The Philippines: A New Voice in Asia

THE PHILIPPINES

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The guerrillas struck at breakfast time, catching the American infantrymen unarmed and off guard. One U.S. sergeant was decapitated at the mess table: his head tumbled neatly into his plate of hash. Others fought back and were later found dead with bloody forks clenched in their fists. Of the 74 officers and men of C Company, 9th U.S. Infantry, only 26 survived. As one of them raged with tears in his eyes: “Damn the infernal Googoos!’

Googoos? That was the contemptuous label which American fighting men applied to an earlier enemy in Southeast Asia, a guerrilla army as fierce and feisty as any elite Viet Cong unit, and twice as bloodthirsty. The ambush of C Company took place on Sept. 28, 1901, on the Philippine island of Samar. The guerrillas were Filipino insurrectos inspired by General Emilio Aguinaldo, tough little “bolomen” whose razor-sharp cane knives and captured Krag-Jorgensen rifles killed 4,165 Americans before the three-year insurrection was quelled. In turn, some 20,000 Filipinos died in the struggle.

Asian Democracy. Last week, 65 years after the slaughter on Samar, Filipinos and Americans were the staunchest of Asian allies. Descendants of the bolomen—1,200 soldiers from the Philippine Civic Action Group—were setting up camp beside U.S. troops in the South Vietnamese jungles of Tay Ninh. American wounded, airlifted from Saigon, were being treated at hospitals outside of Manila, and U.S. fighting ships —back on rotation from the Tonkin Gulf—lay at anchor in the palm-fringed Philippine harbor of Subic Bay. B-52 bombers from Guam swept past the Philippines before making their bomb runs over North and South Viet Nam.

More important than its value as a fighting ally and a site for American bases was the fact that—after 48 years of American occupation and two decades of independence—the Philippine Republic endures as Asia’s freest democracy. It is no “showcase,” to be sure, but it stands as a model of hope for all of non-Communist Southeast Asia: from the introverted Burma of Neutralist General Ne Win to the bankrupt chaos of Suharto’s Indonesia; from royalist Thailand through Malaysia to trifurcated Laos; and certainly to South Viet Nam itself.

Quest for Identity. The custodian of those hopes, and of 33 million Filipinos, is a short, perpetually grinning man who walks with a military spring, drives a golf ball with the tense fury of Ben Hogan, and spends 20 hours a day on the job. As the sixth President of the Philippine Republic,* Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, 49, has been in office only ten months, but in that time he has taken significant steps toward providing the Philippines with the dynamic, selfless leadership it needs to cope with the Southeast Asian burdens of poverty, lawlessness, Communist insurgency and —most important—the quest for national identity after centuries of colonial occupation.

Last week Marcos was busy with preparations for his most ambitious foreign-policy move to date: the seven-nation Manila Conference of Asia’s non-Communist allies, which opens next week. Marcos released $190,000 to patch Manila’s perennially potholed roads, and the city throbbed to the passing of earth movers and dump trucks. Paintbrushes slapped and lawn mowers clattered up and down stately Roxas Boulevard as hotels and nightclubs indulged in a hasty face lifting. U.S. Presidential Press Secretary Bill D. Moyers bustled from airport to embassy to Malacanang Palace (the Filipino White House) making arrangements for everything from protocol dinners to a Lyndon-and-Lady Bird tour of nearby Corregidor. Marcos’ aides wrote hurried position papers, while his First Lady, lovely Imelda Romualdez Marcos, supervised a hurry-up renovation of the palace itself. The twittering of sparrows in the upper reaches of the palace reception hall was drowned in the rattle of hammers and snarl of saws.

Articulate Ambivalence. Though the Manila Conference will deal mainly with the war effort in Viet Nam, it symbolized the rebirth of a 15-year-old Asian desire for concerted unity that has long eluded the region. The Baguio Conference of 1950, called by Philippine President Elpidio Quirino and held in the craggy, cool highlands north of Manila, brought together such disparate neighbors as Australia, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand, and ended with agreement on joint action for the region. The principle of “Maphilindo,” endorsed by Marcos’ predecessor, Diosdado Macapagal, idealized the hope of Asia’s Malay nations (Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia) to regroup ethnically after ages of European-imposed fragmentation. Marcos himself has led the Philippines into a new Asian grouping, the nine-nation ASPAC— and simultaneously he has revived the long dormant Association of Southeast Asia (an economic union of Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines).

