October 20, 1944, Romulo returns to the Philippines, with President Osmeña and General MacAr-
“I came to San Francisco starryeyed, believing that we were going to form an organization that was the culmination of all my dreams.”
- Carlos P. Romulo
In the summer of 1945, San Francisco, Carlos P. Romulo signed the charter of the United Nations on behalf of the Philippines. We were, at that time, a US territory on the verge of becoming a sovereign nation, after having been for centuries a colonial people.
“I came to San Francisco starry-eyed, believing that we were going to form an organization that was the culmination of all my dreams,” he wrote, recalling the sense of euphoria that surrounded the founding of the UN.
Born within the walled city of Intramuros, Manila—a bastion of Spanish authority—Romulo had always dreamed of a world where people no longer sought to conquer other lands. Born on January 14, 1898, at the twilight of the Spanish colonial regime and the dawning of the American era, he dreamed of freedom not only for his countrymen but for Indonesians, Indians, and all people oppressed, exploited, and bound by imperialism.
With the atrocities of the Second World War still fresh in his mind, he wished for an organization like the United Nations—one that would spare humanity from more killing. He envisioned “a world in which the conditions of peace and the conditions of life would be understood and upheld.”
Romulo grew up in the town of Camiling in the province of Tarlac in northern Philippines, the third child of a revolutionary. His father, Gregorio, fought for Philippine independence against Spain and, until surrender, America. The bitterness of the conflicts filled young Carlos with animosity toward the United States, but this did not stop him from forming close relationships with certain American military personnel, and these friendships taught him an important lesson—that people were basically good even if, sometimes, their cause was not.
This nugget of understanding would serve as a guiding principle in forging friendships between nations during his long and distinguished career—one that spanned more than fifty years, including seventeen years as secretary of foreign affairs and ten years as the Philippines’ ambassador to the United States.
Doña Juana Besacruz Romulo, his paternal grandmother whom he affectionately called “Bae,” taught him the ABCs in Spanish, and was his first teacher. He started attending school at the age of five. Though he was more academically inclined than athletically gifted, he enjoyed playing baseball.
The Romulo family transferred to Manila when he was in his third year of high school. The enthusiastic teenager took Manila by storm pursuing several different interests with boundless energy.
At the Manila High School he played the role of Agesimos in the Greek play Pygmalion and Galatea on December 10, 1915.
He took on his first job, while still in high school, as a cub reporter for The Manila Times, assigned to the Senate.
He served as president of the Cryptia Debating Club in 1916, and was also editor-in-chief of his high school’s annual.
After high school he entered the University of the Philippines, joining the UP Dramatic Club and founding a theater group together with Jorge Bocobo and Vidal Tan.
The Real Leader, in which he acted, was the first recorded drama performance in the history of the university. This photo is a scene from Schools for Scandals (ca. 1917).
He became editor-in-chief of the UP student paper, College Folio, reviving it as Varsity News.
He graduated from UP with a bachelor’s degree in 1918. By this time he was already working as an assistant editor on the staff of Senator Manuel Quezon’s newspaper, The Citizen.
On the morning of July 23, 1919, he boarded the Japanese ship S.S. Suwa Maru as a government-sponsored pensionado on his way to attend Columbia University. “You cannot fathom how difficult it is to leave one’s motherland,” he wrote to his older sister Lourdes and her husband. “I have had the experience this morning, and I have never suffered like this in my life. I spilled tears, but more than tears my heart felt like it was being pierced by a lance. And more profound was the pain of not being with Mama, Papa, Henry, Pepita, and Gilbert, both of you, and Choleng, to whom I was not able to give kisses of departure.”1
The forty-five day journey took him to several places, including Hong Kong, China, Japan, Seattle, and Chicago. When at last he arrived in New York City in September, he marveled at the skyscrapers and sights in a letter to his grandfather: “The street called Broadway that is in the middle of the city is as wide as the plaza of Camiling, and as long as the highway of Camiling to Bayambang, more or less.”2
Greetings from Romi. Aboard the Suwa Maru, 1920.
