From the Back Cover
In a swiftly paced, brilliantly vivid narrative, Karnow focuses on the relationship that has existed between the two nations since the United States acquired the country from Spain in 1898, examing how we have sought to remake the Philippines 'in our image, ' an experiment marked from the outset by blundering, ignorance, and mutual misunderstanding.
About the Author
Stanley Karnow won the Pulitzer Prize for this account of America's imperial experience in the Philippines. In a swiftly paced, brilliantly vivid narrative, Karnow focuses on the relationship that has existed between the two nations since the United States acquired the country from Spain in 1898, examining how we have sought to remake the Philippines "in our image," an experiment marked from the outset by blundering, ignorance, and mutual misunderstanding.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
By September 1986, after four years as secretary of state, George Shultz had grown accustomed to presiding over official dinners for foreign dignitaries visiting Washington: the rigorous protocol, the solemn oratory, the contrived cordiality. But he could not recall an occasion equal to this night. He was honoring Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, the new president of the Philippines, and a spontaneous charge of emotion electrified the affair. Americans and Filipinos had shared history, tragedy, triumph, ideals—experiences that had left them with a sense of kinship. Shultz captured that spirit exactly: A “Cory” doll pinned to his lapel, his Buddha-like face beamed and his nasal voice lilted with rare elation. Breaking with routine, he delivered his toast before the banquet—in effect telling the guests to relax and enjoy. “This,” he said, “is a family evening.”
Cory’s appeal transcended her American connections. Seven months earlier, she had toppled Ferdinand Marcos in an episode almost too melodramatic to be true—a morality play, a reenactment of the Passion: The pious widow of Marcos’s chief opponent, the martyred Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, she had risen from his death to rally her people against the corrupt despot, his egregious wife and their wicked regime. Throughout the world she became an instant celebrity, a household icon: the saintly Cory who, perhaps through divine intervention, had emerged from obscurity to exorcise evil. Elsewhere in Asia, in Taiwan and in South Korea, demonstrators invoked her name in their protests against autocracy.
Most Americans may have forgotten, perhaps never even knew, that the Philippines had been a U.S. possession; for those who remembered, Cory symbolized anew that special relationship. During its half-century of colonial tutelage, America had endowed the Filipinos with universal education, a common language, public hygiene, roads, bridges and, above all, republican institutions. Americans and Filipinos had fought and died side by side at Bataan and Corregidor and perished together on the ghastly Death March. The United States was still in the Philippines, the site of its two largest overseas bases, and more than a million Filipinos lived in America. By backing Marcos, even as an expedient, the United States had betrayed its protégés and its own principles, but, as if by miracle, Cory Aquino had redeemed her nation—and redeemed America as well.
Shultz’s role in her achievement, though belated, had been decisive. He was frustrated by unresolved challenges: Central America, the Middle East, negotiations with the Soviet Union. Not the least of his problems were his rivals in President Ronald Reagan’s entourage, constantly nibbling at his authority. Here he had scored a visible victory: He had finally won the Washington debate over dumping Marcos—despite recollections of the disasters that had followed past U.S. maneuvers against such unwanted clients as South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and the shah of Iran. At his urgent behest, Reagan begrudgingly consented to discard Marcos and hustle him off to Honolulu. A bloodbath had been narrowly averted in Manila, and Cory had restored democracy to the Philippines. Now, on this autumn evening, Cory beside him, Shultz savored her success, his success. In what for him was an explosion of enthusiasm, he remarked that the occasion had “a real good feel to it.”
Even the chronically foul Washington weather felt good. The summer heat had faded, leaving the air as soft as satin. From the terrace outside the State Department’s top-floor dining room, the capital resembled a tourist poster. Lights flooded the Washington Monument and the majestic dome of the Capitol and between them, like a giant lantern, hung a full harvest moon as yellow as butter. Aquino, while enduring her husband’s imprisonment under Marcos, had borrowed yellow as her signature color from the poignant Civil War ballad: “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around the Old Oak Tree.” When a guest noted the felicitous coincidence, Shultz’s spokesman, Bernard Kalb, quipped, “The CIA can do anything.”
Cory desperately needed economic aid and investment, and Shultz had carefully reviewed the guest list, inviting a heavyweight contingent from Congress along with some of America’s major bankers and corporate executives. Present, too, were the handful of State Department officials who had lobbied for her against Reagan’s reticence and the opposition of his staff. Diplomats, publishers, journalists, scholars and lawyers were also there, and a group of influential Filipino businessmen had flown in from Manila. The place was “loaded,” Shultz said proudly, with “important people who make things happen.”
