In our image, p.66
In Our Image, page 66
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Certain that the United States engineered every event in the country, Filipinos concluded that Marcos was America’s choice. The conviction improved Marcos’s image; now, it was assumed, he would be able to obtain increased U.S. aid. The Marcoses also believed that the Americans, in some mysterious way, were responsible for their success. Shortly after the election, Imelda’s brother Benjamin Romualdez, a deceptively oafish-looking character nicknamed “Kokoy,” made a proposal to Francis Tatu, who had monitored Marcos’s campaign and offered a few helpful hints. “Frank,” he said, “we know that you placed America behind us, so write your own ticket. What if we got the State Department to name you our foreign affairs adviser?” Tatu demurred. Whatever his own sympathies, he explained, U.S. policy had been “hands off.” In any case, he was not about to scrap his diplomatic career to serve Marcos. Kokoy dangled a fatter plum. Marcos, he mused, might nationalize Benguet, the big gold-mining and timber company. “Frank,” Kokoy persisted, “we could appoint you director.”
Tatu had told the truth: America had been neutral in the election. But, along with other U.S. Embassy officials, he was impressed by Marcos. “We had great faith in him,” Tatu recalled years later. “Marcos was a tremendous guy, solid and dedicated. We believed his promises to renovate the society, to introduce land reform, social justice, real democracy.” President Johnson’s aide Jack Valenti, who attended Marcos’s inauguration, was equally dazzled. Marcos, he wrote to Johnson, was “enormously intelligent” as well as “tough,” and “one of the most magnetic speakers” he had ever heard. Persuaded by Valenti and others, Johnson invited the Marcoses to Washington in September 1966 as the American press lionized the couple. Imelda was extolled in Life as having a combination of Jackie Kennedy’s “grace” and Eleanor Roosevelt’s “energy,” and Time praised Marcos’s “dynamic, selfless leadership.” A note of caution crept into a message to the State Department from William McCormick Blair, Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Manila. Despite his admiration for Marcos, he warned against expecting “extravagant” results from him. At that stage, Blair could not envision the future Marcos autocracy. Nevertheless, he foresaw “profound” problems if Marcos became so convinced of his own importance to the United States that he attempted to manipulate American policy and practice for his own purposes.
Blair was prescient. Beginning in late 1965, Marcos did in fact proceed to influence U.S. policy to suit himself. He started with the accurate perception that Lyndon Johnson was haunted by the nightmare of the Vietnam War. Johnson, then pouring American troops into the conflict, desperately hoped to show the American public that the nations of the region, the “dominoes” that would supposedly topple should the Communists prevail, shared his worries and were eager to participate in the struggle. In reality, the countries of the area were primarily preoccupied with their internal problems, but they would accommodate Johnson if he footed the bill. Thus, at America’s expense, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and South Korea sent in substantial forces relative to the size of their populations. Marcos, on the other hand, set out to extract a maximum profit from a minimal investment and, through shrewd bargaining, he succeeded. So, at the outset of his term, he learned to exert leverage over the United States. The lesson served him well for the next twenty years.
By the end of 1965, I had become Asia correspondent for The Washington Post, and Marcos was aware that Johnson, a newspaper junkie, would read my dispatches over breakfast. He granted me an interview in Manila in November to say that he would commit an engineer battalion of two thousand men to Vietnam following his inauguration a month later. Earlier, he explained, he had opposed Philippine involvement out of fear of an American withdrawal—but now that Johnson was displaying a “resolute will to slug it out, we have been reassured.” Hinting that he would need more than the $6 million he already expected from Johnson to sustain the unit, he added that there was “real goodwill toward the United States in the Philippines [and] no problem between us cannot be solved easily.” The interview was an opening bid in his bargaining. Soon he raised the ante.
On one pretext or another, he delayed the deployment of the Philippine battalion until Johnson fulfilled his request for an official invitation to the United States. Finally, in September 1966, the contingent embarked for Vietnam, landing on the same day that Marcos and Imelda arrived in Washington for their state visit. While Imelda hypnotized Johnson with her singing at the White House banquet, Marcos haggled with State and Defense Department officials at a series of sessions later described by one of them as “messy.”
