An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  While the political campaign for control of the Philippines was getting under way, thousands of miles from Manila there was another example of people power exerting itself: Revolutionary winds were gathering on the Caribbean island of Haiti. For more than a quarter of a century, Haiti had been ruled by father-and-son dictators, the Duvaliers; but now it was on the verge of an explosion. The Haitian people were fed up with the tyranny and poverty the Duvaliers’ rule had brought them.

  At a National Security Council meeting on February 6, 1986, election eve in Manila, I made two decisions: To rid the Caribbean of a dictator and avoid civil war, we offered to spirit Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, with his family and a group of friends, out of Haiti and fly them on an air force jet to Paris. And I agreed to the terms of a spy swap with the Russians that would grant freedom to a prominent Soviet dissident, Anatoly Scharansky.

  Five days later, Scharansky was allowed to emigrate to Israel, and it became apparent we might have to relocate a third person that month—Ferdinand Marcos—to avoid, as we had in Haiti, a bloody civil war. I came to this realization at a meeting with leaders of a congressional delegation that had gone to Manila to determine if Marcos was running a fair election: They said there appeared to be overwhelming evidence of fraud in the balloting.

  I asked our roving diplomatic troubleshooter, Phil Habib, to go to Manila. He confirmed that Marcos had stolen the election and that an uprising of Filipinos on behalf of Mrs. Aquino, the legitimate winner, was inevitable. Things then started to move quickly in Manila: Two of the country’s top military leaders—Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile and Lieutenant General Fidel Ramos—resigned, gave their support to Mrs. Aquino, took control over part of the Philippine military forces, and called on Marcos to quit.

  On February 23, while I was at Camp David, I was told that Marcos and a loyal general, Fabian Ver, had amassed a force of tanks and troops to attack army units loyal to Enrile and Ramos. Ver’s tanks were turned back by hundreds of thousands of civilians —but the next time, the result might be huge casualties. I drafted an appeal to Marcos not to use force and helicoptered back to Washington for a Sunday afternoon meeting in the White House Situation Room, a small room in the basement where we convened during serious international crises. Present were George Bush, George Shultz, Cap Weinberger, Don Regan, Phil Habib, Bill Casey, and National Security Advisor John Poindexter, plus specialists from the State Department and other agencies.

  We agreed that it was inevitable that Marcos would have to give up power; he no longer had the popular support to remain in office. Mrs. Aquino had won the election fairly, and the people of the Philippines intended to make her president.

  Given these facts, the decision I made wasn’t difficult, but it wasn’t enjoyable, either.

  Everyone agreed that we had to do everything possible to avoid bloodshed in Manila; we didn’t want to see it come down to a civil war. I also wanted to be sure we did not treat Marcos as shabbily as our country had treated another former ally, the shah of Iran. At the same time, I knew it was important to start off with a good relationship with the new government of the Philippines.

  I knew Marcos was a proud man, and how we approached him was the critical thing. I didn’t think we should dictate to him; instead, we should lay down the facts and let him make the decision we wanted him to make. I decided that we would offer to fly Marcos and his family out of the Philippines and give them sanctuary in the United States. Based on my understanding of his personality, I told the others that we had to convince him of the hopelessness and inevitability of his situation and persuade him to give up power voluntarily, using the argument that it would avoid a civil war that could destroy much of the country he loved.

  Here are excerpts from my diary during that period, beginning with the aforementioned meeting in the Situation Room:

  Feb. 23

  It was a long meeting with no disagreement but lots of frustration. President Marcos is stubborn and refuses to admit he can no longer govern. I made the point that a message from me must appeal to him on the grounds that if there is violence I’ll be helpless to continue support for the Philippines. We must not try to lay down the law. All we can do is send the message . . . and pray.

  Feb. 24

  The day started at 5:30 a.m. with a call.