1 “No podeis figuraos cuan dificil es salir de la Madre Patria. Yo lo he experimentado esta mañna, y a fs´ que he sufrido como nunca, en mi vida. Derramé lagrimas, pero mas que las lagrimas,tenia el corazon como atravezado por una lanza. Y mas profundo ha sido mi dolor no estando con Mama, Papa, Henry, Pepita, y Gilbert, vosotros dos y Choleng, a quienes ya no he podido dar ni besos de despedida.”
2“La calle se llama Broadway y que esta en medio de la ciudad es tan ancha como la plaza de Camiling y tan larga como la carretera de Camiling a Bayambang, poco mas o menos.”
After earning his master’s degree in philosophy in the spring of 1921, he returned to the Philippines in November, leaving behind a young American named Anna, with whom he had fallen in love. A few days after his arrival, his father died from a ruptured pancreas.
The following month he became assistant editor of The Philippines Herald, the first Philippine daily printed in English, with Conrado Benitez as his boss. Senate President Manuel Quezon appointed him as his private secretary around the same time, and as if that wasn’t enough, Romulo took on a third job as assistant professor in the English Department of UP.
A couple of months later, in February, he met sixteen-year-old Virginia Serapia Vidal Llamas of Pagsanjan. She was one of the contestants of the Manila Carnival of 1922—a much awaited and much publicized annual event that involved multiple balls and social gatherings. He was assigned to be her official escort, and at the end of nine-day event she was crowned Queen of the carnival.
Almost immediately he fell hopelessly under her spell. “She had a fragile doll-like beauty,” he recalled in his memoirs.
Duty called on April 30, 1922, interrupting their love story. Senate President Manuel Quezon had included Romulo in the delegation that was to secure independence for the Philippines. With Quezon and twenty-seven others, Romulo sailed to Washington, DC, on the Philippine Independence Mission, and did not return for another three months.
Once back in the Philippines, Romulo pursued Miss Llamas in earnest, traveling six hours from Manila to Pagsanjan, and then back again, just to catch a glimpse of her or to exchange a few words. The courtship progressed very slowly, but, finally, after more than two years they married on July 1, 1924, in Pagsanjan.
They had their first son, Carlos, Jr., on July 30, 1925. Their second, born on January 3, 1927, they named after both their fathers, Gregorio and Vicente. “No laurels can equal those moments when the newly born is placed in one’s arms to cherish for life, if God wills,” Romulo wrote several years later.
“No laurels can equal those moments when the newly born is placed in one’s arms to cherish for life, if God wills.”
As manager of the UP Debate Team, which went around the world in 1928, Romulo began to win fame abroad. “Everywhere we went we were royally entertained and warmly welcomed, and we won every debate.”
At home he was promoted to editor of the Manila Tribune in 1927. Then, in 1930, Don Alejandro Roces appointed him editor-in-chief of the TVT Newspapers: The Tribune (English), La Vanguardia (Spanish), and the Taliba (Tagalog).
In 1933—the same month his third son, Ricardo Jose, was born—Romulo traveled to Washington, DC, as part of another Philippine Independence Mission. While in DC he wrote a series of articles on the mission’s progress, becoming the chief publicist, thinker, and spokesman of the Philippine independence movement.
The following year Quezon organized another mission to secure independence, and successfully got the Tydings-McDuffie Act passed in Congress, which provided for self-government of the Philippines and for Filipino independence after a period of twelve years. He became the first president elected through a national election and was inaugurated in November 1935.
On December 9, 1935, Romulo addressed seven thousand people at Notre Dame University, which presented him with his first honorary degree. His speech, entitled “The Mind of a New Commonwealth,” commemorated the establishment of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was also honored at the special convocation ceremony.
“Sitting on that platform by the president, receiving, with him, the highest honor conferrable by a great university, and seeing around us the leaders of America’s governmental hierarchy, I felt proud, as any man would be. President Roosevelt represented the world’s greatest nation; in a humbler way I represented the Philippines.”
Romulo became the publisher–editor of D-M-H-M newspapers in 1937, with a share of stock, as arranged by Don Vicente Madrigal.
