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                                                                                January 5, 1987

Woman of the Year

Cory Aquino



Aquino Leads a Fairy-Tale Revolution, Then Surprises the World
with Her Strength


History, wrote Gibbon, is little more than a "register of
crimes, sorrows and misfortunes."  It is, equally often, a study
in black ironies or the fatal mechanisms of tragedy.  Sometimes
history is even a cautionary tale, an Aesopian fable on the
folly of blindness or greed or lust.  But history is rarely a
fairy tale, a narrative that instructs as well as inspires.
Still less often is it a morality play, in which the forces of
corruption and redemption, of extravagance and modesty collide
in perfect symmetry.

In 1986, however, as all the global village looked on, history
turned into a clash of symbols in the Republic of the
Philippines, a nation long relegated to its dustier corridors.
 There is the Southeast Asian archipelago of 56 million people
and more than 7,000 islands, life not only imitated are but
improved upon it.  In a made-for- television drama watched by
millions, two veteran rulers, President Ferdinand Marcos and his
wife Imelda, stumbled and fell in their ruthless campaign to
extend, with an immodesty broader than a scriptwriter's fancy,
their stolen empire.

During the final years of his "constitutional
authoritarianism," Marcos had effectively moved his country
backward--from democracy to autocracy, from prosperity to
poverty, from general peace to a widespread Communist
insurgency.  Treating the national treasury as if it were their
personal checking account, the royal couple had looted their
land of perhaps $5 billion.  "Here in the Philippines," said
Imelda, "we live in a paradise.  There are no poor people as
there are in other countries."  Even as she spoke, seven in
every ten Filipinos were living below the poverty level.

The sudden turn of fortune's wheel came when a confident Marcos,
who had never lost a vote in his life, called a snap election.
 He was thus hoping to satisfy the Reagan Administration's
demands that he become more democratic.  But Marcos' plans for
victory were upset by a slight, bespectacled mother of five, who
had entered politics only two months earlier.  When she went to
fill out her application for the presidency, Corazon Aquino had
nothing to enter under OCCUPATION but "Housewife."  The last
office for which the soft-spoken widow had been chosen was
valedictorian of her sixty-grade class.  In fact, her chief, if
not her only, political strengths seemed to be her innocence of
politics and the moral symbolism of her name.  In Spanish, her
first name meant "heart"; in Philippine politics, her second
signified "martyred opposition," in memory of her late husband
Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, once Marcos' chief rival, who was slain
on his return from exile in 1983, Cory Aquino, at 53, stood in
effect on a platform of faith, hope and charity.

The outcome of the allegorical battle seemed pre-scripted, if
not predestined.  Marcos, who had once been an effective and
even popular ruler, in recent years had gradually proved
brilliant enough to rewrite the rules and brutal enough to
enforce them.  On election day in February, in full view of more
than 700 foreign journalists, Marcos' men ripped up ballots,
bought others and intimidated voters at gunpoint.  As many as
3 million names were simply struck off the voter lists.

Then, suddenly, the implausible began to happen.  Thousands of
volunteer poll watchers, singing hymns and burning candles,
formed a human barricade against the armed goons and carried
their ballot boxes through the streets to counting stations.
Thirty of the government's vote tabulators walked out in protest
against the fraud. The country's Catholic bishops publicly
condemned the election, and the U.S. Senate echoed the protest.


Soon the implausible turned into the improbable.  Defense
Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, the architect of Marcos' martial
law, and Lieut, General Fidel Ramos, the deputy chief of the
armed forces, broke away from the government, claiming that
Aquino was the true winner.  As the rebels barricaded themselves
inside two military camps, first hundreds, then thousands, then
tens of thousands of common citizens poured into the streets to
offer food, support and protection, if need be with their
bodies, to the maverick soldiers and Aquino backers.  As
civilians, bearing only flags and flowers, took up positions to
defend the military men, the world knew that it was watching
more than just an electoral upheaval.

Finally, the improbable became the impossible.  Marcos' tanks
rolled toward the crowds, only to be stopped by nuns kneeling
in their path, saying the rosary.  Old women went up to
gun-toting marines and disarmed them with motherly hugs.  Little
girls offered their flowers to hardened combat veterans.  In the
face of such quiet heroism, thousands of Marcos loyalists
defected; many simply broke down in tears.

Less than 24 hours after Marcos had had himself inaugurated, he
was being helped off a plane in Hawaii, sickly, exiled and
bewildered. His former home, Malacanang Palace, was now a
melancholy tableau of abandoned power, overrun by thousands of
revelers.  The new leader of the Philippines was the reserved
housewife who had worn plain yellow dresses every day of her
campaign.  For her determination and courage in leading a
democratic revolution that captured the world's imagination,
Corazon Aquino is TIME's Woman of the Year for 1986.

