Trustee of the Nation: The Biography of Fidel V. Ramos

Trustee

of the

Nation

The biography of

Fidel V. Ramos

W. Scott Thompson, D.Phil, Oxon.

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for five Thompson apo

To whom I happily pass on the torch

Anina, Ellis, Emmett, Paul and Zachary

gramps with love

November 2012

Table of Contents

Prelude

There was nothing particularly unusual on that late February day in Manila: the weather was pleasant as seasonal Siberian breezes floated down over the archipelago. Lieutenant General Fidel V. Ramos, Armed Forces Vice Chief of Staff, was at his house in Ayala Alabang, an upper-end suburb south of Manila, pondering just how much time he had before the critical decision of his life had to be taken.

Ramos knew from his closest professional confidant, José Almonte, still but not much longer a colonel (he could have asked to be a Field Marshal for what he subsequently did), that the latter’s RAM boys, or Reform the Armed Forces group, were plotting a coup. But that was old news to Ramos, the Intelligence man. The question was when, or would it be too late, and how successful could they expect to be in cutting the head of the cobra off—without damaging the rest of the body politic. Ramos’s second cousin, Ferdinand Marcos, had all but destroyed the Republic. And this was a double source of agony for the General: the younger Eddie had idolized his older, more flamboyant cousin who become President of the Philippines in 1965. More than two decades earlier, they had even spent months together hiding from the Japanese towards the end of World War II, in the barrio of San Narciso in the town of Natividad, about fifteen kilometers from the present Ramos family home in Asingan, Pangasinan. An Ilocano does not betray his family; but then, cousin Ferdinand had betrayed their country. The economic growth rate had been in negative territory for three years and capital was flying out, not all of it stolen goods of the dictator and his cronies but even including virtuous international and local Chinese capital.

In fact Almonte had already briefed Cory Aquino, widow of the slain Senator Ninoy, convincing her that she alone had the moral authority to lead a government at this point.¹ To implement the revolutionary concept of ‘people power,’ he went to Villa San Miguel, a sprawling shady residence on the outskirts of Manila where the most powerful Catholic prelate since the Renaissance dwelt.² A quiet but powerful priest met him at the door to which Jaime Cardinal Sin himself came and, receiving Almonte, led him to the private garden, where they could talk without walls listening. Almonte in particular briefed him on the essential role the faithful must play, the amassing of, it was hoped, millions in the street to back up military action, Sin was to be part of the solution. The immensely powerful Cardinal, who had by this point openly and often rebuked President Marcos and his First Lady, gave his blessing to Almonte’s undertaking and promised to be ready to call out the faithful.³

A junta, a movement for national unity, was planned by RAM, to include Cory, Cardinal Sin, venerables like Jimmy Ongpin (later Minister of Finance), Rafael Salas (Marcos’s first Executive Secretary and an Almonte mentor), and Alex Melchor (also a reformer as Executive Secretary after Salas), plus Defense Secretary Johnny Enrile—and General Ramos.⁴ There was substantial precedent throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia for groups like that to put a legitimizing face on brute power that removed old forces—and who actually assumed power in due course.

The plan—refreshed by a de rigueur reread of Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’état—was undermanned but RAM was going ahead. Almonte tells of his meeting with Ramos.

Cool, discreet, deliberate, General Ramos was the thinking soldier’s soldier…Throughout the years of martial law; he had stood for professionalism and dedication to duty. No desk-bound commander, he was often in the field, living with the soldiers where they were. He knew all the field commanders intimately. Only he could call them down on our side.

We talked for several hours…at first he didn’t say a great deal, though I felt he himself had gone through the same examination of conscience. I didn’t need to tell him the tactical details. How we were to act—where we were to strike—were clear to him. I told him we were counting on him to lead us. As soon as the action began, Sonny Razon would come for him…⁵

There was no one who didn’t take the idealistic but tough Sonny seriously, including General Ramos. Almonte’s final point was as much a warning to, as a welcoming of, his senior to assume the leadership at the ship of state’s helm of last resort, to assert command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Sonny, a PMA graduate of 1974, was Ramos’s Aide-de-Camp.

On the afternoon of February 22 a group of neighbors headed by close friends were demonstrating outside Ramos’s house and he was arguing with them that things weren’t so simple. He had almost 110,000 soldiers under him and their lives had to be considered, he pointed out, though the argument was running thin. He already knew he hadn’t much time.

Then the phone rang again. Marcos had figured too much out, the notorious General Ver, by now merely his henchman, was on the tear, and Defense Secretary Johnny Ponce Enrile faced imminent arrest. Ramos could expect little mercy—or little interval—from Ver, with whom there was a mutual loathing. Would Eddie support him, Enrile asked over the phone. Immediately FVR responded in the affirmative.

The jig was up. It wasn’t as if this was news. Ramos had faced this moment in his dreams, his walks, his conferences, and when his sister Letty, a former Ambassador—and, until his very recent death, his father Narciso (former Foreign Secretary under Marcos)—called to press him forward. But he had a different decision from Enrile’s. Enrile, who had only a circle of RAM (Reform the Armed Forces Movement) security to defend him, was going into rebellion because he had no choice. Ramos had been loyal throughout the declining years of Martial Law and de facto martial law. Why rebel now? What was different?

If Ramos went along with Enrile, it had to be a far different thing; it had to be a positive step, not a reactive one. He had to bring the Republic with him, but he could only do that if he first secured a critical mass of the Armed Forces and National Police. It had to be a move of principle. All his life he had trained himself to obey; he was a segurista, who over-insured against all contingencies, and now the contingency that couldn’t be prepared for was all but upon him.

Anyway, it wouldn’t have been enough for Fidel V. Ramos just to follow the ambitious Enrile into the ring; he had to call in every chit, every debt, move every mountain throughout the Armed Forces and police, or there wasn’t a chance of success, at least not of the sort on which a future worthy Republic must rest. Enrile alone had no chance, but Ramos didn’t need Enrile.

