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Cory's natural air of authority and her sense of noblesse oblige were, in a way, her birthright as a child, the sixth of eight, of Jose and Demetria Cojuangco. After coming to the Philippines from Fujian province in China just three generations earlier, the Cojuangcos had quickly parlayed a small rice mill and a sugar mill into the richest empire in Tarlac province.
For all its wealth, however, the clan was known for an unostentatious reserve, and throughout her childhood, as ever after, Cory preferred to be overlooked. At a series of the country's most exclusive girls' convent schools she was remembered, when she was remembered at all, as a bright, devout girl and the perennial class valedictorian. In 1946, when her family left war-torn Manila for the U.S., the 13-year-old Filipina with bobbed hair enrolled in the Ravenhill Academy, a Catholic girls' school in Philadelphia, and later in the Notre Dame Convent school in New York City. Cory's four college years passed with scarcely a trace at the College of Mount St. Vincent, a small Catholic women's college in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The self-contained student occasionally entertained her classmates with Filipino dances but otherwise kept to herself, spending spare hours with an elder sister and returning home to the Philippines in the summers. Her classmates recall her only as a "shy little violet" who once played an angel in a college production of Green Pastures.
Aquino's upbringing was, in short, the classic, cloistered training in propriety that becomes a thoroughbred young lady of the upper classes. As a Cojuangco, however, she also grew up with as sharp a sense of power as, say, a Rockefeller heiress. For 13 years she was treasurer of the family corporation, Jose Cojuangco and Sons Inc.
Nor could she ever be oblivious to politics. Her father was a Congressman, her maternal grandfather a vice-presidential candidate, one uncle a Senator and another a Congressman. "Since she was a little girl, Cory has been accustomed to meeting the great personalities of the world," says Benjamin Brown, the former director of the fellows program that brought Ninoy to Harvard's Center for International Affairs. "She is comfortable and confident in those circles." Indeed, in 1954 when the well-bred young lady gave up her law studies at the Far Eastern University to marry Ninoy, the sponsor at the wedding was Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay.
If Cory is a singularly family-oriented person even for a family-oriented culture, she is also uncommonly devout even for a country that is 85% Catholic. And if Cory inspires faith, it is largely because she is inspired by it. Three of her closest advisers are Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila; Father Joaquin Bernas, president of the Jesuit Ateneo de Manila University; and Father Catalino Arevalo, another Jesuit, who is her spiritual adviser. Addressing the governors of the Asian Development Bank and 1,200 international delegates two months after coming to power, she frankly declared, "I am not embarrassed to tell you that I believe in miracles."