The C-47 took off smoothly from the Cebu airport and into the moon-bright Philippine night. It was 1:17 a.m., and the plane radioed the tower at Malacanan Palace to have President Ramon Magsaysay's car at Manila's Nichols Field at 3:15 a.m. Then there was only silence. Two hours later, when the plane failed to arrive, the silence became ominous. By dawn, Philippine naval vessels and air-force planes, later joined by the U.S. Air Force, were scouring the lovely inland sea between Cebu and Manila. By radio and whisper, the news spread: the Philippines' beloved President Magsaysay was missing. The long morning wore on. In the barrios, priests offered up special prayers, and Filipinos clustered silently around radios. Then, as night began to fall, came the "very bad news." Wreckage had been found in a mountain ravine near Asturias, only 22 miles northwest of Cebu city. One newspaperman, badly burned, was the only survivor of 26 aboard. President Magsaysay was dead. In the barrios and the streets of Manila, Filipinos wept.
Open Door. To his people, Ramon Magsaysay, 49, was a kind of combination Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson, with none of their faults: a war hero and a man of peace. He was the President who had opened Malacanan Palace to the people. Palace corridors and reception rooms, once the preserve of suave politicians and their richly gowned ladies, were thronged with peasants or plantation workers bringing their troubles. Magsaysay listened to them all.
Rugged, tall (5 ft. 11 in.), plainspeaking, Magsaysay was indefatigably energetic and incorruptibly honest ("My parents taught me to be a good Christian. Do you know of any good Christian who is dishonest?"). He was a blacksmith's son, who came out of the Zambales mountains to work as a chauffeur and mechanic to pay for his mechanical engineering studies at the University of the Philippines. He fought the Japanese as a guerrilla, at war's end commanded an army of 10,000 men—but was especially proud of his U.S. Army rank as a captain in a motor pool. Elected to the Philippine Congress, he battled his own Liberal Party when it indulged politics and corruption in the army, goaded the politicos so much that in 1950 President Elpidio Quirino made him Secretary of Defense.
The Communist Hukbahalaps in 1950 were 16,000 strong; in some areas they levied taxes, ran their own schools, newspapers and factories. They maintained their headquarters brazenly in Manila and drew up a plan for seizure of the city itself. Farmers, forced under antiquated laws to pay 70% of their crops to hereditary landlords, gave the Huks sanctuary, and soldiers, often unpaid for months, felt small inclination to hunt them down. Sleeping only three hours a night, Magsaysay took to the air, island-hopped from army post to army post. When he found soldiers living in shacks and eating miserable food, he fired their officers on the spot. Dropping in unannounced on a remote post one cold night and finding soldiers sleeping without blankets, he furiously roused the officers from bed, made them distribute blankets to the enlisted men.