THERE WAS, admittedly, a crucial difference between the situation in Italy in 1948 and that in the Philippines in 1951. In the former instance, the Truman administration had been worried about Communists’ winning power outright at the ballot box, because the Italian Communist Party was the largest in Western Europe. In the Philippines, by contrast, the Communist Party was prevented by law from contesting the election. The concern was that abusive, corrupt, and reactionary anti-Communists would win the election by fraud and thereby inadvertently strengthen the Communists’ attempts to foment a
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