在1940年以黑馬之姿代表共和黨參選美國總統的威爾基(Wendell Willkie ,1892-1944) 與蔣宋美齡真有曖昧與茍且的關係嗎?
david chou
一
我在高中與大學時代，都曾聽聞被蔣家的宣傳機器塑造成賢德貞節的國母的蔣宋美齡與威爾基的曖昧情事，可惜由於年久月深(年代久遠)，我已無法記得消息來源，比較可能的來源是李敖，但傳到我的耳朵時，不知已經是第幾手了。我為什麼會認為李敖是消息來源呢?因為他與蔣家有血海深仇，而且他博覽群書，博學多聞，寫起文章或開講，也旁徵博引，在蔣家對台灣人民進行戒嚴統治的時代，在網際網路與維基百科尚未興起的時代，李敖給台灣住民提供了不少寶貴的資訊，我們今天來回顧李敖當年揭露的一些蔣宋孔陳四大家族的醜聞，可以發現，他當年說的或寫的，多半信而有徵，因為他當年引用的資料現在都很容易就可以找到，因此也可以證明李敖當年提及的蔣宋家的醜聞並非來自他自己瞎編或者可以證明他所交代的出處沒有錯誤。
對建州派而言，談蔣宋家的醜聞，嚴格說來，是不務正業，不過，由於我們許多支持者年紀超過六十且許多都是蔣家白色恐怖統治與戒嚴統治下的受害者，因此，以蔣家的醜聞為話題或主題的文章現在也必然還存在著參考的價值，所以我們偶爾也不妨寫幾篇，這些不是八卦，也不是道聽途說。
二
我們今天要引用的是由Hannah Pakula所寫的一本大部頭(光是主文就有681頁)的書，書名叫”The Last Empress”(「最後的皇后」，平裝本於2009年由紐約市的Simon & Schuster出版社出版)。
這本書的432-434頁這麼說:
蔣宋美齡在1942年11月至1943年7月訪問與居住在美國，她其中有一段時間是住在紐約市，她很闊氣地把中央公園東南角出入口對面的、頂級的、世界各國的政要與王公貴族下榻的Waldorf-Astoria大旅館的第42層樓全包下來。
’’According to one of Willkie’s biographers, Wendell spent a lot of time with her when she was at the Waldorf.’’ [根據威爾基幾本傳記中其中一本的作者，即”Dark Horse” (黑馬)那本傳記的作者Steve Neal的說法，威爾基在那家旅館與宋美齡消磨了很多時間。]
“In that regard, Mike Cowles wrote about an interesting scene that took place in her suite: “One morning I received a call at my OWI office in Washington from the Chinese Ambassador. The Madame wanted me to come to a black-tie dinner that evening in her Waldorf Towers apartment. -------When she suggested they go right into dinner, he realized that this was not a party but a tete-a-tete. [在宋美齡來美國訪問之前，威爾基奉小羅斯福總統之命訪問中國，Mike Cowles隨行，因此他也在中國認識了宋美齡。宋美齡來美國訪問，就邀請Mike Cowles到紐約與她會見，宋騙他說，這是一個正式的宴會，Mike Cowles就穿了正式的宴會禮服，前往Waldorf旅館赴宴，他到了之後，才知道宋美齡安排的其實是要與他單獨會晤的宴會，那時Mike擔任Office of War Information國內部門的主管。]
由於宋美齡對相貌出眾的威爾基十分著迷，一往情深[威爾基訪問中國時，宋就背著蔣介石，偷偷愛上了威爾基]，而且她知道Mike與威爾基的私交很好，所以就把Mike當自己人，並對他說了一些她心裡想說的話，不過，有些卻是宋美齡自己瞎編來唬弄Mike的。
The Willkie/Soong May-ling Affair
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Taiwan intellectual, legislator, firebrand, and free spirit Li Ao acquired a further distinction--dingbat--during the 2000 presidential election by alleging an affair between Mdme. Chiang Kai-shek (Soong May-ling) and U.S. political figure Wendell Willkie during the Chungking years.