He was elected Third Vice President on the board of Rotary International in 1937. It was considered a tremendous honor to have been elected to the position, as he was the first and only Rotarian to sit on the international board of directors without having served as district governor. He was also the first Filipino to do so.
On December 9, 1938, his youngest son, Roberto Rey, was born.
Romulo’s I Am a Filipino, the most recited literary work in the history of Philippine literature, appeared in the editorial section of The Philippines Herald in August 1941.
He traveled to Hong Kong in September, on assignment for The Herald, where he wrote the first of a series of articles that won him the Pulitzer Prize. From there he chronicled his observations in China, Burma, Thailand, Singapore, French Indochina, and the Dutch West Indies, returning to Manila in November 1941.
On December 8 the Japanese dropped bombs on Manila, Davao, Aparri, Baguio, Clark Field, and the Iba Landing Field, having attacked Pearl Harbor just hours before.
General Douglas MacArthur called Romulo to active duty, and he took his oath as a Major in the Philippine Army Reserve, commissioned to the US Army. By December 17 General MacArthur had appointed Romulo as his Executive Press Relations Officer.
Romulo left for Corregidor, where he joined General MacArthur and President Quezon. He said his goodbyes to his wife and four sons at their Vermont Street house in Malate on January 1, 1942. Within days he was broadcasting over the Voice of Freedom.
By March Filipino and American forces on Bataan and Corregidor were plagued by disease and short of ammunition and supplies. President Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur to leave Corregidor for Australia. Before his departure on March 11, he promoted Romulo to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and awarded him the Purple Heart. (He was later decorated with the Silver Star as well.)
Bataan fell on April 9, 1942, with Filipino and American forces surrendering to the Japanese. Romulo managed to escape at 1:18 am on a small plane that just barely got off the ground. He then sailed a Navy J2F4 to Melbourne to join MacArthur, who appointed him as his aide-de-camp.
Together they flew to San Francisco, where Romulo began a twenty-four-month lecture tour, determined to make Americans pay attention to the war going on in the Pacific. He traversed 143,000 kilometers and visited American 466 cities, often giving multiple lectures in a single day.
Travelling 143,000 kilometers, visiting 466 cities, and giving multiple lectures a day.
In 1943, just weeks before his death from tuberculosis, President Manuel Quezon appointed Romulo as Secretary of Information and Public Relations. Sergio Osmeña then took over as President, appointing Romulo as Resident Commissioner to the United States and Acting Secretary of Public Instruction.
That same year his wartime memoirs were published as I Saw the Fall of the Philippines. Other titles he wrote and published around this time included The United (1951), Mother America (1943), and I See the Philippines Rise (1946)
On Ocober 20, 1944, Romulo returned to the Philippines, now as a Brigadier General, with President Osmeña and General MacArthur in the historic landing at Leyte. It was reported that the American general waded ashore in waist-deep water. Reporter Walter Winchell immediately wired asking how Romulo could have waded in that depth without drowning.
October 20, 1944, Romulo returns triumphantly to the Philippines, with President Osmeña and General MacArthur in the historic landing at Leyte
CARLOS P. ROMULO, A
After three and a half years of separation, the Romulo family was reunited in March 1945. Carlos, Jr., who served with the guerrillas, assisted in the rescue mission.
Romulo addressing the United Nations in San Francisco (ca 1945).
“The word ‘independence’ is paramount because that only can be the goal of all peoples,” Romulo declared at a press conference. “If we are drafting a charter for the whole world it is essential that ‘independence’ should be included in the general policy.”
Romulo—whose lifelong dream was to help build a body such as the United Nations—resolved to make the Philippines the voice of all small nations. He launched himself fully into the world of international diplomacy, standing his ground against the big powers and committing himself to the causes of fledging nations.
The colonial powers at the time of the San Francisco conference (summer 1945) proposed that the United Nations Charter should read that non-self-governing nations should aspire to “self-government.” But Romulo and the Philippine delegation felt this choice of words would render the Charter and the UN organization a farce because it essentially allowed imperialism to continue.
