I once killed Cesar Virata by accident. It was during the pandemic. Word spread he’d succumbed to COVID-19. I tweeted he’d passed. Mercifully, he actually recovered. By all accounts, until the end, he was lucid and died in harness just last week.

In his days of political power (and after), I only knew him as a kind, quiet man who faithfully watched every Repertory performance of his wife, Joy. When I completed the audio production of “Twenty Speeches That Moved A Nation,” he very kindly granted the use, gratis, of the theater of the Yuchengco Center for the launch. He was, as they say, a gentleman of the old school.

In the Götterdämmerung moment of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.—his last inaugural, besieged in the Palace—neither his “elected” running mate, Arturo Tolentino, nor his Prime Minister, Virata, bothered to show up. Then again, his closest crony, Eduardo Cojuangco, was also absent; he had the best excuse: he was packing his bags, preparing to go into exile with his patron-pal. Tolentino, on the other hand, had privately taken his oath as “Vice President” a day or two before. Typically, it was Virata who acted institutionally and pragmatically.

The day after Marcos fled, Doy Laurel recorded in his diary, “I met with Cesar Virata to agree on a smooth turnover of the Office of the Prime Minister. He agreed but asked for time to meet with Batasan MPs (KBL). My takeover was delayed because Virata said the Constitution requires that the Batasan must elect the PM. However, with sympathetic KBL MPs Yñiguez/Virata/JPE plus UNIDO stalwarts, I am assured of a clear majority.”

This is a startling, unexpectedly political glimpse into what we consider, to this day, to have been an essential characteristic of Virata: that he was never a politician, and always a technocrat. After all, he was the first to underscore this. Virata told Nicole CuUnjieng, “Marcos selected a very good Cabinet … His main instruction to us [was]: do your best in your own field, you let me know what you think is the best decision, and let me think about the political consequences of your decision, because we were not politicians.”

Teresa Tadem’s “The Rise and Fall of Virata’s Network: Technocracy and the Politics of Economic Decision Making in the Philippines” (2018) summarizes Virata’s own view of his era: “In Virata’s own assessment, his network was weakened when Marcos’s health failed during an economic crisis in 1981 and after Benigno Aquino’s assassination in 1983. In those crises, Imelda Marcos’s network and Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Fabian Ver’s faction of the military network took power amidst the rise of an anti-dictatorship movement. The United States’ switch of support from Marcos to Corazon Aquino sealed the demise of Virata’s network.”

James Putzel of the London School of Economics never bought it: “In fact,” he once wrote, “many of those portrayed as ‘technocrats’ were no more than representatives of the vested interests of the business community, and are better understood as a group within the oligarchy,” and considered Virata the foremost example of this. But Lisandro Claudio in “The Profligate Colonial” points to Virata and Gerardo Sicat as prepared to tackle entrenched orthodoxies: Virata, for example, pursued devaluation, which was anathema up to that time.

So where lies the truth? Whatever Virata’s origins and social standing, he was a man with feet firmly planted in academe who happened to have strong ideas that bucked the trend; but his ideas only had a fighting chance if given political backing, and to that end, he played the game—perhaps with more relish and finesse than his contemporaries noticed. Claudio quotes Teresa Tadem, who noted that they (Virata and Sicat) were “either oblivious to or simply ignored the political machinations of Marcos in perpetuating himself in power.” Claudio adds a perceptive observation of his own: “Perhaps they were also seduced by the dictator’s power to remove policy roadblocks.”

The posthumous reputation of Virata rests on a counterfactual: what would the New Society and New Republic have been like if he hadn’t been there? Impossible to prove. Against the “what ifs” must be ranged the what were’s: When Virata abolished the coconut levy, Marcos restored it; Imelda Marcos called him “Dr. No,” after one of the Bond villains, because of his opposition to her pet ideas. His only power, then, was the reflected kind, and strictly limited by conjugal considerations when it came to Sir and Ma’am. Benito Legarda Jr. always pointed out the very high regard in which Virata was held abroad and that he was instrumental in saving the economy during escalating crises in 1981 and 1983, after Aquino’s assassination, “Crisis had turned into chaos, but if anybody could restore some semblance of order it was he.”

It was an impression the Great Dictator, with his gift for playacting the philosopher-king, had no problem fostering. Beth Day Romulo recounts in her memoirs that “We were all sitting around the dinner table at Keekarock Lodge in Kenya, after an exhilarating day spent viewing the wild game when Finance Minister Cesar Virata commented pointedly to the President: ‘For every King there are vultures.’ He went on to summarize what the guide had said: that the great lions killed only for food, not greed, and thus retained respect. President Marcos listened carefully and later was heard repeating the statement: ‘For every King there are vultures.’”

In the end, it was the vultures that were kept fat and happy, and returned home from exile to achieve restoration. The technocrats? Then as now, left to clean up the mess they themselves helped create.