For there was another fundamental difference. Enrile commanded no troops, save his small office army, mostly RAM colonels and mostly paid for from his own pocket. He could not resist arrest. Ramos not only had all the police but as the Armed Forces Vice Chief of Staff had military pals and allies scattered all over the archipelago—a valuable confidant in the Bicol region, a most trusted friend in a position to bring all of Mindanao into rebellion, and lower ranking admirers throughout the nation. He had three hours to consider all this.

In the end, Ramos knew, a great deal would depend on what his cousin Ferdinand chose to do—or not do. Surely he could hold on to enough force at the start to flatten resistance in Metro Manila, the capital, so the question was whether Ramos could entice enough of those soldiers and policemen also into rebellion, to give the revolution a chance. And that question, what Marcos would do, might well hinge, just as it did for Ramos, around family. If Ramos had looked up to Marcos in his youth and served him loyally for twenty-one years, Marcos had had to admire his cousin for his incorruptibility, his putting country above self and even family, and his determination to reform the Armed Forces against Marcos’s own subversion of them. In other words, wherever Marcos had betrayed his own ideals, Ramos had sustained his own, even built on them. If it came down to this, would Marcos order his troops to fire on Ramos and his men and women, against the very powers of kith and kin that had kept Ramos so loyal for so long? At best there would be a mind-game of the cousins, whose outcome would bear historic implications not just for the Philippines.

General Ramos made his decision late that afternoon when he began phoning his key allies.

Eddie bid his farewell to his wife Ming and the children present (Angel, the eldest and a very close daughter indeed, was working in Pennsylvania and went into hiding). I told Ming where all the relevant family and legal papers were. He also told her that if anybody knocked on the door saying they were there to fix the TV or the refrigerator—or whatever—to ring the Mayday signal. They’d be there to detain them and murder him.⁶

Then the Constabulary Commander drove off, as usual in a small car, with his son-in-law, Captain Alex Sembrano, his emissary to the rebel forces, using a diversionary route along Roxas Boulevard, to meet and make his country’s destiny. Sonny Razon had prepared an exit strategy out from the back of Camp Crame in case all failed and it was necessary to recamp in the Bicol region in Southern Luzon, but Ramos didn’t have that on his mind.

It was the only thing we’ve ever given the world, General Almonte was later to say. People Power, which had been a central ingredient of RAM’s plans. Fidel V. Ramos had become, for the first time but not the last, Trustee of the Nation.

¹ See his My Part in the 1986 People Power Revolution, published by José Almonte, 2006; also confirmed in interview, Corazon Aquino, 2005.

² See Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave, March 15, 1993.

³ It is essential to note that Ambassador Alejandro Melchor, who was to be Ambassador to Russia through Almonte’s intervention—as thanks for this opening with the Cardinal—arranged the meeting. And it was his wife, Charito Melchor, known well to the hierarchy through her good works for the church, who actually made the call. All this was confirmed in three audiences the present author had with the august Cardinal, all arranged by Ambassador and Mrs. Melchor.

⁴ Almonte, op. cit. p. 12.

⁵ Ibid, and Interview with Almonte.

⁶ Interview, FVR. This is not unfamiliar terrain. When the jig was up for President Erap Estrada in 2001, the present author was heading off for lunch with General Almonte, who warned him that national police cars might be circling the house; they were. It was the same ground.

Foreword

THE MOST celebrated biographies are as a rule written about troubled men and women who have projected their needs on a national, international, or perhaps an artistic map. Read Luther, Hitler, Gandhi, Lenin, Caravaggio or even William Randolph Hearst—great historical puzzles are teased out of their childhood traumas.⁷ Why then a long biography about a middle-class, untroubled man who worked his way up the ladder mostly by his deserts but not without assists from a somewhat privileged environment? Or, if troubled, by the overwhelming needs of his country rather than himself?

There is a further problem with modern biography. We read definitively in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) that

We don’t get the great man anymore…we get the little woman behind him…Timorousness, revisionism, the search for novelty, and in some instances, a desire to do harm all play a part. Lives lose their exemplary, inspirational, sometimes hagiographic quality…Increasingly impatient ourselves, we are confronted no longer with imposing titans, but strange, lopsided off-centered figures—ourselves not as we might aspire to be, but as we fear we are. ⁸

This biography goes against that trend. If we argue that history is the biography of its leaders then we have the beginning of an answer to why Fidel V. Ramos deserves at least one author’s serious attempt to do justice to the great benefits he brought his country and region—attempting to solve the problem of order, poverty and democracy into his ninth decade. We admit at the start that we have not attempted to balance the good that he has done with a search for an equivalent amount of bad. It just isn’t there. It is tempting for biographers to find devils and angels, but the truth is always more complicated. True, this study began with a positive assessment made in earlier works. But I insist that a biography need not divide its parts equally into good and bad. The reader will make his own assessment of whether its subject is worthy of the appraisal—and blinking admiration—found herein.⁹

Another part of the answer is that he committed great deeds, even if in earlier years he was not exactly cast in the heroic mode. There must be a place for consideration of why decent and hard-working people can improve their—and our—world. True, the great destruction brought by the leading fascist and communist leaders of the 20th century bears careful examination; and the thoughtful but often over-wrought biographies of charismatic leaders as the third world emerged do as well. A failed American Presidency has more recently reminded us how much damage ill-prepared and stubborn leaders can leave behind, even in the most advanced countries.

But perhaps human progress sometimes is made because people try to achieve it. We the people benefit because hard-working leaders truly devote themselves to the deserts of those who chose them. Read Franklin Roosevelt or read Margaret Thatcher and Mahathir Mohammad—but the list of those who in the balance weigh positively in the past century is not long.

