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"The story began in the grey, isolated city of Chongqing, China's capital for most of the eight-year war with Japan that began in 1937. The time was October 1942. The occasion was the visit of leading American politician Wendell Willkie, who had run against Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940 and was planning a second bid in 1944.

"Despite their political differences, Roosevelt had sent Willkie on a goodwill mission to China, and the exuberant Republican waded into the crowds as if he was electioneering. Like many westerners, he was particularly struck by the Generalissimo's wife. Her perfect English made her the regime's principal go-between with its American ally. Daughter of one of China's richest and most powerful families, she epitomised modernity in a country steeped in tradition as she drove to the war front in Shanghai in slacks, argued about arms supplies with American generals and pushed for the development of China's air force.

"Then 45, she appeared at a tea party for the visitor with the cloak of an air marshal thrown dashingly over her shoulders. She told the 50-year-old Willkie she found him a very disturbing influence, a remark which visibly gratified him.

"That evening, a large reception was held. Willkie asked his companion on the trip, an American publisher [of *Look* magazine--DT] called Gardner Cowles, to replace him on the greeting line. The politician then disappeared - as did Meiling. When the reception ended, Cowles went back to a house where he and Willkie were staying. After a while, Chiang strode in with three bodyguards. He asked where Willkie was. Cowles said he did not know. The Generalissimo stormed through the house, peering under beds and opening cupboards. Not finding anybody, he left.

"Willkie eventually arrived at 4am. According to a private memoir by Cowles which I unearthed in an American archive, he looked 'very buoyant... cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl'. After giving 'a play by play' account of what had happened between him and Meiling, he said he had invited her to return to Washington with him.

"'Wendell, you're just a goddam fool!' Cowles exclaimed. He acknowledged that Meiling was 'one of the most beautiful, intelligent, and sexy women either of us had ever met', but the politician had to be discreet. Mrs Willkie would probably be waiting at the airport in Washington: if he wanted to run again for the presidency, flying in with Madame Chiang would be a considerable embarrassment.

"Willkie stomped off to bed, but was up a few hours later for breakfast. Since he had a speech to make, he asked Cowles to go to see Meiling to tell her she could not accompany him to the US. When the publisher delivered the message, Meiling scratched her long fingernails down his cheeks so deeply that the marks remained for a week.

"Two months later, Madame Chiang flew to the US on a barnstorming tour to raise support for China in its fight with Japan. She addressed both houses of Congress, and stayed at the White House, bringing her own silk sheets. When they met, Roosevelt had a card table set between them, to avoid being 'vamped', as he put it.

"Back in New York, she invited Cowles to a tete-a-tete dinner in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers, where she took a whole floor. She informed him that, on their wedding night in 1927, Chiang had told her he believed in sex only for procreation and, since he had a son by an earlier marriage, they would not sleep together. Cowles was not sure he believed her--the story seemed designed to be relayed to Willkie. [If Meiling really did say this, Cowles was right to be skeptical; as Hannah Pakula has written, it "stretches the imagination to think that Chiang, a man with an enormous sexual appetite, would have denied himself the pleasure of sex with his highly attractive wife." *The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China,* p. 434.

"Next, she said Cowles should spend whatever was needed to secure the Republican presidential nomination for Willkie. 'She would reimburse me for all expenditures,' he added in his memoir. The cash would, presumably, have come from US loans to China sitting in American bank accounts.

"'If Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world,' she went on. 'I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the western world.' Though Cowles considered the proposal crazy, he was 'so mesmerised by clearly one of the most formidable women of the time that this evening I would not have dismissed anything she said.'..."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/nov/05/china.jonathanfenby

The first thing to ask about Cowles's story is, Is it true? Jay Taylor in *The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China* has his doubts (pp. 217-219):

"Cowles was a conservative, a political supporter of the Chiangs, and not a muckraker by any means. Still, his account of the Chungking liaison raises questions. Dozens of Chinese would have known that Mayling and Willkie spent time alone in the secluded apartment and dozens would have observed the Generalissimo's late-night search under beds in T. V. [Soong]'s house [where Cowles and Willkie were staying]. In gossip-hungry Chungking, rumors would have spread quickly. But no American or other foreigner in China at the time, including diplomats, reporters, and OSS personnel, reported this enticing item.

"When in 1974 an abbreviated version of this story appeared in the book *Pearson Diaries* [apparently Cowles had told the story to Drew Pearson--DT], the government in Taipei filed a civil action in behalf of Soong Mayling, and Gardner Cowles testified in a deposition that the alleged affair was 'impossible.' The publisher apologized and paid the related expenses for the [Nationalist] Chinese government. The publisher of course simply may not have wanted to go to court over the matter and Cowles, who was the source of the story, may have felt he should cover up the affair of his prominent friend, who was by then deceased. In his memoirs written for his family twelve years later, Cowles repeated the story in detail.

