The correspondents’ motto proclaims that they are writing the first rough draft of history. Their task is to report with an outsider’s eye but also dig deep to reach for insider understanding. As they file for the day and then move on to the next day’s headlines, skill, luck and deadlines set the balance between “rough” and “first.” History, benefiting from hindsight, often reads those headlines and reaches a different verdict.
Rare is the correspondent who sits down to re-argue the truth of all those stories filed decades ago. But when history is twisted to restore the reputation of a deposed dictator, an angry correspondent can return to relive the long-ago fight. Then the headline becomes “Journo versus tyrant.” And that is the battle Keith Dalton wages in cramming two books into one — his life as a foreign correspondent and his reporting on former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos — in Reinventing Marcos: From Dictator to Hero.
Marcos was a politician who became a dictator and a kleptocrat, ruling for two decades until he was driven out of Manila by the People Power revolution of February 1986. History’s thumbs-down for Marcos seemed settled when he died in exile in 1989.
But Ferdinand’s widow, Imelda, and son, Bongbong, spent years rinsing and remaking the Marcos legend, and their efforts were crowned when Bongbong was elected president in 2022. At 59 per cent, his share of the vote was the largest since 1981, when his father won 88 per after the opposition boycotted the election.
The Marcos brand has been triumphantly transformed. The family and its followers proclaim that Ferdinand was the nation’s best-ever president who gave the Philippines a “golden age.” Not a golden age but a “bloody age,” responds Dalton, incensed and frustrated by the denialism and the success of the social media campaign.
Keith Dalton arrived in Manila in 1977 with “a backpack, a typewriter, and a burning ambition to be a foreign correspondent.” He found there a big story, “a jarring exhilarating era of political volatility which upturned the fabric of Philippine society and realigned the nation’s political trajectory.” Covering the final decade of Ferdinand’s presidency as a freelancer, he reported for ten radio stations and three newspapers around the world.
Reinventing Marcos takes aim at the apologists, fantasists and propagandists who have weaponised the internet to concoct a revisionist history aimed at swing public opinion “from vilification to veneration.” In reality, Marcos’s headstone should be cluttered, reading “Dictator. Autocrat. Despot. Demagogue. Plutocrat. Kleptocrat,” says Dalton, offering this summary:
The Philippines was Marcos’s fiefdom which he meticulously, systematically, corruptly, and brutally controlled. He ruled with an iron grip; embezzled an estimated US$10 billion; looted the treasury; oversaw the rewriting of the constitution to suit his political ends; stacked government agencies with political and military cronies; politicised the bureaucracy; suppressed trade unions; muzzled the media; controlled the Supreme Court; promoted provincial mates to top military posts; and oversaw a system of crony capitalism that generated wealth and created monopolies for his family and friends.
During the regime “tens of thousands of people were arrested and tortured. Thousands were killed or ‘disappeared’.” The euphemism “disappeared” sits beside the equally chilling “salvaging,” the term applied by the military to its murdering of the regime’s enemies:
For every year I was in Philippines, people were salvaged. Many, many people. “Salvage” would have to be the world’s most obscene misnomer. It’s not a cynical term, nor a snide expression. It’s a disgusting military term; a term that applies only to the military, and a term they use openly. So common is the word “salvaging,” it has become a standard, readily understood, newspaper headline… It no longer means “recovered.” Instead, it means to kill somebody. It’s done, almost exclusively, and always covertly, by specialist military “hit squads,” often at secret locations, and frequently follows acts of torture. It’s equivalent to the appallingly sanitised euphemism “extrajudicial” killing.
As a good correspondent, Dalton knows that facts and figures matter but people make the stories. He introduces the eight-year-old girl who survives a massacre by government militia that kills forty-five people in her village, including her mother and brother; the eleven-year boy who hides in a tree and watches as soldiers behead his father; the trade unionist and the student activist each murdered for their work; and the woman living in a shanty town, her home a large cardboard box originally used to ship cars, who has to give away two of her four children because she can’t feed them.
The pages light up when Dalton introduces Cardinal Jaime Sin, the archbishop of Manila, whom he wryly describes as “one of the country’s most powerful politicians.” Sin was a “a formidable political manipulator” whose outspoken support for the People Power revolution helped drive Marcos from office.
The cardinal and the correspondent clashed occasionally, and Dalton was frustrated that Sin often spoke euphemistically, offering “criticism with a light touch.” But Sin had understated power, Dalton writes: “He was wily and he knew he wielded influence because as the spiritual head of more than forty million Filipinos, he presided over the most powerful institution in the Philippines, after the government.”
Sin quipped that the three fastest forms of communication in the Philippines were “telephone, telegram, and tell-a-nun.” He was at the centre of the revolution that ousted Marcos after he tried to steal the 1986 election. As the Catholic Bishops Conference proclaimed, “A government that assumes or retains power through fraudulent means has no moral basis.”
The church and disaffected military officers came together to support “the biggest civilian uprising” in Philippines history. Encouraged by the church, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of Manila. Dalton pleads with his Filipino wife, Bet, not to go, but he can’t dissuade her from joining the crowds to make history. “I have to go,” she tells him. “It’s up to all of us. This is our chance to get rid of Marcos. If they bomb us, we could die, and I’m prepared to die.”
