The First Lady often was unhappy with the river so near to her open veranda. Too often it had an unpleasant urban-industrial bouquet. Sometimes it had the stench of an open sewer. This night the Pasig was sweet again, flushed by heavy rains that had flooded much of the city and the countryside. Imelda prepared for a dinner across town with foreign journalists. The president made a show of beefing up her security, doubling the armed entourage. And he sent the bulletproof car.
At Manila Metropolitan Police headquarters, on United Nations Avenue across from the Hilton Hotel, the usual crowd of police beat reporters converged on the chief’s office before the first round of news deadlines at day’s end. The city was quiet. Too quiet, said Brigadier General Gerardo Tamayo. “I don’t like it, boys.” But to the journalists no news simply was no news. A Manila Timesreporter, on the phone to his city editor, said: “Don’t expect any earthshaking story from our end.”
All over town the business of government was shutting down for the weekend. Delegates to the scandal-plagued constitutional convention were the first to go home, adjourning early out of weariness from weeks of raucous battles, harsh accusations, and bomb scares. All were tarnished by a vote-buying scandal. This was no way to rewrite a constitution. Sapping everyone’s energy was a final, bruising fight over term limits. A proposal to ban the Marcoses from staying on in the presidential palace was turned back … but not killed off.
The president’s second term would expire in a year, and term limits in the current U.S.-model constitution barred his reelection. Cynics everywhere wondered how Marcos would try to elude the restrictions. It was a favorite topic of banter at the Senate, where some of the president’s leading rivals held office. The most popular of these was Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, the pudgy whiz kid of the opposition Liberal party and virtually every pundit’s favorite to succeed Marcos in 1973.
On Friday, the only Senate business remaining was setting the tariff quotas, a tedious exercise left to a congressional conference committee that would meet all night, if necessary, at the Hilton Hotel.