Fidel V. Ramos was uncharacteristic of Filipino leaders in many ways. Freud famously wrote that there are certain men from whom their contemporaries do not withhold veneration, although their greatness rests on attributes and achievements which are completely foreign to the aims and ideals of the multitude. And, we add, to his fellow politicians, if we are to count Ramos as a politician—in addition to statesman. Ranjit Shahani, his nephew, who had stints in both provincial and national politics, observed that in the Philippines, politics is just about power—naked power. Power of, by, and for the élite. It’s not about democratic values or anything else. [But] my uncle had some ideals.¹⁰ He could have added that politics’ currency was exactly that—currency.

There is a third point. The literary lions of New York and London dominate the world of books, but globalization advances at a much faster pace. Long lists of books can be compiled about the denizens of Bloomsbury or the Kennedy mafia. Is the world still so small? Braudel famously says there will always be a center, moving through the centuries from Venice to Antwerp to London, finally New York—but and always a periphery, like the East Indies or the West African colonies of Britain and France.¹¹ But is this still true? When the Nigerian delta holds the key to world oil prices, one wonders if the old relationship between center and periphery holds. If countries like the Philippines remain on the periphery, how for a shining moment could it be at center stage, opening the way for people power to move forward definitively or beneficially in dozens more countries? Globalization must have meaning.¹²

Fidel V. Ramos’s role therein is not accidental. He was not thrust on a stage ignorant of its dimensions; he was a part of it and knew what he had to do. He created his role on the stage. He made, to be sure, existential choices, but herein we will attempt to unravel the threads in his own upbringing and in the national environment that made those choices inevitable for him—but hardly predictably so had any other person worn his shoes.

He—Ramos—is not just a good guy (the American diplomat John Negroponte’s words, as well as those of the then-chief of staff of the Filipino armed forces, General Hermogenes Esperon, Jr. and once Ramos’s palace guard chief), though he is that, too. When he ran for class President at the old U.P. High School in Manila, his sister Leticia Shahani, who was in a lower class, volunteered that she had campaigned for him. And whom did he vote for? I voted for myself, though his election was all but certain. He was always a reasonable man, but hiding his light under a bushel (though he did that too) was not relevant. Breaking ranks to run for President in 1992 was for example a calculated risk, but there is no evidence that it was a long-burning ambition. Yet when he looked at the alternatives—old traditional politicians and self-serving mega-thieves—he knew the country could have six more years of failure so he gambled all on it, though at 64 he was, as his most significant associate, General Almonte, put it, a fulfilled man, having risen to the head of the Armed Forces then to its Civilian command as Secretary of National Defense. He did what had to be done.

This is an attempt not just at biography but a study of the dynamics between a leader and his nation’s—and the Asia-Pacific region’s—evolving situation, and implicitly a comparison with other leaders. As this is written it is compelling to note merely the unblemished human rights record of an officer and gentleman, our subject, with both his successors, Estrada and Arroyo, who didn’t hesitate to destroy—literally and usually bloodily—enemies standing in their way.

A word about style. From 1992 at his inauguration until the present day, Ramos has always borne the dignity of the Presidency. Very few people called him Eddie, and we have only heard Mrs. Ming Ramos call him Ed. In the volumes that follow, we have mostly addressed the personae in their specific context of that moment. Eddie is thus appropriate up to the time he assumes professional status. After his Presidency, instead of using the American practice of reversion to his highest military title, or General Ramos, like General Eisenhower, he used the title Ex-President Ramos (or Ex-Pres Phil as he liked to say) and we mostly refer to him as FVR—as did even his closest associates. He was never a barkada man, General Renato de Villa, one of those closest to him, said—and an essential point to grasp. And it is precisely because he was not a barkada man,¹³ one who could keep his own counsel, that the whole nation was his barkada at the pivotal existential moment of its salvation.¹⁴

José Almonte—a story unto itself—was greatly feared during the Ramos Presidency, but the author knew him as a friend, and sometimes willy-nilly reverts to the familiar address of Joal. Almonte’s long-time mentor, Alejandro Melchor, one of the most influential Philippine public servants of his generation, referred to him in office with awe as General Almonte, even though he, more than any but Ramos, had put his imprint on him. Although few Filipinos got the literal reference point—the Mountain, as so often referred to in the days of the French Revolution and at the time of Robespierre—Almonte’s name itself literally invoked a reference to places on high. Rightly so.¹⁵

Family. It is fair to say that a cousin, sometimes even a second cousin, is more a family member in the Philippines than a sibling in the West. Ferdinand Marcos, for example, was the second cousin of FVR (Ramos’s maternal grandmother Crispina Marcos being sister to Marcos’s grandfather Fabian), and especially in his early years was considered immediate family. Hernani Nani Braganza, who is a grandson of a younger sister to Narciso Ramos, father of Fidel, referred to FVR always as his uncle, in the immediate sense; in Melandrew Velasco’s biography of Narciso, young Braganza is twice referred to as a grandson of Narciso Ramos. He was a grandnephew of Narciso and thus a nephew once-removed to FVR.¹⁶ We will stick to the niceties of Western distinctions, but advise the reader to understand the fullness of the Filipino understanding of family. After all, books have been written about it.

How did FVR handle this, as the distancing hero president that we assert him to be? He received a letter at Malacañang addressed to Uncle Eddie. This lady assumed he would remember her for presenting herself to him four months earlier in a province; that she was the daughter-in-law of a colonel who was married to a lady whose sister was a sister of another colonel and who had worked for Uncle Andy (hereafter FM, Ferdinand Marcos) in Malacañang; she wondered if he knew that his distinguished uncle, Simeon Valdez, was the godfather of her son-in-law, who in turn was related to her late mother-in-law. Unusually, her purpose in writing was not the normal request for job, promotion, or clemency—but just to meet with him, for unstated purposes. The Ramos files reveal no action, because an aide in his office wrote She’s too far off. I can’t find any relative who’s familiar with her.¹⁷ When a claimed relative begged clemency on presumptively spurious ground, Ramos wrote in the margin Can’t do. This sent a powerful message within Filipino culture.

