Giulio Andreotti, Premier of Italy 7 Times, Dies at 94
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti of Italy with President Richard Nixon in Washington in 1973.
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Published: May 6, 2013
Giulio Andreotti, a seven-time prime minister of Italy with a résumé of signal accomplishments and checkered failings that reads like a history of the republic, died on Monday. He was 94 and lived in Rome.
His death was announced by President Giorgio Napolitano.
Mr. Andreotti had been at the center of Italy’s postwar political order until its collapse in 1992, emerging at the close of World War II as a close aide to Alcide De Gasperi, a founding father of the Italian republic who had practically reinvented the Christian Democratic Party after it had been wiped out by Fascism.
The party became Italy’s dominant one, furnishing all but three postwar prime ministers and governing — though at times barely so — through unruly coalitions or with the acquiescence of other parties.
Mr. Andreotti’s long career epitomized many of the country’s contradictions. He held one important position or another — his portfolios included finance, treasury, defense and industry — as Italy overcame wartime destruction and the threat of Stalinist totalitarianism, coped with staggering social problems and labor discontent, faced down terrorists, and struggled against organized crime.
But to secure power for the Christian Democrats, Mr. Andreotti helped build a system of cronyism that led to vast corruption, government investigations and the end of both the Christian Democratic Party, in 1994, and his career.
A friend of popes and a daily attendant at Mass, Mr. Andreotti was complex and enigmatic. He helped shape the policies that placed Italy among the world’s richest democracies, the Group of 7. But his ultimate inability to rein in the government profligacy that had helped anchor his party’s popularity caused Italy’s indebtedness to balloon.
He was known for a sardonic, sometimes caustic wit. “Power,” he liked to say, “wears out only those who don’t have it.”
On another occasion, he said, “Apart from the Punic Wars, for which I was too young, I have been blamed for everything.”
Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain was wary of him. In her memoirs, she wrote of him as a man possessing a “positive aversion to principle, even a conviction that a man of principle was doomed to be a figure of fun.”
Others believed his character and deeds reflected his Catholicism. Gerardo Bianco, a longtime political associate, was quoted as saying, “Andreotti belongs to a certain Jesuitical, clerical tradition in which you accept that in a fallen world, you have to work with the material at hand.”
Probably his most traumatic episode as prime minister unfolded in March 1978, when the Red Brigades, a radical Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group, kidnapped the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in a street ambush and killed his five bodyguards. They demanded the release of their leaders, who were then on trial in Turin.
Moro was one of Mr. Andreotti’s oldest friends and associates, but a sometime rival as well. In desperate letters to Mr. Andreotti and others, he pleaded with them to rescue him through a prisoner exchange. Mr. Andreotti, though clearly anguished, refused, having resolved not to negotiate with terrorists.
Weeks later, Moro’s body was found in Rome in a battered old car, two blocks from the headquarters of both the Christian Democrats and the Communists.
Mr. Andreotti’s critics contended that his refusal to help Moro was politically motivated, an accusation he denied.
Mr. Andreotti’s detractors in Parliament had him investigated more than 20 times, whenever some scandal or malfeasance was rumored. As early as 1984, and perhaps even earlier, American diplomats in Sicily had reported to Washington that Mr. Andreotti’s Sicilian party faction was reputed to be closely tied to the Mafia. In Italy, he won full vindication each time.
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