Woman of the Year

Cory Aquino leads a fairy-tale revolution, then surprises the world with her strength

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Yet perhaps the greatest danger before the reluctant leader is, finally, a private one. As she becomes ever more the President, she may become less and less the ordinary person -- attending PTA meetings, making pasta and praying with her children -- who captured her country in the first place. In growing more assertive, she may relinquish some of the gentleness that was her greatest strength. Ultimately, in mastering politics, she may have to let politics master her.

Clearly, that problem tears at her. Aquino worries when her friends tell her that she is too honest, and laments, "I don't want to be dishonest." She frets that she can no longer afford to be humble, and she misses the freedom to retreat into her family and her privacy. "I am torn," she said just before firing Enrile, "between acting like a President and like a human being."

Some might say that she has set herself an impossible task in trying to balance those roles, to season force with humanity and realism with faith. Yet if there is one thing that Aquino has already committed to the safekeeping of posterity, it is her gift for stretching the limits of the possible. Last year, the widow with the radiant smile managed to turn history into something of a fairy tale. If she can now bring something of the morality play even to a hardened political world, history itself, like most of the forces she has already met, may one day be quietly transformed.

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