During his visit to Washington last month, Marcos articulated the ambivalence of many non-Communist ex-colonials who now stand on their own. “The challenge to America is to extend to Asia the defensive shield of American power in forms consonant with Asian freedom and self-respect,” Marcos told a joint session of the U.S. Congress. “The challenge to Asia is to discard the dry, meatless bone of mysticism and fatalism.”

The surge of new nationalism throughout Asia is aimed at precisely that second challenge. “The young Filipino looks around him,” says one old Manila hand, “and remembers that his grandfather spoke Spanish; yet his parents and he speak English better than Tagalog. He sees the conglomeration of Spanish and native architecture, spruced up with American modern. His system of government is tailored after that of the U.S.; yet he does not feel truly American. So he stands there, bewildered, asking himself: ‘What am I? Do I belong to Asia, the Pacific? Or am I closer to the West than either of these?'”

Great Experiment. American colonialism in the Philippines was a novel exercise in “enlightened imperialism.” When the former Spanish colony dropped suddenly into Admiral Dewey’s hands on May 1, 1898, President William McKinley was so surprised that, as he later said, “I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance.” He needed it, for the Aguinaldo bolomen would have tried the patience of the most saintly President. Like the Viet Cong, the Filipino terrorists were experts at ambush, using bamboo cannon loaded with scrap iron in place of Charley’s captured Claymore mines. Hatred for the “Flips” was reflected in a popular Army marching song, set to the tune of Tramp, Tramp, Tramp:

Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos!

Cut throat khakiac ladrones!

Underneath the starry flag

Civilize ’em with a Krag,

And return us to our own beloved homes.

Fortunately, that phase of “civilization” gave way quickly to the foresighted civil rule of such Governors General as William Howard Taft and Francis B. Harrison. “Colonialists with a conscience,” as they have been called, Taft and his successors brought the tools of self-government to the Philippines: literacy (72% of all Filipinos can read and write, the highest percentage in Southeast Asia), medicine (Filipino life expectancy in 1900 was 14 years, today it is 60), civil liberties (the Filipino press is the freest in Asia, if not the world). At the same time, the great experiment in self-liquidating colonialism was planting seeds that would sprout into the problems Marcos faces today.

The U.S. colonizers did nothing to alter the compadre system under which a Filipino bureaucrat was permitted to skim the cream from his tax collections and distribute it to his poor friends and relations; as a result, graft and corruption are still the Manila way of life. Nor did the Americans break up the vast estates of the principalia, the Filipino elite; peasants today still pay up to 30% of their crop to absentee landlords, and the rest often goes to local loan sharks. By granting free tariffs to Philippine producers of sugar, lumber and hemp, the U.S. reinforced a backward primary-product economy; today, a major irritant between Washington and Manila is the Laurel-Langley Trade Agreement of 1956, which perpetuates that error. Still, when the date came for Philippine independence, the U.S. kept its word. On July 4, 1946, for better or worse, the philophilic strains of the Filipino national anthem rang out over war-battered Luneta Park, and the child of America’s great experiment walked free.

“It’s Classy.” Twenty years later, the Philippines are an odd melange of American, Spanish and Asian influence, all edged with a ferocity and fecundity that is uniquely Filipino. The crooning of a tuko lizard in the night forests of Cavite is counterpointed by the rattle of gunfire as a cigarette-smuggling speedboat runs a customs blockade offshore. The big beat of jukeboxes in Manila’s waterfront dives does not quite drown out the clink of cocktail glasses at the opulent Army-Navy Club. Manila newspapers splash crime news in Hechtian hyperbole across their front pages.

The high-wheeled horse-drawn calesas of old Manila, with their tasseled canopies and courtly cocheros, have given way to the ubiquitous Jeepney, a freelance taxicab that typically sports a high-gloss enamel finish in rainbow hues, Playboy-bunny mudguards, pink-fringed roof, and a sign that reads “God Is My Copilot.” Crammed with such passengers as pigs, chickens, guitarists and call girls, and plagued with an absence of brakes and springs, the Jeepney needs celestial guidance.

So does Manila (pop. 1,300,000), where the polarities of the nation are reflected in microcosm. Sprawled on both sides of the sluggish Pasig River, the city straddles a grey-green current that carries both sewage and water lilies into Manila Bay. Many of its streets are potholed; rats chitter behind the wainscoting of its finest restaurants; street urchins peddle everything from lottery tickets to fragrant sampaguita garlands —all at outrageous prices. The current craze requires shops to have a D apostrophe preceding the English names, as in D’Artland Gallery, D’Elegant Theater, D’Stag Cocktail Lounge and D’Best Furniture Store. Why? “It’s classy,” explains a Filipino. “It’s French.”

