Angelo Codevilla

David Corbin, Dean of Geneva College in Texas, recounts that when Angelo Codevilla was appointed at Boston University, «it was as if they had hired Hannibal Lecter». Students and professors were not ready to confront the human candor and intellectual clarity of Codevilla, one of America’s most important intellectuals, who died in a car accident on September 20, 2021, at the age of 78. In Switzerland, we hardly even noticed the passing of this Italian from the Padana Valley who emigrated with his family to the United States in 1955 at the age of twelve and who was many things: American naval officer, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown University and Boston University, advisor to Ronald Reagan whose transition he directed, translator of Machiavelli, author of fifteen books, including an extraordinary and little-known one on Switzerland. In the late 1960s, American campuses were rocked by student riots and a fire destroyed a building at Claremont Men’s College, California, where Codevilla was studying. During that time, Codevilla joined a group of students to protect the library that was at risk of being burned down by anarchists.

Codevilla organized a twenty-four-hour watch by encircling the library. Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, an anti-communist exile, taught at Berkeley in those years and wrote: «When you stand at a campus window with a German-born professor, watching the library being set ablaze and her saying ‘I remember’, that’s pretty distressing». Those were violent years, but they were also fertile. In 1969, Leo Strauss arrived at Claremont, and Codevilla was fortunate enough to take classes from the great German Jewish philosopher who had escaped the Nazis. «The most dangerous man in America». Such were the words spoken about Codevilla by a senior American intelligence official when he was serving as a member of the transition team for the upcoming Reagan Administration. Codevilla had already antagonized the establishment in the early 1980s when he served as an aide to Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Wyoming Republican, and was a leading proponent of a space-based anti-missile system and a critic of the policy of détente. Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, later wrote of him: « He was one of the last people to be ‘elite’ in the sense of uniting excellence with responsibility; one of the most foresighted in terms of diagnosing the illnesses of the ‘ruling class’ in America; a well-connected Catholic in a Protestant country».

A Vogherese listed in the town’s electoral rolls with a residence at 23 Via Enrico Toti, Codevilla would return to Voghera whenever he could, tied to his roots by an everlasting umbilical cord. And his 2010 manifesto, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It, where he called for the «campaign party» to overthrow Washington’s elites, made him an important figure in the conservative movement, but also frowned upon by the Republicans. Codevilla believed that the ruling class spanned both parties, dominating academia, the media, intelligence, and government. Codevilla was in many ways the prophet who predicted the rise of outsider Donald Trump. Riccardo Ruggeri, former CEO of New Holland, is the man in Italy who knew Codevilla best. «We met twelve years ago, when I decided to be a publisher and publish what other publishers were rejecting», explains Ruggeri. «Codevilla had been rejected, so I contacted him and he was available to the point that I felt embarrassed, and explained to him that as a publisher I was a nobody. Empathy was created, because we both came from low-income families and he had read my book Una storia operaia (A working-class story). Angelo was the son of a poor family, he came to America at a very young age and had lived the life of a migrant.

He was already working by the time he was in school, not knowing a word of English and he used to clean gardens in New York while his mother worked as a shirt maker. I was fascinated by this idea of his, the ‘Ruling class’. I loved the Midwest, not the large cities, and I met the best person for it. He gave me this idea of the blending among the democratic and republican summits, which today is a normal thing, but at that time we were witnessing the unspoken tailspin of the Wasps, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I had read his book and we were in constant contact, until I decided to launch Zafferano.news and Codevilla became our man in America. Codevilla had nothing of the professor, we would say «the common man», a regular guy. Instead, he was also the greatest translator of Machiavelli’s The Prince and handled Reagan’s succession when he became president, since Codevilla had served in the CIA. Everyone talks today about goals, designs and strategies, Codevilla was instead a man of execution». Little known is a book that Codevilla dedicated to Switzerland during the Second World War. A true tribute to the country against historiographical stereotypes. «Switzerland’s experiences during the conflict - striving to preserve some degree of independence despite being surrounded by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy - have much to teach about the complex meanings of deterrence, subversion, economic instruments, neutrality, balance of forces, and correspondence between what people want and what they can have», Codevilla wrote in Between the Alps and a Hard Place. «In short, the Swiss avoided Nazi occupation through their military preparations, political ambivalence, and financial scheming - a mixture of defiance and cooperation resulting more from calculation than from internal conflict. During the war, Allied economic experts joked that the Swiss spent six days of the week working for the Axis, and on the seventh day they prayed for an Allied victory.

They were able to joke because they knew the reality well». David Goldman, founder of Asia Times and who long signed himself as «Spengler», tells us that «no one I have known combined such fierce contempt for hypocrisy and incompetence with such generosity of spirit as Angelo. He combined a truly European sensibility with a great love for his adopted home, America. Angelo believed in avoiding wars if possible and winning them if they could not be avoided. He disapproved of the twilight of ‘war without victories, no peace’. He had a contempt for the presumption that war could actually be reduced to a science through game theory». Before his death, this sublime Italian intellectual who was unknown to Italian culture had delivered drafts of a final essay to New Criterion magazine. Codevilla writes in it that «a devious tyranny is rising in the West that makes the Chinese one pale». And that, in contrast to the Communists, «we seek control even over the meaning of father and mother». He remained until the end the Italian exile who had the ability to think outside the box.

«Between the Alps and a hard place

by Angelo Codevilla is a rare book that would be worth republishing. Its subtitle - even in the original - is «Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History». These three last words emphasize its relevance. In 2005 it was released in Italian, co-edited by Pedrazzini Edizioni (Locarno) and Alberto Libraio (Verbania), including an introduction by Franco Masoni and forewords by Franz Blankart and Sigmund Widmer. Associated with the edition were Colonels Pier Augusto Albrici, Remo Lardi and Franco Valli. The translation was curated by Bruno Fumagalli.