New Man in Manila

The most popular politician in the Philippines is small, smiling Diosdado Macapagal, 50. Back in 1957, while the Nacionalistas' Carlos Garcia was getting himself elected President, Macapagal ran for the vice-presidency on the opposition Liberal Party ticket. He not only won, but also polled 160,000 more votes than Garcia himself. Last week a boisterous Liberal Party convention met in the mammoth Santa Ana cabaret outside Manila, and named Macapagal to run against Garcia in next November's presidential election.

A son of Luzon's rural slums, Macapagal is a professor of law and doctor of economics who became a strolling actor to help pay his way through law school, and won campaign points by improvising Tagalog poetry right on the stump. Barred these three years from the government's councils by the jealous Nacionalistas, Vice President Macapagal has had little to do but recite an occasional poem in the boondocks, cultivate his excellent relations with the Americans, denounce the Garcia administration for venality and torpor, and impatiently await the Liberal hour. Now he proclaims himself the spokesman of "a new generation" in the style of John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. "Our people want change," he cried in his acceptance speech last week. "We shall open a new era that will bring a new morality in public service. Corruption will be destroyed before it destroys the nation, and unemployment will be immediately solved. This will be achieved primarily through the magic of free and private enterprise."

Macapagal has more than personal popularity and a reputation for honesty working in his favor. Last month anti-Garcia followers of Manuel Manahan, protege of the late President Ramon Magsaysay, formally voted to back Macapagal. Other anti-Garcia Nacionalistas are threatening a party split if Garcia is renominated at next summer's convention. Leaving nothing to chance, Macapagal starts stumping the villages for his "new era" this week, nine months before elections.

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