Prologue — A Disease of the Heart
BROKEN MASTS of sunken ships stuck up out of Manila Bay like a burned-out pine forest when I first arrived in the Philippines as a boy at the end of World War II. Ferdinand Marcos was then a young lawyer with a reassuring grin preparing to make his first run for Congress and his first million dollars, and Imelda Romualdez was a barefoot high school girl on the island of Leyte. Manila had been flattened by American artillery at the bitter end, but the fine old Manila Hotel on the bayfront seemed miraculously intact, some said because General Douglas MacArthur was a director of the hotel and had a penthouse on its roof; and over on the banks of the muddy Pasig River, where the bloated bodies of dogs drifted by on their way to the South China Sea, Malacanang Palace was unscathed, a sprawling Spanish colonial hacienda in the midst of its own walled park.
I made many other visits as a journalist over the years while Ferdinand and Imelda rose to power, secured the beginning of a dynasty, became arguably the richest couple on the planet, then in 1986 took what used to be called French leave, climbing tearfully aboard American helicopters with suitcases full of dollars in the time-honored tradition, heading — without yet realizing it — for exile in Honolulu, as mobs outside worked up the courage to storm the gates. The phenomenon of “People Power” took the overthrow of Ferdinand and Imelda out of the hands of ludicrously incompetent rival military factions; nuns stopped armored personnel carriers (everyone thought they were tanks) by kneeling in their path to say rosaries; and pretty girls blocked soldiers in battledress to poke flowers down the muzzles of their assault rifles. There was a lot of weeping and singing, and in the midst of this great passion the knees of the renegade defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile were shaking so badly he could hardly stand up. Although he wore a flak jacket and carried an Uzi, and had a bodyguard of colonels and majors, when he passed through the crowds his real security was provided by a flock of nuns.
Under the Marcoses, Malacanang Palace had changed. Beneath its shady balconies there was now a “Black Room” where very special political prisoners were tortured. In addition to the three thousand pairs of shoes Imelda left behind, Filipinos searching the palace basement found her bulletproof brassiere, which could bring a tidy sum in auction at Christie’s.
Manila also had changed. It was once a gracious city and may be again. But along the bayfront in the five-star tourist hotel district of Ermita facing the U.S. Embassy, little boys and girls age six or seven now plucked at the shirttails of tourists, offering to perform oral sex for a dollar. Among the most popular tours of the Marcos era were sex junkets for pederasts. As novelist P. F. Kluge observed, the Philippines had become “America’s fellatrix.”
From the heights of power — when they were fawned over by diplomats, bribed by an American president, paid off by the Pentagon, and indulged by the World Bank — Ferdinand and Imelda crashed into a public plight so demeaning it was pitiable. Under what amounted to modified house arrest in Honolulu, they appeared before television cameras like King Lear and his clown, wringing from the audience equal parts of sympathy and astonishment. In his humiliation, launching one desperate plot after another to regain the throne, only to have his most secret conversations taped and made public by men with fewer scruples than he, Marcos and his dynasty became a joke. Why, then, were we persuaded to take him seriously for more than twenty years? Was there some kind of game being played in which we ourselves were the unwitting fools? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.
Despite the blizzard of stories and TV interviews that followed the Marcos downfall, the public airing of Imelda’s black lace underwear, and the revelations of grand larceny on both their parts, I found the Marcos saga deeply unsatisfying. What the Marcoses had done was clear — at least in broad outline — but not why they did it, what drove them to such extremes, and who helped them gain power and hold on to it so long. Among the press disclosures there were hints of Marcos’ ties to underworld figures from America, Europe, Australia, China, and Japan; and there were reports that Ferdinand had been involved in peculiar gold bullion transactions with reputable bankers, statesmen, military men, and gold merchants. The sums mentioned totaled hundreds of tons of bullion, perhaps thousands of tons, far more than the Philippine gold reserves.