Ferdinand Marcos

President of the Philippines (1965-1986)

• Born: September 11, 1917
• Birthplace: Sarrat, Philippines
• Died: September 28, 1989
• Place of death: Honolulu, Hawaii

Marcos was regarded in the 1960s as a reformer dealing with long-standing national problems, such as corruption, smuggling, and poverty, and as a staunch American ally, even sending Philippine troops to fight in Vietnam. His increasingly autocratic style of governing from 1972 onward, combined with his family’s extravagant corruption, began to erode his popularity to the point that he had to flee the country in February 1986.

Early Life

Ferdinand Marcos was the eldest son of Mariano R. Marcos and Josefa Edralin. Both of Marcos’s parents were teachers, and as their assignments changed, the family moved about the country. Marcos’s father was a strict disciplinarian and stressed sports and physical toughness in addition to academic study. Marcos also acquired his oratorical skills from his father, achieving fluency in Tagalog, English, Spanish, and Ilocano.

When Mariano Marcos was elected to the Philippine Congress in 1925, the family moved to Manila, which provided Ferdinand with educational opportunities unavailable elsewhere. Marcos studied in the University of the Philippines High School from 1929 to 1933. Following his graduation, he was given a scholarship and was enrolled in the liberal arts program of the University of the Philippines in Manila. While there he was commissioned as a third lieutenant in the Philippine Constabulary Reserve. Marcos captained the school’s rifle and pistol team.

While Marcos’s future seemed bright, a political incident involving his father now threatened to derail his ambitions. Mariano Marcos had been elected as a congressman for the Second District of Ilocos Norte in 1924 and 1928 but had been defeated in the 1932 election. When the Philippines received self-government as a commonwealth in 1935, the electorate not only had to choose a president but also had to reelect the national assembly. Julio Nalundasan, a member of the new president’s Nacionalista Party, won the Ilocos Norte seat. On September 20, 1935, Nalundasan was murdered, and suspicion eventually fell on Ferdinand Marcos. In 1939, while at the University of the Philippines College of Law, he was tried and convicted for Nalundasan’s murder, while studying for his bar examinations. During the trial, Marcos took his bar examinations and scored the highest grade of those taking the test in 1939, receiving his bachelor of laws cum laude. Marcos’s scores on the written examinations were so high that suspicious officials subsequently examined him orally, and he again succeeded in scoring very high. The case made the front pages of all Philippine newspapers.

In 1940, the Philippine Supreme Court overturned Marcos’s conviction. Marcos subsequently began practicing in his father’s law firm. In November 1940, Marcos joined the Philippine Army as a third lieutenant, leaving the service with the rank of colonel in February 1946. Marcos was present at the final defense of Bataan and endured harsh treatment at the hands of his Japanese captors. After his escape, Marcos organized a resistance group, the Ang Ma Maharlika. In the confused atmosphere of the Philippines under occupation, many exploits were accredited to the group.

Life’s Work

Marcos’s war record brought him new prominence and controversy. Depending on contradictory Philippine governmental reports, Marcos received thirty-two to thirty-four decorations for distinguished service. None of Marcos’s awards was received in the immediate aftermath of battle; Marcos received two American medals and many of his Philippine awards on the basis of affidavits.

The United States gave the Philippines independence and a new constitution on July 4, 1946. Marcos had begun working in March in the law firm that had defended him in his murder trial, Vincente Francisco. In 1947, Marcos served as the technical assistant to the Philippine president, Manuel Roxas y Acuña; among his activities, Marcos visited the United States as a member of the Philippine Veterans Mission, which pushed through support for Filipino veterans to have access to the opportunities of the American G.I. Bill of Rights. As a prelude to his political ambitions, Marcos established his residency in his home province, Ilocos Norte, winning his first election in 1949. Marcos, as a member of the Liberal Party, ran for the newly formed house of representatives on the slogan “Elect me a Congressman now, and I pledge you an Ilocano President in twenty years.” At age thirty-two, Marcos was the youngest member of the house of representatives. Marcos authored the Import Control Law and subsequently became chair of the committee implementing the ordinance.