Turns out, he was right.
In The Soong Dynasty, author Sterling Seagrave had already cited John Service's on-the-scene but anodyne reports on the apparent mutual interest between Willkie and Soong May-ling, which led to Willkie paving the way for Mdme. Chiang's triumphal visit to the United States in 1943.
The story was taken a step further in Jonathan Fenby's recent biography of Chiang Kai-shek.
Fenby quotes virtually verbatim (and fully cites) Mike Looks Back, a privately published memoir (1985) by Gardner Cowles, scion of a publishing empire that included Look magazine. Cowles was Willkie's supporter and confidant during Willkie's political career, which culminated with a presidential run against FDR in 1940.
In 1942, FDR dispatched Willkie on an around-the-world fact-finding trip accompanied by Cowles. During a brief stay in Chungking, Willkie and Mdme. Soong became powerfully enamoured of each other.
On one occasion they slipped away from a government reception, leaving Cowles to divert the attention and wrath of Chiang Kai-shek. Later that evening, the Generalissimo appeared at Cowles and Willkie's quarters and searched it from top to bottom in a vain effort to find his wife.
At 4:00 am Willkie returned, in Cowles' words "cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl...giving me a play by play account of what had happened"--though Cowles is too much the gentleman to reveal the details himself.
Then Wilkie announced to an astounded Cowles that he wanted to bring Soong May-ling back to Washington with him.
Cowles convinced Willkie such an escapade would doom his political aspirations. As repayment Cowles was delegated to deliver the bad news to Mdme. Soong. Her reaction created an indelible impression on him:
Before I knew what was happening she reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.
When Mdme. Soong eventually made her historic trip to the United States the next year, she summoned Cowles to her suite in the Waldorf and proposed that he devote himself exclusively to obtaining the Republican presidential nomination for Willkie, spending whatever was necessary--with his expenses to be reimbursed by Mdme. Soong:
...she wound up her sales talk with a remark I shall never forget: "You know, Mike, if Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world. I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world." And she stressed the word rule.
After the war, Cowles repeated the story to his wife, sophisticate/socialite/inveterate name dropper Fleur Cowles. While deriding Mike Looks Back as ghost-written and inaccurate, at least as it pertains to the launch of her legendary style magazine Flair, she retells the Mdme. Chiang/Willkie story herself in her own 1996 memoir She Made Friends and Kept Them, confirming more explicitly that the encounter was a secret tryst between the two and not simply a tete a tete about absolute world domination:
On this historic trip, Mme Chiang had her dangerous, short-lived affair with Wendell Willkie ...This brief love affair...had taken place in Mme Chiang's secret apartment on the top floor of the Women's and Children's Hospital. Mme Chiang was so besotted by Willkie she asked to see Mike Cowles privately before they left China, pleading with him to make sure that Willkie would beat Roosevelt in the next election for the Presidency. She offered to pay any costs! [Emphasis in original]
The conversation concluded with her agitated promise: 'If Wendell could be elected, he and I would rule the world, I the Orient, Wendell the rest.'
Gardner and Fleur Cowles divorced, apparently not on the best of terms, in 1955. By conflating the two conversations between Mdme. Chiang and Gardner Cowles, she seems to be relying on her own recollections of 40-year old events--indeed she recollects that her husband told her the story "shortly after we were married"--and not regurgitating Gardner Cowles' disparaged memoir.
Amusingly, Fleur Cowles seems unaware of what must have been Mdme. Chiang's resentment at Gardner Cowles for interfering with her plans for the ultimate, world-conquering power couple romance, and for failing to catapault Willkie into the White House in 1944.
When Fleur Cowles unexpectedly passed through Taiwan in 1953, Mdme. Chiang dropped her off at her accommodations--a fog shrouded, cliffside concrete aerie with "hideously primitive" sanitation, originally used as a final residence for Japanese kamikaze pilots--and told the snake-phobic Cowles sharply:
Don't worry about rats, Fleur. My housekeeper keeps a boa constrictor.
