Bonner, Raymond. Waltzing With a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy. New York: Times Books, 1987. 534 pages.

Drawing on nearly 3,000 previously-classified documents, Bonner looks at the diplomatic history of U.S. relations with the Marcos regime in the Philippines. CIA station chief Herbert Natzke once observed that Marcos was a brilliant man, but he has two flaws: "He can't avoid stealing everything in sight, and he can't control his wife." By 1979 Imelda was functioning almost as the head of government. Her incredible waste and consumption was an embarrassment, and the 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino was clearly a government plot, but U.S. diplomats felt that we needed our bases.

After graduating from Stanford Law School, Ray Bonner was twice decorated in Vietnam as an officer in the Marine Corps. During the 1970s he worked for Ralph Nader in public interest law. In 1979 he started travelling in Latin America, and in 1981 was hired by the New York Times. After over a hundred stories filed from El Salvador, where he was one of the first Western correspondents to travel with the guerrillas, the NYT reassigned him in 1982 following complaints from U.S. officials about his alleged anti-U.S. bias. He left the NYT in 1984 and was soon writing for New Yorker magazine. In 1988 he and Jane Perlez moved from New York City to Nairobi, Kenya, where she began her new assignment as the New York Times correspondent for East Africa.
ISBN 0-8129-1326-4

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