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Preface
1. Juan Negrín as a Human Being
2. His Career as a Scientist
3. His roles as Minister of Finance
4. Negrín and the Case of Andreu Nin
5. Governing without Tantrums
6. From Near Triumph to Near Catastrophe
7. The Relationship between Negrín and
Prieto
8. The Policy of Resistance
9. Unresolvable Conflicts of Mission
10. The Emotional Impasse of August, 1938
11. D. Juan Negrín and His Kitchen Cabinet
12. Retreat, and Unaccepted Defeat
13. After the Civil War
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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”Juan Negrín y López, the “enigmatic” leader of the Spanish
Republic from May 1937 until its defeat in March 1939, had not
been treated kindly in many histories of the Civil War. Some
attacks have been personal, with critics scoffing at his “lavish
spending … his delight in pretty women and his gargantuan eating
the drinking.” Others have lambasted Negrín’s disorganized work
habits and high-handed, dictatorial style. But it is Negrín’s
role in the shipping of the Republic’s gold reserve to Moscow
and his inability to prevent the persecution and murder of “Trotskyists”
by Russian agents operating in Spain that have been particularly
seized upon and have led to his denigration as a Communist stooge,
a tool of Stalin’s apparent control of the Spanish Republic.
… Gabriel Jackson’s new sympathetic biography of Negrín
presents a rather different image of the Canarian university
physiology professor: a highly intelligent, unassuming, and
thoroughly decent man. Jackson recounts details of Negrín’s
life before, during, and after the war, his intellectual background,
and his personal life. However, though Jackson makes use of
considerable previously unseen archival material, details are,
on occasion, somewhat vague. As Jackson says, Negrín was a man
“with an extremely reserved interior,” and documentary records
appear to be almost as elusive as the figure himself. Negrín
kept no diary and was not in the habit of saving his correspondence
Many official papers were accidentally destroyed during the
war, others afterwards deliberately by his lifelong companion,
Feli, acting on Negrín’s personal instructions. The lack of
sources means that the early chapters are frustrating, for we
learn little about Negrín’s early life, and Jackson is often
forced to guesswork. However, when we come to the Second Republic
and the war itself, the book is on much firmer ground.
… Jackson argues that though the much-derided Negrín was
a determined war leader, he was no dictator, but was at heart
a moderate socialist and a humanitarian. Like his fellow socialist,
rival and one-time friend Prieto, Negrín did what he could to
stop the paseos, the murder of imagined enemies of the Republic
by “uncontrollables.” He issued passports and wrote personal
letters to help political opponents flee Spain, and on one occasion,
as Jackson approvingly relates, Negrín slept in a prison in
order to limit the blood-letting. And while Negrín himself was
secular, he firmly believed in restoring religious freedoms
and worked hard to secure the release of imprisoned clerics.
… Likewise, Jackson explains how Negrín’s lack of action
over the murder of Andreu Nin by the NKVD and the Republic’s
brutal suppression of the POUM need to be seen within the context
of the Republic’s absolute dependence on Soviet military aid.
Russia was the Republic’s only ally, and Negrín knew that meant
he must do his utmost not to offend Stalin. This is not to say
that Negrín, or Jackson for that matter, condoned the actions
of the NKVD in Spain, but that unless Negrín was absolutely
sure that the Russian agents were responsible for Nin’s disappearance
and presumed murder, he could not afford to rock the boat.
… On the infamous sale of the Republican gold reserves
to Moscow, Jackson confirms that the impetus came from Spain,
rather than from Russia as Negrín’s detractors would have us
believe. Jackson tackles head-on the popular notion that the
Republic’s war effort was dictated by Stalin, rather than Negrín.
To Jackson, Negrín’s determination to maintain his – and Spain’s
– independence has been sorely underestimated. Jackson explains
why Negrín had such close links with Communists and why Negrín
was determined to carry on fighting right to the end, when other
senior Republicans such as Azaña, Prieto, and others knew that
the game was up.
… The answer, of course, was that Negrín and the Spanish
Republic didn’t have the luxury of choice. Facing a superior
army, boosted by troops from Morocco, Italy, Germany, and Portugal,
and deserted by the countries that might have helped, Negrín
and the Spanish Republic fought on because Franco could never
have accepted a negotiated peace. Negrín was forced to accept
whatever help he could get, however tainted and whatever the
consequences for Stalin’s fourth internationalist scapegoats.
Negrín worked closely with the Communist Party not because he
was himself a Communist, or even a fellow traveller, but because
they were the most resolute defenders of the Republic. Like
them, he was determined to fight on until General Casado’s military
coup on March 5, 1939, ended any pretence of continuing resistance.
