The late President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr., during his time and even today, is widely recognized as a brilliant lawyer and an astute politician. His only son and namesake, Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., a Wharton undergraduate, is also a politician of no mean caliber. Ousted from office in 1986, the Marcos family was able to regain lost glory when Marcos Jr. was elected 17th President of the Philippines in 2022 with the help of his now arch-enemy, the family of former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. No one should ever dare take it from them again.
The elder Marcos was convicted of murder at a very young age, completed his law studies while in jail, took and topped the bar exam in 1939 at the age of 22 and defended himself successfully in court. Elected as a congressman in 1949 and senator in 1959, Marcos Senior went on to become the 10th President of the Philippines in 1965 and ruled the country for 20 long years as a dictator. Mr. Marcos was ousted from power in the 1986 People Power Revolution and died while in exile in Hawaii in 1989 at the age of 72. This ignominious chapter in their family’s history must have left an indelible mark in Marcos Jr’s then young mind.
The only other lawyer to be elected president of our country since Marcos Sr. is former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. Duterte was elected in 2016 or half a century after Marcos Sr. and scarcely three years before Marcos Jr took office.
Three presidents, three generations apart, three different backgrounds.
Marcos Senior belonged to that period in our political history where only bar topnotchers get elected to the Senate or the Presidency. Carlos P. Garcia, Diosdado Macapagal and Ferdinand E. Marcos succeeded each other to the presidency in 1957, 1961 and 1965-- all bar topnotchers. These generation included Manuel Manahan, Raul Manglapus, Gil Puyat, Arturo Tolentino, Lorenzo Sumulong, Jose W. Diokno, Lorenzo Tanada, Jovito Salonga and Tecla San Andres Ziga. Marcos Senior’s reign of twenty long years decimated a whole generation of the “best and the brightest” in Philippine politics that we have not been able to find a suitable replacement.
Thirty years separated the presidency of Cory Aquino and her son Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. Between those years rose President Fidel V. Ramos (2002-2008), heir to the Aquino legacy; the short-lived reign of Joseph “Erap” Estrada (1998-2001), a popular town mayor and movie actor and Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (2002-2010), an economist, followed by Noynoy Aquino (2010-2016).
Then came the generation that moulded and produced a Rodrigo Roa Duterte.
An admirer and student of Jose Ma. Sison in his undergraduate years at the Lyceum of the Philippines (now the Lyceum of the Philippines University), Duterte lived through what came to be known as the “First Quarter Storm” (FQS) from where he drew his populist, nationalist and anti-imperialist orientation. He graduated with a degree in political science in 1968 and took up law at the San Beda Law School graduating in 1972. At the nearby UP College of Law, his contemporaries were the late Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago, former Senate President Franklin Drilon and Duterte’s Presidential Legal Adviser Salvador Panelo.
Ever wondered why former President Duterte or President Marcos Jr. act or think this or that way?
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