Tomorrow, December 10, 2004 will be 80 years since Michael Manley was born. He was the second of two sons of National hero Norman Washington Manley, a prominent lawyer who co-founded the People's National Party in 1938.

Michael Burke

His mother, the former Edna Swithenbank, was an artist and sculptor.

Michael Manley died on March 6, 1997, officially at minutes to midnight. But a prominent journalist telephoned me earlier in the day at about sunset for vital information on Michael Manley. Did he know what was about to happen or was Manley dead already?

The late Michael Manley still invokes great passions of either love or hate. Which other Jamaican has ever been written about in such volumes and in such detail? All of that information will be useful before an objective analysis can be done on the life of Michael Manley for which sufficient time has not yet passed.

MANLEY... still invokes great passions of either love or hate

After attending Jamaica College, Michael Manley joined the Royal Canadian Air force during the Second World War, which ended before he could see combat. After attending the London School of Economics, Michael Manley worked with the British Broadcasting Corporation. He returned to Jamaica in December 1951 and became associate editor of the Public Opinion.

Before his return to Jamaica, Michael Manley was already divorced and would actually marry five times, with only one marriage having death as the cause of its end. I mention this because objective analysis should include this part of his personality where he failed to keep a wife for more than about 15 years at most. Interestingly enough, most of Michael Manley's five wives were marrying for the second time when they "tied the knot" with him.

And yet, like his father before him, Michael Manley was an all-rounder. He had an avid interest in sports and was as good a swimmer as his father was an athlete. During the war he was trained as a pilot, yet he had a first degree in economics. He was a journalist and later a trade unionist; the latter he came into quite by accident.

One has to understand the role trade unions played in politics to realise how the PNP split in April 1952 could have brought the People's National Party to an end after not quite 14 years of existence. As the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union was the lifeblood of the Jamaica Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress was equally important to the People's National Party.

So when in 1952 TUC president Ken Hill was expelled from the PNP as part of a so-called communist purge, the TUC was disaffiliated from the PNP. And the PNP formed another union at the beginning of 1953, the National Workers' Union.

It lacked the spark of the TUC until Wills Isaacs invited Michael Manley to a negotiation meeting at Ariguanabo Textile Mills in 1953. From there Michael Manley's career in trade unionism began.

And it was that career in trade unionism that would propel him into politics when his father appointed him a senator in 1962. The same Wills O Isaacs who brought Michael Manley into trade unionism would resign as a PNP vice-president because he had not been consulted on the appointment. In 1967, Michael Manley was elected member of parliament for Central Kingston, "scraping through" by a margin of 43 votes.

At a banquet in honour of his 75th birthday in July 1968, Norman Manley announced that he was quitting politics. On February 9, 1969, Michael Manley was elected president of the People's National Party, defeating Vivian Blake by more than two votes to one. A few days later he was appointed leader of the Opposition.

Immediately after ascending to the PNP presidency, Michael Manley set about re-energising the PNP. And he did not let up until the PNP romped home to electoral victory in the election held on February 29, 1972.

Sworn in as prime minister on March 2, 1972, his stint as head of Jamaica's government for the next eight years and eight months would be what he would be remembered for most in all parts of the world.

Michael Manley came to power in 1972 against the backdrop of a brewing revolution for change. The very things that he has been cursed for doing or trying to do are the same that, had they not been done, there would have been a social fallout.

Let's make no mistake about it, the generation that is in their 50s today, which includes myself (I am 51 years old) were very radical as teenagers and 20-plus.

Indeed, many of us did not see Michael Manley as being radical enough. Who remembers that today? Yet he took some drastic steps to remove Jamaica not only from neocolonialism but also from "neoslavery".

Politics is the art of the possible and after more than eight years in opposition between 1980 and February 1989, Michael Manley as prime minister again led a tame government compared to the one in the 1970s. He stepped down because of ill health in 1992 - and the rest is history.

Executive Class

Gardens with Gravel

Death to the Mullet!