Portugal's Political Development: A Comparative Approach, and: Spain at the Polls, 1977, 1979, and 1982: A Study of the National Elections (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 243 the necessary show of staying power that would bring the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table. In fact, she understands the lesson of Vietnam better than she states it in a concluding, two-paragraph "Epilogue" that I wish she had not written. "The primary significance of this study," she writes, "is its account of media influence on Lyndon Baines Johnson's Vietnam War rhetoric." She could as easily have said that the significance lay in the influence of Johnson's war rhetoric on the press—or, more accurately, the influence of the nature of the war on Johnson's rhetoric. Actually, the media did not influence what Johnson said about Vietnam. On the contrary, Johnson used the media shamelessly in his efforts to get across to the American public the perception he wanted it to have of the Vietnam War. Turner's book is not, as she would have us believe, "a story of communication failure [whose] implications for contemporary American life are profound." That is another sentence from her unfortunate epilogue. Johnson's inability to communicate the message of Vietnam has no implications for contemporary American life, unless Turner is trying to tell us that it was the kind of message that American presidents are regularly required to try to put across at the risk of starting a war with the media. And that is simply not the case, as Ronald Reagan demonstrates on an almost daily basis. Reagan can hopelessly misstate his own Strategic Defense Initiative, walk away from Lebanon while vowing to stay for the sake of Middle East peace and global security, get caught mining Nicaraguan harbors, promise swift retribution against terrorists and then do nothing—he can do all these things while maintaining an amiable relationship with the media. The point is not that Reagan is a different man thanJohnson, though that surely has something to do with the quite different relationship Reagan has with the press. The real point aboutJohnson's relationship with the press has more to do with the message than with the media or the president—the message of a flawed war strategy whose nature and purpose the American public, in the end, could no longer comprehend or support. Portugal's Political Development: A Comparative Approach. By Walter C. Opello, Jr. Boulder, CoL: Westview Press, 1985. pp. 248. Spain at the Polls, 1977, 1979, and 1982: A Study of the National Elections. Howard R. Penniman and Eusebio M. Mujal-León, eds. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1985. pp. 372. Reviewed by Gilad Y. Ohana and Peter Goldstein, M.A. candidates, SAIS. Twelve years ago both Spain and Portugal were governed by entrenched corporatist-authoritarian regimes. Today both have democratic governments under the leadership of progressive parties. But the paths these neighboring nations have taken in their respective transitions from dictatorship to democracy have been very different, both in the role played by various actors and the sequence of events. In the three years following the death of Francisco Franco in late 1975, the institutional system he built was swept away. Franco's heir, King Juan Carlos, wasted little time in beginning the redemocratization process. He replaced the prime minister named by Franco with Adolfo Suárez, a bureaucrat who would become the leader of Spain's centrist political party. Less than a year after Franco's death Spaniards voted on a referendum that broadly outlined the 244 SAIS REVIEW democratization to come. In 1977 they chose representatives to the first democratically elected parliament, which would also serve as a constitutional convention. The election was hotly contested by the newly legalized parties. By late 1978 the constitution was complete, and a year later Spaniards returned to the polls to vote for deputies, senators, and a prime minister. In 1982 they voted yet again, replacing the weakened Centrists with Felipe Gonzalez's Socialist Workers' Party. In Portugal, fifty years of dictatorship came to an end in early 1974. A group of disgruntled midlevel military officers ousted Marcello Caetano, who had replaced Antonio Salazar, the dictator who had ruled the nation from 1932 until 1968. The coup's instigators, the so-called Council of the Revolution, soon became divided...