Whatever else happens in her rule, Aquino has already given her
country a bright, and inviolate, memory.  More important, she
has also resuscitated its sense of identity and pride.  In the
Philippines those luxuries are especially precious.  Almost
alone among the countries of Asia, it has never been steadied
by an ancient culture; its sense of itself, and its potential,
was further worn away by nearly four centuries of Spanish and
American colonialism. The absence of a spirit of national unity
has also made democracy elusive.  Even Jose Rizal, a political
reformer shot by the Spanish and a national hero, called the
Filipinos "a people without a soul." Yet in February, for a few
extraordinary moments, the people of the Philippines proved
their bravery to the world, and to themselves.

Aquino's revolution with a human face was no less a triumph for
women the world over.  The person known as the "Mother of the
Nation" managed to lead a revolt and rule a republic without
ever relinquishing her buoyant calm or her gift for making
politics and humanity companionable.  In a nation dominated for
decades by a militant brand of macho politics, she conquered
with tranquility and grace.

By reviving the promise of democracy without bloodshed, all too
rare in the past, the Philippine revolution also held up a
candle of hope in some of the world's darker corners.  Moderate
South Africans, for example, could take some heart from the
success of civil disobedience; nor could they fail to note the
victory of a woman who was once her failed husband's ambassador
to the world, much as Winnie Mandela works in the name of her
imprisoned husband Nelson.  In overthrowing Marcos, moreover,
Aquino helped erase a whole volume of shibboleths.  She showed
that politics could be the art of the impossible; that force
could speak softly and carry a small stick; that religion could
be not the opium but the stimulant of the masses; that nice
guys, whatever their gender, sometimes finish first.

Aquino's triumph inspired many overhasty and wishful predictions
of sequels in Chile, South Korea or Pakistan to the Philippines'
"People Power."  None of those countries, however, suffer under
the conditions that ruled in the House of Marcos.  Their
economies are not in shambles, their corruption is far from
exorbitant, their armies remain unshakably loyal to their
military leaders.  The U.S., moreover, has shown no sign of
wishing to help push their strongmen out the door.

Yet the symbol remains.  After watching the smiling shots seen
round the world, no dictator can sleep quite so easily.  And
dissidents everywhere now have a stirring precedent and talisman
to invoke. Says Congressman Stephen Solarz, chairman of the
House Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs:  "I have found
that from Poland to Pakistan and from South Korea to South
Africa, those who are committed to democracy see in Aquino a
sense of enduring inspiration. She is probably the most popular
head of state in the world today."

Inevitably, the fairy-tale nature of Aquino's sudden ascension
prompted some extravagant mythmaking.  To some the woman in
yellow seemed a Joan of Arc, a religious figure incarnating her
people's hopes as she led them to freedom; to others she was a
Cinderella, with one glass slipper instead of Imelda's 3,000
pairs of shoes. Indeed, as startling as it may seem in the
secular West, millions of devout Filipinos viewed Aquino as a
sort of Blessed Mother, a redeemer who came to resolve the
passion play that had begun with her husband's death.

Yet the real world does not lend itself to fable for long.
After the revolution comes the Realpolitik, and
happy-ever-afters soon dissolve.  The day after her victory,
Aquino found herself in charge of one of the world's most
desperate countries, saddled with a foreign debt of $27 billion.
 20,000 armed Communist guerrillas and a pile of government
institutions that bore her predecessors' monogram.

Soon enough the new leader's innocence and inexperience showed.
 She summarily dissolved parliament and, ruling by decree, had
all the country's governors and mayors, regardless of
performance, replaced with sometimes unqualified people of her
own.  She then switched to the other extreme, often dithering
over critical decisions. Gradually, however, as the year wore
on, Cory the Chief Executive and the Commander in Chief began
to prove as surprising as Cory the Symbol.  When challenges
arose, the novice rose to meet them.  While followers of Defense
Minister Enrile unsettled Manila with constant threats of a
coup, Aquino coolly went about her business.  Then in late
November, once she was absolutely sure of the military's
support and confident of backing from Washington, she fired
Enrile, the man who had helped put her in power.  Four days
later, she concluded the first cease-fire in the 17 years of the
Communist insurgency.

