Official vs personal record

Any historian who attempts to write a history of the past 50 years will be overwhelmed by all the available material. I cannot even imagine plowing through all the printed government publications. Worse, the online material is more than one brain can handle in 10 lifetimes. To make space on my shelves, I got rid of a series of volumes: the Congressional Record, Record of the Senate, Official Gazette, records of the debates that went into the crafting of our last three Constitutions, and so much more. Of course, I never read much of these, but bought them compulsively just in case I needed a volume or two for reference or citation.

What I still have on my shelves are the first volumes of “Philippine Reports” that I bought one by one from used-book sellers in Recto in the 1980s. Aside from the first volumes of Philippine Reports from 1901 to 1905, I also found the Bulletin of the Japanese Military Administration bound in a volume so thick it had a second purpose in my library as a door stopper. I was recently gifted with more recent volumes of Philippine Reports, and from these volumes, you can find a lot of interesting information on squabbles over inheritance, infidelity, and other cases decided upon by the Supreme Court.

In the 1980s, when I visited Recto in search of rare Filipiniana, anything and everything related to school was readily available: school supplies; school, PE, ROTC, and medical uniforms; academic regalia (from kindergarten level to PhD); textbooks (new and second-hand); maps and periodic tables. Term papers were readily available on order from a list, and in the 1990s, I saw book reviews of my work on sale. Master’s theses and doctoral dissertations were more expensive and made to order. The thesis business must be dwindling today following the rise of artificial intelligence. Along Recto, you could find fake driver’s licenses, diplomas, and transcripts of records from any university in the world. In retrospect, I should have asked to check on the quality of diplomas from US Ivy League universities, as well as Oxford and Cambridge.

I wonder if the bulky Official Gazette volumes are still printed after this was placed online in 2010. Before the website crashed in 2018, we were able to download the section most useful to me, called “The President’s Day.” This was a daily record of the president’s official functions, speeches and addresses, orders and proclamations, etc. We downloaded the material on the late president Ferdinand Marcos Sr., starting with his second term of office from 1970 to about 1984, to put his daily handwritten diaries in context. For example, reading the diary entries of the week before the public proclamation of the declaration of martial law, one needed not just the Official Gazette, President’s Day, but the newspapers of the period.

On Sept. 18, 1972, the Official Gazette reported that the President met with the secretary of Commerce and the Civil Aeronautics Board regarding physical searches of luggage and passengers taking commercial aircraft following a bomb explosion on board an Air Manila flight that made an emergency landing in Roxas City. Reading this was déjà vu because the President met with officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways (then separate agencies) to look into the collapse of a bridge in Naga that resulted in the death or injury of about a hundred people. The Justice secretary was also called upon to file criminal charges against the contractors involved in faulty construction. The President also administered an oath to a Manila City judge.

While the Gazette provided the President’s “official” day, the “unofficial” parts were documented in his handwriting on Malacañang letterhead. On Sept. 18, 1972, Marcos noted that the Constitutional Convention session hall and the sala of then Judge Julian Lustre in Quezon City were bombed that afternoon. Marcos blamed the “subversives.” The events of that week prompted him to work on placing the country under martial law. Plans were finalized that evening in consultation with the secretary of National Defense, the chief of staff, the major service commanders, the Metropolitan Command commander, and, of course, the person he trusted with his life, Gen. Fabian Ver. He wrote:

“They all agreed the earlier we do it, the better, because the media is waging a propaganda campaign that distorts and twists the facts, and they may succeed in weakening our support among the people if it is allowed to continue. The bombing of the Constitutional Convention set the date for the proclamation on Sept. 21, 1872, without any postponement. We finalized the target personalities [to be arrested] and the procedures. Our communications network will center in Malacañang as before.”

Until a time machine is invented, we cannot return to the past, and historians can only recreate a picture of it from traces in public and private records, memoirs, oral history, and newspapers. The Marcos diary is a self-referential document and has to be read with caution, but when validated with other primary source material from the time, we can hope to understand not just the chronology but also the situation that made the events happen as they did.