In Our Image: The United States and the Philippines; Second Interview with Claude Buss Part 2

...suddenly go wrong, but what went wrong with it? There were two things that I think account for going wrong. Until 1977, the balance sheet was pretty even on the pros and cons of martial law. The first thing that went wrong was he bit off more than he could, too, when you undertake the planning for economic development and total responsibility for the welfare of your country. Those are very heavy loads, and you've got to have a pretty intelligent group of people around you in order to implement the policies that you perceive. And I think that there was not the talent that was able to direct from the top. The very great future that he perceived for the Philippines. So I think that he just bit off more than he can chew.

And the second thing was the tremendous growth in his own avarice, I mean the way that things more and more gravitated towards him. And the more that his share of the activities was augmented, I think, that this generated a great deal of opposition. If he had been willing to accept less, I think that it would have made his condition, made his regime much more survivable than it turned out to be. But you're talking about graft and curages that we're going to work with. [inaudible] Use his name when we start off again. A third thing that accounted for the decline of Marcos's popularity and also made him in many ways of failure was the foreign economic situation.

I mean the price of oil going up as it did just simply wrecked his budget and took much more from the Philippines than he ever thought he would have to pay. And when you have the increase in the price of those imports and the fall in the price of his main export sugar and coconut oil, this really put him in a far worse economic hole than he ever expected to be in. Then the fourth thing is the tremendous amount of foreign borrowing that resulted from his grandiose economic plans of these huge industrial combines that he wanted to establish. And when you looked at the foreign economic picture and you saw these huge loans going up, a billion dollars at a clip that he was borrowing from foreign banks. And then when you looked at what was happening in the Philippines, nothing was happening.

All you found were a bunch of shell buildings that none of them producing anything. And you simply had the Philippines going deeper and deeper in debt without any earning capacity being enhanced in the Philippines itself. These things accumulated and made his regime in 1979, for example, far more unpopular than it had ever been. And he was on the downhill side, I think, from 1979 on. What was the impulse to a mass of listening to this huge amount of money? I don't know what the impulse was of a massing, the huge amount of money that he had massed. There's certainly no human being could do all the things that one could be able to do with the amount of money that gravitated towards him.

But to know in many ways, this has got to be said in his defense. Everybody wanted his help. If any Filipino got any idea for way to make a million bucks, he would be guaranteed success if he could go to Marcos and get Marcos on his side. And I have no doubt that far more offers were made to Marcos than he could ever accept. He didn't have to go and hit people over the head to get these things that came to him. And when these people would come to him with their projects, why he just simply got to demanding more and more of his own cut. But what would drive a person to accumulate masses like that? I don't know. Maybe it was the sheer satisfaction that comes in the ability to do it. I can't see more than that. Certainly he was not going to be in position to enjoy it the rest of his life. What about the [inaudible]

You have a particular... If one has a particular question to ask about Imelda, she's a very complex person. She fantasizes like the Dickens. And when she begins to talk, you never know where fantasy takes over and rationalization is left behind. I always thought of her as a person that had not much ability to conceptualize. People would say, if Marcos goes, will she be in position to succeed him? I never had any feeling that that was her capability at all. She was a tremendous organizer, a tremendous executive to get things done. He would get the idea that we ought to have this building, we ought to have this development. And she was the one that could pick up the ball and organize people to do things. Run the election and he'd get the idea of what had to be done in different areas.

And she could turn up with the organization, find the right people, and get them all together. She really had lots of glam that she could just simply get things done. It seemed to me that being one half of a combination she was superb, he would do the conceptualizing, come up with the ideas. And she would just simply pick up the ball and run with it, and have these things translated into reality. How do you explain or could you explain why he more and more... I had a hard time saying it was a wonderful way to get rid of her. And I didn't want to say that. But there were times when I think that probably he was kind of glad to have her in Libya and be king or maybe over in Moscow. But she did achieve a lot for the Philippines in the way of diplomatic accomplishment. She herself often said that when at ?Chernenko's funeral?,

she's the one that people noticed, not just a matter of her representing a great power or anything else. She was Imelda in AAA, for example, when they were working out an arrangement for the future of Mindanao. She made a genuine contribution to the government's policy in trying to put down that Muslim rebellion. And so she did achieve things when it came to power. Governor of Metro Manila, which was one of her big outlets for internally, and also that Ministry of Human Settlements, I think you've got to give her credit for doing a lot of good things. On the other hand, she had a lot of really scatterbrain ideas and a lot of it that was really fluff.

You know, the University of Life, for instance, and a lot of these heart centers and spectacular luxury hotels and the conventions and things that she went on. There was so much that didn't have a good solid foundation that obscured some of the things that she really accomplished. I don't think that he ever intended that she should follow him. I don't think so at all. A little incident one day was very enlightening to me. Marcos was talking about something. I don't even remember what it was he was talking about. But it was right near the end of things. And he was speaking very slowly and was very consciously groping for words. And she would be listening to him and she would see the word he was groping for.

