I highly suggest reading Bonner's, Waltzing With A Dictator: The Marcoses and The Making of American Policy (1988); Romulo's, Inside the Palace: The Rise and Fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (1987), and Gleek's, President Marcos and the Philippine Political Culture (1988).
Thanks for your very helpful reading suggestions. Let me share with you excerpts/reviews of the books you mentioned.
“Rarely, if ever, in history have so few stolen so much from so many.â€
-excerpt from Raymond Bonner’s Waltzing With A Dictator: The Marcoses and The Making of American Policy, Vintage, 1988***
“In a unique position to observe the Marcos regime and their private lives, Romulo (The Manila Hotel, etc.), wife of Philippine foreign minister Carlos P. Romulo, portrays the Marcoses as a powerful and greedy political team, surrounded by sycophants and jetset friends, who exploited a still feudal society with a corrupt patronage system. While Imelda was noted for her lavish and frivolous lifestyle, the author emphasizes that her husband relied on her as a de facto vice-president to whom, as his health failed, he accorded increasing authority, sending her on missions that she combined with mammoth shopping sprees. In this gossipy, meaty expose, studded with frank appraisals of public figures, the author contrasts the glamorous life of the privileged few, which she admittedly enjoyed, with the dire poverty of the Philippine people. Her eyewitness account of the disintegration and toppling of the regime after Benigno Aquino's murder confirms other such reports.â€
-excerpt from Editorial Review, Publishers Weekly, on Beth Day Romulo's Inside the Palace: The Rise and Fall of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos , Putnam, 1987***
“The Philippine political culture is a personalistic but violent, religious but superstitious, corrupt but tolerant, hierarchical but distributionist, solicitous of form but not of content, legalistic, but careless of equity, media-obsessed and nationalistically vociferous with respect to rights but negligent to obligations.â€
-summary of the limitations of Philippine political culture by Lewis E. Gleeck, American observer, diplomat and historian, in his book President Marcos and the Philippine Political Culture, Cellar Book Shop, 1988Just some more reasons for my distaste of our Martial Law years.
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