That car pierced with blows, those newspapers scattered on the back seat, that body covered by a sheet, that trickle of blood that crosses the asphalt of Via Fani. Images, imprinted in our memory, which mark a passage of time. Like Jacqueline Kennedy trying to grab, on the rear hood of the Lincoln Continental (a brand that was an omen), the shreds of her husband’s brain, like Ceausescu listening in surprise to the boos coming from the crowd that had always idolized him, like the arrival of the second plane, framed from below, which crashes into one of the Twin Towers. Sequences of a few frames in which enclosed the making of historical time, the passage from one era to another. Like having witnessed live the Night of the Crystals or the assassination of Francesco Ferdinando in Sarajevo (a place that was an omen).
That day was the most important in post-war Italian history, with the massacre of Aldo Moro’s escort and his kidnapping, the course of the political and institutional history of this country changed. There is, as with the great period passages, a before and an after.
A few seconds and everything changes for years.
There is something surgical in actions such as those in via Fani. Human beings are hit, in the first place the escort agents, and those bullets make a complicated turn, with trajectories that seem impossible.
But they get where they need to go.
Those shots fired by the machine guns of the Brigades fly up to Piazza del Ges, where they hit Benigno Zaccagnini and then suddenly swerve towards via delle Botteghe Oscure where, on the second floor, Enrico Berlinguer works in his office.
An entire political plan, which lasted for years, shatters destroyed by those bullets. It was to be, in Aldo Moro’s intentions, a second phase of republican history in which the collaboration between the two large parties – which had collected, in the 1976 elections, 73 per cent of the votes of the Italians – was made mandatory, to govern the Country. Of course, the DC could still have tried to create a traditional quadripartite, but the PSI was not available. Italy was split in half and Moro wanted to get out of the quicksand of the degenerative phase of a center-left struggling between instability and inefficiency. (…)
all strange, all dirty, in the Moro affair. No one, after more than forty years, has said a definitive truth. First of all, the Red Brigades who, in the best case, must defend the coherence of an autobiography and in the worst case would risk a lot if they told the truth. Those who were responsible for the investigation did not say it. Via Gradoli, the Lake of the Duchess, the role of the Banda della Magliana, the choice not to follow the autonomous with whom the socialists were looking for a solution, the American consultants who wanted Moro dead and the role of the Eastern Services. Steve Pieczenick, sent to the Interior Ministry by the US on Italian request, will not hesitate to say, in an interview with Giovanni Minoli in 2013: Until the end I was afraid that they would free Moro. For Sossi it was, for the commissioner Cirillo also, for the son of the PSI secretary De Martino as well.
And then Andreotti correcting the text of an appeal from the pope, the investigation committee haunted by P2 men, the dangerous game of Mino Pecorelli and his killing.
Too many silences and too many deaths, in this, alas, classic Italian story of the so unjustly regretted First Republic. All strange, all dirty.
The target of the March 16 kidnapping was the hinge function and innovation that Moro had assumed in that very delicate passage of national history. Alberto Franceschini, one of the founders of the terrorist organization, told me clearly in an interview that the aim of the Red Brigades, before and after the kidnapping of the DC statesman, was to blow up the historical compromise.
The Moro operation, from this point of view, was surgical. Hit him, out of the way, that prospect would vanish like snow in the sun. So it was. And even the DC, after a few years, was overwhelmed by its contradictions, confirming one of Moro’s predictions regarding an imminent ruin of the Crusader shield.
Moro had hardly convinced a recalcitrant Christian Democracy to take the path of collaboration with the PCI. He was declared the intention to experiment a phase of collaboration, to legitimize, from a democratic and international point of view, the historical adversary of all time and then to know in this way a democracy of alternation, without having to imagine that an electoral defeat of the DC , which he certainly thought he was avoiding in this way, meant a democratic risk for a Western country.
It was a great design.
Let’s face it, the biggest after the Resistance and the Constitution.