And she would cut in right away and say, "this is the word you want, or use the word whatever it was." And then she'd back out right away. She realized that it wasn't a good thing to take too much attention from him. It was a good thing to be helpful. And yet, when the two of them were together, she was extremely astute. I don't know if it was her intuition, whether it was brain power on her part. She knew very well how to occupy a useful place when she would be in with there and with Marcos as they were working out some plan, whatever it was in front of them at the moment. One thing, which is, you know, she's...in proportion in that respect. How anybody could ever account for whether it's 2,000 or 3,600 pairs of shoes.

I have absolutely no idea. But in her appearance, she was always neat and always kind of spectacular. And on some occasions, super spectacular. She knew how to put on something that would really be a party out of this world. I'm sure we've all read accounts of parties at the Lady Beach or what she did on given occasions. But she honestly believed that the Filipino people wanted her to be that way. And I believe that she believed it. She said that, "After all, if I were a nobody, I would never have the opinion in the hearts of the Filipino people that I have." But she diluted herself like anything. I was with them on the night after the returns came in from the legislature elections in 1984. And when in Manila, in Metro Manila, I think her party won, even with all the cheating that went on,

I think her party only won five out of 21 seats. And she thought that she was going to make a clean sweep of Manila. And she was almost in tears. And it was as if a revelation had come to her. And she says, "I never knew that the people hated me so much." You know, you always got the impression that she showed in public that she believed that she was responding to the desires that fill a pain people. But she darn near broke down on that night and the vote that first went against them. The first intimation, I think, that they really felt that things might go against them was after these legislative elections in 1984. And her whole attitude that night was that this was simply a personal turning against her on the part of the voters that she just didn't believe could happen. How does one explain the love of ostentatious living that one often experiences in the Philippines?

I don't know if that's worse than it is with other societies or not. It certainly is remarkable in the Philippines. The thousands of dollars on a party on a weekend. And even with the poor people out in the boondocks where spenditures for a wedding or a funeral will put a family in debt that they'll never rise above these things occur. There isn't a whole lot in life that's the opportunity to show off their wealth as there is in some of these displays. And the lack of alternative opportunities, I suppose, is one thing.

But some people like it. Some people don't. And just everybody in the Philippines seems to like it. I can't explain it. Let me go on for a moment then. Let's put it a little differently. There are a few societies, I think, modern societies, especially in developing countries where you have such a stark contrast between wealth and poverty. Whatever the statistics are, 70% of the poverty line and so forth. The rest of Asia has overcome this. Again, how could you explain this? I can't explain it. I'm not so sure that it's all that different from other places. I think of the salt and the brunette, for example, with these 20-year-olds' rices? with different colors for different days. And I read all kinds of stories about living like ?Rajas? in other countries.

There isn't the popular condemnation. In China, one doesn't find it that much, for example. I'm speaking of pre-communist China. It would have been very much frowned upon a much more respect for the doctrine of the mean and society like the Chinese society. But I don't know how you explain it. You can't deny the fact. The fact is that the ostentation is the hallmark of the prosperous Filipino and there's just no two ways about it. Apart from ostentation, tell me about the social disparity. Again, I can't explain what we used to call in our own society, the parlor pinks. The Philippines is full of people like this. And in the university world, you can see it.

And a lot of the children that come in, that are children of society leaders in the Philippines. And they can mouth all the ideals of what would be a better society. But to go out and actually take on the responsibilities of leadership, no. And something that Cory has talked about, a great deal. And that is this concept of public service. This has not been driven home. And here is one of the greatest dangers that I can see in the Philippine society now. If you haven't got this concept of public service. And if you admit that the communists, the NPA, do have a concept of public service. If there is even an eye order of social constructiveness in the extreme left, then the Philippines, the current political leadership in the Philippines, is in for a bad day.

Because the great hope that I can see, and what we're talking about earlier, the possibility of development of democratic institutions, depends on a majority of people having that devotion to public service, putting the welfare of the community above their own. And this is sadly lacking in the Philippines. I don't think for one minute that it won't develop. I can only say that it's got to develop more than we've seen it develop in the past. If there's going to be any kind of an optimistic future for a democratic regime there at all. Can I just give Cory a keynote or president? Okay.

President Aquino has talked a great deal about her hope that the Filipinos will develop a higher sense of public service and public morality. And I think she's justified in calling their attention to the lack of those things in previous Philippine history. Too often, people when they get into office, they'll think about obligations to the family, but very seldom the abstract sense of obligations to the state. Many times you will hear people say that what I've done for my family, what I've accomplished in life, is going to be a good thing for the family. But the sense of contributing to the welfare of the state, even at the expense of the family, is something that has not characterized Philippine history.

It's filled with plenty of illustrations of people who have gotten into public office, then court records have shown that they've made a lot of money for themselves. But Philippine social history is not full of examples of people who have been public benefactors such as you'll find in, I think, in our own society. I think this is very much lacking. Could we go back a moment to that thought I threw out here about...for patronage to their families? In our early history, we concentrated on public education, and we were very much interested in building an educated citizenry in the Philippines because we genuinely felt that this would be the basis of the kind of democracy that we wanted in the future.

