For these and many other reasons, the truth about Ferdinand Marcos is all the more interesting for what it reveals about others. It was easy to ridicule him after he fell from power, but he was really only a reflection; the insincere smile, the false heartiness, the watery mollusk eyes, the jaundice and puffiness of kidney decay, all looked disturbingly familiar. “While he lasted,” a U.S. military attaché in Manila told me, “he was our boy. He was us. Maybe he still is.”
Only after the fall was it generally agreed that there was something fishy about him all along.
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The answers to Ferdinand Marcos are bound up in the secrets of his childhood.
There had always been rumors that he was illegitimate, but after centuries of Spanish colonial rule illegitimacy was not unusual among prominent people in the islands. The identity of Ferdinand’s real father was well hidden and, in a place where tempers can be fatal, the persistent rumors were difficult and dangerous to verify. It was commonly accepted in Manila that his biological father was a wealthy judge in the province of Ilocos Norte, a man of Chinese descent who had paid the boy’s way through law school, identified only as Ferdinand’s godfather and friendly benefactor. Whenever Ferdinand mentioned such matters in his biographies, he assigned a name to his godfather that was completely misleading. Nobody realized that the identity of the judge was of special significance.
According to Ilocano sources close to the family, as well as respected journalists in Manila whom I have put to a lot of trouble, and several members of the old Marcos inner circle, Ferdinand’s real father was not just a Chinese magistrate but a leading member of one of the six richest and most powerful clans in the islands, a billionaire clan involved in the daily financial, commercial, and political transactions that are the lifeblood of the islands. Because of their clannishness and their control of the economy, Chinese in the Philippines are both despised and envied. The leading clans (mostly natives of Fukien Province on the mainland opposite Taiwan) were traditional and conservative, and maintained close ties over the decades to the Chiang regime in Nanking and later in Taipei.
Once the stature of Ferdinand’s father was confirmed, a number of other riddles were solved: How young Ferdinand eluded a murder conviction in his schooldays. How a place came to be waiting for him in a brotherhood Filipinos referred to as the Ilocano Mafia, whose pre-war enterprises were said to include smuggling, extortion, black marketeering, and murder-for-hire. And how, after the war, Ferdinand became a young congressman with extraordinary connections in the Chinese financial world, using his position in Congress to extort large sums from Chinese businessmen. The leverage of his father’s clan enabled Ferdinand to ally himself secretly with agents of the Chiang regime, with Japanese underworld syndicates, and with some big-time American operators. His constituency soon floated like a huge jellyfish through the islands, trailing its tentacles everywhere.
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Seen as a literary character rather than as a politician, Ferdinand Marcos occupies the rare and engaging role of the arch swindler, con man, survivor, and poseur, a role that has fascinated writers from Homer to Thomas Mann. For such men discovery is the unkindest cut, so some compassion is in order.
In Asia, lying to strangers bears none of the social stigma attached to it in the West. When Chinese are asked about their background, they usually invent one to suit the occasion. So do the Burmese, the Thais, and the Malays. It is a venerable tradition to lie to protect the truth, to protect one’s ancestors, one’s family, and one’s fragile psyche, not to mention one’s neck. It is not lying, but the creation of a fiction that will gratify the interrogator, which — on reflection — is really an act of courtesy.
Borrowing freely from others, the young Ferdinand Marcos created an entirely different identity for himself, a much happier one than his own, in which he was the hero, the boss, and the driving force. When he decided to go into politics, he went public with this fanciful legend, and used it to build a remarkable international career. In doing so, he was different from other charlatans only in the matter of degree. His success grew out of his resourcefulness, the gullibility of his audience, and the venality and opportunism of Washington.