While it might seem odd today, today’s #stampoftheday was first in a series that honored 10 foreign “champions of liberty”-people who both fought for democratic rights and generally opposed the spread of Russian influence. The stamp in question is an 8-cent airmail stamp, issued on August 31, 1957, that honored Ramon Magsaysay, who was president of the Philippines from 1953 until he died in a plane crash in March 1957.

To be fair, series wasn’t entirely altruistic. Rather, as I wrote in a July posting about another stamp in this series, it was part of larger Cold War, anti-communist efforts that involved senior officials of the National Security Council. Moreover, many of the individuals honored in the stamps – including Magsaysay – had received clandestine support from the CIA. But, it appears, most – including Magsaysay – also had significant popular support, which means it might be naïve or foolish to merely dismiss them as US pawns.

I’m not even going to pretend I’m an expert on Filipino history, but here’s what I’ve learned. Originally an automobile mechanic Magsaysay was a major guerilla leader during World War II. the. In 1946, having been steered into politics in part by supportive U.S. Army officers, he was elected to the Philippine House of Representatives as a member of the new ruling Liberal Party. Magsaysay proved to be a dynamic young politician with a remarkable common touch. In 1948, at the request of the country’s president, he went to Washington where helped secure passage of a bill that gave benefits to Philippine veterans.

According to Stanley Karnow, who wrote a book about America’s involvement in the Philippines that was a companion to a 3-part PBS series that aired in 1989, while he was in Washington, Magsaysay met and befriended Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale, a U.S. Air Force officer on loan to the CIA. The match was critical because the CIA and others foreign policy leaders were worried about the communist-led Hukbalahap rebellion that seemed to threaten America’s position in the Pacific. Moreover, the president at the time, Elpidio Quirino, was conspicuously inept, frustrating U.S. officials in Washington and Manila who began looking for someone to lead the fight against the rebels. Magsaysay agreed to take this on and the CIA subsidized Magsaysay in exchange for his agreement to act as America’s surrogate.

Lansdale – who supposedly was the basis for the character of Col Edwin Hillendale, the main character in William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdicks’ “The Ugly American” and of Alden Pyle, a key character in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” – moved to Manila, where he convinced Quirino to make Magsaysay his defense secretary. Under Lansdale’s tutelage, Magsaysay revamped the Philippine army and intensified the drive against the insurrection. He and Magsaysay also subverted the guerrillas with reforms that deprived them of peasant support. Lansdale, who had worked in advertising, also developed new tactics, including tales that demons would assault the rebels, since the insurgents were just as superstitious as other Filipinos. However, Karnow contends, “the insurgency failed largely because of blunders by its own leaders who, among other errors, prematurely escalated their military operations.”

In 1953, Magsaysay, with the support and help from Lansdale and others, challenged Quirino and won the presidency in a landslide. His administration generally was considered one of the cleanest and most corruption-free in modern Philippines history. Under his leadership, the government undertook notable efforts to encourage rural development and enact agrarian reforms and negotiated a major trade agreement with the US that while flawed did appear to satisfy a variety of Filipino economic interests. A vocal spokesman against communism, Magsaysay helped lead the foundation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), which aimed to defeat communist-Marxist movements in South East Asia, South Asia and the Southwestern Pacific. However, in 1957, Magsaysay, who was preparing to run for a second four-year term, died in a plane crash.

The fact that an estimated 2 million people attended his state funeral underscores the difficulty of assessing his legacy. As Roberto Tiglao, a longtime columnist for the Manila Times who also was a government official in the early 2000s wrote last year, Magsaysay “led the Republic in defeating the communist insurgency in the 1950s,” and was the “first” to make “the urgency of agrarian reform” something that was “high on the nation’s agenda.” But, because of his ties with the CIA “the narrative that Magsaysay was a puppet of the US Central Intelligence Agency [has prevailed] among intellectuals here and abroad….A generation of Filipinos – mine – had been brainwashed by the Communist Party, the landlord elite who wanted to block Magsaysay’s land reform agenda, and left-wing writers…that he was simply and entirely a puppet of the US government, a pliable tool in fact of the CIA’s now renowned Cold Warrior…Edward Lansdale,” who it bears mention moved on to Vietnam after Magsaysay’s election and later was involved in the CIA’s efforts to topple the Castro regime in Cuba.

Tiglao went on to argue: “The big flaw in this interpretation is that it is mostly based not just on interviews with, but writings of, the CIA operative Lansdale himself who would, as most human beings do, exaggerate his role in the making of-and power over-a Philippine president.” In fact, he pointed out, recent scholars, such as Jonathan Nashel, author of the definitive biography of Lansdale, note that “beginning in the 1990s, a revisionist interpretation began to develop.” According to Tiglao, Nashel provided several examples of these interpretations, such as noting that historian Richard Slotkin argued “in fact, Lansdale and Magsaysay worked effectively because the relationship was balanced; and Magsaysay, as both a native leader and an expert in his own political culture, shaped the objectives and overall course of policy. Magsaysay was a genuine reformer.” Slotkin went on to argue that Magsaysay’s intelligence, integrity, and general acumen show that “people of the Third World were (and are today) not simply pawns or dupes of American policy.”

I have to say that viewed from the perspective of 2020, Magsaysay doesn’t look all that bad given that American foreign policy regularly supports corrupt despots – including Rodrigo Duerto, the current president of the Philippines. Moreover, even though the “champions of liberty” series wasn’t entirely altruistic, the idea that the American government would be celebrating such people rather than ignoring or opposing them strikes me as a refreshing idea. And, of course, while many of those honored were fighting against expansion of the USSR, the current American administration has, shall we say, a more benign interpretation of Russian intentions and actions.

I do want to add a caveat here. I don’t know much about the Philippines. So if you’re reading this and you do know something, feel free to weigh in and tell what you think I got right, what I got wrong, and what I missed.

Be well, stay safe, be a “champion of liberty,” fight for justice and work for peace.