“Little Viet Nam.” Forbes Park, in Manila’s southern suburbs, is known as the “millionaires’ barrio”; here curved streets wend gracefully beneath towering acacia trees, and deep-piled lawns run down to Rorschach-shaped swimming pools. Armed guards stop every car without a Forbes Park sticker, and the suburb’s residents—mostly Americans and Filipinos who earn more than 5,000 pesos ($1,250) a month—have their own golf course and polo club.

In stark contrast is the Tondo slum on Manila’s northern waterfront — a maze of alleys, mud-floored huts, hovels built from packing cases. Some 8,000 pushcarts roll through Tondo in search of trash and scrap paper, the collection of which is the district’s principal occupation. Tondo’s kids are a combination of the worst in American and Asian street gangs: the “Canto Boys,” with their distinctive madre tattoos, would as soon knife a stranger as zip-gun a passing police car.

Penchant for Violence. Behind broad Roxas Boulevard, where young hot-rodders zigzag furiously among the Jeepneys, is Manila’s commercial heart: boutiques, which attract American wives all the way from Hong Kong, stand side by side with gun shops that sell everything from matchbox-sized pistols to M-16 automatic rifles. Manila’s private citizenry owns more weapons (365,000) than the entire military and police forces, and it is a rare Filipino whose frilly barong tagalog shirt does not bulge with hardware. Nightclubs, bars, and even the Supreme Court mount signs reading: “Check Your Firearms Before Entering.” No self-respecting lawless Filipino would think of complying.

All that firepower is bound to lead to trouble, as the Philippine crime rate proves. According to the National Department of Investigation, crime in the Philippines jumped 51% last year, There were 8,750 murders (more than in New York), 5,000 rapes and 6,519 armed robberies. The national penchant for violence is reflected in Manila’s thriving Tagalog-language movie industry. Currently packing them in at the Rialto is Fernando Poe Jr. in Switchblade, a film in which “the sacred treasures of a church and a dozen lives rest on the courage of one man and his skill with a blade made from the heart of a heavenly meteorite.” Last week the 14 exuberant Manila dailies were bannering a real-life movie murder: two young toughs were gunned down while dining in the home of Actor Eddie Fernandez, who plays a James Bond type in such films as When I Am Still Alive and Living with Danger.

The Men from Esso. The real power in Manila—and the Philippines—is never so embarrassingly garish. In the leather-upholstered interior of the Casino Español, under the flutter of ceiling fans, the talk is of sugar prices and the new timber-cut in Mindanao as the members of Manila’s power elite discuss their endeavors. Polished ilustrados in dark Italian suits and handsome women in bright mestiza dresses nod politely to aging Carmen Soriano and her 39-year-old son José Maria, heirs of the Soriano fortune (Cebu copper mines, Samar iron, Mindoro cattle and dairy, Mindanao mahogany and San Miguel beer). American businessmen from Esso and Caltex, Hawaiian Dole and General Foods, are prominent in the Manila Polo Club; the Phil-Am Life Insurance Co., with its filigreed, high-pillared headquarters in downtown Manila, symbolizes U.S. and Filipino cooperation.

The Catholic Church, which claims 84% of all Filipinos, is still a vast landholder and, despite a few far-sighted reformers, remains a bulwark of the ancien regime. As a result, a new church, the Iglesia ni Kristo (Church of Christ), is making inroads: since its founding in 1914 by an uneducated Manila hatter, it has acquired 3,000,000 members, who voted en bloc last year for Ferdinand Marcos.

Fierce & Naughty. It would take a hero to rule so complex a society, and the hardest thing to accept about Ferdinand E. Marcos is that any mortal could have tucked into 49 years as much action, adventure, heroism, devotion to duty, romance, singleness of purpose and accomplishment as he has. Born in the farming town of Sarrat, in Ilocos Norte province on Luzon’s craggy northwest slopes. Marcos grew up under a code of spartan self-reliance. His father, Mariano Marcos, was a stern, humorless politician who refused comfort to any of his four children if they cried over injuries. “Don’t start a fight,” he advised brusquely, “until you know you can win it.”

