The reluctant president

I first met Benigno C. Aquino Jr. when I was a college freshman student at Ateneo de Manila University in June 1979. We were having our orientation day at the college gymnasium when the emcee said that the son of the imprisoned senator Benigno Aquino Jr. was there and would speak. He was then a senior A.B. Economics student at Ateneo.

Please remember that I was born and I grew up in a military air base. And then I was there to witness the son of the politician imprisoned by the military give a speech. He talked briefly and wished us well. He was painfully shy and kept his head bowed before and after giving his speech.

He belonged to a brilliant batch that included Albay governor and now congressman Joey Salceda and former Supreme Court chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno. After graduation, he worked for the family corporation and I lost track of him. He later went with his family when his father received a fellowship at Boston University. His father also had a triple heart bypass operation in the United States. It was a way out for both Benigno Aquino Jr. and his nemesis, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. The dictator did not want the oppositionist senator to stay in the country, and the heart bypass operation was a convenient excuse to let him go.

From 1981 to 1983, the Aquino family lived in Boston, which Mrs. Cory Aquino, who later became president, said “were the happiest days of our lives.” They were finally together as a family. Mrs. Aquino spent the early days of the military dictatorship looking for her husband. She had gone to the dreaded ABCD camps (Aguinaldo, Bonifacio, Crame and Bicutan Detention Center), but she could not find him. The senator had been airlifted via helicopter and jailed at Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija, in a detention center surrounded by rusty barbed wires.

After the dictator Marcos was kicked out in the People Power Revolution of 1986, I worked as a journalist. I went to a martial law exhibit and saw a replica of the small cell where they imprisoned senator Aquino. He had neither watch nor calendar, so he drew horizontal chalk marks on the wall to keep track of the days. He only had a wooden bed, a small table with a copy of the Holy Bible, and a small toilet and bath. But the military captors misread the effect of the Holy Bible. Instead of turning the senator into a meek lamb, it deepened his belief and toughened him up.

This depth and toughness he would later impart on his children, especially the only son, Noynoy. When the late senator was assassinated at the Manila International Airport on August 21 1983, Mrs. Aquino came home three days later. Clad in black, she only spoke one sentence at the airport, to a waiting media: “Courage, like cowardice, is contagious.”

Only five words ringing with alliterations, but it electrified a country long inured to the Marcos dictatorship. In two years, Mrs. Aquino would become the reluctant leader of the Opposition. When president Marcos announced a snap election in December 1985 to be held two months hence, the Opposition fielded her.

It was a very short campaign period. Some of us volunteered at the campaign headquarters located near Santo Domingo Church. Others gave away flyers to jeepney and tricycle drivers. I pasted posters and stickers, hung streamers and tarpaulins. We were against a rich and corrupt despot, but we were young and we wanted to stay in the country.

It was an election marred by violence and fraud. On February 23 1986, the people surrounded Camp Aguinaldo to protect the soldiers who had mutinied against the dictator, and three days later, the homegrown dictator fled to Hawaii.

Noynoy Aquino stayed by his mother’s side all throughout her presidency. She faced nine coup d’état attempts and survived them all. The most difficult was the coup d’état of December 1989, when I was a student at Stirling University in the UK and thought I could not come home anymore. I listened to the BBC report of snipers and shooting in Makati and prepared myself for a life of exile.

Noynoy was hurt during that coup, with a bullet lodged in his shoulder. But he survived, and later ran for senator of the land. We were together at the Ateneo de Manila College of Law in 2007, political candidates invited to speak. Koko Pimentel was there, and he said that Bar exam top-notchers like him should be elected to the Senate. Noynoy Aquino spoke calmly about his achievements in Congress. And when I spoke, I said that Ladlad Party-list, which I head, had no campaign funds and we had “a snowball’s chance in hell of winning in the elections,” but we would run and fight.

I was seated beside Noynoy and after I spoke he gave me a piece of paper with his cell phone number. He said, “You’re bright and witty and you have charm. You should run.”

But the Commission on Elections gave us trouble in 2007 and did not allow us to run “for lack of a national constituency.” Noynoy Aquino ran for senator and landed number six. In 2009, his mother died and a sorrowing nation looked around for someone who could match the billions of a Villar presidential candidacy, and they saw Noynoy: calm, collected, seemingly cold. A reluctant candidate, like his mother.

But it was not coldness but stoicism. I guess it is a generational thing. Those of us who grew up during martial law know this. My mother, kind soul that she was, told me to steel myself. My father, a military officer, told me to look at the eye of the storm and never flinch.

Noynoy was shunned by some classmates in college because his father was jailed by Marcos. He was always introverted but he had a strong sense of purpose and a clean nose. So when he ran for president and won, I knew he would bring these qualities to bear on his presidency: common sense, clarity of purpose and a sense of mission.

Farewell, Mr. President, and thanks for everything.

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Danton Remoto’s novel, Riverrun, has just been published by Penguin Books.