At year's end, as the Philippines prepared for a nation-wide
plebiscite in February on a new constitution, Aquino remained
decidedly embattled.  Yet her authority seemed as steady as her
gift for confounding expectations.  To come to power, Aquino had
only to be herself, a symbol of sincerity and honesty.  But to
stay in power, she had to transcend herself.  After ten months
in office, it was not just her softness that impressed, but the
unexpected toughness that underwrote it; not just her idealism,
but a steely pragmatism that made it more rigorous; not just her
rhyme but her reason.  Aquino moved people, in both senses of
the word, by making serenity strong and strength serene.

If Aquino's stunning rise allowed the world a rare chance to
suspend its disbelief and exult, 1986 also gave it many more
familiar opportunities to distrust its leaders and to weep.
Late in the year, the Reagan Administration was suddenly shaken
by the disclosure that it had been covertly selling arms to Iran
in an attempt to win freedom for American hostages in Lebanon.
 That dubious policy flared into scandal with the revelation
that some of the money received for the arms had been diverted,
apparently in violation of congressional laws, to the contra
rebels in Nicaragua.  As questions multiplied with a velocity
that brought Watergate to mind, a backpedaling White House
seemed guilty, at the very least, of high incompetence.  At the
center of the storm was a little-known National Security
Council staff member, Lieut. Colonel Oliver North, whose
mysterious doings, and the questions they raised, threatened to
enmesh many higher officials in a growing web of intrigue and
deceit.  At stake was nothing less than the viability of
President Reagan's final two years in office.

The crisis of faith in the White House only counterpointed a new
air of confidence in the Kremlin.  In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev
continued his brisk public relations offensive by sweeping the
cobwebs out of his foreign service and introducing a little
fresh air into the long- closed rooms of Soviet public life.
In September he managed to trump Washington when the KGB
released U.S. News & World Report Correspondent Nicholas
Daniloff in exchange for a proven spy.  Just two weeks later,
Gorbachev again seemed to outmaneuver President Reagan at their
unofficial summit in Iceland.  The two leaders came closer than
ever before to an agreement on nuclear arms, then ended up back
where they started.

The U.S. fared little better in its long battle against
terrorism. After the Administration launched an air rad on
Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in April, the masked face of terrorism
was mostly absent from the world's airports and alleyways.  Five
months later, though, the threat was back with a bloody
vengeance.  Bombs erupted in downtown Paris, men and machine
guns stormed a synagogue in Istanbul, four Palestinian hijackers
held a Pan American plane hostage for 18 hours in Karachi, and
17 more foreigners were kidnaped in Lebanon.  Many leaders
looked to another kind of pressure--that of economic
sanctions--to push the white-dominated government in South
Africa toward reform.  But neither trade embargoes nor the
pullout of Western firms seemed likely to douse the flames of
racial violence. Indeed, last week the unrest continued, with
sporadic clashes with government forces, protests against a
state of emergency and "black Christmas" boycotts.

The shadows cast by other menacing forces also lengthened in
1986. The disease known as AIDS (acquired immuno-deficiency
syndrome) claimed its 16,128th American life and left millions
more rethinking their private lives.  The epidemic of drugs
became more sobering than ever, as the young turned to an
addictive and unusually noxious boiled-down form of cocaine
known as crack.  One atomic nightmare came true and others were
awakened when a Soviet atomic power reactor at Chernobyl, 80
miles north of Kiev, exploded and then kept burning for several
days, a man-made disaster that could cause as many as 5,000
premature deaths by radiation-induced cancer.  It was history's
worst nuclear accident.

The abuse of technology also sabotaged one of the last vestiges
of heaven--bent idealism--the American space program--when the
space shuttle Challenger turned into a fireball only 73 seconds
after takeoff.  While millions watched on television, the craft
and its seven passengers, including Schoolteacher Christa
McAuliffe, disappeared in a sad trail of smoke.  The tragedy
only deepened when a presidential commission found that the
accident had been caused by bureaucratic mismanagement and
neglect.

None of these events, though, were quite so startling, let
alone uplifting, as Aquino's almost cheerful revolution.  And
if the first woman President of the Philippines was the happiest
symbol of a year of symbols, she was also the most human.  She
showed how one individual could inspire in others a faith so
powerful that it vindicated itself and changed a country's
history.  She brought not only a new face into politics, but
also a new way of thinking about politics and the virtues it
demands.  The victory of "People Power" made no dents in the
larger issues that tower like Stonehenge sentinels over the
planet.  It has not shifted the superpower equation nor reduced
the threat of nuclear war.  But it has, perhaps, affected the
people who affect the issues.

