Magsaysay is my guy

Where were you when Ramon Magsaysay died?

This is Filipino version of the classic American question of where they were on Nov.  23, 1963.

Both events are forever etched in vivid detail in my memory and, I suppose, every other member of the Filipino baby-boomer generation or those born between 1946 and 1956.

I was in grade three in Malaybalay, Bukidnon when RM died in a Cebu plane crash on March 17,1957. I was in third year high school some six years later when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

It would have been impossible not to be shaken by these two earth-shaking events, even in my remote hometown where we only had the transistor radio and no television to get wind of the breaking news of the day. In both cases, newspapers and magazines bearing the sordid details and visual images came a day or more later but the saturation coverage went on and on for weeks and for even longer.

Although I was a bit older and news was more readily available when JFK was gunned down, Magsaysay’s death affected me more deeply and, in my adulthood, with a more lasting sense of tragedy and lost opportunities for our nation.

Perhaps this has something to do with being Filipino and proud of it. Magsaysay was like family, a father figure or beloved uncle wrenched out of our lives so suddenly and with devastating finality. Kennedy was a glamorous foreign leader, a few degrees removed from our lives; his death induced a more vicarious and distant kind of horror.

JFK I only saw in photographs and publications in those pre-TV days where I grew up. RM I saw in the flesh, briefly and in passing from a young boy’s eyes, when he came to visit our town during the presidential campaign of 1953. I wasn’t even in grade one at that time but my unknowing siblings and I wore “Magsaysay is my guy” T-shirts and we gyrated to the bouncy tune of Mambo, Mambo Magsaysay.

Our family album still has a photo of the candidate posing with Dad and his buddies in the Magsaysay for President Movement chapter of Bukidnon in front of the Remedios Fortich house in Malaybalay. There are candid shots of me, my siblings and neighborhood kids, all below six years old, dressed in RM shirts and carrying a huge campaign poster.

Looking at those crumbling MPM photos the other day, I was  saddened by the thought that only Dad, now pushing 91 but his mind still sharp as nails, and two others of the old crowd are still alive. On my recent trip home, Dad was on the phone calling on these hardy survivors and many others too young to have joined MPM to support Jun Magsaysay’s comeback bid for the Philippine Senate.

RM’s namesake son had previously served as Zambales congressman and as a distinguished two-term senator of the realm. He is now in his early 70s, in blessed retirement as a dairy farmer in Laguna, but obviously couldn’t resist the call of public service one more time.

Some critics carp that Jun is too old and, against the counseling of worried advisers, sticks to the issues and refuses to dye his thinning hair or to wear more colorful and eye-catching attire for the campaign. But his supporters insist the man is a sure winner precisely because he stands for the time-tested values of good government and he refuses to trivialize politics like the actors, comedians and charlatans who now infest the trade.

“It’s the least we can do for RM’s memory,” Dad says with a lump in his throat as he talks to one of his MPM friends. “Magsaysay was a great man who cared for the poor and Jun Magsaysay is his worthy son. There are too few honest and competent politicians in our country these days. Like us they are a dying breed.”

Dad needed no prodding from me to rally behind Jun Magsaysay. As a journalist, I had struck a long and enduring friendship with the Magsaysays — Jun and his sister Mila Valenzuela, Marilou Kahn, his charming wife, and Paco, his equally worthy son. They had asked me to edit a 1999 biography of RM for the Magsaysay Foundation. I am regularly invited to the foundation’s annual awards night at the Cultural Center and the late president’s Aug. 31 birth anniversary at his tomb in Manila’s North Cemetery.

A few years ago, I finally made the trek up Mt. Manunggal in Cebu to see the crash site and get a clearer idea of what actually happened in the early morning hours of the tragedy. One of my unfinished projects is to probe deeper into the widely-held belief, never confirmed, that RM’s death was not an accident but a conspiracy that had been successfully covered up all these years.

But to go back to my recollections of 1957. I recall that at high noon of March 17 when the radio confirmed that the president’s plane was missing and raised the thought that he could be dead, there was a lot of crying in our neighborhood which was right in the center of the town. Old women and even grown men openly wept. It seemed that a heavy cloud descended upon us like darkness at noon. I will never forget that terrible moment for as long as I live.

We were far away from Manila and we were not among the one million people who turned out for the president’s funeral a few days later, but we felt like we were there. We were all glued to our transistor radios with flickering signals and static noises. It took a long time for this period of mass mourning to wear off.

Only the universal grief that came with Kennedy’s death with the help of television and better means of mass communications could equal the sadness that had earlier accompanied Magsaysay’s passing.

How can we explain the indelible mark of RM’s memory in this country?

I think it has something to do with the fact that Magsaysay was a good man who brought something honorable into our convoluted political life.

He was the quintessential non-traditional politician. He was no slick operator or hard-crusted warlord. He loved common people and met them on their terms — out in the fields or in the streets. He was an honest man who was incorruptible and humble at the same time. He could be stern and commanding but only because he had zero tolerance for corruption and abuse of authority.

People responded to Magsaysay magic because he was so unlike previous presidents like the imperious Manuel Quezon or the crony-plagued Elpidio Quirino. He was everyman who brought government down to the level of the sovereign people with his disdain for pomp and ceremony and an unwavering, almost obsessive commitment to the common good.

Even when the noted nationalist Claro M. Recto declared all-out war and unfairly called him an American puppet, Magsaysay was the clear champion of the masses. Recto was the darling of the intellectuals, the rich disdained the former mechanic’s populist message, but RM stood unfazed and taller than his enemies.

I feel that Magsaysay was given a bum rap by those who dismissed him as a CIA agent. He was clearly friendly to the Americans but he was no servile puppy nor did he betray his country for material or other reasons. He was the only Filipino president who left office a poor man and who left his heirs no fortune. He fought in Bataan and had no reason to turn against Uncle Sam.

Recto, who served in the Japanese-backed government, was tagged a collaborator and had reason to be bitter against the Americans. I suspect this was the reason Recto became a super-nationalist, if only to get back at the Americans who cast him in most unflattering light. Everybody forgot he was Laurel’s foreign minister and he was imprisoned in Iwahig by the returning Americans. 

The Magsaysay-Recto tussle came to an abrupt end when Magsaysay died. Recto ran for president and made a dismal showing as the tail-ender in a field of four candidates. The irony of it all was that Rectonian nationalism, which was to flourish after Recto’s death in 1960, ended up pushed aside by Maoist communism that gave our nationalists a bad name it is still trying to live down today.

Marcosian despotism won out in the 1970s, only to be replaced by a pathetic mélange of EDSA democracy that has unfortunately disgraced its auspicious origins in the bloodless revolution of February 1986.

It is for this reason that Magsaysay, 56 years after Mt. Manunggal, still cannot be wished away in Philippine politics. He represents no high-flying ideology or complicated doctrine, just the people’s longing for a government that cares for the common man and stands for the principle that public office is a public trust.

Like it or not, this also explains why Jun Magsaysay and the father whose ideals he proudly upholds remain relevant to our times.