Word: aquinos
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...contemplates the enormous challenges before her, Aquino can take heart, perhaps, from her rare gift for surprise. Stalin is said to have claimed that "you can't make a revolution with silk gloves." Edward Bulwer- Lytton, the British 19th century novelist, believed that "revolutions are not made with rose water." And Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced that "revolutions are not made by men in spectacles." In coming to power on a wing and a prayer, Aquino has already disproved them...
...Aquino has also begun to disprove the predictions of her husband, who used to say that whoever succeeded Marcos was "doomed to fail" because of the troubles the person would inherit. His wife ended up with that chaos, and burdened too with all the impossible expectations she had awakened. In addition, she enjoyed no transition period and no advance planning. To make matters worse, she has had to manage a three-party government made up of moderates, leftists and the military. "Given the mess she's inherited," says a senior Washington official, "I think she has been very successful...
Most of those who know Aquino well are even more confident that her iron will and her driving sense of duty will not allow her to give up. In a poem he gave her for her 41st birthday, Ninoy described his wife as "unruffled by trouble, undeterred by the burden, though heavy the load. Nothing is impossible . . ." His sister Lupita, whose relations with the President have sometimes been frosty, now speaks with the fervor of the converted. "I believe that she was born and raised for this role," she says. "After she spoke before the U.S. Congress, I said...
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...