The Cabinetmaker

When the Fascists late in the war arrested Alcide de Gasperi (who was to become Italy's great postwar Premier), they found a small notebook full of names. Soon a band of Fascist toughs burst into the Florence home of Lawyer Adone Zoli, one of those named, to haul him off to jail. "Be careful, or I'll kick your teeth in," warned one of the Blackshirts. "Too late," answered Lawyer Zoli. "They are false."

Last week, with similar equanimity, Lawyer Zoli, 69, took on an assignment which, sooner or later, would almost certainly cost him a few teeth politically. When courtly Antonio Segni resigned as Italy's Premier two weeks ago, the four-party coalition that has dominated Italian politics since 1953 was utterly shattered. The only alternative to the coalition, pending next spring's general elections, was what Italians call a "single color" government--an all-Christian Democratic Cabinet which, since it would lack an assured majority in the Chamber of Deputies, could probably only survive by ducking controversial issues. At President Giovanni Gronchi's request, jovial Adone Zoli agreed to do his best to form such a government.

Zoli can claim the distinction of being one of the first in Italy to be anti-Mussolini. As a boy in the Romagna, short, roly-poly Adone Zoli took a particular dislike to one of his schoolmates, a pushy youngster from a neighboring farm, Benny Mussolini. Even after the pushy youngster became the Duce, Zoli persisted in his pub lic contempt for Mussolini's ideas, invariably had his suits made without lapel buttonholes so that he would have no place to wear the Fascist emblem. His anti-Fascist activities almost cost Zoli his life --after his 1943 arrest he was condemned to death by a Fascist court and was held in a fortress to be shot as a hostage, but to the disgust of the Fascists, the Germans inexplicably freed him.

Zoli as a young man had joined the Christian political movement of famed Don Luigi Sturzo, which later became the Demo-Christian Party. When De Gasperi died, Zoli succeeded to the presidency of the party and frequently acted as a peacemaker between the party's feuding factions.

He was also an able and self-effacing Minister of the Budget in Segni's Cabinet. Last week, while he was still in the midst of his own Cabinetmaking--major appointment: ex-Premier Giuseppe Pella as Foreign Minister--a Roman newsman showed Zoli a journalistic guess as to the Cabinet's final makeup. "Looks fine," grinned the Premier-designate. "Only name I would change is the Premier's."

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