Word: ferdinands
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...MARCOS DYNASTY by Sterling Seagrave (Harper & Row; $22.50). This merciless account of the Filipino dictator's rise and fall poses many intriguing questions and answers some of them. Why did Ferdinand purloin billions of dollars? What did Imelda want with all those shoes...
...famous apercu, author Mary McCarthy charged that everything written by playwright-memoirist Lillian Hellman was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.' " Much the same, Seagrave argues, could be said of Ferdinand Marcos, who blithely concocted a past for his official biographies that bore scant relationship to the truth. Ferdinand claims to be the first son of Mariano Marcos, a provincial teacher and sometime member of Congress. According to Seagrave, there is strong circumstantial evidence -- including his subject's distinctively sinoid features -- that the real father was Judge Ferdinand Chua, scion of a wealthy, politically powerful Chinese clan who came...
...national notoriety, Marcos responded to a slighting of family honor in a manner worthy of Michael Corleone. In 1935 Mariano Marcos was unexpectedly defeated for a third term in the Philippine House of Representatives by a neighbor, Julio Nalundasan. When the victor flaunted this triumph in a humiliating manner, Ferdinand, who had been a member of his university's shooting team, hid in the orchard one night outside Nalundasan's home and at an opportune moment coolly fired two shots from a long-barreled .22-cal. pistol. Ferdinand was found guilty of murder but was eventually freed by the Supreme...
...Marcos Dynasty, which ends with Imelda and an ailing Ferdinand flying off to exile in Hawaii, falls into the morbid subbranch of literature that Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed pathography. As such, it is a book with notable flaws. Seagrave, whose previous works include a biography of China's legendary Soong sisters, writes with glum prosecutorial fury, treating as credible any rumor of lurid conduct -- Imelda's alleged lesbian orgies, for example -- that helps his cause. When venturing into broader areas, like Washington's postwar foreign policy in the Far East, the author lapses into a crude historical revisionism, rejecting...
Finally, Seagrave seems so concerned about building an indictment that he fails to answer the question of what really made Ferdinand and Imelda tick. What drove them to accumulate billions they could never have spent in three lifetimes? What possessed her to buy those infamous closetsful of unworn shoes? Still, the author does persuade us that his subjects, Ferdinand in particular, were paradigmatically venal. Lyndon Johnson, no mean connoisseur of cads, may serve as final witness. After one encounter with the self- glorifying Marcos, L.B.J. called in Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy and warned, "If you ever bring that...