How I Managed Not to Shake Hands with Francisco Franco

Spain was a plum assignment for a young diplomat, but I was not entirely comfortable with it. Friends back in the United States thought I was a bit of a traitor to progressive causes for agreeing to serve in Spain. In their view, an American diplomat in Spain—even one whose work would be entirely cultural—would be automatically implicated in the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

It mattered little to them that my principal job would be working with the Spanish universities, encouraging the study of the United States there as well as encouraging American scholars to interest themselves in Spain. Nor were they won over when, in 1966, I helped mediate a dispute between an American researcher and the National Library of Spain. The American, browsing through the stacks of the library, had come across two of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (dated 1490 and 1505), filled with precious words and drawings of which the library had no knowledge. The American wanted credit for his find (no doubt it would have won him favor back at his university), but the library, embarrassed, wished to hush things up. Working out an agreement that would somehow satisfy both parties was one of the most delicate acts of diplomacy imaginable. And things got even more complicated when Life magazine began sniffing around and eventually published a picture story on the notebooks.

The author conferring with a government official. To the right is Tom Sorenson, Deputy to Director Edward R. Murrow of the United States Information Agency, who was on an inspection trip. Sorenson was the younger brother of Ted Sorenson, John Kennedy’s key adviser and speechwriter.

 

But despite the purely cultural nature of my work, my friends back home still thought I must have gone fascist on them. Franco Spain was Franco Spain. Period. And, indeed, Spain at that time was one big “retirement home” for fascists and even actual Nazis. I would occasionally see the Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Peron strolling about the northern reaches of Madrid, wearing a cape and with an entourage of sycophants and bodyguards. This was before he returned to Argentina as supreme leader for the second time. Fulgencio Batista of Cuba was also around. Once, a long, black Cadillac pulled up alongside me on a Madrid street. All doors sprang open as if on springs, and out jumped four guys in black suits who looked like they were fresh from the set of Planet of the Apes. I quickly crossed the street to get away from them. The men surveyed the street, each with one hand inside his jacket, where I assumed there were weapons. Satisfied there were no assassins about, the number one gorilla, Batista, got out and, surrounded by his bodyguards, entered a bank. With the Cadillac idling outside, the whole setup looked like a bank robbery.

When I attended a party in a huge apartment on Madrid’s main avenue, the Avenida de la Castellana, the beautiful American movie star Ava Gardner was at one end of a long room and Otto Skorzeny, once known as Hitler’s favorite soldier, stood smoking at the other end. Eros and Thanatos. Skorzeny was surrounded by a boisterous group of men who seemed to be laughing at something he had said. Once a member of the Waffen S.S., Skorzeny was best known as the leader of the September 1943 raid to free Benito Mussolini from the mountaintop in the Alps where Italian partisans held him captive. Coming in at night with silent gliders, Skorzeny and his men extracted Mussolini and reinstalled him as leader of the fascist forces of Italy until, in April 1945 he was again captured by partisans and executed.

Skorzeny was living in Spain under Francisco Franco’s protection. Historians have since discovered that he was also active in Odessa, code name for the organization that spirited Nazis out of Germany such as Martin Bormann, Hitler’s loyal lieutenant, Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the mass murder of European Jews, and Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz “Angel of Death.” Spotting Skorzeny, I gravitated towards the end of the room where Ava Gardner, was standing. I wasn’t sure I could control myself in Skorzeny’s presence, and I did not wish to make a scene in the home of my Spanish hosts. Besides, I was thrilled to meet Ava. I tried to engage her in conversation, but she was already too drunk for reasonable discourse. She told me that, for a Spaniard, my English was “excellent.” I didn’t bother to correct her. It was symptomatic of the Spain of those days that Ava Gardner and Otto Skorzeny could be at the same party. Not to mention me. What was I doing there?

