Drums for a President

Manuel Quezon, 65, first President of the Philippine Commonwealth, lay in a log house at Saranac Lake, N.Y. He was listening: his physician was reading aloud from the Sermon on the Mount. Tuberculosis had almost conquered his fighting-bantam little body. But he did not believe he could die when the sun was shining, and now it was bright morning. After a while he asked that the radio be turned on. The news: U.S. troops had landed at Sansapor, Dutch New Guinea. Manuel Quezon, who had dreamed of re-entering Manila with General MacArthur, exclaimed: "Just 600 miles!" Then he coughed spasmodically. A hemorrhage began. When his wife, came, summoned from Mass, he waved her away to spare her the sight of his suffering. He was unconscious in a few minutes. In a few more, his dragging breathing stopped.

The Grey Bird. In Washington, Sergio Osmena, the shrewd, quiet, Chinese mestizo, became President of the Philippines. For almost a half century Osmena, like Quezon, had dreamed of power. But the impressionable Filipinos, fascinated by Quezon's impassioned oratory, his imperious political scheming, the glitter of his presence, thought of Sergio Osmena as a grey bird flying beside a brightly plumaged jungle cock. Osmena accepted his defeats quietly, finally became Manuel Quezon's political friend, came with him to the U.S. as confidant and Vice President after the fall of the islands.

In 1943, when Quezon's term as President expired, Osmena should have succeeded him, since a Philippine election was obviously impossible. Instead he agreed with the U.S. Administration's desire to leave the ailing Quezon in office as a symbol of freedom for his conquered countrymen. Now, as President, he was content to walk again obscured by the pomp of Manuel Quezon's passing.

Quezon, who once planned to costume the attendants at his Philippine mansion like Buckingham Palace guards, went to his grave in somber splendor. All night, after its return to Washington in a dark baggage car, his body lay in state before the flower-banked altar of St. Matthew's Cathedral off fashionable Connecticut Avenue. White-gloved soldiers stood impassively with rifles grounded as crowds filed past. People of Filipino descent, great men of the U.S. and plain Americans came, paused, passed on, hour after hour. The next morning General Marshall, Admiral King, Interior Secretary Ickes, Senators and Supreme Court justices were in the packed church as a Requiem Mass was said.

Then Manuel Quezon's funeral procession began, to the throb of muffled drums, the cadenced music of a military band. The casket was borne on a black-wheeled artillery caisson drawn by six white horses. Behind it marched mourners and battalions from the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. The procession wound its way to the highest hill in Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to a tomb beneath the grey steel mast of the U.S.S. Maine. There, to the measured boom of a 19-gun salute and the long, sweet notes of "Taps," Manuel Quezon was laid to rest.

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