She’ll Succeed at Unwanted Job, Aquino Tells Class

Digging deeply into her own religious and academic roots in America, President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines paid a visit to a small Roman Catholic college in the Bronx where she spent four years and declared before an audience of her former classmates that she never wanted to be president of her country.

“Now that I am president, though,” Aquino concluded in her extemporaneous speech to 52 American women who graduated with her from College of Mount St. Vincent in 1953, “I am determined to succeed.”

Aquino’s visit to the 100-year-old school, where she majored in French and mathematics, came on the sixth day of her eight-day, official trip to the United States. She has described her visit as a mission to expand the friendship and economic cooperation between the Philippines and the United States.

Her visit to the Bronx capped a weekend in Boston and New York that she has called “a sentimental journey.”

Before leaving Boston on Sunday morning, Aquino visited the stately 14-room home in suburban Newton, Mass., where she and her late husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr., spent 3 1/2 years in political exile during the regime of deposed Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Fordham Honorary Degree

In the afternoon, just 10 minutes’ drive from her alma mater, Aquino received an honorary doctorate at Fordham University, where the university president, Father Joseph A. O’Hare, noted that four other Philippine presidents have been similarly honored by Fordham in the past four decades.

“Only the name of your immediate predecessor is conspicuously absent,” O’Hare told Aquino in referring to Marcos, who ruled the Philippines for 20 years until Aquino helped drive him from power last February.

In the evening, Aquino addressed a $500-a-plate dinner at the Pierre Hotel that was organized to raise money for victims of human rights abuses in the Third World. Today, Aquino is scheduled to deliver an address to the U.N. General Assembly before traveling to San Francisco.

For the 53-year-old Aquino, Sunday was her most relaxed day of the trip.

Aquino spoke extemporaneously for the first time during her visit. She used more than a dozen religious references, among them her philosophy of government: “Praying with all my heart; working with all my might, and leaving the rest to God.”

The most personally revealing moments of Aquino’s trip came Sunday afternoon at her alma mater.

Nearly half of her Mount St. Vincent graduating class came to see her, some traveling from Puerto Rico, Texas, Illinois and Wisconsin.

“She hasn’t changed a bit,” Anita Cipriani of New York said of the woman listed in the college’s 1953 school yearbook as Maria Corazon Cojuangco.

“She looks younger than anyone else in the class,” Mary Amend Lundberg said.

And Sister Mary Ann Garisto, who became a nun after graduating as a close friend of one of just three Filipino girls in the school at the time, said, “She’s just the same sweet Cory.”

Most of the alumni recalled the Aquino they knew in school with the words “shy,” “quiet” and “very formal.”

“She had been very strictly brought up,” said classmate Natalie Foote Tierman, a close friend of Aquino’s who traveled from Libertyville, Ill., to see her. “She was an academic overachiever.”

And Aquino was religious even then, recalled Jean Capestro Loubriel of New Jersey. “She would visit the chapel after every class.”

Tierman, though, was one who knew another side of Aquino--”an impish side” that occasionally led to turning the lights back on after the nuns had ordered all the girls to sleep.

Aquino, who spent--in all--eight years of her adolescence in the United States, attended an academy in Pennsylvania before entering Mount St. Vincent.