Of all the countries in the area, Johnson believed, the Philippines, with its historic attachment to the United States, should have been the first to volunteer soldiers for Vietnam. He wanted Marcos to commit more men, combat troops rather than merely engineers. But Marcos, sensing that Johnson was vulnerable, insisted on a heavy price. He would mobilize ten battalions at America’s expense on condition that he be allowed to keep some of them at home for his own purposes. Anxious to have the Philippine flag among his Asian banners, Johnson ceded. In the end, Marcos sent only a token force to Vietnam, retaining nearly all the units to build roads and other pork barrel projects in the Philippines just before his next presidential campaign. A subsequent investigation by the U.S. Congress failed to determine precisely how he spent the funds, and Marcos muddled the matter further by claiming years later that he had received “no fee or payments of any kind” for his largely phantom contribution to Vietnam. Besides the military subsidy, Johnson had also given him $80 million in economic aid and other grants, including $3 million for Imelda’s cultural center. Johnson, who usually referred to his allies in possessive terms, had called Marcos “my right arm in Asia.” Afterward, realizing that Marcos had outwitted him, he barked to an aide: “If you ever bring that man near me again, I’ll have your head.”
Johnson also handed Marcos another lever with which to manipulate the United States. Following the Washington visit, he sent a top secret message to William Blair, the American ambassador in Manila, instructing him to disclose to Marcos that nuclear weapons were being stored at the U.S. bases in the Philippines. Marcos might have guessed as much, but until then no Philippine president had been officially given that information, which had never been made public—and which, to this day, is confidential. Johnson’s motives for the gesture are still unclear. He may have believed that, by taking him into his confidence, Marcos would be more cooperative. Instead, Marcos realized that he was in a stronger bargaining position than he had previously imagined, and he held the bases as his trump card in negotiations with future American presidents. As a former Johnson aide later phrased it: “The instrument of our policy became the object of our policy. We had to submit to Marcos for the sake of the bases.”
Richard Nixon placated Marcos for the same reason. Nixon had scheduled a brief stop in Manila in July 1969, during his first trip abroad as president. Marcos, who was running for reelection later in the year, invited Nixon to spend the night at the Malacañang palace in hopes of creating the impression that the United States endorsed his candidacy. Precisely to avoid that trap, Nixon planned to stay at a hotel. But Marcos pressed, and Nixon finally complied. Imelda hastily renovated the palace and put on one of her opulent dinners, followed by hours of entertainment. Despite their exhaustion, Nixon and his wife, Pat, endured the ordeal. Two months afterward, Imelda repeated the performance for Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, and his wife, Nancy. Nixon had sent the Reagans to Manila to represent him at the opening of Imelda’s cultural center, and she fêted them at banquets and receptions that by comparison made Hollywood parties seem like church picnics. The Marcoses showed shrewd foresight. Reagan never forgot their hospitality, which he misinterpreted as a personal mark of friendship and, as president, he remained faithful to them long after their behavior had become scandalous.
Marcos was just as clever at manipulating his own people. Shortly after entering office in 1965, he promoted himself as modern and sophisticated by recruiting a staff of so-called technocrats, many of them educated in the United States, and announced agrarian reforms and other ambitious plans. Thanks to the engineer units underwritten by Lyndon Johnson, he did build roads and bridges, and he fortuitously benefited from a major scientific breakthrough. Largely financed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, agricultural experts at a center near Manila had recently developed new breeds of high-yielding rice that were now producing record harvests. The Philippines became a food exporter for the first time in nearly a century, and the achievement redounded to Marcos’s credit. But soon his administration was adrift. By 1969, his agrarian reform had distributed land to only three thousand tenants. Violence was as rampant as ever, partly through his own encouragement. Under the guise of fighting remnant Huks in central Luzon, he approved the formation of vigilante groups known as the “Monkees,” after the popular rock group of the time, and he employed them to intimidate and even murder his rivals. Denouncing corruption, he claimed to have put his entire assets of $30,000 into a “blind trust” devoted to “scientific research for the public welfare.” In fact, he was then starting to amass his colossal fortune, largely by requiring his cronies to pay him kickbacks in exchange for lucrative government contracts and other privileges. In March 1968, according to subsequent disclosures, he deposited a total of $950,000 in four accounts at the Credit Suisse in Zurich, two in his name and the others in the names of Jane Ryan and William Saunders.
