was estimated that in the period immediately preceding the election more than five million Italians each week saw American documentaries. The 1939 Hollywood film Ninotchka , which satirized life in Russia, was singled out as a particularly effective feature film. It was shown throughout working-class areas and the Communists made several determined efforts to prevent its presentation. After the election, a pro-Communist worker was reported as saying that What licked us was Ninotchka.

The Justice Department served notice that Italians who joined the Communist Party would be denied that dream of so many Italians, emigration to America. The State Department then ruled that any Italians known to have voted for the Communists would not be allowed to even enter the terrestrial paradise. (A Department telegram to a New York politico read: Voting Communist appears to constitute affiliation with Communist Party within meaning of Immigration Law and therefore would require exclusion from United States. ] It was urged that this information be emphasized in letters to Italy.

President Truman accused the Soviet Union of plotting the subjugation of Western Europe and called for universal military training in the United States and a resumption of military conscription to forestall threatened communist control and police-state rule . During the campaign, American and British warships were frequently found anchored off Italian ports. Time, in an edition widely displayed and commented upon in Italy shortly before the election, gave its approval to the sentiment that The U.S. should make it clear that it will use force, if necessary, to prevent Italy from going Communist. 8

The United States and Italy signed a ten-year treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation . This was the first treaty of its kind entered into by the US since the war, a point emphasized for Italian consumption.

A Friendship Train toured the United States gathering gifts and then traveled round Italy distributing them. The train was painted red, white and blue, and bore large signs expressing the friendship of American citizens toward the people of Italy.

The United States government stated that it favored Italian trusteeship over some of its former African colonies, such as Ethiopia and Libya, a wholly unrealistic proposal that could never come to pass in the post-war world. (The Soviet Union made a similar proposal.)

The US, Great Britain and France maneuvered the Soviet Union into vetoing, for the third time, a motion that Italy be admitted to the United Nations. (The first time, the Russians had expressed their opposition on the grounds that a peace treaty with Italy had not been signed. After the signing in 1947, they said they would accept the proposal if other World War II enemies, such as Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania were also made members.)

The same three allied nations proposed to the Soviet Union that negotiations take place with a view to returning Trieste to Italy. Formerly the principal Italian port on the Adriatic coast, bordering Yugoslavia, Trieste had been made a free city under the terms of the peace treaty. The approval of the Soviet Union was necessary to alter the treaty, and the Western proposal was designed to put the Russians on the spot. The Italian people had an intense sentimental attachment to Trieste, and if the Russians rejected the proposal it could seriously embarrass the Italian Communists. A Soviet acceptance, however, would antagonize their Yugoslav allies. The US prodded the Russians for a response, but none was forthcoming. From the Soviet point of view, the most obvious and safest path to follow would have been to delay their answer until after the election. Yet they chose to announce their rejection of the proposal only five days before the vote, thus hammering another nail into the FDP coffin.

A Manifesto of peace to freedom-loving Italians , calling upon them to reject Communism, was sent to Premier de Gasperi. Its signatories included two former US Secretaries of State, a former Assistant Secretary of State, a former Attorney General, a former Supreme Court Justice, a former Governor of New York, the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and many other prominent personages. This message was, presumably, suitably publicized throughout Italy, a task easy in the extreme inasmuch as an estimated 82 percent of Italian newspapers were in the hands of those unsympathetic to the leftist bloc.

More than 200 American labor leaders of Italian origin held a conference, out of which came a cable sent to 23 daily newspapers throughout Italy similarly urging thumbs down on the Reds. At the same time, the Italian-American Labor Council contributed $50,000 to anti-Communist labor organizations in Italy. The CIA was already secretly subsidizing such trade unions to counteract the influence of leftist unions,9 but this was standard Agency practice independent of electoral considerations. (According to a former CIA officer, when, in 1945, the Communists came very near to gaining control of labor unions, first in Sicily, then in all Italy and southern France, co-operation between the OSS and the Mafia successfully stemmed the tide.)10

The CIA, by its own later admission, gave $1 million to Italian center parties , a kings ransom in Italy 1948,11 although another report places the figure at $10 million. The Agency also forged documents and letters purported to come from the PCI which were designed to put the party in a bad light and discredit its leaders; anonymous books and magazine articles funded by the CIA told in vivid detail about supposed

communist activities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; pamphlets dealt with PCI candidates sex and personal lives as well as smearing them with the fascist and/or anti-church brush.12

An American group featuring noted Italian-American musicians traveled to Rome to present a series of concerts.

President Truman chose a month before the election as the time to transfer 29 merchant ships to the Italian government as a gesture of friendship and confidence in a democratic Italy . (These were Italian vessels seized during the war and others to replace those seized and lost.)

Four days later, the House Appropriations Committee acted swiftly to approve $18.7 million in additional interim aid funds for Italy.

