced voluntary public pre-elementary education for children aged three to five years. A law promulgated on 21 July 1965 introduced new pension provisions under the general scheme.

Moreover, the legal minima was raised, all current pensions were revalued, seniority pensions were introduced (after 35 years of contributions workers could retire even before attaining pensionable age), and within the Social Security National Institute (INPS), a Social Fund (Fondo Sociale) was established, ensuring to all members pensioners a basic uniform pension largely financed by state, known as the social pension (not related to the later social pension introduced in 1968). A law of 22 July 1966 extended pension insurance to small traders, while law of 22 July 1966 extended health insurance to retired traders, and a law of 29 May 1967 extended compulsory health insurance to retired farmers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers, and extended health insurance to the unemployed in receipt of unemployment benefits.

A law approved on 18 March 1968 introduced the principle of earnings-related pensions within the general scheme, with the pension formula to equal 1.626% of average earnings in the last 3 years of work multiplied by the number of contribution years (maximum pension: 65% of previous earnings) up to 40. A law of 5 November 1968 extended family allowances to the unemployed in receipt of unemployment benefits.^[15]

Vajont Dam disaster

On 9 October 1963, during initial filling, a massive landslide caused a man-made megatsunami in the lake of the Vajont Dam in which 50 million cubic metres of water overtopped the dam in a wave 250 metres (820 ft) high, leading to the complete destruction of several villages and towns, and 1,910 deaths. This event occurred when the company and the Italian government dismissed evidence and concealed reports describing the geological instability of Monte Toc on the southern side of the basin, and other early warning signs reported prior to the disaster. Estimates of the dead range from 1,900 to 2,500 people, and about 350 families lost all members.

Numerous warnings, signs of danger, and negative appraisals had been disregarded, and the eventual attempt to safely control the landslide into the lake by lowering its level came when the landslide was almost imminent and was too late to prevent it. Although the dam itself remained almost intact, and two thirds of the water was retained behind it, the landslide was much larger than expected and the impact brought massive flooding and destruction to the Piave valley below.

After the tragedy, Moro immediately dismissed the administrative officials who had supervised the construction of the dam.

Coalition crisis

Aldo Moro with the Socialist leader Pietro Nenni.

On 25 June 1964, the government was beaten on the budget law for the Italian Ministry of Education concerning the financing of private education, and on the same day Moro resigned. The rightist Christian Democratic President of Italy, Antonio Segni, during the presidential consultations for the formation of a new cabinet, asked the socialist leader Pietro Nenni to exit from the government majority.^[16]

On 16 July, Segni sent the Carabinieri general, Giovanni De Lorenzo, to a meeting of representatives of the DC, to deliver a message that, according to some historians, it referred to the availability of the president, if the negotiations for the formation of a new center-left government had failed, to confer a subsequent mandate to the President of the Senate Cesare Merzagora, for the formation of a "president's government", composed by all the conservative forces in the Parliament.^[17][18] Moro, on the other hand, managed to put back a centre-left majority and, on 17 July, went to the Quirinale, with the acceptance of the assignment and the list of ministers of his second government. During the negotiations, Nenni had accepted the downsizing of his reform programs.

Saragat's election

On 6 December 1964, President Segni resigned because of a thrombosis. In the presidential election of December, Moro and his majority tried to elected a leftist as President. On the twenty-first round of voting, the leader of Italian Democratic Socialist Party and former President of the Constituent Assembly Giuseppe Saragat was elected President with 646 votes out of 963. Saragat was the first left-wing politician to become President of the Republic.^[19][20]

Resignation

The centre-left coalition, the first one for the Italian post-war political panorama, stayed in power until the 1968 general elections, despite the strong opposition of Segni and other rightist Christian Democrats. His third cabinet (1966–68) stayed in power for 833 days, a record for Italy's so-called "First Republic".

