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  But the climax of her Washington visit, Cory realized, would be her appearance before a joint session of Congress—where the money was. She delegated the task of drafting her speech to Mark Malloch Brown, a former British journalist employed by a New York public relations firm, and Teodoro Locsin, Jr., a Filipino graduate of the Harvard Law School. Both had worked on her election campaign, enabling her to claim, as a shield again possible nationalist criticism, that she had not relied on American advisers. The address, designed to appeal to liberals and conservatives alike, omitted mention of America’s bases in the Philippines—a divisive issue among Filipinos and one Cory preferred to shelve for the time being. She added a passage about her assassinated husband. The words, however, were less dynamic than the picture she would portray of herself. As Cory, the plucky little housewife who had crushed the malevolent Marcos, her conquest of Capitol Hill was virtually guaranteed.

  She wore a tailored yellow suit, and the packed chamber was a dazzle of yellow. Senators and congressmen, cabinet members, diplomats and spectators reveled in yellow shirts, blouses, ties, handkerchiefs. The House majority leader, Jim Wright, had shipped in two hundred yellow roses from his home state of Texas, the flowers bedecking her path as she walked down the aisle to the podium—the chant of “Cory, Cory, Cory” rising in cadence to the rhythm of her steps. No longer the model of self-effacement, she was convinced of her mission. She spoke earnestly and confidently for half an hour, pausing only for the dozen bursts of applause—her eloquent English a further reminder to the assembly, if it were necessary, that she was the product of America’s tutelage of the Philippines, educated in American schools.

  Their “three happiest years” had been her family’s exile in Boston. Out of honest gratitude she said, “Thank you, America, for the haven from oppression.” Then, striking a sincerely religious chord, she invoked the “brazen” murder of her husband in Manila in August 1983, presumably at Marcos’s doing, intoning: “His death was my country’s resurrection.” Filipinos “threw aside their passivity and fear” to propel her drive against Marcos. “And so began the revolution that has brought me to democracy’s most famous home, the Congress of the United States.”

  But now an insurrection that thrived on poverty and injustice threatened democracy in the Philippines. Her goal, Cory said, was to lure the Communist rebels out of the hills, and win them over “by economic progress and justice … for which the best intentioned among them fight.” Only by exploring “the path of peace” would she have “the moral basis” for “picking up the sword of war” if her effort faltered. She believed in Lincoln’s dictum—“with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Like him, she understood that “force may be necessary before mercy.”

  In any case, American aid was indispensable. Marcos’s profligate rule had left the Philippines with a foreign debt of $26 billion; the interest alone cost half its annual export earnings. Congress failed to ease the burden—even though, Cory chided, “ours must have been the cheapest revolution ever.” Nevertheless, Filipinos had backed her campaign to clamor for democracy, however abstract the concept may have been to them. “Slum or impoverished village,” she said, “they came to me with one cry: Democracy! Not food, though they clearly needed it, not work, though they surely wanted it—but democracy.” So her question for Congress—and for America—was plain: “Has there been a greater test of national commitment to the ideals you hold dear than what my people have gone through? You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were reluctant to receive it. And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only help to preserve it.”

  A volcanic ovation erupted. Engulfing Cory as she descended from the podium, legislators cheered, applauded and jostled one another as they reached to grasp her hand. “That was the finest speech I’ve heard in my thirty-four years in Congress,” exclaimed Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, who from his perch as House speaker had been looking down with avuncular benevolence during her address. The chamber again chanted “Cory, Cory, Cory” as she walked up the aisle, escorted by Senator Robert Dole, the leader of the Republican majority. “You hit a home run,” he remarked to her—to which she snapped back without hesitation, “I hope the bases were loaded.”

  Similar accolades awaited her elsewhere on her whirlwind schedule. Governor Mario Cuomo and Mayor Edward Koch greeted her on the steps of New York’s City Hall. Fordham University, a Jesuit institution, awarded her an honorary doctorate, an appropriate tribute to her piety, and she revisited Mount Saint Vincent, the small Catholic college for women in the Bronx where she had studied thirty years before. A high school band serenaded her at the Boston airport with her husband’s favorite song, “The Impossible Dream.” She returned to her large brick house in suburban Newton, Massachusetts, now a shrine, then spoke at Harvard, where Ninoy had been a fellow for part of his exile. Boston University gave her an honorary degree at a ceremony attended by Governor Michael Dukakis and Senator John Kerry, a yellow rose in his lapel. Her speechwriters had done their homework; she cited John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts in 1630, when she compared the Philippines to his “city upon a hill, with the eyes of the world upon us.” Kerry, the distant cousin of a pioneer U.S. governor of the Philippines, commented that her address to Congress two days earlier had “moved even the most hardened politicians to tears … because of the simple truth of her ideas.”

