“Who says I can’t?” May-ling asked.
“I do,” he said, explaining that it would be “unwise politically” for Willkie. “Before I knew what was happening,” he added, “she reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.”
The next Willkie event was a dinner party given by H. H. Kung on the lawn of his house, at which Wendell was seated between May-ling and Ching-ling. The American visitor had requested that Chou En-lai, whom he had met with twice, be invited—the first time that Chou had ever been entertained by any member of the Soong family. When dinner was over, May-ling led Willkie into the house to see sister Ai-ling, who, she said, was suffering from “neuralgia in her arm and couldn’t come outdoors for the party.” Madame Kung, her arm in a sling, greeted them. “The three of us talked and had such a good time we forgot about the hour and the people outdoors.” Finally, at about 11:00 P.M., Kung came in, “gently scolded Madame and me for our failure to return to the party,” and sat down to talk. “Finally, just before we were to leave, Madame Chiang said to Dr. and Mme. Kung, ‘Last night at dinner Mr. Willkie suggested that I should go to America on a goodwill tour.’ The Kungs looked at me as if questioning. I said, ‘That is correct, and I know I am right in asking her.’ ”
“Mr. Willkie, do you really mean that and, if so, why?” Kung asked. Willkie asked May-ling to leave the room while he explained. “Someone from this section with brains and persuasiveness and moral force must help educate us about China and India and their peoples. Madame would be the perfect ambassador.… She would find herself not only beloved but immensely effective. We would listen to her as to no one else. With wit and charm, a generous and understanding heart, a gracious and beautiful manner and appearance, and a burning conviction, she is just what we need as a visitor.”
The day Willkie left China, Cowles told Washington columnist Drew Pearson, the car stopped on the way to the airport so that Wendell could say good-bye to May-ling. Willkie went into the house, and his party waited outside for an hour and twenty minutes. When he finally emerged, he had May-ling with him, and she joined them on the trip to the airport. Just as he was about to board the plane, so the story goes, May-ling “jumped into his arms. Willkie picked her up and gave her a terrific soul kiss.”
IT CERTAINLY DID not take May-ling long to follow Willkie back to the United States. She had been vacillating about a trip to consult doctors about her health, and a letter written by Eleanor Roosevelt a month earlier indicates that an invitation from Washington was already lying on her desk. Although there had been some previous discussion at the White House about inviting the generalissimo’s wife, it was not until Pearl Harbor that Roosevelt’s advisers suggested that such a visit might not only help give the appearance of a united front in the Pacific theater but also counter Japanese attempts to suggest that the war was about the white versus the yellow race. Eleanor’s letter outlined the benefits that a visit to the United States would confer. “I have discussed the matter [of a visit] with my husband,” the first lady wrote Madame Chiang, “and we both feel that a visit with us at the White House would not only enable us to get to know you better and to secure a better appreciation of China’s problems, but would also, in large measure, serve the ends of publicity.… We could, of course, send a comfortable plane for you.”
Six week after Willkie’s departure from China, on November 27, May-ling arrived in Florida, via a special stratoliner provided by the U.S. War Department.* She left for New York the same day and was met at the airport by Harry Hopkins. He drove with her to the Harkness Pavilion of New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she had taken a suite under a false name, reserving the rest of the rooms on the twelfth floor for her staff. Harry Hopkins and T. V. Soong were friends, and their daughters attended the same school. This may have been one of the reasons Madame had sent word to Roosevelt that she was “most anxious” to see Hopkins “before she talks business with anyone else.” A better reason was that Hopkins was directing Lend-Lease at the time. On the way to the hospital, she told Hopkins that she wanted it made clear to Roosevelt that she had only come to the United States for medical treatment, then launched into complaints about Stil-well, who “does not understand the Chinese people and… made a tragic mistake in forcing Chiang Kai-shek to put one of his best divisions in Burma where it was later lost.” She followed this “more forcibly than I had heard anyone express it before her belief” in the importance of defeating Japan before Germany. “I did not argue this point unduly with her,” Hopkins added, “beyond saying that I thought such a strategy was unfeasible.”