The painful speech that Moro gave must be remembered, fifteen days before being kidnapped, at the decisive meeting of the parliamentary groups of the DC. It started from the recognition of the fact that something, for years, has been broken, rusty in the normal mechanism of Italian political life. And then, reflecting on the outcome of the 1976 political elections, he said: We had a victory, but we weren’t alone. Others also had a victory; we are two winners, and two winners in one battle certainly create problems.
After recalling the flexibility of the Christian Democrats, who has ensured its hegemony in the country since the war, Moro explains why, after the steps of non-confidence and the program agreement that characterized the start of the legislature, there is a need to take a further step: entry , with full rights, of the PCI in the government majority. (…)
Moro is speaking to everyone, not just the scudocrociati deputies in front of him.
Talk to the PCI, to the chancelleries.
Reassures, guarantees.
He wants to avoid a rupture in his world that would upset his design.
This is why he wanted Andreotti as head of the government, for this reason the DC has produced, in those hours, a composition of the government that infuriates Botteghe Oscure for the total continuity with the previous single colors. (…)
On the morning of March 16, the Chamber met for the presentation of the new government.
Not for that event will go down in history, the livid and rainy Thursday at the end of the winter of 1978. (…)
Berlinguer, like Moro, distressed by what risks appearing as paragraph 22 of Italian politics. One season is over and another cannot begin. A left-wing alternative government would in fact trigger a violent reaction. On the domestic level but, even more so, on the international one. The American administration did not care to know Gramsci and the foundation of the PCI’s originality of which, no less dangerously, the Soviets were all too aware. And therefore the idea that Communists could share participation in NATO secrets, in a time of the Cold War still dominant, put everyone, as we have seen, in great agitation. Nothing could be excluded. For several nights, in the mid-1970s, leaders of democratic organizations slept outside the home, on the recommendation of their respective parties.
The PCI was aware of this and Berlinguer had the courage to reopen, updating it, a theme that had already engaged Palmiro Togliatti’s research: the politics of alliances. A theme that a communist party only arises if it has discarded the idea of taking power. (…)
Also in Berlinguer, as in Moro, the strong discontinuity that is proposed is accompanied by reassurance towards one’s community. Against the DC, against the forks, against centrist politics, the PCI had defined its identity for decades.
Now, suddenly, the way to a collaboration is pointed out, of a historical compromise with the opponents of all time. For this reason, even Berlinguer, moreover without the baggage of prestige and internal authority that Moro had acquired over the decades, in putting forward the proposal that is close to his heart, frames it in such a way as to make it seem not a turning point and certainly not a rupture, but something that is in perfect continuity with a tradition. Hence the quotations from Lenin and NEP as demonstration of the value of the science of the offensive and the science of retreat.
Moro and Berlinguer try to move their worlds, to bring them to meet, after decades of bitter conflicts, but both are concerned with delivering, to this meeting, their large, undivided, undeveloped communities. (…)
Against this line the Br. By hitting Moro they shatter the whole project. And Italian politics, as in the tension of a broken rubber band, returns to the starting point.
The Red Brigades wanted communism but produced the five-party. They wanted to destabilize and ended up restoring it the state.
And they themselves, in order to get too close to the sun, burned their wings. the dramatic fate of bees that if stung, die.
The book on newsstands and in bookstores
In addition to the introduction of which we publish an excerpt, the volume by Walter Veltroni The Moro case and the First Republic (Solferino), out on 6 May at newsstands and in bookstores, contains a series of conversations with characters who provide their testimonies. The review opens with an interview that Veltroni had in prison with the BR terrorist Prospero Gallinari, one of Moro’s jailers, published at the time by the Unit on 23 October 1993. Interviews with politicians who appeared in Corriere della Sera between July 2019 follow. and July 2020: the former socialist minister Rino Formica, the former leader of the PCI Aldo Tortorella, the former Christian Democrat minister Virginio Rognoni, the former exponent of the DC and Minister of the Interior of Forza Italia Beppe Pisanu, the former Christian Democrat parliamentarian Mario Segni, the former secretary of the PCI and the PDS Achille Occhetto, the former socialist minister Claudio Signorile, the former radical minister Emma Bonino, the former vice president of the socialist council Claudio Martelli.
May 2, 2021 (change May 2, 2021 | 21:46)
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