actors had simply to respect the rules of the game, which had hardly been the case in most of the earlier parliamentary regimes.
During his first year as official heir apparent, Juan Carlos was inevitably very guarded in remarks about any future plans, while Franco's health remained relatively stable as of 1970 and the opposition was entirely impotent. Therefore, when the influential American journal Foreign Affairs asked me early in 1970 to write an article on the current political situation in Spain and its future prospects, my prognosis, too, was guarded. The resulting article, "In the Twilight of the Franco Era," noted the extensive social and economic transformation of the country, and suggested that the present system would change and evolve under Juan Carlos, but that the immediate prospects were for "continuity more than change." 21
That was technically the case as of mid-1970, but the situation continued to evolve rapidly, and during the next two years Juan Carlos gave clearer signals regarding his future plans, while by 1973 Franco's health was deteriorating seriously. During these years there were several conferences and seminars in Washington on Spanish affairs, including a special seminar at the Foreign Service Institute on July 12, 1972, on the "Spanish military," focused on their likely behavior following the death of Franco. In the spring of 1975 Washington upgraded the ambassadorship to Madrid by appointing the veteran Welles Stabler, a distinguished career diplomat and former assistant secretary of state for southern Europe. I participated in the orientation seminar organized for the ambassador-designate on May 1, 1975, and was hopeful about the country's political prospects, though the new ambassador was perhaps not surprisingly apprehensive about what he would soon encounter in Madrid.
The strangest meeting in Washington on the eve of Franco's death took place on June 10, 1975, when a Left-liberal pressure group, the Fund for New Politics, collaborated with representatives of the opposition Junta Democrática to sponsor a private, nongovernmental hearing in one of the congressional meeting rooms. Approximately fifteen people participated, together with various members of the junta, ranging from Opus Dei to the Communist Party. The message of this hearing was that the U.S. government should act directly to control the Spanish military after Franco's death; if it did not, any transition to democracy would be almost inevitably thwarted. This was possibly the only time that a foreign Communist entity urged American intervention in its country's affairs.
I was the only participant who challenged this viewpoint, pointing out first that the most active member of the Junta Democrática was the Communist Party of Spain, something that had been carefully ignored in the public presentation of this hearing. I held that American intervention or pressure would not be necessary and that Juan Carlos, after succeeding Franco, would introduce effective democratization that the great majority of Spanish people would support, and that the Socialist Party could play a constructive role in representing the main forces of the Left. The analysis that I advanced concluded that the Spanish military only intervened in moments of crisis, deep division, and disruption of legality. If the democratization process maintained stability and proceeded through legal channels, the military were not likely to reverse it. This analysis proved substantially correct. 22
The summer of 1975 was a grim time in Washington, as North Vietnam violated its peace agreement to launch an all-out military offensive, which resulted in the fall of South Vietnam. Communist totalitarianism was expanding not merely in southeast Asia but also in some parts of Africa, while the Portuguese Communists seemed to be gaining dominance in Lisbon and the future of Spain was in doubt. The Department of State therefore called a special conference on the prospects of