Corazon Aquino's first, ever so hesitant entry into the
larger-than- life melodrama of recent Philippine history came
when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972.  One of the
first people to be arrested without charge was Ninoy Aquino,
Marcos' closest rival.  The tough but charismatic Aquino had in
quick succession become the youngest mayor in Philippine history
(at 22), the youngest governor (at 29) and the youngest
President too, as soon as Marcos' second and final term ended
in 1973.  Before that could happen, Marcos threw him in jail.

As Ninoy languished in prison, his diffident and devout wife
became his eyes, ears and voice in the outside world, acting as
his liaison with what remained of the Philippine opposition.
For seven years and seven months, spending hours alone with her
husband in his cell, the upper-class matron received tutorials
in opposition strategies from a master of the political arts.
 In between, she had to smuggle messages to and from him,
sometimes on scraps of paper, sometimes in her head.

During the early weeks of martial law, recalls Cory, she could
not watch television lest she see Marcos or her husband's
official Jailer, Defense Minister Enrile (the man who signed the
arrest warrant was none other than General Ramos).  In her
conjugal visits, she had to share her husband with hidden
cameras and bugs.  Once, when Ninoy's guards simply removed him
from sight for more than six weeks, Cory was forced to wander
from prison to prison in search of him.

In 1980, however, Ninoy was released from confinement, and his
wife from politics, when Marcos granted the ailing prisoner
permission to travel to the U.S. for triple-bypass heart
surgery.  With a trumped- up death sentence over his head at
home, Ninoy settled down after his operation in a red brick
house in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton.  There he
returned to scheming for the overthrow of MArcos, while Cory
resumed her favored routine of browsing through department
stores, raising bonsai trees and relaxing over Falcon Crest and
Dallas.  Her American neighbors remember the President of the
Philippines especially for her Peking duck.

The years in Boston were the most uneventful of Cory's adult
life; she has also called them the happiest.  In 1983, however,
she had to look on stoically as her husband defied repeated
warnings from Manila and decided to return to the Philippines
to challenge Marcos, death sentence or no.  Hardly had Ninoy's
plane landed in Manila when he was met by a group of soldiers
and hustled out of the plane.  Seconds later, shots rang out,
and Ninoy Aquino lay dead on the tarmac.

Ten days after the killing, up to 2 million people streamed into
the streets in an unprecedented outpouring of sorrow and shock,
transforming Aquino's funeral into the largest procession in
the country's history.  In the weeks and months that followed,
street vendors and socialites, businessmen and radicals all
awoke from years of resignation to cry out their rage.  Yet the
official opposition to Marcos remained fatally factious, divided
into more than a dozen self-seeking groups, each of them tainted
either by extremist positions, associations with the government
or long years of failure.

It soon became obvious that the only person far enough above
the political differences to unite the opposition was the
martyr's widow. She was also, by no coincidence, the only one
who did not seek the role.  "I know my limitations," she said
three months after the murder, "and I don't like politics.  I
was only involved because of my husband."

Still the pleas for her candidacy gained momentum.  Finally, in
October 1985,while delivering a lecture on "My Role as Wife,
Mother and Single Parent" at a University of the Philippines
sorority, Aquino conceded that she would stand for the
presidency--provided that Marcos called a snap election and that
1 million people petitioned her.  The very next month, prodded
by the warnings of Senator Paul Laxalt, President Reagan's
special emissary, that U.S. support for his regime was
weakening, Marcos stunned even his advisers by announcing a snap
election.  One month later, Aquino was presented with her
million signatures.

That unanswerable summons sent her into a soul-searching
retreat.  By the time she emerged, she was a candidate.  In
order to unite the opposition forces, she swiftly approached
Salvador Laurel, who was planning to lead his own ticket against
Marcos, with a deal.  She would give up her affiliation with her
brother's party, Lakas Ng Bayan (LABAN), or People Power, if he
would give up his candidacy and be her running mate.  Her magic,
his machine. After days of bartering, the makeshift pair finally
filed their candidacy papers only 90 minutes before the midnight
deadline.

On the campaign trail, it soon became clear that Aquino's main
asset was, quite simply, herself.  Turning her appearances into
what amounted to improvised prayer rallies, the small figure in
yellow stood before crowds, voice quavering, and delivered
heartfelt parables about her life under Marcos.  Wherever she
spoke, tens of thousands of worshipers came together in a sea
of yellow, flashing the L sign of LABAN, and striking up chants
of "Co-ry!  Co-ry!  Co- ry!"

