Apologies for the tardiness of this newsletter. Last weekend saw sad news of the passing of Amado Doronila.
Last week’s The Long View:
THE LONG VIEW
Doro
By: Manuel L. Quezon III – @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:30 AM July 12, 2023
The last time I saw Amando Doronila, purely by happenchance, happened to be on his last day in the Inquirer. I was seated in the lobby, and I looked up and saw him emerge from his office on the top floor. He walked slowly, with that pouchy eyed scowl of his, to the top of the stairs, and then even more slowly, proceeded to go down the stairs, studiously looking straight ahead. The normal hustle and bustle of a standard editorial day accompanied this slow progression down the stairs. There was a small cluster of people in the lobby, waiting for him, holding a few small boxes.
Looking neither to the left nor the right, he straightened his back and shuffled out. I didn’t have the heart to greet him on this somber occasion, and I suspect neither did many others. It was better, perhaps, that he just left, on his own steam, with no fuss, in the middle of a regular working day.
Francophile that he was, I know Doro would have known and agreed with the famous declaration of Charles de Gaulle, that “old age is shipwreck.” Age, in the inexorable way it does, had been catching up with him. A colleague had told me, with mingled awe and pity, of seeing him manfully climbing those same office stairs, grasping the banister with one hand, and, thrusting another arm forward, literally hauling himself up, stair after stair, floor after floor. In his last years, he’d come to share an office with a colleague literally a third of his age, in charge of digital marketing, and knowing he was a mutual friend, Doro once bellowed at me, “It’s like sharing an office with Death! The Grim Reaper looking over your back!”
He was a man of his generation. A ceremony of sorts would mark the conclusion of each column. He would put in the last keystroke and then call for our universally beloved editorial assistant, Tintin, who would, in that magical way of hers, magically appear in a flash. She would then save Doro’s column on a diskette (and eventually, a thumb drive) because that is as far as his dealing with the system would go.
Yet wherever he was, and for the longest time he was a journalist whose datelines were either Canberra or Manila, his roving curiosity, phenomenal memory, and analytical preeminence meant nothing fundamental escaped his attention. It was, indeed, on his powers of analysis, and not on his ability to extract an inside scoop, or to the gleeful, willful, ultimately egotistical exercise of influence, that he took the greatest pride and which was, unquestionably, (to use a word of which he would have approved) his métier. It was a competitive advantage that only sharpened and didn’t dull, with age.Writing, like the other arts, is an activity that can greatly improve with age. Or to put it another way, age in and of itself is not a deterrence to the craft. To this day, I celebrate the élan of Carmen Guerrero Nakpil who sang the praise of melatonin, saying it made her sleep like a baby—after she’d downed each dose of this natural cure, with a snifter of brandy. One of the few things to make Doro smile was the mention of wine and food: He would suddenly look young again.
An active, inquisitive mind is probably one of the best ways to keep functioning to a ripe old age: witness the remarkable longevity of Filipino columnists, very few of whom lived truly abstemious lives.
I started reading the papers avidly in my teens, after Edsa, when the bylines were a Who’s Who of journalism. Eldest of all was Vicente Albano Pacis, who’d already been a senior editor in prewar years. He was literally a living link with Philippine journalism stretching back to the 1920s. Armando Malay occasionally wrote a link to the 1930s, while Teodoro M. Locsin, Nick Joaquin, Luis Mauricio, and Carmen Guerrero Nakpil harked back to the ’40s and ’50s. Max Soliven, Doro himself, were the Young Turks of the ’50s turned seniors of the ’80s and ’90s. What they all imbued the reader with, was what goes by that humdrum term, “institutional memory,” which goes beyond knowing who’s who, or what’s what, but the whys that link the who and the what.
It struck home one idle moment after one of our quick editorial discussions with the late Gani Yambot. I was walking with Doro to the fabled stairs when he turned to me and said, “You know, this Noynoy thing, I haven’t seen such enthusiasm for a campaign since Magsaysay. Not even in 1986.”
With his passing, I celebrate the miles of column inches he wrote but mourn the books he planned but in pursuing daily events, never got to finish. Over the 20 years I knew him, he kept on talking to me about his dream of writing a book comparing Quezon and Atatürk, of whom he had an interesting thesis he only got to hint at in a four-column series in this paper. You may be a columnist for decades, but you will always end up running out of time.
Additional readings:
There is the fond farewell of Vergel Santos which, together with the obituary of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, says it all. Perhaps one day someone will do as study of columnists not in terms of what they wrote, but of what others thought of their writing, in particular, the leaders (and their followers) whom they supported or opposed. This struck me when, looking back at Doronila’s remarkable life, one sees the intense dislike of some, the respect and liking of others, and how like could turn to dislike over time. Before martial law, for example, one could contrast the mild categorization of Gregorio Brilliantes with the venom of the (pro-Matcos) Kerima Polotan. The praise of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for Doronila at the start of her presidency was surely miles away from what she felt about him at the end of her administration.
I first wrote about him in 1996, in the context of a book he published, based on a thesis he wrote: The state, economic transformation, and political change in the Philippines, 1946-1972.
The (three-part) series I mentioned in my column can be found in my website:
Manuel Luis Quezon—a strongman Filipinos need
Quezon and Ataturk (2), clash of empires
The social ideas of Quezon and Ataturk (3)
We know what might have been the title of the book, if it had come out: Quezon: the Social Origins of Filipino Authoritarianism; a comparative study.
