The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

by Barbara Moran

  If America had to choose someone to deliver bad news to a grumpy foreign official, Angier Biddle Duke was the perfect man for the job. “Angie,” as everyone called the ambassador, was charming and urbane, with flawless manners, a voice smooth as velvet, and a way of easing uncomfortable situations. He never lost his temper. “Even,” said his wife, “when people were behaving badly.” Duke had been born and bred into gentility, with a family tree reaching and branching through a century of American aristocracy. His grandfather Benjamin Duke helped found the American Tobacco Company, a Duke family business that dominated the cigarette industry until it was trust-busted in 1911. Grandfather Duke also helped found Duke University. On the other side of the family, Angie could list ancestors such as Nicholas Biddle, the first editor of Lewis and Clark’s journals, and Brigadier General Anthony Drexel Biddle, Jr., deputy chief of staff to Eisenhower during World War II.

  As ambassador to Spain in 1966, Angie was in his early fifties but still tall and trim from regular exercise. He had a long, aristocratic face and combed his thinning hair straight back from his high forehead. He dressed elegantly, in finely tailored clothes. Angie evoked an earlier age, a time when people dressed up to fly on planes, wore hats and gloves in public, and wrote notes on personalized stationery. He was, above all, civilized.

  Yet for all his connections, Angie’s upbringing had left him insecure. His mother, Cornelia Drexel Biddle, had married his father, Angier Buchanan Duke, when she was only sixteen. The marriage had failed, and the two had divorced when Angie was six years old. Angie’s father had died two years later but had disinherited his two sons, cutting them off from his share of the Duke tobacco fortune. Angie’s mother was so furious that she changed her sons’ names to incorporate her own: Angie, christened Angier Buchanan Duke, Jr., became Angier Biddle Duke. Despite the disinheritance, Angie inherited enough from his grandfather that he never actually had to work for a living. But as an adult he invested poorly and was never quite as rich as everyone thought. Joseph Smith recalled that Duke never had any cash on hand to pay for restaurants and lodging. Smith would also receive letters from luxury hotels around Spain, saying that the ambassador’s checks had bounced.

  For a role model, Angie turned to his uncle Tony Biddle, a globetrotting diplomat. As a teenager, he regularly visited Uncle Tony in Oslo, once attending a hunting party in Austria that his uncle hosted for the king of Spain. The visit with the royal family made a strong impression on him, especially the evening conversations about Central Europe and the rise of Hitler. Angie, dazzled by the dignitaries, the serious talk, and the importance of it all, began to contemplate a career in diplomacy.

  He attended Yale, studying Spanish and history on a “prediplomatic” track. But after two and a half years, he dropped out, married the first of his four wives, and never went back to school. He regretted the decision for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he remained painfully embarrassed that he had never earned a college degree.

  After Yale, Angie floundered. He spent his twenties traveling the world, working briefly at a sports magazine, and toying with business. He divorced his first wife and married his second. Eventually, World War II gave him some direction. He enlisted in the Army before Pearl Harbor, then attended Officer Candidate School, becoming a second lieutenant in January 1942. It was a proud moment for the flighty young man with no college degree: for the first time in his life, he had actually accomplished something. He served much of his tour in the Washington war room of Secretary of War Henry Stimson. There, as the lowest-ranking officer, Angie read incoming cables and updated battle maps with colored pushpins. Sometimes he stood at the maps with a pointer as generals discussed battle plans. He remained in the Army for five years, retiring with the rank of major.

  After the war Angie drifted again until fate pushed him back toward foreign affairs. In 1948, he was conducting an auction at a golf tournament. In the audience that day was an investment banker named Stanton Griffis. Griffis was impressed by the young man’s poise and, speaking with him afterward, discovered Angie’s interest in diplomacy. Griffis had served as ambassador to Poland and was expecting another appointment if Harry Truman got elected. Griffis knew that any embassy posting would involve a heavy load of socializing, and, as a widower in his sixties, he wasn’t up to the task. Angie and his young wife, however, would be perfect. Angie lit up at the proposition, but with no college degree, he wasn’t qualified to take the Foreign Service exam. Griffis pulled some strings, Angie took the exam, and in 1949, Angier Biddle Duke began his diplomatic career as special assistant to Stanton Griffis, the new ambassador to Argentina. When Griffis was appointed to Spain in 1951, after the United States had resumed diplomatic relations with the country, he took Angie with him. The following year, President Truman named Angier Biddle Duke ambassador to El Salvador. Only thirty-six years old, he was the youngest U.S. ambassador in history.