In April 1954, Marcos met Imelda Romualdez, a beauty queen from Tacloban, Leyte, and proposed on the spot. On May 1, 1954, Marcos married the twenty-three-year-old Imelda following a hectic eleven-day courtship. In 1957, Marcos was elected for a second time, serving as minority floor leader and acting temporary president of the Liberal Party.

After three successful terms in congress, in 1959 Marcos was elected a senator. Marcos quickly became the minority floor leader of the Philippine senate, and on April 6, 1963, was elected senate president, taking over from the elderly Eulogio Rodriguez, president of the Nacionalista Party. Marcos in 1961 had supported as Liberal Party candidate Diosadado Macapagal, serving as his campaign manager in return for a promise of reciprocal support in 1965. As this arrangement fell through, Marcos changed sides; as Macapagal refused to honor his 1961 agreement with Marcos to step aside, in April 1964, Marcos was sworn in as a Nacionalista candidate by José Laurel. In November 1964, Marcos won the Nacionalista Party presidential nomination; Imelda Marcos managed the campaign.

The November 1965 presidential campaign was one of the most expensive and sordid in Philippine political history. Both candidates traveled widely and used increasingly harsh rhetoric. Marcos accused Macapagal of ineptitude, and Macapagal in turn labeled Marcos a “murderer, a thief, a swindler, a forger, and a threat to the country.” Marcos won the contest by 670,000 votes, replacing Macapagal and becoming the sixth president of the Philippines on December 30, 1965. Marcos attempted at this point to portray himself as a “man of the people,” listing his total assets as $30,000 and his annual salary as president as $5,600. In his January 1966 state of the nation address, Marcos vowed to be a “leader of the people,” reaffirming his promise to “make this nation great again.” Campaigns were undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, while in the countryside a limited program of land reform was inaugurated to reduce insurgent influence.

While Marcos had run on a platform of no Filipino aid to American forces in Vietnam, he now changed his mind. Noncombatant construction teams were sent in late 1966, an action that in turn generated increased support for Marcos in Washington. In October 1966, Marcos hosted a seven-nation conference of countries allied in defending Vietnam, winning wide praise for his statesmanship.

Philippine problems began to mount; in 1968, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was organized, taking over from the older Partido Komunistang Pilipinas (PKP), whose leadership had been decimated by arrests. In 1969, the CPP allied itself with the remains of the military arm of the PKP; the resultant amalgam was named the New Peoples Army (NPA). In the middle of this growing threat, Marcos won his second term as president.

In 1970, a constitutional convention began rewriting the country’s constitution; the president attempted to influence the convention, an action that created an outcry among student groups. Marcos attempted to persuade the delegates to the convention to include a provision that would allow an incumbent president to run for a third term. In January, riot police were set on student demonstrators, who fought back and suffered bloody reprisals. The ensuing wave of protest was known as the First-Quarter Storm.

Throughout 1972, unrest continued to grow. A bad monsoon season devastated the country’s rice crop, and urban terrorist bombings were on the increase. A vehicle carrying the defense minister, Juan Ponce Enrile, was attacked in September, which led Marcos to declare martial law. Enrile later stated that the attack was staged to allow Marcos to implement his plans. As Marcos’s second term was ending, he was unable to stand for a third term; his assumption of emergency powers allowed him to evade these constitutional niceties.

Martial law was announced to the nation on September 21, 1972, and was repealed only in January 1981. To counteract the unfavorable publicity, Marcos called for the formation of a “new society,” in which a “democratic revolution” would abolish the oligarchy’s control of the nation. The underlying idea was that connections would no longer matter, but the optimism and goodwill generated by the gestures were short-lived. Marcos labeled his actions “constitutional authoritarianism.”

Marcos declared in General Order Number One that he would “govern the nation and direct the operation of the entire government.” A second general order allowed the minister of defense broad powers to detain individuals deemed dangerous by the government. Senator Benigno Aquino was arrested, and the newspapers, radio, and television were shut down while the government determined their loyalty. Congress was shut down, and the constitution suspended.

In his address to the nation Marcos stated that he was acting in accordance with the 1935 Philippine constitution. Marcos rejected all subsequent criticism, expanding the police powers of the military. A number of delegates to the constitutional convention were arrested. The rump convention’s activities were ordered by the president to be hurried along; on November 29, 1972, a draft constitution was approved.

