Aldo Moro

Moro was the party's great mediator. He brought the Socialists into government in 1963, and in the 1970s negotiated the "historic compromise" under which the Communist Party supported a Christian Democratic government from outside, arguing that Italy's democracy needed its two mass parties to cooperate. The Red Brigades kidnapped him on the day that government was presented to parliament in 1978 and murdered him 55 days later, after his party refused to negotiate.