Franco was right: Suárez’s ambition ended up being lethal for Francoism; his lack of scruples as well. These two things alone, however, do not suffice to explain his stunning ascent in the 1960s and 1970s. Suárez was always working, and his political talent was beyond doubt: he had curiosity, listened more than he spoke, learned quickly, solved problems by the simplest and most direct routes, cleared out the teams of politicians he inherited without a second thought, knew how to bring opposing wills together, reconcile the irreconcilable and detect the dead in what appeared to be still alive; furthermore, he never let a single opportunity slip by to prove his worth: as if he really had sealed a pact with the devil, he didn’t even waste opportunities that could have ruined the career of any other politician. On 15 June 1969, when he was still civil governor of Segovia, fifty-eight people died under the rubble of a collapsed restaurant in the residential development of Los Ángeles de San Rafael; the tragedy was the result of the proprietor’s greed, but normally such a scandal would have spattered Suárez politically, especially at a time when the battle Falangists and Opus Dei were waging for control of the regime was reaching its decisive point; Suárez nevertheless managed to come out of the catastrophe reinforced: for weeks the newspapers were constantly praising the serenity and courage of the civil governor, who as the accounts kept repeating arrived at the scene of events shortly after the collapse, took charge of the situation and began pulling the wounded out of the debris with his own hands, and whom the government decorated a short time later for his conduct with the Great Cross of Civil Merit.
Months after the disaster of Los Ángeles de San Rafael an event that changed the future Prime Minister’s life occurred: he met the future King. By that time Suárez already had the conviction that Prince Juan Carlos was the winning horse in the imminent race of post-Francoism — he had it from Herrero Tejedor, from Admiral Carrero, from López Rodó, he had it especially from a reasoning and a political instinct that were in him the same thing — so he bet all his capital on the Prince, who, for his part, also bet on Suárez, in need as he was of the loyalty of young politicians prepared to do battle at his side against the powerful sector of old inflexible Francoists doubtful of his capacity to succeed Franco. That was the task to which Suárez devoted himself almost exclusively over the next six years, because he knew that doing battle to make the Prince King was doing battle for power, though also because, just as he knew how to detect what was dead in what appeared still alive, he knew how to detect what was still alive in what appeared dead. As for the King, from the beginning he felt enormous sympathy for Suárez, but never deceived himself about him: ‘Adolfo is neither for Opus Dei nor for the Falange,’ he said on some occasion. ‘Adolfo is for Adolfo.’ Shortly after meeting the Prince — and partly owing to his insistence — he was named director general of RTVE; he stayed in this post for four years during which he served the cause of the monarchy with belligerent fidelity, but this was also an important phase in his political life because this was when he discovered the brand-new potential of television to configure reality and because he began to feel the proximity and the actual breath of power and to prepare his assault on government: he visited the Zarzuela very frequently, where he gave the Prince recordings of his travels and ceremonial acts regularly broadcast on the news bulletin of the main channel, consulted with Admiral Carrero every week in the headquarters of the Prime Minister’s Office, at Castellana 3, where he was welcomed affectionately and where he received ideological orientation and concrete instructions he applied without hesitation, pampered military officers — who celebrated him for the generosity with which he received any proposal from the Army — and even the intelligence services, with whose chief, the future golpista Colonel José Ignacio San Martín, he struck up a certain friendship. It was also during that time, towards the end of his term at RTVE, that Suárez’s sixth sense registered an almost invisible shift of the centre of power which in a very short time would turn out to be decisive: although Carrero Blanco continued symbolizing the assurance that Francoism would continue after the death of Franco, López Rodó began to lose influence and instead Torcuato Fernández Miranda emerged as the new key politician, then Minister Secretary General of the Movimiento, a cold, cultured, fox-like and silent man whose haughty independence of mind provoked the suspicions of all the families of the regime and the partiality of the Prince, who had adopted that professor of constitutional law as his first political adviser. Suárez took note of the change: saw less of López Rodó and more of Fernández Miranda, who, although perhaps secretly despising him, publicly allowed himself to be befriended, undoubtedly because he was sure of being able to manage that young Falangist hungry for glory. Suárez’s hunch turned out to be right, and in June of 1973 Carrero was named Prime Minister — the first named by Franco who still kept the powers of head of state for himself — and Fernández Miranda added the leadership of the Movimiento to the vice-presidency of the Cabinet, but Suárez did not obtain the post of minister he thought he already deserved, and didn’t even convince Fernández Miranda to console him with the post of deputy Secretary General of the Movimiento. The disappointment was enormous: Suárez resigned from his post at RTVE because of it, taking refuge in the directorship of a state company and of the YMCA.
For the next two and a half years Suárez remained far from power, and his political career seemed stagnant; at some point it even seemed to have reached its end. Two violent deaths contributed to this fleeting impression: in December 1973 Admiral Carrero died in an ETA attack; in June 1975 Herrero Tejedor died in a car accident. The murder of Carrero was providential for the country because the disappearance of the Prime Minister who was to have preserved Francoism facilitated the change from dictatorship to democracy, but, given that with Carrero he lost a powerful protector, for Suárez it could have been catastrophic; Herrero Tejedor’s death could have been even worse: with it Suárez might have been said to have been left definitively out in the open, deprived as well of the shelter of the man in whose shadow most of his political career had been played out and who just three months before the accident had appointed him deputy Secretary General of the Movimiento. Suárez overcame that double setback because by the time it happened he was too sure of himself and of the Prince’s confidence to allow himself to be defeated by adversity, so he devoted that parenthesis in his political ascent to making money in shady business, convinced with reason that it was impossible to prosper politically in Francoism without the benefit of some personal fortune (‘I’m not a minister because I don’t live in Puerta de Hierro and I didn’t study at the Pilar,’ he once said during those years); he also devoted it to strengthening his relations with Fernández Miranda — and, through him, with the Prince — and to organizing the Union of the Spanish People (Unión del Pueblo Español, UDPE), a political association created in the wake of the tiny liberalizing impulse promoted by Admiral Carrero’s replacement at the head of the government, Carlos Arias Navarro, and made up of former ministers under Franco and young officials of the regime like Suárez himself. Otherwise, at a time when the death of Franco after forty years of absolute government appeared at once as an imminent and marvellous event and when every health crisis of the octogenarian dictator left the country trembling with uncertainty, Suárez cultivated masterfully the necessary ambiguity to prepare his future no matter what the future of Spain: on one hand, he let no opportunity slip by to proclaim his fidelity to Franco and to his regime, and on 1 October 1975, accompanied by other members of the UDPE, he attended a huge demonstration in the Plaza de Oriente in support of the general, hounded by the protests of the international community owing to his decision to execute several ETA and FRAP members; on the other hand, however, he went around saying in public and in private that he was in favour of opening up the political game and creating channels of expression for the different sensibilities present in society, commonplaces of the political soup of the time that sounded to Francoists like inoffensive impudence or naive ruses and to those in favour of ending Francoism could sound like still repressed affirmations of the desire for a democratic future for Spain. It is likely that neither on one hand nor the other — not when he declared himself unquestionably Francoist or when he declared himself an incipient democrat — was Suárez telling the truth, but it’s almost certain that, like a transparent being whose deepest secret consists of not having secrets or like a virtuoso actor declaiming his part on a stage, he always believed what he was saying, and that’s why everyone who heard him ended up believing in him.