Castilicm Juggler

THE SPANISH STORY (282 pp.)--Herbert Pels--Knopf ($3.50).

Once a newspaperwoman, interviewing Economist Herbert Feis (rhymes with nice), thought that his eyes reflected "the soul of a young Shelley." In 1931, Secretary of State Stimson, who was not seeking a Shelley, read the young professor's Europe, the World's Banker and made him economic adviser to the State Department. Feis held the job until 1944, when he got tired of U.S. muddling in economic policy.

There is nothing muddling about his new book, The Spanish Story. Here is the best-documented account so far of Franco's devious dealings with both the Axis and the Allies during the years 1939-44. Feis needed little filling in on the shifts and turns of the U.S. policy toward Franco; he was instrumental in shaping it. What gives his book its incisive and even exciting quality is his skillful use of captured enemy documents.

Modern Machlavelli. Franco emerges as Machiavelli's most finished 20th Century disciple. He got what he wanted--if not when he wanted it, at least in time to stave off internal disaster: U.S. oil and wheat when the U.S. and its allies needed both; German weapons and aviation gasoline when Hitler had barely enough for his own forces. How did he do it? As Feis carefully shows, by threats, by false promises, by outright lies, by playing the hopes & fears of the democracies against those of Hitler, and always by beautifully timed dissimulation.

Franco offered to get into the war on the Axis side in the summer of 1940. But Hitler, riding high, had no military need of him and wouldn't hear of the Spaniard's price: Gibraltar and a huge African empire.

Franco grew cagey in his dealings with Germany. At Hendaye, France, in the fall of 1940, he talked with Hitler for nine hours in the Fuehrer's private car, "each entranced talker explaining himself in heedless stretches, recognizing no interruption or answer." Hitler thought he had sealed a pact; Feis shows that Franco had come to "seal a vacuum." A few days later Hitler told Mussolini that "rather than have the conversation over again, he would prefer to have three or four teeth pulled out." Franco soon decided that Spain should stay out of the war and get what it could from both sides. But neither the U.S. nor Britain knew this.

Save Franco. When Hitler needed Spain's military help, Franco pleaded unreadiness. Hitler reminded the little Caudillo that without Hitler and Mussolini there would have been no Fascist Spain. Franco placated the Fuehrer by refueling Nazi submarines with U.S. oil, giving German spies a free hand, and turning over the Spanish press to Axis propagandists. (Hitler had kept an itemized bill for his aid to Franco during the Spanish Civil War; Franco made payments on it all through World War II with U.S. food and oil and Spanish strategic materials which, he told the Allies, Hitler would not get.)

It is clear from The Spanish Story that Allied policy bolstered Fascist Spain, but the evidence is overwhelming that the support was a military measure and not one of ideological sympathy. As long as Rommel kept up the fight in North Africa, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were thankful for even Franco's brand of "neutrality," since it left Gibraltar in British hands (the Rock's commander admitted that it could not be held).

Suppose the U.S. had adopted the get-tough-with-Franco policy that most leftists demanded at the time? Writes Feis: "What the scene in Spain would have been at the time of our [Dday] landing is--for me at least--an unanswerable question. Franco still in power--ruling with strong measures? A parliamentary government and a satisfied people? A weak government and a sullen people which would have later come under Communist control? Or no government--anarchy and cruel civil war again?"

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