Giovanni Leone
Giovanni Leone resigned the presidency over a bribery scandal he had nothing to do with, and was apologised to twenty years later by the people who had driven him out. He was a criminal lawyer from Naples and a professor of procedure, a Christian Democrat of the moderate centre who twice formed caretaker governments whose only purpose was to hold the ring until the parties could agree on something. That was also how he became president. The electoral college of 1971 took twenty-three ballots across three weeks before it produced him, and the votes that finally did it included the neo-fascist party's, which left him with a defect of legitimacy that the left never let go of. His seven years were the worst of the republic's peacetime history. The years of lead ran through the whole term: bombings by the extreme right aimed at provoking a crackdown, kidnappings and assassinations by the extreme left, and a state apparatus that was in places complicit in the first. The oil shock of 1973 ended the postwar boom and brought double-digit inflation. In the spring of 1978 the Red Brigades took the leader of his own party out of his car in Rome, killed his escort, held him for fifty-five days and shot him when the government refused to negotiate; Leone was willing to sign a clemency measure that might have opened a channel, and was not permitted to. A month later he was gone. He had been named in the margins of a scandal about American aircraft bribes, and a campaign in the press and a best-selling book built a portrait of a corrupt and vulgar man that the country believed. He resigned in June 1978, six months early, and the party that had led the campaign against him supported it. In 1998 the leaders of that campaign publicly apologised: no evidence had ever connected him to the bribes, and none was found afterwards. He was ninety and had spent twenty years as a private citizen who had been removed for nothing.
- Lived: 1908 CE – 2001 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
