Chiang’s strange speech struck one foreign guest at the party as “very impressive, and in a cockeyed way convincing. There he stood, talking in the most logical way, saying in effect that if he were guilty of such conduct he was unworthy to be the leader of China. But he was the leader of China. Therefore he could not be guilty of such conduct. Oddly enough, I was convinced.”
Although May-ling answered publicly—first in Chinese, then in English—that she had never for a second doubted her husband, it would be interesting to know why Chiang felt obliged to make such a point of his supposed fidelity. He must have thought that it was the way to get public opinion back on his side in the deteriorating political situation in which he now found himself. According to one account, it was May-ling who told him he must deal with the stories swirling around them. “Even during a month of disastrous military defeat,” according to White and Jacoby, “this garden confessional got top billing in Chungking conversation for days.” According to the reporters, “semiofficial transcripts of the Generalissimo’s denial could be obtained from the government on request.”
This must have seemed an excellent time for the generalissimo wife to take a sabbatical. Even in the United States, the press, which always gushed sympathy and admiration for her, had taken a second look at her stylish clothes and serious furs. “First Lady of China Too Chic” declared The Boston Post in July 1944. “When it was announced that Madame Chiang would make her personal appearances in America, the public expected to feast their eyes upon the sad-smiling lady whose photograph they knew in scenes of rubble among China’s war-stricken orphans… the illusion somehow was broken when they saw her in her priceless sable coat and muff, adorned with diamonds and jade worth a king’s ransom.”
Suffering from bad publicity and nerves, a “pale and listless” May-ling left China for Brazil on July 1, 1944, with a party of ten: Ai-ling; Ai-ling’s daughter Jeanette; Ai-ling’s son Louis; Louis’s wife; plus Madame’s personal maid, Ai-ling’s personal maid, two other maids, a secretary, and a cook. They departed secretly, in order to avoid an attack by the Japanese. At the beginning of the trip, Madame took up residence in a house on the tiny island of Brocoio off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, living quietly under the care of doctors, seldom going even as far as Rio.* On July 20, Chiang wired, “I haven’t heard from you yet. I miss you very much. Did you receive my wire of the 13th? Have you recovered from your illness?” In August, she heard from Emma: “I have been so distressed that you have had to leave Chungking again, although not very surprised after what you wrote about yourself.… I do hope… you have been left more in peace than you were up here [i.e., during May-ling’s last trip to New York].”
Only in her journal did Emma write about what really concerned her: “May-ling is strongly under the influence of Mrs. Kung. I wish she had almost anyone else with her in Rio. And the weird Jeannette and rather gross young nephew are along as well.… H. H. Kung’s adherents are taking charge of the Bank of China, and he has succeeded in liquidating China Defense Supplies… a newly returned American army officer said Kung was taking 10 to 20% of the total national income of China.”
In the middle of August, May-ling cabled T.V. that she was “not supposed to stay [in Brazil] too long because of the humidity,” and on September 6, 1944, the Chinese party flew from Rio to the United States. They arrived in style on the presidential plane known as the “Sacred Cow,” a C-54 fitted out with a stateroom and an elevator for Roosevelt.* Once more, May-ling took over a floor in the Harkness Pavilion of Presbyterian Hospital. Her illness was described as nervous exhaustion, for which her doctors prescribed the usual rest. A month later, she moved to River Oaks, a seventeen-room mansion Louis Kung leased for her in the Riverdale section of the West Bronx, although she continued to return to the hospital for treatments. When Willkie died in early October, she was not told, because “physicians fear that excitement might hinder her recovery.”
Just before May-ling and Ai-ling left for Brazil, H. H. Kung had left China for Washington. The war years had not been easy for Kung. He had spent most of his time alone, rattling around his huge Chungking home while his family retreated to Hong Kong or the United States. He suffered from malaria as well as a condition of the spleen that made his life a misery. His son David had been named a director of the Central Trust, but, according to White, David’s “conduct was outrageous.” Kung’s daughter, Jeanette, was not much better. Returning from the United States to China with Auntie May on an American military plane that arrived over the Hump with barely enough fuel to get back, the young woman insisted that the American ground crew drain the tanks so she herself could have the gas.