And for a while, we contemplated the building of a bureaucracy. There weren't that many Americans interested in taking jobs in the Philippines, and through the early days when our Republicans were in charge of the Philippine administration, there were a few Americans that would go out and take jobs, superintendents of schools, in some cases, in post office administration. But never many down the line, and we never developed a civil service abroad. But you must remember that we didn't even develop a foreign service abroad, that when it came to an American foreign service, which would be a career service, this is a post-World War I development. Then when the Democrats came in, and Wilson named Harrison as the governor general,

one of the things that most Americans in the Philippines held against that change from the Republican Democratic administration, they charged him with having wrecked the civil service. He "filiponized" the civil service, and what few Americans we had, we took away the attractions of what would have been a career service, and simply opened that civil service to Filipinos. And it wasn't any time at all until the same practices that you found in the other political institutions in the Philippines came to mar the construction of civil service in the Philippines. For example, you won't find anybody who will say that the Philippines ever developed the native standards of Filipino civil service that would compare, for example, with the Malay civil service, where you had in the colonial service and in the British territories, the development of a colonial service, which was a mixture of British and Colonials. And the transfer of the standards of British civil service to their colonies, we just never did it.

And again, I think the knowledge that sooner or later we were going to get out of there is a thing that just simply dampened the enthusiasm for Americans building up something that was going to last that long after they departed. I got two more subjects to like to get on. Well, let's start off light. Could you do us a little character sketch with him? When I say that Ninoy was a typical Filipino politician, I don't want to condemn him with faint praise. Hail fellow, well met an extrovert, a person that extreme confidence in himself, he had all those attributes. The ability to rise above his suffering was something that one would have never discovered had it not been for the years that he had to spend in solitary confinement.

And an estimate of his character has to be upgraded tremendously by the way that he behaved under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Keeping a sense of humor about him, not losing sight of ambition, confidence that he had the ability to serve the Filipino people, all those things were very much a part of him. Let me ask you to go back to before he was assassinated. Oh yes, one could see changes after he came out of jail. You don't go through seven years of solitary confinement without having tremendous things happen to you. And I think it was absolutely miraculous the way he could keep those original one might say even happy, go lucky things about him.

They were not destroyed by that those years of confinement at all. Much more serious in his planning, much more aware of the difficulties ahead of him, these things characterized his attitudes before his assassination, but his enthusiasm. I don't think that I'm being wrong when I even use the word boyishness about him that was a tremendous amount of that and in spite of all the things that he went through. Did he stop off to see you on his way out? He stopped. He came here with ?Guy Parker? and his younger sister and we had all half a dozen hours together here. I'm not sure if it was directly on his way back or within weeks.

He's going to talk about why he's going back. If you can skip the other names because we don't who they are. I think that his testimony before the Congress shows very well his attitude on the way back. He had no illusions about the difficulties that he was faced with. I don't remember that any mention of possible assassination came up in conversation unless it would have been all half in jazz. I wouldn't have known how serious it was in the back of his own mind, but where he said, of course you never know what might happen to me, something like that might have come up. But the idea that he was, that his day of destiny had come, there was none of that in his attitude at all.

I don't think that what he wanted to change. Could you just try and quote him? I mean, where were you? Could you set the scene? Was he here at the house? No, it was [inaudible]. I took him to the faculty club for lunch and I think. Over lunch. Over lunch, we talked about what his role in the future would be. I had much more the feeling that he was thinking in terms of succeeding Marcos, rather than of displacing Marcos. I think that he was reconciled to the fact that Marcos was there until 1987. See, this was after all in 1983, when he came through here. And this would give him plenty of time to operate, to build up a succession machine provided he would be allowed to operate in the Philippines.

And I think that this is what he wanted to do. Did he talk at all about Imelda trying to dissuade him not to go back or any of those things? No. I never talked with him about his relations with Imelda. And all I know about Imelda's relations with him, I learned from Imelda. And she had no hesitation at all in talking about her contacts with him and her ideas about what the future would be. And how she tried to get him to accept a place within the Marcos administration. See, not a job, but a thing to do, a relationship, or something that would fit in the future of the Philippines, but without displacing Marcos. What was she offering him?

I'm not quite sure- Sorry about that, would you mention her name? Yeah. I'm not quite sure what kind of a place she would offer him. She did talk about money. She even talked about setting up a loan for anything that he might want to do. Whether she conceived of his possibly going into a non-political life, I don't know. But I don't think that she felt that she was going to make it possible for him to replace Marcos at all. I know one story, and I don't know where in the world this one came from. And it came either from Aquino or from Imelda. At midnight, one night in New York, he was in his pajamas and got a phone call from her. And in this phone call, she said that she is having a party over at the Waldorf Historia.

And she wanted him to come over. And he said, "Oh no, it's too late. I don't want to come now. I'm too tired. I've had a busy day." And she insisted, no, no, you've got to come. And he decided to go. And when he arrived at the party, she met him and threw her arms or bowed him and the photographers clicked. And he went around the table and she took him around the tables. Practically he said, oh come on in. I want you to meet my guests. I've been introduced to him too. This is Mr. X. This is Mr. Y. This is Mr. Z. And took him all around the room. And then after she had made the rounds with him, she practically deserted him.

