[Philippine corruption] Diary of a Dictator -- Ferdinand Imelda The Last Days of Camelot #4/234

Yes, throughout the diary Marcos lies to himself. All the same, it provides an extraordinary view of history and a rarely witnessed event: the advent of a dictatorship. Despite pages filled with calculated disinformation, the diary still manages to expose far more truths about power, ambition, and treachery than its author ever intended.

The diary was discovered almost by chance about a year after Marcos and his family fled the Philippines in 1986 for exile in the United States. Investigators for the new government of President Corazon Aquino, seeking to trace some of the purported billions of dollars looted from the Philippine national treasury by Ferdinand and Imelda and their cronies, came upon a collection of cardboard boxes set aside in a neglected corner of the Malacanang compound. Inside was the diary, along with other sensitive presidential documents, apparently abandoned in the mad scramble to load other valuables - gems, jewelry, cash and gold - into the bellies of two jumbo jetliners.

The documents were seized and locked away by the Philippine government, which still possesses the original diary manuscript. Few copies have been permitted outside government vaults since this author, writing for the Los Angeles Times, first disclosed its existence and published some of its contents in 1988. The diary photocopies and other related documents were obtained from Philippine government sources that still cannot be identified.

Officially, the Marcos diary was classified “secret” by the Aquino government for national security reasons. Twenty-five years later, much of the diary remains under seal. Scattered among the nearly three thousand pages made available to the author are occasional brief gaps in the numbering sequence, indicating pages withheld by the sources to protect Philippine national interests.

Most of the document is intact, however — as is the story it reveals. To tell this tale of Ferdinand and Imelda, Diary of a Dictatorreturns to a tumultuous period in Philippines history, a time when the youthful and charismatic Marcos and his glamorous wife were regarded as the John F. and Jacqueline “Kennedys of Manila.” They were international celebrities. He was the Philippines’ first re-elected president; she was the country’s jet-setting personal diplomat. The beautiful and ambitious couple appeared to “have it all.”

But one early morning, alone with his diary, Marcos reflected on his life. And it came to him, like a shiver in the dawn:

I am president. I am the most powerful man in the Philippines. All that I have dreamt of I have. More accurately, I have all the material things I want of life — a wife who is loving and is a partner in the things I do, bright children who will carry my name, a life well lived — all. But I feel a discontent.

It was a discontent that would haunt the entire nation, ushering in the darkest hours of democracy since the brutal Japanese occupation of World War II - and wiping clean any lingering memories of “the Kennedys of Manila” or their fairytale Philippine Camelot.

W.C.R.

February 24, 2013