Cover Story
The Veteran
At 66, Federated States of Micronesia President Leo Falcam has been there, and done that.
At age 66, Federated States of Micronesia President Leo Falcam represents the last of an era of heads of government in this sub region of the Pacific who were born before World War II. Most of his contemporaries — island leaders and former presidents such as Amata Kabua, Lazarus Salii, and Tosiwo Nakayama — are either dead or long out of politics. But Falcam has staying power and a resume of a person who has “been there, done that” many times over.
Elected as Micronesia’s fifth president in mid-1999, Falcam is leading his country at a time of considerable uncertainty. Guaranteed funding from Washington ends less than two years from now and renegotiation of long-term financial aid provisions of the Compact of Free Association are in progress.
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While strong United States-FSM links will continue under the overall framework of the Compact, which does not expire, the extent of the funding that the FSM will be able to secure from the U.S. remains an open question.
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Falcam was born in Pohnpei in 1935, a period of peak economic activity for the Japanese-administered islands. Falcam recalled seeing “katsuobushi” and other fish processing factories. “When you looked out Nett Point from the bridge all the way out, the whole place was a factory,” he recalls. Agriculture workers cultivated much of Pohnpei’s lush land, while small businesses — run by Japanese — abounded. One of his brothers worked with a business that assembled bicycles for sale.
Falcam and other local children attended Japanese-run schools whose aim was to develop basic Japanese language proficiency among the local population, but not educate people beyond about a mid-grade school level. “During that time there was no such thing as a college education,” Falcam says, adding that Japanese held virtually all top jobs.
The schools followed Japanese rituals, including an assembly before school that started when all students turned to face the direction of Japan and bowed to the emperor (rituals whose significance the young Falcam didn’t appreciate until much later in life when, as a modern-day Micronesian leader, he twice visited the emperor of Japan at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo). Pohnpei was busy in those days, but the economic hubbub was tinged with the flavor of an authoritarian administration that meted out harsh punishment to those who violated regulations.
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One of those who enforced the law was Falcam’s father, Albert Falcam, a municipal policeman. As Japanese shifted from economic exploitation to war preparation, things changed: people were ordered to evacuate their homes and villages so Japanese could establish camps. Japanese military personnel started arriving in droves and the civilian population dwindled. The military dug trenches and fox holes, prepared guns and bunkers facing the ocean.
Later, Pohnpeians were forbidden from building fires at nighttime for fear of American bombing raids. In contrast to the islands of Chuuk, Palau and Saipan, however, the fighting largely bypassed Pohnpei.
Not long after the war ended, Falcam began attending the Catholic mission school run by the legendary Fr. Hugh Costigan, a Jesuit priest from Brooklyn, New York, who founded the well-known Pohnpei Agriculture and Trade School (PATS). In the late 1940s, Costigan selected Falcam and a few other students to go to a Catholic high school in the Philippines.
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Flying into Manila on a military plane at night, one of Falcam’s buddies from Pohnpei looked out the window and then turned to Falcam, asking, “What month is this? It must be Christmas in the Philippines because of all the lights.” Their first time out of Pohnpei was a shock: bright lights, paved roads, big cities, and military personnel everywhere. Transportation on Pohnpei, when the group left, was limited, according to Falcam, to just one Jeep that had been donated by the New York police department.
The first year away from home was miserable for the young Falcam. Homesick, he could do little other than wish he could return home. “We were fed well, we had good accommodations, but we wanted to go home,” he remembers. “We’d think, ‘what am I doing here?’ And we were thinking about four years, never coming home, no money. It was a very rough life at first.
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“You know when you start to learn Latin, English and math, whatever, at the same time, you get lost,” Falcam says. It wasn’t until his junior year that things started to click for Falcam. His grades and English improved and he gained confidence. Nowadays, when he misses a Sunday church service in Pohnpei, sometimes his priest will say, ‘I didn’t see you last Sunday.’ “So I always say that you know, in high school I went to church every day, so that’s enough,” Falcam says.
