Chapter 1
That’s how the film ends: in a perfectly meaningless chaos, just as if the essential document about 23 February was not the chance result of a camera left running during the first minutes of the seizure, but the result of the guiding mind of a producer who decides to conclude his work with a plausible metaphor of the coup d’état; also, with a vindication of Adolfo Suárez as Prime Minister. Suárez was not a good Prime Minister during his last years in power, when democracy seemed to begin to establish itself in Spain, but maybe he was the best Prime Minister to confront a coup d’état, because no other Spanish politician of the time knew better than he did how to conduct himself in extreme circumstances or possessed his sense of the dramatic, his convert’s faith in the value of democracy, his mythologized concept of the dignity of a prime minister, his knowledge of the Army and his bravery in opposing the rebel military officers. ‘We must make very clear that in Spain there is no such thing as a civilian power and a military power,’ wrote Suárez in June 1982, in an article where he protested the benevolence of the sentences handed down to those prosecuted for the 23 February coup. ‘Power is only civilian.’ That was one of his obsessions during his five years at the head of the government: he was the Prime Minister of the country and the military officers’ only obligation was to obey his orders. Until the last moment of his mandate he got them to obey, until the last moment of his mandate he thought he’d subdued the military, but in the very last moment of his mandate on 23 February that belief was thwarted; maybe he’d lost his touch, or maybe it was impossible to subdue them. In any case, Suárez was not unaware of how to handle them, but he didn’t always think he should have to handle the military with kid gloves, and from the very day he became Prime Minister and especially as he established himself in the post he had a tendency abruptly to remind them of their obligations with orders or rudeness: he liked to take generals down a peg or two by making them wait outside his office door and never hesitated to confront any soldier who questioned his authority or showed him a lack of respect (or threatened him: in September 1976, during a very heated argument in Suárez’s office, having just accepted or demanded his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister, he was told by General de Santiago: ‘Let me remind you, Prime Minister, that this country has seen more than one coup d’état.’ ‘And let me remind you, General,’ answered Suárez, ‘that this country still has the death penalty’); he was brave enough to make vital decisions like the legalization of the Communist Party without the approval of the Armed Forces and against their almost unanimous view; and therefore the store of 23 February anecdotes is overflowing with examples of his outright refusal to be intimidated by the rebels or to cede a single centimetre of his power as Prime Minister. Some of these examples are inventions of Suárez’s hagiographers; two of them are undoubtedly true. The first happened in the early hours, in the tiny room near the chamber where Suárez was shut away after his first attempt to parley with the golpistas. According to the testimony of the Civil Guards keeping watch, at a certain moment Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the room and without a word drew his pistol and aimed it at the Prime Minister’s chest; Suárez’s response was to stand up and twice shout in the face of the rebel officer the same emphatic order: ‘Stand at attention!’ The second happened on the evening of the 24th, once the coup had failed, during a meeting of the National Defence Council at the Zarzuela, chaired by the King; that was when Suárez understood that Armada had been the main ringleader of the coup and, after hearing the evidence that incriminated the King’s former secretary, among which were the recordings of the telephone conversations between the occupiers of the Cortes, the Prime Minister ordered General Gabeiras to arrest him immediately. Gabeiras seemed to hesitate — he was Armada’s immediate superior at Army General Headquarters, he had hardly been apart from him all night and the measure must have struck him as premature and disproportionate — then the general looked at the King for a ratification or a contradiction of the order he’d been given by Suárez, who, because he knew very well who the authentic chief of the Army was, hurled two furious phrases at the generaclass="underline" ‘Don’t look at the King. Look at me.’
That was Adolfo Suárez deep down or what he liked to imagine he was: a cocky provincial risen to the top of the government and completely immersed in his role of Prime Minister. That’s how he tried to behave during the almost five years he was in power and that’s how he behaved on 23 February. His gesture of standing up and trying to parley with the golpistas is basically no different from his gesture of confronting Tejero or Gabeiras: all three are attempts to assert himself as Prime Minister; nor is it basically any different from his gesture of remaining seated while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber: this is a gesture of courage and grace and rebellion, a histrionic gesture and an entirely free gesture and a posthumous gesture, the gesture of a washed-up man who conceives of politics as an adventure and who tries agonizingly to legitimize himself and for one moment seems fully to embody democracy, but it is also a gesture of authority. That’s to say: a gesture of violence. That is: the gesture of a pure politician.
Chapter 2
What is a pure politician? Is a pure politician the same as a great politician, or an exceptional politician? Is an exceptional politician the same as an exceptional man, or an ethically irreproachable man, or simply a decent man? It’s very likely that Adolfo Suárez was a decent man, but not an ethically irreproachable man, or even an exceptional man, or at least not the kind of man usually thought of as exceptional; he was however, all things considered, the most forceful and decisive Spanish politician of the last century.
Around 1927 Ortega y Gasset tried to describe the exceptional politician and perhaps ended up describing the pure politician. For Ortega, this is not an ethically irreproachable man, nor does he have any reason to be (Ortega considers it insufficient or paltry to judge a politician ethically: he must be judged politically); some qualities that in the abstract tend to be considered virtues coexist in his nature with others that in the abstract tend to be considered defects, but the latter are no less essential than the former. Here are some virtues: natural intelligence, courage, serenity, fighting spirit, astuteness, stamina, healthy instincts, the ability to reconcile the irreconcilable. Here are some defects: impulsiveness, constant preoccupation, lack of scruples, talent to deceive, vulgarity or absence of refinement in one’s ideas and tastes; also, the absence of an inner life or a defined personality, which turns him into a chameleon-like actor and a transparent being whose deepest secret is that he lacks any secrets. The pure politician is the opposite of an ideologue, but he is not only a man of action; nor is he exactly the opposite of an intellectuaclass="underline" he possesses an intellectual’s enthusiasm for knowledge, but he has invested it entirely in detecting the dead in what appears to be alive and in refining the essential ingredient of his trade: historical intuition. That’s what Ortega called it; Isaiah Berlin would have given it another name: he would have called it a sense of reality, a transitory gift not learned in universities or in books, that assumes a certain familiarity with the relevant facts that allows certain politicians at certain moments to know ‘what fits with what: what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know’. The Ortegan handbook of the pure politician is not unassailable; that’s not why I’ve summarized it here, but because it proposes an exact portrait of the future Adolfo Suárez. It’s true that among the qualities of the pure politician Ortega barely mentions in passing the one for which Suárez was reproached most insistently in his day: ambition; but that’s because Ortega knows that for a politician, as for an artist or a scientist, ambition is not a quality — a virtue or a defect — but a basic premise.