http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-zapatero17mar17,1,1596193.story?coll=la-home-headlines(free registration or try www.bugmenot.com )
MADRID, Spain -- For Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the path to power can be traced to the last testament of his grandfather, a Spanish army captain executed by Gen. Francisco Franco's fascist forces nearly 70 years ago during Spain's civil war.
As the captain prepared to face a firing squad, he wrote a letter urging his family not to hate his killers. "He dies innocent and pardons," the doomed Republican government-backing man wrote of himself. "He asks his wife and sons to also pardon."
Zapatero, now 43, "was 11 or 12 when he first saw that letter, and it had a profound affect on him," says Oscar Campillo, author of a sympathetic 2001 biography of the Socialist Party leader who was elected as prime minister of Spain on Sunday.
Zapatero's belief in national reconciliation over revenge could serve him well with the Spanish public, which for years had been led by the confrontational Jose Maria Aznar.
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Bush, he suggested, should "engage in some self-criticism."
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