A word about tense. In Democracy and Discipline: the Philippine Presidency of Fidel V. Ramos, we mentioned that we were reluctant to use the past tense, since FVR now at 83 is so very much alive and kicking—with his work going forward. That still being the case, we nonetheless have used the past tense throughout, given the convention that prevails. I do not mean to countermand our previous admonition, however.

Language. English may be—indeed very much is—on the decline in the Philippines as a vernacular, but it remains the language of government and higher education. High officials who never speak a word of English at home or in their group discussions take pride in their usually excellent English prose.¹⁸ The reformist General Ramon Montaño, for example writes elegantly in it, as we see below. Literally millions of pages in the Ramos files are in good English; far less than one percent is in Tagalog (now officially Filipino,) still less in Ilocano, Pangasinense, or whatever.

English was the first language in the Ramos household, and given that Ming’s first was Ilonggo, Eddie’s second Ilocano or even Pangasinense, it is small wonder that the language of their education and of the then emerging élite remained dominant at the dinner table.¹⁹ He thinks in English, a staff member commented, and it is said that when he returned to the Philippines from education abroad, his English had not slipped into the accented Filipino version; it was West Point American.

The care with which FVR used the dominant language, even under the pressures of the Presidency, is seen in a letter to a relative by affinity whom he distrusted—Imelda Marcos, at the time she was permitted to bring her husband’s remains back to the archipelago, four years after his death. A decent draft submitted to him was pored over, every sentence showing change. May the Good Lord Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, see to it the final divine guidance will be attained by all,²⁰ movingly became May the Good Lord Almighty, in His infinite wisdom, see to it that surcease of spirit, mind and body, be finally attained by all. The author was brought to witness a discussion with the former speaker, José de Venecia. They were speaking in Pangasinense, which JDV was plainly more comfortable in, and quickly reverted to English, which they both were more comfortable in—with a visitor. FVR’s letters to Ming and other family members were in English.

But even though General Almonte and he often spoke together in Tagalog, Joal, on his return from trips, usually sent long hand-written notes, in excellent script and in perfect English, to the boss to give him advance notice while bureaucratic wheels turned out trip reports.

Thus on Christmas Eve 1992, Joal returned from an exploratory trip to London, important for the administration’s attempt to diversify its foreign connections: not to put too fine a point on it, away from Mother America. Almonte got access to almost everyone and was plainly a hit, from the way he was moved higher and higher up the stuffy British echelons. They were very optimistic and supportive of our government. But some key leaders in their private sector need a kind of final push before believing in our reform program. At the end he gave an address to the Royal Institute of International Affairs—Chatham House, around the corner from the Palace of St. James’s, where heads of state sometimes trembled in days past—and concluded, maybe smugly, that he was asked to convey the message that the Queen will be happy to host a lunch on March 12 and Prime Minister John Major on March 15. Buckingham Palace was not familiar ground to Filipinos in the past, but the lunch that occurred was to be a stunning success. After all, HM—along with her husband the Duke, and younger son Prince Edward—could surely be delighted that an American-trained couple, a fellow head of state with a self-confident wife, spoke the Queen’s English.

Sources. Filipinos have many exemplary qualities, many of them brought out in these volumes. Alas, along with most of their Asian counterparts, good archiving is not high on the list. The tradition of careful archival work for government, whether that filed away, or drawn upon, for history, is largely absent in the Philippines. Even such secondary sources as newspapers and magazines are difficult to find in organized fashion. The author recalls a meeting in the 1970s with Foreign Secretary (and former UN General Assembly President) Carlos P. Romulo, hoping to persuade the latter to give him archival access for a book being undertaken on policymaking in the Philippines. Romulo seemed not to understand, until the student asked how he would find out who was fighting for what position against whom. Ah, you’ll have to go to the newspapers for that, he said. It was not far off.

It is extremely fortunate that former President Ramos is an exception: a diligent man, he kept his records from early on, though the pre-war period is sadly absent, given the wide-scale havoc wreaked on the archipelago during the Japanese occupation and the American bombing that came with liberation.

It is probably safe to say that the 60-year records of Fidel V Ramos are the best collection of public documents to exist anywhere in Southeast Asia for a career—if not anywhere. True, the documents were maintained for their relevance in a specific posting, not for their usability by future scholars. At the present time, the National Library is proposing to digitize this remarkable record, but such was not available during the period of research. We are incredibly grateful to President Ramos for granting us full and uncensored access to the millions of pages in hundreds of file-drawers at his Presidential library. Though Ramos and his associates and critics gave us enormous amounts of time to share their memory of working with the Colonel, the General, the President, it will be obvious that the principal source of this biography came to be the Presidential library. We are fortunate that numerous documents with the request destroy upon reading were filed. It was shades of Nixon, if for a more elevated purpose. Increasingly, and here again the present writer was a beneficiary, Ramos began to grasp that not only his example was part of his legacy—but these papers themselves.

To be sure, the very discretion of Ramos as a person ensured that much of the substance of government was not recorded. But drawing on interviews and other ways of understanding Ramos the man, we can often infer what those documents of form encapsulated in substance.

Numerous trusted confidants, colleagues, family members and his few opponents were willing to speak openly with us. There were a few notable exceptions.²¹ Ramos was a public figure from at least the 1970s and that record is largely available—in his compilation of speeches and newspaper sermons. He seemed to have nothing to hide. At least that is the assumption with which we set out—and ended. And the benefit of living off and on in Manila gave us continued access to most of those interviewed as early as 2001, thus to check on the progress of original Ramos initiatives or just to correct the record. The footnotes to not recflect the sheer volume of these sometimes random encounters—constantly with Almonte but with Cielito Habito, Alunan, and numerous others.

