Max Soliven
Maximo Villaflor Soliven was a Filipino journalist and newspaper publisher. In a career spanning six decades, he founded the Philippine Star and served as its publisher until his death.
Background
Soliven was born on September 4, 1929, at the Philippine General Hospital in Manila, Philippines. His father Benito, who died from aftereffects of the Bataan Death March and imprisonment in Capas, Tarlac during World War II, was elected to serve in the pre-war National Assembly. Soliven spent his undergraduate years at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he received the OZANAM award for writing. Soliven received a Master of Arts from Fordham University and Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced and International Studies.Soliven was proficient in Spanish, as it was one of the languages used by his Ilocano grandparents.
Max was the eldest of ten children. His brothers and sisters were Guillermo, Regulo, Manuel, Mercedes, Teresa, Augusta, Victorio, Ethelinda, Benito. Victorio Villaflor Soliven are the owners of VV Soliven Group of Companies, including VV Soliven Towers located near the Santolan–Annapolis station along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue.
His youngest sister, Ethel Soliven Timbol, is also a journalist. She was a writer and Lifestyle Editor of the Manila Bulletin from 1964, retiring in 2007.
Early life
Max was asthmatic as a child, inspiring an early nickname from his siblings as "the guy who never sleeps, but talks at night."At the age of seven, Max was reciting poems and delivering speeches as he imitated his father. He wrote poetry at the age of thirteen and continued until he was twenty-one.
When his father died at the age of 44, Max helped his mother, who was 30 years old at the time, support the family. At the age of 12, Max served as the role model and assumed the role of father figure to his younger siblings. He worked for the Jesuits as a messenger and errand boy using a second-hand bicycle he had saved up for. He also sold cigarettes and shined shoes in helping his mother support his nine siblings. While working these odd jobs, Max won academic medals as a scholar at the Ateneo de Manila University.
Marriage
While studying in New York City for university, Max got engaged to an American woman. One week before the wedding, the woman asked Max to consider her wish to live in the US. Max said, "No ifs or buts; my life is in the Philippines. I must serve my own country and that is where I need to be." When she did not agree to the decision, Max cancelled the wedding.When he was 28, Max married Preciosa Silverio, who he had met when she was 16 years old. Preciosa's mother was daughter of Manila police captain Manuel Quiogue. She was 19 when Max proposed to her. They married in 1957 at the St. Anthony's Church in Singalong, Manila. Throughout their marriage, Max called Precious "Ifu" and "my Precious Silver," a play on her name. In 1966, Preciosa founded the Operation Brotherhood Montessori Center.
Education
Soliven spoke English as a first language, like most children of the pre-war Filipino middle class. He also spoke Latin, Spanish, and Ilocano.Max received all his schooling, from elementary to college, in the Ateneo de Manila University. He also went on to receive a master's degree from Fordham, a Jesuit school in New York City.
While Ateneo was closed for rebuilding after the war, Max was sent to Japanese vocational school in Escolta where he learned Japanese, typing, and stenography. He was then sent to Paco Parochial School.
In June 1945, classes in Ateneo were resumed for third and fourth year high school students only in Plaza Guipit. Max was accepted in third year and became part of Ateneo's Guild 47 or High School Class 1947. His classmates included Cesar Concio, Ramon Pedrosa, Luis Lorenzo, Jose Tuazon, Jesus Ayala, Onofre Pagsanhan, Johnny Araneta, Ramon Hontiveros, Florentino Gonzales, Hector Quesada, and Ricardo Lopa.
Guild 47 would be the first class to graduate from the Padre Faura campus, which reopened after World War II for the 1946–47 school year. About half the class, including Max, stayed in Ateneo for college and would belong to the Class of 1951.
Max took some pre-law courses as his initial career preference was law, but he stuck to writing, obeying his father's deathbed wishes.
Whilst in college, Max joined The GUIDON, the school's official student publication, and served as its managing editor. He served as part of the College Editors Guild, which he would become vice-president of in 1949–50, attending conferences at Iloilo, Cebu, and Zamboanga. Before graduating in March 1951, Max joined the Sentinel, the weekly newspaper published by the Archdiocese of Manila as associate editor.
Max was also an active member of the Ateneo's Chesterton Evidence Guild as a champion debator and orator.
Taking his father's interest in military and his admiration for Foch, Max took ROTC for four years, twice as required and two by choice as he became a corps commander.
After graduating from college, Max accepted an offer from the Jesuits to be a construction overseer of their college in Cebu City. He did this while he made inquiries about scholarship grants to the United States. After Cebu, Max worked full-time for The Sentinel. Assigned to the defense beat, Max would meet Ramon Magsaysay, a congressman from Zambales who became Secretary of Defense in late 1950. Max eventually received two scholarships: the Fulbright for travel expenses and the Smith-Mundt covering tuition, board and lodging, and some pocket money.
