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In his 14½ months in office, Magsaysay has brought about great changes in the Philippines. First he rebuilt the army, until then a demoralized, politics-racked conglomeration that couldn't fight its way out of a bamboo hut with a howitzer. Then he went after the Huks, who were so strong at the time that they were thinking seriously of seizing Manila itself. Last week, with his newly respectable and respected 40,000-man army, and some 10,000 reinforcements from the R.O.T.C. and reserves, he underwrote an election which, for all the bloodshed, gave free voice to the popular will.
To rank & file Filipinos, he has become a national hero. To his boss, President Quirino, he has become at times an embarrassment but, day in & day out, his party's best asset. To the opposition, he has become an unexpected Good Samaritan for keeping the polls free (they gave him an admiringly inscribed copy of Peace of Mind). To the Western world, too often handicapped in its outer reaches by propped-up Bao Dais and Syngman Rhees, he has brought a glimmer of hope for democracy in the Orient.
Pass the Lapu-Lapu. Ramon Magsaysay, rugged, tall (5 ft. n in.), is a blacksmith's son from Zambales, a province in western Luzon. He has both Chinese and Spanish blood, and calls himself a mixture of Ilokano and Tagalog, which refers to the dialects his parents speak. He is a table-thumping, toe-tromping activist who would rather hip-shoot a gun at bottles tossed into Manila Bay than put away one of Quirino's famed two-hour breakfasts at Malacafian Palace, with pancakes, papaya and fried lapu-lapu (a choice fish). He lacks the usual Filipino impulse for orotund oratory, fancy dress and luxurious living. Every month he turns over his 1,000-peso ($500) salary to his pretty, shy wife, Luz. In his five years in politics, he has won an unchallenged reputation for honesty.
Magsaysay has a great regard for the law, but a greater regard for law and order. Last year he persuaded Quirino to suspend the right of habeas corpus for all prisoners suspected of being Huks. "When I've decided to punish someone who deserves to be punished," Magsaysay vows, "nobody can stop me. Nobody! I will send my own father to jail if he breaks the law."
McKinley's Prayer. The Filipinos have reason to cheer the rise of Ramon Magsaysay—and the U.S. has reason to be a sympathetic onlooker. For the infant republic of the Philippines is the great—and unfinished—U.S. experiment in transplanting democracy. In its tropical laboratory, among the dying roots of colonialism and the lushly growing thickets of Communism, the U.S. brand of freedom is being tested in the Orient.
So far as most Americans are concerned, they stumbled into the Philippines in their sleep, awakening one morning in May 1898 to learn that Commodore George Dewey had steamed his four cruisers and two gunboats into Manila Bay and said: "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley." (One who wasn't surprised was Assistant
Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, who had taken advantage of the Secretary's absence to give Dewey the go-ahead.) It was a heady exploit, and made an overnight hero of Admiral Dewey; the headaches came later.