The regular Marcos column in the Expresscame from all the hours Tibo spent at the president’s side. Tibo’s extraordinary palace access made him privy to many high-level secrets.
“Sir — ?” Another apprehensive aide was on the intercom. Enrile was away from his office. They were trying to find him. The president pondered the cluster of silent red telephones arrayed before him and waited. Enrile was supposed to be at Camp Aguinaldo, the Pentagon of the Philippines. Some of the red phones were direct lines to those offices. The others linked the president to every major military camp in the country. The new communications system, financed with foreign aid money from the United States, put all key military officials in easy reach — except at that moment, apparently, for the secretary of defense.
These were particularly unsettled times for Marcos and for the Philippines. Political criticism was deafening. The peso was slumping. Commodity shortages had set off panic buying in urban grocery markets. But among the surplus commodities were rumors: of plots to assassinate the president, of Communist rebel plans “to liquidate” Manila business leaders, of secret alliances between opposition senators and subversive groups, of CIA meddling, of agents provocateurs from the military spreading violence and fear, of plans for a military takeover of the government. Nightly bombings had become as predictable as sunset, although most exploded harmlessly and shattered little more than glass and nerves.
Finally, the maelstrom of terror swirled even around Manila’s children with the school bomb threats that forced citywide closures that morning. In an open letter to her president, already set in type for the Manila Chronicle’sSaturday editions, a local sixth-grader named Patty demanded of Marcos: “What are you going to do about the situation?”
In fact, the president was looking for his secretary of defense on that Friday evening to deal with what he, too, called “the situation.”
On matters of political delicacy Ferdinand Marcos confided in no one more than Juan Ponce Enrile. The most influential member of his cabinet, a man Marcos addressed as “Johnny Ponce” when he was pleased or as “Secretary Enrile” when he was not, Enrile had been Marcos’s personal lawyer before The Boss became president.