It’s character that makes a President, not brickbats or plaudits

The New York Times editorial, as reprinted in the NYT’s international clone, the International Herald Tribune, hit La Presidenta right between the eyes. Even the headline alone of that editorial was stinging. It was titled: "The Sad Decline of Arroyo."

The Opposition was gleeful. The local media, where there’s no love lost for GMA, buzzed with comment over the powerful New York daily’s spanking of La Gloria. Resentfully, Malacañang Press Secretary and Presidential spokesman Ignacio "Toting" Bunye issued his standard response. He said that the Palace had "shrugged off" the nasty editorial. They ought to invent a new dance, involving shaking shoulders in honor of Toting, and call it "The Shrug."

The NYT, which used to emblazon on its front page the stern motto: "All the News that’s Fit to Print" continues to preen itself as the newspaper of record not only for the USA but for the world, despite a number of embarrassing Pulitzer Prize scandals.

What that great New York newspaper says, certainly, has clout. Its exposes of the Pentagon Papers, and the Iran-Contra scam, among others, have shaken governments with shudders (not "shrugs") equivalent to 9 on the Richter Scale.

Mrs. Arroyo and her government surely experienced such shocks and aftershocks yesterday, but tried to put a brave face on it.

Imagine the strong language invoked by the NYT, which asserted: "Filipinos thought they had put an end to electoral chicanery and governmental intimidation when they overthrew the Marcos dictatorship two decades ago. Unfortunately, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has completely lost touch with the ideals that inspired that 1986 "people power movement."

The editorial conceded that "Arroyo is no Ferdinand Marcos, at least not yet. But this onetime reformer is reviving bad memories of crony corruption, presidential vote-rigging and intimidation of critical journalists. Unless the Philippine Congress and courts find ways to rein in her increasingly authoritarian tendencies, democracy itself may be in danger."

More brickbats: "Her narrow re-election victory became tainted after a tape revealed her discussing her vote totals with an election commissioner while ballots were still being counted. She survived an impeachment attempt over that incident. But she was forced to send her husband into exile over charges that he took bribes from gambling syndicates."

"Earlier this year, she briefly declared a state of emergency in response to allegations of a coup threat that others disputed. Since then," the editorial alleged, "she has been intensifying pressure on a wide range of political critics and especially on the press. Government officials have warned news outlets that they will be held to restrictive new guidelines, the justice secretary talks darkly about a journalistic watch list, and the staff members of a well-known center for investigative journalism have been threatened with sedition charges. No Philippine government has made such efforts to muzzle the press since the Marcos era."

Sanamagan. Since I’ve quoted almost the entire hortatory opinion piece verbatim, might as well publish the mordant, concluding paragraph which declares: "President George W. Bush has repeatedly hailed Arroyo as an important ally against international terrorism. He now needs to warn her that by undermining a hard-won democracy, she is making her country far more vulnerable to terrorist pressure."

So there.

It’s now up to you, Dear Readers, to judge the validity of that prestigious newspaper’s acidic broadside.

Can’t blame La Gloria’s defenders for indignantly exclaiming, "OUCH!" or Toting Bunye dancing "The Shrug," in mock disdain.

* * *

I was a stringer, later what they call "part-time correspondent" of The New York Times for seven years – yep, lucky seven. I had been hired by the late Richard Trumbull, later worked in the Southeast Asia Bureau in Hong Kong under Seymour Topping ("Top" subsequently returned to New York to become Managing Editor). My last Editor-in-Chief, before I quit, was Abe Rosenthal.

I remember the first dispatch I sent from Saigon. Having trained in the New York Daily News (under a Joseph-Medill Patterson scholarship), my stylebook was more suited to that colorful tabloid which loved to refer to England’s Queen Elizabeth as "Lizzie" and underscored crime, sex, and human interest stuff, accompanied by photographs selected for their shock value. The Daily News formula worked circulation-wise in those days, since the newspaper boasted a Sunday circulation of 3 million.

When the New York Times foreign news editor, Manny Friedman, got my Vietnam story, he telexed me back: "Kindly write English." God rest his soul, he wrote "30" many years ago. But I’ll never forget his injunction – and I hope I’ve managed to live up to it.

In any event, what the NYT, my alma mater, says is to be respected – and, I might point out, La Presidenta does deserve some of the scorn heaped on her by that "Sad Decline" piece. Yet, it exaggerates.

The NYT is earnest, serious in assessment, but it’s far from infallible. And when my old paper pontificates it sometimes becomes obnoxious.

