Juan Carlos: Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Paul Preston
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drafting by the newly installed president of his Privy Council, José María Pemán. According to Pemán himself, he had been selected for the job precisely because he had no political ambitions of his own and he got on well with Franco. Now, to Don Juan’s text, he added what he called ‘the perfume so necessary for El Pardo’.110 Don Juan seems not to have perceived that Franco’s growing interest in the boy was as his direct successor not as the eventual heir to his father. The letter began by recognizing that ‘it would be absurd for him not to receive an eminently patriotic education, inspired in the same loyalty to the fundamental principles of the Movimiento that he had imbibed in the military academies’. He recognized that the interests of the State should be paramount. He accepted Franco’s suggestion of Suárez Verdeguer and other professors. Regarding the issue of whether the monarchy would try to alter the Francoist State, he engaged in an extraordinary juggling act. Recognizing that some of his supporters wanted a parliamentary monarchy, while others such as the Carlists were virulently opposed to it, he still claimed that his loyalty to the principles of the Movimiento was unquestionable. He also called, rather optimistically, for Franco to make a declaration that: ‘the way in which the Prince’s education is taking place does not prejudge the question of the succession nor alter the normal transmission of dynastic obligations and responsibilities.’ Pemán had already begun some behind-the-scenes negotiations with a sympathetic Carrero Blanco. That they had borne fruit was revealed in Franco’s reply nearly four weeks later in which he offered a meeting on 21 or 22 March at the Parador of Ciudad Rodrigo near the Portuguese border.111
News of the impending meeting stimulated rumours that major decisions about the future were imminent. Franco was now 67 and gossip was rife that his health was failing. On returning in his Rolls Royce from a hunting party in Jaén on 25 January 1960, a fault in the heating system had led to the rear of the car being filled with exhaust fumes. Noting his drowsiness, Doña Carmen had the presence of mind to order the car stopped before any serious harm was done. Wild rumours circulated within the regime, although Franco assured Pacón that he had suffered only a severe headache. Nevertheless, particularly after an announcement from the Rolls Royce Motor Car Company that exhaust gases could enter the car only if there had been deliberate tampering, the incident provoked speculation that something sinister had happened.112 So, when news of the proposed meeting at Ciudad Rodrigo was broadcast on foreign radio stations and leaked in the press, gossip raced around Madrid that Franco planned to hand over power to Don Juan. Journalists, radio reporters and newsreel cameramen descended on the border town ready to flash the news to the world’s capitals. Deeply irritated, Franco postponed the meeting for seven days and changed the venue.
Franco was infuriated by the rumours that he assumed to have emanated from Estoril and the change of venue was meant as a reprimand for Don Juan. Nevertheless, given the eager talk about Franco’s mortality, enormous significance was read into Franco’s third meeting with Don Juan, their second at Las Cabezas, on 29 March 1960.113 Las Cabezas had been inherited, on the Conde de Ruiseñada’s death, by his son, the Marqués de Comillas. Talking to Pacón before the meeting, Franco made it quite clear how little he planned to offer. He stated categorically, ‘as long as I have my health and my mental and physical faculties, I will not give up the Headship of State.’114
Pedro Sainz Rodríguez was beginning to suspect that not only would Franco not relinquish power before his death but that he would also pick as successor someone other than Don Juan. Of the various competing candidates, Juan Carlos would be preferable, but Don Juan had no desire to lose the throne even to his son. Accordingly, in his preparatory notes for the Pretender, Sainz Rodríguez argued that he must insist that: ‘the presence of the Prince must not be used to carry out manoeuvres suggesting that there is any agreement by which the order of succession can be altered.’ This threat came to be referred to by Sainz Rodríguez as ‘balduinismo’ – a reference to King Baudouin of Belgium who had ascended the throne in 1951 after the abdication of his father, Leopold III.115
A grey-suited Franco arrived with a staff of 82 in a convoy of 11 Cadillacs. He was accompanied by the Ministers of Education and Public Works, as well as numerous security guards and aides, two cooks and a doctor. Apart from the driver, Don Juan was accompanied only by his private secretary, Ramón Padilla, and the Duque de Alburquerque. In contrast with their two previous meetings, the Caudillo manifested somewhat less interest in bringing Don Juan around to his point of view, having already eliminated him as a possible successor. In the event of ever needing to organize a rapid succession process, Franco had long since decided not to offer the throne to Don Juan. Rather, he would pick Juan Carlos and simultaneously ask Don Juan to abdicate, confident that he would agree rather than risk a public break with his son. For some time to come, he would astutely refrain from making that decision public, convinced that if he did so, Juan Carlos would side with his father. Nevertheless, the notion underlay his agenda at Las Cabezas which went no further than criticism of Don Juan’s collaborators and discussion of the details of the Prince’s remaining education. Don Juan, for his part, firmly expressed his concern at the way Franco was seemingly fostering the claims of other pretenders to the throne. It was no small triumph when he successfully pressed Franco to admit that some of them (certainly Don Jaime) were receiving financial support from the Secretary-General of the Movimiento.
Don Juan complained vigorously about the continuing anti-monarchist propaganda in Spain. In particular, he protested about a book, Anti-España 1959, published in Madrid by an obsessive regime propagandist, Mauricio Carlavilla, who was also a secret policeman. The book denounced the monarchist cause as the stooge of freemasonry and a smokescreen for Communist infiltration, as well as insinuating that Don Juan himself was a freemason. Hundreds of copies had been sent by the Movimiento to people in official positions. Don Juan knew that the censorship apparatus would not have permitted the book to be distributed while Juan Carlos was resident in Spain without the Caudillo’s connivance. Now, Franco, who could plausibly have feigned ignorance, once again claimed evasively that he had no control over the press. He asserted that patriotic journalists must have seen the book as a reply to the memoirs of the monarchist aviator Juan Antonio Ansaldo, published in Buenos Aires in 1951.116
This revealed that, even if Franco had not commissioned Carla-villa’s book, he certainly approved of its contents. Ansaldo’s ¿Para qué …? (For What?) had referred to Franco as ‘the usurper of El Pardo’ and attacked his failure to restore the monarchy as a betrayal of the sacrifices made in the Civil War against the Republic. Don Juan pointed out that there was little need for a reply to a book that had been banned in Spain. He went on to complain about the constant attacks to which the monarchy had been subjected by the Movimiento press over the previous 15 years. Implying again that the press was beyond his control, Franco shiftily attributed these criticisms to indignation over the 1945 Lausanne Manifesto on the part of journalists. Franco exposed his identification with Carlavilla’s views by referring bitterly to members of Don Juan’s Privy Council as ‘traitors’. He spent 25 minutes criticizing Pedro Sainz Rodríguez as a freemason, to which Don Juan replied that nothing that he had heard could persuade him that his piously Catholic adviser could be a mason. Somewhat rattled by this, Franco replied darkly that he knew of other masons in Don Juan’s circle including his uncle ‘Ali’ – General Alfonso de Orleans Borbón – and the Duque de Alba. When Don Juan burst out laughing at this, Franco finally desisted.
The remainder of the interview dealt with the education of Juan Carlos. Franco suggested that, while he would start off with a residence in El Escorial, he should soon move to the palace of La Zarzuela. Just outside Madrid, on the road to La Coruña, La Zarzuela was very near to Franco’s own residence at El Pardo. The interest shown by the Caudillo in this respect led Pemán to note in his diary, ‘La Zarzuela is being prepared for him and Franco is personally taking charge of its furnishing like a doting grandfather.’ Franco also suggested that Juan Carlos should work in Admiral Carrero