By voting day Aquino had become a powerful political presence.
 Only eight hours after the election, in the face of widespread
cheating by Marcos forces, she seized the initiative by
declaring herself the winner.  When Philip Habib, Washington's
troubleshooter-at-large, came to Manila to suggest a compromise
with Marcos, she icily informed him that she would accept
nothing less than Marcos' removal from office.  "This is my
message to Mr. Marcos and his puppets," she declared with quiet
fury as the confusion dragged on.  "'Do not threaten Cory
Aquino, because I am not alone.'"

An Enrile and Ramos staged their revolt in Manila, Cory, 350
miles away in Cebu, at first lay low in a Carmelite monastery.
 But as the revolution continued, she hurried back to Manila,
ready to take charge.  While her advisers collapsed in
exhaustion around her suburban bungalow and a gunfight continued
less than a block away, the President-elect serenely announced
that she planned to take a shower and get changed.  Then she had
herself driven to her inauguration in her white Chevrolet van,
stopping at every red light.

Demureness and determination; steel and silk.  In Cory Aquino
there has always been the sense of a confidence so strong that
it does not need to proclaim itself.  Aquino knows where she
stands and is sure of the foundations below her:  her family and
her faith.

Cory's natural air of authority and her sense of noblesse
oblige were, in a way, her birthright as a child, the sixth of
eight, of Jose and Demetria Cojuangco.  After coming to the
Philippines from Fujian province in China just three generations
earlier, the Cojuangcos had quickly parlayed a small rice mill
and a sugar mill into the richest empire in Tarlac province.

For all its wealth, however, the clan was known for an
unostentatious reserve, and throughout her childhood, as ever
after, Cory preferred to be overlooked.  At a series of the
country's most exclusive girls' convent schools she was
remembered, when she was remembered at all, as a bright, devout
girl and the perennial class valedictorian.  In 1946, when her
family left war-torn Manila for the U.S., the 13-year- old
Filipino with bobbed hair enrolled in the Ravenhill Academy, a
Catholic girls' school in Philadelphia, and later in the Notre
Dame Convent school in New York City.  Cory's four college years
passed with scarcely a trace at the College of Mount St.
Vincent, a small Catholic women's college in the Riverdale
section of the Bronx.  The self-contained student occasionally
entertained her classmates with Filipino dances but otherwise
kept to herself, spending spare hours with an elder sister and
returning home to the Philippines in the summers.  Her
classmates recall her only as a "shy little violet" who once
played an angel in a college production of Green Pastures.

Aquino's upbringing was, in short, the classic, cloistered
training in propriety that becomes a thoroughbred young lady of
the upper classes.  As a Cojuangco, however, she also grew up
with as sharp a sense of power as, say, a Rockefeller heiress.
 For 13 years she was treasurer of the family corporation, Jose
Cojuangco and Sons Inc.

Nor could she ever be oblivious to politics.  Her father was a
Congressman, her maternal grandfather a vice-presidential
candidate, one uncle a Senator and another a Congressman.
"Since she was a little girl, Cory has been accustomed to
meeting the great personalities of the world," says Benjamin
Brown, the former director of the fellows program that brought
Ninoy to Harvard's Center for International Affairs.  "She is
comfortable and confident in those circles."  Indeed, in 1954
when the well-bred young lady gave up her law studies at the Far
Eastern University to marry Ninoy, the sponsor at the wedding
was Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay.

If Cory is a singularly family-oriented person even for a
family- oriented culture, she is also uncommonly devout even for
a country that is 85% Catholic.  And if Cory inspires faith, it
is largely because she is inspired by it.  Three of her closest
advisers are Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila; Father
Joaquin Bernas, president of the Jesuit Ateneo de Manila
University; and Father Catalino Arevalo, another Jesuit, who is
her spiritual adviser. Addressing the governors of the Asian
Development Bank and 1,200 international delegates two months
after coming to power, she frankly declared, "I am not
embarrassed to tell you that I believe in miracles."

The absoluteness of that belief gives Aquino a firmness that can
turn into stubbornness.  Indeed, her very real sense that she
is an instrument of God's will prompts friends and relatives to
refer to her career, again and again, as a "mission."  Says her
mother-in-law and confidante, Dona Aurora Aquino:  "I think this
is a mission for her, to put her country in shape.  Then she can
retire.  Ninoy's assassination was his fate.  The presidency is
hers."  Cory often says the same thing.

Faith is also the basis of her fatalism.  "If someone wishes to
use a bazooka on me," she once said, "it's goodbye.  If it's my
time to die, I'll go."  In the meantime, she exasperates her
security men by acting as if she were protected by some
invisible shield.  Her sense of religion accounts too for
Aquino's uncanny patience, her willingness, while awaiting what
she regards as the appointed moment, to hold onto a burning
match until it singes her fingers.