In sheer quantity, the largest source for this volume is a book already published, Democracy and Discipline: the Philippine Presidency of Fidel V. Ramos, by Ambassador Federico Macaranas and myself. With my co-author’s generous permission, I have extracted sections for the present volume. These pages are heavily revised thanks to my subsequent access to President Ramos’s files, but I have nonetheless used them to inform at least a third of the present book; ‘reinventing the wheel’ and starting over hardly made sense. In any case, I am relying on those sections that I myself wrote. Though this book presents itself as an original contribution, I thought it crucial to present the story of the presidency that shone so brilliantly and that is chronicled in the previous volume—along with that of the whole man. The Ramos archives leave so much still for hundreds of scholars yet to come to add to what small wisdom we can pass on herein.

An unfortunate admission must be made to the diligent reader. Sources were found with only partial identification or dates, but about whose authenticity there could be no doubt, on both internal and external evidence. When computerization of documents and papers are completed, these few omissions can be corrected. In the meantime I must ask the reader to indulge the author for the occasional incomplete footnote.

Necessarily a biographer hears a variety of narratives about his subject. All are partial—in both senses. Some contradict others. In the end, the writer as much like a scientist as possible chooses to rely on the fullest narrative that best fits the data points of his story. Some people knew Ramos longer than did General José Almonte, but from the point of the view of our essential subject, none covered the key periods of Ramos’s service as well as Almonte nor did anyone begin to match his insight and foresight about the potential and likelihood of a Ramos Presidency; nor did anyone serve him more loyally and less self-servingly than Almonte. It is partially the fact that their views were so intertwined for so long; partially the fact that Almonte was a brilliant public servant in his own right; but mainly the overwhelming conclusion that Almonte’s narrative checks out as true, that we have—where reliance on a single narrative is necessary²²—turned to that always informative and incisive thinker and soldier, Jose Almonte.

E. H. Carr said that Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones.²³ Good or not, I admit that one couldn’t take on a project of this magnitude just out of admiration for its subject. We all think of the future. Almonte has spoken eloquently on the need to study the Ramos administration for guidance for the Filipino future, for reform, for good governance, for decency. Even as a very present outsider,²⁴ I can’t claim this; but I can say that a study of this man in his interaction with his society has a lot to tell all of us, wherever, about integrity, diligence, and the intelligent application of scarce resources, something with which any professional should be concerned. Among the many absorbing aspects presented by our subject was his continuing search for the best solutions and the best advice, which gave this writer confidence to undertake this task critically and analytically—with, shall we say, flinching admiration.

W. Scott Thompson, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of International Politics

⁷ Or, the movies, e.g., Rosebud, in the celebrated film à clef about William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Kane.

⁸ Michael Hofmann, The The-list, TLS, London, April 24, 2009.

⁹ The reader will note that Forrest Pogue, in his celebrated biography of the great American General, George C. Marshall, vol I-IV, similarly disclaims any attempt at balance: he admired him before he set out on his work and found more to admire him in the study of his career. I can say the same.

¹⁰ Interview, Ranjit Shahani

¹¹ Braudel, Fernand, The Perspective of the World, Vol III, Civilization and Capitalism, 15-18th Centuries, p. 39.

¹² See Kishore Mahbubani, who presses this argument to some of its logical implications, See his The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, New York, 2008.

¹³ A barkada in Tagalog is a band of brothers, almost a fraternity, of boys or men moving together and loyal to one another.

¹⁴ Interview. There is one instance to the contrary. In a Message in 2007 regarding Ambassador Ralf Gonzales, he says "He was part of my barkada—as teen-agers in the tough neighborhood of José Rizal Avenue corner Doroteo José Street." One would have needed a barkada at that point and this in no way invalidates our very basic point about Ramos’s temperament and stance among his peers.

¹⁵ If at times the reader wonders whether they are reading a study of Almonte rather than Ramos, it is simply because for so long a time during their public careers their fates and ideas were closely intertwined.

¹⁶ Melandrew T. Velasco, An Enduring Legacy: The Life and Times of Ambassador Nariso Rueca Ramos, 2nd Edition 2008, pp 265 and 277. It might be worth noting that Braganza was usually considered a nephew of Ramos, as much as the real nephew Ranjit Shahani.

¹⁷ Aurora Banzon to FVR, July 29, 1994; Office of the President, August 3, 1994. Note the short elapsed time in responding at Malacañang.

¹⁸ It is notable that in an important Social Weather Stations study on Governance in 2009, a large gap was found between spoken English and the more accommodated written version. This is counterintuitive but helps to explain the easy use of English in official reports.

¹⁹ Though when middle daughter Chula lost much of her reasoning faculties in an accident, in 2003, the language she recalled upon coming out of a coma was Tagalog, the more important language of her childhood peer group..

²⁰ FVR to Mrs. Imelda Romualdez-Marcos and Family, Sepember 9, 1993.

²¹Juan Ponce Enrile, a Senator and several times Defense Minister, declined to meet with us on the grounds that he was writing his own study of the period. One suspects his motive was also continued envy at the success of his sometime (and chronological) junior.

²² We distinguish reliance on a narrative from concluding as fact—though in several years of research we never found Almonte contradicted.

²³ Cited in Stefan Collini, Historian of the future: E.H.Carr the intellectual as realist, Times Literary Supplement, March 7, 2008.

²⁴ A permanent resident since 2005, however; and who first spent part of a sabbatical affiliated with the University of the Philippines in 1970—at what was soon to be christened the Asian Center of Advanced Studies, headed by General Almonte.

