Gianni Agnelli Quotes
And I don't say that we didn't expect it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see the generosity of their foreign policy; and the generosity of their foreign policy at that moment was expressed through the Marshall Plan.
Agnelli, Gianni. Interview. Cold War, episode 3, "Marshall Plan, 1947-1952", CNN, 11 Oct. 1998.
He was referring to the Early Cold War. The American official position and propaganda called for Russian military and political control of Eastern Europe to end and supported uprising and revolution, but the U. S. did not have the power to dislodge Russia without risking a nuclear war.
President Johnson had invited Ike to the White House to advise about the Vietnam War in general and the Rolling Thunder operation in particular. President Eisenhower’s quotation was one of the clearest statements of the so-called Domino Theory which was believed by almost all American Military and Foreign Policy leaders. It was tragically wrong, but it drove U. S. policy throughout the war. When the Communists took South Vietnam, there was no subsequent Communist takeover or attempt in any of the countries Eisenhower had enumerated. One of the reasons was that the Vietnam Communists were not very close to the Russians and for over 1000 years had considered China their worst enemy. They had little solidarity with the International communist movement, but American intelligence did not realize that. They did not believe that the ethnic hatred between Vietnam and China would inhibit the Vietnamese in modern times. It did. Even after the war, the Vietnamese developed better relations with the U. S. then they had with China. One of the major things the intelligence and policy operators missed was that there was not a single map in China that showed Vietnam as a country. To the Chinese, it has always been a part of China and they want it to be in the future. The Vietnamese have not agreed for a millennium.
The reference to Munich referred to British Prime Minister meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich, giving Germany some of their demands while receiving assurances that there would be no further aggression. This appeasement just encouraged Hitler to take more and soon he had invaded all of Europe beginning World War II. The view since has been that a dictator must never be appeased in unjust aggression, even on relatively small items. What made the Vietnam War so complicated was that while it appeared that the attacks on South Vietnam by Communist North Vietnam was a first step of general Communist Aggression, the reality was that it was primarily a Civil War where the South was a massively corrupt, Catholic Controlled dictatorship and the North was a Communist dictatorship dominated by Buddhists. And there was major friction between the Vietnamese Communists and the Chinese Communists who were not working in concert for general Communist domination. The North Vietnamese were a nationalist movement. The Domino Theory had been wrong.
This was more than a decade after the fal of the Soviet Union.
Agnelli was educated at Pinerolo Cavalry Academy, and studied law at the University of Turin, although he never practiced law. He joined a tank regiment in June 1940 when Italy entered World War II on the side of the Axis powers. He fought on the Eastern Front, being wounded twice. He also served in a Fiat-built armoured-car division in North Africa, where he was shot in the arm by a German officer during a bar fight over a woman. After Italy surrendered, due to his fluency in English, Agnelli became a liaison officer with the occupying American troops. His grandfather, who had manufactured vehicles for the Axis powers during the war, was forced to retire from Fiat, but named Valletta to be his successor. Gianni's grandfather died, leaving Gianni head of the family but Valletta running the company. Fiat then began producing Italy's first inexpensive mass-produced car.
