How does one remember? The person? The politician?

So the Eternal Footman came to hold Monching Mitra by the shoulder and lead him gently away. I have a lot of difficulty writing this in memoriam for while Monching was a friend, I could not, would not in conscience spare him at all as a politician. And this is where the wall sprang up between Monching Mitra and myself, a wall I would have wanted to destroy but could not. I suppose this is the heavy burden of committed journalists, columnists specially, who seek to distance themselves from prominent personalities they are compelled to write about.

One such was Monching Mitra, once he got to be Speaker of the House. Prior to that, we were good friends. The other was Joe de Venecia, who succeeded him to this third most important political post in the republic. Once either got into my journalistic line of sight, the friendship disappeared for I had no choice but to throw my grenades. Did it hurt? Yes, it did. On a very personal basis, I immensely liked both of them.

The time came when Monching Mitra believed I held a personal grudge against him. Can't you write something nice about me at all? he once asked. Once I did, a temperate column, and the telephone rang the following morning, and it was of course the Speaker of the House profuse with thanks. We knew each other from way, way back when he was a frontliner reporter of the Manila Chronicle and I was a correspondent of the Agence France-Presse in the 50s.

He was young, tall, engagingly handsome, articulate, still single and the girls were drawn to him like moths to a burning lamp. He had a gorgeous clump of black hair, and his byline was a frequent feature in the Manila Chronicle. Another young and enterprising reporter who was with Monching in the Chronicle at the time was Feliciano (Sonny) Belmonte, now House Minority Leader who eventually met Betty Go, founding president of The Philippine STAR. Sonny went on to become a prominent businessman and president of the International Junior Chamber of Commerce. Like Monching, Sonny too was dashing and debonair.

But to our main subject.

Monching Mitra would still be around, a pillar of Philippine politics if he had run for the Senate in 1987 and not the House. That is, of course, if he had not been stricken with cancer. President Corazon Aquino was extremely fond of Monching. If my instincts do not and did not err, Cory Aquino wanted Mitra to succeed her as president in 1992. Monching and Ninoy Aquino were the closest of friends. Ninoy then (this was in 1969) was the daring young man on the political trapeze. Everything about him pointed to the presidency in 1973.

As circumstances then prevailed, Ninoy could not miss. They were a political Damon and Pythias, Ninoy and Monching. The latter was a sort of understudy for Ninoy completely dominated the constellation of political stars during that time. He was brash, yes, but his sharp intellect was a blue flame that danced sprightly across the table, with a physical energy to match, and a charm than then had no equal.

Monching looked up to Ninoy. I met both of them at the Aquino residence in Times St., Quezon City in August 1969. Cory, as was her wont then, hardly joined political conversations, preferring to stay in the shadows. She was shy and self-effacing and whoever imagined that she would one day soar to the presidency, bravely taking the nation by its heart after the 1983 assassination of her husband. At the Aquino residence, Monching would always defer to Ninoy whenever I asked questions.

But we have to whirl forward. If Monching had run for the Senate in 1987 and of course won, he would have been only one of twelve senators. He would have been smothered by seniority, and eclipsed by such stalwarts as Jovito Salonga, Raul Manglapus, Juan Ponce Enrile, Ernie Maceda and Tito Guingona. In the House, he would easily tower, and he did. The speakership was hand-tooled for him. It was an ideal catapult for the presidency in 1992. His party, Laban ng Demokrasyang Pilipino, was the biggest there was, formidable, with an almost bottomless war chest.

And, yes, he would have the support of Cory Aquino.

It didn't turn out that way. The speakership became a curse instead of a blessing. Loyalty had to be bought. Bastoneros, who would push legislation, would have to be in his pocket. Greed, cupidity, rapacity formed the intestines of the lower house of Congress. Scandal followed scandal. Bonuses, pork barrel, gun smuggling, procurement of brand-new cars for each congressman. All these combined into a stench that pulled down the name of Speaker Ramon Mitra Jr.

Maybe he couldn't help it. Maybe he needed the speakership as a tarpaulin for the presidency. Maybe the presidency became an obsession, blind-sided him. Maybe his better sense told him to quit, but he couldn't.

He had to pay the price, and he paid it dearly. Successive surveys for the presidency showed Monching far, far down, and he couldn't believe them. He began to develop the notion that the surveys were stacked or spurious. After I resigned from Malacañang as press secretary and joined the Philippine STAR June 1989, Monching and I eventually were at daggers drawn. He accused me of being unfair to him in my writings. I replied that shouldn't matter very much because it was radio, not print, that was a continuous media stream from one end of the country to the other.

Monching countered that quite a number of radio broadcasters or newscasters read my columns and translated them into the vernacular. "You don't seem to realize," he said, "that your column has such a wide audience even in radio, and you have hurt me a lot." I said, abashed and really feeling very sorry for Monching Mitra, that I was very sorry to have caused him so much unhappiness. Those were the times I regretted being a columnist. And the same thing happened when Joe de Venecia -- an old, old friend -- became House speaker. He too was a tradpol, and I gave it to Joe de V in spades. At one time, Joe was near tears.

And yet, Monching along the way was firmly convinced during the 1991-92 campaign he would be the next president. He looked the part. As I said in a past column, with his silver white beard, he looked like El Cid, magnificently up front, espying the enemy with supreme confidence.

While he did not have the support or endorsement of Cory Aquino, he had the blessing of Jaime Cardinal Sin. Cory would have easily backed Monching except that she was suspicious of his close ties with her first cousin, businessman Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco. Danding then (and I think still now) was No. 1 in her index expurgatorius. And that could have been because Cory could just not evict from her mind the possibility that Danding knew of the Malacañang plot to murder Ninoy, or worse, might have been involved. So President Aquino supported the candidacy of her defense secretary, Fidel Valdez Ramos. The word still goes around that Danding was the chosest crony of the dictator.

What happened to Monching Mitra during the 1992 presidential elections was Philippine politics at its worst. A lot of partymates dropped him, the LDP network ran amuck, there was betrayal almost everywhere. And Mitra lost disconsolately, shattered that anything like that could ever happen to him. He was never the same after that. Monching retreated to the mists of his beloved Palawan. His ranch, his horses, his love of nature. And yet, through all that, he never lost his calm, his composure. His dignity.

He was a broken Ming vase that could not be put together again.

Against his better judgment, he was persuaded to run for the Senate in 1995. He lost. Palawan could not quite shelter him completely from the outside world. Yes, he would not lose his way in politics again. But there was the world of public service. He would show them another Monching Mitra, no longer the politician, but one who would serve selflessly in an office he felt he could handle well if not brilliantly.

He sought to be chairman of the Commission on Elections (Comelec). Outwardly Monching looked excellent for the position, a senior politician in retirement, bearing -- as he said -- no grudges. All his hurts had already peeled off. Again, Monching was to be frustrated. For he could not convince the powers-that-be he was no longer saddled with the heavy baggage of his political past. The position of the Comelec chair needed Tristan without an Isolde. At least, that was the perception.

Once we met while he was already undergoing dialysis for terminal cancer. I had just written a column on him, this time tender and compassionate, tearing off th veneer of my previous writings. "Finally, Teddy," he said at the lobby of the hospital, 'you have written something very nice about me." I shivered. I knew I was looking at a man about to die. I knew he was bearing his fate with unexampled courage, and you could not help but admire him. Sophocles it was who said: "Even the bold will fly when they see Death, drawing in close enough to end their life."