It was said that Kung had left China to attend the three-week-long U.N. Monetary and Financial Conference held at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, the postwar conference that established the International Monetary Fund. But a U.S. State Department dispatch indicates that Chiang, aware of the “bad odor surrounding Dr. Kung and members of his family,” had exiled Kung to the United States—a conclusion Kung went to great lengths to deny in his “Reminiscences,” which he dictated in 1948. A shining example of Chinese “face,” Kung was annoyed when Treasury Secretary Morgenthau was late getting to the airport to greet him, and nothing about his arrival appeared in the papers until he himself held a press conference. According to the reporter for The Washington Post, the “indifferent reception” was “intolerable” to Kung, who immediately set up a branch of the Chinese News Service in the United States.
The day after her arrival in New York, May-ling called Emma, saying she was “suffering the tortures of the damned” and asked her friend to come to the hospital the next evening for dinner. During the next day, which brought torrential rains and hurricane warnings, Emma called to beg off, but after receiving a call from May-ling’s secretary, Miss Garvey—“Madame has had a wretched day and been looking forward so much to your coming”—she went. During a steak dinner served in her hospital suite, May-ling talked about love and the rumors about her marriage to Chiang. “She admitted she had never been in love herself, but spoke of her husband in a natural, easy manner,” Emma wrote in her journal. “Once again she said she could be completely herself with me.” From love they passed on to looks, and May-ling told Emma that “more than anything, I always wanted perfect beauty— more than brains or money.”
“Who has such ‘perfect beauty’?” Emma asked, disregarding May-ling’s lack of concern for money as “nonsense.”
“Mrs. Luce. But she’s losing it now,” May-ling answered, launching into her version of her last conversation with Joe Kennedy, who had told her that she had more sex appeal “than any woman I’ve ever met.”
“You really mean charm,” May-ling said she had answered.
“No, Clare Luce has charm but doesn’t stir me in the least,” Kennedy claimed. “What did you think has been the cause of all the enthusiasm about you? Why, sex appeal, of course.” Eventually, in May-ling’s version of the story—which differed considerably from Kennedy’s—she had managed to get rid of him, refused his subsequent efforts to see her, and did not answer his wire saying good-bye.
If Joe Kennedy found May-ling attractive, her husband was clearly suffering from her absence. “Are you feeling better now?” he wired at the end of November. “It’s a pity that I cannot take care of you myself. Tomorrow is our seventeenth wedding anniversary. We will not be able to spend the great day together at home as we had promised each other. The only thing that I can do is pray in my heart every morning and evening, hoping that my beloved wife will recover and that we can live together soon again.” By the time May-ling’s birthday rolled around in March, Chiang seems to have calmed down a bit: “Your birthday is coming up soon,” he wired. “It is a pity that we cannot be together to toast you. I sincerely hope that God will help you recover and return to our homeland as soon as possible.”
May-ling saw a lot of Emma during her stay in New York, mostly in the spring, after her health improved. The two o
ld friends went to the movies, the circus, and the Bronx Zoo. When May-ling’s energy returned, she even got one of her Secret Service men to teach her to drive, and she drove Emma around Manhattan, up to Hyde Park to see Eleanor Roosevelt, and to the state prison for women in Westchester to study conditions there. She was also wont to call her friend at all hours of the day and night, asking her to come to Riverdale and edit articles she was writing. Nine years later, Emma remembered being frustrated by May-ling’s passion for esoteric language. “How she loves long words.… I longed to simplify some of those tortured phrases.” At one point May-ling handed Emma a check for $1,000. “I’ll be so far away soon and some day you may need money in a hurry,” she said when Emma protested. “I worry you live alone, and what you would do in case of sudden illness or accident.”
