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DESPITE fifty years of public prominence and a life lived well into the television age, Francisco Franco remains the least known of the great dictators of the twentieth century. That is partly because of the smoke screen created by hagiographers and propagandists. In his lifetime, he was compared with the Archangel Gabriel, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, El Cid, Charles V, Philip II, Napoleon and a host of other real and imaginary heroes.¹ After a lunch with Franco, Salvador Dalí said ‘I have reached the conclusion that he is a saint’.² For others, he was much more. A children’s textbook explained that ‘a Caudillo is a gift that God makes to the nations that deserve it and the nation accepts him as an envoy who has arisen through God’s plan to ensure the nation’s salvation’, in other words, the messiah of the chosen people.³ His closest collaborator and eminence grise, Luis Carrero Blanco, declared in 1957 in the Francoist Cortes: ‘God granted us the immense mercy of an exceptional Caudillo whom we can judge only as one of those gifts which, for some really great purpose, Providence makes to nations every three or four centuries’.⁴

Such adulation may be dismissed as typical of the propaganda machine of a despotic regime. Nonetheless, there were many who spontaneously accepted these comparisons and many others, who by dint of their relentless repetition, failed to question them. This is not an obstacle to knowing Franco. What does render him more enigmatic is the fact that Franco saw himself in the inflated terms of his own propaganda. His inclination to compare himself to the great warrior heroes and empire-builders of Spain’s past, particularly El Cid, Charles V, Philip II, came to be second nature, and only partly as a consequence of reading his own press or listening to the speeches of his supporters. That Franco revelled in the wild exaggerations of his own propaganda seems at odds with the many eyewitness accounts of a man who was shy in private and inhibited and ill-at-ease on public occasions. Similarly, his cruelly repressive politics may seem to be contradicted by the personal timidity which led many who met him to comment just how little he coincided with their image of a dictator. In fact, the hunger for adulation, the icy cruelty and the tongue-tied shyness were all manifestations of a deep sense of inadequacy.⁵

The inflated judgements of the Caudillo and his propagandists are at the other extreme from the left-wing view of Franco as a vicious and unintelligent tyrant, who gained power only through the help of Hitler and Mussolini, and survived for forty years through a combination of savage repression, the strategic necessities of the great powers and luck. This view is nearer the truth than the wild panegyrics of the Falangist press, but it explains equally little. Franco may not have been El Cid but was neither so untalented nor so lucky as his enemies suggest.

How did Franco get to be the youngest general in Europe since Napoleon? How did he win the Spanish Civil War? How did he survive the Second World War? Does he deserve credit for the great Spanish economic growth of the 1960s? These are important questions with a crucial bearing on Spanish and European history in the twentieth century and they can be answered only by close observation of the man. He was a brave and outstandingly able soldier between 1912 and 1926, a calculating careerist between 1927 and 1936, a competent war leader between 1936 and 1939 and a brutal and effective dictator who survived a further thirty-six years in power. Even close observation, however, has to grapple with mysteries such as the contrast between the skills and qualities required to achieve his successes and a startling intellectual mediocrity which led him to believe in the most banal ideas.

The difficulties of explanation are compounded by Franco’s own efforts at obfuscation. In maturity, he cultivated an impenetrability which ensured that his intentions were indecipherable. His chaplain for forty years, Father José María Bulart, made the ingenuously contradictory comment that ‘perhaps he was cold as some have said, but he never showed it. In fact, he never showed anything’.⁶ The key to Franco’s art was an ability to avoid concrete definition. One of the ways in which he did that was by constantly keeping his distance, both politically and physically. Always reserved, at innumerable moments of crisis throughout his years in power, Franco was simply absent, usually uncontactable while hunting in some remote sierra.

The greatest obstacle of all to knowing Franco is that, throughout his life, he regularly rewrote his own life story. In late 1940, when his propagandists would have us believe that he was keeping a lonely and watchful vigil to prevent Hitler pulling Spain into the World War, he found the time and emotional energy to write a novel-cum-filmscript. Raza (Race) was transparently autobiographical. In it, and through its heroic central character, he put right all of the frustrations of his own life.⁷

Raza was merely the most extreme, and self-indulgent, manifestation of Franco’s tireless efforts to create a perfect past. Like his war diary of 1922, it provides invaluable insight into his psychology. In his scattered writings and thousands of pages of speeches, in his fragments of unfinished memoirs and in innumerable interviews, he endlessly polished his role and remarks in certain incidents, consistently putting himself in the best light and providing the raw material to ensure that any biography would be hagiography. The persistence of many favourable myths is a testimony to his success.