"One possibility is that Willkie, with more than a few drinks in his system, in his ebullient and boyish manner misled his friend into thinking he had enjoyed the intimate favors of the beautiful and famous First Lady of China, and Cowles imagined the rest. But her reputed behavior and words in the two meetings with Cowles himself remain unexplained..." https://books.google.com/books?id=7Kz111Lie-0C&pg=PA217

One piece of corroborating evidence: When the husband of Eleanor Lambert, well-known fashion publicist and friend of Meiling, suddenly died in 1959, Meiling, who was visiting New York at the time, told her: "'Don't think I don't know what you're going through, because I too had a deep love for someone that I was thinking of giving up everything for.'...She said she was willing to divorce the general, do anything, etc...It was Willkie." Hannah Pakula, *The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China,* p. 434. https://books.google.com/books?id=4ZpVntUTZfkC&pg=PA434

Anyway, let's just assume that Cowles's story is true. What I next want to ask is, What if Willkie got Madame Chiang pregnant? After all, forty-five year old women can and do get pregnant. It is true that Meiling thought she was sterile: "'She was devastated,' according to her nephew Leo Soong. 'She said she had had some problem. She was always talking about a doctor in Nanking or Chungking who 'essentially sterilized her' in an operation. She loved children and I know she wanted to have children.'" Hannah Pakula, *The Last Empress,* p. 634. https://books.google.com/books?id=4ZpVntUTZfkC&pg=PA634 But maybe she was wrong in her belief that she had been sterilized (the word "essentially" seems to indicate at least a bit of doubt)--though this belief may account for her willingness to have the affair: at least, she may have thought, that was *one* danger she didn't have to worry about.

It may be objected: If Meiling wasn't sterile, why didn't she have any children by Chiang Kai-shek? An obvious answer is that Chiang himself may have become sterile through contracting a venereal disease (he had frequently consorted with prostitutes as a young man). That is presumably why he never had any children after his first marriage. To be sure, there is the curious story of Meiling's supposed pregnancy in 1928:

"The...story revolves around an entry in Chiang's diary saying that May-ling suffered a miscarriage on August 25, 1928, eight months after their marriage...But with no corroboration of the pregnancy from a doctor [in a footnote, Pakula adds, "according to DeLong, the doctors told May-ling that she was not pregnant. [Thomas A. DeLong, *Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Miss Emma Mills,* p. 80"] or anyone in the family, with Chiang's history of venereal disease, and with May-ling's penchant for illnesses--real and imagined, gynecological and otherwise--it is hard to believe the incident was anything other than wishful thinking. Chiang's second wife, Jennie, claimed that Chiang's doctor had told him after their marriage that he was sterile--something he would never have admitted to May-ling, who might not have married him had she known." Pakula, pp. 184-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=4ZpVntUTZfkC&pg=PA185

OK, so let's say Willkie does get Meiling pregnant. What then? An abortion? (It might be hard to keep secret, but then the same thing could be said about the original seduction.) That's the obvious answer until you realize that Meiling desperately wanted to have a child, and this unexpected development would almost certainly be her last chance. (Also, it is even possible that the Generalissimo and his wife, as Methodists, had real religious qualms about abortion. Of course their Christianity, though apparently sincere, didn't stand in the way of ruthlessness toward actual or potential political opponents [1]--but if this is a contradiction, it is hardly a unique case.) So--assuming she and the Generalissimo were still having sex--she tells him that the baby is his. The Generalissmo is naive enough to believe her because he is flattered by the thought that contrary to what the doctors had said, he can still father a child. So a baby is born, and nobody dares to inform Chiang of all the whispering about "his" child's alleged Eurasian appearance...

(I know Cowles' story may seem difficult to believe, and I had a hard time believing it myself. But Meiling may have gotten an exaggerated sense of Willkie's political importance from her American friends like the Luces. And Willkie's boyish ebullience--he fit the Chinese stereotype of an American much more than, say, "the gaunt, severe Joe Stilwell" (as Jay Taylor notes, *The Generalissimo,* p. 216)--could be very attractive. There is also, as I noted, the confirmation from Eleanor Lambert of Meiling's love for Willkie. In any event, Meiling's description of Willkie in a letter to Clare Boothe Luce was positively gushing: "He is all you led us to expect--and more." "The effect he has had on the populace has been immense; they took him to their hearts at once. His popularity is due, of course, to his perfect naturalness and evident sincerity." She added, "I would so like to go to America with Mr. Willkie, but my husband does not want me to go right now. So you see, after all, I am not an emancipated woman--still tied to my husband's (I cannot say apron-strings so I must say) military belt." Laura Tyson Li, *Madame Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Eternal First Lady,* p. 186. http://books.google.com/books?id=FRY0v7AH2ngC&pg=PA186 When Willkie died in October 1944, Meiling, who had been ill, was not immediately told, because physicians feared that learning about it might hinder her recovery. (Pakula, *The Last Empress,* p. 505) So she does seem to have had *some* strong feeling for him, even if it can't be proven to have found a sexual expression. Besides, there is also the puzzle of why Cowles would make up a story like this. Unlike some of the American reporters in China during World War II, he was not a left-winger out to discredit the Chiangs, whom in fact he admired--as he did Willkie. He didn't do it to sell books, certainly--he told the story in a privately published volume of memoirs meant for his family. And as Taylor notes, the possibility that WIllkie himself exaggerated his expolits to Cowles would not explain Meiling's reported behavior and words in the meetings with Cowles himself.)

[1] This was as true of Meiling as of her husband. Once FDR asked Meiling how China would handle a troublesome labor leader like John L. Lewis. According to Mrs. Roosevelt, "She never said a word, but the beautiful small hand came up and slid across her throat." Pakula, p. 425. https://books.google.com/books?id=4ZpVntUTZfkC&pg=PA425
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