Historic compromise

Moro was considered a very tenacious mediator, particularly skilled in coordinating the different internal trends of DC.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Moro was one of the most convinced supporters of an alliance between the DC and the Italian Socialist Party, in order to widen the majority and integrate the socialists in the government system. In the 1963 party congress in Naples, he was able to convince the whole party directive of the strategy. The same happened in 1978, when he supported a "national solidarity" government with the backing of the Italian Communist Party.

Moro's main aim was to widen the democratic base of the government: the cabinets should have been able to represent a bigger number of voters and parties. He thought of the DC as the fulcrum of a coalition system, on the principles of consociative democracy.

Moro faced big challenges, especially, the necessity to conciliate the Christian and popular mission of the Democrazia Cristiana with the rising laicist and liberal values of the Italian society in the 1960s, and the necessity to integrate new important social groups (youth, women, workers) in the democratic system. DC's mission, in Moro's vision, was intended to recover the popular class that supported Fascism and ferry them in the democratic system. The contradiction of Moro's political stance was in trying to reconcile the extreme mobility of social transformations with the continuity of the institutions of representative democracy, and the integration of the masses in the State, without falling into autocracy.^[27]

Aldo Moro in 1978

Following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Italian Socialist Party had taken a definitive distance from the Italian Communist Party, and Pietro Nenni had collaborated with the DC in the early 1960s. After the rise of the Italian Communist Party of Enrico Berlinguer at the 1976 general elections, when the Communists scored 34,4% of the votes, Moro conceived the idea of a "national solidarity" cabinet, whose parliamentary base should include the Italian Communist Party as well. Moro's idea was openly criticised, as such an "Historic Compromise" would have involved an Italian Communist Party which was still under direct influence from Moscow. Berlinguer openly defused the proposition.

In 1976–1977, Berlinguer's Italian Communist Party broke with Moscow, and convened with the Spanish and French parties to draw the lines of Eurocommunism. Such a move made an eventual collaboration more acceptable for DC voters, and the two parties began an intense parliamentary debate, in a moment of deep social crises.

In 1977, Moro was personally involved in international disputes. He strongly defended Mariano Rumor during the parliamentary debate on the Lockheed scandal, and some in the press reported that he might have been "Antelope Cobbler", an alleged bribe recipient. The accusation, aimed at politically destroying Moro and avoiding the risk of a "Historic Compromise" cabinet, failed when Moro was cleared on 3 March 1978, 13 days before his kidnapping.^[28]

The early-1978 proposition by Moro of a Christian Democracy-Italian Socialist Party cabinet supported also by the Italian Communist Party was strongly opposed by both super-powers. The United States feared that the collaboration of an Italian government with the Communists might have allowed these later to gain information on strategic NATO military plans and installations, and pass them to Soviet agents. Moreover, the participation in government of the Communists in a Western country would have represented a cultural failure for the USA. The Soviets considered potential participation by the Italian Communist Party in a cabinet a form of emancipation from Moscow and rapprochement to the Americans, therefore also opposing it.

Negotiations

The Red Brigades proposed to exchange Moro's life for the freedom of several prisoners. There has been speculation that during his detention many knew where he was (in an apartment in Rome). When Moro was abducted, the government immediately took a hard line position: the "State must not bend" on 'terrorist demands'. Some contrasted this with the kidnapping of Ciro Cirillo in 1981, a minor political figure for whom the government negotiated. However, Cirillo was released for a monetary ransom, rather than the release of the imprisoned extremists.