A bemused Cowles concludes:
...I used to reason that, in all likelihood, neither snake nor housekeeper really existed, that the snake had been conjured up as a mischievous form of revenge by Mme Chiang for 'dropping in' on her but...I just couldn't sleep. By the time I left, I had decided that insects, whether flying or crawling, and the hole in the floor for sanitation, were horrible enough to make the snake merely another ingredient in a nightmare.
Gardner Cowles' recollections, complete with claw marks, can't be dismissed as hearsay or third-hand tittle-tattle. And it was a story he regaled his wife with shortly after the event, before age, imagination, and fading memory had taken their toll.
The question that interests me is What did Li Ao know--and when did he know it? Did he glean allegations from the otherwise obscure memoirs of Gardner and Fleur Cowles? Or are there other voices?
Posted by China Hand at 12:33 PM
Encounter: Wendell Willkie Romances Madame Chiang Kai-shek
Peter Carlson
https://www.historynet.com/encounter-wendell-willkie-romances-madame-chiang-kai-shek.htm
When Wendell Willkie met Madame Chiang Kai-shek, it was love at first sight. Or maybe just lust at first sight. Either way, the smitten pair, both married to other people, managed to slip away for a steamy one-night stand. It happened in 1942, in Chungking, China’s wartime capital. Two years earlier, Willkie, a businessman who never held political office, had been the dark horse Republican candidate for president. Now he was an emissary of the man who defeated him, Franklin D. Roosevelt, on a 49-day trip to visit America’s allies in North Africa, Iran, the Soviet Union and China.
“A great hulk of a man, with attractively shaggy hair, a booming voice, and a genial homespun manner, he exuded charm, vitality and that all-important, if difficult to define, political asset: charisma,” wrote Willkie’s traveling companion Gardner Cowles, the founder of Look magazine.
When Willkie and Cowles arrived in Chungking, they were treated to an elaborate reception staged by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist Chinese leader, who believed Willkie would probably be the next president of the United States. Enormous crowds lined the 11-mile route from the airport to the city, waving little paper Chinese and American flags and cheering.
“This scene moved me profoundly,” Willkie later wrote.
In Chungking, Willkie and Cowles stayed at a mansion owned by Madame Chiang’s brother. “It was equipped with all sorts of luxurious trappings,” Cowles wrote, “as well as dozens of perfect servants to attend to our needs.” For six days, Willkie was ushered through a carefully choreographed round of receptions, banquets, meetings and military parades. “The idea is to get him so exhausted and keep him so torpid with food and drink,” wrote “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American general stationed in Chungking, “that his faculties will be dulled and he’ll be stuffed with the right doctrines.”
The plan worked. “I have fallen so much in love with the Chinese people,” Willkie announced, “that it is going to be difficult to carry out my fact-finding mission with the correct critical approach.”
Perhaps Willkie had fallen in love with all the Chinese, but one in particular caught his eye—Chiang’s wife. Scion of the powerful Soong family, Madame Chiang was, as Stilwell noted in his diary, “a clever, brainy woman… forceful, energetic, loves power, eats up publicity and flattery.” At 44, she was also beautiful, charming and extremely ambitious. Educated in the United States, she spoke perfect English with a fetching Southern accent.
Willkie fell for her. In a speech, he suggested that she become ambassador to the United States: “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.”
She, in turn, gushed over him. At a reception, she announced that she’d written a speech but decided to scrap it after meeting Willkie: “He is so spontaneous, so warm-hearted, so essentially human that anything written down could not express the welcome felt in our hearts.”
Perhaps those words were meaningless niceties. But American diplomats observing the pair thought the wily Madame was wooing Willkie. “There is little doubt that Little Sister has accomplished one of her easiest conquests,” wrote an aide to Stilwell, using one of the Madame’s nicknames.
Willkie, 50, was married but for years he’d conducted a semi-public affair with a New York newspaperwoman. Now he embarked on another fling. At a luncheon, he asked Cowles for help. “He whispered that he and the Madame were disappearing in a few minutes and that I was to take his place and cover up for them,” Cowles wrote in his 1984 memoir. “Sure enough, ten minutes later, they were gone.”
