The Diary: An Introduction

In the regal isolation of Malacanang Palace, Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos had visions of grandeur. He imagined a place for himself alongside the world’s great figures. He studied the lives and politics of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. And he listened to voices calling him to greatness. One night in a dream, he said, God told him to save his country. “You are the only person who can do it.… Nobody else can.” So obsessed was he with the judgment of history that he fantasized about future eulogies and epitaphs:

I often wonder what I will be remembered in history for. Scholar? Military hero? Builder? The new constitution? Reorganization of government? Builder of roads, schools? The green revolution? Uniter of variant and antagonistic elements of our people? He brought light to a dark country? Strong rallying point, or a weak tyrant?

But who would render history’s verdict? That was the rub. He distrusted historians who, he feared, would be influenced by a stubbornly hostile press. Some of the country’s most influential journalists were his biggest critics. In that regard, he felt a kinship with U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.

To assert more control over his own legacy, however, Marcos preferred the model of statesman-writer Churchill - “make history, and then write it.” To that end, at the beginning of his second term as president, Ferdinand began keeping a personal record. Thus was born the Marcos Diaries.

It is a decidedly odd document blending history and fiction. Marcos wrote it himself, without the aid of a stenographer, in longhand and in English on pages of palace stationery. His penmanship was usually neat, his prose often Olympian. The diaries chronicle the mundane as well as high intrigues, national policy issues and family affairs. Marcos is revealed as a conspiratorial and paranoid politician and as a doting and sometimes deceitful husband.

The final product is replete with self-serving, even utterly false, entries about key moments and events. It commonly offers up Ferdinand’s delusions as facts, his paranoia as authentic menace, and his titanic personal ambition as the will of God.