Dead Duce Walking (The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy) (Book Review‪)‬

The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, by Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. 258 pp. ONE CURIOUS, seldom-noticed interaction between Italian and American political history is the despair at supporters' antics which Mussolini and Warren G. Harding voiced, independently, just months apart. Harding, before Teapot Dome publicly blew up, lamented to Kansas newspaperman William Allen White: "I have no trouble with my enemies ... But my damned friends,... White, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!" Less than a year later, in June 1924, Il Duce complained in analogous terms. Fuming at how junior Fascists had tortured socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti so severely as to induce their victim's fatal heart attack, Mussolini echoed Harding almost to the syllable: "My worst enemies could not have done me as much harm as my friends."