Eulogy: Blas Ople

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In 1986, BLAS OPLE was the guy Ferdinand Marcos dispatched to Washington just before he ordered tanks to try to quell Manila's People Power revolution. In a starched barong tagalog and with an extraordinary baritone, Blas vainly lobbied Capitol Hill that Marcos wasn't all that bad. One day, he admitted to the press what he shouldn't have: that the Philippines under Marcos was in an "interregnum." Blas, a big talker and determined erudite, loved that word.

He was a Marcos Cabinet minister for 18 years, but he wasn't corrupt, and that anomaly—plus the widely admired interregnum comment—led to an amazing acceptance after Marcos' ouster, culminating in his appointment as Foreign Secretary in 2002. When I met him a few weeks before he died, Blas, 76, was short of step but lucid and humorous—and he never forgot to light a fresh cigarette directly after the previous one expired. He recalled the 1986 phone call in which he told Marcos the Reagan Administration's support was collapsing. "Blas," Marcos bellowed. "You know the Soviets. Can you give them a call?" Remembering this exchange, Blas lit another cigarette and chuckled. He said no to his boss— in effect declining to help make the Philippines a Soviet colony three years before the Berlin Wall fell.