Waltzing with a dictator: the Marcoses and the making the foreign policy.

• Author: Fallows, James

Waltzing With a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of Foreigh Policy.

These two books* are about two different countries. William Chapman is mainly concerned with economic and social problems in the Philippines; Raymond Bonner with policy-making in the United States. Both books are valuable and well worth reading--and, I should make clear, both authors are friends of mine. Chapman's book probably tells us more about the future problems we're likely to face in the Philippines. The contrast between his approach and Bonner's helps answer the question around which Bonner builds his book: Why does America so often end up embracing the Somozas, Duvaliers, and Marcoses of the world, the thugs and dictators who mistreat their people while they're in power and embarrass us for our complicity when they are finally overthrown?

* Waltzing With a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of Foreign Policy. Raymond Bonner. Times Books, $19.95.

* Inside the Philippine Rovolution. William Chapman. Norton, $18.95.

To call Bonner's book a polemic is not to insult it. Bonner has a case to make--that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were corrupt and wicked, and that until nearly the last minute the U.S. tolerated and even encouraged them, thereby putting ourselves on the wrong side of history and making Filipinos who hated Marcos hate us. He lays out the evidence as relentlessly as a prosecutor working to bring in a guilty verdict.

Obviously he has a lot of raw material to work with. His case is summed up by the pictures in his book: they show Nixon, Kissinger, Reagan, Mondale. Bush, Weinberger, and so forth, most of them decked out and ridiculous-looking in "barong tagalog,' the Philippine national shirt, and all of them fawning over Imelda or toasting Ferdinand. (The picture section is valuable in another way. Philippine accounts of the Marcoses's rise invariably dwell on Imelda's "beauty' as a crucial ingredient. I've studied pictures of even the sleek young Imelda and have never understood what all the excitement was about. But one picture in this collection, taken in 1965 when Marcos was campaigning for his first term as president, shows Imelda smiling lewdly at on-lookers like a Manila bar-girl. The woman in this picture could have gotten Lyndon Johnson's attention--as Bonner says she did. Nothing Hartlike came of the encounter between them, but through the sixties and seventies Imelda was serenely confident that she could wrap Yankee statemen around her finger.)

The episodes Bonner describes flesh out the relationship shown in the photos. William Byroade, the U.S. ambassador when Marcos declared martial law in 1972, heard about the plans in advance, Bonner says, and raised no objection at all. Walter Mondale went ahead with a visit to the Philippines, despite clear warnings that Filipinos would see it as an endorsement of Marcos when martial law was still in force, when the human-rights record was getting worse, and when corruption under the "conjugal dictatorship' was moving into high gear. George Bush told Marcos that...