My next door Madrid neighbors may also have been Nazis. The previous tenant of my house, a major in the United States Air Force who had been stationed at Torrejón Air Base, told me that my neighbors were Romanian Nazis in exile. In the four years I lived next door to these people, we exchanged not one word, though our townhouses shared a party wall. I could occasionally hear them murmuring on the other side, but I never got to ask them the one thing I wanted to know. Nor would I have known how to ask it: Hi, are you Romanian Nazis?

My dog, Pipo, inherited from the Air Force officer along with the house, may have known the truth about the folks next door. He and Ngaio, the next door neighbor’s dog, spent the better part of the day murderously snarling and barking at each other on either side of the iron fence that separated the two driveways. The noise was intolerable. I imagined Pipo and Ngaio as surrogates for the unexpressed feelings of their respective masters.

This state of affairs continued for three years, until one day Ngaio came around the fence and attacked Pipo in our driveway. This violated the apparent understanding between the dogs: they could bark and snarl and make a fearsome racket, but they were each to remain on their own side of the fence. Ngaio, the younger and stronger of the two (according to another neighbor on my street, Pipo and Ngaio were father and son), quickly got Pipo by the throat. There was a water hose right there, and I turned it on full force. When the cold water failed to separate the antagonists, I picked up a baseball bat one of my children had left in the driveway and, placing it between the two wet, twenty-five pound struggling dogs, lifted them off the ground. This left me with a sore shoulder but forced Ngaio to release Pipo from his death grip. When the dogs fell to the ground I was able to chase Ngaio back to his own side of the fence. This time a powerful stream of water worked fine.

Pipo soon proved he had not forgotten Ngaio’s territorial invasion. One evening, several days later, when the two dogs were at it again at the fence, I saw Ngaio suddenly abandon the field of battle and run down his driveway into his basement. I thought it might be a trap not a retreat, but Pipo immediately dashed around the fence and down Ngaio’s driveway. I was not far behind. I did not want to enter a neighbor’s house unbidden, especially the house of supposed Romanian Nazis, but I needed to extract Pipo.

I entered the basement just in time to see the next door maid come at Pipo with a raised broom. Before the blow could land, Pipo did an astonishing thing. He launched himself through the air like a rocket and, biting the maid’s unprotected leg with a single swipe, left her calf hanging by a few tendons. Surprisingly, there was almost no blood, just that calf flapping freely. The maid and I looked at each other in horror.

Telling her that I would take her to the hospital immediately (to my great relief I learned that the alleged Romanian Nazis were not at home; this would not have been the most auspicious occasion to make their acquaintance), I grabbed Pipo with one hand clamping his muzzle shut, the other grasping him under the belly, and ran out of the basement and up the driveway. Or tried to. Ngaio had hold of my ankle with his jaws and front paws. Luckily, I was wearing heavy jeans and substantial socks, so I would only be left with a small scar on my ankle, but I made slow progress up the driveway dragging Ngaio behind me, with Pipo, eyes demonic, struggling to get out of my grip to attack his adversary.

I took the maid to the hospital, waited while her calf was reattached, paid her bill, and gave her $200 in pesetas, which she seemed grateful to receive—amounting then to several months pay—but how does one properly compensate another human being for nearly having their calf torn off by one’s dog?

I awaited some note of displeasure from the Romanian Nazis but they remained silent. Nor did I hear from lawyers. In the United States, Pipo would surely have been quarantined, soon after probably gassed as a “vicious dog,” and a law suit for millions would have been brought against me. Romanian Nazis or not, I owed my neighbors an apology, and hereby offer it, but, given their advanced age at the time, I doubt they are alive. And I’m sure Ngaio is long gone too.

As for Pipo, I couldn’t take another minute of his war with Ngaio. One of them had to go, and I couldn’t imagine flipping a coin with my next door neighbors. So, I put an advertisement in the Madrid newspapers the next day: “Loving dog needs new home. Good with children. Very gentle.” I said nothing about Pipo’s singular talent, when aroused, to launch himself through the air and nearly remove a calf. Okay, I should have said something about that when, two days later, a fellow American family, living outside Madrid in the town of Alcobendas, came for Pipo. But, after all, Pipo had done it only once and only under the stress of his ancient feud with Ngaio. He’d be fine out in the country, I told myself, away from the Romanian Nazis and their crazy dog. Saddened, but relieved, my family and I waved goodbye to Pipo, never to see him again. Things could now settle down.

