Word: quezon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This was the man that shrewd Manuel Quezon, the first President of the Philippine Commonwealth,* had trained and picked to succeed him. Roxas had beaten aging President Sergio Osmeña in the election last April. On him the whole moral and physical rehabilitation of the war-devastated islands depended. He would have to give the Republic credit, a face, a mind, perhaps even a heart. He was not exactly starting from scratch, but it would be a long pull...
...Quezon arrived in Washington as Resident Commissioner to the U.S. from the Filipino people. In 1942, as President of the Commonwealth, he arrived there again, head of a government in exile 9,000 miles from home. The first news of the attack on Pearl Harbor had reached him at Baguio, the Philippine summer capital. While he was still at breakfast, Jap planes were overhead. For two months, from crowded quarters in one of Corregidor's bombproof tunnels, Quezon followed the slow squeeze of Mac-Arthur's army down the rugged peninsula of Bataan...
...Quezon's Problem. Forty years earlier, a young guerrilla under Aguinaldo, Quezon himself had surrendered on Bataan to U.S. forces. According to one of the most candid chapters in The Good Fight, this veteran of another Bataan defeat soon decided that the situation under MacArthur was hopeless. At one point he asked himself whether "any government has the right to demand loyalty from its citizens" if it could no longer protect them. At another he considered giving himself up to the Japanese-not, he protests, out of disloyalty but because, in a way he never makes clear, he thought...
This proposal was approved by the Philippine Cabinet and forwarded to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt replied that the Philippines would be "defended by our own men to the death," whatever the Filipinos themselves might do. The effect of this reply, says Quezon, was "overwhelming. . . . When I realized that [Roosevelt] was big enough to . . . place the burden of the defense of my country upon the sacrifice and heroism of his own people alone, I swore to myself and to the God of my ancestors that as long as I lived I would stand by America...
Delayed Threat. Quezon's The Good Fight was ready to be published in October 1944-but was delayed because of the protests of Sergio Osmeña, who became President on Quezon's death. Osmeña protested that its publication might "assist" the Jap war effort or cause "unrest" among the Filipinos. Some of Quezon's friends have seen political motives in this attitude, noting that while The Good Fight speaks in generally friendly terms of Osmeña, it gives higher praise to Manuel Roxas, Osmeña's victorious rival...