Marcos’ grandfather taught the boy how to track wild animals in the mountains of Luzon. By the age of twelve, Ferdie was an expert pistol and rifle shot, and at 16 he became national champion in small-bore competition.

When Marcos entered the University of the Philippines in 1934, he had gained enough scholarship support to ensure his education without parental help. As a sophomore, he not only proved a top student, but found time to star on the wrestling, boxing and swimming teams, and become captain of the rifle and pistol squad as well as cadet battalion commander in the ROTC. He also got his first taste of political activism. Ferdie took to the soapbox to comment acidly on everything from the curriculum to the policies of the Philippines’ first President, Manuel Quezon.

White for Innocence. In September 1935 occurred an incident that still haunts Marcos’ career. His father had been defeated in a congressional election by Julio Nalundasan, a sharp-tongued Nacionalista who had insulted Mariano fiercely during the course of the campaign. To Filipinos, insults cannot go unanswered. On a stormy, wind-whipped night shortly after Pistol Champion Ferdie Marcos had returned to Ilocos on vacation, Nalundasan rose from his dinner table and walked to a washbasin. He was starkly silhouetted in the lighted window. A single .22-cal. bullet cracked in the banana tree outside, and Nalundasan dropped dead, shot through the heart. The shadow of suspicion was heavy: Mariano had been defeated and insulted; Ferdie was the best small-arms shot in the Philippines.

Justice works slowly in the islands, and not until Dec. 7, 1939, was Marcos arrested for the murder. He was then within five months of graduating with honors from law school. From his jail cell, Marcos successfully petitioned for his release on bail, then succeeded in winning his degree (two cops accompanied him to his graduation). In the subsequent bar examination, he scored the highest average ever (98.01%). When the puzzled judges accused him of cheating on the exam, Marcos demanded that he be tested orally—and scored 92.35%, the second highest average in history. Then, clad in a white sharkskin suit and white shoes to emphasize his innocence, Marcos pleaded his own case before the Supreme Court on the murder charge. He was exonerated on grounds of conflicting evidence.

Years later, however, his guilt or innocence was to be raised again—both by political opponents and his own son. “Little boys have amazing minds,” Marcos said recently. “Just the other day our nine year old, Bongbong, came to me and said: ‘Hey, Dad, what’s this about you having murdered a man once?’ And I said: ‘Well, if that had been so, I wouldn’t be standing here with you now, would I?’ Bongbong said: ‘O.K., who did kill him then?’ We just left it there.”

In the Oldsmobile. When the Japanese invaded the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, the stage was set for another leap in the Marcos legend. Called to duty as an intelligence officer, 2nd Lieut. Marcos required only a few weeks to become a hero. His idea of intelligence duty was to prowl behind the Japanese lines—often in his personal Oldsmobile sedan—probing for weak spots. He found one on Bataan’s Mount Natib: a Japanese military battery that was lobbing 70-mm. shells into U.S. General Jonathan Wainwright’s beleaguered defenders. Marcos and three privates scouted the battery, trailing two bearded Japanese artillerymen to it, then cut loose. They killed more than 50 Japanese, spiked the guns, and escaped with only one casualty. Marcos won the first of a brace of Silver Stars for the operation, and a few weeks later was recommended for the U.S. Medal of Honor for his part in the defense of the Salian River. But the recommendation was never filed with Washington, and Marcos failed in becoming the only Filipino to win America’s highest military award.

Hit by shrapnel and rifle fire in the last days of Bataan’s defense, Marcos was captured by the Japanese and began the infamous Death March half dead already. He was imprisoned at Camp O’Donnell, where Filipinos and Americans died at the rate of 300 a day. There, he says, “I learned to hate.” At Manila’s Fort Santiago, where the Japanese Kempei Tai (secret service) tortured him in the hope that he would reveal the whereabouts of Filipino guerrilla groups, Marcos refused to talk. The Japanese pumped him full of water and jumped on his stomach. After eight days of “the water cure,” he agreed to lead a patrol to a suspected guerrilla camp south of Manila. In the course of the march, he led the Japanese into a prearranged ambush—his captors died and he escaped into the hills.

Marcos’ guerrillas were among the most effective in the islands. When Douglas MacArthur made good his promise to return to the Philippines, Marcos won his second Silver Star. Singlehanded, he stood off a 50-man Japanese patrol; when his submachine-gun fire drove them off, Marcos pursued them alone for two miles—despite the fact that he had taken a bullet in the leg.

