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THE book is not only about the legacy of President Ferdinand E. Marcos but also the ignominious story of how two governments – and others – driven by a mixture of greed and vindictiveness, ganged up on him and his family, divested them not just of lawful power, but of honor as well as of possessions.

This is the story of how legal systems were manipulated for sinister ends, how God-given rights were wantonly violated by governments professing respect for human rights.

This book also consists mostly of official documents that are incontrovertible proof of the unjust punishments inflicted upon the Marcoses without them first being found guilty by the courts of law. These documents chronicled lies, frauds, flawed logic, anomalous processes and judicial partisanship that made adverse decisions against them possible in various courts.

The accusatory and punitive documents comprised a paper trail of shameful acts that their authors would regret come Judgment Day. What human law can justify, for instance, the desecration of the dead? What commitment to human rights can legitimize their sustained violation? What advocate of justice can glory in denying it from the accused?

Justices, lawyers, students and laymen would no doubt be amused or bewildered by the whirlwind allegations lodged against the Marcoses, and the maze of processes they went through. Legal systems are vulnerable to manhandling that frustrates justice. Most of the holdings against the Marcoses have been based on the discretion of officials of uncertain impartiality.

Both legal experts and laymen have to wonder, for example, why one American court cautioned that its decision was not to be published, and why the Supreme Court of the Philippines insisted in another decision that its ruling should not be construed as a precedent.

President Marcos’s vision and ideas about leadership, government and constitutionalism still remain fresh and timeless today. He believed in fair and transparent political competition, operated in the national interest, created more friends and widened his network of friendship throughout the world, including in hostile places where others feared to tread.

His enemies and critics saw almost everything he does as a threat to their political ambitions and economic interests. Strangely, they literally “hanged the wrong man” (Hubris 2000) at a time when he was fighting a deadly kidney disease that had emaciated his athletic body not in his homeland but in the United States, a country known for its liberal democracy and many of whose leaders had treated him with dignity and as a reliable ally only to be crucified and abandoned for political, security and economic expediency.

Even his wife, Imelda Romualdez Marcos, their children and grandchildren were not spared from all manners of indignity.