And it was just as if he weren't there. And he turned around and went home. Did he tell you that story? I don't know. I told you that story [chuckles] but I don't know. Because he told it to me, but I could have told it to you too. My reactions to Cory. And again, I have to say Cory, without any loss of respect for her and her position, her achievements at all, because it's always natural in the Philippines to refer to anyone by their nickname. And even though she's become the president, you still can't refrain from referring to her as Cory. And my first intimations of her possibilities as a political leader came from my friend, Teddy Locsin Jr. when he was over here and preparing for what turned out to be the campaign later.

And he told me about her, what he perceived to be her possibilities. And it got me serious, thinking about her. And whatever I had known about her was just as Ninoy's wife until that time. And then when I went out again, must have been in the fall of 85, and I think just after she had announced that she was going to team up with Doy Laurel and run for the presidency, her development as a political leader became very clear. And I very quickly became convinced that here was a person with tremendous hitherto unrevealed qualities. And in her appeals to people in her handling crowds, I immediately thought of a few people.

She had a tremendous way of communicating with crowds. And the thing that came through to me was her absolute sincerity. You can call it confidence of integrity, which is so important in the Philippines, because there are such kidders, you know, that everybody, they laugh and kid and joke. And it's very easy to take liberties with the truth. And you could tell that Cory had none of that about her at all. When she said, this is the way I think, or this is what I want, she really gave you confidence in her integrity. This was right from the beginning.

And this is why I felt that nobody else, nobody else, could possibly have made the show against Marcos that she did. Because to me, that campaign, I don't know how you felt about it. But that campaign to me was Cory Aquino versus Marcos. And it was really public service versus graft and corruption if you want to put it that way. And all through the campaign for almost a year, she demonstrated that she could take it, that she had the qualities of leadership. And I just simply became an enthusiastic supporter of her, not just as an anti-Marcos person in the Philippines, but of her leadership. Let me tell you one incident. Hold on, just a second. I'm sorry.

We were at... Sorry. But we were at headquarters when after the votes had been cast but not counted. And everybody was alert to the possibility of fraud taking place. Between the time the ballot boxes were transported from the precinct headquarters to the assembly point wherever it might be. And word was coming in to her headquarters about frauds taking place here and there. And word came in of a massive irregularity that was taking place over to Makati City headquarters. And there were a whole bunch of reporters in the room in the course of a conference that she was holding. And a bunch of television people there. And Rene Sadisag was in charge and he was her public relations director.

And he told the assembled conference what was going on. And she took over the conference from him. And she said, I would like all you reporters who are here to go along with me, I'm going over to Makati. And I would especially like you reporters with cameras to go along. And then in the best Hollywood way. But unconscious as they come, she threw up her arm in the air. And she said "Charge!" and she started down the aisle and everybody was with her. And it was just one of these unconscious things that showed tremendous political intuition that one doesn't find in many political leaders. After her running the government for a year. Now as you get down to the pros of running the government interest to the poetry of the election.

How do you evaluate her? I evaluate her very high. I'm sorry if you just start again as Cory. Oh, yeah, Cory as a president. In the first year of her performance, I evaluate her very high. I do not think that she has been guilty of vacillation of weakness or indecisiveness. I think that hesitancy has been entirely justified. And it's far better to take your time in making a decision than to rush in and then spend a whole lot of energy and having to back out. And where people have wanted quick results, for example, the problem of land reform. Nobody can say that her government has achieved what it should achieve at that time.

But at the same time, I don't think anybody can accuse Cory of falling down on the job. She's given a minister of land reform, a minister of agriculture, minister of local government to face up to their problems and to the basic problem of land reform. The best that they can do, and they have not been able to come up in one year with a program that they are able yet to put into motion. I don't think that that is a failure on Cory's part. I think that she has said to her people, you get to work on land reform and come along as quickly as humanly possible. And I don't expect two fast results from a group of operatives in a problem which is centuries old in its existence in the matter of insurgency. I think that so easy to put all the problems of anti-government, law and order, rebellion, insurgency, into one category which we usually lump as counter insurgency and say she hasn't come up yet with a counter insurgency policy.

Maybe she hasn't, but she's got a lot of diverse elements that she's got to well together. And I don't think that she's done such a bad job of it, particularly when the elements that she's got to well together are so divided within themselves. You take just such a concept as the army and think of what the army is, integrated police, civilian home defense forces, all the different cliques within the army. And even to get the army together is a tremendous job. And then you look how the leadership is developed when you've had to go through an end really series of end really episodes. Not quite sure what Ileto is going to do, not quite sure whether Ramos is going to provide strong leadership or not.

And I don't look at those things just as Cory's what. It's all right to say that she ought to knock heads together, but you only knock heads together when you knock him together for a purpose. You're not doing it just to bruise somebody's head and what these folks in the army must do must get their act together. Then she's got to get them all together as best she can to tackle the fundamental problem of law and order. And so when you think of what she's been able to accomplish in a year, I think it's been pretty miraculous. I admit that when you say what tangible results is she brought about, it's pretty hard to put your fingers on tangible results. I feel at the end of the year the Philippines is a lot better off than it was a year ago. But I know very well that it's going to take time before you get to the solution of these problems which entadate her by far.