  Ambassador Duke poured his abundant energy into the new job. He desperately wanted to make his mark on foreign policy and worked hard to understand key issues and participate in important decisions. But, to his continued dismay, most of his colleagues considered him more adept at parties than policy. The American press called Angie a “tobacco-rich playboy,” and one colleague described him as an “amiable lightweight.” Yet he was much loved in the countries he served. One Salvadoran reporter wrote, “He has dedicated more sewers, slaughterhouses, and clinics than half a dozen politicians.” When Eisenhower, a Republican, won the 1952 election, Angie hoped to remain at his post in El Salvador, but the political winds blew him out of his beloved government job. He plugged away on international refugee issues for the next eight years, then worked on the John F. Kennedy campaign. When Kennedy won the 1960 election, Duke expected another posting, hopefully as ambassador to Spain. Instead, the new president called him in late December and asked him to serve as his director of protocol.

  Angie balked at the offer. He wanted to shape foreign policy, not arrange table settings like some glorified Emily Post. But Kennedy, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, convinced him that the job was critical to the administration’s foreign policy goals, and Angie finally accepted. Soon he and his third wife — a Spanish aristocrat he had met while stationed in Spain — were up to their ears in diplomatic minutiae. Duke ensured that the rooms of one foreign dignitary were stocked with his favorite brand of soda crackers; that another had an informative visit to the Tennessee Valley Authority. He sent birthday greetings from the president and answered queries on the correct way to display the American flag. He introduced new ambassadors to Kennedy and arranged the seatings and menus for state dinners. He attended about a dozen cocktail parties a week, a half-dozen dinners, and two or three luncheons. With his elegance and boundless energy, Duke excelled at the job. In 1964, The New Yorker ran a long, flattering profile of Duke. At one point, it caught him in a moment of despondency. “I’m lost,” he told the magazine. “I’m lost and of no importance.” Then, after a moment, he brightened. “But there are compensations,” he said. “It’s satisfying to be as close as I’ve been to the sources of world power.”

  After President Kennedy was killed, President Johnson kept Angie on as director of protocol. But Duke craved something more substantive. In early 1965, Johnson gave Angie his dream job: ambassador to Spain. Duke’s third wife, the Spanish aristocrat, had died in a plane crash in 1961, and he had remarried for a fourth and final time the following year. So in 1965, he, his wife, Robin, and their children from previous marriages packed up and moved to Madrid.

  Ironically, once he got to Spain, Angie felt marooned. For years, he had stood at the side of the president. Maybe he had just been an observer, but he had been at the center of the Washington whirl, meeting kings, chatting with Jackie Kennedy, watching history being made. Now he was stuck in the backwaters of Europe. “When I got there, I found that I was moving from the center of the action into the countryside,” he said years later. “Fankly, to move to a dictatorship after th
e hurly burly of the White House years, in many ways was disappointing.” Nonetheless, Duke, patriotic and dedicated, threw himself into his new job with characteristic vigor.

  Spain had changed enormously since Duke’s last posting in the early 1950s. But the embassy’s main policy goals had changed very little. As ambassador, Duke had to maintain the solid working relationship between the U.S. and Spanish governments. There was only one reason the United States cared at all about its relationship with Spain: the military bases. In 1966, the U.S. and Spanish governments jointly held four major military bases in Spain. The Air Force operated three bases: Torrejón, near Madrid; Morón, outside Seville; and Zaragosa in northeastern Spain. The Navy ran a Polaris submarine base on the southern coast at Rota, near Cádiz. Connecting these four bases, cutting across the center of Spain, stretched a 485-mile-long pipeline that supplied the bases with petroleum. The American military presence also peppered the rest of Spain. The Air Force ran a small air base at San Pablo and a fighter base at Reus, about ninety miles southwest of Barcelona.

