Fat, Smug, Complacent

COMPLACENT DICTATOR (319 pp.)--Sir Samuel Hoare--Knopf ($3.50).

"It is appalling," grumbled H. G. Wells, "that this blinkered, pleasant, gossipy, gullible snob," Sir Samuel Hoare should be named British Ambassador to Spain. Wells was not the only one to wince. The nauseous memory of the Hoare-Laval Deal to appease Mussolini (1935) was still fresh. That of the Hitler-sweetening at Munich was even fresher. In 1940 Britain needed someone to talk straight, not sweet, to Spain's Franco. Sir Samuel hardly seemed the man. He had passed "from experience to experience, like Boccaccio's virgin," said a wag, "without discernible effect upon his condition."

Judged by this book, the story of his 4 1/2-years there, Sir Samuel did his share of straight talking in Spain.

Sir Samuel has not suddenly turned Spanish republican. Now Viscount Templewood, he describes himself as an "English monarchist," suggests that a new Spanish monarchy might bring back peace and even "vigorous social reform" with the crown. But he makes plain his feeling that almost any form of government would be an improvement over Franco's, and cannot hide his disgust with the Franco regime.

Five of Clubs. He had one job to do in Madrid, he says: to keep Spain out of the war ("Many people thought that I had gone to Spain to appease"). Arriving soon after the collapse of France, he played a hand at first "with nothing higher in it than a five of clubs." German prestige was boundless; German spies and informers were thick underfoot. A "very sinister" Turk named Lazar, attached to the German Embassy although he was a Jew, controlled the Spanish press. Seated before signed photographs of Hitler and Mussolini, Dictator Franco received the British envoy with polite disdain. "Why don't you end the war now?" Franco asked. "You can never win it."

Had Franco been a little less sly, and Hitler and Mussolini a little less stupid, Spain would have joined the Axis, Sir Samuel believes. It was largely luck that Spain stayed out and pretended to be neutral--luck, plus Allied economic bait, plus the sympathies of a few Spaniards, notably Count Francisco Gomez Jordana, for two years (1942-44) Franco's Minister for Foreign Affairs.

No Questions. Jordana replaced Franco's brother-in-law, Serrano Suner, a fanatical Falangist, a few weeks before the North African invasion. It was a happy freak of fortune, says Sir Samuel, that Franco chose this time to oust his ambitious brother-in-law. Had Serrano Suner remained in office, the invasion might have miscarried. The Gibraltar airfield could have been crippled "in less than a half hour." Gibraltar bay, which had been filling with ships for days, was almost as vulnerable. Jordana was "pro-Ally to the core," discreetly looked the other way, asked no embarrassing questions.

Like former U.S. Ambassador Carlton J. H. Hayes (Wartime Mission in Spain), Sir Samuel speaks warmly and gratefully of Jordana, who died in August 1944. Unlike Hayes, who apparently considered Franco a "cautious" if annoying politician, he rips the "little Generalissimo" up & down: "Fat, smug, self-complacent . . . convinced that all his actions are inspired from heaven . . . the chief cause of a Spain divided within itself and isolated from the civilized world."

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