Alternative that they could have been brought into the political process. Referring to the the the Huks. The critical turning point which I think came in it at the time of the end of the war in 1945. You've had in recent years social reform movements, land reform movements throughout the Philippines. And in the area where these hooks came into being up in central Pampanga. This has been a hotbed of socialist protests against rich landlords for many years. And there was a leader of these people in Pampanga but the name of Pedro Abid Santos. He was a guy that looked like Gandhi and had a whole lot of Gandhi ideology about him. And he was a very educated man and he became the leader of these disaffected people in Pampanga before World War II.

And when the war broke out, he came to my office in Manila and offered the service of his socialist tenants if ever they should be used, ever should be needed against the Japanese. Quezon saw Santos come into my office and he called me over the next day to Malacañang. I was glad to go and he says, "What in the world are you doing flirting with my enemies?" He said, "These fellas are socialist. They hate my guts. And yet you welcome them into the High Commissioner's office." And I said, Mr. President, what Pedro Abad Santos came into the office of the American High Commission for was to offer the service of his people against the Japanese. He didn't say anything at all about the political position of President Quezon.

And all we talked about was whether these people could be useful to the Americans in a war against Japan. Well, this ambivalence in the Philippine scene existed until after the war broke out. In other words, you're against people like Quezon who represented the old oligarchs, who represented the rich political leaders. And you were also in favor of Americans in the event that a foreign invader like the Japanese would come. And this was their frame of mind during the war. When the war broke out, they did, according to our own records, kill more pro-Japanese in the Philippines than any other group of people. See, they organized this thing which was called Hukbalahap, which is People's Organization against the Japanese. But as soon as the war was over, the problem arose.

Yes, they killed a lot of pro-Japanese, but most of these pro-Japanese were rich Filipinos, and therefore they are dangerous socialists. We made the decision, we being whoever the powers in the United States government were at that time, that they were dangerous as outlaws against the new Rojas administration. And when the votes were counted to four against Roxas, there were seven congressmen who were elected on the Huk ticket. This was very important because at this time, the bill, the tidings bill for the rehabilitation of the Philippines and the Bill Bill, parody, trade, privileges for our traders in the Philippines, were linked together. And we said that we will make this money available to the Philippines for rehabilitation only if they will make a clause in the new constitution that will grant a favored American position in Philippine trade. The Huks opposed that. The vote to make this constitutional grant of the Bill parody bill was so close that if those seven congressmen had been given their seats, that constitutional amendment would be defeated.

And consequently, whatever the procedures were, the votes of those Huks were not counted. They were not allowed to have their seats in the Congress, and the Bill Bill, which was for the American trade privilege, was accepted. They had nothing, they said if they were treated this way by the new regime, not to have their political voices heard, there was no future for them under the new regime. Consequently, they said the only future for us is in the hills. And I think that what happened then was well known. They did grow in central Pampanga, they did become very strong, they were a social menace until Magsaysay came along and handled them in his own successful way. That's the background of that bunch of Hukbalahaps that were so against us and against the regime that we helped to support in the days right after independence.

During the Magsaysay period, you went over there. How much of the Maksai Sai success was due to him? How much of it do you think was due to his American support? It's hard to separate the American support and the talents of Magsaysay and the procedures of Magsaysay in judging his success against the communists. I think that the Americans helped him in a material way and they helped him in a very real pragmatic way when it came to winning his election as the president. But I don't think that that was the crucial factor in his putting down the Huks. See, he was the minister of defense under Quirino in 1948.

And as minister of defense is when he said, look, the previous way of fighting Huks has been all wrong. For example, he said, you send the army out, they go out in jeeps in the morning. They can't find the Huks they come back to their homes in the afternoon and that's the end of the anti-Huk campaign for the day. He said, as minister of defense, it's going to be different. He said, when my men go out as soldiers at the end of the day and they don't find the Huks, they're going to get out of their jeeps, they're going to camp there, they're going to start to look for them the next day and they're going to keep after them until they do fight them. And when they find them, they're going to fight them. Now, that was a military campaign that he launched against the Huks and for two years, he fought that campaign successfully. Now, whether Lansdale's advice on how to use the jeeps and how to fight after you got there, I'm in no position to say how valuable that was. I only know that Magsaysay's personal performance was vital.

He gave the army a new confidence in itself. He acted as a military leader, should act. He was out there with his own men. And he said to the soldiers, your job, first of all, is as soldiers. Then, after that war was won in the field, and then after the intelligence people gave him the information that enabled him to capture that Communist Politburo in the city of Manila, then came the job of how do you take this guy that's been a successful soldier and he's carried on a successful campaign against the guerrillas, and we call them Communist guerrillas, and I wish that for the sake of our own accurate thinking that we just simply recognize that they were rebels. They were anti-government, whether they were communist or not communist, or the degree to which they were communist, and what their leadership was communist, I think, is less important in the fact that they were all anti-government and Magsaysay ?lit? them.

