* Fenby tells us that the ambulance had been given to the CCP by the New York Chinese Laundrymen’s National Salvation Association and still bore the name of its donor on its side.
* The book, United States Relations with China, published by the State Department in 1949, was known as the “White Paper.”
* Prompted by the dismissal of Stilwell, Gauss had resigned as ambassador to China, and Hurley had taken over his position. Upon being named ambassador, the Oklahoman had had the ambassadorial residence redecorated and bought a new Cadillac, which, according to John Service via Drew Pearson, was “shipped over the Hump by airplane during the height of the war when the Chinese were desperately hard up for supplies.” (Drew Pearson: Diaries, 1949–1959, ed. Tyler Abell, p. 181.)
* See endnotes for a résumé of what happened to Service, Davies, and Vincent.
* Jeanette Kung also seems to have considered herself an official personage; witness a letter sent to T.V. by Wedemeyer, who had received a request from Madame Chiang “to transport the Kung sisters to the States.” The general wrote: “when I indicated that I was unable to do so, Madame Chiang requested that I give the Kung sisters first priority on Air Transport Command. I informed Madame Chiang that at present time there are several thousands of Americans awaiting return.… If I were to give the Kung sisters, who insofar as I can learn contributed in no way to the war effort, I would be personally subject to severe criticism and rightly.… Later on it may be possible to transport civilians… provided they pay for same. Also commercial airways will be open and available.” (Hoover Archives: Wedemeyer papers, Box 83, Folder 7, Albert C. Wedemeyer to T. V. Soong, November 12, 1945.)
* Estimates vary between 1 and 2 billion.
* Hopei, Shantung, Chahar, Jehol, and northern Shansi.
* Editor of the comprehensive four-volume Biographical Dictionary of Republican China.
* This was true. The CCP felt she would be more valuable as an independent voice and did not induct her until just before her death, so it could advertise her allegiance to posterity.
* Four years later Emma was even more embarrassed when she had to inform May-ling that one of the Chinese charities she (Emma) was helping had been closed due to “our funds over there… being manipulated.” (Wellesley Archive: Emma DeLong Mills papers, Emma Mills to Madame Chiang, April 11, 1950.)
* A well-known comic strip of the time, created by Milton Caniff.
* It will be remembered that the Russians had already removed everything the Japanese had built in the way of factories and equipment.
* Figures from Crozier, The Man Who Lost China, p. 291.
* Marshall had originally chosen Wedemeyer, who very much wanted the job. But Wedemeyer’s pessimistic attitude toward Marshall’s mission, an ill-considered letter he sent Marshall to that effect, his obvious bias toward the Chiang government, and an honest appraisal of the situation in China before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee lost him the appointment. Stuart was named to the post in July of 1946.
* The Communists had delayed the Assembly, originally scheduled for May 1, by refusing to name their delegates, leading one to believe that they never had any intention of going.
* Sometime after Wedemeyer left the military, May-ling wrote to say that she and her husband wanted him to know “that we are thinking of you.… We heard of your retirement from the army with mixed emotions. We realize how wearing and frustrating the past few years have been for you… now that you are out of the Army, we do hope and pray that you will find surcease of inner turmoil from an impossible situation.… What a true and tried friend you are!” (Hoover Archives: Albert C. Wedemeyer papers, Box 31, Folder 5, Madame Chiang Kai-shek to Wedemeyer, July 27, 1951.)
* Approximately $104 million in today’s dollars.
* R. Keith Schoppa from Loyola College in Maryland.
* According to Chang and Halliday, Mao was selling all the food Manchuria could produce in return for arms and goodwill, thus condemning hundreds of thousands of Manchurians to death by starvation in 1948. (Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 310.)
* The next day the embassy added the information that the “David Kung Stock Exchange scandal” was “further complicated” by reports that the brokerage firm that had performed the transaction was connected with Du Vee-pin, the eldest son of Big-eared Du. (National Archives: microfilm file 184, roll 58, September 3, 1948.)
† $6,000,000 Chinese = $1,500,000 U.S. in 1948 ($13,411,000 today).
* These figures come from Seymour Topping. Journey Between Two Chinas, p. 14.
† These men, it will be remembered, had originally declared for Chiang but later joined the Communists.
* See endnotes for the results of Truman’s investigation into the China Lobby.
* Probably Huang Shao-hung, an associate of Li.
† $2,000,000 in 1949 would be the equivalent of $18,054,000 today. $10,000 would be worth $90,270, and $20,000 would be worth $180,540.
* It is interesting to note that Madame Chiang’s records have been removed from the hospital data center. This is not only highly unusual; it would have been illegal in the state of New York unless Madame herself signed a letter of authorization for their removal.
* Stuart, who had been born in China, died in Washington, D.C. In his will he had written that he wanted his remains moved to China. This was accomplished—“after years of negotiations about the political implications of such a burial”—in 2008, forty-six years after his death. (David Barboza, “John Leighton Stuart, China Expert, Is Buried There at Last,” The New York Times , November 20, 2008.)