On 2 April Romano Prodi, Mario Baldassarri,^[35] and Alberto Clò, of the faculty of the University of Bologna, passed on a tip about a safe-house where the Red Brigades might have been holding Moro. Prodi claimed he had been given the tip by the founders of the Christian Democrats, from beyond a grave in a séance and a Ouija board, which gave the names of Viterbo, Bolsena and Gradoli.^[36]

Captivity letters

Aldo Moro with Giulio Andreotti

During this period, Moro wrote several letters to the leaders of the Christian Democrats and to Pope Paul VI, who later personally officiated in Moro's Funeral Mass. Some of those letters, at times very critical of Andreotti, were kept secret for more than a decade, and published only in the early 1990s. In his letters, Moro said that the state's primary objective should be saving lives, and that the government should comply with his kidnappers' demands. Most of the Christian Democrat leaders argued that the letters did not express Moro's genuine wishes, claiming they were written under duress, and thus refused all negotiation. This was in stark contrast to the requests of Moro's family. In his appeal to the terrorists, Pope Paul asked them to release Moro "without conditions".^[37]

Murder

When the Red Brigades decided to murder Moro, they placed him in a car and told him to cover himself with a blanket saying that they were going to transport him to another location. After Moro was covered they shot him ten times. According to the official reconstruction after a series of trials, the killer was Mario Moretti. Moro's body was left in the trunk of a red Renault 4 on Via Michelangelo Caetani towards the Tiber River near the Roman Ghetto.^[38]

After the recovery of Moro's body, the Minister of the Interior Francesco Cossiga resigned.

Antonio Negri's 1979 arrest and release

On 7 April 1979, Marxist philosopher Antonio Negri was arrested along with other leaders of Autonomia Operaia (Oreste Scalzone, E. Vesce, A. Del Re, L. Ferrari Bravo, Franco Piperno and others). Pietro Calogero, an attorney close to the Italian Communist Party, accused the Autonomia group of masterminding left-wing terrorism in Italy. Negri was charged with a number of offences including leadership of the Red Brigades, being behind Moro's kidnapping and murder, and plotting to overthrow the government. A year later, he was found innocent of Moro's murder.

In 2003, Alexander Stille accused Negri of bearing moral but not legal responsibility for the crimes.^[39]

New Revelations and Controversies

Memorial to Aldo Moro, in via Caetani, Rome

In 2005, Sergio Flamigni, a leftist politician and writer, who had served on a parliamentary inquiry on the Moro case, suggested the involvement of the Operation Gladio network directed by NATO. He asserted that Gladio had manipulated Moretti as a way to take over the Red Brigades in order to effect a strategy of tension aimed at creating popular demand for a new, right-wing law-and-order regime.^[40][41]

In 2006, the Harvard and MIT educated American psychiatrist and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Management, Steve Pieczenik, was interviewed by Emmanuel Amara in his documentary film Les derniers jours d'Aldo Moro ("The Last Days of Aldo Moro"). In the interview, Pieczenik, an expert on international terrorism and negotiating strategies who had been brought to Italy as a consultant to Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga's Crisis Committee, stated that: "We had to sacrifice Aldo Moro to maintain the stability of Italy."^[42][43]

Pieczenik maintained that the U.S. had had to "instrumentalize the Red Brigades." According to him, the decision to have Moro killed was taken during the fourth week of his detention, when Moro was thought to be revealing state secrets in his letters,^[44] namely, the existence of Gladio.^[43] In another interview former interior minister Cossiga revealed that the Crisis Committee had also leaked a false statement attributed to the Red Brigades that Moro was already dead. This was intended to communicate to the kidnappers that further negotiations would be useless, since the government had written Moro off.^[45][46]

Possible beatification

According to media reports on 26 September 2012, the Holy See has received a file on beatification for Moro.^[47] Beatification is the first step to becoming a saint in the Roman Catholic Church. Nicola Giampaolo serves as the postulator for the cause.

In April 2015, it was reported that controversies around Moro could cause the suspension or closing of the cause. The postulator has stated the cause will continue when the discrepancies are cleared up.^[48] The halting of proceedings was due to Antonio Mennini, the priest who heard his last confession, being allowed to provide a statement to a tribunal in regards to Moro's kidnapping and confession. The cause was able to resume its initial investigations following this.

Primary sources

• Interview with Giovanni Moro, Aldo Moro's son by La Repubblica, 16 March 1998.