When the family of the late journalist-political columnist Nestor Mata donated his immense private library to his alma mater the University of Santo Tomas (UST) in June 2023, among the 846 old books that covered politics, journalism, history, and geography, was a signed copy of the original 1957 edition of “One Came Back: The Magsaysay Tragedy.”
Co-written by Vicente S. Villafranca, “One Came Back” is Mata’s compelling yet harrowing account of the March 17, 1957 plane crash at Mount Manunggal in Cebu that claimed the life of President Ramon Magsaysay and 24 others, some of them Mata’s colleagues in the presidential press. As it turns out, Mata was the lone survivor of the disaster whose cause (engine breakdown or sabotage?) continues to haunt the nation to this day.
Last March 18, a day after the 67th anniversary of the crash, the UST Miguel de Benavides Library hosted the launch of the new edition of “One Came Back.” The affair was graced by the Mata siblings (Jocelyn, Jan, Mike, Francis, and Julia) and by former Senator Jun Magsaysay and Mila Magsaysay-Valenzuela, very familiar to the lifestyle press for having been the long-time and very well-liked social and public relations director of The Peninsula Manila.
The Mata and Magsaysay clans also graced the opening of the exhibit at the lobby of the UST central library of the memorabilia of Nestor Mata across more than six decades of journalism. The exhibit is open to the public and will run till April 30, 2024.
Published in 1957 by Philippine Publishers, Inc., the book provides readers with a vivid portrayal of President Magsaysay, shedding light on his character and leadership qualities. It offers a first-hand account of the harrowing experience endured by Mata, providing valuable insights into the events leading up to and following the tragedy.
The new edition is published by Art Angel Printshop Commercial Quests, Inc. It has a prologue by former Senator Francisco S. Tatad, who became Mata’s junior colleague in the prestigious diplomatic beat some years after the crash: Mata was covering for the Philippines Herald, Tatad for the Manila bureau of the Agence France-Press. Tatad recalls that Mata was only 31 when the disaster occurred: “Although quite young, Mata was a weather-beaten newspaperman, having covered the Korean War as a correspondent.”
‘Biblical’ saga
Mata’s saga was nothing less than “biblical”: “He received a second life twice longer than his first one,” writes Tatad, noting that having survived the 1957 crash, Mata went on to continue to live and thrive until he passed on at 92 on April 12, 2018.
From the Old Testament, Tatad proceeds to the New and compares Mata to Lazarus and other resurrectionists granted another go by Jesus. Tatad indicates Mata outdid all of them: “Somehow, they disappear from our view after receiving the miracle of a second life. Not so with Nestor.”
The book’s harrowing narrative was culled mainly from the dispatches that Mata started filing the moment he regained consciousness at the Southern Islands Hospital in Cebu where he was brought and treated for second- and third-degree burns in different parts of the body. “In extreme pain (and) in between hard gasps,” he writes that he “dictated (his report) to a pretty nurse.” Although the typical newsman who apparently couldn’t resist making glowing tributes about female beauty, Mata was suffering intensely from the burns in his body.
‘Newsman till the end’
Mila Magsaysay-Valenzuela, in her remarks during the book-launch, said he first met Mata at the hospital and she was horrified at his burnt condition. Despite the pain and agony he was going through, she said Mata was furiously dictating his dispatches to be filed later that day to the Herald.
“He was a newsman till the end,” she said.
“My chest heaved and hurt as I tried to strain my voice over a sound of a whisper,” Mata later told fellow newsman Leon Ty. “But it was the hot, searing sensation I felt over my whole body that made the task one of pure agony.” Sending the dispatches as his body coped with the lingering severe scalding punishment it got from the plane’s explosion was something “I hope I never would have to go through again.”
But of course, Nestor Mata had to go through the ordeal over and over again if only to satisfy queries especially from his press colleague about what happened.
