A Philippine Memoir : In an Anecdote-Studded New Book, Journalist Stanley Karnow Details the Bumbling, Bloody, Comic Dealings Between the U.S. and Its Former Colony

Getting there was not half the fun for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos as they fled the Philippines three years ago. On the way to Hawaii with their retinue of relatives, grandchildren and servants, the ousted president and his flashy, profligate wife had to make a pit stop in Guam to buy toothpaste and diapers--and to exchange their pesos for dollars.

But despite the hassles, there was a moment of surreal levity on the U.S. Air Force transport as it lifted the badly packed autocratic couple to exile. Imelda Marcos began the journey by singing “New York, New York,” a hymn to one of the cities where she loved to shop.

These are among the anecdotes that Stanley Karnow accumulated while he worked on the highly praised “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines” (Random House), a history of the bumbling, bloody and often comic relationship between the United States and the 7,000 islands that make up the Pacific nation. A PBS series based on the book is scheduled for broadcast next month, giving everybody with a television set a chance to behold a weeping Imelda bemoan the inconveniences of speedy exits.

While “In Our Image” covers recorded Philippine history from its discovery by Magellan in 1521 to America’s annexation after the Spanish-American War, the book also is a detailed account of recent events behind today’s headlines. For instance, last week’s arrest of Saudi Arabian financial fixer Adnan Khashoggi in Switzerland is directly tied to the years of misrule and profiteering by Marcos covered in Karnow’s book. Khashoggi was arrested last Tuesday by Swiss police on a U.S. warrant charging that he conspired with the Marcoses to hide money and property that they had stolen from their country.

Meanwhile, the Marcoses themselves have been charged with many felonies, not the least for embezzling $345 million from the Philippines government to buy prime Manhattan real estate. A week ago Marcos’ case was severed from his wife’s because he reportedly is too ill to stand trial.

For Karnow, a veteran Asian correspondent perhaps best known as the author of “Vietnam: A History,” gathering the raw material for his sprawling account was sometimes a marathon of enduring monologues and gastronomic excess.

In 1984 on his first trip to Manila after an absence of some years, Karnow was worried about getting access to the Marcoses, he recalled in an interview. He shouldn’t have worried--at least about Imelda.

“Night after night she was calling up, ‘You must come to dinner,’ ” he explained, launching into a saga of sleeplessness and police surveillance. “Dinner consisted of meeting at six o’clock somewhere and sitting until four in the morning listening to her babble away. With Dom Perignon champagne and caviar being served to you. I never thought I’d get to the stage where I’d have too much caviar and champagne. . . . About the third night the producer (of the PBS series) said, ‘OK, you’re the chief correspondent, you go tonight.’ One night I slipped away to go have dinner with friends of mine at some restaurant somewhere. I guess the police were watching or something because the phone rang and it was one of her aides on the phone saying the First Lady would like you to come to such and such a nightclub. . . . After one night I knew she was manic. After 10 nights, I didn’t need that much research.”

Cosmic Connection

Although he spent many wretched hours with Imelda Marcos, Karnow was reluctant to indulge in pop psychology about the woman whose 3,000 pairs of shoes--among other signs of indefatigable collecting--were found in the presidential palace after the Marcoses fled.

“There’s this febrile, frenzied quality about her,” he said. “She never stopped. She’d get into all this stuff about her cosmic theory. God help me, long nights of this stuff, meaningless gibberish. . . . Obviously there’s something screwy there. What it is, I don’t know.”

After abandoning crates of antiques and art in the haste of flight, Imelda, who once spent $12 million on jewelry in a single day, sought to fill the void with wholesale purchases of souvenirs like those available in airport shops, Karnow said, recalling a visit to the Marcoses’ home in Honolulu.

“The stuff they have in the house is all this airport kitsch,” he said. “She’s basically a very tacky and tasteless person. I think the real Imelda is these little airport gewgaws with salacious sayings on them--’I love my wife, but, oh, you kid.’ ”

Money for Power

Ferdinand Marcos, on the other hand, was less egregiously materialistic, according to Karnow. “He’s different,” Karnow said. “He wanted the money but he wanted the money for power purposes. . . . He was a very abstemious guy. He would, of course, go along with her flashy things and appear at these parties, but I don’t think he was entirely comfortable with that kind of thing.”

In contrast to the flamboyant, possibly addled Imelda and the power-seeking Ferdinand, Cory Aquino--the woman who became president after the not-so-fun couple jetted away--made much less of an initial impression on Karnow, the seasoned journalist. Karnow blames that partly on Aquino’s late husband, Benigno, the leading opponent to Marcos, gunned down as he stepped off an airplane in Manila in August, 1983. Benigno, who became a friend of Karnow, was an exuberant, talkative man who never gave his wife a chance to put in a word--until she reluctantly assumed his mantle.

“The cliche is that when someone becomes a celebrity, you say I’ll never forget the first time I met so and so,” Karnow explained. “I really can’t remember the first time I met her. I vaguely remember about when it was and that she was effaced by her garrulous husband, her male chauvinist pig husband as she would call him.”

Nonetheless, Aquino rose to the challenge of leading a revolution. “It’s as if the lady next door to me suddenly became president,” Karnow said. “In 40 years as a reporter, it’s hard to think of anything as miraculous, which is the word she uses incidentally.”

Although the Marcoses were corrupted by the power they wielded for so long, Karnow places part of the blame on the United States, which tried to remake the Philippines in its own image during the half-century it ran the Pacific islands as a colony. In his book, Karnow argues that the attempt succeeded only in superficial ways, giving Philippine society a common language in English, a facade of American--style suburbs and public buildings in Manila, as well as a widespread taste for American education and American consumer goods. But underneath the country’s democratic and material trappings, the United States had little impact in changing the almost feudal structure of the Philippines, a web of economic, political and family relationships that defy standard American visions of orderly government and political probity, Karnow asserts.

Karnow also is critical of the war the United States waged to suppress Filipino opposition to annexation. Ill-remembered in this country, the turn-of-the-century war was in some ways a forerunner of Vietnam, particularly in the atrocities committed by both sides and the guerrilla-style war that evolved, according to Karnow. (At about this time President William McKinley, who had been maneuvered into starting an American empire, confided that he wasn’t really sure--within a few thousand miles--where the Philippines were.)

Perhaps most damagingly, Karnow believes that Filipinos have acquired a reliance on the American art of manipulating appearances rather than substance.

“In many ways, they’ve acquired the worst of America, the sense that the answer to all problems is public relations,” Karnow noted. “To this day Marcos believes that it (his ouster) was all the fault of the press.”

During the waning days of his rule, Marcos was visited by former U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt, an emissary of the Reagan Administration seeking means to shore up the dictator.

“One of the big subjects of discussion was how to improve Marcos’ image in the United States,” Karnow said. “Here’s a guy who’s stole billions of dollars, ran an autocracy, violated human rights and he sees his problem as an image problem. And Laxalt says what you really need is a good public relations firm. So he hires for a million dollars some right-wing Washington public relations firm.”

Yet Karnow acknowledges that the relationship between the United States and the Philippines endures because of a real affinity, a closeness that is not duplicated in the former colonies of other imperial nations. He writes that he once asked a Filipino waiting in line for a visa at the American consulate why he wanted to come to this country.

“Surprised by such an obvious question, he replied, ‘America is my other home,’ ” Karnow reports.