By seven-thirty, the guests were filing through the reception chambers furnished with elegant American antiques, their walls adorned with vintage portraits of America’s founders: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams. With Shultz towering above her in the receiving line, Cory wore a pink gown with butterfly sleeves, reserving yellow for her address to Congress the next day. Nobody who knew her, as I had for twenty years, could have foreseen this magic moment. Nor could she, for all her belief in providence, have ever thought it possible. I imagined her reply had I, possessed of some superhuman faculty, predicted this occasion even a couple of years before. “Golly, Stan,” she would have remonstrated, “you must be crazy.” Yet here she was, a woman of fifty-three, a grandmother, serene and poised, shaking hands, bussing an old friend, her broad smile and amazing grace radiating a natural incandescence. And, as we dined in the spacious Benjamin Franklin Room, a euphoric glow kindled the gathering. Guests table-hopped to exchange nostalgic anecdotes. One effusive congressman was appareled in a lustrous yellow matched set of bow tie, cummerbund and handkerchief, and another sported a yellow badge proclaiming: “I <3 Cory.” As entertainment, Shultz had brought in a loony washboard combo from San Francisco—a frivolous touch described by one of his assistants as “real American.”
Vice President George Bush, acting as official greeter, had paid a call on Aquino the previous day at her hotel suite. As they posed for the photo opportunity, she smiled stiffly. Of course she would not spoil the occasion by dredging up old grievances, but Bush was anathema to her for his effulgent praise of Marcos during a visit to Manila in 1981. The Marcoses, masters at lavishing attention on important guests, had laid on an opulent dinner for him at the Malacañang, the presidential palace. Scripted by the State Department to reassure Marcos of the Reagan administration’s “friendship,” Bush toasted Marcos’s “adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic processes.” The inane remark had clung to him for years, and he knew that Cory remembered it. Now, however, he sought to reassure her. There was “no resistance of any kind to you” within the administration, he told her, predicting that she and Reagan would “get along very well … in terms of chemistry.”
He was wrong. A man who prized loyalty, Reagan stuck by those who had been faithful to him—a trait he displayed in his reluctance to dismiss unethical subordinates. Nor did he easily shed illusions, as in his tendency to confuse movies with reality. Whatever Marcos’s faults, he still esteemed him an “old friend and ally,” an intrepid anti-Japanese guerrilla during World War II and a veteran “freedom fighter” in the struggle against communism. Besides, he had never forgotten his first trip to Manila in 1969, when he was governor of California. President Richard Nixon had sent him and Nancy there to represent the United States at the opening of a cultural center, and the Marcoses had treated them like royalty. By contrast, he instinctively distrusted Cory. On one occasion he had proposed that she compromise with Marcos, which to her was tantamount to a pact with the devil, and despite massive evidence of chicanery by Marcos’s followers during the election, he publicly suggested that her supporters had been equally fraudulent. He was angry when she banished Marcos from the Philippines rather than permit him to retire to his native province.
Not until April, a full two months after her victory, did he personally congratulate her by telephone. She interpreted the delay as an indirect reproach—and, a few days later, he exacerbated it with a gesture that she could justifiably consider an insult. En route to Asia, he had stopped for a few days in Hawaii and actually contemplated driving over to see Marcos, who was now living there in splendid exile. Shultz had all he could do to dissuade him, and Reagan telephoned Marcos instead. Marcos, his voice slurred, carried on almost endlessly, insisting that he was still the rightful president of the Philippines, denouncing Cory as incompetent and soft on communism and complaining about his confiscated property. His wife, Imelda, pouring out her heart to Nancy, blubbered that the press had maligned her with exaggerated reports of the thousands of shoes and sundry glitz she had left behind in Manila. The maudlin performance embarrassed the Reagans—all the more so because Imelda, to show that the Marcos connection with the United States was intact, had violated the privacy of the conversation by arranging for a Honolulu television station to broadcast a silent segment. Administration spokesmen, fearing that Reagan’s contact with Marcos might alarm Cory, hastily expressed his endorsement of her, but she was unconvinced. She continued to believe that Reagan still yearned for Marcos’s restoration to power. And now, five months afterward, as her motorcade sped to the White House, she was rankled as well by Reagan’s refusal to elevate her journey to Washington to the full panoply of a “state visit”—an honor that he had accorded the Marcoses in September 1982, which in diplomatic semiotics signified unqualified recognition as a chief of state.
