Aldo Moro

Aldo Moro was five times prime minister of Italy and the dominant strategist of Christian Democracy, until the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered him in 1978. He was a law professor from Puglia who entered politics through Catholic student organisations. He served as minister of justice and of education in the 1950s and became secretary of the Christian Democrats in 1959. His first premiership ran from 1963 to 1968, his second from 1974 to 1976. He was also foreign minister for much of the intervening period, where he pursued a deliberately pro-Arab line. His political method was patience and ambiguity, and his speeches were famously difficult to parse. The strategy behind them was not. He built the opening to the left that brought the Socialists into government in the 1960s. He then spent the 1970s constructing the historic compromise, an arrangement under which the Italian Communist Party, the largest in Western Europe, would support a Christian Democrat government without joining it. Both Washington and Moscow disliked the idea. On the morning of 16 March 1978, the day the new government was to be presented to parliament with Communist backing, Red Brigades gunmen ambushed his car in Rome, killed his five bodyguards and took him. He was held for fifty-five days. He wrote letters from captivity begging his party to negotiate, and the party refused on the principle that the state does not bargain with terrorists. His body was found in the boot of a car in central Rome on 9 May, parked midway between the headquarters of the two parties he had been trying to bring together.

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