In any newsroom, the loftiest perch is that of the editor in chief, who is sometimes also the publisher, and in any case, the one who “thunders and shrills,” while the life’s-blood, the reaper of eyeballs, “the objective reporter, the impartial journalist, who gave the paper many a scoop,” is the head of reporters; but the most unacknowledged but most essential person in this trinity is the one usually known—and almost always unheralded and unacknowledged because of the boring nature of the title—as the managing editor: the one who keeps the newsroom “from going to pieces as it threatened to do every day.”
This is about one such man, who happened to be my managing editor for six years, and who turned the online Official Gazette and our (now defunct) office’s publications into something useful and perhaps even worthy of respect. I take great pride in what we achieved—a skeleton and content that have continued to provide relevance and value—and what we published; it was his personal integrity, his deep-seated professionalism, and his ability to contain within himself the tensions bubbling up from his own passionate nature and inflicted upon him from outside that held things together with a staff that was young, enthusiastic, gifted, but innocent of the cruelties of public service. When our time was up, he went abroad, reaping his reward with an editorial job for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Singapore.
Some years back, he published an essay online on his decision to give up that splendid job and come home to return to the demeaning rat race to the bottom that is the fate of every writer in this country, bar none. As he put it, “upheaving your life, even for the right thing, can be incapacitating.” I was moved when he mentioned a conversation we had near the end of our public service: “I remember what my old boss from government told me when we were about to step down from office: ‘Being important one day and being unimportant the next will be a shock.’ And it was then and it was again.” I’d only shared this piece of family advice, handed down over the generations, with two people, both of whom happened to be my deputies: he, because he was my managing editor, and the other, because he was my deputy as head of the pool of presidential speechwriters. Both were young but honorable men who deserved not to be bedazzled and warped by the temporary.
He gave up the expat life to come home and write, knowing that what the government takes away from you is your own voice, your own facility with the means to express your own thoughts: words, and what skills you possess in wielding them, having become someone else’s for so long. He expressed this with wonderful economy: “Years of policy work have made me the slowest writer in the world.” Yet he would persevere, as “a freelance writer and an aspiring novelist—the first thing struggles to pay the bills, but it’s the second unfinished thing that keeps the show going.”
On the night he died, without knowing he was breathing his last, I’d been rereading a portion of Paul Johnson’s “Creators,” which explored writing from the point of view of an editor and a writer: the editor sometimes having to lock up the writer—literally—to compel them to produce; the writer, on the other hand, needing experience by which Johnson meant, “the combination of observation and feeling that leads to a creative moment”—and then the compulsion to put pen to paper to capture or recapture that moment. A great editor knows enough of writing to save writers from themselves, but great editors can be frustrated in their ambitions to be great writers, because so much of themselves is used up for others.
Yet the compulsion is there. This compulsion found expression in that essay he wrote: “A novel in this country won’t turn out to be a big payday someday, but that’s not the point. The point is the work, the creation, or the process of it. One day, maybe soon, it will be finished (and, just maybe, published), and then the thing that will keep the show going will be the next one.” I mourn that the novel will forever be unfinished; I celebrate that in the writing of it, he found fulfillment and contentment and the kind of purpose that not only affirmed himself but all who knew him. The daring is the thing.
I take pride that what he did finish—practically single-handedly, since he proposed it, shepherded it, indeed, practically wrote all of it (the section in English by himself, and then he supervised the portion in Filipino)—is a style guide, the only one ever properly attempted by any administration, and for that reason quite likely the only one that will ever be. If you write, or edit, or both, go to archive.org and look for Style Guide for the Government (Gabay sa Estilo para sa Gobyerno). It was his distillation of the best of the best manuals, combined with the practical requirements of official communications and lessons derived from days spent cultivating—what? Pearls to daily scatter before—what? The grieving, bitter pen knows what it wants to write.
There is music, and the music of words—poetry; and while I have never been much for poetry, it is the closest I can come to capturing an important part of his personality, which was a love of music: he was a percussionist, and he could sing; the rest of the time, his was a wry stillness, a volcanic calm. “Past Midnight” by the late Teodoro M. Locsin Sr.:
The music is ended
The hall is deserted
all the dancers are gone
Drink to the empty chairs.
Juan Pocholo Martin B. Goitia (Oct. 31, 1982–July 25, 2026).
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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3