President B. S. Aquino 3rd’s strong words in Boston, while recalling his father’s three year- medical furlough there, and his assassination at the Manila international airport upon his return on August 21, 1983, compel me to reveal for the first time a conversation I had with Ninoy Aquino at Harvard in the summer of 1982.
As presidential spokesman, press secretary and information minister from 1969 to 1980, I had engaged Ninoy on television and in the print media many times before martial law. We stood on opposite camps, but we were never enemies. His sister Lupita Kashiwara, who used to be my neighbor, coursed some of her more urgent messages to Marcos through me. Ninoy and I spoke to each other again on June 21, 1977 when he was brought to Malacañang from his detention cell in Fort Bonifacio, by Brig. Gen. Josephus Ramas, commanding general of the Army.
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