Stepping Into Cory's Shoes

By Sandra Burton

It was not the formal passing of the mantle of office, but the moment was telling. Front-running presidential candidate Fidel Ramos was paying a postelection call on outgoing President Corazon Aquino, whose endorsement was largely responsible for the slim lead he now holds in the ballot count of the seven-candidate race. As the pair emerged from their meeting, the normally deferential former Defense Secretary confidently stepped forward to field reporters' questions, leaving Aquino nodding in the background.

Although the vote tally is still not complete, Ramos is cautiously staking his claim to office. Voters and political experts alike, however, still wonder whether Ramos is up to the job. Acknowledging the sensitive issue of his predecessor's shortcomings, Ramos has pledged to "improve on the deficiencies and defects" that marked Aquino's tenure.

The question is how. As the first Protestant leader of a predominantly Roman Catholic country, Ramos needs to forge a new relationship with the church, which remains an important unifying force in a society riven by social, ethnic and political divisions. The job demands a felicitous combination of skill and character, and it is difficult to say whether Ramos has it. Though he has spent 46 of his 64 years in the public eye, he remains an enigma to all but a tight circle of relatives and friends, most of them fellow military men. A West Point graduate with a degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois in the U.S., Ramos is more likely to stupefy audiences with statistics than stir them with rhetoric. The most informal thing about him is the cigar he keeps clenched between his teeth -- and the stogie has not even been fired up since 1987, when he gave up smoking.

Businessmen hail him as the leader best equipped to guarantee political and economic stability, but critics claim that as former commander of the armed forces, he was at least indirectly responsible for fissures within the military. Ramos' harshest critics are the victims of the Marcos martial-law government. Their accusations of torture and harassment at military hands dogged Ramos throughout the campaign. He portrayed himself as one of the few officers who were able to intervene with Marcos to cut prisoners' sentences. Among the beneficiaries of his intervention was Benigno Aquino, the outgoing President's late husband, who spent 7 1/2 years in Marcos jails. "The good guys are behind him," said Aquino of Ramos shortly before Aquino's 1983 airport assassination. "But I don't think Ramos will prevail. He has no instinct for infighting."

That assessment was incorrect: during the dictator's overthrow, Ramos showed himself to be a master infighter who encouraged others, including Marcos, to underestimate him. That Ramos operated with cold and effective calculation in the cutthroat Marcos administration and emerged with his "Mr. Clean" reputation largely intact is his most salient achievement.

Those same skills served him well as Aquino's crisis manager, but questions persist about whether Ramos has what it takes to move beyond mere survival to inspired leadership. As armed forces Chief of Staff, he correctly assessed the lengthy insurgency by the communist New People's Army as a political, rather than military, problem rooted in the rural poverty that stifles 70% of the population. But Ramos has yet to show that he can mobilize resources to relieve the country's misery on a scale that will make a difference.

Ramos, who was Aquino's Defense Secretary during the early stages of negotiating a new military-bases agreement with Washington, shares the blame for loss of the bases and a corresponding reduction in multilateral aid pledged by Japan and other U.S. allies. After the Philippine Senate rejected a provisional accord, Ramos urged the government to delay the U.S. withdrawal at least until the facilities could be converted for commercial use. American officials complain, however, that as soon as Ramos launched his quest for the presidency, he stopped talking about the touchy issue.

Ramos argues that once the Senate rejected a new bases treaty, there was not much he could do about it. After he's in office, he declared in an interview with TIME, "we will review the entire range of U.S.-Philippine relations. The rejection of the bases treaty may have given the wrong signals to our neighbors, including the U.S. and Japan, that we have become isolationist, but that's not correct."

Ramos talks of emulating fellow generals who have wrought economic miracles in Taiwan and South Korea. Ramos is mindful that the region's economic miracles were due in part to the authoritarian control that other leaders exercised while they effected painful economic reforms, and that it is too late to impose such measures in the Philippines.

As a soldier, Ramos has spent a lifetime sizing up situations quickly and subordinating himself and his men to the task of working to best advantage within unforgiving constraints. That background may not lend itself to flights of rhetoric or legislative imagination, but the fractious Philippines could do worse than to agree on a set of priorities and settle down to the tedious task of putting the country back on its feet.

And in that context, Ramos may prove to be the right man, in the right place, for a tough and thankless job.

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Nelly Sindayen/Manila