Neither Marcos nor American Embassy officials in Manila were then aware of an event that portended a grave crisis for the Philippines. On December 26, 1968, in a remote village of Pangasinan province in northern Luzon, eleven young Filipinos met to found a new Communist party. They had chosen that day, Mao Zedong’s seventy-fifth birthday, out of respect for the Chinese Communist leader, whose strategy of guerrilla warfare they intended to pursue. Their organizer, José Marie Sison, barely thirty at the time, was a slim figure with a scraggly mustache. The son of a wealthy landowning family, he had until recently been a lecturer in English literature at the University of the Philippines. In Manila, as elsewhere in the world, the academic community was erupting in radical protests during the 1960s. Sison, caught up in the ferment, had joined the old Communist party—only to find himself at odds with its veteran leaders, who opposed Mao’s doctrine of “armed struggle.” They were “weekend warriors,” he told William Chapman, an American journalist, in 1986. He quit and, under an appropriate nom de guerre, Amado Guerrero, established his own party with seventy-five disciples, most of them students.
Sison soon encountered Bernabe Buscayno, alias Commander Dante, a Huk guerrilla chief. The original Huks, defeated in the 1950s, had since deteriorated into racketeers who managed prostitution, gambling and bars around Clark Field, the U.S. air base in central Luzon—usually with the tolerance of the American authorities. Buscayno, the son of a poor peasant, idealistically hoped to revive the revolution. In March 1969, he and Sison formed the New People’s Army with an arsenal of seventy weapons. Though they never received Chinese aid, they taught their followers to recite Mao’s aphorisms, among them “A single spark can ignite a prairie fire.” It proved to be apt. Both Sison and Buscayno were later captured—but, over the next twenty years, the Communist rebellion spread to nearly every province in the archipelago as the insurgents won support in reaction to Marcos’s corruption and abuses.
Meanwhile, a kinky episode that reflected the licentious flavor of the Philippines unfolded late in 1968 with the arrival in Manila of Dovie Beams, an overage American starlet who had supposedly been hired to act in a film about Marcos’s wartime exploits. She began a liaison with Marcos that lasted for nearly two years, and the movie, a sham from the start, was never made. Marcos dropped her without severance pay, and the scandal broke. As a precaution, Dovie had hidden a tape recorder under the bed to acquire electronic evidence of their trysts. She convened the press and played the tapes, which student radio stations promptly broadcast—giving the public a heavy dose of Marcos grunting, breathing obscenities, crooning love songs and revealing Imelda’s sexual inadequacies. Menaced by Marcos’s thugs, Dovie fled to the U.S. Embassy for protection, and CIA men rushed her onto a flight to Hong Kong. Marcos ordered a Manila magazine to publish a piece defaming her as a slut, illustrated with pornographic photographs of her that he himself had snapped. Relegated to obscurity after that, Dovie resurfaced in 1988, when she was sentenced by a California court to eight years in prison for bank fraud.
Like other Filipino wives whose husbands maintained queridas, Imelda asked only that Marcos exercise discretion. But he had violated the rules of the game, humiliating her in the eyes of the Manila socialites whose acceptance she sought. He knew it and, to atone, catered to her every whim from then on. “It was a turning point,” one of their friends later told me. “He could no longer control her, and she went crazy with power and greed.”
Marcos understood, however, that his private capers were irrelevant to the politicians, who themselves kept mistresses and, in any case, admired machismo. The key to gaining and preserving authority, he had long before grasped, was through utang na loob—putting the entire political structure, from local officials to national legislators, into his debt. The means to that end was the money to dispense patronage to the provincial bosses who guaranteed the vote. Marcos displayed his mastery of the system in 1969, when he easily beat Sergio Osmeña, Jr., the lackluster son of the former president, and won an unprecedented second term. He spent the equivalent of $50 million on the campaign, part of it on a pair of American advisers, Lawrence F. O’Brien and Joseph Napolitan, longtime Democratic party professionals. His own political skills notwithstanding, Marcos somehow felt compelled to seek American counsel—he even hoped in his final days that a Washington public relations firm would save him from collapse.