Yet her piety is very farm from passivity.  In 1984, returning
to Mount St. Vincent College to collect an honorary degree, the
mild, once bookish college girl surprised her former classmates
with a forceful address.  "Faith," she told them, "is not simply
a patience which passively suffers until the storm is past.
Rather, it is a spirit which bears things--with resignation,
yes, but above all, with blazing serene hope."

That is the same quality noticed by Richard Kessler, a senior
associate for U.S.-Philippines relations at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.  "She's a very biblical type
of person," he observes.  "But it's not from a Hallmark card.
 It's saintliness at in the Old Testament.  On the one hand, you
pardon your enemies; on the other, it's an eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth."

If Aquino's blaze of righteousness is partly responsible for
her luminous, even numinous, magnetism, it also explains her
unbending ruthlessness in applying an eye for an eye.  "In some
ways," says a close confidant, "she's an unforgiving person.
She never forgets." When a former supporter, Homobono Adaza,
went over to Enrile's camp, she not only stripped him of his
$50,000-a-year position on the board of the San Miguel
Corporation, a large state-controlled conglomerate, but replaced
him with his archenemy Aquilino Pimentel.  The flip side of her
fidelity is inflexibility.  "I have a long memory for people who
have helped me," the President recently warned a group of
subordinates, "but I have a longer memory for people who have
stood in my way."

That air of discriminating toughness was hardened during her
marriage, which was, as much as anything, a rhyming of
opposites, a marriage of public and private.  "She was a very
supportive wife," recalls her mother-in-law Dona Aurora.  "She
was content to remain in the background.  She did not meddle,
she stayed at home."  As it happened, she had little choice.
"Let's face it," the President likes to say with a wry mixture
of affection and realism, "my husband was the original male
chauvinist."

Yet if Ninoy was the public center of the family, Cory was the
moral backbone.  "He decided that he would be the indulgent
parent," she has written, "and I would be the disciplinarian."
 Often she extended that loving discipline even to her husband,
telling him the difficult truths that his cronies preferred to
hold back.  "Cory was his highest conscience," says Harvard's
Brown.  "He valued her judgments enormously."

In its way, indeed, the Aquino marriage seemed to play out in
miniature the central dialectic of Cory's life between politics
and faith.  As a traditional Filipino fresh presser, Ninoy
regarded all politics as dirty politics and was content to join
the rough-and- tumble system in order to beat it.  Cory,
however, disapproved of such chicanery, and in deference to her,
Ninoy and his friends never discussed skulduggery when she was
present.  "The minute she entered the room," says one close
family friend, "people put on their best behavior.  Even Ninoy
behaved when Cory was around.  I was nervous when Cory served
the coffee.  She can be very cutting, and she will cut you in
public.  She has a dismissive gesture of the hand to indicate
that she's tired of the discussion or the person.  It's very
un-Filipino, and it has unsettled a lot of people."

Some problems, though, she could not wave away.  Ninoy's free-
spirited ways, could never have been easy on his young wife.
Yet it seems that her husband's private life exercised her no
more than his public one.  Wherever he was, Ninoy turned his
home into a kind of 24-hour coffee shop in which the loquacious
host and his associates would thrash out tactics through the
night, while Cory waited on them.  The ceaseless bustle must
have placed a considerable strain on the retiring patrician
woman.  "Cory is an introvert, Ninoy was an extrovert," says
Ninoy's favorite sister, Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara. "He thrived
on people.  She doesn't need them."

Those who have known Cory Aquino as wife and hostess are hardly
surprised by her quiet authority--only by the suddenness with
which she has steeled herself to her new role, transforming
herself in 30 months from a self-effacing lady to a
self-confident leader.  Yet those who have just met her are
often so disarmed by her softness that they overlook her ability
to act with decisiveness.

The White House, to take one example, was markedly reluctant
during the dying months of the Marcos era to accept the petite
grandmother with a little girl's voice as a plausible leader of
the country that houses the largest U.S. military installation
abroad.  Even after the election, a White House aide publicly
complained, "How the State Department thinks that Aquino can
govern on her own is just beyond us."

Since she came to power, however, Aquino has systematically
gone about stilling many of those doubts about her ability to
govern. Afterward, and ever since, the normally poker-faced
Secretary has fairly glowed at the very mention of Aquino's
name.  When Cory spoke before a joint session of Congress, she
received the most thunderous reception given any foreign leader
in more than a generation. Indeed, the entire U.S. tour,
observed a State Department official who accompanied her, was
"staggeringly successful.  She had hard- bitten politicians
eating out of her hand."

