Presidentita vs the Brat Pack

FOR FIVE years and through seven botched coups mounted against her government, I covered President Cory as a reporter for The Manila Times and The Manila Chronicle. We were all young then, impetuous, stubborn, irrepressible, and we did not always agree with Cory and her Cabinet. To be honest, there were moments when we did not like her all that much. And the feeling, though fleeting, was somewhat mutual. Field a testy question, and she was sure to show her repulsion. In quick succession, she’d serve you a pout (her mouth twitched, not puckered), knit her brows, swing her head to the left, then right, then left again, and finally a curt missive, “Next question, please." I was then president of the Malacanang Press Corps, the batch that came to be called “Brat Pack," which in 1987 staged a protest action against Cory and her restrictive guards. We all came garbed in black or with black armbands. For hours, we sat slumped on the curbside of Malacanang Palace. It was to be the only protest action to be staged by reporters inside Malacanang. For three days, with our editors’ support, we did not write a single story about Cory. We ignored her and all her events at the Palace. All we wanted was reasonable access to information and to official sources as we believed befitted the return of press freedom after the EDSA People Power revolt. We called her “Presidentita," and the Palace guards commanded by then Col. Voltaire Gazmin, her attack dogs. Not that they actually assaulted us with cannons and rifles, but there were many episodes of pushing and shoving and verbal tussles between the guards and the Palace press. They wanted to secure Cory’s space; we wanted our stories from Cory’s office. One time the guards pushed so much that Malaya reporter Joel C. Paredes actually challenged Cory’s guards to a fistfight. Brave, burly, but pudgy, Joel, a former college fratman, suddenly dropped notebook and pen, rolled his fists into balls, spread his legs a la Pacquiao in the ring with Hatton, and dared Cory’s guards to take him on. We got Joel out of that mess, rescuing him from certain death. After he had chilled, we realized the inequity of it all: our notebooks and pens vs the weapons cache of Cory’s guards, not to mention of the Armed Forces, which she led as commander in chief! Perhaps the pushing and shoving came with the territory because we wanted to cover Cory so diligently. That, or we inflicted the power of the pen too much on Cory and her officials. The Cory government had to contend with a media most pervasive, most menacing, and most unruly. From sunrise to dusk – on occasion up to midnight or dawn because coups and calamities visited her government in a series – we covered Cory like obsessively, compulsively. In large measure, that was because we were zealous of our restored freedoms; we did not want to yield ground, or leave any policies unexplained by Cory and her officials. Most working days, the reporters among us would typically thrust tape recorders, the photographers Nikons and Canons with massive lens, and the television crews big, heavy videocams, at the mouth, nose, ear, nape, and face of whoever emerged from a visit or meeting with the Presidentita. Most of the time, by our own doing, we went home with bumps or lumps from the cameras and recorders we carried. When Cory went to church or held closed-door meetings with anyone, we hounded her, too. Our network of sources then was, in reporter’s lingo, as deep as an oil well. It had to be because Cory presided over a government that launched many firsts and enacted many controversial policies. She also had to deal with many threats to the security of the republic, and many vanquished Marcos-era politicians reinventing themselves, and who now mocked the good sense and the sanity of our people. We resorted to the “ambush" interview -- that intrusive, you might say uncouth, behavior of reporters toward sources. We did so to get our stories between the long, boring wait by the curbside of the Malacanang Premiere Guest House, a two-story building where Cory held office. Perhaps the modesty of the official residence Cory had chosen was the real problem. There was no room at the Guest House for about 40 reporters from as many media agencies assigned to cover Cory every single day. In time, in part because of our protest action, the Presidentita’s staff built the media a gazebo by the garden across the Guest House, and we finally had a roof over our heads when it rained while we waited for news. By 1989, as new press secretary, journalist Teodoro C. Benigno had the Malacanang Palace renovated to make room for a press briefing room and work stations for the Press Corps members. Back then, the Malacanang Beat was a hardship post. Reporters wrote from five to 12 stories a day, each with a unique event or policy peg. It was important to read up on issues and documents, to know not simply who or what but also why and how, to understand not just concepts but also stats, to be both literate and numerate. The Cory years launched a whole new regime of good programs that by quality and quantity surpasses the combined achievements of her three successors. The three post-EDSA presidents after Cory – Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph E. Estrada, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo – practically just had to breeze through the presidency all because Cory had done most of the work for them. And yet, by all accounts, they built less and destroyed more of what Cory had set out to do for the nation. And yes, they probably did more bad than all the good and not-so-good things that Cory did. Apart from a new Constitution, Cory gave the nation groundbreaking policies and reforms, notably the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the Commission on Human Rights, the Local Government Code, the Family Code, the Administrative Code, the Expanded Value-Added Tax, the Generics Act, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, the National Youth Commission, and a bounty of laws for mothers, children, rebel-returnees, and indigenous communities. In addition, Cory freed political prisoners, forged peace with rebels, and nursed to life the communities struck down by the biggest disasters in recent Philippine history (the 1990 earthquake and the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in1991). In Cory’s time, politics was less about spin, embellished stats, brownie points and executive privilege; politics was more about people and public service. In Cory’s time, reporters may field the toughest questions to the highest officials and were sure to get honest – if not absolutely complete – answers. To be sure, Cory did not have all the answers to all the questions that we asked then, and still ask today, as a people. Yet the best cut is this: When Cory was president, decency defined the conduct of reporters toward politicians, and politicians toward reporters. Integrity was the standard against which reporters assessed politicians. Cory was sometimes a difficult source. But she certainly was always a good source. She was good as she was honest. In our trained reporter’s eye, we saw she did not know how to lie, or was totally uncomfortable holding back information. Cory would rather be caught frowning or scowling on cam than tell reporters tall tales. Indeed, the lesson of Cory Aquino as leader and president should not be lost on Filipino politicians. Powerlessness – acting and doing like one is without power – was the secret of Cory’s power over the masses. Most others in the practice of politics today keep a contrary faith that was defined 60 years ago by Jose Avelino, Senate president under the government of Elpidio Quirino. “What are we in power for?" asked Avelino, when he was investigated in 1949 for tax evasion and eventually slapped with a one-year suspension. Quirino later resurrected him as ambassador at large. Avelino ended up in the dustbin of Philippine history for a devastatingly great quote on the inscrutable and incorrigible ways of Filipino politicians. With absolute antipathy toward his investigators, he remarked: “Why should we pretend to be saints when in reality we are not? We are not angels, we are not saints. When we die, we will all go to hell. It is better to be in hell because in that place there are no investigations." Cory thrashed Avelino’s hypothesis of the “smarter" politician. In life as in death, she commanded the boundless affection and respect of the people that is probably the only kind of real, smart power that should matter. The Filipino people have demonstrated time and again that they get it so well: they don’t like politicians who demonstrate genius only in the practice of the seven deadly sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride or vainglory. In truth, the less Cory propped herself, the more she grew in the people’s love and respect. As president, Cory took her oath of office before the Constitution, but defined her politics by the canons of her faith, the heavenly virtues of charity, diligence, patience, kindness, temperance, and humility. If politics were a test of sainthood, we can count on one hand the Filipino politicians who would make the grade. In my book, as a journalist who had covered Cory then and now, even with sometimes testy results, Cory would be in the running. – PCIJ, August 2009