Hardly had he been reelected president than he began pondering ways to retain power. A new constitution, he reckoned, would permit him to run for a third term. He entrusted his palace guard to Colonel Fabian Ver, an enigmatic cousin with vague military credentials. Concerned with possible betrayal, he tightened his circle of cronies. None of this eluded Manila’s keen journalists. In February 1970, not long after his second inauguration, the Philippine Free Press prophetically observed that Marcos “might become a megalomaniac, drunk with his own importance [and] even consider enthroning himself as lifetime president or dictator.” The publication was remarkably perceptive. Just about that time, Marcos confided to his diary: “I have that feeling of certainty that I will end up with dictatorial powers.”
Though the possibility of martial law worried ambassador Henry Byroade, some of his staff saw the prospect as salutary. Francis T. Underhill, the chief political officer, subsequently reconstructed his feelings during that period for Raymond Bonner, an American writer: “This place is a hopeless mess. Power is so dispersed that nothing can be done. Graft and corruption are rife. The streets are unsafe. The Philippines needs a strong man, a man on horseback to get the country organized and going again.”
Manila was roiled by student, labor and peasant protests, several provoked by the Communists. Marcos welcomed their demonstrations as justification for the eventual repression he envisioned—as his diary entries for the period indicate. “We should allow them to gather strength, but not such strength that we cannot overcome them,” he wrote on February 17, 1970. However, he himself was behind much of the unrest. “The disorders must now be induced into a crisis so that stricter measures can be taken,” he wrote on March 3—adding soon afterward: “A little more destruction and vandalism, and I can do anything.” Nevertheless, he was typically cautious, calculating that he might not be able to muster public backing if he launched his crackdown prematurely. “I must continue to restrain myself,” he wrote in his diary, “lest we lose the support of the people by a stance of tyranny.”
Late in January 1971, after a day of turmoil, Marcos directed his army commander and Chief of Staff to prepare for martial law. They refused, and he subsequently relieved them. On the night of August 21, an ugly incident occurred that gave him another excuse to clamp down. Legislative elections were approaching, and the rival Liberal candidates had gathered before a crowd of ten thousand at the Plaza Miranda, a Manila square frequented by soapbox orators. Suddenly grenades and explosives tore through the rally, killing at least ten people and injuring more than a hundred others. Marcos immediately suspended the writ of habeas corpus and blamed the Communists, further alleging that Ninoy Aquino, who had arrived at the meeting suspiciously late from a dinner, was abetting them. But, again prudent, Marcos recoiled from imposing martial law then. The culprits were never apprehended. Years afterward, the Communists denied responsibility for the attack, confirming a CIA analysis that concluded at the time that they were too weak and disorganized to have staged such an assault.
Marcos was beginning to alarm the old oligarchy, which threw much of its weight behind the Liberals. They won six of the eight senate seats in the 1971 election, even scoring overwhelmingly in Marcos’s native province. Shocked by the results, Marcos realized more vividly than ever that he would have to move decisively—and soon—to perpetuate his power.
He later claimed that several plots to liquidate him had accelerated his plan to impose martial law. One, conceived by Sergio Osmeña, Jr., was indeed genuine and, like much of the Philippines itself, surrealistic.
Early in 1972, Osmeña hired Larry Tractman, Robert Pincus and August McCormick Lehman, three American hit men with U.S. police records. He also engaged a Scotsman named Albert Brian Borthwick, the Singapore representative for Interarms, a firm owned by Sam Cummings, a former CIA man and one of the world’s leading weapons dealers, who had headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, resided in Monte Carlo and traveled on British and Irish passports—and does to this day. According to a former Interarms employee, Borthwick and Cummings agreed to cooperate with Osmeña in exchange for an exclusive arms contract once Marcos had been removed. Borthwick flew to Osmeña’s hometown of Cebu to demonstrate his weapons for the American killers. One, a high-powered Belgian rifle with a cyclops scope, would be fired from a hole in a Volkswagen van at Marcos while he was playing golf. Borthwick also devised a radio-controlled toy airplane packed with explosives to dive-bomb Marcos on the golf course. A third alternative was to blow up Marcos with limpet mines hidden under the dock he used to board his yacht. After additional testing, the equipment was to be shipped to Osmeña through the police chief of Cebu.