In her first ten months as President, Aquino has already begun
to freshen up the office with an honesty and humility rarely
seen in political circles.  Before her U.S. visit, for example,
she exasperated Philippine couturiers, accustomed to the
imperial Imelda, but refusing to spend more than $40 on any
dress.  She still prefers not to be called "Madam," an honorific
she feels was stained by the former First Lady.  In many ways,
in fact, she seems as open as before.  Upon learning that a
local journalist had won a grant to study in the U.S., the
President stunned the woman by calling her up to offer her an
old winter coat.

That unassuming style reflects a person with a very precise
sense of herself and her limits.  Aquino recognizes the vanity
of vanity. "I've reached a point in life," she says, "where it's
no longer necessary to try to impress.  If they like me the way
I am, that's good.  If they don't, that's too bad."  It is that
same kind of detached self-possession that enables her, in the
midst of pandemonium, to remain as composed as a sermon.  "A
single word of anger from her or any suggestion of violence [at
Ninoy's funeral] could conceivably have overtaken Malacanang
Palace," relates Emmanuel Pelaez, the Philippine Ambassador to
the U.S.  "But she was very scriptural.  'Vengeance is mine,'
she must have said to herself."

Nor has the presidency yet smudged her sense of priorities.
The eldest of Cory's four daughters, Maria Elena ("Ballsy")
Cruz, 31, is still her private secretary, and her only son,
Benigno III ("Noynoy"), 26, was one of her emissaries to the
Communists.  Aquino attends no more than three formal dinners
a week, and the day on which the historic cease-fire with the
Communists was signed found her marking what would have been her
husband's 54th birthday with Cardinal Sin and her
one-year-old-grandson Justin Benigno.  Being a grandmother, she
says, makes her happier than being President.

With her moral--even moralistic--strictness, Aquino can at
times treat even her Cabinet colleagues with the kind of
affectionate sternness she lavishes on her children.  She allows
no smoking in her office, and she expects all the President's
men to be prompt and tireless.  Once she told Chief Speechwriter
Teodoro Locsin to dress less like a gangster.  The faint air of
maternalism is heightened by her habit of referring to "my
people," "my Cabinet," and even, most disconcertingly, "my
generals."

For all that, however, Aquino's leadership of her Cabinet has
often been uncertain.  She manages by intuition, observers say,
which is perhaps why her government remains somewhat disorderly.
 So far, says one minister very close to the President, "she
gives herself a B. Her political instincts are superb, but she
needs a better balance of close-in advisers.  What she really
needs is a chief of staff."

At the center of the confusion, and the controversy, are the
human rights activists, whom Aquino admires for their idealism
and especially for the faithfulness with which they stood by her
husband during the dark days of martial law.  Ninoy's lawyer
Joker Arroyo is her executive secretary; Ninoy's cellmate Jose
Diokno is chairman of the Presidential Commission on Human
Rights; Ninoy's friend Locsin is her speechwriter.  Many people
feel that Aquino is too protective of these advisers and that
they are too protective of her.  The prime target of these
charges is the principled but overworked Arroyo, who sometimes
spends as much as six hours a day huddling with the President.

The conflict between personal loyalty and public policy becomes
even more vexing when it comes to Aquino's own large family.
If ever the President moves, as promised, to redistribute
national wealth, she can hardly afford to overlook the wealth
of the Cojuangcos.  More troublesome still are the activities
of her younger brother and close adviser Jose ("Peping"), who
has been accused of reaping personal profits from two new
casinos in Manila.

Having changed the rules of Philippine politics, moreover, the
self- professed housewife often finds herself judged by the old
rules.  In restoring her country's freedoms, for example, she
is content to go about her business while marcos loyalists stir
up trouble in the streets and Cabinet ministers speak their
minds to the 26 daily newspapers in rumor-mad Manila.  The
resulting appearance of dissentious sound and fury is, she says,
simply a sign of the government's self-confident strength:
democracy in action.  Others take it for weakness.

Likewise, her slowness to act while former Defense Minister
Enrile was openly challenging her authority was widely seen as
a symptom of her habit of praying and delaying.  Yet her
admirers point to the Enrile firing as an example of an inspired
sense of timing.  "She's an extraordinarily good judge of people
and performance," says Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who led
the U.S. team of observers at the February elections and
returned to Manila in August.  "She has instinctive feelings of
loyalty and of who is pulling with her."

