JPE at 100
MEDIUM RARE
Dinengdeng. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Giant clams that cost hundreds of pesos in Makati but harvested free by the shore in his hometown. Reporting for work every day in Malacañang without missing a beat.
It adds up to a century of achievements and accomplishments for the one and only Juan Ponce Enrile. As a lawyer with a private practice, he never lost a case (but he lost his heart when he met the fair Cristina Castaner, and then he lost his presidential campaign to a movie-star opponent).
At age 100 years and three days old, JPE is still “the most intelligent mind in the room,” according to another lawyer by the name of Rodrigo Roa Duterte. To his daughter Katrina Ponce Enrile and her children, he is their beloved “dinosaur.” To the rest of the nation, JPE has been a servant of the people – customs commissioner, secretary of Justice and Defense, senator and Senate president, congressman, architect of martial law, and now from serving under Ferdinand Marcos Sr. (at whose ouster he rejoiced), he is Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s chief legal counsel.
A peasant’s diet of vegetables and fish. Reciting the Rubaiyat as a memory sharpener. Up until the pandemic, jet-skiing on weekends. When the controversial JPE was under a freakish hospital arrest many years ago, an afternoon snack of chicken mami noodles and siopao from Ma Mon Luk was the way to make him smile, wake up his appetite.
Once upon a time, he took me on a helicopter to Cagayan to show me “that little house down below,” where he was born. “I’ve never had it repaired, to remind me of my origins.” For the sake of young people, the legend of JPE should read like a cinema script. He walked several kilometers, barefoot, to and from school. He came to Manila to look for the lawyer-father who had never met his own flesh-and-blood.
Among JPE’s early clients, pro bono, were reporters and editors facing libel charges. He’d pick them up from their office in his car, himself behind the wheel.
Without fail, he’d win the case. To edit his book, Juan Ponce Enrile: A Memoir (2012), he chose an anti-Marcos columnist, Nelson Navarro.
They don’t make guys like Johnny Enrile anymore.