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Even when he was Prime Minister, de Gasperi lived a life of simplicity and devotion. When he first took office he had to get an advance on his salary so that he could afford a new suit.
Like many other leaders, de Gasperi began his day with a walk. He took along his press secretary for briefings and a pocketful of candy for the children he met as he walked through the foothills of Rome. He worked until 9:30 at night and often turned out the lights in the government’s offices himself. For several years after he came to power, he, his wife, Francesca, and their four daughters lived in the same small apartment that had been their home when he was a Vatican clerk and that he had furnished on the installment plan. The only decorations in his bedroom were a crucifix and a picture of the Madonna.
During the first years of de Gasperi’s premiership, his neighbor across the hall was an elderly countess who blamed the fall of the Italian monarchy on de Gasperi personally. (He had been the principal advocate of republicanism in the 1946 referendum in which the Italians chose their form of government.) She pursued her grudge against the Prime Minister by leaving her trash can in the hall in the hope that he might trip over it and by banging on her piano far into the night. De Gasperi put up with these inconveniences with bemused good humor.
De Gasperi’s power brought him and his family comfort but never opulence. When I visited Italy after de Gasperi’s death, I called on his widow and found her living in a modest apartment on the outskirts of Rome.
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An ardent Catholic, de Gasperi founded Italy’s Christian Democratic party while working in the Vatican library. Especially after the Church backed him against the Communists in 1948, he was sometimes accused of taking orders from the Pope. His associates usually replied that his thinking was so pervasively Catholic, and had been so since early in his life, that it was not necessary for the Vatican to remind him to uphold Christian doctrines.
In both Italy and West Germany, leaders arose after the war who raised the banner of Christian democracy and who were dedicated to restoring and preserving individual liberty above all else. To both de Gasperi and Adenauer, Christian politics were by nature centrist politics in which limited state intervention in society was not only permitted but desirable so long as it did not interfere with the liberty of the individual to think, act, and pray as he chose.
De Gasperi attended mass daily, often visiting small churches very early in the morning so that he would not attract attention. His Catholicism had always been an all-consuming variety, the “spirit and heart of things” both public and private.
In any case de Gasperi proved his independence of the Church in 1952, when it favored a coalition between the Christian Democrats and all other non-Communist parties, including the neo-Fascists, to keep the Communists from taking over the Rome city government. On this de Gasperi defied the Pope and ruled out the neo-Fascists.
De Gasperi was as passionately committed to the European ideal as was Adenauer. De Gasperi came from a border province, as did Adenauer, and had the same gut-level sense of Europe’s common heritage. Each believed that a unified Europe was the only way to protect the liberty of their peoples from encroachment by their Communist enemies to the east, as well as a way to reduce the internal threat to peace in Europe that resulted from nationalism and xenophobia.
De Gasperi was a staunch supporter of the European economic community and NATO. He had an enormous investment in the European Defense Community, through which the nations of Western Europe would have contributed to one federated European army. In August 1954, when he had been out of office for a year, the seventy-three-year-old de Gasperi broke down and wept during a telephone conversation in which he begged his former Interior Minister and the current Premier, Mario Scelba, to keep Italy committed to the idea. Some believed that when he died of a heart attack a few days later, his heart had really been broken by France’s continuing reluctance to approve the plan.
His success at putting Italy solidly in the Western European community lived after him. During several visits to Europe after he left office—including one while I was President, in 1969—I found that in times when NATO was experiencing internal dissension, the Italians could always be counted on to be the most consistently loyal Europeans. It is not surprising that Italy’s Manlio Brosio proved to be one of NATO’s most effective Secretary Generals. Except for the fact that he was a member of a small party, Brosio might have been another great Italian Prime Minister.
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De Gasperi did not look like a hero or sound like a hero. But he was one of the heroes of the postwar world. He showed that a statesman does not need bombast or even eloquence; that a leader can lead quietly, without thundering; that good men can prevail.
At the end of the war Italy faced a perilous political vacuum. The Fascists had come to power in 1922; Italy’s young adults knew no other form of peacetime government. De Gasperi gave the Italians what they needed most: moderate, consistent government based on pragmatism instead of ideology and liberty instead of coercion. In spite of the intrigues of the best-organized Communist party in the West, de Gasperi was able to establish a republic and make it stick.
When de Gasperi took office in 1945, industrial and agricultural production were perilously low and unemployment was rampant. At one point Italy’s warehouses contained only enough grain to last two weeks. Yet, after six years of his leadership, the agricultural sector had almost completely recovered and industrial output was higher than it had been before the war.
He also fully restored Italy’s respectability among nations, establishing lasting links with both the United States and the nations of Western Europe. It is in large measure because of de Gasperi that Italy’s national government is still dominated by the Christian Democrats and that its relations with the rest of the free world are still friendly. In fact Italy remains one of the most dependable members of what has become a very troubled alliance.