† Joseph Alsop’s brother, who often collaborated with him on columns.
* It may or may not be a coincidence that, according to those same files, Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper, reported in September 1949 that over a three-month period an estimated $500 million had been taken out of China’s bureaucratic capital and that T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung had “nearly completed their removals and had placed their money in the United States, Thailand and a small amount in Indonesia.” (FBI files, WFO 97-766, June 19, 1953, p. 12. Material furnished to the author by the Department of Justice in response to Freedom of Information inquiry.)
† W. A. Swanberg.
‡ The equivalent of $9,027,000 today.
* Luce’s biographer W. A. Swanberg says that Goodwin’s salary was only $25,000 and was eventually taken over by the Chinese News Service.
† In the investigation into the China Lobby, noted in chapter 47, it is said that the Yangtze Trading Company, of which Louis Kung was a director, “was denied the privilege of using export licenses by the Department of Commerce because of alleged shipments of tin to Communist China.” (Truman Library: James S. Lanigan to Theodore Tannenwald, Jr., Memorandum Re: China Lobby, October 9, 1951.)
‡ $100,000,000 in 1949 would be the equivalent of $902,737,000 today, $300,000,000 would be worth $2,708,211,000 today, and $1,500,000,000 would be worth $13,541,000,000 today.
* Immediately after the publication of the White Paper, Marshall invited May-ling to his estate in the Adirondack Mountains, where she spent ten days on a “purely social” visit—a kindly invitation that was attacked in a cable from the Chinese military attaché to the G-mo, claiming that “all our American friends” regarded Marshall’s invitation as “an insidious and malicious gesture.” (Charles Wertenbacker, “The Ubiquitous Major,” Reporter, April 15, 1952, p. 21.)
† After establishing the PRC, the Communists not only changed the name of the capital, currently called Peiping (“Northern Peace”), back to Peking (“Northern Capital”) but adopted a different method of spelling in the Latin alphabet, which resulted in the capital being called Beijing. This was used along with Peking until sometime in the 1980s, when the Chinese began to enforce the use of the official name, i.e., Beijing, on government documents, flights, etc. It is now common usage. It should be noted, however, that all three names and spellings (Peking, Peiping, and Beijing) are only approximations of Chinese sounds and spellings.
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* 5 yen = 0.13¢ in 1947 (1.34¢ today).
* This was after a four-month hiatus at Grass Mountain, since the house in Shilin was not ready when she arrived.
† The house, which was turned into a museum, was burned down in April of 2007. Gasoline stains in several places led experts to suspect arson, and as of this writing, there is an ongoing investigation to determine the source of the fire.
* Tenants had previously paid their landlords 50 to 70 percent.
† One authority estimates that as late as 1969 there were nearly 250,000 full- or part-time informers out of a population of something over 11 million people on the island.
* The author of the first complete biography of Dean Acheson.
* Chiang had originally objected to Yeh’s idea and followed his recommendation only after the foreign minister assured him that the United States would never accept his offer.
* The final session of the peace conference was boycotted by the Soviet Union and other Communist countries.
* A woman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art whom May-ling had recommended as a source of experts in Chinese art.
* Adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH).
* An additional eighteen had committed misdemeanors like getting into drunken brawls; Wu ordered these men sent to court to be tried and the rest set free.
* This was apparently done so that Chiang could hear what guests were saying among themselves before appearing at his parties.
* Chiang had recently fired his secretary-general in what was considered “a serious blow to ‘liberalism’ within the Chinese Government.” (National Archives: RG 59, CDF (1950-1955) Box 4218, November 19 and 27, 1953.)
* It will be remembered that Mow had been married to Chiang Kai-shek’s first wife’s sister.
† Equivalent to $3,563,000 today.
‡ Early in the war, Madame Chiang, Donald, and Chennault had all tried to have Chou, known for his “stupidity and inefficiency,” removed, but the G-mo had always refused, since he believed Chou was loyal to him. (Cornell University, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, James M. McHugh papers, File C-105, “Changes in Chinese Airforce Administration, March 7, 1938.)
* The author of The China Lobby in American Politics. (See Laura Tyson Li,Madame Chiang Kai-shek, pp. 402–3, for how the Nationalist Government and the China Lobby pressured the U.S. government to ban the book, how the publisher “was forced” to destroy 4,000 copies, and how some of the remaining 800 books disappeared from library shelves.)
† Equivalent to $6,215,000 today.
* Equivalent to $58,000,000 today.
* The social secretary of the American Legation in Peking in the 1920s; married to James A. Thomas, head of the Far Eastern division of the British American Tobacco Company.
* Fulton Oursler was the author of popular books on Christian themes; his wife, Grace, who had started her career by writing “racy” books under the pseudonym Dora Macy, had become a freelance journalist.
