Ninoy’s real gift to us was ‘faith’

If ever recalling Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino’s day of martyrdom, which was yesterday (August 21), becomes a ritual, we will have lost the meaning of the remarkable life he led, which brought him inevitably to a heroic death.

Ninoy was never a man of ritual. He was always full of surprises. He would surprise everyone, at times even himself. He was all too human. He could weep, or be on the brink of tears, in times of disappointment, or depression; but he would always bounce back. He was a fighter, and setback or misfortune, instead of defeating him, summoned up his innate optimism and courage. Adversity brought out the best in him.

Nothing demonstrated this better than the dark hour when we were all arrested on September 20 (not September 21, as the subsequent Marcos propagandists said) at the stroke of midnight, or in the wee hours of the morning. Even while he suspected (as we, his fellow detainees, believed) that he was Macoy’s Public Enemy Number One, Ninoy spent those hours and the days of anger and uncertainty that followed consoling the others who had been arrested – cracking jokes, even about the probability of his own "execution", inducing laughter in place of gloom.

Before our martial law arrest, everybody – including this writer – used to call Ninoy, half in derision, half in admiration, "Superboy". This is because of the meteoric, breakneck nature of his career. He always appeared a "Young Man in a Hurry". But there was always a logic and a sort of rhythm to everything Ninoy did.

His mother, the late Doña Aurora Aquino, in the week of grief in which his murdered body lay in Sto. Domingo, visited by seemingly endless lines of mourners, remarked to me that "perhaps Ninoy was always in a hurry, because he knew in his heart that his life would be so short."

The truth is that Ninoy could have taken a short-cut to national leadership (he was already, in effect, "living" in Malacañang) by remaining within the great President Ramon Magsaysay’s circle of power, eventually ascending to a Cabinet post, and from that lofty perch making a broad jump into the Senate. Monching Magsaysay, whom we called "The Guy", affectionately regarded young Ninoy as his "Boy General", spear-bearer, all-round "gofer", and cheer-me-upper. But pole-vaulting to national office via the patronage of one of the most popular Presidents we ever had simply wasn’t Ninoy’s way.

He perceived that the only way to serve the people was to understand the people. He went "home" to his beginnings, to the town of Concepcion, Tarlac, and ran for Mayor. True to type, he became the youngest mayor in the country’s history (he even had to present – I didn’t say "forge" – a birth certificate to disprove the complaints of critics and adversaries that he was "not of age"). At 23, the youngest municipal mayor, Ninoy became at 27, the nation’s youngest vice-governor, at 29 the youngest governor.

* * *

Here's a reminder to GMA:

As governor of Tarlac, Ninoy ran afoul of another popularly-elected President – none other than "Cong Dadong" Macapagal. As a "Magsaysay Boy", Ninoy was a fervent Nacionalista, and when Magsaysay died in a tragic plane crash on Mount Manunggal in Cebu, RM’s Vice President, Carlos P. Garcia, "inherited" Ninoy as a Palace adviser. However, CPG was subsequently roundly trounced by the Liberal Party challenger, Macapagal, in 1961.

No sooner had Macapagal taken his seat in Malacañang than he began to put the screws on Aquino.

Macapagal bled Tarlac to the bone. No public works appropriations, no "pork barrel". Governor Ninoy Aquino found his public school teachers replaced, his puericulture centers running short of medicine from the Department of Health, his roads unpaved, his projects "underfunded". When he sought ways and means to raise revenue for the province, he found that a provincial governor was powerless to impose taxes, much less collect them. Macapagal’s "condition" for releasing money for Tarlac was no less than abject surrender on the part of Ninoy. His ultimatum: Ninoy should leave the Nacionalista Party and swear himself in as a Liberal.

A few days before he announced his reluctant decision, Ninoy rang me up on the phone. Later, he came to see me, among other friends, to explain his capitulation. He said to me: "All of us must, at some time, pay a price for everything we do. I could not see my people in Tarlac suffering for my stubborn pride. So I took the only course left open to me. I became a turncoat. I kissed my innocence goodbye."

I’ll have to admit it. I was unkind to Ninoy in that agonizing hour. I scolded him for caving in, for betraying principle (how pompous that sounds), for "switching coats". My sermonizing must have been even more painful for him because, ironically, I had been so openly pro-Macapagal in that hard-fought election campaign to topple ex-President Garcia. While all the other dailies had been for Garcia, as publisher of The Evening News (now defunct), I had thrown the support of my newspaper unequivocally behind Dadong Macapagal. Our friends, the late General Hans Menzi, publisher of the powerful Manila Daily Bulletin, had laughed merrily at me as the "boy publisher" and scoffed that our puny rantings in favor of Macapagal were insignificant. But, to his surprise – as well as mine – Macapagal won.

