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Ferdinand Marcos
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HomePolitics, Law & GovernmentWorld LeadersPresidents & Heads of States

Ferdinand Marcos
 ruler of Philippines
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Also known as: Ferdinand Edralin Marcos
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Last Updated: Apr 20, 2023 • Article History

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Ferdinand Marcos
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Born: September 11, 1917 Philippines
Died: September 28, 1989 (aged 72) Honolulu Hawaii
Title / Office: president (1965-1986), Philippines
Political Affiliation: Nationalist Party
Notable Family Members: spouse Imelda Marcos

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Ferdinand Marcos, in full Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, (born September 11, 1917, Sarrat,
Philippines—died September 28, 1989, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.), Philippine lawyer and
politician who, as head of state from 1966 to 1986, established an authoritarian regime
in the Philippines that came under criticism for corruption and for its suppression of
democratic processes.
Marcos attended school in Manila and studied law in the late 1930s at the University of
the Philippines, near that city. Tried for the assassination in 1933 of a political opponent
of his politician father, Marcos was found guilty in November 1939. But he argued his
case on appeal to the Philippine Supreme Court and won acquittal a year later. He
became a trial lawyer in Manila. During World War II he was an officer with the
Philippine armed forces. Marcos’s later claims of having been a leader in the Filipino
guerrilla resistance movement were a central factor in his political success, but U.S.
government archives revealed that he actually played little or no part in anti-Japanese
activities during 1942–45.
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From 1946 to 1947 Marcos was a technical assistant to Manuel Roxas, the first president
of the independent Philippine republic. He was a member of the House of
Representatives (1949–59) and of the Senate (1959–65), serving as Senate president
(1963–65). In 1965 Marcos, who was a prominent member of the Liberal Party founded
by Roxas, broke with it after failing to get his party’s nomination for president. He then
ran as the Nationalist Party candidate for president against the Liberal president,
Diosdado Macapagal. The campaign was expensive and bitter. Marcos won and was
inaugurated as president on December 30, 1965. In 1969 he was reelected, becoming the
first Philippine president to serve a second term. During his first term he had made
progress in agriculture, industry, and education. Yet his administration was troubled by
increasing student demonstrations and violent urban guerrilla activities.

Philippine and U.S. dignitaries

On September 21, 1972, Marcos imposed martial law on the Philippines. Holding that
communist and subversive forces had precipitated the crisis, he acted swiftly; opposition
politicians were jailed, and the armed forces became an arm of the regime. Opposed by
political leaders—notably Benigno Aquino, Jr., who was jailed and held in detention for
almost eight years—Marcos was also criticized by church leaders and others. In the
provinces Maoist communists (New People’s Army) and Muslim separatists (notably of
the Moro National Liberation Front) undertook guerrilla activities intended to bring
down the central government. Under martial law the president assumed extraordinary
powers, including the ability to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Marcos announced
the end of martial law in January 1981, but he continued to rule in an authoritarian
fashion under various constitutional formats. He won election to the newly created post
of president against token opposition in June 1981.
Marcos’s wife from 1954 was Imelda Romuáldez Marcos, a former beauty queen. Imelda
became a powerful figure after the institution of martial law in 1972. She was often
criticized for her appointments of relatives to lucrative governmental and industrial
positions while she held the posts of governor of Metropolitan Manila (1975–86) and
minister of human settlements and ecology (1979–86).
Marcos’s later years in power were marred by rampant government corruption,
economic stagnation, the steady widening of economic inequalities between the rich and
the poor, and the steady growth of a communist guerrilla insurgency active in the rural
areas of the Philippines’ innumerable islands.

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Ferdinand Marcos

Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos

By 1983 Marcos’s health was beginning to fail, and opposition to his rule was growing.
Hoping to present an alternative to both Marcos and the increasingly powerful New
People’s Army, Benigno Aquino, Jr., returned to Manila on August 21, 1983, only to be
shot dead as he stepped off the airplane. The assassination was seen as the work of the
government and touched off massive antigovernment protests. An independent
commission appointed by Marcos concluded in 1984 that high military officers were
responsible for Aquino’s assassination. To reassert his mandate, Marcos called for
presidential elections to be held in 1986. But a formidable political opponent soon
emerged in Aquino’s widow, Corazon Aquino, who became the presidential candidate of
the opposition. It was widely asserted that Marcos managed to defeat Aquino and retain
the presidency in the election of February 7, 1986, only through massive voting fraud on
the part of his supporters. Deeply discredited at home and abroad by his dubious
electoral victory, Marcos held fast to his presidency as the Philippine military split
between supporters of his and of Aquino’s legitimate right to the presidency. A tense
standoff that ensued between the two sides ended only when Marcos fled the country on
February 25, 1986, at U.S. urging. He went into exile in Hawaii, where he remained until
his death.
Evidence emerged that during his years in power Marcos, his family, and his close
associates had looted the Philippines’ economy of billions of dollars through
embezzlements and other corrupt practices. Marcos and his wife were subsequently
indicted by the U.S. government on racketeering charges, but in 1990 (after Marcos’s
death) Imelda was acquitted of all charges by a federal court. She was allowed to return
to the Philippines in 1991, and in 1993 a Philippine court found her guilty of corruption
(the conviction was overturned in 1998).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy McKenna.
James Fenton
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James Fenton
British poet and journalist
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Also known as: James Martin Fenton
Written by