… This bleak reality provides the context for Jackson’s
portrayal of Negrín. For Negrín, like the second Spanish Republic,
there was no happy ending. Continuing squabbles with Prieto
over Republican money ensured that Negrín was effectively sidelined
after 1945, and he died of a heart attack in 1956. In this new
biography Jackson argues that Negrín was treated unfairly. Some
may disagree but, at the very least, Jackson’s study clearly
shows that Negrín’s role in the final year of the doomed Spanish
Republic has been worthy of reappraisal. Richard
Baxell, a trustee of the International Brigade Memorial Trust,
writing in The Volunteer, is the author of British
Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War
“One of Gabriel Jackson’s major achievements
in this engrossing biography is to move beyond the mountains
of stereotype, slander and half-truths, and to use all the
available evidence to paint the portrait of complex man facing
extremely complex circumstances; a fundamentally honest and
decent human being who sacrificed his health, reputation,
and academic career in a failed attempt to save his country
from disaster. Jackson’s book covers the whole of Negrín’s
life, with the bulk of the chapters dedicated to the years
1937–39. As a biographer, Jackson brings to the table not
only years of painstaking research – including new archival
materials and dozens of interviews with Negrín’s friends,
family members, colleagues and their children, conducted over
a forty-year time span – but also a significant dose of human
understanding and intuition, mediated through his knowledge
of Spanish history as much as his own life experience as non-Communist
social democrat barely thirty years younger than his subject.
(For a political biography, Juan Negrín is in fact a remarkably
personal book.) Indeed, Jackson is forced to engage in a fair
amount of speculation, given the limited evidence available:
in contrast to many of his colleagues, Negrín, an extremely
reserved man, kept no diary and his extant correspondence
is too scant and impersonal to give much insight into his
emotional, sentimental, and philosophical state of mind. The
result is an eminently readable, refreshingly straightforward
account of an accomplished scientist and cosmopolitan intellectual
who in normal circumstances would have never had to become
a politician, let alone take his country’s reins during the
most difficult years of its long history. Jackson’s Negrín
is a welcome addition to other recent reappraisals of the
Prime Minister’s life and career, including Enrique Moradiellos’
Don Juan Negrín (2006) and Ricardo Miralles’ Juan Negrín.
La República en Guerra (2003). …
… Jackson’s Negrín is no whitewash. The biographer has
no problem acknowledging his subject’s significant weaknesses:
his lack of organization; his impulsiveness; his habit to
make important decisions without consulting his cabinet; his
“wild side” or “mercurial streak” (128, 121, 295); his inclination
to avoiding unpleasant but necessary topics of conversation;
and his tendency to hide his “ambitions for personal power”
by coyly stating that “he was not a politician” (123). On
the human and moral side, however, Jackson forcefully rejects
the image of Negrín as a poster child of the seven deadly
sins. Negrín, he indicates, always treated his fellow human
beings with utmost respect and was capable of a tremendous,
self-effacing generosity. Not only did he place “a great deal
of emphasis of good manners and personal courtesy” (10), and
honoured those whose political and religious outlook on life
differed from his; but in fact he was one of the very few
among his colleagues never to speak badly about others as
individuals. “There are lots of nasty anecdotes about Negrín,”
Jackson points out, “but not by Negrín against others” 139).”
Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
“One reason for the relative paucity of scholarship on Juan
Negrín before the recent spate of biographies was the almost
complete absence of primary source material. Negrín never
kept a diary, wrote few personal, as distinct from professional
letters and did not save his correspondence. His son, Juan
Jr, exercised absolute control of his father’s papers and
did not permit anyone to consult them before his own death
in 2002. A few years after Negrín died in his Paris exile
in 1956, his adopted granddaughter, Carmen, chanced upon his
companion Feli López, with whom Negrín lived for thirty years,
burning bundles of notes. Jackson therefore merits special
praise for the meticulous way in which he has reconstructed
Negrín’s eventful life – above all his early years as a scientist
– from precious little detailed information.
What do we learn from Jackson’s labour of love about Dr Negrín’s
personality and achievements? Born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
in 1892 to a well-off conservative family, Negrín always dressed
well, frequented fine restaurants and stayed at the best hotels.
An outstanding student, he studied in Germany where he completed
doctorates in medicine and physiology. Having made a favourable
impression on the Nobel laureate, Santiago Ramón y Cajal,
he was appointed first director of the newly established Physiology
department in the Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid. Between
1927 and 1931 he was active on the construction committee
for the Ciudad Universitaria. ‘A man of tremendous (hetero)sexual
appetite’ (10), he was a ‘very energetic, convivial, unhappily
married man’ (11). Not a Marxist, but perhaps a freemason,
Negrín joined the Socialist Party in 1929. In Jackson’s opinion,
the single most controversial question about Negrín is the
future prime minister’s attitude towards the Communist Party
and Stalin’s Russia. Since the Western democracies had deserted
the Republic in its hour of need, its defenders were presented
with a stark choice: ‘work with the Russians and the Spanish
party, be grateful that there was one major power providing
weapons and military advice comparable to what the enemy was
receiving; warn so-called Trotskyites if possible – but not
risk the goodwill of the only power supporting us by publicly
challenging [wild accusations that Trotsky and his miniscule
“Fourth International” were agents of fascism]…’(24). …
… Jackson’s nicely written volume, interspersed with
personal anecdotes, including his own experiences as a fellow
traveller in the 1930s and his encounters with exiled Republican
leaders, makes for compelling reading.” Bulletin of Spanish
Studies
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