  But if Cory had belted the ball, as Senator Dole had cracked, the game was being played on a soggy field. Within five hours of her speech, the House of Representatives increased aid to the Philippines by two hundred million dollars above the half-billion dollars already appropriated, but the measure passed by only six votes. “We voted with our hearts, not our heads,” said one member regretfully, explaining that foreign aid was poison at this time of budgetary constraints. Ten days later, the Senate rejected the package. Dole was responsible for the rebuff despite his encomium for Cory. Her silence on the U.S. bases in the Philippines had vexed him, as it had several other Republican senators. He was also determined to prove that he would not be suckered by sentimentality. The House decision, he said sardonically, had given Cory “the biggest honorarium in history”; it was “not very good policy” that “because someone came here and made a speech, they get two hundred million dollars.” Only through a “mushy compromise,” as one congressman phrased it, were the extra funds subsequently approved.

  Future aid proposals sparked fresh debates on Capitol Hill, leaving Filipinos wondering whether Cory’s stirring performance in Washington would translate into consistent U.S. support. Even Secretary of State Shultz, his affection for the Philippines notwithstanding, put a limit on American help. Cory’s vice president, Salvador Laurel, once begged him for urgent economic assistance, saying, “Our needs are infinite.” “That may be,” Shultz replied, “but our resources are not.”

  Revisiting Manila over the next few years, I found Cory to be increasingly comfortable with power. Despite her family fortune, she had never flaunted her wealth. Besides, she wanted to project an image of austerity after the outrageous ostentation of the Marcoses. She chose to live in a modest house rather than move into the Malacañang, the ornate presidential palace, studiously avoiding flamboyance of the kind that had become Imelda’s trademark. But, no longer shy and self-effacing, she was not afraid to assert her authority over the veteran politicians to whom, as Ninoy’s dutiful wife, she had once served coffee. She also seemed to be learning the difference between the poetry of revolution and the prose of government. Rallies and rhetoric, she realized, were not going to solve unemployment or defeat insurgents. Nor did she address every challenge by asking herself what Ninoy would do. “I reached the point,” she told me, “when I knew that I was president, not Ninoy, and that I had to make the decisions.”

  Ninoy had once remarked, she recalled, that the successor to Marcos would face such tremendous problems that he would collapse in six months. Of course Ninoy had neve
r imagined that she would become president, much less foreseen her fortitude. She survived five coup attempts during her first year and a half in office. Some of her cabinet members plotted her ouster, and her inner circle was roiled by rivalries. Nevertheless, she promulgated a new constitution that was ratified by an overwhelming majority of the voters, and she had held the first fully free legislative and local elections since Marcos declared martial law in 1972. Certainly, she conceded, she had not done enough. But, as she phrased it, “there is no school for presidents.” She was accumulating experience as she went along, and dealing “step by step” with the insurgencies and economic stagnation. “After all,” she said, “we had a dictator for fourteen years. We can’t change everything overnight.”

  After three years in office, though still popular, her reputation had eroded—largely because she could not have conceivably lived up to the image of miracle worker that her own supporters had originally pinned on her. The Marcos legacy was a daunting enough burden for her to bear. But she had inherited a sprawling archipelago of disparate languages and cultures that owed its semblance of unity mainly to the legal definition of Filipino citizenship and an allegiance to the Catholic Church. Despite its modern trappings, it was still a feudal society dominated by an oligarchy of rich dynasties, which had evolved from one of the world’s longest continuous spans of Western imperial rule.

  * * *

  First came Spain and then the United States—or, as the neat summation of Philippine history goes: “Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood.”

  Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer flying the flag of Spain, stumbled onto the islands in 1521 in his search for the lucrative spices of the Indies. He died there, a victim of his own imprudence, and his ships sailed on—one of them to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe. Other Spaniards returned and remained, even though the archipelago was not the El Dorado of their dreams. Manila was convenient for trade with nearby China, and the provinces offered the Catholic Church a fertile field for saving souls. So, under Spain, the Philippines became the only Christian country of Asia—and, through Christianity, the West’s first foothold in the region. Spain left another heritage, in the form of land grants to Spanish settlers—which, passed on to rich Filipino mestizo families, created the oligarchy that wields power today. Coupled with her American education, Cory Aquino personifies the legacy of the Spanish era. Her intense piety stems from an almost medieval brand of Spanish Catholicism, and she owes her private fortune to a Chinese great-grandfather who acquired large properties a century ago.

  Spain, itself in a cocoon, sealed off the Philippines from the outside world until the nineteenth century, when liberal Spanish kings opened the islands to foreign trade. The landed gentry prospered from the global demand for sugar and other commodities stimulated by the industrial revolution. Seeking recognition to match their wealth, they began to defy their imperial Spanish masters long before the elite of other European possessions in Asia challenged their rulers. The Filipino clergy agitated for equality with Spanish priests. Affluent young Filipinos, sent by their fathers to study in Europe, returned home from the heady atmosphere of Madrid, Paris and Berlin with enlightened ideas that, to the Spanish administration in Manila, seemed subversive.

