Giovanni Leone, who died on November 9th aged 93, was president of Italy during the country's difficult terrorist years, but is now best remembered for his resignation, forced on him by his implication in a corruption scandal.
An affable Neapolitan lawyer, he joined the Christian Democrat Party in 1944 and was a member of the constituent assembly that framed the post-war constitution. He was elected to parliament four times, serving as speaker of the chamber of deputies between 1955 and 1963, and twice as prime minister, in 1963 and 1968. Both governments were short-lived "summer holiday" affairs, intended to allow MPs to repair to the beach while a longer-term solution was thrashed out.
His independence from the main Christian Democrat factions was one of the reasons for his choice as stop-gap prime minister. It also contributed to his election as president, on December 24th, 1971. Unable to choose between Amintore Fanfani and Aldo Moro, his party opted for the isolated Giovanni Leone as a compromise. The election required 23 ballots.
Giovanni Leone was an incongruous figure as president. Short, garrulous and with a pronounced Neapolitan accent, he was possessed of an irreverent sense of humour. He was twice famously photographed making the "horns" sign with his index and little fingers, a traditional southern Italian gesture used as an insult or to ward off the evil eye. Once it was to respond to insults from protesting students at Pisa University, on another occasion as a precaution during a visit to cholera patients at a Naples hospital.
His presidential dignity was further strained by the behaviour of his family and the court of hangers-on who accompanied him to the Quirinale Palace. His three sons were criticised for their playboy lifestyle, which saw them carousing around Roman nightclubs with their presidential bodyguard. In the informal family atmosphere prevailing at the Quirinale, the prime minister, Aldo Moro, had to insist that Giovanni Leone send his eldest son out of the room before they discussed affairs of state. His wife, Donna Vittoria, was an active society hostess. A glamorous woman 20 years his junior, she was frequently the subject of gossip and innuendo, which did little for presidential gravitas.
The peccadillos of the presidential family were chronicled relentlessly by Mino Pecorelli in his magazine Osservatore Politico. Pecorelli claimed he was offered 40 million lire (£32,000) if he agreed to call off his campaign against the president. A man with excellent secret service contacts and many enemies, Pecorelli was shot dead the year after Giovanni Leone's resignation. The substance of his attacks found its way into the mainstream press and a book by Camilla Cederna. Though Cederna was later convicted of libel, the major elements of her case were uncontested.
His downfall was precipitated by the Lockheed scandal, in particular the payment of bribes to Italian politicians in connection with the purchase of Hercules military transport planes from the US.
The mounting scandal forced him to resign and he departed the Quirinale on June 15th, 1978.
He lived subsequently in obscurity at his luxury villa on the outskirts of Rome, the building of which had fuelled his reputation as a man with a relaxed approach to questions of financial probity. This discreet existence, devoted to the study of law, did much to restore his reputation. Though never wholly rehabilitated, many now consider that he was used as a scapegoat by more powerful members of his party.
A brilliant professor and successful lawyer, he is said to have obtained the acquittal of a murder suspect by addressing a court non-stop for three days. He was the father of the judicial procedure by which suspects are formally notified that they are under investigation. Intended as a means of protecting the rights of the defendant, it turned into the method by which the reputation of an entire political class was destroyed. During the 1993 "clean hands" corruption probe, newspapers ran a roll-call of the great and the good as they became entangled in the prosecutors' net, thanks to the notification system sponsored by him.
His presidency coincided with some of the most dramatic years in recent Italian history, marked by right-wing coup plots, bomb massacres and the terrorism of the Red Brigades. The kidnap and murder of Moro by these left-wing revolutionaries came just months before his fall, highlighting the impotence and incompetence of the state over which he presided.
His disgrace was a rare event in a period when impunity for political corruption was one of the privileges of the ruling elite. Humane and simpatico, he was not the president that such trying times demanded.
Giovanni Leone: born 1908; died, November 2001