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Paalam, PNoy
‘A true democracy is consensus building’ — your words put flesh to my thoughts. Our people’s lives have been bettered by your sacrifice. Thank you.
— President Noynoy Aquino, in a TIME cover dedication for the author
I can still recall the first time we met. It was supposed to be a formal job interview, but I could sense, in all my nervousness when meeting a public figure, Noy’s effort to make the encounter as informal as possible. He asked light questions. He joked around. He made sure I was comfortable, even though that was impossible.
Then he hired me as his speechwriter, which meant entrusting one’s soul to a total stranger.
My family and friends could not believe my luck — so did I. The whole country knew him as the son of a former President. He was a congressman for nine years and now elected Senator with a fresh six-year term. How on earth do you get a gig like that?
But I did, and the hard work of proving I deserved it was no mean feat, like climbing the K2 of impostor syndrome. Writing copy, personal essays, letters — you can master the trade on some acceptable level. But when you write for and on behalf of someone else, and that someone else is a very important person, there is no way around adopting his way of thinking, moving inside his brain if you can and predicting his views on a potential issue. Ideally, I had to be one step ahead of him.
To short-circuit the process, building a relationship was essential, and Noy gave that his utmost priority. After Senate sessions, he would invite the entire team for dinner, and my favorite was a shabu-shabu place in Malate. Easy for a bachelor to do, less so for staffers who still had mountains of work to do, but we learned to adjust. Noy knew the dangers of the arena and the hazards of playing political games that were part of his full-time job. He knew the importance of taking a break, laughing heartily, and drawing some sanity from that as a way of making the burdens of official responsibilities more manageable.
It is hard not to honor a person who feeds you, makes you laugh, and teaches you a thing or two that are never taught in school. In the early…