Certainly, her swift if belated stroke of decisiveness against
Enrile dispelled in a single blow much of the turmoil that was
unsettling Manila.  And when she went on to ax four
controversial ministers, while signing a cease-fire with the
Communist rebels, Aquino pulled off a strategic coup of her own.
 Few could doubt that she had mastered the Napoleonic axiom that
"justice means force as well as virtue."

That radical shake-up also succeeded in soothing, for the
moment, some of the restiveness of the 250,000 men of the army.
 General Ramos, the head of the armed services, has declared
himself repeatedly, in word and deed, to be fully behind the
President. Nevertheless, as many as 6,000 young officers in the
Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM), outraged at Enrile's
ouster, may yet make trouble.

The military will stay quiet only if the President deals
decisively with the Communist threat, which has spread to 64 of
the country's 74 provinces.  Few expect the present 60-day
cease-fire to hold, and many hard-liners on both sides cannot
wait for it to collapse. Aquino's unswerving Catholicism and her
calm distaste for radical reforms make her highly unsympathetic
to the Communist cause.  Yet she is convinced that most of the
rebels were driven to the hills not out of ideology but out of
desperation, and can therefore be won back by negotiation.  As
the second stage of talks concluded last week, however, the
guerrillas were still demanding a coalition government and the
removal of U.S. bases, while the government was offering only a
package of social and economic reforms, including "amnesty with
honor."  If the talks break down, Aquino has already warned that
she will not hesitate to "take up the sword of war."

Perhaps the best weapon she could wield against the growing
Communist threat would be an improved economy.  As it is, her
presence and her free enterprise policies have already restored
a little business confidence.  As capital outflow has all but
halted, hard-currency reserves, down to only $200 million in
February, are now back to $2 billion.  Yet the economy is still
in desperate shape and dependent upon outside aid, especially
from the U.S.  In Manila, more than one in every two people does
not have a full-time job, and in the countryside, four children
in every five are suffering from malnutrition.  Real wages are
no higher than in 1972, and the economy will have to sustain a
robust 6% annual growth rate for six straight years just to get
back to where it was in 1981.

As she contemplates the enormous challenges before her, Aquino
can take heart, perhaps, from her rare gift for surprise.
Stalin is said to have claimed that "you can't make a revolution
with silk gloves." Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the British 19th
century novelist, believed that "revolutions are not made with
rose water."  And Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced that
"revolutions are not made by men in spectacles."  In coming to
power on a wing and a prayer, Aquino has already disproved them
all.

Aquino has also begun to disprove the predictions of her
husband, who used to say that whoever succeeded Marcos was
"doomed to fail" because of the troubles the person would
inherit.  His wife ended up with that chaos, and burdened too
with all the impossible expectations she had awakened.  In
addition, she enjoyed no transition period and no advance
planning.  To make matters worse, she has had to manage a
three-party government made up of moderates, leftists and the
military.  "Given the mess she's inherited," says a senior
Washington official, "I think she has been very successful."

Most of those who know Aquino well are even more confident that
her iron will and her driving sense of duty will not allow her
to give up.  In a poem he gave her for her 41st birthday, Ninoy
described his wife as "unruffled by trouble, undeterred by the
burden, though heavy the load.  Nothing is impossible..."  His
sister Lupita, whose relations with the President have sometimes
been frosty, now speaks with the fervor of the converted.  "I
believe that she was born and raised for this role," she says.
 "After she spoke before the U.S. Congress, I said to myself,
'Ninoy, you can rest in peace.  She is the President now.'"

Yet perhaps the greatest danger before the reluctant leader is,
finally, a private one.  As she becomes ever more the President,
she may become less and less the ordinary person--attending PTA
meetings, making pasta and praying with her children--who
captured her country in the first place.  In growing more
assertive, she may relinquish some of the gentleness that was
her greatest strength.  Ultimately, in mastering politics, she
may have to let politics master her.

Clearly, that problem tears at her.  Aquino worries when her
friends tell her that she is too honest, and laments, "I don't
want to be dishonest.  She frets that she can no longer afford
to be humble, and she misses the freedom to retreat into her
family and her privacy. "I am torn," she said just before firing
Enrile, "between acting like a President and like a human
being."

Some might say that she has set herself an impossible task in
trying to balance those roles, to season force with humanity and
realism with faith.  Yet if there is one thing that Aquino has
already committed to the safekeeping of posterity, it is her
gift for stretching the limits of the possible.  Last year, the
widow with the radiant smile managed to turn history into
something of a fairy tale. If she can now bring something of the
morality play even to a hardened political world, history
itself, like most of the forces she has already met, may one day
be quietly transformed.

--By Pico Iyer. Reported by David Aikman/Washington, Nelly
Sindayen and William Stewart/Manila.