The much-feared air attacks never happened. The tanks stopped and their crews joined the crowd. The people won and the despised dictator fled. The truth of that history can’t be remade.
Dalton’s book is a gritty paean to an era of journalism before computers, the internet and mobile phones: that long-ago time when the landline phone was king. Setting up his home office, he journeyed to the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company and paid several hundred pesos — “the most blatant bribe I had ever given” — to leap the fifteen-year queue and have his phone connected in a week.
Doing radio pieces involved unscrewing the mouthpiece of the phone to attach alligator clips to the two exposed wires, then plugging the audio cable into the tape recorder. To complete the makeshift studio, he worked with a blanket over his head to dull the sounds of the neighbourhood, a torch in one hand and the script in the other.
Broadcasting loudly and slowly down a crackly phone connection helped iron out his Australian diction, he found: “It was not my intention, but I was told my accent sounded ‘mid-Atlantic’ and apparently that made it acceptable to the American networks.”
When he eventually got access to a phone on the eighth floor of the UPI newsagency, he also got a window with a view of the presidential palace. During the Peoples Power revolution he placed the phone on the window ledge and leant out as far as the cord would go, reporting live to overseas radio stations with the sounds of battle in the background:
It made for great radio. At key moments, over those four days, BBC listeners heard live gunfire between rebel and government troops; listeners to Canada’s CBC heard me describe a helicopter rocket attack on the presidential palace; and when President Marcos fled Manila in a US military helicopter that flew directly over the building, listeners to Germany’s Deutsche Welle heard the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the rotor blades.
Being a freelance correspondent is an exciting way to starve. During ten years in the Philippines, no radio station or newspaper paid Dalton a retainer or covered expenses or travel costs. The arrangement was: “you do the story, and we will pay you, but only if it’s used.” To survive, a freelancer spends as much time chasing bills as stories: “Payment for stories was irregular, often monthly, and very often disputed.” When he left to return to Australia, one radio network still owed him thousands of dollars. The struggle served Dalton’s version of the correspondent creed: “Getting the story mattered. Getting it right mattered most.”
In a dangerous country, Dalton’s microphone gave him power that could push him into peril. Covering a protest rally in Manila that had turned into “an active war zone for about 100 metres,” Dalton finds a dead protestor sprawled in the gutter. Nearby, a soldier struggles violently with two protestors, holding their shirts in a single grip, waving a handgun at their heads, snarling, yelling angrily and gesturing as if to kill: “The soldier like many others, had removed his name tag. Now, he could do whatever he wished, anonymously, without restraint, with impunity. He appeared wildly out of control.” The frantic soldier has to decide. So does the correspondent:
As I approached, slowly, directly, staring, I pulled my tape recorder with its large BBC sticker to the front of my body, so it was in full view, and held the microphone out in front of me as if I was recording. I wasn’t. “I’m watching you,” I said. He seemed startled, confused. The soldier stopped struggling with his two captives and stared, disbelieving at my intervention. I was close. The microphone, outstretched, could have touched his chest. A slight smile crossed his face. He seemed relieved. I was. Hesitantly, he lowered his gun and released his grip on the two demonstrators and instantly they scampered away in opposite directions.
Pushing the microphone and demanding answers draws a chilling response from the regime’s chief enforcer, defence minister Juan Ponce Enrile. Brushing aside questions from a brash, impudent journalist, Enrile has Dalton taken from his office by two goons in civilian clothes with holstered revolvers. They drive in an unmarked military jeep for forty minutes to an abandoned building site.
Convinced he was “on the road to oblivion” Dalton watches as one of his captors unloads bullets from his revolver one at a time:
It was all for show. I was their plaything, the human prop in their pantomime of intimidation. But then he went off script. Instead of putting one cartridge back and spinning the cylinder, he left the chamber empty — at least that’s what I think I saw, hoped I saw — and held the barrel to my temple. “Don’t report anything,” he sneered. He didn’t pull the trigger. He didn’t need to. The pressure on my temple was enough. I felt the spreading warmth of pee in my pants. Seconds later, I was ordered out of the jeep and left to find my way home.
Another near-death experience, in Sydney forty years later, inspires Dalton’s book. As doctors debate the best way to keep him alive during a twenty-two-day hospital stay, Dalton is in a stupor and starts to have visions: “Not dreams. Not hallucinations. Semi-conscious visions, both day and night. Visions with a clarity I never believed possible.” The visions are of places, events and people in the Philippines:
The significance of the hospital visions was obvious: they were niggling subconscious prods for me to tell of my time as a foreign correspondent in the Philippines, to rebut the lies, the superficial gloss and dross of pro-Marcos propagandists intent on whitewashing the brutality and authoritarianism of the Marcos regime. I am not religious or spiritual in any way, but these visions were gnawing on my conscience like an omen, a psychological go-ahead to start writing while I still could. My experiences in the Philippines and life under Marcos needed telling.
The near-death visions delivered a new deadline. The subconscious was telling the correspondent to file again. Dalton asked a nurse for a pen and paper and began to write as “characters floated by and incidents flickered to life.” Like any journalist notebook, the scrawl of the handwritten notes builds the frame of what must be reported, as Dalton writes in his dedication: “I hope I have found the words to speak for those who can’t.” •
Reinventing Marcos: From Dictator to Hero
By Keith Dalton | Lightning Source | 464 pages | $37.99