But they didn’t. With Pipo gone, Ngaio took to trotting over to our house every morning and leaving a “deposit” on the marble front steps. The first few times Ngaio did this, I just cleaned it up. I was still feeling badly about the maid’s calf and was not eager to provoke my neighbors. But one day, tired of their dog’s misdeeds, I wrote a note and placed it in my neighbors’ mailbox. There was no answer and no change in Ngaio’s behavior. And marble is a stone that absorbs stains. To make my point more emphatically, I later took to daily scooping up their dog’s excrement in a dustpan and placing it on my neighbor’s identical marble steps. After a few days, Ngaio stopped coming over. Just how this was managed I never knew. But Ngaio still hung out by the fence between the two properties, looking, I thought, rather forlorn. His raison d’etre was gone. I suspect he missed Pipo as much as we did. Maybe more.

I never ascertained the identity of my neighbors. Whether they were Romanian Nazis remains unknown to me. But the fact I had been told they were, and believed they were, was symptomatic of Franco Spain, where such people were in plentiful supply.

Speaking of Franco, I have barely said a word about him yet. I had a Franco-related experience when passing through the city of Caceres en route to a brief vacation in Portugal. Walking around the town, I passed a vast house, so big you could drive cars into its dark interior courtyard. Suddenly, out of the gloom, a voice went “Pssst!” I stopped, and a short man in humble clothes came out into the sunshine and said, “Would you like to see some pictures?” My first thought was that he must have something pornographic in mind.

Instead, this man, who seemed to be a portero (a combination doorman and janitor), had a large cardboard box full of loose snapshots of Franco and his family during the Civil War. I gathered from the man that the Generalisimo had been headquartered in this house in Caceres in 1936 early in the Civil War, but why hadn’t he or his family or someone on his staff taken the pictures with them when they left? And it was now decades later. I’ve always wondered what happened to that box of photographs which, despite my aversion to Franco, must have had considerable historic significance. Perhaps they are still there in that house for a Spanish scholar to discover one day.

I first saw Franco himself one July 18th in the parade on Madrid’s Avenida de la Castellana commemorating El Dia del Lanzamiento, the start of the Spanish Civil War, then a national holiday. He stood in an open car, with the young Prince (now king) Juan Carlos beside him, the car surrounded by masses of marching troops and brass bands.

Despite these minor experiences, I never thought I would meet Franco. My official duties would not require me to do so; I was also too low ranking to represent the embassy with anyone high up in the Spanish government. Then, one day in 1967 our ambassador received an invitation to the inauguration of the Spanish National Art Show which took place annually in the Crystal Palace in Retiro Park. This event being of little significance to the ambassador, he passed the invitation on to his second in command. The minister looked it over and passed it on to the director of public affairs. The director of public affairs considered it unworthy of his attention and passed it on to the cultural attaché, and the cultural attaché, my immediate boss, passed it on to me, the most junior of his three assistant cultural attachés. Since there was no one lower than me in the embassy hierarchy to whom I could pass the invitation, I attended the event.

I really didn’t mind. Many of my Spanish friends were artists, and I thought I might see some of them there; my work was cultural, after all. But when I arrived at the Crystal Palace there was not one artist in sight. I suppose artists were, by the “wisdom” of Franco Spain, too “subversive” to appear at such occasions even though it was their pictures that adorned the walls. There were, instead, a multitude of Spanish government officials and military officers as well as delegates from each embassy accredited to the Spanish government. Some embassies, representing small countries, consisted of a single diplomat, the ambassador. I rather liked hobnobbing with all those ambassadors.