He graduated and returned to Pohnpei in the early 1950s, where he began teaching grade school in the mornings and in the afternoons working for the prominent Eitchet family as a salesman in their store, the largest on the island at the time. He earned $18 a month but his credit debt to the store was always more than his salary. In 1957, he jumped at an opportunity to attend the University of Hawaii. “I heard the (American administration) government was giving out scholarships to go to the University of Hawaii,” he says. “It was a big deal. You hear ‘Hawaii’ and you want to go. Not primarily to go to school, but to go to Hawaii, period. So I applied, took the test, passed it, and I was one of the group going to UH.”
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There were only about 30 other Micronesians studying in Hawaii at the time, so they quickly got to know one another. Many future presidents and political leaders were there: Amata Kabua from the Marshall Islands, Lazarus Salii from Palau, Bethwel Henry and Bailey Olter from Pohnpei, and Luke Tman from Yap, among others. “This is how we got to know Marshallese and Palauans. We never knew each other here in Micronesia,” Falcam says of this cast of characters who would shortly begin shaping the political agenda of Micronesia and defining future relations with the United States government.
But it wasn’t all politics and academics in Hawaii. Falcam also met his wife, the former Iris Green, while there in the late 1950s. Not satisfied with a job offer he received from Pohnpei after graduation from UH, Falcam made a move that would define his career: he accepted a job offer from the U.S. Trust Territory government in Saipan as an assistant political affairs officer. He thus became one of the highest ranking, if not highest paid, Micronesians in the T.T. administration.
He was quickly confronted with the T.T.’s double standard of pay for Micronesians and the American expatriates. “When you know that you’ve gone through the same training, have the same degree, yet the salaries are very different because you are Micronesian and he is an expatriate, it was very difficult to accept,” he says, adding that during his time on Capitol Hill in Saipan it wasn’t uncommon for Americans to get jobs because of connections. “They don’t have to have any skill,” Falcam says of the Americans who were hired every time a new U.S. president was elected. “They know somebody, so they’re hired and brought in.”
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Falcam later would become the first Micronesian to be acting High Commissioner, the highest ranking American in the Trust Territory, when the “HiCom” was traveling out of Micronesia. In the 1960s, before the Congress of Micronesia, before the notion of nationhood became a reality, the High Commissioner was the power in Micronesia.
“The High Commissioner was the ultimate authority for everything,” Falcam says. “He legislated, he adjudicated, and administered the area.”
Though the power of the HiCom had been acceptable in the 1950s and early 1960s, many of the newly educated Micronesians began calling for increased authority and self-governance — moves that led to the formation of the Council of Micronesia, then the Congress of Micronesia and finally, by 1969, a future political status negotiating team for Micronesia.
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While the Congress of Micronesia and the future political status commissions of various islands became power bases for many Micronesian leaders, Falcam remained in the upper echelons of the T.T. administration. After working in T.T. headquarters in Saipan for many years, he moved back to Pohnpei first as Assistant District Administrator, and later as DistAd, as the T.T. began replacing American administrators with Micronesians. Today, Falcam’s chief regret is that he didn’t step into politics — and out of the T.T. government — sooner than he did.
His Saipan experience and interactions with other Micronesians convinced him that the islands that comprised the T.T. would not remain as one unit, as some hoped would happen.
“I clearly saw at the time that there is no way Micronesia could become one nation,” he says. “You deal with the Palauans who are very aggressive, they want to move fast, they want to take chances, and then you deal with the Yapese and Marshallese who really are very different, and then you saw leadership in those days that would not be subjected to leadership from another place.”
Falcam chaired Pohnpei’s delegation to the 1975 Constitutional Convention that drafted what became the FSM Constitution. “When the convention was held in Saipan, the Palauans came in with their non-negotiable set of principles and Tosiwo Nakayama (of Chuuk) would not accept that, Amata Kabua (of the Marshall Islands) would never accept that,” he says. “So early on in the Convention you sensed that it’s not going to work. They will accept being Micronesian but not under one village.”