In August 1951, Max went to New York for the fall term at Fordham, where he formed his political ideas, which included a dislike for ideological movements like Communism, Fascism, and any form of state control.
Although Max did not have to work, he took a part-time job as a waiter in the school cafeteria, sending $100 each month to subsidize his brother Willie's studies in the Philippines.
In his spare time, Max would go to the UN headquarters when the United Nations was in session, especially when Philippine ambassador General Carlos Romulo was present. Romulo was a fellow Ilocano and close friend of his father, while both studied in UP. Romulo was Max's original role model as a journalist.
Whilst in Fordham, Max also developed a predilection for smoking pipes, accumulating over 300 pipes of different sizes, materials, and origins. Max also became a stamp and toy soldier collector, and accumulated a collection of books by the mid-Nineties.
When Max finished his Master's in journalism in 1954, he moved to Washington, D.C. for a one-year Master's program in international affairs in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Johns Hopkins University. He was accepted along with around 100 other students, drawn from a pool of foreign affairs and think-tank experts and scholars. It was here where Max developed an interest in Vietnam, which led to his involvement in covering foreign affairs as a journalist.
Journalism career
Soliven began his career at 20 as associate editor of the Catholic newspaper The Sentinel, as police and political reporter for the Manila Chronicle at 25.After returning to Manila, Max took a job in Procter and Gamble, which paid ₱500 a month, as a production manager for its factory in Velasquez, Tondo. He demanded for a "flex time" arrangement, which his boss accepted. Max would start earlier in the day and work late at night if needed, as he kept his afternoons free to teach in the Ateneo.
For a brief period, Max juggled his Procter and Gamble job with moonlighting at the Chronicle, before leaving Procter in late 1956 to be a full-time journalist, as he believed the corporate world was not meant for him.
Chronicle
He claimed this opportunity back in 1954 when he bumped into one of his high school colleagues in Ateneo de Manila University, Oscar Lopez. At this time, Lopez was working with his father, Don Eugenio Lopez, who was currently the publisher of the Manila Chronicle. Oscar Lopez offered a job to Soliven in which he accepted. Max started out as a beat reporter under Enrique Santos, one of the legendary "terrors of Philippine journalism. He then got his break when Vergel Santos, one of the veteran news-writers of that time saw how Americanized he was and in turn, offered him to write an 11-part series on US economic and military assistance which was then featured on the front pages of the Chronicle in February 5–16, 1956. This helped earn him the National Press Club's Journalist of the Year Award of 1957. Soliven was popular with the editors because of his unique form of grammar and syntax when it comes to writing. This gave him the edge over the younger journalists of his time.Max was chosen to be one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of 1960 for journalism. Max then moved to the Manila Times, the nation's dominant paper, and made his claim as one of the best and brightest of the post-war generation in the 1960s to 1970s.
Manila Times
From 1957 to 1960, he would become the associate business editor to the Manila Times wherein he will finally be fully involved in the world of journalism. Because of his credentials back in his college years and because of his works in Chronicle, the people of Times were impressed by him, especially the publisher, Joaquin Roces.The Evening News
In 1960, his receiving of the TOYM award caught the eye of Stonehill, which owned a newspaper called the Evening News. Max began there with a daily column entitled "A Word Edgewise" which the editors of the paper did not touch as per the deal requested by Max upon accepting his job there. At the age of 32, following the resignation of Fernando E.V. Sison as publisher, Soliven became the publisher and editor-in-chief of the now-defunct The Evening News, which rose in 1960 from sixth to second highest in daily circulation in the Philippines from being sixth on the year Max arrived there. Soliven again asserted himself demanding absolute editorial control with no interference from Stonehill, which was again accepted. He was only 32, and thus was called "the boy publisher" by Manila Daily Bulletin publisher Hans Menzi who was 51 at the time.In 1961, as he always had an eye for foreign coverage, his request to cover Cuba was granted. He wrote an editorial published on April 26, 1961after the failure of the Bay of Pigs writing "How can it maintain its position of pre-eminence, how can it retain the trust of the Free World, when it shows it is capable of such calamitous bungling?". Soliven would also produce an 11-part series from September 16 to 27, 1961 entitled "The Truth About Cuba", detailing the planning by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Eisenhower administration and execution of the Bay of Pigs by the Kennedy administration less than three month after assuming office.
Upon his return to the country, Max covered the 1961 presidential election between President Garcia and Vice President Macapagal, and would solidify his being a political columnist around this time.
In 1962, Max left the Evening News after he found he had lost the full editorial policy he had asked for.
In June of that year, the Times announced that Max, along with his wife, ventured to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the Kissinger program, which was a month's long worth of seminars, field trips, and discussion amongst the small group of 15 made up of legislators from Europe and newsmen from Japan who went along with Soliven.
He would spend the entirety of 1963 returning to Philippine developments before rejoining the Times the following year.