Spain and the United States - Real Instituto Elcano

OVERVIEW 17
money was used to purchase cotton, fertiliser, tractors, wheat, coal, equipment
for railways and for the development of mining and hydroelectric power.
Truman sent Stanton Griffiths as ambassador to Spain at the end of 1950, after
the United Nations allowed ambassadors back into the country following a
break of four years, and Admiral Forrest Sherman, chief of naval operations,
met with Franco. In 1951, the US Congress voted Spain a further $100 million.
Spain’s real GDP jumped 17.6% in 1951, in no small part due to the US
inflows, which began to reactivate an economy “held together by bailing wire
and hope.” 9
Franco played hard to get and in return for the bases repeatedly held out
for large amounts of money that Washington rejected. In the final stages of the
arduous negotiations, he told his negotiators “in the last resort, if you don’t get
what you want, sign anything they put in front of you. We need that
agreement.” 10 By the time the Pact of Madrid to establish air bases at Torrejón
(near Madrid), Zaragoza and Morón de la Frontera and a naval base at Rota
was signed in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower, the commanding general of the
victorious forces in Europe during World War II, was president. As a military
man, he was more in tune with Franco than Truman (who in a press conference
had equated Franco’s regime with Hitler’s and Stalin’s 11 ). Eisenhower became
the first US president to visit Spain in 1959.
The agreement was controversial, especially for France and Great Britain,
which believed it undermined the moral authority of the Western block, and for
liberals in the United States, democrats in Spain and Spaniards in exile. France
and Britain, however, were trading with Spain. When asked why France was
importing oranges from Spain, De Gaulle famously said that he “didn’t think
oranges were fascist”. A New York Times editorial said the United States was
“swallowing a bitter pill” 12 , and the American Protestant community expressed
its outrage. For Franco, the agreement was a triumph, particularly as no
political liberalisation was demanded. The dictator’s regime gained
international respectability, especially in the multilateral area (Spain joined the
United Nations in 1955). Internally, the dictatorship felt more secure with US
troops on its soil, although by then the threat to it from the political opposition
was negligible as it was weak and divided. As a contemporary analyst put it,
Spain had gone “from United Nations outcast to United States partner”. 13
9. See New York Times, quoting a report by a US economic mission (October 28, 1951).
10. See p. 623 of Franco by Paul Preston (HarperCollins, 1993).
11. “There isn’t any difference between the totalitarian Russian government and the Hitler government
and the Franco government in Spain. They are all alike.” (Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, vol.
25, p. 45).
12. See New York Times (September 28, 1983).
13. See “Franco’s Foreign Policy: From UN Outcast to US Partner” in World Today (vol. 9, no. 12,
December 1953).