And how do you take that man, who by this time had become a political phenomenon, and how do you make a president out of him? When you knew that the ins controlled the ballot boxes, and you were afraid that when it came to counting the votes that no matter how popular Magsaysay's was, he wouldn't win. And so you had the creation of this national movement for Magsaysay, the Magsaysay for president movement, and all this mobilizing public opinion, and all this establishing the watchdogs over the ballot boxes and the rest, I think the Americans back of him had a great deal to do with that. But I think the two processes must be differentiated, and I give Magsaysay the individual the credit for really putting down the Huk menace as an armed rebellion against the government. Then when it came to transferring that personality, and making out of him the political leader that he became, I think a great deal of credits got to go for the Americans and backing him up at that stage of his career.

I mean, how would you deal comment on the sort of inflated beyond reality? I'm sorry, talk a little bit about Lansdale for a moment. Okay, yeah, yeah. The role of Colonel Lansdale with Magsaysay at that time, and the way that that was popularized in the book, the Ugly American, it wasn't quite that way. The such things as being more practical than the advice that he gave to the Filipinos. You remember there was an incident in the book where he taught them how to put handles on their brooms instead of having to stoop over to sweep with stitches that would break your back. You could put stand up straight, and all that bunch was a bunch of junk when you come right down to it.

Let me think for a minute. Joker Arroyo says, "Cory, you must never forget human rights. You must never forget that you're dealing with people." You've got Teddy Locsin on the other hand that has said, "Look, we don't want to reconcile with a communist. We want to kill him." And there, her two closest advisors are absolutely like that. You see, Joker Arroyo, and I don't think that it's going to be possible for ?Enrile? or anybody else to get either at Joker or at Teddy Locsin. Cory's got so much, depends on them so much in a very real way, but I don't think she could afford to get away with either one. I think she'd really be a ship without a rudder without either one of those guys.

And I feel that the directions that she's getting are coming primarily from those two. Those two are not politically motivated. Neither one. I mean, off of seeking. And yet, it really is just like this. And what you've got now is a political support that Teddy comes and as I showed you in this letter where 200 helicopters, if they be, and he says, "I don't want to just kill the 26,000 NPA. I want to get rid of the whole five million." And Teddy, I said, this is a horrible. Insane? That's exactly what I said to him. I said, "Do you realize what you're saying here? And what you're saying," I said, "is only leading into deeper trouble than you've ever been. Now, if the best that you've got is to take this kind of an attitude against these poor people", I said, "then neither you nor Corey deserves to survive." And I really feel that because if there's nothing constructive, that word slipped in a little earlier when I talked about the constructive side of the NPA.

If you read Joe Marie Sison's program, for example, you will see that social reform, it's got a heck of a lot of social reform in it. And these guys do not want to tackle the problems that Cory says she wants to tackle. Then they've just got to be prepared, I think, to be ousted. Let's go back to talk about Magsaysay and Lansdale. And then we can go back just from all like, was there a difference between Magsaysay's approach and Lansdale's approach? Could you describe that? Lensdale was not nearly as interested in the social problem of the Philippines as he was in putting down communist insurgency. See, we're dealing with a period that goes from 1950 until 1955, something like this. And you recall that these are the days of great trouble in China.

The days when the communist revolution in China is reaching its climax. And these are also the days when the first quality of a successful American policy had to be anti-communist, were right after McCarthy days in the United States. And this is the kind of an environment which spawns Lansdale and which motivates his going to the Philippines. Once to make sure that nothing in the Philippines happened, like has just happened with China. And it's not the problem that this is a social problem of the Philippines, it's not the approach that this is just a social problem in the Philippines. It's just the possibility that if the communist hooks are not stopped now, we'll get in the Philippines another China. This is the kind of thing that's going to motivate an American advisor to Magsaysay at that time, or to any other Filipino.

And the approach is that from the Filipino's point of view is that he's got a social problem that he's got to alleviate. The American's point of view is that we have interests in East Asia, which are threatened by communists of whatever breed, and we don't want the Philippines to go the way that China has gone. Let's take this up to the present. Do you feel that you could talk about what Cory said to Reagan or is that [inaudible]? I can talk about Cory's attitude because I've got this- See, Cory is aware of her problem, her social problem. And here is where she enjoys very much the support of the church. In my last trip to Manila just a couple weeks ago.

Sorry, you're going to have to do that again but since we're on the air, it won't be a couple of weeks ago. Oh, pardon me. All right, right, right. Tell the anecdote without placing a time factor. Okay. I'll tell you when. Corey's analysis of her social problem has much more in common with church people in the Philippines than it has with American policy advisors in Washington. See, her position is as she's advised from all over the country, by the church people all over the country, she is told how bad the suffering of the people is, and she's very conscious of the 70% of the Philippine population that lives near the poverty line. Washington's concern is that communist insurgents, particularly NPA, must not be allowed to get any larger and put the Philippine government in danger of a communist takeover.