Richard Pallardy

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Last Updated: Apr 21, 2023 • Article History

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Born: April 25, 1949 (age 74) Lincoln England

Awards And Honors: Costa Book Awards (1994)

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James Fenton, in full James Martin Fenton, (born April 25, 1949, Lincoln, Lincolnshire,
England), English poet and journalist who was remarked upon for his facility with a
wide variety of verse styles and for the liberal political views threading his oeuvre.
Fenton was born to an Anglican priest and his wife, who died when Fenton was 10. After
studying at the Chorister School in Durham, where he performed with the cathedral’s
renowned choir, he attended the Repton School and the British Institute of Florence.
Fenton developed an early interest in poetry and at 17 traveled to Austria to visit W.H.
Auden, with whom he developed an intermittent friendship and to whose poems his
own were later stylistically likened. In 1967 he enrolled at Magdalen College, Oxford,
initially intending to study English but later switching to psychology, philosophy, and
physiology. There he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, a contest wherein students
wrote poetry on a set topic, in this case the opening of trade and diplomatic relations
between Japan and the United States in 1853–54. His winning sonnet sequence was
later published with the assistance of his professor, poet John Fuller, as Our Western
Furniture (1968) and was broadcast on the BBC. Another set of poems was published by
Fuller’s press as the broadsheet Put Thou Thy Tears into My Bottle (1969).
Upon graduation in 1970, Fenton embarked upon a career as a freelance journalist and
was hired (1971) to report on literature and politics for the New Statesman. In 1973
Terminal Moraine (1972), his first full-length collection of poetry, won the Eric Gregory
Award. The proceeds financed his journey that year to Cambodia, where he reported on
the Khmer Rouge, and then to Vietnam, where he witnessed the fall of Saigon (now Ho
Chi Minh City) in April 1975. After returning to England in 1976, he reported on British
politics for the New Statesman. Though a stint reporting from Germany for The
Guardian (1978–79) was ultimately abortive, A Vacant Possession (1978), his pamphlet
of narrative poems, was a critical success. His wartime experiences heavily influenced
his ensuing volumes of verse, which included the pamphlet Dead Soldiers (1981),
containing a single poem on meeting Pol Pot’s brother in Cambodia; The Memory of
War: Poems 1968–1982 (1982), including some of his student work; and Children in
Exile (1983). Fenton’s poems ranged from narrative to nonsense. Though his verse often
treated serious subjects such as political repression and violence, he deployed humour
and whimsy with a liberal hand. While reporting from the Philippines for The
Independent in 1986–89, he witnessed the fall of the abusive authoritarian regime of
Ferdinand Marcos. His experiences there provided fodder for the poems in Manila
Envelope (1989). All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim (1988)
was an account of his journalistic experiences.
Fenton was also active in the theatre scene. In 1979 he became a theatre critic for The
Sunday Times, for which he also later served as a book critic. His theatre reviews were
later collected as You Were Marvellous (1983). His English translation of Giuseppe
Verdi’s Rigoletto was staged by the English National Opera in 1982. The production,
which transplanted the story to the Mafia underworld of 1950s New York City, was a
success, and it caught the eye of theatre producer Cameron Mackintosh, who asked him
to translate the French musical Les Misérables, based on the book by Victor Hugo.
Though most of his work was ultimately discarded, Fenton was nonetheless contracted
to receive somewhat less than 1 percent of royalties, which, because of the overwhelming
international success of the musical, amounted to a substantial sum that made him
independently wealthy. His translation of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra was staged by the
English National Opera in 1985, and he wrote the libretto for the operatic adaptation of
Salman Rushdie’s tale Haroun and the Sea of Stories, staged at the New York City
Opera (2004). Fenton’s adaptations of the Chinese play Zhaoshi guer (The Orphan of
Zhao) and Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote were produced by the Royal
Shakespeare Company in 2012 and 2016, respectively.
Further volumes of poetry included Out of Danger (1994), which won the Whitbread
Book Award (now the Costa Book Award); Selected Poems (2006), a Penguin anthology
of his work; and Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011 (2012), an even broader survey
containing previously uncollected verse. A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed
(2001) inventoried some of Fenton’s favourite plants and his philosophy on how they
should be planted. Two libretti and an oratorio were published as The Love Bomb
(2003).
Fenton was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983. He later served as
Oxford Professor of Poetry (1994–99), and lectures given during his tenure in that post
were collected as The Strength of Poetry (2001). He was awarded the Queen’s Gold
Medal for Poetry in 2007 and won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2015.
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Richard Pallardy