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,
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 the 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: Torrejon, near Madrid; Moron, outside Seville; and Zaragosa in northeastern Spain. The Navy ran a Polaris submarine base on the southern coast at Rota, near Cadiz. 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 Torrejon, 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