Graft & Huks. War’s end left the Philippines with wounds even more painful than those Marcos had suffered. Filipinos had learned a way of life that centered on murder, thievery and revenge. Every Filipino had a gun—or soon acquired one from the vast caches of armaments left behind by the Japanese and American armies. Though graft had its roots in the Spanish period, the postwar inundation of the Philippines with large stocks of U.S. military surplus turned black-marketeering into a national pastime. “First you became a small businessman,” recalls one observer, “then a crook, then a big businessman.”

Those who failed to follow that route often found themselves siding with a new force in Philippine politics: the Huks. Originally known as the Hukbong bayan laban sa Hapon (People’s Army Against Japan), the Huks turned quickly to the Communist antidemocratic guerrilla warfare that their brothers in China and Indo-China were fostering. By the late 1940s, the Huk menace was massive: it claimed 14,000 fighting men under arms, and controlled by terror and taxation some 4,000,000 Filipino peasants, mainly in central Luzon. President Roxas, who died in office of a heart attack, was succeeded by Elpidio Quirino, a well-meaning but weak lawyer who was unable to come to grips with either government corruption or the Huks.

Fortunately for the Philippines, a hero arrived in the form of Ramon Magsaysay, a tall (5 ft. 11 in.), tough blacksmith’s son from Zambales province, who took over as Defense Secretary in 1950. A principal backer in the Cabinet reshuffle: Freshman Congressman Ferdinand Marcos. Magsaysay tackled the Huks with double-barreled dynamism: his green-clad, rubber-booted troops rooted them out of the Luzon jungles and killed them without quarter; defectors were offered land in islands not infested by Huks. By 1954 Magsaysay had quelled the Huks, and won himself the presidency. Then in 1957, Magsaysay died in a plane crash, and the government passed into the hands of yet another weakling, Carlos Garcia.

Foul Shape & Fair. Magsaysay had gone a long way toward curing the Philippines’ ills before his untimely death. His successors, however, were either uninterested in putting an end to graft and lawlessness or simply did not have the strength to cope. Ferdie Marcos did. As the youngest Liberty Party Congressman ever elected, his name was attached to legislation that ranged from civil rights to land reform. Off the floor, Bachelor Marcos had a reputation as a sportsman and Lothario: when he wasn’t blasting quail and ducks with his 20-gauge Browning over-under, he was breaking hearts in Forbes Park. That ended one day in 1954 when he wooed and won the daughter of one of the islands’ wealthiest families. Sugar-rich Imelda Romualdez, cousin of House Speaker Daniel Z. Romualdez, was crunching watermelon seeds as she listened to Marcos orate in the House. When Marcos finished, he went up to the erstwhile Miss Manila (a proudly packaged 36-23-35) and asked: “Would you mind standing up, please?” Back to back, Marcos determined that Imelda was an inch shorter than his 5 ft. 7 in., then turned to an onlooker and said: “Fine. I’m getting married.” Eleven days later, he was.

Singing with Imelda. After Magsaysay’s death, Marcos felt that he was in line for the vice-presidency on the Liberal ticket. It went instead to Diosdado Macapagal, who won the presidency in 1961. Embittered and disgusted with Macapagal’s inability to cope with the nation’s ills, Marcos in 1964 decided to shift his loyalty from the Liberal Party to the opposition Nacionalistas—a maneuver common in Philippine politics. The Nacionalistas could not have found a better man to lead their party against Macapagal in the 1965 elections.

Imelda joined him on the campaign; the two sang duets and applied her corn-padre family connections on his behalf. The Marcos-Macapagal encounter produced some of the fiercest infighting ever seen in a nation that averages 60 murders every election. Macapagal’s supporters spread rumors that Imelda had posed in the nude for magazines and blue movies; Marcos accused Macapagal of everything from corruption to ineptitude. When the votes came in last November, Marcos had won by 660,000 votes, out of a total of 7 million.

A Call for Heroes. Marcos’ inaugural speech sounded a refreshing tone that had been missing from the Philippines since Magsaysay’s death. “The Filipino has lost his soul and his courage,” he said. “Our people have come to a point of despair. Justice and security are as myths. Our government is gripped in the iron hand of venality, its treasury is barren, its resources are wasted, its civil service slothful and indifferent. Not one hero alone do I ask, but many.”

