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He was at the pinnacle of his political career, the twice-elected president of a strategically important Asian democracy; when Ferdinand Marcos began one of the most extraordinary documents in modern political life - his presidential diary. It was handwritten in English on Malacanang Palace stationery, the penmanship unusually neat, the prose often Olympian. The diary was intended to document Marcos's place among the world's great leaders. Instead, it would document the fears and fantasies that drove a paranoid, messianic leader to the depths of deceit and treachery and to the heights of authoritarian power. Ultimately, the Marcos diary would provide history with a remarkable inside view of a rarely witnessed event: the advent of a dictator.
The previously undisclosed diary fell into the hands of Marcos's rivals several months after his regime had collapsed in 1986. Investigators for the new government of President Gorazon Aquino, searching for financial records to help trace billions of dollars in missing funds, discovered a cache of cardboard boxes in a neglected corner of the Malacanang compound. Inside they found a piece of history - thousands of palace papers, including the diary, abandoned in the rush to pack the Marcoses' gems, jewels, and other valuables for life in Hawaiian exile.
Los Angeles Times correspondent William C. Rempel, the first person outside the Aquino government with access to the historical papers, transforms the diary into a compelling story of a complex man, haunted by superstition and fears of illness and assassination, who believed he had personal conversations with God and possessed extrasensory powers; a deceiver who lied to his allies, to his nation, his wife, and, at times, even to his own diary; a leader who practiced politics with the principles of Machiavelli and the Red-baiting smears of Joe McCarthy; and, finally, a dictator manically obsessed with power.
For Ferdinand Marcos, who long distrusted journalists and historians, Delusions of a Dictator is everything he feared: it is an immensely important historical document and a candid portrait of a flawed world leader and his frustrated dreams of sharing historic glory with such leaders as Caesar, Napoleon, and Churchill.
