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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 nationwide 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.