Owen Lattimore, Chiang’s political adviser, who had traveled on the same plane with May-ling, was deeply offended by her when they arrived in New York. According to Lattimore, the generalissimo’s wife “still seemed to consider me a part of the household” until the moment their plane landed. “When Madame Chiang was received at the foot of the gangway by Harry Hopkins,” Lattimore said, “she immediately turned her back on me, and from that moment on cut me dead.”
Eleanor Roosevelt came to the hospital at ten the following morning. May-ling told her she had come to America for her health, not to make any demands on the U.S. government. The first lady said that Madame Chiang was much admired in the United States, and the president looked forward to being able to discuss postwar problems with her. When Eleanor asked about May-ling’s attitude toward Britain, May-ling wisely demurred, asking what the president thought. Mrs. Roosevelt outlined FDR’s opinions, which led them into a conversation about India, on which the ladies discovered that they were in agreement. After nearly an hour’s visit, Eleanor left, promising to return the following week. According to a cable May-ling sent home, Eleanor Roosevelt was “so moved that she came up to kiss my cheek. She said she wished to be my personal friend.” During her second visit they discussed the importance of women in the postwar world. “She expressed her admiration for me, several times during our talk,” May-ling wrote Chiang, “which made me blush a lot.”
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about these visits in her autobiography, saying that Madame Chiang seemed to be “highly nervous and to be suffering a great deal; she could hardly bear to have anything touch any part of her body.” The first lady said that “Madame Chiang seemed so small and delicate as she lay in her hospital bed that I had a desire to help her and take care of her as if she had been my own daughter.” The president’s wife was also grateful to May-ling, who had arranged for her son James, just operated on for a gastric ulcer, to be fed the right food on a visit to China. On a few occasions Mrs. Roosevelt took people to the hospital to meet Madame. “I felt she would tire of seeing only me,” Mrs. Roosevelt explained, “and many people were anxious to meet her.”
There was enormous curiosity about Madame Chiang on the part of the press and the public, and DeLong tells us that while in the hospital, the G-mo’s wife received up to a thousand letters a day. One of these was from Frances Gunther, a writer and journalist like her well-known ex-husband, John. The two women had met in China, and May-ling invited Frances to come see her in the hospital. A careful note taker, Gunther described Madame in her corner room in the Harkness Pavilion with plenty of flowers, her bed up, resting against embroidered pillow slips, lying under a pale green Chinese silk bedspread embroidered in coral. Her face “perfectly made up,” May-ling was wearing a pink velvet bed jacket with coral earrings. She was smiling, although Gunther was aware of “an aftermath of recoiling horror still in her eyes.”
May-ling also received a letter from Emma—a
brief note to welcome you, and to tell you that I stand ready to be of any service to you in any way at all.… You have been rumored so many times to be on your way here, or even already here, but in seclusion somewhere that it hardly seems possible yet that you are actually now actually this side of the Pacific. I do hope that the medical aspects of your visit will be speedily taken care of, and that you… get some of the rest that you must so
badly need.… Of course I am anxious to see you—it is so many years ago that you saw me off on that station platform in Peking—but I fully realize all the demands there will be on your time, once your health is taken care of, and that you are here, perforce, largely as an official personage, with all the limitations that implies.
It was not until two months later, in fact, that May-ling invited Emma to lunch with her at the hospital.
On the day before Christmas, Harry Hopkins flew back to New York to see May-ling, who asked him about Russia’s postwar expectations. Hopkins told her that Russia was planning to set up regimes in the Baltic countries— Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—and wanted certain priorities in the Balkan nations as well. But, he said, neither Roosevelt nor the British were too worried about the ambitions of the Soviet Union, that the president felt sure he could find a way to deal with Stalin and that circumstances in Russia would prevent the Soviets from communizing the rest of the world. “Thinking over the talk with Hopkins,” May-ling later wired Chiang, “I came to the conclusion that Britain, America and Russia will focus on their own postwar interests without paying attention to China. I think that we can obtain an important position in the peace talks if the right preparations are made.” In this cable she said that she was “alone here without funds. Thus it is necessary to ask Eldest Sister [Ai-ling] to come to America to lend me a hand. You better urge her to set off as soon as possible.”
