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When squat puppet president José Laurel invited him to join his cabinet, Roxas declined. He was appointed anyhow, and meetings were held at his bedside. Jap guards surrounded his house. He received checks which he did not cash. The newspapers announced his membership on puppet commissions before Roxas had heard of them. He resisted attempts to take him to Tokyo, but he did accept the chairmanship of a Laurel food-gathering commission—on the condition that "the Japanese do not get one grain of rice." And he helped write the puppet constitution—an act that has since thrown suspicion of collaboration upon him. What critics did not know was that the constitution read almost word for word like the U.S. Constitution, and that its jumpy, slippery author was the coordinator and spark of the all-important U.S. espionage in Manila.
As the returning Americans approached Manila, Roxas and his family were taken to Baguio under guard. In April, with his family and four members of the puppet cabinet, Roxas hiked three days through the hills to the U.S. lines.
Fruits of Independence. Today, Roxas rises at 6:30 a.m., works seven days a week in Manila's sprawling stucco Malacañan Palace, smokes up to five packs of cigarets (Camels, Kools) a day, sees up to 500 people a week and takes books to bed with him. He is thin, tense, courteous, worldlywise. Eight weeks ago he made a flying trip to the U.S., where he was greeted by Daughter Maria Rosario, a student at Vassar, made an excellent impression in Washington as an energetic, businesslike administrator who realizes that the Philippines' best interests lie in close cooperation with the U.S.
Roxas has a strong hold on the emotional Filipino. The vast majority of his countrymen thinks of him as a war hero, not as a collaborator (an opinion emphatically not shared by the acrid newspaper columns of ex-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes).
He needs that hold. Without the greatest meeting of heart, mind and magic, no man could hope to put the Philippines together again. There is no national economy, no export trade. Fifty percent of the carabaos, on which farming depends, have been killed by bombs and bullets or slaughtered for food during the war. Next to Warsaw, Manila is the world's most devastated city.
In central Luzon, a 150,000-man army of ex-guerrillas, the Communist-led Hukbalahaps, bristles with arms and defiance to the Roxas regime. They make their own laws and fight the Philippine Military Police. Their leader, boyish, 33-year-old Luis Taruc, bossed them when they were guerrillas. Now he bosses a seven-man anti-Roxas bloc in the House of Representatives and bides his time.
In Mindanao, the unmanageable Moros ignore Manila, as usual. Without forceful persuasion, perhaps 80% of the population could never be made to dream of anything but siesta, fiesta and sunsets.