  The Navy stored oil at a supply center in northwestern Spain and kept oil and ammunition in a depot at Cartagena. The U.S. military also operated seven radar sites across the country.

  George Landau, who worked at the embassy with Duke and became the State Department’s director for Spanish and Portuguese affairs in 1966, called the Spanish bases the “crown jewels” of America’s foreign military bases. Strategically located at the entrance to the Mediterranean, they were a key component of the military’s nuclear deterrent strategy. The Sixteenth Air Force, headquartered at Torrejón, oversaw the bases in Spain (and Morocco until 1963) and was the largest SAC force overseas. SAC stocked the Spanish bases with tanker planes and medium-range bombers, critical for both its strip alert and airborne alert programs. The bases also offered numerous amenities: servicemen could live there on the cheap, the sky beamed blue and clear almost every day, and the Spanish government — at least in the early days — rarely hassled the Americans about anything. “The Pentagon was absolutely enamored with Spain,” said Landau. “They thought it was the wherewithal for everything.”

  The base agreement that existed in 1966 would expire in just two years, and American officials were starting to negotiate terms for a new agreement. The American military had a good thing going in Spain and wanted the situation to remain as it was. But the Spanish government had grander goals.

  “Spain wanted to be a part of Europe, a world power,” said the embassy staffer Joseph Smith. “The original base agreement made it clear that Spain was a junior partner. They wanted the United States to acknowledge Spain as something bigger…. They wanted to change from a purely military relationship to one that involved politics on the highest level.” The U.S. Embassy in Spain had a finite number of diplomatic chits; diplomats had to spend and save them wisely, always with an eye toward the upcoming base renegotiations. The bases, according to Landau, were not the embassy’s top concern, they were the only concern. If not for the bases, the United States would have never reached out to Spain’s military dictator, General Francisco Franco, at a time when Western Europe still regarded him with scorn.

  Generalissimo Francisco Franco, chief of state, president of the Council of Ministers, and caudillo of Spain by the grace of God, didn’t look the part of an iron-fisted terror. He was short and tubby, his soft face dominated by wide brown eyes with long eyelashes that gave him a decidedly feminine appearance. When he spoke, words tumbled out in a high-pitched squeak. Angie Duke described him as “the most uncharismatic dictator you ever saw in your life.” Franco had “a white face, mottled, jowled, fishy eyes, a very limp handshake, a big pot belly. Yet at the same time, he had quite an impressive personality. He had enormous reserves of power inside of him.” Franco had led the right wing Nationalists to victory during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939.

  Both sides had committed horrendous atrocities against civilians, and Franco emerged from that bloody conflict with a reputation for coldhearted brutality. During the war, Franco ordered the slaughter of anyone who opposed him or posed a threat: schoolteachers, trade unionists, prisoners, wounded troops. He refused to hear any appeals for clemency.

  Franco idolized Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and his side received massive military assistance from them during the war. But when World War II began just six months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, he had little to offer his friends. The civil war had devastated Spain. Most of the country’s industry lay in ruins. About half a million Spaniards had been killed or had died of disease and malnutrition. Another half million had fled the country, and those who remained faced widespread poverty and hunger. Spain was a broken country, and Franco was in no position to support the Axis powers when World War II broke out. Throughout the war, Spain remained officially neutral.

  The Allies worked hard to maintain Spain’s neutrality. Britain knew of Franco’s infatuation with Hitler and Mussolini — the British ambassador reported that Franco kept signed photos of the two dictators on his desk. But the British also knew that they couldn’t afford to lose Gibraltar, the tiny British stronghold jutting off southern Spain that served as their gateway to the Mediterranean.

