The death of Franco — whose funeral chapel he visited in the company of the top brass of the UDPE after waiting for hours along with thousands of Francoists bathed in tears — relaunched his political career for good. After being proclaimed King, Juan Carlos ceded to the pressure of the most hard-line band of Francoism and kept a firm Francoist like Arias Navarro at the head of the government, but he managed to get Fernández Miranda to be both President of the Cortes and of the Council of the Kingdom — the other two principal organs of power — and also, thanks to Fernández Miranda, got Arias Navarro to appoint Suárez Minister Secretary General of the Movimiento. It was a post he’d been coveting for years, fit to satisfy the most ambitious ambition, but Suárez was more ambitious than the most ambitious, and did not settle for that. In theory his mission in that government that was to guide post-Francoism was almost ornamental (the substantial ministries were taken by older men with much more presence, prestige and political experience, like Manuel Fraga and José María de Areilza): Suárez was not unaware that he’d been placed there as the King’s valet or messenger boy; however, he was again quick to seize any opportunity that presented itself and, especially as Arias proved himself to be a clumsy and hesitant prime minister incapable of shrugging off his colossal Francoist debts, took advantage of the disunity and inefficiency of a government overtaken by a wave of social conflicts that were actually political actions to steal the limelight from his Cabinet colleagues: in March 1976, in the absence of Manuel Fraga, Minister of the Interior, Suárez skilfully managed the crisis provoked in Vitoria by the death of three workers at the hands of the police, preventing Prime Minister Arias from decreeing a state of emergency in order to suppress what in the eyes of the government seemed about to degenerate into a revolutionary outbreak; in June of the same year he defended in the Cortes, with a brilliant speech in which he advocated political pluralism, a timid attempt at reform sponsored by the government, as a way of achieving reconciliation among Spaniards. The attempt failed, but its failure meant a much greater success for Suárez than its success would have. It’s not a contradiction: at that moment, six months after the proclamation of the monarchy, the King and his political mentor, Fernández Miranda, had already understood that in order to conserve the throne he’d have to renounce the powers or a large part of the powers he’d inherited from Franco, converting the Francoist monarchy into a parliamentary monarchy; they’d also conceived a project of more profound and ambitious reform than that supported by the government, they knew that Arias Navarro could not and did not want to put it into practice and Suárez’s speech in the Cortes finished persuading them that the young politician was the right person to do it. Or rather finished persuading the King, because Fernández Miranda had been persuaded of it for some time by then, while the monarch had not yet clearly seen that this obliging and ambitious nonentity, that this affable, crooked, uncultured and cocky little Falangist — so useful to him as a valet or messenger boy — was the ideal character to carry out the extremely subtle task of dismantling Francoism without disasters and erecting some form of democracy on top of it that would assure the future of the monarchy. It was Fernández Miranda who, with his rhetoric of a reader of Machiavelli and his intellectual influence over him, convinced the King that at least for his purposes at the time those personal characteristics of Suárez’s were not defects but virtues: they needed an obliging and ambitious nonentity because his obligingness and ambition guaranteed an absolute loyalty, and because his lack of relevance and of a definite political project or ideas of his own guaranteed that he would apply those they dictated to him without deviating and that, once his mission was completed, they could get rid of him after thanking him for services rendered; they needed a cocky Falangist with his spirit because only a cocky, young, quick, tough, flexible, resolute, tenacious, spirited Falangist would be able to put up with the ferocious attacks of the Falangists and military officers first and keep them at bay afterwards; they needed an affable guy because he would need to seduce half the world and a crooked guy because he would need to fool the other half; and as for his lack of culture, Fernández Miranda was cultured enough to know that one doesn’t learn politics in books and for that endeavour culture could be a hindrance, and perceptive enough to have noticed already that Suárez possessed more than any other politician of his generation that transitory gift or that exact and inexplicable comprehension of what at that moment was dead and what was alive and that familiarity with significant events — with what fits and what doesn’t fit, with what can and cannot be done, with how and with whom and at what cost it can be done — that Ortega called historical intuition and Berlin called a sense of reality.
