Ninoy's return: An untold story

MANILA, Philippines – (The author organized the Ninoy Aquino Movement, which became the largest overseas anti-Marcos group, exposed their incredible corruption and vast realty possessions in the US, and the human rights violations to cut US military aid to the Marcos government.)

The week in August 1983 when Ninoy Aquino was leaving Boston for his fateful journey to Manila, he rang me up in New York.

“Sonny, come to Newton,” he said without preamble. “We have to talk. Everything’s all set. I’m going home.”

Ninoy sounded far more excited than he was three years earlier when he survived a multiple heart bypass operation. “I’ll live,” he said laconically when I visited him shortly after the bypass.

He had arrived in Texas on the second week of May 1980 for treatment at the Baylor University Medical Center. Weeks earlier he had suffered a serious heart attack in a detention center. Nearly eight years in prison, almost entirely in solitary confinement, had taken its toll on him.

Apprehensive that the country’s most famous political prisoner might expire in jail, an event for which he would certainly be liable, the astute Marcos had allowed Ninoy to travel to the US for heart surgery and then hoping perhaps that he remain in America indefinitely.

At Baylor in Dallas, Ninoy appeared to be a physically drawn man. But the light in his eyes was undimmed, his sense of humor persisted, and his spirit remained unvanquished.

When Ninoy regained his health, he asked me to locate a house for him and Cory in New York, the center of American communications. In New York, he met anti-Martial Law opposition leaders, the American civil society and academic groups. Many of them have had stakes or experience in the Philippines or in Asia. He traveled with us to key cities, speaking before Filipino-American organizations, meeting with American policy-makers. At the Asia Society, he made his first historic speech with the historic quote, “The Filipino is worth dying for.”

At the beginning he remained his old vibrant and animated self, spewing thunderbolts against Marcos, galvanizing the commitment of those who sought to restore our democracy, lifting the morale of Filipinos everywhere.

Some time in the autumn of 1981, I began to feel a change in Ninoy’s thinking and attitudes about Marcos. Through our conversations, his Marcos critique seemed to have modulated. At one point, he quoted Oscar Wilde: “When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood, it is hard to shake hands with her.”

Part of the thinking of the anti-Martial Law opposition at that time was to use force – selectively and reluctantly – against the dictatorship. One such heroic effort was the undertaking of Dorris Baffry who exploded a device when Marcos was a guest of the PPSTA at a tourism conference. The other was the unfortunate fiasco of Victor Lovely when a bomb prematurely exploded at the YMCA Manila, which Marcos capitalized on.

Ninoy and I shared a passion for reading. Sometimes we would spend hours discussing the merits and ideas of a given book. When I visited him on his 50th birthday in 1982, he asked me to read the life of Mahatma Gandhi. I told him I had already read Gandhi’s biography. Read it again, he said.

“While you are at it, you may want to re-visit the lives of Martin Luther King and Abdul Ghaffer Khan,” he said.

I was embarrassed to tell him that I had never heard of the latter. I requested him to spell out the full name of Khan, who turned out to be a Pathan from Afghanistan and one of the 20th century’s great proponents for non-violent change.

By early January 1983, Ninoy’s transformation was very visible. He no longer shared the belief that fighting the dictatorship of Marcos was through the use of force and violence: “We can not build a nation on the bones of our people,” he told a group of leaders who had organized in Mindanao in the island of Jonpiras, closest to Malaysia.

Now, barely three years after his heart surgery, Ninoy was preparing to challenge the Marcos regime. He was exhilarated at the thought of going home. He was almost unmindful of what lurked ahead, for now he was a man wholly transformed.

For almost two decades, the anti-Marcos alliance in the country and abroad had anchored their strategy on some violent strategy to end the dictatorship. Yet, here was Ninoy Aquino, the foremost opposition leader, abandoning that strategy, supremely confident that the way of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Abdul Ghaffar Khan could prevail in his homeland.

On a chilly and windy autumn day, Pepe Calderon and I drove to Ninoy and Cory’s home in Newton near Boston, Massachusetts, over 400 miles from our Manhattan base. He gave me a crocodile leather attaché, a gift from his mother Doña Aurora. He told me to keep the anti-Martial Law movement united and active over the Marcos propaganda machine always seeking to curry favor with the American government. After we talked about plans and exigencies, Ninoy extracted a promise, that if he dies going home, we must strive to seek a peaceful road to democratic restoration.

At dawn on August 19th, Ninoy and I, with Pepe Calderon, Kiyoshi Wakamiya, a Japanese newspaperman, and his orthopedic doctor-friend, attended mass at a nearby church with a coterie of friends. Later that same day, Cory and children drove him to the Boston Logan International Airport, where he would take the first leg of his journey to martyrdom.

To the world and to us at that point in time, Ninoy Aquino still loomed as a political figure, an icon of the opposition to Marcos. 

No longer a political warrior, he went home an apostle of non-violent restoration of democracy. He united and unleashed the greatest force yet to be organized in Philippine history, and perhaps, the world: People Power, with its irresistible capacity for revolutionary change.