Touched by class

With all the praises and paeans being heaped on our late publisher, Boss Max Soliven, I won’t try to come up with anything original, much less attempt to top what’s already been said by many of his contemporaries and peers in journalism.

I can’t claim to have been "close" to him. Nor can I say I was his friend. A significant difference in age, and the uncommonly lofty stature which he already had achieved in the profession, made that simply impossible.

We spoke many times, but our conversations were never between equals. I was his disciple, he my superior and master. I was figuratively at his feet, picking up whatever crumbs of knowledge and insight he would deign to throw in my direction.

And yet, one doesn’t have to be close to, or be a friend of, someone as unique and "up there" as Max to get a good idea of what the man was about, why he earned the respect and admiration of others in the profession, as well as those who occupied high positions in government and in social and civic life.

When Max spoke, people listened, whether or not they liked what he was saying. When he wrote, people related to what he had written, if for no other reason than that you knew the man wrote from the heart, and that if he was not always right, he at least always thought he was right, unless someone proved otherwise to his satisfaction.

For journalists, that is not always easy: to write and say what you think, not because you are sure you are right, certainly not because people in power, out of power, or simply out there on the streets all chorus that you are right, but because you, using experience, the facts and your gut as guides, think you are right.

It’s the difference, I think, between looking at yourself in the mirror and not liking what you see and being able to face yourself because what you’ve written is entirely your own, and you can damn the torpedoes and face all the consequences.

My first conversation with Max was hardly auspicious. It happened more years ago than I care to remember. I was then editor-in-chief of the Ateneo college newspaper, The Guidon. Max Soliven, a former editor of that same college paper, was already a swashbuckling columnist of the Manila Times. His acerbic pieces were must-reading for pre-First Quarter Storm college kids pretending to be tough, no-nonsense journalists.

It was sometime in the ’60’s. My editors and staffers wanted someone with a "front seat" to history to help us make some sense of what was going on. It was a time, now seemingly forgotten in the wake of George W. Bush’s recent visit to Hanoi, when a savage Vietnam War was being ratcheted up even more by a newly-installed and still all-knowing Lyndon Johnson. A rabid anti-commie, Max had also written about what he considered the obligations of true democratic states in the face of the red menace.

But Max was already shuttling between one speaking engagement to another. Such was his drawing power even then. When I finally spoke to him on the phone, he told me, in his characteristically direct manner, "Listen, Mr. Puno. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to start getting out of all these speaking engagements. So I think I’m going to decline your invitation, even if it’s coming from an Atenean. Sorry, maybe next time."

I mumbled something about how I understood, but that was that. There never was a next time. Over the next decade, Boss Max got busier than ever, covering Vietnam as an original "embedded" reporter, in between mixing it up with President Marcos and a host of unsavory politicians.

The only time Boss Max got a bit of rest, in a manner of speaking, was in 1972 when Marcos decided to declare martial law and silence scores of troublesome politicians, like Ninoy Aquino, and journalists, like him, by throwing them all in jail.

About 1984, when I already had a public affairs talk show on Channel 7, I invited him and several well-known anti-Marcos figures to the program. Others like the late Louie Beltran, Butz Aquino and Joker Arroyo came on board. My program, I’d like to think, gave the opposition to the regime a bully pulpit. Max, however, never agreed to guest on any political talk show, not even after Cory Aquino had become president.

Much later on, as head of the news and current affairs group of Channel 2, I asked him to revive his famous "reality television" program, Impact, on ANC. Still he wouldn’t budge, making clear to me that that part of his career was over. He was unrelenting even when I told him, somewhat obsequiously, that along with J.V. Cruz Views the News, his Impact was one of my all-time favorite TV shows.

The term "reality TV" wasn’t even a glint in an imaginative producer’s creative eye then, but what else would you call TV which showed politicians who were being bad-mouthed on the show by rivals bursting onto the set and challenging their tormentors to fisticuffs… LIVE! Max kept control and never allowed the Flash Elorde-wannabes to demo their murderous left hooks. But to me, that was exciting and "educational" TV!

When, in response to other suggestions, he did agree to do a series of interviews of the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential candidates (including one with a somewhat "reticent" FPJ, which some swear marked the start of his slide in the polls), I thought we would finally see the return of Max as television talk show host. No such luck!

When the series was over, he returned to his old Underwood, happily pounding on the Jurassic typewriter and producing kilometric columns laden with historical allusions and insightful comments, as only he could.

Pros like Max Soliven and the late, greatly-admired Louie Beltran, belong to another age of Philippine journalism. I daresay we won’t see their likes again. They had real, as opposed to imagined, power. They were also deeply committed to the responsibilities that that power carried with it.

MOPC President Tony Lopez tells me that Boss Max always refused to pontificate about "press freedom." He thought that media practitioners were better advised proving every time they wrote that they deserved that freedom. As long as they remained true to the ideals of their profession – truth, accuracy and fairness – who the hell cared what anyone else said?

Max’s career is testimony to the truism that the pen is mightier than the sword. That was proven countless times in the reactions of government officials, including Cabinet members and Presidents, to uncomplimentary remarks in his columns.

I think a fitting tribute his brothers in the profession can give him is to allow him the epitaph the controversial American television news personality Mike Wallace says he wants on his own gravestone: Tough But Fair. Boss Max was certainly that. We will all miss him. He will be a permanent presence in our professional lives.