“The word ‘independence’ is paramount because that only can be the goal of all peoples,” Romulo declared at a press conference. “If we are drafting a charter for the whole world it is essential that ‘independence’ should be included in the general policy.”
In the end, the word was included in the Charter. As an indicator of how appreciated was his fight for decolonization, Romulo was later nominated by the African states for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Romulo served as chairman of the Philippine delegation to the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in London, January 1946. He also represented the Philippines in the new Far Eastern Commission, and chaired the London Conference on Devastated Areas.
The day after President Manuel L. Roxas was sworn in as the first president of the Philippine Republic, Romulo was appointed as the country’s permanent delegate to the United Nations with the rank of Ambassador. Around this time the Commission on Human Rights was established by the United Nations, with Eleanor Roosevelt as its chairperson. Romulo joined the committee to help draft a declaration of human rights.
By October 1946 the Romulo family settled into what would be their home for the next fourteen years, at
In the fall of 1947 Romulo attended the second session of the United Nations General Assembly in Flushing Meadows, New York, as chief of the Philippine delegation.
In the spring of 1948 he chaired the monthlong Conference on the Freedom of Information in Geneva, Switzerland.
Meeting with Eleanor
By August he was heading back to Europe, this time with his wife and youngest son, Bobby, aboard the RMS Queen Mary, to attend the Third Regular Session of the UN General Assembly, which was held at the Palais de Challiot in Paris. He was elected chairman of the Ad Hoc Political and Security Committee and was named as one of the four candidates for the UN presidency.
At the end of 1948 the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which
Romulo, Roosevelt, and other committee members had arduously worked on and argued over for nearly two years.
Back home Vice President Elpidio Quirino had assumed the presidency in April 1948 after Roxas died suddenly of a heart attack. A month later Romulo’s mother passed away in Camiling.
On September 20, 1949, Romulo won the election for UN President. It was an honor unprecedented in at least three counts: he was elected by an overwhelming majority of 53-6, he was Asian, and he was the first UN President with the rank of ambassador, predecessors having been either premiers or prime ministers.
On September 20, 1949, Romulo won the election for UN President.
Confronted with a heavy agenda, his first words were to say that he wished the session would become known as the “peace assembly” by accomplishing further progress away from the tensions building toward World War III.
He later recalled having to be “perched atop three thick New York City telephone books” just to see and be seen by all the delegates below the podium.
In 1950 President Quirino made Romulo Secretary of Foreign Affairs while he continued serving as Philippine Ambassador to the US and head of the Philippine Mission to the UN. The same year he was chief Philippine delegate to the Baguio Conference (conference of Southeast Asiatic and Western Pacific nations).
In 1951 he represented the Philippines at the fifty-one-nation Japan Peace Treaty conference in San Francisco. While he felt the treaty was not wholly acceptable to the Philippines, he also felt (as a citizen of Asia) that it was important to not stand in the way of peace. “You, Japan, have done us a grievous injury . . . but fate has decreed that we must live as neighbors, and as neighbors in peace. . . .”
“Save humanity whie there is still time!”, UN President Romulo adressing the United Nations while “perched atop three thick New York City telephone books”.
In December 1951 Romulo’s term as Secretary of Foreign Affairs ended, and in February 1952 he presented his credentials as ambassador to US President Truman in Washington, DC.
He resigned from his post as ambassador to the US and as permanent delegate to the UN to run for the presidency in 1953, with Fernando Lopez as his vice-president; however, they withdrew their candidacy three months later in favor of Ramon Magsaysay.
President Ramon Magsaysay appointed Romulo in 1954 as Special and Personal Envoy of the President of the Philippines to the United States without portfolio. Later that year he gave him the Golden Heart Presidential Award.
Throughout his lifetime Romulo received well over a hundred awards and decorations internationally. Ripley’s Believe It or Not featured him as the most decorated human being on the planet.
Romulo served as chairman of the Philippine delegation to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955. In The Meaning of Bandung, published in 1956, he expressed the sentiments and aspirations of the peoples of Asia and Africa, especially those who had just emerged as independent nations.
