Word: franco
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Predictions from Trivia. Spaniards have turned Franco's long refusal to name his successor into a national guessing game. Its object is to predict-by attributing great significance to acts of meaningless trivia-when, if ever, Franco will restore the monarchy, and to whom, if anyone, he will give the crown. Franco plays the game, too, by scattering contradictory clues, and last week he was playing it with obvious relish. He allowed Spain's monarchists to organize a mass rally to greet Queen Victoria Eugenia at the airport, but restricted TV coverage to a 17-second film strip...
Nothing, of course, that Franco did or did not do last week shed any real light on the succession. Don Juan, as son of the late King Alfonso XIII, is still the official pretender and conducts himself like a man who expects to be king. He receives advice from a shadow cabinet of royal councilors, holds audiences in his villa at the Portuguese resort town of Estoril and is attended at all times by a grandee of Spain. Last week the monarchist crowds in Madrid even dared chant a forbidden cry: "Long live King Juan...
Olympic Prince. Franco, on the other hand, seems to favor Juan Carlos, who is now 30, lives in Madrid and is much more tractable than his father. At Franco's behest, the handsome Prince has been getting a full course in the government of Spain. He holds commissions from all three Spanish military academies and is now making the rounds of all Cabinet ministries, learning the ropes in long sessions with each minister. Juan Carlos also sees Franco from time to time, and the Spanish press is sometimes allowed to portray him as a popular hero. An avid sportsman...
...king. His father, he insists, is the rightful king, and he will never take his place as long as Don Juan is alive. And then, of course, there is the matter of whether anyone will be king. There is nothing in Spain's supposedly monarchial constitution to prevent Franco-or the administrators of the government he leaves behind-from naming a permanent regent instead of a king...
Wearing the Green. The week did produce one real shock when Italy's 27-year-old Franco Nones became the first person other than a Scandinavian or Russian ever to win an Olympic cross-country ski race. A wiry customs agent from Castello di Fiemme in the Dolomites, the tireless Nones sped 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) in 1 hr. 35 min. 39.2 sec., to beat Norway's Odd Martinsen by the margin of 49.7 sec.-roughly the equivalent of three city blocks. Some experts credited Nones' victory to the wax he used on his skis -a special...