From the standpoint of the U.S., Marcos’ concern was well-founded. The issue in the Philippines was neither ideological nor anti-American: both candidates had been pro-American. Here it was a question of character, personality and ability, and Washington left no doubt that Marcos was favored. In his ten months of command, Marcos has already defined and come to grips with the major problems outlined in his inaugural. Manila is overcentralized: the bulk of the nation’s nascent industries (oil refineries, cement factories, textile mills, steel mills) are clustered around the city. Only half of the Philippines’ 38,000 miles of roads are in drivable condition, and the Bureau of Public Works estimates that 5,400 miles more are needed to give the nation a minimal service network. Telephones are rare—and even more rarely do they work. Travel is sheer adventure, and the only vehicle that can negotiate the muddy tracks of the bundoks (the Tagalog origin of the American boondocks) is the groaning carabao.

Tuberculosis and pneumonia still kill the bulk of Filipinos; teachers are in surplus in Manila, in short supply in the countryside. With 70% of the population engaged in subsistence, peasant-style farming, the average annual income is a scant $140 a year—far less than that of Japan and Formosa. Population growth is among the world’s highest: Catholic-dominated Filipinos add 1,000,000 mouths a year to the rice bowl (3.2%). Simultaneously, the economic-growth rate is a minimal 4.2% . The rice yield is scandalously low. Of the world’s top 20 major rice-producing nations, the Philippines rank ahead of only Cambodia, Laos and Nepal.

Rugged IR-8. Marcos has taken the first steps toward defining and defeating these problems. His new Four-Year Plan, which won $21 million worth of support from Washington last month, envisions self-sufficiency in rice and corn production by 1969. His expedients: a combination of improved irrigation systems and more fertilizer plus such superior strains of rice as the rugged IR-8, developed by the Rockefeller Foundation (TIME, Oct. 7) at the rice institute at Los Baños.

The Washington visit also managed to quell some of the voices from the Philippine left, which argues against further U.S. involvement in the Philippines. Marcos won a pledge from the U.S. to cut its lease on bases (Clark Field and Subic Bay) from 99 years to only another 25. The complex demands of parity and tariff arrangements set up by the Laurel-Langley Trade Agreement have provoked dissension among Filipinos and Americans engaged in developing the country: Marcos reached one of the first accommodations on that thorny issue in a decade. Lyndon Johnson agreed to open negotiations for a new trade instrument that would ease both Filipino fears and American appetites.

As for the Huks, who remain in small but noisy numbers around the U.S. bases and in the ricelands of central Luzon, Marcos ignores them. He is more concerned with such Red-backed outfits as Masaka (Free Federation of Farmers), which provoke vociferous demonstrations and pose a long-range threat to the government. Of the thousands of armed Huks who once terrorized the islands, only a few hundred remain. Bandits with a profit motive, on the other hand, still thrive. Pirates roam at will through the Sibuyan Sea and even in Manila Bay itself. The U.S. promise to equip ten Filipino battalions (at a cost of $20 million) may help to cut bandit operations over the next two years—or so Marcos hopes.

“It’s All There.” The U.S. is more than willing to back the Philippines’ new leader. “In less than a year,” says one White House authority, “he did well enough for us to decide that it was worthwhile to underwrite him a little more.” By sending a brigade to Viet Nam (albeit in a “noncombat” role), Marcos lost a lot of support from anti-American critics whose nationalism he had hoped to convert to political power. He did not get the $250 million stabilization loan he had hoped for to back the peso (which Washington considers stable enough); he did, however, get the Manila Conference, which should win him both regional recognition and a great deal of popular support at home.

No one in Washington considers Marcos a lackey; indeed his words before the cheering throngs at Manila airport on his return from Washington still ring clear in State Department ears. “America must realize,” he said, “there are conditions she must accept in Asia. The first is a diversity of Asian cultures, governments, economic and political systems; the second, that to run against the tide of Asian nationalism is worse than impractical—it is also highly dangerous.”

In a nation that never had to win its independence by force of arms, there is a perennial need for heroes. With his unmatched war record, his dazzling political success, and his stern insistence on an Asian solution to Asian problems, Marcos—with luck—could meet that need. “It’s all there,” says a Washington admirer. Whether the full potential is ever realized depends on Marcos.

* His predecessors: Manuel Roxas (1946-48), Elpidio Quirino (1948-53), Ramon Magsaysay (1953-57), Carlos Garcia (1957-62), Diosdado Macapagal (1962-65). * The Asian and Pacific Council, whose members are Australia, Formosa, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea and South Viet Nam.