Frank Dorn, Stilwell’s former aide, who had been recalled to the United States shortly after Stilwell himself, was currently serving as a brigadier general in charge of the Armed Forces Information School in Pennsylvania. He was there during the time that May-ling was in Riverdale. Although he tried to see her, he was told by Ai-ling that she was suffering from “a chronic nervous condition and mental depression which had destroyed her digestive system,” that she had “eruptions… over her entire body,” and that it might be three to six months before she could stand the “excitement or nervous upset” of seeing anyone. After what Dorn called “some mutual conversation sparring” between them, Ai-ling told Dorn that she wanted to ask him a strictly confidential question: Was the story she had heard that Stilwell was “definitely a Communist sympathizer (politically) and that he had attempted to aid them to power” true?
Dorn answered that Stilwell was “not interested in politics or parties as such; he looked on the Chinese Communists as another possible source of military manpower just as he considered any other groups of able-bodied men in China… his attitude was that they were all Chinese (rather than members of parties—in the same sense that we are all American, whether Republicans or Democrats); and that he, like everyone else, hoped that the two groups could come together for the good of China.” He must have convinced Ai-ling, because she wound up saying that Stilwell’s “deep and sincere feeling for China and her people and soldiers was above all politics.” Moreover, she claimed that she had been “shocked” at his recall and hoped to be instrumental in bringing him back. She also stressed the confidentiality of her conversation with Dorn three or four times. As for May-ling, she kept silent on the subject of Stilwell’s dismissal for many years but then attacked him in a commentary about the book of his successor, General Wedemeyer, On War and Peace. When it was published in the 1980s, she compared Stilwell to Wedemeyer who, she said, “changed discord into harmony… following the arrogant divisiveness and cantankerous friction… left by the know-it-all… Stilwell cabal.”
May-ling was often at her worst when she was with Ai-ling. During her year in the United States, Ai-ling’s daughter Rosamonde became engaged and was due to marry in New York. According to Fenby, May-ling ordered her niece’s trousseau to be sewn by the Women’s Work Department she had set up in China to make clothes for soldiers. The clothes and linens were to be flown to the United States, but the plane crash-landed and a newspaper got hold of the story. The article said that the work that had gone into making the trousseau could have clothed a regiment of men; the cost of flying Rosamonde’s trousseau would have fed many thousands of starving refugees; and the price of the wedding would have endowed a Chinese university.
There were many stories flying around Chungking of May-ling’s “antics” in the United States, mostly aimed at her love of expensive trappings. United Press claimed that many Chinese high in KMT circles were predicting “with lightly concealed pleasure” that Madame Chiang would never return to her position of power if the elder statesmen had anything to do with it. They were critical of Madame’s Western ideas, Western manners, and what they called her “ ‘extravagant’ use of jewelry, nail polish and other items of personal adornment.” She was, they told Chiang, “setting a bad example for the Chinese people who were being urged to lead a life of austerity during China’s war of resistance.” Shortly after May-ling’s departure for Brazil, a reporter asked a high government official, “When could the madame be expected to return to China if as reported she planned to visit the United States and possibly England?” The official waited a moment before answering, then “replied, with obvious satisfaction: ‘Young man, I don’t believe you or I will live to see Madame Chiang return to China.’ ”
43
History is the folding of miscalculations.
—BARBARA TUCHMAN
ON NOVEMBER 7, 1944, the day Roosevelt was reelected to his fourth term in office, Brigadier General Patrick J. Hurley, bristling with “overbearing self-confidence,” flew from Chungking to Yenan to effect a rapprochement between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang. Hurley, the fourth in a parade of what China Hand John Davies called “a preposterous series of plenipotentiaries to China,” had already failed in his other two assignments—the first being to solve the Chiang-Stilwell problem and the second to establish U.S. control over the Chinese army. Nonetheless, he approached this, his most difficult task, with a cheerful bravado resulting from naiveté and a lack of information about the aims of the parties on both sides.