PART I

Trustee of a Nation

The Rise of

Eddie Ramos

THE HOUSE in Lingayen, the capital of Pangasinan province, where Fidel V. Ramos was born, is walking distance from the capitol, an impressive building with Corinthian columns just off the beach where General Douglas MacArthur and his liberation forces landed in January 1945. The house itself, constructed in 1995, is a faithful reproduction of the original pre-war house, furnished only with pictures of the family and in particular the President’s life. It is on a small lot, about 2000 square feet (190 square meters); there has been no family upward revisionism, proved because it corresponds to prewar pictures taken before the bombing of Lingayen.

An elderly aunt, Concepcion Dizon, described the young Eddie as always respectful and humble.²⁵ She had watched him grow up nearby until he moved to Manila. In a serialized autobiography published in Japan, FVR later noted that his elementary school classmates described him as very friendly and easy to get along with.²⁶ Thirty kilometers to the west in the Mayor’s Office of Alaminos City, Nani Braganza, a 44-year-old Ramos nephew (calculated by the Filipino standard of affinity), an ex-radical student leader who eventually served as a young congressman during the Ramos Presidency and as a Cabinet Secretary thereafter, asserted, I would take a bullet for Ramos. He said he had to work doubly hard as a congressman to prove himself, precisely because being a Ramos family member and his own family, the Braganzas, long the most powerful family in the city, had marked him.

But this is Ilocano country, and a long shadow hangs over Ramos himself—the Presidency of his second cousin Ferdinand Marcos, who had three and a half times as long to bring pork barrel benefits to the province. Even the educated lifelong residents of the province, like a physician who provided a hiding place to the two young future Presidents during the guerrilla movement period of World War II, could not see the distinction between the havoc wrought by the dictatorship of Marcos and the flourishing that developed under Ramos. Because the Philippines is a country where personality dominates to the almost total exclusion of ideology, it is perhaps understandable why Marcos the destructive dictator could maintain such a hold on his own province—especially given the twenty-one years of benefits Ilocano country got under Marcos.

Ramos frequently describes himself as middle class, and distinguishes himself from the rich landowners and later industrial magnates making up the élite. But that is a stretch—unlike most people who move themselves up the ladder.²⁷ In Asingan, now the de facto provincial headquarters of the Ramos family, a cousin living next door to the more recently built Ramos-Shahani house confirms that they were the Principalia²⁸; No, aside from the largely Chinese land-owning rich, we were at the top of the pyramid. Indeed: there are schools named after Ramos’s mother and a bridge after his father.²⁹

But Ramos was acutely aware of class distinction from the start; well, who isn’t in his almost supremely hierarchical country?³⁰ Another positive trait is that I can talk to and get along with anyone without distinction as to economic status, regardless of social class.³¹ But he notes that his family had a big black U.S.-made car, bearing the plates Assemblyman Ramos number seven, the driver of which took him and his sisters to school as they watched others walking barefoot. I often felt guilty and invited them to ride with us in the car whenever possible.³² Classmates recall these rides—with his pushing toward the seat’s center to make room, squeezing his sister Letty perhaps more than she wished.

But there are no statues of the President, and the current principal of the public school which Ramos attended for a year was not aware that he had been there. In any event, the records were destroyed in World War II.

This two-story house itself is on a side street, and in the style of the neighborhood; it is larger than it looks on its small lot, but was built with large visitations in mind. But it is modest, without many modern conveniences, and with only one fulltime retainer.

A. Ramos the Boy

The picture gathered of the young Eddie is almost annoyingly consistent; chinks in his armor nowhere to be found. We would expect his classmates from grade school to share their praise of a province’s most successful person. What is notable is the consistency of the stories across the class sixty years on and then some. Quiet and adventurous, forgiving—even of the classmate who left the indelible scar on his upper lip—a good leader even at so young an age; he and his friends searched for dragonflies and spiders. Not surprisingly, they saw in his childhood the roots of his presidential success: he will run the country with the same conviction and innate qualities that we first saw in him in elementary [school].³³ His curiosity outran the others’. He was a budding philatelist, finding stamps on trashed envelopes even in the garbage, soaking them off and working up the food chain to more valuable ones that he could trade with adult members of the local stamp club.³⁴ A knowledge of geography and politics inevitably ensued.

My mother made sure there were books in the house, he told us.³⁵ "We read Shakespeare—I remember The Taming of the Shrew—very appropriate for this country. A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream was memorable. All my life I’ve carried books around looking for chances to read. In the military camps I always had paperbacks which I passed around."

Recollections of a maid help us see him too. Nenita Castillo Marron, a few years older than Eddie himself, stowed away in the family move from Asingan to Manila in 1945, to work in the congressman’s household, eventually becoming caretaker of the kitchen. You know when Fidel was attending both high school and college, each time he came home from school, he came to the kitchen and asked if I was tired from the chores and tapped me on my shoulders…[from all the family] there has been never any instance of unkindness toward me.³⁶

Until the war broke out, school was a succession of quiet triumphs; none of his classmates was in the least surprised by his eventual ascent. He remained in Pangasinan one year, after the family moved to Manila for the father to attend to his congressional duties, in order to graduate with his class—as its Valedictorian. Of course once in Manila and with the advent of war, studies were interrupted; his mother tutored him and his two sisters at home. Later with Manila’s liberation—the United States re-entered Manila on the night of February 3, 1945, though Japanese resistance continued in the south, he was able to validate successfully, through qualifying exams, his home studies, including even in physics. He got his high school diploma at the Centro Escolar University Boys’ High School, originally an institution exclusively for ladies, but becoming co-ed thanks to wartime exigencies. But he was concurrently enrolled at the nearby National University College of Engineering, within walking distance. Manila was a rather small place then; home was in what is now a crowded section of Malate near the grand old buildings of government. It was in that eventful year of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 that he entered the competitive examinations for the one slot provided by the U.S. Military Academy for Filipino cadets. Having won that coveted place, he left after completion of a year in civil engineering, embarking for New York in July 1946.