See, the approach to the problem from the standpoint of Washington and the standpoint of the Philippines is different. As one cabinet member of Cory's cabinet put it this way. He said, we do not see the problem of insurgency in the Philippines as a contest between the knights of the Kremlin and the Poobah of the Potomac. That what we see in the Philippines is a tremendous social problem rooted in poverty, the problem which has got to be solved by eradicating the roots of that poverty rather than by killing just the members of the New People's Army. Now, given Cory's own social class-

really knows how to grapple with this problem. I do not think that Cory's sense of this social problem is abstract. She has been coping with this problem since the days of Magsaysay. Her husband Ninoy was one of Magsaysay's most active cooperators in the campaign against the hooks. Her own family's plantation in Tarlac is right in the heart of Hook Country. And all her life she and her family have had to cope with this problem of getting along with the Huks. How much do you buy them off? That's what her critics say, that she buys them off. She says that what I'm doing is paying them, giving them something to alleviate their poverty so that they won't have to fight for a better living. See, Marcos always accused Ninoy of being a commie coddler because in his getting along with the communist, in his own plantation,

he simply said it's better to get along with him, maybe pay them off. I don't know if he paid them off or not. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he did. But in his view, that was the way that he was going to have of coping with this communist problem, with this insurgency problem, this rebellion problem, even in the area where he, where he, the Aquino family lived. See, it's not an abstract problem. It's a problem that's been very real to the Aquino family from Magsaysay's day on. Let me go on to just to finish up with something- You see in the years ahead, you seem to see a real crisis developing the Philippines. I do. I see a crisis- Can you start again?

I see a crisis developing in the Philippines very much as I think crisis has developed in other third world countries, where the results of poverty have gotten to the point where military action has been taken to put those problems down. I can see more of a parallel than I like to see with Vietnam in a situation there. There is no doubt about the reality of social injustice in the Philippines. And I think that there's no doubt that that problem of social inequity and social injustice has got to be met. I think there is great doubt about the ability of meeting that problem by military methods. And I feel that if we or a Philippine government or anybody else overly concentrates on a military method to put down a social problem,

they are just getting deeper and deeper into trouble. When you have a military assistance program, which concentrates on highly sophisticated weaponry, on training methods, which would apply to highly industrialized enemy instead of a third world enemy. I see a tremendous gap between the cause of the problem and the solution of the problem that's being followed. And I'm afraid that if we try to apply exclusive military remedies to a social problem in the Philippines, we might run into the same kind of handicaps and difficulties that we faced when we were against what seemed to be at that time certainly,

the same kind of problem in Vietnam. What do you see 1991 is going to turn [inaudible] The problem of the bases and the problem of insurgency are in a way interrelated, but not all that much. If the American philosophy of a whole world being upset by a communist menace were to be accepted by the Filipinos, if the Filipinos were to see those bases as an integral part of a worldwide campaign against the communists, then I don't think we would have much difficulty in negotiating the future of the bases. If it just boiled down to a matter of how much should we pay, I think that we could reach an agreement very easily on that.

But the Filipinos at present, I believe the majority of them at least, don't see it that way. And what they see is the bases contributing more to unrest than they're contributing to the putting down of that unrest. Too many people feel that these underprivileged people in the Philippines, these people who are victims of social injustice, are being victimized by people who are also collaborating too closely with the Americans. And just as in the days of Marcos, when you saw put down the US Marcos dictatorship as being part of their program, this is still part of the program. And I would be much easier in my own mind if the program of putting down rebellion in the Philippines were separated from the anti-communist worldwide campaign, which is so vital to the United States.

Go back to one question again. Can you foresee, I know, asking for predictions is always a little tricky but, in the possibility of the insurgency rising to the extent where it might be a threat to the bases and raise the question in the United States of whether we send forces in there to protect the bases. The year, 1991 is very vital in U.S. Philippine relations. As long as Cory is in power and says that she will accept the status quo, as she has said until 1991, I don't see any issues arising that might drive a wedge deeply between us. But you have to stop you for a minute. You're going to have to explain what 1991 is, it's the end of the week.

In 1991- Could you start again? Yeah, yeah, yeah shall I start the whole business again? If you could, just so. to them at present. This is what the Filipinos say. They say that you Americans want us Filipinos to accept your worldview. And it's your worldview that we object to. We do not the Filipino, even SP Lopez, who is a Filipino ambassador, at least has been at the United Nations will say, what we Filipinos object to is your view of world affairs. We don't see ourselves in your policy the way you see us in your policy. You think of us as being adjunct to your obligation to confront communism anywhere in the world. What we see is American presence here as a help or hindrance as the case might be in forwarding the development of the Philippines.

And unless you are willing to make compromise in your interpretation of the basis role in the world, we're never going to be able to get together on an agreement. I'd like to just throw up a remark to you and get your comment on it. You know, Anding Roses [inaudible] The colonial mind is still very much in existence, both on the part of some Americans and on the part of some Filipinos. You've got to remember that there's still a lot of Americans that feel that never anything is going to happen good in the Philippines until the Filipinos come to their senses and let us help them in a way we could. There are still a lot of Americans that feel that after all one Filipino put it this way, if only we could find another General MacArthur how lucky we would be.