  The situation in the Philippines is deteriorating. The Marcos family and the Vers left the Palace and went to the airport. Then Gen. Ver apparently talked them out of leaving. Back in the Palace, they went on TV. The president and the general. They got in an argument. The general wanted to launch an attack on the military that has gone over to the anti-Marcos people. The president said No. All this ended sleep for me.

  In the office at 9. The staff meeting and N.S.C. were on the same subject. I was approving statements for delivery to the President, pleading for no violence. Then a call from Nancy—what to say to Imelda Marcos who was calling her? At same time I was told Paul Laxalt, George Shultz, John Poindexter and Don R. were coming in about Paul’s call to Marcos. We’ve agreed that he should be told I’m recommending he step down and we’ll take the lead in negotiating his safety and offering him sanctuary in the US. He says he wants to live out his life in the Philippines. Well, we’ll try to negotiate that. Wound up the day in the dentist’s chair. Time for inspection. I passed.

  Feb. 25

  The call this morning was at 6:45. President Marcos and his family and close circle I was told are in our Clark Air Force Base. We don’t know yet his destination but he’s said he wants to stay in the Philippines. He has a home in northern Luzon. In the office I was met by George Shultz and the VP, Cap, John, Don, etc. We are ordering our ambassador and others to contact Aquino to see if we could persuade her to accept his staying in the islands with a promise of security.

  As the day went on, we learned she wasn’t going to do that. He incidentally is quite ill and is bedridden at Clark. By evening we learned his party had left by medivac plane for Guam. He was carried to the plane on a stretcher.

  After the Marcoses received sanctuary in Hawaii, they tried several times to contact Nancy and me as well as Paul Laxalt in order to convince us that they were still the president and first lady of the Philippines. But there was nothing we could do. We recognized Corazon Aquino (whom I came to admire and respect after first being skeptical about whether she had enough determination to fight the Filipino insurgents) as the duly elected president of the Philippines, and had offered all of our help to her.

  Ferdinand and Imelda also asked us repeatedly to see if we could arrange for them to live out their lives at the home they owned on Luzon. Marcos sent word that he envisioned himself as a kind of elder statesman. Several times, we asked Mrs. Aquino if she would accept his return to the Philippines if, in exchange, he agreed to surrender the money he was accused of looting from the Filipino treasury; but she was afraid that if he returned to the Philippines, he would try to arouse his former supporters and regain power. Considering the events that occurred later, she was probably right: Marcos hadn’t been in Hawaii more than a few days before we started learning of telephone calls to Manila and other points in which he said he regretted leaving the country without a fight and desperately encouraged supporters to conduct a coup aimed at overthrowing Mrs. Aquino and restoring him to power. We also, at one point, foiled an attempt to ship a substantial number of arms to Marcos loyalists in the Philippines.

  The Marcoses didn’t like their life on Hawaii—most of all, I think, because their presence in the United States made them easy targets for lawsuits by the Aquino government and others. At their request, we asked several countries, including Panama, Spain, Mexico, and others, to take the Marcoses. But no one wanted them.

  We spoke to them one last time, by telephone, during a stopover Nancy and I made in Hawaii while we were en route to the Tokyo economic summit in April 1986. They didn’t like Hawaii and spoke longingly of a desire to return to the Philippines, where Ferdinand said he wanted to be buried. Even th
en, I don’t think they understood the depth of the feelings against them, not only among the Filipino people but among many Americans because of the corruption that had been rampant in the Philippines. Imelda kept Nancy on the phone for almost an hour. It was uncomfortable for all of us. We couldn’t help but remember how well they had lived in Malacañang Palace when we first met them when I was governor—and note how different their lives were now.

  For Nancy and me, the telephone call was a final farewell, a sad and bittersweet parting. We never spoke to them again.

  Until the day he died in the autumn of 1989, Marcos continued to claim that he was the president of the Philippines and Imelda claimed that she was the first lady.