In 1957 he served twice as president of the UN Security Council (the body primarily charged with maintaining international peace and security), a position he would hold again in 1980 and in 1981, making him the only individual in history to have occupied the post for so many occasions.
That same year Romulo’s personal life hit an alltime low, when his eldest son died in a plane crash south of Manila. Remembering his grief, Romulo later wrote, “How much did I know of this boy I so deeply loved?”
He continued serving the country under President Carlos Garcia as Philippine Ambassador to the US, and in 1959 he also took on the designation of Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Cuba and Brazil, with residence in Washington, DC.
During the 1960 commencement exercises of Georgetown University, Romulo served as commencement speaker and was conferred with an honorary degree. (In his lifetime Romulo received more than sixty honorary degrees from universities all over the world.) His youngest son was part of the graduating class, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree.
Before the end of the year President Diosdado Macapagal appointed Romulo as the president of the University of the Philippines effective upon the retirement of Vicente Sinco in 1962. At the same time he was appointed Secretary of Education. His autobiography I Walked with Heroes came out in 1961, quickly becoming a best-seller in the Philippines and the United States. He authored several other titles during this period, as well, such as Contemporary Nationalism and the World Order (1964), Evasions and Response: Lectures on the American Novel (1966), and Filipino Nationalism: Jose Rizal Its High Priest and Chief (1963).
Virginia Llamas Romulo, who in Romulo’s words was his “shrewd and loving adviser” and an “artist in homemaking and in social living,” died on January 22, 1968, at the age of sixty-two.
Four months later Romulo filed his retirement as university president and Secretary of Education. At the end of the year President Marcos made him Secretary
of Foreign Affairs, a position he would stay in from 1969 to 1984.
After a serious collision with a cargo truck in March 1972 that left him unconscious for sixteen days, with broken bones, and needing massive surgical repair on various organs, Romulo amazed everyone with a miraculous recovery. Already seventy-four, no one expected that he would be able to attend the 7th ASPAC ministerial conference in June, but in fact he not only traveled to Seoul for it; he headed up the Philippine delegation.
By fall Romulo was in New York for the 27th Session of the UN General Assembly, when martial law was declared by President Marcos.
On September 8, 1978, Romulo married Beth Day in a secret ceremony at the Pasay City home of Chick and Katsy Parsons. When asked how he won over such a lovely American lady, he quipped, “Why don’t you ask how she managed to marry such a distinguished Filipino?”
In 1979 he chaired the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, hosted by the Philippines, and he co-chaired the Philippine delegation to the UN’s fall assembly.
“We now have a strong voice in the international community,” he said of the Philippines in January 1981, just after serving as chairman of the UN Security Council for the third time. “With its membership in the UN Security Council, its chairmanship of the ASEAN Standing Committee, its status as observer in the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as its close association with the Arab, African, and Latin American groups, the Philippine position in world affairs has been clearly established and defined.”
In September 1981 UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim awarded him with the United Nations Peace Medal. “General Romulo needs no tribute from me,” he said. “[This medal] is a modest token of our gratitude to a world statesman to whom the world owes so much.”
In 1982 he was named a National Artist for Literature, having authored eighteen books, four plays, and several poems.
In recognition of his lifetime contributions to world peace, President Ronald Reagan conferred upon him in 1984 the highest civilian award of the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the same honor that would later be given to Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, and Nelson Mandela.
By the time he died on December 15, 1985, he was a major general in the Philippine Army, and had served on the boards of a number of prestigious Philippine corporations.
Extolled by three United Nations Secretary-Generals as “Mr. United Nations” for his dedication to freedom, world peace, human rights, and decolonization, Romulo acknowledged the goodness, the godliness, of every human being. This, which he learned early in life, was to him the very basis of peace.
“There is a spark of the divine in every human being no matter how bad he may be thought to be,” he wrote. “All it takes is for his spark of the divine to strike the spark of the divine in the other fellow and the result is mutual understanding. Perhaps harmony.”
– Carlos P. Romulo