December 21, 1959: Eisenhower's visit to Madrid

The date of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s visit to Madrid, 21 December 1959, marks the public culmination of a political process begun with the Madrid Pact of 23 September 1953. The visit gives visible form to a relationship whose terms had been negotiated between governments, while the agreement’s original signing went largely unreported to the Spanish public.

The pact behind the visit

On 23 September 1953, Spanish Foreign Minister Alberto Martín-Artajo and James C. Dunn, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, signed the Madrid Pact at the Palace of Santa Cruz. Martín-Artajo was accompanied by Commerce Minister Manuel Arburúa; Dunn came with Max H. Klein, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Spain. The contrast between two Spanish ministers and an American ambassador accompanied by a business-association leader signaled the unequal standing of the two countries.

An unequal bargain

Spain had unsuccessfully sought to give the agreement a higher status. A treaty would have required approval by a majority of the U.S. Senate, which the Eisenhower administration did not expect to obtain; it therefore chose a government-to-government pact requiring no parliamentary procedure. Public distaste among U.S. senators for Franco’s regime did not prevent the United States from entering what the account characterizes as an abusive, unequal relationship with a former Axis ally. Franco’s government gained more from the arrangement, while the Spanish people, as so often, were left uninformed.

A concealed signing and its later display

The U.S. embassy sent a photographer to record the signing, but the Spanish press did not publish the photographs. On 23 September 1953, ABC did not report the ceremony at Santa Cruz. Its attention instead followed Franco’s visit to Ourense, where the previous day he had inaugurated the Major Seminary of the Divine Master. The newspaper also carried a striking report on Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s former head of political police, who had been arrested on 9 July and later executed. Against that subdued and diverted coverage, Eisenhower’s Madrid visit six years later appears as the public-facing sign of a process whose decisive agreement had received little public notice when it was made.