Hurley was a tall, good-looking man with straight posture and a bristling white mustache. An orphan born in Oklahoma, he had been a coal miner, cowboy, soldier (he had fought in World War I), lawyer, millionaire, and secretary of war for President Hoover. He had served every president since Theodore Roosevelt except Warren Harding and was pulling strings to succeed Gauss as U.S. ambassador to China.* Regarded as an experienced troubleshooter, he was social and gregarious. He was also given to doing war dances in the middle of embassy parties and letting out war whoops of the Choctaw Indians, whose language he had learned early in life.
Hurley was sixty-one when Roosevelt sent him to China. Never much of an intellectual—he pronounced Mao Tse-tung “Moose Dung” and called Chiang “Mr. Shek”—he was having trouble with his eyes and used the junior officers in the U.S. Embassy to read to him what they considered essential papers and dispatches. Most of these men spoke Chinese and had had experience in the country, which Hurley himself had not. “He works almost entirely alone and without advice from Embassy personnel,” noted Frank Dorn, “and being unfamiliar with the ramifications of Chinese wheels within wheels, has made some peculiar mistakes.” State Department officer John S. Service had predicted that Hurley’s appointment would be a “disaster,” and it came as no surprise that Hurley and his diplomatic associates in Chungking were constantly at odds. While they referred to the famous six adjectives describing the generalissimo’s government—“inept, incompetent, inefficient, un-Democratic, corrupt, and reactionary”—Hurley blindly supported his new best friend, Chiang Kai-shek, not even allowing reports critical of the G-mo to go out from the embassy. Roosevelt’s new emissary branded those who disagreed with him as Communists, and several men were recalled from Chungking on his say-so. (As one wag put it, they were “Hurleyed out of China.”) Within three months of the Oklahoman’s arrival in Chungking, he had become, according to White and Jacoby, “an island of outraged dignity in the American community,” a man who “saw in the differing opinions of other Americans a constant plotting to undermine him.” Hurley seems not to have realized, as White put it, “that the Kuomintang was not China but one Chinese party, with a party dictatorship and a party army.” With this lack of knowledge and perspective, Hurley set out from Chungking for Yenan to make peace between the leaders of the KMT and the CCP.
BY THE TIME Hurley arrived in Yenan, the Chinese Communists, who had started with only 35,000 square miles at the end of the Long March in 1937, had gained control over a region of 155,000 square miles with a population of 54 million souls and an army of 475,000 men.* They had, according to White and Jacoby, “exploded rather than expanded,” inhabiting an are
a containing the largest concentration of Japanese soldiers and industry in China apart from Manchuria. By moving in behind Japanese lines, the CCP had also been able to establish enclaves in northern Kiangsu and Hupei, in the south near Canton, and on the island of Hainan. Since the Communists offered the locals a reduction in taxes and a political organization free from KMT-style corruption, they had won the support of the peasants in their areas, who now lived better than they had ever lived before.
To quarantine the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek kept twenty of his best divisions (300,000 soldiers) tied up blocking 50,000 soldiers of the CCP. According to the KMT, the Communist troops were in league with the Japanese; according to the CCP, theirs were the only troops fighting the common enemy. Neither claim was true. The Nationalist soldiers bore the brunt of the conflict in spite of poor leadership, lack of food, and a paucity of arms. The CCP was in a position to choose its battles; its soldiers were better fed; and more care was taken of the wounded.
Communist soldiers obtained their arms by attacking small groups of Japanese soldiers and taking their weapons. They fought in bands of 300 to 400 men, connected by telephone or radio to their headquarters in Yenan. These bands could be called up quickly and put together for an assault of anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 men, then sent back home. Guerrillas were also called out to attack the enemy’s long, extended columns of soldiers, and from 1942 on, mine warfare, which the Communists taught the peasants, was raised “almost to the level of an indigenous national sport.” As White and Jacoby put it, “no Chinese group other than the Communists ever dared to arm the people, for that meant enabling peasants to rectify their own grievances. The Communists, serene in the consciousness of popular support, could arm hundreds of thousands and know that the arms would not be turned against them.” Like Chiang, however, the CCP did not hesitate to enrich itself through the sale of narcotics, although the use of opium was banned within Yenan.
The Last Empress Page 66