As 1982 began, the Polish crisis was testing the character of western leaders. It would have been impossible to imagine a Churchill, a de Gaulle, an Adenauer, or a de Gasperi reacting as did some of Europe’s political and intellectual leaders when confronted with the Soviet-directed crackdown on Poland’s stirrings of freedom. They simply did not have room for the sort of temporizing, equivocating, hope-it-all-goes-away avoidance that seems increasingly to characterize European politics generally and the Western European response to the Soviet threat specifically. De Gaulle could be imperious, and his stubborn independence was often a thorn in the American side. But at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he sent President Kennedy a message: “If there is a war, I will be with you. . . .” De Gaulle, Adenauer, and de Gasperi were all leaders whose political principles were rooted in deep religious faith. They were not men who could be intimidated.
There has lately been a concern in the United States about the nature and cohesiveness, even the dependability, of the western alliance, a growing feeling that we may have to go it alone rather than risk depending on unreliable European allies. The Europeans, for their part, increasingly describe the United States as trigger-happy or impulsive or alarmist, finding one excuse after another to avoid any action to meet the Soviet threat. Europe in the 1980s chillingly resembles Europe in the 1930s in this regard. The question is whether the lessons of the 1930s will be learned in the 1980s—and learned in time.
ANTICOLONIAL REVOLUTIONARIES: NKRUMAH, SUKARNO, NEHRU
For the nations of Western Europe the postwar period meant the end of empire. For many of their former colonies it meant an abrupt immersion in the uncertainties of independence and, for the leaders of those former colonies, a formidable test that some would pass and others would fail. Three who particularly captured the world’s imagination were Ghana’s Nkrumah, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and India’s Nehru. All were charismatic, all were successful at throwing off colonial rule, all ventured ambitiously into the maelstrom of international Third World politics. Both the sim
ilarities and the contrasts among their records show how vastly different are the requirements for leading a revolution and for building a nation.
When I visited Europe in 1947 as a member of the Herter committee, I found leaders struggling desperately to retrieve their countries from the ashes of destruction so vast that it staggered the imagination. They needed help to rebuild; they also needed food to keep millions from starving. But they were not creating new nations out of the jungle. They could summon the accumulated wisdom of centuries of advanced civilization. They could speak to the spirit, and it would respond again as it had in one crisis after another. Beneath the ruins was a highly competent work force that was experienced in operating a modern industrial economy. All that was necessary was to give them the tools and they could do the job.
Ten years later I visited Ghana, representing the United States at the ceremonies marking that country’s independence. While Ghana did not have the trained work force and industrial base of the European countries, the briefings I received indicated that it had an excellent chance to succeed as it embarked on self-government.
Ghana was the first black African colony to win independence. It had acquired independence through a peaceful rather than a violent revolution. The leader of its independence movement, Kwame Nkrumah, had been educated in the United States, at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania. Ghana was hailed at the time as an example of Britain’s policy of “creative abdication.” As they had in other colonies, the British, to their great credit, had carefully prepared the country for independence by training Ghanaians in the civil service and promoting them to positions of responsibility. Ghana also had a robust economy and an educated elite. With the world’s largest cocoa crop, it had ample foreign reserves and a favorable balance of trade.
Today Ghana has become an economic and political disaster area, and one of the principal reasons for its tragedy is Kwame Nkrumah. He is a prime example of the man who succeeds brilliantly at leading a revolution, but then fails utterly at building a nation.
Delegations from all over the world attended the independence ceremony. I vividly recall our first night in the new hotel that had been built for the visiting delegations and for the tourists that were expected to follow thereafter. We were kept awake practically the whole night by people chanting, singing, and dancing the “Hi-life” in the streets.
The Duchess of Kent represented the British crown. She arrived at the parade grounds in a Rolls-Royce and seemed impeccably cool and regal despite the oppressive heat. When she read the speech for the crown at the opening of Parliament, the Ghanaian ministers and representatives of what was then an opposition party wore white British wigs. The ceremony was carried off with great dignity.
The reception given by the British Governor-general, Charles Arden-Clarke, was a gala affair. Dignitaries from all over the world went through the long receiving lines. An hour had passed by the time Mrs. Nixon and I came to the head of the line. I felt sorry for Arden-Clarke. A heavy man, he was sweating profusely under the heavy woolen dress uniform that the British required their foreign service personnel to wear, even in the tropics. As we shook hands, he said, “This is a good time to take a break,” and escorted us into an air-conditioned reception room, where we were served ice-cold lemonade. I asked him whether he thought the Ghanaian experiment would work. Arden-Clarke, who had overseen much of the preparation for independence, considered my question for a moment and shrugged as he replied, “The chances of success are about fifty percent. We have prepared them as well as we possibly can. On the other hand, you have to remember that it was only about sixty years ago that we carved an area of warring tribes out of the jungle. It may be that those people you heard dancing in the streets last night are getting their independence too soon. But we are forced into it by world opinion.”
