Death of a Friend

The C-47 took off smoothly from the Cebu airport and into the moon-bright Philippine night. It was 1:17 a.m., and the plane radioed the tower at Malacanan Palace to have President Ramon Magsaysay's car at Manila's Nichols Field at 3:15 a.m. Then there was only silence. Two hours later, when the plane failed to arrive, the silence became ominous. By dawn, Philippine naval vessels and air-force planes, later joined by the U.S. Air Force, were scouring the lovely inland sea between Cebu and Manila. By radio and whisper, the news spread: the Philippines' beloved President Magsaysay was missing. The long morning wore on. In the barrios, priests offered up special prayers, and Filipinos clustered silently around radios. Then, as night began to fall, came the "very bad news." Wreckage had been found in a mountain ravine near Asturias, only 22 miles northwest of Cebu city. One newspaperman, badly burned, was the only survivor of 26 aboard. President Magsaysay was dead. In the barrios and the streets of Manila, Filipinos wept.

Open Door. To his people, Ramon Magsaysay, 49, was a kind of combination Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, with none of their faults: a war hero and a man of peace. He was the President who had opened Malacanan Palace to the people. Palace corridors and reception rooms, once the preserve of suave politicians and their richly gowned ladies, were thronged with peasants or plantation workers bringing their troubles. Magsaysay listened to them all.

Rugged, tall (5 ft. 11 in.), plainspeaking, Magsaysay was indefatigably energetic and incorruptibly honest ("My parents taught me to be a good Christian. Do you know of any good Christian who is dishonest?"). He was a blacksmith's son, who came out of the Zambales mountains to work as a chauffeur and mechanic to pay for his mechanical engineering studies at the University of the Philippines. He fought the Japanese as a guerrilla, at war's end commanded an army of 10,000 men--but was especially proud of his U.S. Army rank as a captain in a motor pool. Elected to the Philippine Congress, he battled his own Liberal Party when it indulged politics and corruption in the army, goaded the politicos so much that in 1950 President Elpidio Quirino made him Secretary of Defense.

The Communist Hukbahalaps in 1950 were 16,000 strong; in some areas they levied taxes, ran their own schools, newspapers and factories. They maintained their headquarters brazenly in Manila and drew up a plan for seizure of the city itself. Farmers, forced under antiquated laws to pay 70% of their crops to hereditary landlords, gave the Huks sanctuary, and soldiers, often unpaid for months, felt small inclination to hunt them down. Sleeping only three hours a night, Magsaysay took to the air, island-hopped from army post to army post. When he found soldiers living in shacks and eating miserable food, he fired their officers on the spot. Dropping in unannounced on a remote post one cold night and finding soldiers sleeping without blankets, he furiously roused the officers from bed, made them distribute blankets to the enlisted men.

The army awakened, Magsaysay launched savage forays to root out the Huk activists. At the same time, he struck at the roots of their power--the discontent that made potential Huks of every Filipino farmer. "They are fighting the government because they want a house and land of their own. All right, they can stop fighting because I will give them a house and land," he cried. And he did, setting up settlements complete with houses and electric lights in unused lands. "I don't know where to put all the Huks that have surrendered," he said triumphantly, and the Huk rebellion was broken.

Honest Election. In the past, the army had dominated Philippine elections as the bullyboy of the politicians in power. In 1951 Magsaysay undertook to insure the Philippines' first free election. He jailed mayors or town officials for allowing phony registration, warned trigger-prone local bosses, once arrested a town's whole police force for murdering opposition voters. The results were incontrovertible proof of Magsaysay's honesty in Philippine eyes: his party was resoundingly defeated.

By 1953, Maysaysay was fed up with Quirino's Liberal government. He had been offered one too many bribes, had seen one too many corrupt colleagues, he said. But when the rival Nationalists approached him to lead a military coup d'etat, he refused ("I might be a good dictator, but how do you know about the next one?" he asked them). Then they asked him to become their presidential candidate. His speech at the nominating convention was short. "I am a man of action. Therefore I am not a speechmaker," he said, and sat down. He was elected President by a landslide.

As President, Magsaysay was the U.S.'s sturdiest defender and stoutest friend in all Asia. When opponents taunted him as an "American puppet," he replied defiantly that he would run for election any time on the platform of friendship with the U.S. He had no patience with neutralism. "Between our way of life and Communism, there can be no peace, no paralyzing coexistence, no grey neutralism," he said. "There can only be conflict--total and without reconciliation."

Smiling Now. Even his well-wishers worried over Magsaysay's impatience with experts and technicians. When forced to listen to them, he cracked his knuckles nervously and rolled his head back and forth on his neck. "The professor's reports aren't as important as people," he said; what saved him from folly was his instinct for what the people wanted and needed. Whenever he could, he got out of the palace to go back to the barrios. Filipinos lined the roads along his route, and he extended his hand to brush their fingers as he passed. Bounding up steps two at a time, mopping the sweat from brow and neck with a towel, he shook hands in city halls and in the village squares, talked under mango trees among nipa huts, pledging a new pre-fabricated schoolhouse here, discussing a new road or a new irrigation dam there. Magsaysay himself seemed to draw strength from the contact. Looking out at the sea of people, Magsaysay said proudly: "People smile now. It's only six years since no one smiled and everybody was afraid of his neighbor."

Ramon Magsaysay flew whenever he could, at any time and in any weather. He shrugged off protests impatiently; any other way wasted time, and he was a man in a hurry. Last Saturday Magsaysay flew down to Cebu. He talked at three universities, to the local war veterans, to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Then he decided to fly back to Manila that night.

After the crash, the Cabinet hurriedly summoned Vice President Carlos Garcia home from Australia, where he has been attending the SEATO Conference. A nondescript politician forced on Magsaysay by the Nationalists, Garcia is unlikely to be more than a caretaker until the presidential elections, to be held this fall. Just who that successor will be, no one can predict. Magsaysay so completely dominated Philippine politics and affections that in all likelihood he would have been nominated by both parties. There was no one like him --a man in whom Filipinos saw their best, just as he always saw the best in them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.