On March 16, 1978, while on his way to pray before going to Parliament, the former prime minister of Italy and leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped in broad daylight in a Roman suburb. In a carefully planned and brilliantly executed operation, a woman driving a white car backed in front of Moro's official dark blue Fiat and caused an accident. She and her male companion sprang from their car and blasted automatic weapons into the front seat of the Fiat, killing Moro's chauffeur and bodyguard. Moro, who had been quietly reading the morning paper when the attack began, was pulled unhurt from the backseat and hurried away in an escape vehicle. Thus began Aldo Moro's horrible ordeal, and one of the most daring instances of organized terrorist violence in the postwar era.

Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigade, a terrorist group that emerged out of the student protest movement. During the 1960s, many young Italians became convinced that Italy needed fundamental change. These students believed that Italy's traditional left-wing political parties (the Socialists and the Communists) could never transform Italy's political or social structures in any meaningful way. The Communists were sunk in inertia; the Socialists had shown themselves to be just another group of politicians interested in personal power when they joined the Christian Democrats in a governing coalition in 1962. The students turned instead to the street protest of the "New Left." In 1967, students occupied the University of Trento. Over the next several months, student protest spread throughout the country.

The New Left ideology of the student movement was broadly Marxist, but opposed to Soviet-style communism. Spontaneity, a mistrust of authority in any form, a rejection of political doctrine (in some cases, a rejection of any books at all), and an insistence on direct democracy all characterized the movement in its first days. By 1970, however, the movement had altered. Heartened by the spread of the most serious labor unrest in Italian industry since World War II, students shifted their focus from the universities to the factories. As students joined striking workers spontaneity disappeared; doctrine and discipline returned with a vengeance. The movement adopted Soviet-style authoritarianism and factionalized into small revolutionary groups, each of which demanded conformity to its brand of ideological purity.

One of these factions was the Red Brigades, led by former student activist Renato Curcio. The Red Brigades declared an "attack on the heart of the state." By targeting politicians, judges, journalists, and professors, the Brigades hoped to terrorize the ruling elite, destabilize the Italian state, and push Italian society into revolution. In 1976 and 1977, fifteen people died and over fifty were wounded in Brigade attacks. Then, in the spring of 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro.

Just a few weeks before, the Italian state had brought to trial fifteen captured Red Brigadiers, including Curcio. Kept in a cage in the courtroom in Turin, the defendants screamed insults and made obscene gestures at the judges and jury. It was from this cage that Curcio shouted to the world, "Moro is in our hands!" Curcio then explained, "The real trial is taking place elsewhere ... Moro is in the hands of the proletariat, and the whole state will be on trial."

To the Red Brigadiers, Moro represented the kind of compromise-based politics that prevented any fundamental transformation of Italian society. Moro had spent much of his political career working to ensure that Italy's traditional left-wing parties posed no radical threat. During the 1960s, under Moro's leadership, the Christian Democrats had formed coalition governments with the Italian Socialists. Moro believed that by including the Socialists in government, he could tame them—and he was right. Once in office, the Socialists abandoned much of their radical rhetoric and most of their radical goals. In the 1970s, Moro sought to cooperate with the Communists, in hopes of domesticating them just as he had tamed the Socialists a decade earlier. To the Brigades, then, Aldo Moro was "the most authoritative leader, the undisputed theorist and strategist of the Christian Democratic regime, which for thirty years has oppressed the Italian people."

The so-called trial conducted by the Red Brigades had nothing to do with proving a case against Moro but consisted of repeatedly badgering him with allegations. The goal was to keep Moro in complete terror and to break down his will. After a month the Red Brigades announced the completion of the Aldo Moro trial. The verdict: "ALDO MORO IS GUILTY AND IS THEREFORE CONDEMNED TO DEATH."

On May 9 the Red Brigades brought the affair to a dramatic finale. They telephoned Moro's assistant and told him where to find his boss. The former prime minister's bullet-riddled body lay in the back of a red Renault station wagon across the street from the American Cultural Center, which stood almost exactly halfway between the headquarters of the Christian Democratic and Italian Communist parties. By leaving Moro's body in this spot, the Brigades expressed their contempt for the entire Italian political establishment. Moreover, by managing to park a car containing Moro's bloody body in plain view in a city swarming with policemen, the Brigadiers taunted the government with their apparent invincibility. From his cage in the Turin courtroom, Renato Curcio declared, "This is only the beginning. You have not understood what will happen in Italy during the coming days and months."

But Curcio was wrong. Moro's death utterly failed to ignite the revolution. Appalled by Moro's murder, Italians from across the political spectrum supported a new antiterrorist offensive mounted by the government. By 1982 many of the Brigadiers had been arrested. Much to the surprise of many Italians, Italian society emerged from its bloody encounter with "revolutionary justice" not only intact, but even, it can be argued, more united than before—exactly the opposite of what the Brigades had intended.