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Yet if Ninoy was the public center of the family, Cory was the moral backbone. "He decided that he would be the indulgent parent," she has written, "and I would be the disciplinarian." Often she extended that loving discipline even to her husband, telling him the difficult truths that his cronies preferred to hold back. "Cory was his highest conscience," says Harvard's Brown."He valued her judgments enormously."
In its way, indeed, the Aquino marriage seemed to play out in miniature the central dialectic of Cory's life between politics and faith. As a traditional Filipino flesh presser, Ninoy regarded all politics as dirty politics and was content to join the rough-and-tumble system in order to beat it. Cory, however, disapproved of such chicanery, and in deference to her, Ninoy and his friends never discussed skulduggery when she was present. "The minute she entered the room," says one close family friend, "people put on their best behavior. Even Ninoy behaved when Cory was around. I was nervous when Cory served the coffee. She can be very cutting, and she will cut you in public. She has a dismissive gesture of the hand to indicate that she's tired of the discussion or the person. It's very un-Filipino, and it has unsettled a lot of people."
Some problems, though, she could not wave away. Ninoy's free-spirited ways, could never have been easy on his young wife. Yet it seems that her husband's private life exercised her no more than his public one. Wherever he was, Ninoy turned his home into a kind of 24-hour coffee shop in which the loquacious host and his associates would thrash out tactics through the night, while Cory waited on them. The ceaseless bustle must have placed a considerable strain on the retiring patrician woman. "Cory is an introvert, Ninoy was an extrovert," says Ninoy's favorite sister, Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara. "He thrived on people. She doesn't need them."
Those who have known Cory Aquino as wife and hostess are hardly surprised by her quiet authority -- only by the suddenness with which she has steeled herself to her new role, transforming herself in 30 months from a self- effacing lady to a self-confident leader. Yet those who have just met her are often so disarmed by her softness that they overlook her ability to act with decisiveness.
The White House, to take one example, was markedly reluctant during the dying months of the Marcos era to accept the petite grandmother with a little girl's voice as a plausible leader of the country that houses the largest U.S. military installation abroad. Even after the election, a White House aide publicly complained, "How the State Department thinks that Aquino can govern on her own is just beyond us."
Since she came to power, however, Aquino has systematically gone about stilling many of those doubts. Before visiting her in Manila in May, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz privately expressed doubts about her ability to govern. Afterward, and ever since, the normally poker-faced Secretary has fairly glowed at the very mention of Aquino's name. When Cory spoke before a joint session of Congress, she received the most thunderous reception given any foreign leader in more than a generation. Indeed, the entire U.S. tour, observed a State Department official who accompanied her, was "staggeringly successful. She had hard-bitten politicians eating out of her hand."