YOU’D have to be over forty years old, and closer to 50, to remember a time when Ferdinand E. Marcos hadn’t already been president. If you were born in 1965, the year he became president, when he finally left the palace you would have been 21 years old, much of it spent listening to government propaganda telling you he was the greatest Filipino ever. If you were born when Marcos fled, you’re now 21 years old: Much of it spent being told that Marcos was the worst Filipino, ever. Both you and your parents have grown up in the shadow of one man and his wife.
Just recently, the Comelec accredited a party list group called The True Marcos Loyalists, and there will be candidates running under the movement he founded, the KBL. Marcos’s widow, Imelda, enjoys celebrity status: Loyalists and Imelda amuse us; but not too long ago, they enraged a country.
Marcos was a man of talent; we continue to disagree whether he used those talents for anything larger than his own ambitions.
The dull biodata of his life, the one we copy and paste for reports, doesn’t force us to try to make sense of his life. Perhaps the most perceptive effort to do this that I’ve encountered was written by an American, Lew Gleeck. He wrote a slender, often quarrelsome book, titled “President Marcos and the Philippine Political Culture.”
The life of Ferdinand Marcos can be divided, said Gleeck, into phases. Those phases mirrored chapters in our nation’s development, and that of the culture in which leaders and the led operate.
Phase One was Marcos the law student who gained fame. While standing trial for the murder of his father’s political opponent, Julio Nalundasan, Marcos became the bar exam topnotcher. The Supreme Court summoned him because his grades were so high, they were convinced he cheated.
He convinced the justices he had passed. Soon afterwards, he faced some of the justices again, when his conviction for murder reached the Supreme Court on appeal. He won his appeal on Sept. 21, 1940, a date he would immortalize 32 years later.
Phase Two is also the most mysterious: Death March survivor Marcos; the guerrilla Marcos. How much of it, as demonstrated by his medals was true? At least part of it.
This phase, I’d like to suggest, contains a period often overlooked in the debate over his war record. That period is Marcos’ intellectual, even philosophical development. In this he was surely influenced by a statesman to whom Marcos felt he owed his acquittal by the Supreme Court, Jose P. Laurel.
Laurel said that the rallying center of our national unity were four: The flag, the constitution, the national anthem, and the presidency. Marcos in his day would try to leave his mark on all four: He changed the color of the flag; he unveiled a modern arrangement of the anthem during one independence day; he almost single-handedly wrote a new constitution; and he made his office, and thus himself, the Alpha and Omega of our government and society.
The third phase was Marcos the elected politician: As congressman from 1949 to 1959, first in the Liberal administration, given his first big break as a presidential assistant by President Roxas, then supported in his candidacy by his fellow Ilocano Elpidio Quirino, and then in opposition to the Nacionalistas; then Marcos the senator from 1959 to 1965, including being Senate president from 1963, and president-in-waiting after Macapagal promised to support him in 1965. The power base of Marcos the up-and-coming politician were three: His generation of the UP Cadet Corps, and the guerrillas, the fraternities, and the Ilocano vote.
The fourth phase was the President Marcos of 1965-69, and the incumbent president who achieved a landslide re-election in 1969, only to be embattled from 1969 to 1972 on all fronts. This was a time of social upheaval, where our deeply divided society tried to figure a way forward.
The solution, to Marcos’s mind, was martial law. This was the fifth phase: The reformist Marcos, the one who’d written “Today’s Revolution: Democracy,” and who was, let’s not forget, widely supported by his people from 1972 to 1975.
It was a time when, to borrow a phrase made popular today, many were prepared to give up some of their freedoms to move the country forward.
The barrio, he decreed, would once again be known by its ancient name, the baranggay. The government was reorganized. Private armies disbanded. Rice and corn lands subjected to land reform, and the entire country proclaimed a land reform area.
Dissidents were locked up, the press carefully controlled, Congress padlocked, a curfew from 12 to 4 a.m. imposed, and the streets cleared of crime. The old oligarchy was crushed; old dynasties deprived of power and privilege. Miracle rice was introduced. Infrastructure ranged from roads, to bridges, to wells and electric grids — and cultural, tourist, and governmental structures. A new constitution was imposed, with the voting age lowered.
Gleeck says this reform phase ended in 1975, with the firing of Executive Secretary Alejandro Melchor. It gave way to the sixth phase, the dictator who set aside reform and increasingly concentrated powers in his own hands from 1975 to when Marcos combined in himself the offices of President and Prime Minister in 1978, and who then presided over massive corruption from 1979 to 1981. Marcos’s New Society became the New Republic, officially, our fourth.
Gleeck says Marcos’s 1981 inaugural ushered in the seventh, and final phase of Marcos’s political life. Marcos as the ailing dictator whose regime began to unravel from 1981 until, from 1983 until his fall in 1986, he finally lost touch with reality, was ousted, and exiled.
Oddly enough, these are seven stages for a man whose lucky number was the number 7. But how should we view Marcos? Gleeck argued, convincingly I think, that to understand Marcos — his strengths and weaknesses — requires understanding the culture in which he operated. A culture he tried to master, but which ultimately mastered him.
President Marcos also once said that Filipinos “will accept any kind of radical reform provided it is constitutional and legal”; whatever he might do, he did under the cloak of legality and proper form. Never mind if the substance came to be eroded by ill health and cronyism. Until late in his regime’s life, many were content to ask, “what is your alternative?” and “who will you replace him with?” to justify their continued support.
It was only when the economic gains came crashing down in 1982-84, that the public decided it was fed up with having no freedom and no more economic gains.
In the end, as Marcos’s health and grip on power weakened, he came to validate what is said to be the fundamental weakness of all strong man regimes: As the saying goes, nothing grows under the shade of a great tree. Marcos could not, would not, provide for a successor; and it was on the fundamental question of what should come after Marcos, that his regime began to crumble, and fell.