B. Ramos the Man

One of the most famous titans of Philippine Commerce, to the author’s suggestion that Ramos was an unusual President in spending his weekends on tour in the slums or inspecting development projects in the provinces—rather than attending ritzy social functions in Forbes Park, commented—revealingly—What’s his choice? He’s an Ilocano. As if the President of the Republic cannot attend any party he pleases—unlike the Chinese businessman who made the revealing suggestion.

The eminent American diplomat John Negroponte, who dominated Manila’s diplomatic corps in the central years of Ramos’s Presidency, suggested, looking out from his great offices at the Department of State, First of all and above all, Eddie is a wonderful man, a pleasure to work with, jokes and seriousness together. But never forget the three formative influences in his life—Methodism, West Point, and the Police. In a stunning interview he returned to this trinity three times.³⁷

Methodist refers to the central fact that Ramos’s family had broken away from the almost all-dominant Catholic Church that veritably ruled most of the archipelago for more than three centuries prior to Ramos’s birth in 1928. It started more as a reaction to all outside influences—why did the Philippines take instruction from Rome? Could there not be a Catholic church with its hierarchy at home? But that couldn’t be, ever since Henry VIII, and since the emphasis was on autonomy, not on doctrine, the notion of an independent church only slowly gave way to a more truly Filipino church, in this case the Aglipayan, an Iglesia Independiente, during the Philippine Revolution of 1896-98. Its founder, Bishop Gregorio Aglipay, was a Valdez family friend. This plunged many of its followers into Protestantism and all its doctrines during the early American period. By the time the Church could influence the young Ramos, the formative senses and doctrines of Protestantism were well understood in that sector of the Philippines, most particularly the work ethic, the sense of an earned destiny, in which fault was not forgiven through rosaries and Hail Marys, but through earned returns on good works. Angel Ramos stressed that one should never underestimate this dimension of her father’s Protestant weltanschauung.

West Point refers to the young Eddie’s long-shot application, at the head of several hundred Filipino competitors, to the great school on the banks of the Hudson River. And it was not just its prestige that mattered, not even its ability to inculcate the order essential to a good soldier, it was an American connection. And not an American connection for its own sake, as for so many Filipinos—as for Presidents Quezon and Osmena, who, General Almonte once commented, used that connection for their own advancement, not for the good of the nation. It was one born of a pride in the Philippines, but one then just achieving its titular independence, won after the historic battles of Bataan, Corregidor and Leyte Gulf. FVR throughout his life nurtured the lessons and standards of West Point, while savoring and using successfully the principles of Americanism that had made that country strong—for application to his own country.

The Police are the least mentioned of this trinity in most views of Ramos. From the early 1970s until EDSA of 1986, Ramos was either commander of the combined Philippine Constabulary and Integrated National Police or its most influential person. A police mentality is different from an Army mentality. A policeman is less of a strategist at best; he thrives on order, knowing his terrain—neighborhood blocks, city trouble zones, corruption ever tempting, and intelligence—not order-of-battle, artillery, and ever-present hierarchy. The reason generals—or even majors—in so many developing countries have ruled is merely because they do hold the heavy weaponry, and have managed to convince so many populations that they hold a sacred trusteeship of their polities (most influentially and successfully, until recently, in Turkey), as a necessary ideology to justify their rule.

Yet soldiers are distant from their people, living in encampments and justifying their power from their obvious role in defending their boundaries from Huns on the tear or ever more powerful neighbors. Policemen walk their neighborhood, befriend the mighty, take alms from retailers on the corner in return for protection. The image of the police is seldom as noble as of the man on horseback. But the police in the larger order of things are far more important, more critical.

More significantly for our story, it breeds a proximity to a nation’s problems. There was hardly a barrio Eddie didn’t know throughout the archipelago, Negroponte said, and he was right. He knew the station commanders, but he also knew the Mayors, even the Kapitans, and Ramos was both Army and Police, having won his General’s star commanding platoons, companies, Special Forces groups and brigades, while serving as an infantry officer for 22 years.

C. The Philippine Sociology: The Crab Mentality

F. Sionil José, in his delightful novel Mass, has his scalawag protagonist, Pepe, sum it all up:

Listen, our history is a history…of failed revolutions. Always, in the end, someone was bought or someone turned traitor. We’re a nation of traitors… We delight in seeing the downfall of others, even friends. We betray for money, for revenge, for envy… But most of the time, out of sheer cussedness… We remember the slightest injury to our pride, our so-called self-respect. We etch these in our hearts to wait patiently for the day when we can stick a knife in the back. But let someone do us a good deed—and we forgot it easily. We’re also a nation of ingrates.³⁸ And this despite the central unifying concept of Filipino culture—utang na loob—or debt of the heart. The Filipino game is to pay back one’s debts, to be owed a little more than owing.

But hero-status is not easily bestowed in a crab culture. Over and over Ramos was damned by faint praise. Bernardo Villegas, a distinguished conservative economist, commented at the end of Ramos’s Presidency that Thanks to the unflagging commitment of President Fidel Ramos to democratic principles, we will be crossing the threshold to the new Millennium as the model of a successful market economy that is at the same time a bulwark of democracy. Now that we are celebrating the lives of heroes…let us give credit to a contemporary hero.

But then he goes on to say that he was sure history would consider Ramos as one of the greatest Presidents the country has ever had.³⁹ Who was even in competition with him? He was in a league of his own.