The need to tamper with reality which is revealed by Franco’s tinkering with his own past was indicative of considerable insecurity. He dealt with this not just in his writings but also in his life by creating for himself successive public personae. The security provided by these shields permitted Franco almost always to seem contained and composed. Everyone who came into contact with him remarked on his affably courteous, but always distant, manner. Behind the public display, Franco remained intensely private. He was abundantly imbued with the inscrutable pragmatism or retranca of the gallego peasant. Whether that was because of his origins as a native of Galicia, or the fruit of his Moroccan experiences is impossible to say. Whatever its roots in Franco, retranca may be defined as an evasion of commitment and a taste for the imprecise. It is said that if you meet a gallego on a staircase, it is impossible to deduce if he is going up or down. Franco perhaps embodied that characteristic more than most gallegos. When those close to him tried to get hints about forthcoming ministerial changes, they were rebuffed with skill: ‘People are saying that in the next reshuffle of civil governors so-and-so will go to Province X’, tries the friend; ‘Really?’ replies the sinuous Franco, ‘I’ve heard nothing’. ‘It’s being said that Y and Z are going to be ministers’, ventures his sister. ‘Well’, replies her brother, ‘I haven’t met either of them’.⁸

The monarchist aviator Juan Antonio Ansaldo wrote of him ‘Franco is a man who says things and unsays them, who draws near and slips away, he vanishes and trickles away; always vague and never clear or categoric’.⁹ John Whitaker met him during the Civil War: ‘He was effusively flattering, but he did not give a frank answer to any question I put to him. A less straightforward man I never met.’¹⁰

Mussolini’s Ambassador Roberto Cantalupo met him some months later and found Franco to be ‘icy, feminine and elusive [sfuggente]’.¹¹ The day after first meeting Franco in 1930, the poet and noted wit José María Pemán was introduced by a friend as ‘the man who speaks best in all Spain’ and remarked ‘I think I’ve just met the man who keeps quiet best in all Spain’ (‘Tengo la sospecha de baber conocido al bombre que mejor se calla en España’).¹²

In his detailed chronicles of their almost daily contact during more than seventy years of friendship, his devoted cousin and aide-de-camp, Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, ‘Pacón’, presents a Franco who issued instructions, recounted his version of events or explained how the world was threatened by freemasonry and Communism. Pacón never saw a Franco open to fruitful dialogue or to creative self-doubt. Another lifelong friend, Admiral Pedro Nieto Antúnez, presented a similar picture. Born, like Franco, in El Ferrol, ‘Pedrolo’ was to be successively ADC to the Caudillo in 1946, Assistant Head of the Casa Civil in 1950, and Minister for the Navy in 1962. He was one of Franco’s constant companions on the frequent and lengthy fishing trips on his yacht, the Azor. When asked what they talked about during the long days together, ‘Pedrolo’ said ‘I have never had a dialogue with the General. I have heard very long monologues from him, but he wasn’t speaking to me but to himself’.¹³

The Caudillo remains an enigma. Because of the distance that Franco so assiduously built around himself through deliberate obfuscations and silences, we can be sure only of his actions, and, provided they are judiciously evaluated, of the opinions and accounts of those who worked with him. This book is an attempt to observe him more accurately and in more detail than ever before. Unlike many books on Franco, it is not a history of twentieth-century Spain nor an analysis of every aspect of the dictatorship, but rather a close study of the man. Through memoirs and interviews, his collaborators have provided ample material and there are copious despatches by foreign diplomats who dealt with him face-to-face and reported on his activities. Franco’s own writings, his speeches – in which he often held a kind of dialogue with himself – and his recently published papers also constitute a rich, if not easy, source for the biographer. They are the instrument of his own obfuscations but they also provide remarkable insight into his own self-perception.

By use of these sources, it is possible to follow Franco closely as he became successively a conspirator, Generalísimo of the military rebels of 1936 and Caudillo of the victorious Nationalists. Several myths do not survive a comprehensive investigation of his survival of the Second World War and the Cold War and of his devious dealings with Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. Equally striking is the picture which emerges of his passage from the active dictator of the 1950s to the somnolent figurehead of his last days. By following him step by step and day by day, a more accurate and convincing picture can emerge than has hitherto been current. Indeed, only by such an exhaustive examination can the enigma of the elusive Franco begin to be resolved.