The picture of a very slim picture of Ninoy Aquino jogging with his Filipino doctor in the front page of another daily paper on the 21st of August 2011 reminded me of a meeting with him in the halls of the Fletcher School of Tufts University at Medford, Massachusetts (in the greater Boston area) one early day in October, 1982. The occasion was a two-day seminar on Thailand and ASEAN. It had been 16 months after I had left the NEDA as its director general. I was in the meeting on the strength of my involvement then on ASEAN economic cooperation issues.
“Personal health and life.” During the social time among the conferees in the morning, my path crossed that of Ninoy. I remember greeting him respectfully as Mr. Senator but he greeted me in my familiar name as if I was a long lost acquaintance. We were of course only compatriots, not friends.
Our conversation centered on how his physical rehabilitation from a surgery had progressed. That was apparent from his lean and lively look. Then the talk gravitated toward running. He must have known about how I happened to be involved in the country’s running boom (the Milo 10 Ks, marathons, running seminars, etc.). All of that was the result of my personal quest for good health and the virus of desire to pass it on to others.
Ninoy had already been in the US for some two years by then. He underwent a successful heart bypass surgery in Texas. Ninoy told me that he had taken up running for his physical rehabilitation. He told me that he had gone to Dallas and sought advice from Dr. Kenneth Cooper, who prescribed for him an exercise point system. The famous doctor was the main booster of the running and exercise boom of the 1970s.
(In his book on Aerobics, Cooper explained and documented the health benefits of aerobic exercise. Dr. Cooper defined aerobics as exercise that makes the lungs work progressively harder to the point of being able to push a large volume of oxygen into the blood stream to power the circulatory system. Eventually, the result is cardiovascular fitness. The heart is stronger and works more efficiently, thus extending life.)
Kenneth Cooper’s work and that of James Fixx, writer of the other popular book on running, extricated me out of the life of the sloth in middle age. They probably succeeded in lengthening my life. Perhaps Ninoy saw in me a kindred soul on that account. And kindred souls exchange ideas on what thrilled them.
“Politics of exile.” We had a second brief encounter in the afternoon. I went out of the conference room to do a personal thing and suddenly I found him circling about from a different direction. That time, it was more about politics. Probably, he knew me to be apolitical and so it was him who talked most of the time.
He said that meetings such as the one we were attending were opportunities for US foreign policy experts to learn more about a specific issue. The conference brought all these experts to assess how the situation was going. (More than half the conferees were from the US, a third from Thailand, and the rest from ASEAN). Such meetings, he said, gathered a lot of scholars on a common topic and included also many CIA types who helped to feed situation assessments for the US State Department and Congress.
As Ninoy continued, he also touched on his impressions of the Philippine situation. He did not try to draw out any opinions from me. But he was essentially giving his own assessment that the future was not far off when he could return and challenge the government politically. In this sense, he gave me some premonition of what was afoot.
At one point, he simply said that the shine on Mrs. Marcos’s political prominence as a successor would fade quickly as Marcos himself lost his political control. So he was not worried about any challenge from the direction of Mrs. Marcos in the struggle for political succession. This was a prophetic statement. It took on from his metaphor that the moon’s reflection came from another light.
During his extended stay in the US, Ninoy enjoyed fellowships that enabled him to have an academic base for his work and reflections. During his first year of his stay in the Boston area, he was a fellow at Harvard University. Then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology extended to him a similar fellowship.
Thus, two great universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts gave Ninoy an academic base to prepare and consolidate. These two institutions had each a center for international studies. They had faculty members who were influential in the US foreign policy establishment.
From this vantage point, Ninoy also had access to seminars on development and on developing countries in the region and to the strategic thinkers on development issues. Further, his leadership position gained greater prestige over the other Filipino political exiles in the US who were derided in Manila as the steak commandoes. The Aquinos acquired a residence in Newton, Boston, just across the Charles River which ran between Boston and Cambridge, Mass.
“What if Ninoy had stayed alive and led the nation afterward....?” Historians often ask the question, what if the turn of events did not happen as they did? What if Ninoy had lived, arrived home safely and led the opposition to Marcos beginning in 1982 when he returned? This is a fair question to ask.
Philippine history would have been very different. He was always preparing for high office – ultimately, that of the presidency. His meteoric rise from intrepid journalist, to town mayor and then governor of Tarlac Province and then to senator of the Republic was designed to lead one day to that final goal of challenging for the presidency.
He was so unlike his wife, Cory, to whom the presidency became a possibility once he was assassinated. This was also the same phenomenon to Noynoy, whose mother’s untimely death months before the presidential elections of 2010 catapulted him to a candidacy that he did not actively seek. These two accidental presidencies would not have happened, And the nation would have been led by one who was preparing for the job almost all his life.
When capable leaders steer a nation, great things could happen. Singapore and Malaysia were guided by leaders with great vision and enormous capability and preparedness. From 1966 through to 1982, Marcos piloted the nation well and forward. And Fidel Ramos, hampered by a short fixed term, solved major problems of the nation that he faced. Suharto, despite his absolute power, steered Indonesia from a greater abyss of the unknown and consolidated what is today a better nation.
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