Foreign News: Cool Sicilian

All over Italy schoolboys were delighted when Dr. Gaetano Martino was appointed Italy’s new Foreign Minister. As Minister of Education, Dr. Martino had cracked down on the comfortable Italian habit of turning out thousands of ignorant youngsters with college degrees and a smattering of Latin while training too few mechanics and skilled workers. “Flunk without pity lazy or stupid students,” he ordered examiners. As a result, June exams became known as “the slaughter of the innocents.”

Spare, soft-spoken Dr. Martino, 53, is by training not a diplomat or politician but an educator and a distinguished man of medicine. As rector of the University of Messina since 1943, he has made the university one of Italy’s best. As a medical man specializing in the nervous system, he has done research and lectured in Berlin, Paris, London and South America, authored 150 publications. The son of a distinguished Sicilian (his father was mayor of Messina for 30 years) and married to a descendant of an old Sicilian noble family, Martino is not the fiery and excitable Sicilian of tradition, but deliberate and controlled to the point of pedantry. “He’s one of those rare Sicilians who doesn’t need to use his hands when he speaks,” says one colleague. He and his family were well known as antiFascist, but medical skills were needed, and he worked in a navy hospital during World War II. At war’s end Dr. Martino entered politics by joining the revived anticlerical Liberal Party. As vice president of the unruly Chamber of Deputies, he showed surprising skill at handling Communist quibbling and obstructionism.

Clerical circles were alarmed when Premier Mario Scelba, also a Sicilian, picked Martino as Minister of Education seven months ago, because Martino is firmly opposed to clerical influence in public schools. But Martino concentrated on the noncontroversial job of refurbishing Italy’s run-down public-school system, became one of the Scelba Cabinet’s brightest stars. The first Italian Foreign Minister since the late Carlo Sforza who can carry on a conversation in English (passably), French (pretty well) or Spanish (fluently), Martino is a sturdy supporter of the Western Alliance, a “good European” who believes that the defeat of EDC was one of the great misfortunes of recent history; he can be depended on to support efforts to find an adequate EDC substitute when he makes his first appearance on the international stage this week at the London Conference.