The hero the Philippines has forgotten

deliberate framework of narrative. Rather, it came about as an inevitable consequence of a mindset for projecting Dr. Laurel in the right

In one forum conducted by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication, some grandchildren of Dr. Laurel were on hand to narrate what life, but I did not hear anything that I had not heard before. Did this indicate that everything that could be known about Dr. Laurel had already been made known? If so, then what was there still left for me to write about?

- nally settled down to writing this book was, to make a difference. And to be different is to get out of those aspects about Dr. Laurel that are already well-known and seek out aspects about him that are not yet known.

scale in writing this book. Dr. covered in writings by so many authors that articles about him tend to be mere repetitions of one another. One more in this genre would sound like, to use a cliché, a broken record.

- raphy of Dr. Laurel can pretend to surpass “in depth and breadth and height” For factual information needed for this better source than that book by Dr. I attempted to write another chronology of the events undergone by the life of Dr. Laurel, I would end up just doing a duplicate of copy at that. As in any duplication, nothing beats the original.

But my being no product of the academe turned out to be my ultimate advantage in writing this book. Shunning constrictions of begin, with no thought of what, who, how, where, with what to begin. And as always in all my writings, the beginning just led to developments in the narrative that though not thought out previ that gushes forth profusely from break of the earth.

character must be projected of Dr. Laurel, to begin writing was no I began, there was no stopping. of a man thrown into a most unenviable fate of bearing his nation at a time when no others would.

work not just one more dry chronology of events. Make it a moving story, a heart-tugging drama, and set story and drama in the romance of the American colonial era, the grim and spectacle of the second world war, and the uncertainties and political turmoil of the post- war period-- and what do you get but a book in which people can feel like viewing a true-to-life motion picture even as they are only reading it.

not come out as mere enumera- tion of data but as living scenes performed by partakers in each depicted historical episode. opens in a mood of quiet, a tranquil Manila slumbering in the night, its colonial architecture that characterizes government buildings bathed in the glow of many- colored Christmas lights, while in his study Dr. Laurel, reviewing documents of a case he is handling as justice of the Supreme Court, decides to call it a night and repairs to bed to join his already sleeping wife, Paciencia. Out in the street, the Christmas carols sung by a lingering batch of segue to the rowdy singing of American flyers, newly arrived from the United States, partying in the Fiesta Pavilion of the Manila Hotel. Far out in Hawaii that very hour, early beach swimmers are distracted by a bomber plane diving from out of the blue above Oahu island, and the US Pacific Fleet Commander, otherwise in the leisure of a golf game, grows speechless at seeing that trailing the single bomber plane was a horrendous swarm of Japanese bombers that proceed to blast the men and facilities of the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. In the Pacific

It is this treatment, chapter after chapter, that should make the book quite delectable to the palates of a people continuously given to ro of heroes to whose ranks Dr. Laurel every chapter aspires to tell a story all its own, independent in itself, and yet always forming part of the entire saga of Dr. Jose P. Laurel.

it is for no other reason than that in the course of the writing it took on a deliberateness of design so that Dr. Laurel had all his life been welfare of the nation. Only in Dr. feel she really ever gets to own him.

So cry your heart out, the scene is really meant to make your heart - sion to write a Dr. Jose P. Laurel biography like no other.