Two weeks later, the United States gave Italy $4.3 million as the first payment on wages due to 60,000 former Italian war prisoners in the US who had worked voluntarily for the Allied cause. This was a revision of the peace treaty which stipulated that the Italian government was liable for such payments.

S ix days before election day, the State Department made it public that Italy would soon receive $31 million in gold in return for gold looted by the Nazis. (The fact that only a few years earlier Italy had been the enemy fighting alongside the Nazis was now but a dim memory.)

Two days later, the US government authorized two further large shipments of food to Italy, one for $8 million worth of grains. A number of the aid ships, upon their arrival in Italy during the election campaign, had been unloaded amid ceremony and a speech by the American ambassador. A poster prominent in Italy read: The bread that we eat-40 per cent Italian flour-60 per cent American flour sent free of charge. The poster neglected to mention whether the savings were passed on to the consumer or served to line the pockets of the baking companies.

F our days before election day, the American Commission for the Restoration of Italian Monuments, Inc. announced an additional series of grants to the Italian Ministry of Fine Arts.

April 15 was designated Free Italy Day by the American Sympathizers for a Free Italy with nationwide observances to be held.

The American ambassador, James Clement Dunn, traveled constantly throughout Italy pointing out to the population on every possible occasion what American aid has meant to them and their country . At the last unloading of food, Dunn declared that the American people were saving Italy from starvation, chaos and possible domination from outside. His speeches usually received wide coverage in the non-left press. By contrast, the Italian government prohibited several of its own ambassadors abroad from returning home to campaign for the FDP.

In his historic speech of 12 March 1947, which came to be known as The Truman Doctrine , the president had proclaimed:

I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their

own way.13

It scarcely needs to be emphasized how hypocritical this promise proved to be, but the voices which spoke out in the United States against their governments crusade in Italy were few and barely audible above the roar. The Italian-American Committee for Free Elections in Italy held a rally to denounce the propaganda blitz, declaring that Thousands of Americans of Italian origin feel deeply humiliated by the continuous flow of suggestions, advice and pressure put on the Italians, as though they were unable to decide for themselves whom to elect. 14

The Progressive Party also went on record, stating: As Americans we repudiate our Governments threat to cut off food from Italy unless the election results please us. Hungry children must not go unfed because their parents do not vote as ordered from abroad. 15The partys candidate for president in 1948 was Henry Wallace, the former vice-president who was an outspoken advocate of genuine detente with the Soviet Union. History did not provide the opportunity to observe what the reaction would have been- amongst those who saw nothing wrong with what the United States was doing in Italy-if a similar campaign had been launched by the Soviet Union or the Italian left in the United States on behalf of Wallace.

Though some Italians must have been convinced at times that Stalin himself was the FDPs principal candidate, the actual Soviet intervention in the election hardly merited a single headline. The American press engaged in speculation that the Russians were pouring substantial sums of money into the Communist Partys coffers. However, a survey carried out by the Italian bureau of the United Press revealed that the anti-Communist patties spent 7 1/2 times as much as the FDP on all forms of propaganda, the Christian Democrats alone spending four times as much.16As for other Soviet actions, Howard K. Smith presented this observation:

The Russians tried to respond with a few feeble gestures for a while-some Italian war prisoners were released; some newsprint was sent to Italy and offered to all parties for their campaign. But there was no way of resisting what amounted to a tidal wave.

There is evidence that the Russians found the show getting too rough for them and actually became apprehensive of what the American and British reaction to a Communist victory at the polls might be. (Russias concern about conflict with the West was also expressed within a month of the Italian elections in one of the celebrated Cominform letters to Tito, accusing the Yugoslavs of trying to involve the Soviets with the Western powers when it should have been known ... that the U.S.S.R. after such a heavy war could not start a new one .)17

The evidence Smith was alluding to was the Soviet rejection of the Trieste proposal. By its timing, reported the New York Times, the unexpected procedure caused some observers to conclude that the Russians had thrown the Italian Communist Patty overboard. 18 The partys newspaper had a difficult time dealing with the story. Washington did as well, for it undermined the fundamental premise of the Italian campaign: that the Italian Communist Party and the Soviet Union were indistinguishable as to ends and means; that if you buy the one, you get the other as well. Thus the suggestion was put forth that perhaps the Soviet rejection was only a tactic to demonstrate that the US could not keep its promise on Trieste, out the Soviet announcement had not been accompanied by any such propaganda message, and it would not explain why the Russians had waited several weeks until near the crucial end to deliver its body blow to their Italian comrades. In any event, the United States could only come out smelling a lot sweeter than the Russians.

When the Broadway show had ended its engagement in Italy, the Christian Democrats stood as the clear winner with 48 percent of the vote. The leftist coalition had been humiliated with a totally unexpected polling of but 31 percent. It had been a crusade of the kind which Aneurin Bevan had ascribed to the Tories: The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century, the British Labour leader wrote, is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.