Yet, I had counted on Ninoy, even then, to "grow up" to become President of the Republic someday. And in my puritanical and prudish way, I felt that standing fast against overwhelming odds, and being true to one’s party and one’s beliefs, were the qualities that should characterize a President and true leader.

In retrospect, the harsh words I addressed to Ninoy at that time were both cruel and thoughtless. Only later did I realize what must have been Ninoy’s private agony: The father whom he loved had been branded a wartime "collaborator" with the Japanese; and now, here he was being forced to collaborate with Macapagal!

Once he had crossed that bridge, Aquino became Macapagal’s close-confidant and a pillar of the Liberal Party. But he had crossed the bridge in an ill-starred hour. No sooner had he comfortably settled in as an LP than Ferdinand E. Marcos (ironically the former president of the Liberal Party) crossed over to the opposition Nacionalistas and, in a surprise second-ballot, copped the nomination for President as the standard-bearer of the NP. In that crucial 1965 election, Apo Ferdie trounced and unseated Macapagal.

It was dramatic proof of Ninoy’s leadership in Tarlac that, despite the fact that close to half of the Tarlaqueños were Ilocanos, Macapagal still managed to beat Marcos in that province.

* * *

By 1967, Marcos was still riding high. He decided to barnstorm all over the country to plug for the NP local candidates and push the LP Senatorial ticket, vowing to crush all LP opposition, and predicting an eight-to-zero "shut-out" in the Senate race. Ninoy ran for the Senate and mobilized the students and young people behind him, campaigning on a platform of "Youth! Experience! Hope!"

He was everywhere. His specialty was the "helicopter attack". He would quip: "When you arrive in a car, people don’t look at you. But when you arrive from 2,000 feet up, people will gather from all over to watch you come down. Right there and then you have an audience – an automatic audience!"

On election day itself, Ninoy – utterly exhausted by his uphill fight – resigned himself to whatever outcome fate might decree. He came by my house in Paco and spent a couple of hours with me, chatting. He said: "I think I’ll win. But after I go to sleep, Marcos and his machine will get to work, and when I wake up, I’ll find that I’ve lost." Then he went home to sleep.

Do you know? When all the ballots had been counted, Aquino was the only survivor in a Liberal Party rout. And what a showing he made! He was nosed out only by a whisker as "topnotcher" by the veteran Senator Jose J. Roy (a Nacionalista, also from Tarlac). Pepe Roy got 3,770,000 votes against Ninoy’s 3,650,000. All the other LP contenders had been squeezed out.

No wonder Ninoy was singled out by Marcos as his nemesis.

Indeed, if Marcos had not declared martial law, if he had not taken the entire country "prisoner" under the gun and bayonet, Ninoy and then Senate President Gerry Roxas would have battled it out in 1973 for the LP Presidential nomination – and, almost surely, Ninoy would have become President.

God had better plans for him. He became a hero.

There have been endless speeches, sermons, essays, and laudatory articles about Ninoy and his sacrifice. But I submit that Ninoy’s greatest legacy to us all was his boundless optimism and faith. When we were released from the maximum security prison of Fort Bonifacio, and only Ninoy was left, he spent all those years of loneliness in solitary confinement. He was – under a sentence of "death" – literally buried in military prison for seven years and seven months. This would have, as they say, broken a lesser man. But Ninoy Aquino emerged instead, despite having to be rushed to America for an emergency heart operation, as brave, determined, and spirited as ever.

You know the rest. The story has been repeated ad infinitum, possibly ad nauseam. When he decided it was time to come home from "exile" to seek to convince Marcos to restore the nation to freedom (a forlorn mission), we all warned him: "Don’t come home, stupid. They will kill you."

But he came home, restating his faith in the Filipino. Can you imagine anything that sounds more ridiculous today than his remark, "The Filipino is worth dying for?" Aside from being too melodramatic in tone, it provokes both cynicism and sarcasm. Yet, for a paladin like Ninoy – to invoke that old-fashioned name for a knighthood no longer in fashion – it was a matter-of-fact assertion. He believed in love, in life, in chivalry, in riding into battle "on a white horse", even if – as another, more rough-cut knight errant, Manila’s late Mayor Arsenic Lacson used to put it – he "felt like a dope in shining armor".

Ninoy knew his Cyrano de Bergerac. Remember that line: "If you tilt with windmills" (as Don Quixote did) "those giant arms will catch you and throw you into the mud." To which the reply was: "Or up among the stars!"

Up there among the stars, I know, he smiles down on us and our follies. Still full of faith in the Filipino, no matter how often we’ve let him down.