Years ago, I was having dinner in the apartment of Margaret and Clifton Daniels. As you may recall, Margaret Truman was the daughter of US President Harry S. Truman, and Cliff was one of our editorial directors in the Times.

The conversation drifted to how the New York Times decides what to underscore on its editorial page. Daniels shrugged (ala Toting Bunye) and smiled: "We toss a few ideas around, then check out the reports from our correspondents, then decide what’s the question of the hour."

This is no state secret. This occurs daily in editorial offices all over the world.

It must have been true love that brought Margaret and the handsome Clifton Daniels to the altar on April 21, 1956. The New York Times was one of the newspapers most detested by her dad, President "Give ’em Hell" Harry S. Truman.

Harry also detested the Washington Post. On December 6 (1952?) a Washington Post music critic panned Margaret’s singing, to which Harry replied on White House stationery, by delivering an angry rebuke and threatening to go over to the Post to give the critic a punch on the nose.

In sum, Harry didn’t like the press – and made no bones about it. But, in retrospect, even the media, who disliked Truman in return, had to admit he was a man of courage and decision.

* * *

If you’ll recall, it was The New York Times who built up the Cuban revolucionario Fidel Castro Ruz. Herbert Matthews, one of the NYT’s senior correspondents went into the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and returned bringing back with him stirring photographs of Fidel, Che Guevara, and his Barbudos, and declaring that Fidel was the hope of bringing freedom and democracy to Cuba, by toppling the dictatorial rule of the military despot, Fulgencio Batista.

Matthews and the Times asserted that Castro was not a Communist, but a nationalist – indeed, Fidel resolutely vowed he was not even a Socialist. The legend of Fidel and his resolute band was woven by The New York Times, and indeed he cut a fine figure. After he and his "26 of July" movement, allied with centre-right and rightwing students and guerrilla movements overthrew Batista, sending him and his cohorts fleeing the country on New Year’s Eve 1959-60, Fidel was welcomed in New York city with kisses and confetti, like a conquering hero.

This writer flew to La Habana in 1961 to spend a few months there writing a series of eleven frontpage articles on "What Went Wrong in the Bahia de Cocinos" (Or Why the Invasion in the Bay of Pigs Had Failed).

By that time, Fidel had shown his true colors and was declaring his government Socialist –later, Communist. I remember standing in the blazing sun in the Plaza Civica, with an immense crowd of fervent supporters, while Fidel spoke for three hours, assailing the corrupt, imperialist United States and the other enemies of "democracy" and Socialism.

With him on the stage were, of course, the handsome Che (already becoming an international icon), and the Soviet Union’s famed Cosmonaut, the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. (I told my Cuban friends that Gagarin was an Ilocano – for it’s true there are many Gagarins in Ilocos Norte, not just Marcoses, Vers, and Ablans).

Fidel was a spellbinder on the entablado in that heady era, even though his regime was already bloodstained with the blood of even former comrades and fellow, but middle-class rebel fighters against Batista. He thundered that "if the Norteamericanos don’t want to live 90 miles from a Socialist country" (the first in the Americas) "they should move!"

Despite the smothering heat, the audience frequently erupted into locomotive yells of "Fidel, Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!!!!!"

Or songs like "Somos Socialistas, palante, palante!" Or "Fidel, que tiene Fidel, que los Norteamericanos no pueden con el!"

The slogans of the hour were, naturally, "sin cuota, pero sin amo." (No sugar quota, but no master!) and "Patria o muerte, venceremos!" (Fatherland or Death – we shall overcome!)

Afterwards, Fidel enthusiastically told me when I said I had studied at the Ateneo de Manila, "Hermano," he exclaimed, "soy Jesuita tambien!" No wonder he’s like that. It turned out that from boyhood he had been trained by the Spanish Jesuits, first in his native Santiago de Cuba later in the capital of Havana.

In their first school, he and his brother had been expelled by the Jesuit fathers because they were too rowdy. This was the Colegio Dolores. The boy Fidel raged at his parents, but his mother said the priests didn’t want him back because he and his brother Raul were troublemakers. He then threatened her: "Mama, if you don’t send me back to that school, I will burn down this house!"

Afterwards, they sent him to enrol in the more exclusive Jesuit school in Havana, the Colegio de Belen. There, Fidel’s upper middle class and upper class schoolmates scoffed at him as "Guajiro" (probinsyano) which, afterwards, despite his terrible temper and violent nature became a term of endearment.

As for Che Guevara (an Argentine, really, from Rosario), it was hard to imagine him Governor of the Central Bank – but he was concurrently the official berdugo. The joke, told himself by Che, was that when Fidel was farming out Cabinet and other major posts to his cronies and comrades, he had called out: "Who among you is an Economist?" Che, a doctor actually, raised his hand.

