It might be that the above-mentioned anecdote is false — one more of the legends that surround his youth — although Suárez did fulfil that programme point for point. In the closed and pyramidal order of Francoist power, where servility was an indispensable tool of political promotion, doing so demanded from the start that he thoroughly employ all his flair for congeniality and all his capacity for adulation. As Herrero Tejedor’s secretary his job consisted of taking care of correspondence, arranging appointments and attending to visitors, many of whom were Party leaders or civil governors passing through Madrid, none of whom would forget the handsome, diligent and enthusiastic Falangist who greeted them with a raised arm in an imitation of the fascist salute (At your service, chief!) and saw them off with an imitation of a military click of his heels (May I be of any further service?). This is how he began to carve out his prestige as a Falangist cub and scale the promotion ladder of two strategic enclaves of the regime: the secretary generalship of the Movimiento and the Prime Minister’s Office; and this was how, without giving up his loyalty to Herrero Tejedor, he began to win the confidence of the dictator’s subordinates who in the mid-1960s held most of the effective power in Spain and represented the most viable possibility of a future Francoism without Franco: Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Minister of the Presidency, and Laureano López Rodó, Minister for the Development Plan. By that time Suárez already knew better than most all the nooks and crannies of the corridors of power, had developed a sixth sense for capturing the slightest tremor in the delicate tectonics that sustained it and had a doctorate with full honours in the extremely refined discipline of circulating among the conflicting families of the regime without making unmanageable enemies for himself, and persuading them all, from the Falangists to the members of Opus Dei, that he was one of their own. The time was still distant when he would consider the Madrid political village to be a great sewer: now that same city held him spellbound with the supernatural gleam of an exquisite jewel; his least indulgent biographer, Gregorio Morán, has described in detail the ambitious strategies he used in his desire to conquer. According to Morán, Suárez heaped attention on those he needed to captivate, he took advantage of any excuse to visit their houses and offices, he did everything possible to win over their relatives and, wielding first-hand information about the interiorities of power and of the abuses and weaknesses of those who exercised it, he came and went with news, gossip and rumours that made him a very valuable informer and opened the way for his climb. He took no notice of methods, didn’t skimp on resources. In 1965 he was appointed programme director of Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE); his boss was Juan José Rosón, a sombre Galician insensible to his talent and charm with whom he maintained not very cordial relations: he managed to improve them by moving with his family into a flat in the same building where he lived. Around about the same time he decided that his next objective should be to become a civil governor; it was a very attractive post because in those years a civil governor possessed enormous power in his province and, in order to win over the Minister of the Interior, Camilo Alonso Vega — close friend of Franco’s and responsible to a great extent for the appointment of civil governors — for three consecutive summers he rented an apartment next door to the one occupied every year by the minister in a development in Alicante and subjected him to a non-stop siege that began with the daily Mass first thing in the morning and ended with the last drink in the early hours. In 1973, when he was starting to harbour well-founded hopes of becoming a minister, he conceived the brilliant idea of renting a summer villa just a few metres from La Granja Palace in Segovia, in the gardens of which a celebration was held each year for an entire day to mark the anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War in the presence of Franco and all the bigwigs of Francoism; Suárez invited a select few to the villa, who, before and after the endless reception, the tedious lunch and the spectacle the Minister of Information and Tourism inflicted on those who attended, enjoyed the privilege of relief from the heartless heat of every 18 July, freedom from the torture of travelling the eighty kilometres that separated the palace from Madrid with their evening dresses and tuxedos stuck to their bodies with sweat, and being fêted by the host, whose sympathy and hospitality generated feelings of lasting gratitude.
He won the friendship of Camilo Alonso Vega, and in 1968 was named civil governor of Segovia; he won the friendship of Rosón — or at least managed to reduce the mistrust he inspired — and in 1969 was named director general of RTVE; he won the friendship of many of Francoism’s bigwigs, and in 1975 was named minister. He was irresistible, but these purely picaresque episodes not only constitute part of his real reputation, but also a demonstration that few politicians mastered as well as he did the degraded inbreeding of Francoist power and that few were willing to go as far as he was to make the most of it. That’s why the person who in certain respects best portrayed Suárez at this time was Francisco Franco, who was the person who knew better than anyone the logic of Francoist power because he was the one who’d created it. The two men hardly ever coincided in their lives outside of ceremonial occasions, on one of which, however, the young politician drew attention with some discordant declaration; maybe because of that, and undoubtedly using the psychological gifts that had served him so well in his occupation of the leadership of the state for forty years, Franco thought he recognized in Suárez the disposition of a blossoming traitor, and on one occasion, when Suárez was head of RTVE, after the two had been chatting for a while in El Pardo Palace the dictator commented to his personal physician: ‘That man’s ambition is dangerous. He has no scruples.’*