  54

  WHILE I WAS PRESIDENT, Nancy and I made trips overseas that left us with memories that will never leave us. In the spring of 1984 it was China. Subsequent events in Tiananmen Square have tempered the enthusiasm generated in us by that trip, but when we went there during that beautiful spring, it seemed events were occurring in China and Poland that were heralding the demise of Communism.

  In March of that year, Treasury Secretary Don Regan had come back from a trip to Beijing with an intriguing report: The People’s Republic of China was moving slowly but surely toward acceptance of a free enterprise market, and inviting investment by foreign capitalists. Many farm communes were being disbanded, and Chinese farmers were being granted long-term leases and the right to sell their produce for a profit.

  Before most of my major foreign trips, the National Security Council prepared a short film that gave me a preview of the places I would be visiting and the people I would be meeting. The film they showed me on the eve of my trip to China confirmed that significant cracks were appearing in the foundations of Chinese-style Communism.

  On Easter Sunday, April 22, after a brief visit to Rancho del Cielo, we left for Honolulu on the first leg of the trip. During a two-day stop there, I saw Barry Goldwater, who was stopping over before continuing to Washington after a visit to Taiwan. Barry was upset about my visiting China and made little attempt to hide it. Although I told him I would make it plain to the leaders of the PRC that we would not forsake old friends in order to make new ones, he suspected I was getting ready to give up on Taiwan, and I don’t think I convinced him otherwise.

  We began our six-day visit to China in Beijing on a cloudy, overcast morning following another overnight stopover on Guam. We drove immediately to the Great Hall of the People for arrival ceremonies and a twenty-one-gun salute, and that night we had the first of a succession of twelve-course dinners. Thanks to some tutoring we’d gotten in Washington, Nancy and I both managed to handle our chopsticks with adequate deftness. We generally heeded advice that Richard Nixon, who’d come to Beijing in 1972, had given us before we left on the trip: Don’t ask about the food they serve you at the big banquets, just swallow it. Still, I had difficulty identifying several items on my plate that first night, so I stirred them around in hopes of camouflaging my reluctance to eat them.

  The following morning, when I met for breakfast with the staff, we kept noisy music playing loudly on a tape recorder as a precaution against hidden microphones. It was a good thing we did: Later, we found five listening devices hidden in our rooms in the guesthouse. One staffer unscrewed a plate over the light switch in his room, discovered a bug, removed it, and took it home as a souvenir.

  At my first official meeting with Chinese leaders, a ninety-minute session with Premier Zhao Ziyang, I emphasized that we were not seeking an alliance with China and that we approved of its non-aligned status, but felt that as friends and Pacific Basin neighbors we could contribute jointly to peace and stability in the basin. With that, I think the official part of the visit got off to a good start. Later that day, I addressed a group of Chinese civic leaders; a recording of my speech was subsequently broadcast to the Chinese people—minus several of my lines about the Soviet Union, religion, and the value of a free economy. Then came another meeting with Zhao and several party leaders, where we discussed trade and investment. At this meeting, a small, feisty ideologue tried to lecture me about removing our troops from South Korea. I tried to give it right back to him. If North Korea really wanted to improve relations with us, as he claimed it did, let them stop digging illegal tunnels under the demilitarized buffer zone between the two Koreas, I said.

  That night, there was another twelve-course dinner; somehow, the second one went down easier than the first had. By then, I guess I was really heeding Dick Nixon’s advice.

  The following day was the big event of the trip, my meeting with the top man in China, Chairman Deng Xiaoping. A small man with thick shoulders and dark, impressive eyes, Deng exhibited a playful sense of humor when we met. Nancy had come with me for the formal introduction, and Deng smilingly asked her to come back to China without me someday so he could show it to her. But later, when we got down to business, his smile was gone and he immediately began criticizing the United States for a whole range of supposed sins: our support of Israel, which he claimed made the entire Middle East unstable; our treatment of the developing nations; and our failure to come to terms on a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviets.