We diplomats were milling about, perfunctorily gazing at the pictures, drinking wine, and plucking hors d’ouvres from the trays of elegantly dressed waiters, when someone—he must have been the Spanish chief of protocol—announced that we were to form a single line side by side. I found myself situated between the Ambassador of Guatemala and the Ambassador of an African country I had never heard of. I chatted with both of them, but they seemed unhappy to learn that I was not an ambassador but a low, indeed the lowest, ranking diplomat at the American Embassy.

In any case, our socializing abruptly stopped when silence fell over the hall. I looked down the long line of diplomats and nearly fainted. Coming along in military dress, surrounded by various dignitaries, was “the mummy” (as Franco was then referred to by my Spanish friends) himself. He was stopping in front of each diplomat, shaking hands, and exchanging a few words. Some of the diplomats bowed slightly as they addressed the Generalisimo. “Oh, shit,” I thought to myself. “What do I do now?”

My embassy work was with intellectuals, people in the arts, university professors and students who represented the future of a democratic Spain. I used to invite such people over to my house and sometimes we would, very quietly to be sure, listen to a collection of 78 rpm records an uncle had given me that had been produced by Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.

The small collection of records was titled “Songs of the International Brigades” and had been recorded in Barcelona. Each had a little paper sticker on it that said in Spanish: “The defects of this record are due to the fact that it was recorded during cuts in electricity during a bombardment.” Songs included were “The Four Generals,” which parodied Franco and his three leading confederates and songs such as The Thaelmann Column, sung by the German Socialist entertainer, Ernst Busch, who had fled Nazi Germany and joined the International Brigades.

My work in Spain was, I suppose, subversive of the Franco regime in minor ways. Sometimes I wondered whether I might one day step over the line, be declared persona non grata, and ordered to leave Spain. The United States government maintained excellent official relations with the Franco government, for, without them, we would not have had the vital military bases in Spain arranged during the Eisenhower administration. Culture, what I did, was all very well, but it would never be allowed to undermine military arrangements. The Cold War with the Soviets was the U.S.’ primary concern. Like it or not, the United States was in bed with the Franco government.

And here was El Caudillo himself approaching. I knew I couldn’t bring myself to shake hands with him as all the other diplomats were doing, embassy duty or not. But how could I escape doing so? If I created an incident by refusing to shake hands with Franco I would be on the first plane out of Spain within an hour on the insistence of the Spanish government. But first, I would get chewed out back at the embassy and this would surely mean the end of my diplomatic career. My annual fitness report would be a disaster. I would be encouraged, if not forced, to resign.

Franco was getting closer. There was no escaping him. What was I going to do? It was the ultimate damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. I may not have wanted to shake hands with Franco, but the United States had shaken both his hands and continued to do so on a daily basis.

I thought that if I moved a bit back perhaps Franco would go by without noticing me. Leaning back, I discovered immediately behind me a freestanding panel covered with pictures. Perhaps I could get behind it. I had to do something: Franco was only six diplomats away. Slowly, I backed up behind the screen and stood there hoping no one had noticed my disappearance. I imagined Franco must have been up to the Guatemalan ambassador. Now the African. Then, as I looked to my left I saw that he had already moved on down the row, was past where I had been. I waited another minute or so and then glided out from behind the temporary wall to take my place between the two ambassadors. Whether they had noticed my absence or not, they didn’t say. My hunch is that they were so intent on their handshake and words with Franco that they hadn’t missed me at all.

I had, presumably, escaped the Spanish government’s wrath, but there might still be my own government to contend with. I was in mortal fear that someone would phone the United States Embassy to register a complaint. When I got to work the next day there would be hell to pay.

But when I did arrive no one said anything, and my brief report on attending the Spanish National Art Show, which traveled up through the hierarchy, was never questioned. Obviously, I did not mention how I had avoided shaking hands with Franco, though I was proud of having managed it. Perhaps if I had wanted to—though I decidedly did not—I could have been recruited some day by the C.I.A. I did seem to have secret agent potential.