(First Installment)

My dear, there are always people who are just a little faster, more brilliant, and more aggressive,” Imelda Marcos in 1979, replying to an American journalist’s question why so many of her relatives and friends had reached the top of business and government. Imelda’s quote was compressed into “Some are smarter than others” that became the title of an anti-dictatorship monograph on the Marcoses’ cronies.