Word: gasperi
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Once, years ago, when he still indulged in his favorite sport of mountain climbing, Alcide de Gasperi careered downward when his rope jammed. "I found myself dangling over the void," he said later. "For 20 minutes I could not move. People in the valley could see me just hanging there. Then I swung over to a ridge and I was safe." Italy's 71-year-old Prime Minister no longer climbs mountains, but his talent for hanging on has become one of the most awesome political feats of the postwar...
...Librarian. Anti-Fascist Alcide de Gasperi was a regular inmate of Mussolini's prisons until, his health broken, he was let out in 1929. He spent the next 14 years in the quiet of the Vatican Library-as a clerk, filing index cards. He stretched his $80-a-month salary, on which he supported a wife and four daughters, by translating from the German at a nickel a page. Meanwhile, he kept in touch with his fellow Christian Democrats, and when Mussolini fell, a skeleton Christian party was ready. By April 1945 De Gasperi was Italy's Foreign...
Today, he no longer lives in the $9-a-month, five-flights-up Rome apartment he rented even after becoming Premier. His grateful party last year gave him an eight-room villa and his salary has gone up to $500 a month. A kind of Latin Attlee, De Gasperi is the complete antithesis of his predecessor, Mussolini. Like Adenauer in Germany and Schuman and Bidault in France-Roman Catholics all-De Gasperi belongs to that underrecognized group of Christian Democrats who have done most to save postwar Western Europe. At a time when the left was divided in Marxist confusion...
...Dangers. Last week, however, there were signs that Italy's greatest political balancing act of modern times has nearly run its course. The very compromises that have won De Gasperi power may topple him from it. Governing a sprawling coalition that runs from Socialists to monarchists, De Gasperi has been unable to get agreement for a concerted attack on Italy's great and growing economic problems. Italy has 2,000,000 unemployed, another 1,500,000 working part-time. Millions of Italians still live in caves and huts, or jammed four and five into a room. Land reform...
...weeks ago, the Western Allies forgave Italy ber war guilt and wrote off the restraints of the peace treaty so that Italy could build air and ground forces for Western defense (TIME, Dec. 31). Last week Premier Alcide de Gasperi, after an eleven-hour cabinet session, announced a 1952-53 budget of $3.4 billions, of which almost a third is for "internal and international security." He had to face down ministers who wanted more money for the unemployed and for essential social reforms, who worried about high taxes, and who wanted to get the U.S. to pay the arms bill...