  As host, he got the first shot. Then it was my turn. I did my best to rebut just about everything he’d said, correcting his facts and figures. Host or not, he’d touched a nerve, so I let him have it. After that, to my surprise, he suddenly started to warm up; his smile came back and he seemed to want to relax and be more cordial. Still, that didn’t keep him from bringing up our friendship with Taiwan, which he claimed was an interference with Chinese affairs. I told him that the split between the PRC and Taiwan was a problem to be worked out by the Chinese, but that the United States wanted it worked out peacefully; any attempt at a military solution mounted by his country would damage relations between our countries beyond repair.

  By the time we broke for lunch, the intensity of our earlier discussion had faded into a warm and pleasant social event with toasts all around. By then, I think I understood him, and he understood me. After lunch, I picked up Nancy and we left for a visit to the Great Wall, with huge crowds waving to us along the way. Although I’d seen photographs of the Great Wall since childhood, seeing it rise up and disappear over the mountains in both directions was a tremendously emotional experience, one that even now I have trouble fully describing.

  During our tour of Beijing, it seemed that everywhere we looked we saw bicycles—all of them black. Virtually all of the cars, I was told, were owned by the government. One family, however, had just been able to buy a personal car, and instead of punishing them, the government broadcast the news on television while we were there. The government seemed to want to make heroes of the family, sending a message to the people: Private property is not all bad. Work hard and save your money and maybe you, too, can own an automobile.

  Next came several more days of sightseeing that included a few opportunities to observe the changes going on in China, as well as a fascinating look into its past. We flew to Xian, the ancient capital of China, then drove almost ninety minutes to the tomb of China’s first emperor and the site where archaeologists had unearthed hundreds of life-size terra-cotta figures of soldiers standing in ranks, complete with horses and chariots, to guard the tomb. “They know there are more than 7,000 [terra-cotta soldiers] that haven’t been uncovered yet,” I wrote that evening in my diary: “It is an unforgettable experience. This—plus the drive past villages surrounded by endless wheat fields dotted here and there with burial mounds and relics of China’s ancient past—made for a day we’ll long remember.”

  We had asked to visit one of China’s new free markets where Chinese farmers and entrepreneurs could sell items for profit in a departure from Communist ideology. At first the Chinese officials said that it would be impractical because of security restrictions, but then they offered to set up a sample market, and Nancy bought several decorations for our Christmas tree and presents for our grandchildren from a young girl
there. Nancy’s bill came to five yuan, about $2.50. I handed the girl a ten-yuan note, and when she discovered she didn’t have any change, she looked around, flustered and embarrassed, searching for help.

  I’d been briefed that tipping was not customary in China, but I felt sorry for her as she looked around in panic for help, so I said, “Keep it,” and we moved on. But in a few moments she caught up with us and handed me my change, which somehow she had managed to find.

  By then, I was the embarrassed one. I realized that, in trying to be helpful to the girl, I’d appeared to be tipping her. I hadn’t thought fast enough and had made a faux pas.

  After our visit to Xian and a farewell ceremony in Beijing with Chairman Zhao that marked the close of the official part of our visit, we flew to Shanghai, where we toured a factory China was modernizing with the help of U.S. technology, then spoke to students at a Shanghai university (where about half of the faculty members had attended school in America) and I made an address that was televised live in Shanghai. The next day, we went to the Rainbow Bridge commune (in a subtle indication of the changes that were under way in China, the “commune” in its name had recently been changed to “township”), where we visited a private home in which a young couple lived with their small boy and the husband’s father and mother. After years of saving money, the husband had built the house himself and the family was very proud of it. We also spoke to several women who worked outdoors in the fields at the commune; under China’s new policies, they told us they were allowed to sell in the open market anything they produced that exceeded quotas set by the government, providing them some of the incentive inherent in the free market. From Shanghai, we flew to Fairbanks, Alaska, for an overnight stop and a brief visit with Pope John Paul II, who was on his way to South Korea, and then home to Washington.