The Rhetorical as Political: The Ramon Magsaysay Award and the Making of a Cold War Culture in Asia

Abstract

Often considered Asia’s Nobel Prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award was instituted in 1957 through the initiative of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF).² Just six weeks after the death of Ramon Magsaysay in a plane crash in March 1957, John D. Rockefeller III proposed, in a letter to the successor-president Carlos Garcia, the establishment of a living memorial to the late president, to be called the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Rockefeller declared in the letter that “this award will be given annually to one or more persons in Asia whose demonstrated leadership is motivated by a concern for the welfare of the people comparable to that which characterized the life of Ramon Magsaysay...”³

Cold War was, as much as anything else, a competition over discourse, a “struggle for the word.” Christian Appy¹