timed, ingeniously shaped, in a voice that must tritely be compared only to an organ.” Aside from being “enormously intelligent,” Marcos was “tough,” and “had guts,” Valenti wrote.34
Valenti’s comments cast Marcos as a composite of the Hollywood leading man—one who combined the civility of the cosmopolitan easterner with the rugged individualism of the western hero. Such observations meshed with the U.S. endorsement of “heroic leadership” in the Third World during this period. As formulated by Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger in his essay “On Heroic Leadership and the Dilemma of Strong Men and Weak People,” the doctrine of heroic leadership postulated that the political grooming of strong leaders in the Third World was the “most effective means of charging semi-literate people with a sense of national and social purpose.”35 Thus hitched to the Cold War project of inculcating Third World peoples with the culture and values of the United States, heroic leadership, as Hoberman points out, was defined in particular by the culture and values disseminated by Hollywood.36
Marcos’s transfiguration as heroic leader was experienced as a national ceremony—a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of the necessary communications infrastructure for “wiring the nation.” With approximately 600,000 radio receivers (at 19 sets per 1,000 people), 120,000 television sets (3.8 sets per 1,000 people) and 776 cinema screens (2.6 seats per 100 people), the Philippines in 1965 was not nearly as internally colonized by the media as the United States was.37 Indeed, Marcos would hold the “modernization” of the media to be among the New Society’s top priorities. The dictator would ostensibly make good this promise with the importation of satellite and computer-based technologies by the late 1970s.38 In anticipation of this dramatic media expansion, however, Marcos had enlisted the country’s available media resources, however modest, to mold himself as the “Philippine JFK.” The Kennedy campaign was a tough act to follow. But follow Marcos did, releasing a biography, inspiring a feature film, and having his every move on the campaign trail followed by the press.
That Marcos’s role as heroic leader could piggyback on the one created a few years earlier by Kennedy points to the global spread of what Daniel Boorstin, in 1962, termed the pseudo-event: a mass-mediated public drama that functions as a “press release writ large.”39 In the U.S. context, the pseudo-event was characterized by a tendency to proliferate, becoming increasingly self-reflexive and self-conscious. In Boorstin’s words, “One interview comments on another; one television show spoofs another; novel, television show, radio program, movie, comic book, and the way we think of ourselves, all become merged into mutual reflections.”40
Boorstin’s observations anticipated Jean Baudrillard’s theorization of simulation and simulacra as distinctively postmodern phenomena. No longer representations of an objective reality, the simulations produced by the media do not refer to anything other than the intertextual relations underpinning them. A media text, according to this view, “has no relation to reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.”41
For Hoberman, the pseudo-event and the discursive continuum extending it were part and parcel of the nation’s “dream life,” in which “images themselves were shadows cast by shadows and mirrors of mirrors.” The purpose of this image-driven totality, as Hoberman puts it, was to sell an ideal image of American identity back to America.42 This “dream life” acquired a particular urgency within the atmosphere of heightened anxiety attending Kennedy’s management of the Cold War. If at the beginning of his presidency, Marcos inspired “flashbacks” to Kennedy, it could very well have been because Americans desired a Third World simulacrum of Kennedy, or at the very least, a congenial image of heroic leadership that the United States could disseminate as a symbolic weapon against communist incursion in the Third World.
Cold War Western: The United States and Third World Nationalism
For a United States struggling to preserve its post–World War II position as the world’s greatest economic and military power, so much was perceived to be at stake in Marcos’s bailiwick—the so-called Third World. This blanket term for the numerous “new states” engendered by the collapse of European empires at the end of World War II underscored the precarious balance of power opened up by decolonization.43 U.S. strategists feared that the political and economic instability engendered by decolonization could not but lead to the spread of revolutionary movements linking Marxism with the force of nationalist aspirations. At issue was the apparent clash between Third World nationalism and what was then coming to the fore as a defensive U.S. nationalism.
On the occasion of his first televised State of the Union address, on January 30, 1961, the newly elected Kennedy conjured the specters of the Cuban revolution, Ngo Dinh Diem’s faltering hold over South Vietnam and the escalating war in the Congo. “Today, the crises multiply,” he warned. “Each day, their solution grows more difficult. Each day, we draw nearer the hour of maximum danger.”44 The alarmist tones of Kennedy’s speech exemplified the crisis mongering that would come to define his administration’s foreign policy. Simply put, the public had to be conditioned to support America’s war on communism—for what was at stake, as political theorist Walt Whitman Rostow put it, was nothing less than the survival of the nation and its defining values.45
The Truman administration’s famous military document, NSC-68, presciently expressed Kennedy’s posture of a defensive nationalism when it warned that the United States might be “crippled by internal weakness at the moment of its greatest strength.”46 In the intervening years the worry that the American public would not support the nation’s postwar economic and security roles was a persistent one, and the permanent mobilization of the population (to support foreign aid and military interventions in the decolonizing world) posed chronic problems.
The specter of public apathy found a powerful solution in the covert military operation, which was closely intertwined with public anticommunist mobilizations.47 In the early Cold War years, the former served the interests of military elites while the latter engaged the masses. The lines separating the two became increasingly hazy with Kennedy, for whom the “theory and practice of foreign interventions served less to preserve imperial interests than to demonstrate the firmness of American will.”48
With the New Frontier as his campaign signature, Kennedy had at his disposal a powerful set of symbols to “summon the nation as a whole to undertake (or at least support) a heroic engagement in the ‘long twilight struggle’ against Communism.”49 In particular, he resurrected the frontiersman whose rugged individualism, self-sacrifice, and constant vigilance had figured prominently in the nation’s expansionist history. Kennedy’s New Frontier glamorized this violent history, and it did so by making covert military operations in the Third World function as spectacle.
In Kennedy’s time the hero of the frontier myth metamorphosed into the covert operator, also known as the freedom fighter. This new and improved icon of the nation’s expansionist-cum-anticommunist foreign policy was invoked—literally or metaphorically—in a series of media spectaculars, most notably the Bay of Pigs invasion (Operation Zapata; April 14, 1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16–28, 1962). As Hoberman points out, these pseudo-events began as top-secret happenings, “scripted, produced and directed by the CIA” with the full participation of the president.50 Whether by design or by happenstance, these events were thrust into the nation’s living rooms and daily papers. This development pointed to the increasingly permeable border between public spectacle and covert operations; a phenomenon that, Rogin points out, has since become a characteristic feature of the “postmodern American empire.”51
Rogin convincingly argues that covert military interventions derive from the imperatives of spectacle. Furthermore, they owe their invisibility not to secrecy but to something else entirely—political amnesia. As a form of “motivated forgetting,” political amnesia is the phenomenon whereby “that
