THE mayor of Davao City proudly posed with a copy of the book, “Kingmaker The Hardcopy” the story of lawyer Vic Rodriguez, the man who did the heavy lifting to make the return of another Marcos easier to Malacanang.
Baste Duterte got his copy of the book several days ago, reading into the many surprises and inside accounts as to how Rodriguez engineered the victory of candidate Ferdinand Marcos in the May 2022 presidential elections.
His sister, Sara Duterte, won as vice president in the same elections. She provided the swing vote in the Marcos victory, as documented in the book.
His father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, penned the book’s foreword, saying the public ought to know what went wrong 79 days after Marcos’ victory.
Rodriguez left the Marcos’ Cabinet, protesting that the First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos was getting in the way of presidential decisions.
“As events unraveled, the break-up that triggered the purge at the top would only be the beginning of an irreversible slide. It would pull down, not just the power on the throne, but sadly the country and its people,” Duterte said in the foreword.
“There are enough juicy details to titillate the minds of a people hungry to find out what went wrong in what otherwise seemed like an enduring friendship,” the former president said.
Duterte had called Marcos a weak leader. These days, people believed that Marcos has always yielded to the whims of his first lady.
“To say that this is a must-read book would be to stress the obvious. It is not just the story of one man and a moment in time that will soon take its place as a footnote in history,” he said.
The former president said Rodriguez’s account ought to be placed on record.
“No historian, no matter how scholarly he subjects his body of work to, cannot completely extricate himself from his own biases and fixations that in turn cast a shadow on it,” he said.
Rodriguez handed the former President a copy of the “Kingmaker The Hardcopy” in Cebu on June 29.
“Not a few would gladly pay a tidy sum just to get a first-hand look into the workings inside Malacanang in the heady days after the 2022 elections and the first sign of the cracks that would destroy, perhaps forever, a bond that had weathered many storms,” the foreword said.
“The break-up would take a life of its own, spilling over into the irreversible slope that would threaten the very existence of the nation,” he said.
“Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction. This book is proof of that,” the former President said.
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