Resolved to make Suárez the Prime Minister who would carry out the reform, on 1 July 1976 the King secured Arias Navarro’s resignation; he did not have, however, a free hand in naming his replacement: according to Francoist legislation, he had to choose between a shortlist of three candidates presented to him by the Council of the Kingdom, a consultative body on which sat some of the most conspicuous members of orthodox Francoism. But, thanks to the guile and ability of Fernández Miranda, who chaired the Council and had been preparing this for months, at midday on 3 July the King received a shortlist that included the name of the chosen one. Suárez knew it; or rather: he knew he was on the shortlist, but he didn’t know he was the chosen one; or rather: he didn’t know it but he guessed, and that Saturday afternoon, while waiting for the King’s phone call in his house in Puerta de Hierro — he was finally living in Puerta de Hierro and that’s why he was a minister and could be Prime Minister — he was consumed by doubts. In his last years of lucidity Suárez remembered the scene publicly a few times, at least once on television, old, grey and with the same melancholy smile of triumph with which Julien Sorel or Lucien Rubempré or Frédéric Moreau would have remembered at the end of their lives their supreme moment, or with the same ironic smile of failure with which a man who’d sold his soul to the devil remembers many years later the moment when the devil finally fulfilled his part of the bargain. Suárez knew of the King’s and Fernández Miranda’s calculations, of Fernández Miranda’s certainties and the King’s doubts, knew the King appreciated his fidelity, his personal charm and the efficiency he’d demonstrated in government, but he wasn’t sure that at the last moment prudence or fear or conformity wouldn’t advise him to forget the audacity of appointing a secondary politician like him almost unknown to the public and opt for the long-serving Federico Silva Muñoz or Gregorio López Bravo, the two others on the shortlist. He’d never wanted to be anything else, never dreamt of being anything else, he’d always been an ascetic of power, and now everything seemed prepared to allow him to sate his hunger in real life and his ambition for plenitude sensed that if he didn’t get it now he would never get it. He felt impatient beside the telephone and finally, at some point in the afternoon, the telephone rang. It was the King; he asked him what he was doing. Nothing, he answered. I was getting some papers in order. Ah, said the King, and then he asked him how his family was. They’re on holiday, he explained. In Ibiza. I’ve stayed home alone with Mariam. He knew the King knew that he knew, but he didn’t say anything else and, after a very short silence that seemed eternal to him, he decided to ask the King if he wanted anything. Nothing, said the King. Just wanted to know how you were. Then the King said goodbye and Suárez hung up the phone with the certainty that the monarch had been unnerved and had appointed Silva or López Bravo and hadn’t had the courage to tell him. A short time later the phone rang again: it was the King again. Hey, Adolfo, he said. Why don’t you come over here? I want to talk to you about something. He tried to control the euphoria and, while he was getting dressed and driving his wife’s Seat 127 to the Zarzuela through the light traffic of a summer weekend, in order to protect himself from disappointment against which he was defenceless he kept telling himself over and over again that the King only called him to apologize for not having chosen him, to explain his decision, to assure him he was still counting on him, to wrap him in protestations of friendship and affection. At the Zarzuela he was received by an aide-de-camp, who made him wait a few minutes and then invited him to enter the King’s office. He went in, but he didn’t see anyone, and at that moment he experienced a sharp sense of unreality, as if he were about to conclude abruptly a theatrical performance he’d spent many years acting without knowing it. A loud laugh pulled him out of that second of panic or bewilderment; he turned around: the King had hidden behind his office door. I have to ask you a favour, Adolfo, he told him point-blank. I want you to be Prime Minister of the government. He didn’t yell in jubilation; all he managed to articulate was: Shit, Your Majesty, I thought you’d never ask.