  They, along with the United States and other allies, sent Spain petroleum, cotton, food, and other materials under the condition that the country remain neutral. Franco eagerly accepted the goods while keeping his eye on the changing winds of the war. Once the United States entered the fray and the tide began to turn against the Axis powers, Franco started to hedge his bets. “Henceforth,” said one historian, “his energies were to be devoted almost impartially to working both sides of the street while keeping Spain untouched by war.”

  Meanwhile, Franco continued his brutal behavior within Spain. Between 1939 and 1945, the Franco government executed thousands of political opponents; one study says the death toll may have reached 28,000. The government imprisoned hundreds of thousands more and sentenced them to hard labor. Franco, threatened by ethnic groups like the Basques and Catalans, banned the Basque and Catalan languages, folk music, and traditional dance. The government muzzled the press and stifled all political opposition. Only Catholics were allowed to build churches and practice their religion openly.

  Franco’s internal policies, and his waffling during the war, disgusted the Allies. After the war, the victors paid him back. The fledgling United Nations excluded Spain from membership. Then, at its second meeting, the UN. General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending that all members recall their ambassadors from Madrid. On March 4, 1946, the United States, France, and Great Britain signed a Tripartite Declaration to the Spanish people, warning that they would not gain full relations with the three countries as long as Franco remained in power. In 1949, when NATO was formed, Spain was kept out. Finally, and perhaps most devastating, the Allies excluded Spain from the Marshall Plan, the massive aid program that helped rebuild Europe after the war.

  Spain crawled forward in virtual isolation for several years, its only foreign relations with the dictatorships of Portugal and Argentina. The country lagged behind the rest of Europe, its economy and industry struggling, its people — for the most part — desperately poor. But Franco, dictator for life, knew he could wait out any storm. Historians tell a famous anecdote about the dictator’s legendary patience. As the story goes, Franco kept two boxes on his desk. One was labeled “Problems That Time Will Solve;” the other, “Problems That Time Has Solved.” Franco’s career involved shifting papers from the first box to the second.

  And indeed, time — and the advent of the Cold War — did solve the problem of Spain’s isolation. In the late 1940s, as the situation between the United States and the USSR grew increasingly tense, “more weight was given to the help Spain might furnish in the next war than to any hindrance she had offered in the last,” according to the historian Arthur Whitaker. Franco had long been a virulent anti-Communist, and in the new world of nuclear deterrence, Spain’s strategic location looked
increasingly useful. Furthermore, the idea of giving aid to Spain now seemed more acceptable: American Catholics were lobbying their congressmen to give economic aid to the starving country.

  Franco encouraged the warming Spanish-American relations. In July 1947, he told a reporter that the United States could obtain the use of Spanish bases if it tried hard enough. The Pentagon pushed for bases, and President Truman didn’t put up much resistance. “I don’t like Franco and I never will,” he said. “But I won’t let my personal feelings override the convictions of you military men.” In late 1950, Congress appropriated $62.5 million in aid for Spain. In 1951, Stanton Griffis — with Angie Duke in tow — arrived in Spain to fill the long-vacant post of ambassador. That summer, American military officials started talking to Franco about military bases in Spain as Great Britain watched in annoyance. “The strategic advantages which might accrue from associating Spain with western defense,” said the British foreign secretary in the summer of 1951, “would be outweighed by the political damage which such an association might inflict.” American military officials waved such protests aside. They wanted those bases.

  On September 26, 1953, the United States signed three agreements with Spain that together became known as the Pact of Madrid. The United States would give Spain military aid—$226 million in the first year alone — in exchange for the use of three existing air bases at Morón, Torrejón, and Zaragosa. The United States would expand and update the bases, as well as build a new Navy base at Rota and other facilities. The United States and Spain would operate the bases jointly, but the Americans would run the show. The pact would remain in effect for ten years — until 1963—and then could be extended in five-year increments. Because the pact was an executive agreement, not a treaty, it did not require congressional approval. Military necessity had trumped the ideals of freedom and democracy. A New York Times editorial called the deal “a bitter pill.” “Let us hope,” it said, “that the medicine will not do more harm than good.”