A Prize from Across the Sea

The former Italian Prime Minister, during a gala celebration of NIAF, the Italian-American Foundation. Political and diplomatic relations which go back decades

EDITED By ALBERTO SAVORANA

Giulio Andreotti was given two standing ovations during the gala dinner of the National Italian-American Foundation (NIAF) on June 6th at the Hotel Excelsior in Rome. The organization represents twenty million Italian-Americans, who are the fifth largest ethnic group in the United States and one of the most important on the American social panorama. The former Prime Minister received the “Hands Across the Sea” award, along with the President of FIAT, Paolo Fresco, and United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Senator Andreotti, speaking in front of the five hundred guests at the dinner, said that “receiving this recognition from you, here in Rome, has a very special meaning for me.” Reached by telephone, Andreotti briefly answered some questions for us.

Senator, during the NIAF gala dinner, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, like you awarded a prize in Rome by the Italian-American Foundation, said, “The United States has no better friend in Italy than Giulio Andreotti. No one has done more for us in Italy than he has in the past fifty years. And while in recent times he has been subjected to attack, today I am pleased to know that it is all over. We knew that he would be absolved, and we are happy to be able to embrace him again.” What did the “Hands Across the Sea” prize, given by the NIAF last June 6th, mean to you?
I am happy for many reasons, starting with the public recognition of uninterrupted esteem by Supreme Court Justice Scalia, which is even more meaningful as he was a friend of Falcone.

The former American Ambassador to Italy Peter Secchia said about you, “This is the man of the century, a man who knows how to respect the rules. The diplomats who have worked with him before and after me have always done so with great profit. He is the person who helped America and NATO to build a peace force. A true friend, who has stretched his hand across the ocean.” As President of the Council of Ministers and Foreign Minister, how have you lived this long-term relationship with the United States?
Very well, always paying close attention, and when I dissented, stating clearly why.

What does the United States represent for twenty million Italian-Americans?
A great force of propulsion.

What are the qualities you most appreciate in the American people?
America’s strength lies in her enormous attention to research, which places her in the avant-garde in all fields.

A Curiosity Finally Satisfied

We offer some excerpts from Giulio Andreotti’s book Gli USA visti da vicino. Dal Patto Atlantico a Bush [A Close-up Look at the USA. From the Atlantic Pact to Bush] (Rizzoli 1989) in which the Senator gives in-depth summaries of relations between Italy and the US

My first contact with America came about when I was a child, and in an unusual way. Our doorkeeper–Laurina Volpi, a good-natured woman from the Marches who had not been subjected in her day to obligatory schooling–would sometimes come up to ask my mother to read her the letters she received from relatives who had emigrated to Pennsylvania. To repay the favor, she would give me the envelopes, and I would be happy to see the foreign stamp, but they aroused a curiosity in me that no one satisfied: Why was Philadelphia written with ph in the place of the f ’s? I listened with interest to the contents of the letters, with their simple reports of the life of a family of workers, whose standard of living–to be sure much higher than what they had left behind–seemed fascinating to me. Both the reader and the listener would go into ecstasies, and I would absorb their admiration, for example, at learning that over there the laundry was done by machines which freed them from those cracked, chapped hands that European-style washing produced both in my mother and in the woman who presided over our front door. When, fifty years later, I heard wholesale criticism of consumerism and household appliances, I never joined in the chorus, remembering just these childhood impressions.
1978 On May 30th, still in shock at the assassination of Aldo Moro (during Moro’s imprisonment, Carter had written me a message of great support–along with his prayers–in defense of the democratic principles which the government was demonstrating, and he had sent Minister Califano to express solidarity with us), I went to Washington for a meeting of the Atlantic Council.
Our embassy was surrounded by forty security policemen, backed up by tanks and helicopters. Also in New York, where I went on June 2nd to address the UN in the session on disarmament, there was a great outlay of protective forces. On a wall–and there, this kind of graffitti is not so frequent–someone had written, “Moro=Andreotti”.
1986 Had Qaddafi really been “excommunicated” by the Americans? Some time earlier, the American Ambassador to the Holy See, Bob Wilson, had asked me to transmit to Tripoli his desire to visit the colonel, which later took place; and since Bob Wilson (whose popularity in California I had witnessed for myself, as well as his intimacy with President Reagan) had certainly not gone in order to visit the excavations at Sabratha, my indomitable optimism led me to think that something good was happening. The Ambassador to the Vatican, the President’s former personal representative, might have wider margins for movement than his own Department of State.
The fact that Libya, discounting the multicontinental horizons of certain intentions announced by Qaddafi, was a threat to the stability of Chad, Sudan, Egypt, and perhaps Indonesia, was correct. But we should not overestimate his military power, and other means had to be sought to make Libya return to a policy that respected the rules of international relations. Other countries, which were perhaps praised as honorary anti-Libyans, were doing more business than ever.
Italy, I went on, had no sympathies for non-democratic regimes of any sort; but she had always tried to engage a policy of dialogue and strengthening of relations with her neighbors, no matter what their political systems were.
1988 A delegation of American Jews came to Rome to attend the world congress of refugee Jews from Libya, many of whom now live in Israel, but a good number also live in Italy, where their President Raffaello Fellah resides. In my talk, I repeated our concept of solidarity with Palestinians with the same commitment with which we stood by the persecuted Jews. And I received the support, even written, of the American delegates. The times–albeit very slowly–may be changing.
1989 Max Rabb has left Rome after two four-year terms at the head of an embassy that is not an easy one, where he had set as his daily goal that of making even better the already excellent political standing of Italy in the United States. The few times–very few–in which he took a polemical stance were caused precisely by his irritation at seeing that Italian priority which he was so proud of having conquered being put at risk.
On the human plane, I did not miss noticing two acts of his which showed his personal consideration for me: in April 1983, when my friends decided to celebrate–without invitations–my forty years in public life, Max came to the Teatro Adriano, and I was pleased. Six years later, when I reached the seventy-year mark in my life, I received from him–on a day when my humility was being severely put to the test, between a message from Gorbachev and a telephone call from Pope John Paul II–a long handwritten message full of friendly remarks, and he repeated the same concepts in the letter with which he bade his final farewell to Italy.