He had accompanied Magsaysay and the education secretary, Gregorio Hernandez Jr., to Cebu aboard the “Mt Pinatubo,” the presidential plane named after the highest peak in Magsaysay’s home province of Zambales. It was graduation season then and the president was supposed to deliver commencement-exercise speeches in various universities in Cebu.
Despite Mayor Sergio Osmeña Jr.'s suggestion to stay in Cebu for the night, Mata chose to board the Mt. Pinatubo to cover the President's journey back. Mata vividly remembered President Magsaysay's last smile before the flight.
Contrary to initial speculations on why he survived, Mata clarified that he was not seated at the tail end of the plane but rather in the second seat next to the President's compartment.
Blinding flash
The crash occurred between one and two o’clock Sunday morning, March 17.
“First, there was a flash—blinding, intense and incandescent—like a thousand flashbulbs popping at the same time,” Mata writes, “afterwards an explosion, an ear-splitting, violent wham as in the crash of a whole building tumbling against the pavement or the clatter of a tangled mass of steel and twisted metal hurtling from the precipice; then the sharp, sudden fadeout of all senses, each one of them fast blinking out one after the other.”
Regaining consciousness around three o’clock that same morning, Mata found himself amidst the wreckage on a steep cliff. Despite excruciating pain, Mata's calls for help eventually led to his rescue by local farmers around eight that morning.
Summing up the investigation of the combined team from the Philippine Constabulary, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, National Bureau of Investigation, Civil Aeronautics Administration, and Philippine Air Force, Mata and Villafranca write that the official probe ruled out sabotage.
“The cause of the crash of the Mt. Pinatubo was the … breakage of the pencil drive shaft of the right engine generator due to ‘metal fatigue,’” declare Mata and Villafranca.” In short, engine breakdown or better still, engine breakup or collapse.
Popular presidency cut short
The disaster cut short a presidency that would forever be memorialized as the closest to the people, because Magsaysay, of humble roots and of legendary stature because he was a guerrilla resistance fighter during the Japanese Occupation, was a champion of the common people.
Widely admired even internationally, Magsaysay’s death was deeply mourned. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund put up the RM Awards the same year and the awards started to be given the following year to exemplary Asians in different fields of endeavor. Nowadays the RM Awards are considered Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.
After his miraculous escape, Mata went back to newspapering and column-writing and he even became, according to Tatad, “one of the nation’s first trimedia practitioners … with his regular program on DZHP and his TV program on IBC-13.”
He also acquired a master’s in foreign affairs at UST and became a lecturer on politics and international relations at the UST Faculty of Arts and Letters.
He also basked in the attention of his colleagues and friends in the media and the arts, attending regularly get-togethers at Odette Alcantara’s Heritage Art Center in Cubao, where he regaled them with his rich baritone by singing his favorite opera arias.
“I always went there to listen to Nestor,” Mila Magsaysay-Valenzuela said. “He was really a good singer.”
‘Magsaysay legacy’
But amid the camaraderie and fanfare, Mata frequently asked himself, "What does God want me to do?" “He spared my life because he wants me to do something,” he told friends. “And I don’t know what it is."
Later he found the answer: he lived to tell the story and memorialized the “Magsaysay legacy.”
In several forums, whenever he would be introduced as the only survivor of the 1957 plane crash, Mata would protest. “There was a second survivor,” he would declare. “I call it the Magsaysay legacy.”
As Virgil is to Augustus, as Eusebius of Caesarea is to Constantine, and as Sandburg is to Lincoln, Nestor Mata is to Ramon Magsaysay. He has become the principal rhapsode, the poet laureate of the Magnificent Magsaysay Moment in Philippine history, brief as it may have been.
As Fr. Angel Aparicio, OP, the UST prefect of libraries, declared during the launching:
“The book ‘One Came Back’ … tells the story of a good man, the President of the Republic of the Philippines, whom most of us present here never met personally, nor even personally knew, but whose last moments have been carved in the psyche of every Filipino of good will in minute detail, by the pen of the man we honor today, journalist and the only survivor of the tragic accident, Mr. Nestor Mata.”