Mambo redux

When we were young and our life was an open book, we used to hear about the guy, Ramon Magsaysay, the president who died in a plane crash: Mambo of Zambales, a legend in his own time. He was a chapter in our social studies book in the elementary grades, subtitled Man of the Common Tao, and a name passing mention in the mouths of our elders, sometimes in awe, occasionally in depreciation, after all he was "just a mechanic."

But if in America the incident of Buddy Holly’s death in a plane crash was known as "The Day the Music Died" (re Don MacLean’s American Pie), here in our home country Magsaysay’s passing away in similar circumstances now looks, in hindsight, as the end of the innocence for Philippine politics, and the lone survivor of the president’s party when they slammed into a mountainside in Cebu one early morning in 1957, Nestor Mata, a kind of idiot savant of the Cold War era.

"Magsaysay, the people’s president" by Manuel Martinez is a sterling product of research in an attempt to recreate the life and times of perhaps the country’s most popular president, thus we are brought back to a belle époque of a Zambales, the circumstances surrounding his birth filled with portents of a unique destiny, to a boy’s simple and rustic childhood and his revels as a young man in Manila, forever on the go as if the gods were chasing him towards his fate as leader of a people rising from the ashes of the Pacific War; his courtship of the former Luz Banzon of Bataan, the war years and the battle with the Huks, his stint as defense secretary, the ins and outs of 1950s politics, his friendship with the Americans and, finally, the inevitable presidency that was cut short just when he was about to run for reelection.

Martinez, with able editorial assist by Nelson Navarro, interviews surviving members of the Magsaysay family, including the senator, the late president’s son and namesake, and daughter and PR practitioner Mila Valenzuela, as well relies extensively on the memoirs written by the Magsaysay matriarch Perfecta, who half the time seemed to downplay the greatness of her son, as if stressing the ordinariness in RM would somehow avert the course of tragedy.

To Martinez’s and Navarro’s credit, the superlatives and related adjectives are held in check, focusing instead on a life well lived, although the oft-repeated analogy is like that of a meteor or comet, indeed as if RM had merely fallen out of the sky and walked for a while among mortals like us. It is, however, disheartening to note that a project of this magnitude would suffer the same grammatical lapses still prevalent in most newsrooms: the gender bending possessive pronoun taking the gender of the object instead of the subject, as in, the president and HER beloved mother, a construction which may be a holdover from the transliterated Spanish, but there should be no excuses.

We read how Magsaysay was a true freedom fighter, a warrior for democracy who was said to be America’s boy, and during that post-World War 2, McCarthyist era we can understand his uncompromising stance in the war on communism, which struck a sympathetic chord in the population still reeling from the Japanese Occupation and all things despotic. It’s a wonder that some of RM’s more or less contemporaries have refused to outgrow that bogey hunting demeanor, although lately they may have transposed it to the 21st century war on terror.

RM’s courtship of Luz Banzon is described in austere detail, a fitting subplot to this adventure-type biography. Martinez too comes up with the worthy observation of RM’s eye for beauty, how he was able to discern it almost like a presentiment when he chose Luz over her older sisters more adept in the social graces. His ruse about sending the Banzon driver away so he could himself drive the Banzon mother and daughters back home is good for a laugh, evidence that the guy was also pilyo.

The Magsaysays’ main conjugal home in the early years of marriage was on Arellano Street in Singalong, and we can only hope that some marker or plaque has been placed there, similar to the old Laurel abode on Peñafrancia in Paco, because a place of history should not forever be lost among the accessorias and internet shops, bottled water stations and vulcanizing and car wash shops, though for this last one, maybe RM wouldn’t mind that much.

His living through the war years as an undercover providing food supplies for guerrillas and families in the mountains of Zambales is fraught with hyper-realism, and readers can only marvel at the man’s perseverance and survival instincts that we have to be reminded of Perfecta’s declaration that her son had no amulet, rather the charm of faith and belief in his mission to serve the less fortunate or those plainly oppressed by war, any war.

Among those who donated goods and other relief items to the guerrilla cause during the Occupation was Go Puan Seng, patriarch of the Go family and founder of the Fookien Times, a benevolence that second-guessed The STAR’s current Operation Damayan, a project started by founder Betty Go-Belmonte, eldest daughter of Go Puan Seng.

RM’s making it to the cover of TIME as Huk fighter during his tenure as President Quirino’s defense secretary in the early 50s may have earned the envy of his then growing rivals and critics in the political scene, but it was a harbinger of things to come in Malacañang in a couple of years or so.

It is also noteworthy that one of RM’s youth volunteers and ardent supporters during his run for the presidency and even the Palace years, was Ninoy Aquino, who come to think of it now seemed to mimic Magsaysay’s firebrand style that similarly had his foes on tenterhooks. And like the Guy, Ninoy also died at the age of 50, half a century that changed the course of a nation, though we wouldn’t say like a comet or meteor, rather like a fire in the dark night of the Pinoy soul that suffered through martial law.

Publisher Max Soliven was a reporter at the time of the Magsaysay presidency, and noted how RM’s style was that he would kill you with his kindness and generosity, such as when Magsaysay covered the sleeping media entourage with blankets during a coverage that had them journeying by boat, perhaps on the MV Ang Pangulo.

Magsaysay was also a stickler against bribery and the lagay and palakasan system, something that unfortunately may have been institutionalized during martial law and damaged our culture, possibly irreversibly.

As full-fledged biography then, "Magsaysay the People’s President" is instructive and, pardon the overused term, educational, enlightening us on the life and death of a man whose greatness was very much evident long before we were born and whose influence continues to linger now in our creeping middle age. It’s just two years away from the 50th anniversary of the guy’s death, by which time he would have been dead as long as he had lived, a milestone by any measure.

Yet somehow we can’t help feeling how the subject would have been handled by more able–and not to say more compelling–writers like, say, the late Nick Joaquin, or even the equally late Quijano de Manila, who however are one and the same RM awardee not too long ago, when the Pinoy world was not filled with Jose Velardes and Pidals.

But we take what we can get out of the Martinez-Navarro work, and by reading about Mambo we can only imagine how the man might be cringing and rolling in his grave due to our country’s latest developments, such as Cha-cha and wiretaps –if they can bug a president when they’re not yet in power, how much more they can do to the common tao when they take over, since a missing election commissioner seems enough to convict the incumbent in the bar of public opinion–and maybe, not to mention ironically enough, rightly so. Might RM have belonged to a different race?