  The most brilliant of them, José Rizal y Mercado, oculist, poet, painter and writer, fueled the ferment with his polemical novels. Cautious and conservative, he championed integration with Spain rather than independence. But reactionary Spanish priests and officials in Manila, resistant to even the mildest change, railroaded him to execution in 1896. Filipinos, for whom the Passion is a reality, perceived in his martyrdom an imitation of Christ’s agony, and they have revered him since as a quasireligious national hero—a status they have also begun to confer on Ninoy Aquino.

  Rizal’s death ignited a rebellion against Spain led by Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, a dashing if naïve young Filipino whose objective was independence. Most Americans had never heard of the Philippines, but they were soon to become embroiled in the conflict as the United States reached across the Pacific for the first time in its history.

  America was then going through a stupendous transition as dynamic entrepreneurs and a restive immigrant population transformed its vast resources into an industrial powerhouse. But Americans were split over the issue of whether to project their new power overseas or to concentrate their energies at home. With nuanced differences, essentially the same debate over global priorities has preoccupied the nation since.

  The imperialists, advocates of a strong American presence abroad, included figures like the young assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Captain Alfred Mahan, the scholarly naval strategist. Only as a world power, they affirmed, could the United States trade, prosper and protect itself against its potential enemies. This role, they maintained, was America’s “manifest destiny”—a phrase originally coined to promote the settlement of the West. William Randolph Hearst, lord of the yellow press, was their publicist. Though mostly Republicans, they were backed by the Populists, poor farmers of the Middle West who blamed their economic problems on foreign bankers, and so thrilled to the idea of fighting any foreigners. They had no plans at that stage to grab territory, as the Europeans were doing in Asia and Africa. Their vague objective was to make America a voice on the international scene. For Teddy Roosevelt, war itself was the highest form of human endeavor.

  Various motives inspired the anti-imperialists. Tycoons like Andrew Carnegie asserted that costly foreign ventures would divert America from the development of its domestic economy. An older generation of Americans, recalling the horrors of the Civil War, flinched at the thought of another conflict. The northern factory workers and southern farmers who supported the Democratic party tended to be isolationist. Grover Cleveland, the former president and a Democrat, delayed the annexation of Hawaii as long as he could, and William Jennings Bryan, the party standard-bearer, was equivocal on the issue.

  The imperialists prevailed in 1898. The United States went to war with Spain—the first war waged by America beyond its continental boundaries. An inexorable force drove the nation into war, but like all wars, it was not inevitable.

  It began over Cuba, where rebels were struggling against Spanish tyranny. Skilled Cuban propagandists in the United States, abetted by Hearst and other sensationalists, had won America’s sympathy. American investors in Cuba favored an end to Spanish rule. For the Spanish, whose Latin American empire had crumbled, Cuba was a last vestige of past grandeur—and its potential loss had already ignited political passions in Spain. The queen, traumatized by the threat to her tottering throne, had nevertheless edged toward compromise, and a strong U.S. president might have given her time. But, though the prospect of war alarmed him, William McKinley was weak and indecisive. He waffled for nearly two months following the mysterious sinking of the Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898, while hawks whipped up the fervor. Finally, still befuddled, he allowed Congress to push him into a conflict he neither wanted nor understood. Least of all did he grasp the purpose of the offensive against the Philippines.

  Congress had affirmed at the outset that America intended to free, not acquire, Cuba. But America’s ultimate goal for the Philippines, a sideshow to the main Cuban arena, was left undefined. There, on secret orders from Roosevelt, a U.S. fleet commanded by Commodore George Dewey had sunk a decrepit Spanish armada in Manila Bay in a few hours on the morning of May 1, 1898. McKinley pondered the problem of what to do with the archipelago—which he could not find on the map.

  He complied with Dewey’s request for forces to secure his victory, and in another historical first, U.S. troops crossed the Pacific. They occupied Manila shortly afterward under an arrangement with the Spanish while McKinley continued to contemplate the future of the Philippines. Eventually, he later revealed to a group of clergymen, God told him to annex the islands and “do the best we could for them.”
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  Unlike presidents today, McKinley rarely committed himself to paper, and the scant record contains no clues to the thinking that went into his decision. So historians have conjectured that, given his malleable character, he was carried along by a momentum that he either would not or could not control—just as he had been propelled into the war with Spain.

  Even ardent imperialists initially spurned the notion of retaining the Philippines. At most, they reckoned, the United States might keep a naval base or trading station in Manila. But the dream of empire gradually germinated in the minds of Americans. Some envisioned the archipelago as the pivot of a booming commerce with China. Christian missionaries hoped to convert pagans, and ideologues saw America as the master of “inferior races.” Strategists warned that another foreign power—most likely Japan or Germany—would grab the islands if the United States withdrew. Rudyard Kipling, the literary apostle of British imperialism, also exerted influence. He deliberately wrote his famous poem “The White Man’s Burden” as an exhortation to Americans to bestow the blessings of their civilization on the Philippines—though, he warned, it would be a thankless task.