765.00/6–2553: Telegram
No. 746
The President
to the Ambassador in Italy (Luce)1
Dear Mrs. Ambassador: Thank you very much for your lucid and informative cable2 concerning Prime Minister De Gasperi’s views. I have long been his admiring friend, and I am grateful to him for speaking so frankly and exhaustively on subjects of the utmost moment to both our countries. I hope that you will inform him of these sentiments, including an expression of my best wishes and personal regard.
I was somewhat astonished to note that he gave strong, even though secondary, importance to the influence of the American Rosenberg case in the Italian elections. I would have thought Italian leaders could have easily shown to their own people that the Rosenberg case was strictly an American domestic affair, that the Italian people could have no knowledge of the enormity of the offense committed by the Rosenbergs nor of the dangers inherent in weak-kneed action with respect to the spy rings established by the [Page 1618] Soviets throughout the world. If the individuals involved had been of Italian citizenship or even extraction, I could have understood Italy’s sympathetic involvement in the case. But I repeat, it is difficult for me to see how this incident could have achieved a political significance in Italy that even remotely equalled the other factors. Finally, it is the clear fact that the Italian elections were completed before the Rosenberg case was terminated, so again it would appear that the influence of that execution must have been exaggerated in the Prime Minister’s mind.
By and large, however, I follow his reasoning and it will be most helpful to us here to have this clear expression of his views. We count on early Italian ratification of EDC, and wherever it is possible and feasible, we shall certainly do our best to cooperate in furthering the solidity of Western Europe and the advancement of NATO.
With personal regard.
- The text of this letter was transmitted in telegram 4874 to Rome, June 25. In a memorandum of June 23 to John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower asked Dulles to look over a draft reply he had prepared for Luce and, if it met with the Secretary’s approval, to have it dispatched. Roderic L. O’Connor, in a memorandum for Whitman of June 24, indicated that only one minor change had been made in Eisenhower’s original draft. Part of one sentence in the third paragraph, “We count on early ratification of EDC”, had been added by Dulles. (Eisenhower Library, Eisenhower papers, Whitman file)↩
- Supra.↩