Since you're relying on Reagan's biographers, I can understand how you reached the wrong impression. I do wonder, though, that you seem so acute in discerning the role of the Schlesingers as hagiographers, yet so willing to accept the judgements of Reagan's hagiographers. Selective perception exists on both sides of the political fence.
There's a lot they aren't telling you.
By the time Reagan made his plea for Marcos to resign, it no longer mattered. The issue had already been decided on the streets of Manila. It was no longer a question of whether he would leave or not, but of whether he would leave alive or dead.
We used to joke then that Reagan was the second-to-last person to understand that Marcos was finished. The last, of course, was Marcos himself, who hoped to the last that his man in the White House would fly him to his home province, where he could raise an army and march on Manila to recover what he believed to be his by natural right.
The relevant comments were made between the "snap election" and the uprising in late February, and you won't find any of them quoted in Reagan's biographies. We paid attention to every one of them. I don't know if you've ever lived in a country on the brink of civil war, but it focuses the attention in a most amazing way. It was generally understood that Marcos had been kept in power after '83 solely through the personal intervention of Ronald Reagan. (Assassination would have been unnecessary, all we needed to do to get rid of him was to stop sending him and his cronies billions of dollars in "loans". The Marcos regime violated - ignored, in fact - every deal it made with the IMF, don't you wonder why the money never stopped flowing?)
After the election, Reagan ignored the comments of his own observer's mission, publicly announcing that there was evidence of fraud on both sides. He repeatedly urged the opposition to accept the results of the election, and even suggested that Aquino form a coalition government with the people who had killed her husband. Many of these comments were made without consultation with the foreign policy apparatus; diplomats here were aghast, and livid, as was the American community. It was very clear that he wanted Marcos to stay, and was simply incapable of understanding that a continuation of Marcos' rule would make a communist takeover inevitable.
It was surreal. Here you had the great anti-communist, sounding as though he was reading a script prepared by the communists, making comments that seemed deliberately calculated to lead the country into a civil war that the communists would have won. That civil war didn't happen, but only because a million or so Manila residents took matters into their own hands. Please don't give Reagan any credit for it. |