Afterwards, he explained when he was surprisingly designated head of the Central Bank and other financial institutions, "Economist? I thought you had said ‘Communist’!"

Che later died in Bolivia, tracked down and shot down in the forest by CIA-trained Special Forces.

Anyway, the New York Times had guessed wrong about the young Fidel Castro.

Now, in Latin America another Fidelista has arisen, El Commandante Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela. Chavez is using his country’s oil wealth to give out "aid" to other countries like Mexico, and other South American nations (perhaps he’s already doled out US $25 billion) in order to mobilize them against the United States of America.

I had interviewed him some years ago, and he said that Fidel Castro was his idol and role-model. He’s now surpassing his idol, even in colorful gimmickry. On a recent TV program, I saw him explaining how he and his archers would repel a "coming American invasion" with poison-tipped arrows!

Gee whiz. Betcha, GMA would like to borrow some of those arrows to use against The New York Times.

* * *

Perhaps – when all is said and done – La Glorietta ought to, in turn, adopt Harry S. Truman as her idol.

One of the most unforgettable photographs in US newspaper history is that of President Truman stepping out onto the rear platform of his "whistle-stop" campaign train, the Ferdinand Magellan (by coincidence), on November 4, 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri. Truman was chatting with reporters when somebody handed him a copy of the Chicago Tribune, his least favorite newspaper.

Across the front of it ran a huge headline, soon to become immortal: "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN."

Holding the newspaper aloft in both hands, grinning from ear to ear, Truman paused to allow photographers to snap that scene, his cheshire-cat smile seemingly to say: "Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers."

For by that time, Truman had already crushed his Republican rival, Thomas E. Dewey. Truman, whom almost all the newspapers (including The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) had predicted would be buried under a Dewey landslide had carried 28 states with a total of 303 electoral votes, and even licked Dewey in the popular vote by more than 2.1 million.

Truman polled, in the final tally, 24,105,812 votes, Dewey 21,970,065.

In that crucial election, the first postwar contest, NEWSWEEK magazine took a poll of 50 highly-regarded political writers to ask who would win the election. The results appeared in the October 11, 1948 issue, or three weeks before election day. Of the pundits polled, not one thought Truman would win. The vote was unanimous, 50 for Dewey, 0 for Truman.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of HST, David McCullough quoted NEWSWEEK as declaring: "The landslide for Dewey will sweep the country." The election was as good as over.

The gamblers’ odds, the opinion polls, the forecasts by columnists, political reporters, political experts, biographer McCullough noted, had practically dismissed Truman.

The biggest and most influential dailies, such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Star, the Kansas City Star, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Wall Street Journal, all endorsed Dewey.

The Detroit Free Press called Truman intellectually unqualified. The Chicago Tribune simply dubbed Truman "an incompetent."

The Boston Post, it seems, was the rare exception. In its editorial, the Post called Truman "Captain Courageous" and described him as "humbly honest, homespun and doggedly determined to do what is best for America as Abraham Lincoln."

In the words of the old song, the newspaper hymned Harry, because he ‘Dared to be a Daniel; Dared to stand alone. Dared to hold a purpose firm. Dared to make it known.’ "

On the final day, The New York Times predicted a Dewey victory with 345 electoral votes. The Wall Street Journal and NEWSWEEK prognosticated Dewey would have a clean sweep. LIFE magazine carried a full-page photo of Dewey, slugged "The Next President."

When Truman, on Friday, November 5 returned to Washington in triumph, almost everybody in town lined the streets to hail him. Passing the stone-fronted offices of the Washington Post, Truman looked up to see a big sign strung across the facade: "WELCOME HOME FROM CROW-EATERS!"

By golly, Harry – you showed ’em!

The historian Eric Sevareid would say nearly 40 years later of Truman: "I am not sure he was right about the atomic bomb, or even Korea. But remembering him reminds people what a man in that office (of the President) ought to be like. It’s character, just character. He stands like a rock in memory now."

I wish GMA could be described like that, four years, or 40 years from today. The NYT editorial should be for her a heads-up, wake-up call. If she would only listen.

Character is what makes the difference. Harry fought on, never-say-die, whatever his most vicious critics and the doomsayers said.

Victory over vitriol is never attained by words, but by difficult, courageous deeds.

That’s Harry’s legacy to us all. Hats off to you, Give ’em Hell Harry! You gave Americans a kick in the bottom, and a shining example to all of us – never to be forgotten.