Message from Garcia

"I come here on behalf of the Philippine people, your best friends in Asia, who live in the faith that the heart of this great American nation has for them a soft spot." The speaker before a joint session of Congress was the Philippines' cheerful, articulate President Carlos Garcia, and as he moved through Washington last week on an official state visit, he soon found that U.S. officials indeed had for him a soft spot.

In talks with President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, Secretary of State Dulles and their staffs, President Garcia sought $400 million in U.S. loans to be spread over the next three years to ease the Philippines' chronic trade deficit. "It was taken with a great deal of sympathy by the President," said Carlos Garcia, and at talks' end he got loans of up to $125 million, with an understanding that more might be available next year and the year after that if the $125 million is wisely spent.

He also got sympathetic consideration of the Philippines' longtime request for a status-of-forces agreement to grant Philippine courts jurisdiction over off-base offenses committed by Philippines-based U.S. servicemen in the style of the U.S.'s status-of-forces agreements with Japan and other allied countries. And he also got a flat and unequivocal guarantee from President Eisenhower that "any armed attack against the Philippines would involve an attack against United States Forces stationed there and against the United States and would be instantly repelled." Summed up the Philippines' Ambassador to Washington Carlos Romulo: "Mission accomplished."

But Carlos Garcia found his softest spot among the hardest hearts of all Washington, i.e., Washington's press corps, when in the week of Sherman Adams' troubles, he offered a timely ad-lib reply to a question at a National Press Club luncheon about why bribetaking and influence peddling were so widespread back home (TIME, April 21). Said Carlos Garcia deadpan: "That [corruption] exists in the Philippines I shall not deny. I do not believe there is any head of government anywhere in the world--this country not excepted--who can stand before you and affirm truthfully that his country is immune to this social cancer."

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