[Corruption in the Philippines] Imelda Marcos The Rise and Fall of One of the Worlds Most Powerful Women #8/212

They kept faith and waited anxiously for the day when the country would have leaders brave and bold enough to break away
from the onerous special relationship with America. Paradoxically, it seemed such a leader would have to have the moral vision of a saint and the ruthlessness of a scoundrel, if there was such a
man, to wean the country from its habits of dependence.

Press accounts of the President-to-be augured well for optimists, who saw in Marcos’s character traits that might just fulfill the role. He was young, brilliant, and daring. There was some discomfiture that his reputed ruthlessness outweighed his moral qualities, but such doubts were cast aside. There had been “good” Philippine Presidents and they had been unable to deliver. The rationale was cultivated in those days that Filipinos might, after all, need a kind of devil to pull them out of the colonial morass, someone who knew the game of evil and would cope with it for their sake.

This mood for compromise was the cue on which publicists built an image of Marcos as a “crisis hero.” What it really meant was that with Marcos’s mediocre political record, they proceeded to fantasticate the legend—brilliant student, war hero, successful politician. Overnight, Filipinos were besieged by propaganda of a superhero combining the qualities of Audie Murphy and John F. Kennedy, who lived in their midst, unknown until the Presidential campaign of 1965. A book entitled For Every Tear a Victorydocumented this heroic life so preciously hidden from public knowledge. There was some grumbling that the over-enthusiastic portrayal of Marcos as a larger-than-life hero was being made at the expense of Filipinos. But even these objections were brushed aside as petty. The stakes were too high to quibble about propagandists’ hyperbole. Marcos has always believed that it was this book that won him the Presidency. It had not been written, after all, for Filipinos but for Americans.

Also he had Imelda. She, too, proclaimed highly paid propagandists, was a paragon of virtue, the female complement to the modern-day superhero. She was rich, young, and beautiful, an Asian Jacqueline Kennedy. The souvenir program described her as the wealthy and well-bred descendant of one of the “mightiest political clans of the country.” As she sat in animated conversation with Mr. Humphrey and former President Carlos P. Garcia on the Luneta grandstand, there was no reason to dispute the claims.