Joseph LaPalombara
In March 1985, Bettino Craxi, then Italy's prime minister, visited Washington. President Ronald Reagan greeted him with a firm hand-shake and a (somewhat) facetious question: "How's your crisis going?" Craxi replied, "Very well, thank you."
No doubt his other NATO allies had asked Craxi, the Socialist Party leader, the same question. When Americans or Canadians or Germans think of Italy, many imagine a sunny, picturesque Mediterranean land- scape whose inhabitants...
In March 1985, Bettino Craxi, then Italy's prime minister, visited Washington. President Ronald Reagan greeted him with a firm hand-shake and a (somewhat) facetious question: "How's your crisis going?" Craxi replied, "Very well, thank you."
No doubt his other NATO allies had asked Craxi, the Socialist Party leader, the same question. When Americans or Canadians or Germans think of Italy, many imagine a sunny, picturesque Mediterranean land- scape whose inhabitants are in chronic...
into World War II and disaster.
There have been few, if any, dictators of the Right or Left in our century whose rise to power owed more to the myopia of democratic statesmen and plain citizens. Mussolini's fall from power was as dramatic as his ascent, and the Fascist era merits our reflections today.
Many younger Americans may think of Mussolini only as actor Jack Oakie portrayed him in Charlie Chaplin's classic 1940 film, The Great Dictator: a rotund, strutting clown, who struck pompous poses...
the Mediterranean and the awesome barrier of the Alps, four-fifths of the territory consists of mountains and hills. Not only the great Alpine arc, sweeping west to east from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, but. . . the Apennines, stretching . . . down the length of Italy. ..set per- manent barriers to the possibilities of cultivation."
So writes Stuart Woolf in A History of Italy, 1700-1860 (Methuen, 1979). Indeed, it was the diversity of Ita- ly's physical and climatic characteristics...
LECTIONS
eetin 10
Few writers have elicited more admiration or more antipathy than Thomas Steams Eliot (1888-1965). Many critics and fellow poets have assailed him as a stodgy traditionalist who denied any possibility of great modem verse. Just as many have hailed him for defining the modem poetic "sensibility." Here, on the centennial of his birth, Frank McComell reintroduces the Missouri-born expatriate who once said of himself, "How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!"
by Fr...
"Ballpark figure" is a nice, fairly new phrase meaning "rough approxima- tion" (such as the estimates of attendance at a ball game). But it seems that America has entered the era of ballpark language where words are used approximately;they mean only roughly what we think they mean. So observes Joseph Epstein, singling out for disdain educators, heiresses, bu- reaucrats, TV anchormen, ecologists, and social scientists-among the many "quasi-semi-demi-ostensibly educated"...
as it has vexed seven U.S. presi- dents. And W. Raymond Duncan describes how Nikita Khrushchev's dream of easy gains in the Third World-and Castro's own arnbi- tions-gave a succession of Soviet leaders expensive new allies in Latin America and Africa.
Tad Szulc
"It was much easier to win the revolutionary war than it is to run the Revolution now that we are in charge."
So Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz observed some months after taking power in Cuba early in 1959. Only 33 years old, he...
against
U.S. contra aid; with White House encouragement, conservative out- fits have raised money for the "freedom fighters," in some cases possibly violating U.S. laws against supplying arms abroad.
Even after nearly eight years, views of the Sandinista regime's fundamental nature vary widely. Some scholars regard it as far more Marxist-Leninist in rhetoric than in practice. Foreign Policy editor Charles William Maynes argues that Managua's Soviet-backed rulers can be "tamed and...
n Fidel Castro entered Havana in triumph on January 8, 1959, placards (Gracias Fidel), television cameras, and bell ringers were ready. But there was no need to fake what one American reporter called "the magic of his personality." His political skills would help make him the longest-surviving head of government in a major nation after North Korea's Kim R Sung and Jordan's King Hussein.
WQ WINTER 1988
48
At the age of 62, Fidel Castro seems to be outliving the forces that helped establish...
and lobby against
U.S. contra aid; with White House encouragement, conservative out- fits have raised money for the "freedom fighters," in some cases possibly violating U.S. laws against supplying arms abroad.
Even after nearly eight years, views of the Sandinista regime's fundamental nature vary widely. Some scholars regard it as far more Marxist-Leninist in rhetoric than in practice. Foreign Policy editor Charles William Maynes argues that Managua's Soviet-backed rulers can be "tamed...