| Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos, Sr. (September 11, 1917 � September 28, 1989) was a Filipino lawyer and politician who served as President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He ruled under martial law from 1972 until 1981 and his regime as dictator was known for corruption, extravagance and brutality.[2][3] Public outrage led to the snap elections of 1986 and to the making of People Power Revolution in February 1986 which removed him from power.[4]
Prior to the presidency, he served as a member of the Philippine House of Representatives from 1949 to 1959 and of the Philippine Senate from 1959 to 1965, where he was Senate President from 1963 to 1965.
His wife was Imelda Marcos whose excesses during their kleptocracy[3][5][6] made her infamous in her own right, spawning the term "Imeldific".[2][7][8][9] She is still active in Philippine politics along with two of his three children,Imee Marcos and Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, Jr.. |
Ferdinand Edralin Marcos was born 11 September 1917, in the town of Sarrat, Ilocos Norte, to Mariano Marcos and Josefa Edralin.[11] He was baptized into the Philippine Independent Church,[12] but he was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church at the age of three.
In December 1938, Ferdinand was prosecuted for the murder of Julio Nalundasan along with his father, Mariano, his brother, Pio, and his brother-in-law Quirino Lizardo; Nalundasan one of the elder Marcos' political rivals. Nalundasan had been shot and killed in his house in Batac on 20 September 1935�the day after he had defeated Mariano Marcos a second time for a seat in the National Assembly. According to two witnesses, the four had conspired to assassinate Nalundasan, with Ferdinand Marcos eventually pulling the trigger. In late January 1939, they were denied bail[13] and in the fall[when?] of 1939 they were convicted. Ferdinand and Lizardo received the death penalty for premeditated murder, while Mariano and Pio were found guilty of contempt of court. The Marcos family took their appeal to the Supreme Court of the Philippines, which overturned the lower court's decision on 22 October 1940, acquitting them of all charges except contempt.[14]
Marcos studied law at the University of the Philippines, attending the prestigious College of Law. He excelled in both curricular and extra-curricular activities, becoming a valuable member of the university's swimming, boxing, and wrestling teams. He was also an accomplished and prolific orator, debater, and writer for the student newspaper. He also became a member of the University of the Philippines ROTC Unit (UP Vanguard Fraternity) where he met his future cabinet members and Armed Forces Chiefs of Staff. He sat for the 1939 Bar Examinations, receiving a near-perfect score and graduating cum laude despite the fact that he was incarcerated while reviewing; had he not been in jail for 27 days, he would have graduated magna cum laude. He was elected to the Pi Gamma Mu and the Phi Kappa Phi international honour societies, the latter giving him its Most Distinguished Member Award 37 years later.[15]
He claimed to have led a 9,000-man guerrilla force called Ang Mah�rlika (Tagalog, "The Noble") in northern Luzon during the World War II, although his account of events was later cast into doubt after a United States military investigation exposed many of his claims as either false or inaccurate.[16]
In Seagrave's book The Marcos Dynasty, he mentioned that Marcos possessed a phenomenal memory and exhibited this by memorizing complicated texts and reciting them forward and backward, even such as the 1935 Constitution of the Philippines. Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, in an interview with the Philippine Star on March 25, 2012, shared her experience as a speech writer to President Marcos: "One time, the Secretary of Justice forgot to tell me that the President had requested him to draft a speech that the President was going to deliver before graduates of the law school. And then, on the day the President was to deliver the speech, he suddenly remembered because Malaca�ang was asking for the speech, so he said, 'This is an emergency. You just have to produce something.' And I just dictated the speech. He liked long speeches. I think that was 20 or 25 pages. And then, in the evening, I was there, of course. President Marcos recited the speech from memory.
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