Ruth Benedict famously makes the distinction—in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword—between shame cultures like Japan and the guilt cultures of the West. The Philippines spent too long in the convent and Hollywood to be wholly a shame culture, but it is more at that end of the spectrum. Teachers induce correct behavior by threatening exposure, loss of face. Westerners so often incorrectly impute mendacity to people who simply aren’t capable of admitting a wrong in front of peer groups. This is at the root of most misunderstanding by Westerners of Asians and, in particular, Filipinos. Filipinos are also the most passive-aggressive people on earth, a psychiatrist trained in America commented of his own people. It’s a maladaptive way of hitting out at others to excuse one’s own failures. We never heard Ramos blame anyone for deficiencies in his governance, but he expected his team to act similarly—accepting personal responsibility and getting on with it.

Historical Overview

It no longer seems to be the case that Mexico is so far from God, so close to the United States: certain U.S. liberals, indeed, seem to fear that their country is too close both to God and Mexico. But the experience of the Philippines has, for at least the last half-millennium, catastrophically entailed undue proximity to whatever energies have been running highest in the world. Where it could have benefited mightily from contact, it has had to face conquest. The first Asian country to feel the full weight of the European outpouring of the sixteenth century, it found its struggle for nationhood drowned in the larger torrent of the United States’ only experiment in conventional colonialism; and on its way to a constitutional resolution of this experience, it was ground into near-ruin by the fire and ruthlessness of Japanese imperial ambition reborn—the fastest-grown and deadliest of its visitants. Three empires in the space of half a century, followed by further years of bitter civil strife where crude feudalism nourished international communism; a hollowing experience. There has never been a Philippine Empire—one of its problems in legitimizing centralized authority domestically—but the rest of the world seems incapable of keeping its hands off the Philippines.

The implications on political—and hence public—life were a recurring disaster. The Malay-type evolution of independent sultanates—in its early but gathering stages–was overthrown, maybe a century before its time, everywhere north of Mindanao by the Spanish conquest and evangelization. The Latin-type evolution of the last child of the Spanish Empire that would have to undergo its own struggle of liberal democracy versus caudillo conservatism was both aborted and subordinated, maybe mere decades before fruition, by the manifest destiny of the United States. The American-type democratic showcase was about to have its responsibilities taken seriously by a Filipino-in-Chief who was ready to mature and at last face the handiwork—as only Quezon could—of his long career of high-populism when the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere brought exile and unfulfillment, and an unreformed Republic.

Continuing unfulfillment—this in a polity recognizable over a century old and ever described as immature because of the dominant politics of personality and populism under the control of an élite. That the roots of this go very deep, ultimately being derived from the country’s island geography and its colonial—indeed anciently pre-colonial—history, misses the point. Each stage of history was meant to lead somewhere different and leave these roots far behind—but the continuing felling of the Philippine tree left whatever new growth would arise both green, delicate and close to the ground.

That most singular character of Philippine public life is the emphasis on personality to the near exclusion of issues, themes, let alone ideology is perhaps especially apt because the Philippines and Filipinos are unique in that they carry in their very name, not just that of a man, but one who never trod their soil, who lived half the planet away: King Philip II of Spain.

Prior to the sixteenth century conquest and evangelization, Filipinos had lived in small autonomous communities called barangay defined by their immediate riverside, coastal, mountain or island environments—not tribes so much as extended families and associates under their own warrior-chiefs. What was starting to happen—particularly in the Manila area—was the introduction from the South of Islam and the centralizing instincts of Muslim princes—if only to compete with their peers. Having established itself solidly on Mindanao, its source was today’s Indonesia upon whose Javanese plinth were built successive and great Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic kingdoms from the seventh century onwards, and whose Sultan (and now governor) of Yogyakarta still wields hereditary power and huge influence. Still peripheral, the Philippine islands were truly archipelagic, its small communities living a presumably sufficient life of fishing and rice farming. Small wonder Spain could conquer so easily and, imposing peninsular centralization, govern through the friars and native local élites in every one of the towns where the scattered Filipinos were forced to settle.

In the nineteenth century, economic opening fostered the commercialization of agriculture and the prosperity—and power—based on land. The native élites that ran local government either owned large tracts outright, or more commonly, leased these from the friars. Since the religious orders almost always had the last word—in Madrid if not in Manila—they were an effective and increasingly brutal check on the ambitions of privileged Filipinos everywhere. One group of such friars could turn due process against, for example, the Rizals of Calamba and threaten ruin, shame, exile or death. Execrable though their presence, role and behavior came to be regarded, this restraint arising out of a true separation of powers—a tarnished silver lining which, to be sure, does not deserve to be appreciated too much—remains largely unnoted.

But it is important in light of what happened afterwards. The Americans seized power and purchased their international legitimacy over the Philippines. They disestablished the Catholic Church, crushed the popular elements of the Revolution and co-opted the Ilustrado elements. They bought up the friar lands and sold them to their targeted collaborators, who had previously been the largest lessees. And at the same time allowing for Ilustrado consolidation of the portion of the friars’ power which flowed from their role as landlords, the Americans gave them positions in Manila and provincial capitals as well. In the name of hurried expediency, the result was vertical integration of power from the capital (or even Washington) to the fields by the landed families whose names would be rightly regarded as more powerful by those under their sway than the mere ideas of the nameless who could not even promise to deliver tangible benefits—funds, favors or fiestas, immediately.

Landowners and their allies made up the bulk of the large political parties, and their best leader, Manuel Luis Quezon—head of the Nacionalistas, Assemblyman, Senator, Resident Commissioner in Washington, Commonwealth President—was their darling as he continually wrong-footed the Americans by all too easily invoking the moral high ground and demanding independence. The Republicans who manned the first colonial governments saw his game and held firm, but it was Woodrow Wilson’s governor, Francis Burton Harrison, who, dancing to Quezon’s tune, promised a firm date soon for independence. From there it was all downhill as the Americans tried vainly (and