There was another talk with Hopkins ten days later, reported by May-ling to her husband. Hopkins had asked May-ling if there had been any fighting in China, and she replied that, due to a lack of planes, no major counterattack had been started. She wired Chiang that there was seldom any news about the war in China in American papers and that Hopkins had said there ought to be more. He suggested that he could help if he was kept informed from time to time of what was really happening, that such news releases would be far more valuable than the propaganda currently being given out by the Chinese News Agency, and that bona fide information would make it possible for China’s supporters to avoid the kind of falsified news that inevitably led to ridicule.
May-ling began a seventh secret wire to her husband on a note of concern: “Roosevelt has arrived in Africa [for the Casablanca Conference, the first summit of World War II]. Stalin has also been invited… and I’m not sure whether there are any important representatives from our side.… Given the warm invitation to Russia by the American government, it is clear that Russia cannot be bullied.”* She suggested that since neither Russia nor China had been represented at the conference, China might try to come to some kind of “concrete understanding” with Stalin in order to improve the position of both in the international arena. The G-mo’s wife went on to say that she had been telling Americans that China’s “great sacrifice” was being made not just for the Chinese but for the peace and happiness of “people all over the world.” As a result, she reported, there were now a few commentators speaking and writing with admiration of China’s “pure and lofty goal.” But, she said, there were still many people hostile to China.
Known by the State Department code name Snow White, guarded day and night in the hospital by members of the U.S. Secret Service and agents of the FBI, May-ling was also tended to daily by a hairdresser and a beautician. She was kept up to date on Chinese business, receiving on January 12 a copy of a wire from her husband to Roosevelt, appealing for a $500 million loan. During her stay she was taken from the hospital in a limousine for several drives around New York and to see a dentist. She certainly must have seen Willkie, who sent her more than one bouquet of flowers. On December 11, he wrote a letter to May-ling’s private secretary offering to see to anything Madame needed, saying that he “would naturally like to see her very much” but “would not intrude” and would “await her command.”
May-ling was supposedly in the hospital to get treatment for the injury she had suffered when she had been thrown out of a car six years earlier on the road between Nanking and Shanghai. In a letter to Chiang Kai-shek, her doctors said that although “no organic disease of a serious nature has been found,” she was treated for painful abdominal spasms and for sinus trouble brought on by an earlier operation. Her wisdom teeth were also extracted. But even an extended time in the hospital and a week’s further rest at the president’s family home in Hyde Park did not, apparently, give her back her health, for she was said to be “on the verge of collapse more than once” during her subsequent tour of the United States. “She should have been an invalid with no cares,” according to Eleanor Roosevelt, “but she felt that she had work to do, that she must see important people in our government and in the armed services who could be helpful to China, and that she must fulfill official obligations.”
Concerned about her guest, Mrs. Roosevelt met with one of Madame’s doctors, Dana Atchley, and was “very favorably impressed by him.” He and Madame’s primary physician, Robert Loeb, told Mrs. Roosevelt in late January that Madame Chiang’s “progress” had been “quite satisfactory.” Nevertheless, Dr. Loeb wrote T.V. in February, “As you know we did not consider your sister cured upon discharge from the hospital.… Madame is suffering from the strain of years.” Along with medications, May-ling’s doctors said that she should remain in bed until 10:30 every morning and rest at least one hour every afternoon and one day every week. She was to limit her American speeches to five, make no more than one official dinner engagement every month, attend no more than one large reception a month, and limit difficult conferences to one a day.
But, of course, that was not why she had come to the United States.
36
If the Generalissimo could take the Japs as Madame took Congress, the War in the Pacific would be over in the bat of an eyelash.
