The Mayor Returns

Like a "dope in shining armor" (his own description), a young man with a broken nose and a pair of dark glasses bounded into Manila's City Hall and plumped himself down at the mayor's desk. The broken nose, a football injury, belonged to Arsenio H. Lacson, 40, the ribald, rambunctious reformer whom Manilans chose as their first elected mayor in 1951. Lacson was back at his desk last week after 73 days' suspension from office by Filipino President Elpidio Quirino.

A self-styled Don Quixote who trod on Quirino's toes by pushing his investigations of municipal graft embarrassingly close to the presidential palace, Lacson likes to boast that he "calls a spade a spade, and if necessary, a dirty, stinking, lousy shovel." Not surprisingly, it was his tongue (which a Manila hostess once suggested he should send to the laundry) that got him into trouble. Lacson was sued for libel--and gladly suspended by President Quirino--after he publicly denounced his deputy chief of police as "ignorant, an ignoramus and incompetent."

But the mayor of Manila won his case handily. Last week the Philippines supreme court dismissed the alleged libel as "fair comment," and ordered Arsenio Lacson reinstated as mayor.

It was a black eye for Quirino and a bright new feather in cocky Mayor Lacson's cap. More important, the court's decision is a tonic for the thousands of Filipinos who applauded Lacson's cleanup campaign but who feared that corruption, in the courts as well as in the government, would quickly drag him down.

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