* It will be remembered that the generalissimo offered troops only after he was assured that they would be refused.
* Later Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
† Needless to say, there were probably no significant notes or journals (or at least none that this writer has been able to track down) and eventually no book by her.
* About this time, T.V. wrote May-ling that, according to his sources, “W [Chiang] is talking blue streaks of invasion to keep up the spirits of his civilian and military.” (HA: T. V. Soong papers, Box 63, Folder 33, T.V. Soong to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, April 27, 1963.)
* See endnote.
* The Japanese language was forbidden on Taiwan.
* When he first tried to buy this apartment, T.V. was turned down by the board of directors of the cooperative building for no apparent reason except the obvious one that he was Chinese. He then asked former Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to write a letter of recommendation to the board. Morgenthau complied with a letter, giving his “personal guarantee” that Mr. and Mrs. Soong would not open a Chinese laundry in the building. (Story from Henry Morgenthau, Jr.’s, son, Robert Morgenthau.)
* She was sixty-eight or, by Chinese reckoning (they consider a newborn already one year old), sixty-nine.
* The Miranda decision declares that suspects cannot be interrogated before being informed of their rights.
* Ching-kuo’s eldest son worked at the Taiwan Power Company, his second son was interested in politics, and the youngest entered military school. His daughter married a man who had been divorced three times and was eighteen years her senior. Around 1941, Ching-kuo had started an affair with his secretary, and in May of 1942, she gave birth to twin sons. Six months or so later the children’s mother died under highly mysterious circumstances, and the boys were raised by their grandmother. Since Chiang Kai-shek had proposed that the boys take their mother’s name, few people outside the intimate family even knew of their existence until John Chang entered politics.
* They had previously been identified as technical advisers.
* Chou En-lai, who was not only Ching-ling’s friend but realized her symbolic importance to the party, stepped in to stop the harassment, issuing an order that said, “It is absolutely forbidden to attack Comrade Soong Ching-ling.” Moreover the Soong parents’ graves were restored to her satisfaction and guards were sent to patrol the graveyard and her homes. (Jung Chang, Mme. Sun Yat-sen, pp. 124–25.)
* Louis Kung had not only worked with the China Lobby to elect Nixon but had encouraged him when he was defeated for U.S. president and governor of California, making him, according to a letter from T.V. to May-ling at the time Nixon became president, “our most precious asset.” (HA: T. V. Soong files, Box 63, Folder 33, draft of a letter, T.V. to Madame Chiang Kai-shek, March 22, 1969.)
* Nixon and Kendall had helped each other in the past as well. Kendall owed the fact that he had not been fired as president of the company to a photograph taken at the American Trade Exhibition in Moscow in 1959 (the scene of the famous Kitchen Debate) showing Nikita Khrushchev and Nixon both drinking Pepsi. Conversely, when Nixon’s law firm won the Pepsi- Cola account, one of Nixon’s biographers says that it was “directly attributable” to their friendship and Nixon’s help (probably through the Chiangs) in setting up Pepsi franchises on Taiwan. (Jonathan Aitken,Nixon, p. 310.)
* A pact signed by the United States and Taiwan in October 1954 after a crisis on Quemoy in which the United States committed to defending Taiwan providing that Chiang agreed not to attack the mainland.
† $1,300,000,000 = $6,900,000,000 in today’s dollars, $7,400,000,000 = $24,430, 000,000.
* C. V. Starr (named for Cornelius Vander Starr) was the parent organization of AIG Insurance, started in Shanghai in 1919, in which May-ling’s family, according to one Chinese gentleman who knew them quite well, “had substantial investments.” (Notes from a conversation between Lionel Tsao and Barbara Thompson Davis.)
† Worth $871,168,000 today. This estimate of T.V.’s worth was traced by the author to an “outside confidential source of unknown reliability,” the wife of a “prominent Chinese official” who spoke to the FBI in 1942. The following year the Japanese propaganda machine operating out of Hong Kong began “making announcements over the radio to the effect that T. V. Soong has $70,000,000 in either the Chase National Bank or the City National Bank in New York City.” But Francis Biddle, the U.S. attorney general, warned that “many of the charges made by the confidential informant about the Soong family are so patently false that they seem to be either enemy-inspired or put forth with extreme malice.” (FBI files: Memorandum for Mr. J. Edgar Hoover re Soong Family from Lawrence M. C. Smith, Chief Special War Policies Unit, January 30, 1943, no. 65-31284-103; Memorandum, April 30, 1942, no. 31284-94; Memorandum for Mr. Lawrence M. C. Smith, February 24, 1943, no. 65-31284-79 (?); Memorandum for Mr. J. Edgar Hoover re Soong Family, March 25, 1943, no. 65-31284-101. Material furnished to author by Justice Department under Freedom of Inf
ormation Act inquiry.)
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