Somehow, Aquino Kept Her Halo

Before his murder, Benigno Aquino predicted that anyone who succeeded Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos would smell like manure in six months. But his own wife would prove him wrong, writes Howard Chua-Eoan of Time. Corazon “Cory” Aquino, who died yesterday of heart failure, was a political saint who never quite lost her halo, “a good woman whose goodness alone, at the very end, was what proved enough, if only by an iota, to save her country."

Aquino never managed to provide her country with stability or economic prosperity, but she held on long enough to ensure a democratic transfer of power, establishing a democracy that holds, albeit tenuously, to this day. She dies a revered figure in the Philippines. As she once said, “No one can say that Cory did not give it her all.” (More Corazon Aquino stories.)