And there are a lot of Filipinos that the thing they really object to is the fact that that American presence is still necessary for their own future stability. It isn't too bad that the Americans are the only people that we can turn to to help us in our hour of need. Anybody that's been in the Philippines for any length of time is bound to come across several sentiments of this kind. And this is the heart of the basis problem. If a Filipino is honest or going to say that we want a world policy which is independent of the United States, he is going to take a very tough stand on those bases. It's awfully hard to deny the colonial mentality when it's such a darn pleasant thing to have.

Every Filipino likes American things and the lineup of people in front of the American embassy that want visas to come the United States. And how the dream of being part of America is still part of a Filipino makeup, even many of our bitter critics cannot deny that what we in the United States have and enjoy is also what they enjoy and what they would like to have. And it angers them that this fact exists and yet their anger doesn't deny the fact. And that relationship, it is a reality and the great imbalance between their power and our power is also a reality. As Ambassador Lopez put it, it's nice to talk about colonialism to you people who are at the head of the stairs.

But to those of us who are at the bottom of the stairs, it's extremely galling. And this is one of the most complicating factors in the future of these bases in the Philippines. Now another thing that got to be considered as we looked at the future is the relationship of the Philippines with their ASEAN neighbors. Excuse me, we need to change lens and when you say maybe Southeast Asian neighbors. Okay, that's my next line. ASEAN means the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and includes Singapore and Malaysia and Thailand and Indonesia and also Brunei across the way. And they constantly chide the Filipinos and not being worth independence.

They never fought for it. They've had it handed to you in a silver platter. And they're all the time arguing for a zone of independence, ZOPFAN, they call it a zone of freedom and independence and neutrality. And they say we would never have the American bases on our soil. And it angers the Filipinos and they say yet you always tell us in private that you don't want the Americans out of here that we would never be able to be assured of a future stability if the Americans weren't there. And they say that out of one side of your mouth, you say you ought to be neutral and you shouldn't tolerate American's bases on your soil. And then by the same token, you also say that we would never have them in our soil and yet, privately we ought to keep the Americans there because they're mighty good for the stability of our entire region. A lot of Filipinos are getting fed up with this ambivalence and you can be sure that between now and whenever the negotiations for the bases come up,

you're going to lay it, the Filipinos are going to lay it on the line with their neighbors in Southeast Asia too. If you think that you are benefiting from the presence of the Americans here, maybe you ought to chip in and pay part of the costs also. All things you ought to stop criticizing the thing that you so gladly accept. And this kind of psychology is taking place in the Philippines at the present moment. Another one more thing that might. The Filipinos are also getting a little uneasy about the rearmament of Japan as I say just a little uneasy because they are quite convinced that Japan is quote on the side of the free world. But at the same time they are aware that this might not always be so and they are not quite sure that Japan will always be as benign in its relationships with Southeast Asia is at the present time.

In a recent conversation about Japan's possibly taking over surveillance of the lines of communication. Marcos as a matter of fact said, "It's one thing to talk about the Japanese looking after the lines of communications a thousand miles out. But when they take a thousand miles out, be sure you measure the thousand miles towards San Francisco and that south toward Manila." So, in the figuring of the future, on the future of the bases, all these considerations in worldwide international politics have got to be taken into consideration. When one looks at the future of the Philippines and the American role in it, what we can,

what we Americans can actually do is very little so much of the aid, which has been sent over there is in my view a very questionable value. When you put a hundred eighty million dollars a year which is our obligation at present and you send this in terms of helicopters and in terms of ammunition and weaponry and so forth. To me this is of a lot less value than economic help would be or what they need, I suppose as much as anything as budgetary assistance work and they get credits to pay for the things that they see that they need. Unfortunately, the American government is much more willing to extend military aid, which can be justified in terms of anti communism

than it's willing to actually send credit to open in credit to any of the third world countries and the Philippines is not the only nation that got claims for American help, they all have. And when you look at the future the program for land reform that the new minister of land reforms come up with calls for a price tag of five billion dollars. There are five billions, there's no way that Americans are going to dig in their pockets and say that we will even help toward the implementation of that land reform. And where a start has got to be made, people like Cory and people like the other big landowners in the Philippines are going to have to say that you can have part of my land for this land reform they are the people that are going to have to come up with a capital that they have so carefully hoarded so far they have taken over some of the Marcos farms and have said these are going to be made subject to land reform.

They also mentioned some of the cronies that they say we'll take this land and use it for land reform but the needs of the Philippines are in capital production there in increased productivity and certainly in expanding the means of industrialization and providing jobs for people that haven't got any jobs. The figure of people that are under-employed in the Philippines is just absolutely staggering and putting these people to work is the problem that the government of the Philippines faces and any amount of military assistance that we go are willing to provide for the Philippines is going to be of minimal help in solving that economic problem. Filipino is likely to say what we want to do more than anything else is to recover the money that Marcos is stolen from us or the wealth is stolen from us and

fantastic economic figures have been put forward how much they can get back from him and also from his cronies but it's going to be very little. Then beyond that, there have got to be Filipino entrepreneurs that will get into the business of production and share the profits with the people that are working for them I don't mean sharing the profits only in the sense of dividing the-