A Cabinet Commentary:
The editors of the Philippine Daily Inquirer asked me to do a commentary on the President’s Cabinet, one year in. There is one thing I didn’t include because it deserves its own commentary: the President deciding to take on the Agriculture portfolio.
COMMENTARY
Marcos’ first year in office: The past and present in the official family
By: Manuel L. Quezon III - @inquirerdotnet
Philippine Daily Inquirer / 05:30 AM July 11, 2023
CABINET MEET | President Marcos presides over a Cabinet meeting at Malacañang in this photo taken on Sept. 12, 2022.(MALACAÑANG PHOTO)
MANILA, Philippines — The second Marcos presidency was born under the shadow of the first: a public expectation of excellence in Cabinet appointments. But it was also born in a different era: a post-pandemic world, in which economic rehabilitation was foremost in both global and domestic observers’ minds. Finally, there was also the blunt reality that as historic as the victory of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was, every administration is a coalition, and every faction expects a role.
All this helps to explain what preceded Marcos’ oath-taking: the jockeying for position, and clumsy demands for a share of the spoils of victory; the echoes of the past, in the president-elect’s choices for appointments; and the combination of self-assurance in this, the third restoration regime of our republic, and improvisation due to the short amount of time between a president-elect’s proclamation and the actual inauguration.
From this coalition, there came crude, social media-driven efforts to float potential Cabinet appointments to preempt, or worse, hem in, the incoming administration. Then there was the unexpected, because naïve, demand by Vice President-elect Sara Duterte to be given the defense portfolio, which the president-elect, in his first demonstration of leadership, had to forcefully but diplomatically reject (she was given, and accepted, the thankless job of secretary of education instead).
Echoes of the past lay in the selection of familiar names from the first Marcos regime: either second-generation legacy appointees such as Conrado Estrella III, Susan Ople, Toni Yulo-Loyzaga, or actual veterans, such as Juan Ponce Enrile, who was returning to serve in a Marcos Cabinet 40 years after having served in the first: making him the oldest Cabinet officer in our history, but also a throwback to Marcos Sr.’s appointing Jose Yulo (grandfather of Yulo-Loyzaga) to the justice portfolio 30 years after he first held the post during the Commonwealth.
Credible economic team
Marcos’ primary, almost exclusive, focus was on recruiting a credible economic team. His being able to do so went far to dispel any anxiety over the short-term prospects of the administration. But it meant that when he took office, there were gaps in his official family. Marcos lacked a secretary of foreign affairs. The post was filled only shortly after he assumed office, which left the president to his own devices on inauguration day, his first test of diplomatic skill considering the high-profile delegations sent by the United States, China, Japan, and Australia.
In retrospect, this should have served as an indication of where the new president was most confident in his own skills, foreign affairs, as shown by the choice of a bland figure, career diplomat Enrique Manalo, to be a nonthreatening choice.
He also started with only an officer in charge (OIC) designated for the Department of National Defense (DND), which was explained away as a necessity because of a legal impediment to his choice to assume the portfolio immediately. It was here, as it turned out, that the president seemed to find the question of appointments the most problematic. Months were spent dealing with the unintended fallout of having a fixed term for the AFP chief of staff. It entailed shuffling generals and OICs in DND. The health department, too, remained in limbo for nearly a full year.
The only surprises lay in the choice of the new president’s senatorial chief of staff to be executive secretary, when he lacked the experience normally expected of the job. In turn, Marcos’ choice for communications and national security adviser could only be understood in terms of factions — in this instance, those associated with the new executive secretary.
This, in turn, would be quickly evicted in what was widely understood to be a housecleaning effort by the first lady. Something she herself denied: while the president said she was a great organizer, he eventually said he consulted her on legal, and not administrative, matters.
Early on, the president also undertook a reorganization of his office, undoing some of the changes made by his two immediate predecessors, such as the abolition of the position of Cabinet secretary and subordination of the Presidential Management Staff to the executive secretary. By reestablishing the position of presidential adviser on military and police affairs and placing it under the special assistant to the president, he reverted to an earlier model of management.
Cabinet mix
In his first year, Marcos’ Cabinet could be described as being a mix of pragmatic politicians such as Benhur Abalos and Jesus Crispin Remulla (including a subset of local politicians: Christina Frasco, Zenaida Angping), technocrats, legacy appointees harking back to the era of his father, and placeholders keeping positions warm until the expiration of the ban on defeated candidates being appointed.
Of course, there were also removals, resignations, and reinforcements: Erwin Tulfo failed to withstand congressional scrutiny; Zenaida Angping was brought down by the alleged antics of her husband; Paul Soriano was brought in to burnish the presidential image. All these resulted in untidy backbiting and rumor-mongering within the chattering classes of the president’s own coalition to explain his choices or lack of them.
Only when the one-year ban on appointing defeated candidates expired, and Gilberto Teodoro Jr. and Ted Herbosa were named to the defense and health departments, can the president be said to have truly completed the task of forming his Cabinet.
The past year demonstrated the hallmarks of the Marcos restoration: nods to the past, self-assurance in foreign affairs, conservatism in domestic political management, but a willingness to fire rather than let problems fester.