By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Last week I wrote about some good things about Mayor Mauricio Domogan who is now a congressional candidate. I should also be praising the other congressional candidate, Nick Aliping, but then as I opened my computer, there was this big picture of Imee Marcos accompanying the brouhaha on whether or not she graduated from UP and Princeton. So the article on Nick will have to wait for next week.
Back in 1979 I was admitted to the UP College of Law. In the other section was beautiful Imee Marcos along with Karl Miranda, now a justice in the Sandiganbayan, and so many others like Paul Poblador who became the valedictorian and the speech writer for Juan Ponce Enrile. I once received a note from him to vote for Enrile.
We had the same professors in many of our subjects who often would combine the two sections perhaps to save on time, effort and saliva. Or perhaps out of laziness. When Imee would recite, it was always flawless. She must have had a photographic memory. She would easily rattle off all the details of a case in crisp and very refined English accent, or was that the Princeton accent? Oh, how I envied that accent.
Many of us would be awed by those fantastic recitation. But not just by that. Perhaps also because of the fact that she was way up there in terms of privilege…… while we were way down there due to lack of it.
So I was sort of amused when she was asked in the interview that resulted in the brouhaha if she indeed graduated from UP. She appeared to have answered in the positive but she added that what was important was her performance, meaning as a politician. She insinuated that, how many politicians aside from her can really cite or speak of their good performance?
That was humble of her. She did not say anything about her grades in the college of law which I am very sure were very high from what I have seen.
We knew she was already in the campus whenever we spotted the two black FORD Cortinas. Yes, she was using Fords. Not Benzes or Bentleys or Rolls Royces. Then there were her plain-clothes bodyguards pretending to be reading books while standing somewhere in the corridors. Their military haircuts were a giveaway.
In our section was also a guy whom a classmate of ours, Danny Gutierez (the son of former SC Justice Gutierez), would often address as colonel. Danny then told me that the guy was there as a part of Imee’s security detail.
Then I dropped out from school to work full time crisscrossing the country for an advocacy. When I went back, I became an international student with classmates in the lower years, in the upper years, in the evening classes—everywhere. Sometimes I, the academically incorrigible, would be in Imee’s section. Sometimes on our last exam at the end of a semester she would treat us to some merienda (a sandwich and a tetrapack) being given out by her bodyguards to everyone who finished the exam.
Then she was nowhere to be seen for about a semester. She got married. After about a semester I spotted her at the corridor. She was big. She was pregnant. As far as I know she went on to finish the law course.
On instruction of our professor in Constitutional Law, I once borrowed a book from her by Learned Hand for my report on judicial review.
A few years back, I was hanging around the court building in La Trinidad after a hearing. I ended up conversing with a kid of a lawyer from the Office of the Solicitor General. He also graduated from the UP College of Law and then he started asking about my contemporaries there nong panhon pa ni Mahoma. I then mentioned a number of them who are famous nationally and internationally (Raul Pangalangan who replaced Maid Miriam in the International Criminal Court). When I mentioned Imee Marcos he informed me that her son was his classmate in the same college and they became lawyers at the same time.
That is Imee Marcos. Beautiful, brilliant. She was a congresswoman, now a governor. She will make a good senator. Vote for her.
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