ITALY: Man of Many Lives

In his long career of violence and intrigue, Italy’s Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti has proved himself a man of many lives. He escaped a Fascist firing squad in 1922 an instant before the rifles went off. A raid by comrades rescued him from a Spanish death sentence in 1939. He survived three assassins’ bullets in 1948. Luck and a surgeon who bored four holes in Togliatti’s skull saved him after a severe automobile crash in 1950.

Last week the man of many lives was waging another match with death. On May Day Togliatti journeyed to Trieste to deliver Italian Communism’s principal May Day speech. He also had to tackle a serious jurisdictional problem that flared up when Italy regained control of Trieste, and threatens to heat up further if Yugoslavia and Russia come closer to a reconciliation. The Trieste Communist Party has a heavy Slovene membership, and its fiery boss, Vittorio Vidali, is resisting Togliatti’s efforts to take over the Trieste party now that Trieste is Italian again. Togliatti devoted part of his May Day speech to telling the Slovene Reds in effect that they must submit to Rome.

Words of Lava. Togliatti’s characteristically effective oratory flowed like lava across the big crowd in Trieste’s Valmaura sports stadium. As he spoke, the hot sun beat down on him. Suddenly, after 45 minutes of his harangue, Togliatti gasped and slid heavily into a nearby chair. His secretary and girl friend, Leonilde lotti, handed him an aspirin tablet: Togliatti swallowed it, then stood up, apologized for “my slight indisposition” and finished his speech in a few minutes.

His aides spirited Togliatti off to an obscure villa owned by a party member, surrounded it with guards, summoned Trieste’s best neurologist and telephoned Rome for the doctor who had operated on Togliatti’s skull in 1950. “Venous congestion due to sunstroke,” the doctors said in a joint communiqué; language had in it the suggestion that Togliatti had been struck down by a blood clot. It was plainly more than “indisposition,” as Togliatti’s own doctor let slip some days later. “It must not be forgotten, the state of tension of the honorable Togliatti on that day,” said Dr. Mario Spallone, and added, as if trying to put all the blame on recalcitrant Comrade Vidali : “This tension was due to a very special political situation.” Imperial Procession. For several days, Togliatti could not be moved. Then, surrounded by an imperial procession of bodyguards, doctors and attendants, he was borne on a stretcher to a special railroad car. Overnight the train moved slowly to Rome. An ambulance whisked Togliatti off to his home in Monte Sacro.

The Communist daily L’Unita insisted at first that Togliatti had “a light and passing ailment,” but later conceded that it was a little more serious. One day last week, as all Italy began to speculate on Togliatti’s health and future, a medical bulletin announced that Togliatti had been able to spend some time on his feet: “He is untouched by paralysis.” Some Rome diplomats suspect that Togliatti, now 62, may have suffered a severe apoplectic stroke.

“I think the chances are ten to one that Togliatti is finished as an effective top-level Communist boss; physically, he just won’t be up to it,” said one diplomat.

Only Togliatti’s intimates know how ill he really is and whether the time has come at last to pick a successor for the man whose wile, resilience and strength built Italy’s Communist Party into the largest (2,000,000 members by non-Communist estimate) and most persistently threatening (6,000,000 votes in the 1953 election) in the Western world,