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Falcam found that working for the U.S. administration, particularly in the waning stages of American rule in the late 1970s as the drive for self-government became more insistent, had its disadvantages. “It was a very delicate situation,” he recalls of his role as District Administrator in Pohnpei. “They (Pohnpeians) look at you and say, ‘Well, this guy is speaking for the High Commissioner, for the American administration.’ When you say something, they say it’s an American talking.” The problem was often compounded by hostile sounding statements from Washington-based officials, including the oft-cited quote attributed to President Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “There’s only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?”
For Falcam, who had matured during the T.T. period, there was the additional uncertainty of what a future without American administration would bring, and in particular the potential danger of losing funding and services from the U.S. in exchange for increasing local self-government. And, despite the imminent breakup of the T.T., it was far from clear in Falcam’s view just where Micronesia was heading in the late 1970s.
With the T.T. clearly phasing down operations in preparation for transferring authority to each island entity, Falcam took the jump into politics, becoming the first elected governor of Pohnpei soon after the FSM Constitution was ratified in 1978, and the states of Pohnpei, Kosrae, Chuuk and Yap were established. He believes that he lost a bid for reelection in the mid-1980s because of his aggressive leadership style.
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“Maybe they’re not ready for me, for my style of leadership,” he remembers of that time. “Maybe it’s an excuse because you lose, but when you think back, there’s a certain truth to it.” Falcam describes his leadership style as “aggressive, decisive; not afraid to make mistakes; quick, demanding.”
“I get very impatient when I think people can do it and they don’t,” he says. “You know they have the talent (but) it’s not done. It’s irritating.”
Falcam described the “Micronesian Way” as consensus building, lots of consultation and deliberation — nearly opposite of the way he described himself. But he doesn’t see a conflict. “You consult and do your best, but during the process you let people know that the consultation can’t go on forever. Somebody has to have the political will to make a decision and that’s where I come in.”
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In Pohnpei, political (and many other) decisions often develop around a “sakau” bowl. Sakau is Pohnpei’s thick and strong version of “kava”, one that features in the daily lives of countless numbers of Pohnpeians — from growers to pounders to drinkers. Falcam estimates that he drinks sakau at least three times a week; some weeks, it’s a nightly routine.
During a visit to Pohnpei in May of all of the FSM’s overseas ambassadors, the president pulled together a hasty dinner gathering for the group at his home. Because it was a fairly last minute event, he didn’t organize to have sakau. But when Falcam’s older brother, Carlos Falcam, found out about the gathering of these significant FSM personalities, he arrived with pepper root in hand, and proceeded to produce a supply of sakau that lasted long into the night. So even on “off” nights, sakau often appears.
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Falcam attends numerous official ceremonies where sakau is a central part of the event. But he generally prefers the quality of the sakau that is produced for small groups, such as was the case one evening when Pohnpei’s top baseball team — whose name, naturally, is “Sakau” — hosted him for an evening at Cliff Rainbow Hotel. The same could be said for the sakau prepared when he hosted friends and visitors at a favorite sakau bar, Dehkla Andreas’s Market, which is near his residence. The taste of the sakau, to say nothing of the quality of the conversation, is much higher in these more intimate settings than at a Pohnpei funeral that typically involves several thousand people.
Over coconut cups of sakau is one way that Falcam connects with friends in his home state. He has also made a point of traveling to school graduations and other large events in far-flung corners of the FSM — including places like Ulithi High School — in order to talk with FSM citizens about issues of the day, particularly the ongoing Compact negotiations.
“It’s a great concern (communicating with people) because you must move with the people, and when I became president, I made a conscious decision that I will go everywhere I can in the FSM to let people know that they have a stake in this nation,” he says. “I also would like people to know that my generation will move on and they will have to come and carry on.”
Photo: Floyd K. Takeuchi