Winston Churchill once commented to me that he thought Franklin Roosevelt, in his anticolonial fervor, had pressured Britain, France, and other colonial powers into withdrawing too soon from Africa and Asia. He believed eventual self-government was the right of every nation, but he added, “A democracy is the most difficult kind of government to run. It requires years of preparation for a people to be able to handle the problems they face in a free, democratic society.”
Still, in 1957, like virtually all the Americans attending the independence ceremony, I was caught up in the optimism of the moment. This was the first time I met Martin Luther King. We talked for over an hour one night about the prospects of Ghana’s future. I was deeply impressed by his highly intelligent and coolly objective appraisal. But his eyes flashed when he told me passionately, “Ghana just has to make it. The whole world is watching to see if the first black African country to receive its independence can successfully govern itself.”
I thought Ghana was starting out so auspiciously that it would take a genius to ruin it. I had not reckoned with the extent to which Nkrumah would prove such a genius. In fact, at that time, I found him very impressive both in his demeanor and in what he said.
Nkrumah professed a deep admiration for American democracy and all that it had achieved. When I presented him with the official gift of the U.S. government, a complete technical library, he seemed delighted and said that it would help him put the scientific advances of western civilization to work in Africa. He also told me that Abraham Lincoln was one of his heroes, and that he was determined to carry out Lincoln’s principles in a way that would fit Ghana’s political, economic, and social conditions.
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Nkrumah was born in 1909 in a remote section of British West Africa. His father was the village goldsmith. He attended Catholic mission schools and Achimota, a famous college in the Gold Coast, and was such a brilliant student that his uncle, a diamond prospector, decided to send him to study in the U.S. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree at Lincoln University, then did further study both in the U.S. and in Britain. He returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 with two graduate degrees and a strong interest in socialism and pan-Africanism. He soon formed his own political party, the People’s Convention party, and—like Sadat and Nehru—ended up serving time in prison for his proindependence activities. He was released by Arden-Clarke in 1951 when the People’s Convention party won the general elections by a landslide. The following year he became Prime Minister.
Since his youth Nkrumah had shown a knack for public speaking, and with his soaring voice and brooding good looks he could hold crowds enthralled. I saw him cast just such a spell over those who gathered in 1957 for the independence ceremonies. Though soft-spoken in private, when he moved among the people and addressed them, he was a different man. With a few words he could send them into a frenzy of excitement. His people were obviously devoted to him, and when I talked to him, it seemed that he was devoted to his people.
But after the warm glow of the independence ceremonies wore off, Ghana lurched from one disaster to another. Nkrumah spent profligately, much of it on those projects backward countries see as the symbols of modernism: a huge dam, an airline, an airport. Determined to make Ghana economically independent, he set out to eliminate imports by producing locally everything Ghana needed, and to Nkrumah this meant production by the government—no matter that the government might not be competent or that the locally produced goods turned out to be more expensive than the imports had been. He nationalized industries, plantations, and stores, with catastrophic results. He saw himself as the father not only of his country but of African independence, and in vain he spent heavily for a headquarters for the Organization for African Unity, which was eventually located in Ethiopia instead. He poured his country’s money into independence movements elsewhere in Africa.
Nkrumah’s anti-western paranoia and militant pan-Africanism escalated during a period when Ghana would have benefited enormously from closer ties with the industrialized West. He developed a cult of personality and lavished his government’s rapidly dwindling funds on elaborate monuments to himself.
In t
he mid-1960s the price of cocoa—still Ghana’s principal export—collapsed, and Ghana no longer had any reserves to fall back on.
As the economy ran down, instead of focusing on the hard measures needed to turn it around, Nkrumah tried to reach out and impose his own distress on others. Guinea, to the north, was a country blessed with enormous natural resources, including gold and diamonds. Guinea’s leader, Sekou Toure, came to Washington in 1960, and I escorted him to the White House. He came across as a warm and charming man. But he was a devout Marxist and had tried to impose Marxist principles on Guinea with the predictable result. If anything, Guinea, despite its abundance of natural resources, was even worse off than Ghana. But while Nkrumah, like Sukarno in Indonesia and Nasser in Egypt, was unable to cope with the problems within his own country, he developed an insatiable appetite for foreign adventures. He tried unsuccessfully to unite Ghana and Guinea.
As the years passed, Nkrumah became more and more detached from his people, calling himself “Redeemer” and ruling from within a heavily guarded compound. In 1964 all opposition parties were outlawed and many of Nkrumah’s critics jailed. Two years later, when the Ghanaian economy was staggered by the fluctuations in the price of cocoa and the effects of his expensive development projects, Nkrumah was overthrown by the military while he was on a visit to Peking. In 1972 he died in exile in Guinea.
In its first quarter century of independence, Ghana had five military coups and three civilian governments. Its cocoa crop, still the staple of its economy, is barely more than half what it was before independence. Its gold production is down by two-thirds. Tobacco production on the nationalized plantations is a tenth what it was eight years ago. Food production has diminished. Of the country’s paid work force, eighty-five percent are paid by the state.
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