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On his record, General Antonio de Spinola should be the last man in Portugal to lead a campaign for reform and liberalization. For most of his 64 years he has been a stern authoritarian. The son of a top financial adviser to Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, he was a volunteer fighter on the Franco side in the Spanish Civil War, commanding a detachment of other Portuguese volunteers. A few years later, the Portuguese high command, recognizing his potential, sent him to Nazi Germany for training with the then invincible Wehrmacht. From the German side he watched the siege of Leningrad.

When African rebels began challenging Portuguese rule in Angola in 1961, Spinola once again was an early volunteer. Brought home after three years, his chest festooned with ribbons and medals, he was made second in command of Portugal's National Republican Guard, a paramilitary police force. In 1968 he was sent back to Africa as commander in chief and military governor of the territory of Portuguese Guinea, where he served until he returned to Lisbon last summer to receive the Order of the Tower and the Sword with Palm, Portugal's highest military honor, and to become deputy chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a post set up specially for him.

In Guinea, Spinola created a MacArthur-like aura around himself. His bushy eyebrows, the flashing monocle in his right eye--an adornment he picked up in Berlin--the gloves, and the riding crop he invariably carried were as well known to Portuguese troops as MacArthur's corncob pipe had been to Marines and G.I.s in the South Pacific. Unlike MacArthur, however, he believed in cultivating the enlisted man, and he would pop from his helicopter in hazardous spots to see personally how the fighting was going.

Though Spinola had worked in Guinea to involve the native population in the affairs of government--a sign perhaps that his own thinking was changing--few Portuguese were adequately prepared for the heretical turnabout of ideas in his book, Portugal and the Future, which came out last March and became Portugal's overnight bestseller (200,000 copies). In words that had an eerie echo of the arguments against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, Spinola said what many in the country had been thinking: Portugal cannot win its African wars, and some political accommodation must be achieved with the rebels.

"Any national strategy based on the rigid pursuit of a policy that imposes such heavy spending on defense," he wrote, "will irremediably compromise survival, the very thing for which the expense is being made. Trying to win a subversive war by military means is to accept defeat in advance, unless one possesses unlimited capacity to prolong the war indefinitely, turning it into an institution. Is this our objective? Clearly not."

Probably no one but Spinola could have said such a thing and escaped confinement in Caxias prison. But not even the staunchest right-wingers could fault his patriotism, bravery or adherence to accepted Portuguese values. Indeed, Spinola is a man whose character is conservatism itself.

Except during his service abroad, he has lunched every day for as long as anyone can remember at the same rooftop restaurant of a Lisbon hotel. His hair has been cut by the same barber for 30 years, and his nails have been cared for by the same manicurist for 26 years. A teetotaler, he has stayed trim by regular riding on his horse Achilles, the mount on which he has won several national and international competitions. He can also be somewhat overbearing. In Guinea, he told fat officers to lose weight, and if they did not, he ordered them shipped home. He is an odd man indeed to inspire a liberal-leaning revolution, but he is perhaps the only man in Portugal who could have done it.

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