The single event that galvanized the country against the Marcos regime was the assassination of Benigno Aquino on August 21, 1983, at Manila International Airport. Aquino was the country’s leading dissident and had returned to Manila after several years in exile in the United States. The official government version of the attack stated that a lone gunman was responsible, who was then killed by governmental security forces. On October 24, 1984, the Agrava Board, which had been charged with investigating the murder, concluded that there had been a military plot. The political frustration caused by Aquino’s assassination, combined with growing anger at Imelda Marcos’s extravagance, caused a surge of unrest in the country.

On November 3, 1985, Marcos announced the holding of presidential elections, in response to American pressure. Aquino’s widow, Corazon, announced her candidacy. Following the February 7, 1986, election, both sides claimed victory; on February 25 each group held inauguration ceremonies. Foreign observers, a group that included a number of American members of Congress, believed that Marcos’s claims of victory were built on the blatantly fraudulent tactics used by his supporters. Cardinal Jaime Sin, long a prominent oppositionist, urged Roman Catholics to go into the streets and protect the rebel army units that were disassociating themselves from the regime. Later that evening, crowds estimated to number more than a million surged into the streets of Manila and began making their way to the Malacanang Palace.

The Marcos entourage hurriedly departed the palace and were taken by helicopter to Clark Airfield. The Marcoses first flew to Guam and then to Hawaii. In Manila, the excesses of the departed regime were symbolized by the discovery of 1,060 pairs of Imelda’s shoes, along with 580 ballroom gowns. Medical equipment, including a dialysis machine, left in the palace confirmed the poor state of Marcos’s health.

The Marcos entourage was immediately charged with gross corruption by Corazon Aquino’s government, which began to use the courts in an attempt to recover the billions that it claimed Marcos had stolen. Marcos died of cardiac arrest complicated by kidney and lung failure early in the morning of September 28, 1989. Aquino’s government denied a family request to allow his remains to be returned to the Philippines for burial.

Significance

For a leader who embodied such hopes when he first became president, Ferdinand E. Marcos’s fall from grace seemed extraordinarily complete. On his election as president in November 1965, the Philippines seemed poised to enter a new era. Marcos vowed to right some of the more blatant abuses of the system, and a number of his actions, among them land reforms, eased life for the poorer segments of Philippine society. Marcos also proved himself a loyal ally of the United States during this period, sending Philippine troops to South Vietnam, a decision that was not popular at home.

Marcos’s second term was more turbulent, with Marcos declaring martial law in September 1972 to repress a communist insurgency. While the crackdown was extended to include a wide field of antigovernment critics, Marcos proclaimed a “new society” that, despite the political harshness, included national benefits such as a drop in the inflation rate and increased government revenues.

As Marcos continued his “constitutional authoritarianism,” the country grew slowly more disenchanted with its ruler. The increasingly opulent lifestyle of the Marcoses offended many in a country with one of the lowest levels of per capita income in the world, while the increasingly harsh repression of all political dissent blocked any legitimate outlets for the people’s frustration. The blatant assassination of Benigno Aquino in August 1983 proved the final straw for many Filipinos. Marcos’s war record has been challenged by historians, journalists, and politicians. Marcos died accused of plundering his country of billions of dollars. Aquino would not allow his body to be returned to the Philippines for burial, though flags were flown at half-staff. His body was then allowed to be returned and interred in a mausoleum in his home province of Ilocos Norte in 1993, and in 2016, despite much opposition, his remains were relocated to the country's National Heroes' Cemetery.

Upon the efforts of his son, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., to rise to the highest political position in the country, largely beginning with an ultimately failed 2016 run for the vice presidency and continuing with his highly publicized entry into the 2022 presidential race, his legacy was prominently discussed once more. By the time that Bongbong was congressionally declared the victor of the presidential election in May, many commentators both within and outside of the Philippines argued that he and his political teams had long made attempts to revise the history of his father's rule through a more favorable narrative. Critics asserted that, including through social media, Bongbong and his family widely disseminated disinformation and altered perceptions of the period of Marcos's presidency, targeting younger generations that had also been shaped by President Rodrigo Duterte's leadership. Some expressed concern that with the acquisition of such a powerful position, Bongbong could try to solidify such versions of history through mediums such as textbooks.

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