—FRANK MCNAUGHTON
THE OFFICIAL part of Madame Chiang’s tour of the United States did not begin until February 17, 1943, when she arrived at the train station in Washington, D.C., accompanied by her niece and nephew, Jeanette and David Kung, along with an entourage of twenty-five, including nurses, secretaries, and four reporters. David, currently a student at Harvard, did not cause as much immediate comment as eighteen-year-old Jeanette, whose “Chinese boy’s robe and boyish haircut”* were tactfully dubbed “interesting-looking” by the reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. The party was met by Mrs. Roosevelt, Madame T. V. Soong, the Chinese ambassador, his wife, and a large contingent from the Chinese Embassy. For her initial appearance in the nation’s capital, May-ling wore a mink coat, a black dress trimmed in red, and a black sequined scarf. Escorted into a reception room, she emerged arm in arm with Eleanor Roosevelt, who took her to meet the president, who was waiting in an official White House car outside the station.
Warned about May-ling’s legendary charm, Roosevelt had determined not to be “vamped” (one of his favorite words) by her. Usually he sat on a sofa with his guest of honor next to him, but for their initial discussion in the Oval Office, he had a card table placed between them, explaining to his daughter, Anna, that he didn’t want her “too close.” Madame lived up to his fears, inviting him and others at the top of the administration to return to China with her. During one tête-à-tête, Roosevelt asked her about Wendell Willkie’s visit to China. She replied that China had liked having him there.
“What do you really think of Wendell Willkie?” he continued. An ardent gossip, the president was probably aware of the stories about their affair.
“Oh, he is very charming,” May-ling answered.
“Ah, yes, but what did you really think?” Roosevelt asked again.
“Well, Mr. President, he is an adolescent, after all.”
“Well, Madame Chiang, so you think Wendell Willkie is an adolescent— what do you think I am?”
“Ah, Mr. President,” she replied, “you are sophisticated.”
In spite of her attempts to charm him, May-ling was not successful in getting the president to commit to sending large amounts of war material to China. According to a Chin
ese reporter, she was noticably unhappy: “some of the servants… sensed and noticed her disappointment, and the others misunderstood her for being unpolite and snobish [sic]. Of course, Madame Chiang was alone at the White House, and Mrs. Roosevelt was away and President Roosevelt did not come in to see her very often, and only says a few words of greeting to her whenever he happened to see her.”
Observers also noted that, for whatever reasons, personal or political, May-ling avoided joint conferences and close contact with T.V. during her visit to the United States. T.V., who had been in China, returned to Washington twelve days after her arrival, setting off speculation that he had come to help her get more aid for China. This supposition was confirmed when he declared in a press conference that he certainly approved of his sister’s requests for arms and planes. “If I said she was satisfied with what we have received from Lend-Lease,” he said at a dinner at the home of Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, “I would not be telling the truth.”
If May-ling’s legendary appeal failed with the president, it succeeded brilliantly with Congress. Her best-remembered and most dramatic appearances took place the day after her arrival, when she addressed the Senate and the House of Representatives. The first private citizen and only the second woman* invited to do so, she had dressed carefully in a black cheongsam with sequin trim and jade jewelry. Led down the green-carpeted center aisle of the Senate to take a seat on the dais next to Vice President Henry Wallace, she made quite a sensation. She told the senators that she had not planned to give a speech, was not “a very good extemporaneous speaker, in fact, no speaker at all,” but had just been asked by Wallace to address the House. Having sufficiently disarmed her audience, she told a story about one of General James Doolittle’s pilots† returning from a bombing mission over Tokyo who bailed out in the interior of China. When he landed and saw Chinese running toward him, he waved and yelled out the only Chinese word he knew—“Mei-kuo,” which means both “America” and “beautiful country.” The Chinese, she reported, laughed and “greeted him like a long lost brother.… He… told me that he thought he had come home when he saw our people; and that was the first time he had ever been to China.”
The Last Empress Page 54