Cowles chatted up Chiang for the rest of the reception. Then he returned to his luxurious quarters. Willkie wasn’t there, so Cowles poured some Scotch, and asked the servants to prepare dinner.
“Shortly after dinner, there was a great clatter in the courtyard,” he wrote. “The generalissimo stormed in, visibly furious. He was accompanied by three bodyguards, each carrying a little Tommy gun.”
“Where’s Willkie?” Chiang asked.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Cowles replied and offered Chiang tea.
Chiang gulped it down, then asked again: “Where’s Willkie?”
“I assure you, Generalissimo,” Cowles said, “he is not here.”
Unconvinced, Chiang stormed through the house, opening closets and peeking under beds. Failing to find Willkie, he left in a huff.
Cowles sipped more Scotch, worrying that his friend might soon end up in front of a firing squad. “At four in the morning, a very buoyant Willkie appeared, cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl,” Cowles wrote in his memoir. “After giving me a play by play account of what had happened between him and the Madame, he concluded blithely that he had invited the Madame to return to Washington with us.”
“Wendell, you’re just a goddam fool!” Cowles exclaimed. “You want to be nominated again in ’44 and you want to be elected the next president.”
Angry, Willkie lumbered off to bed. A few hours later, he told Cowles that he had to run off to deliver a speech. “You’re going to see the Madame,” Willkie said, “and tell her that she cannot fly back to Washington with us.”
Dutifully, Cowles visited Madame Chiang’s apartment hideaway to inform her that she couldn’t travel with Willkie.
“Who says I can’t?” she asked.
“I do,” Cowles replied. “I told Wendell that he could not take you along because it would be unwise politically.”
At that, Cowles recalled, “She reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.”
o Madame Chiang didn’t fly to America with Willkie. A couple months later, however, she came on her own. One night, she invited Cowles to dinner in her New York hotel suite. He arrived, expecting a dinner party but found instead a dinner for two. The Madame implored him to devote himself to electing Willkie president, and promised to repay any money he spent in that pursuit.
“If Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world,” she told a stunned Cowles. “I would rule the Orient and Wendell would rule the Western world.”
It didn’t work out that way. Willkie ran for president in 1944, but the Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey instead. Then, a month before Dewey lost to Roosevelt, Willkie died of a heart attack.
Five years later, in 1949, Mao’s Communists conquered China and the Chiangs fled to Taiwan, where they set up a one-party dictatorship. In 1975 the generalissimo died, and Madame Chiang moved to New York. She lived there until 2003, when she died, still quite beautiful at the age of 105.
Originally published in the August 2010 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
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[Mei-ling Soong]
Wartime China’s Elegant Enigma
Nov. 3, 2009
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/books/04garner.html
See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com.
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Soong Mei-ling, better known to history as Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, was exaggerating only slightly. Chinese by birth, American by education and cultural inclination, she was a seductive blend of both societies; for a time, no woman in the world was more powerful.
Mme. Chiang led a long, vastly complicated life, one that is richly detailed in “The Last Empress,” Hannah Pakula’s long, vastly complicated new biography. Ms. Pakula’s book is a yeoman work of historical research, with fact grinding against fact. It is also a monotonous piece of storytelling, one that has little pliancy or narrative push. Its 681 pages of text are at times as grueling as a forced march across the Mongolian steppe.
The story of Mme. Chiang’s life has lost none of its strange, piquant appeal, however. Born in Shanghai in 1898, she was the daughter of a peasant who had gone to America at age 12 and found work on ships and in printing shops. Her father, Charlie Soong, eventually graduated from Vanderbilt University and returned to China at 20, where he had six children and became rich publishing Bibles. He raised Soong Mei-ling and her siblings to appreciate almost everything Western, including mattresses (soft), food (American) and religion (Methodist).
Cutting against the grain of a staunchly patriarchal society, Mr. Soong expected big things from his daughters as well as from his sons. Soong Mei-ling’s two older sisters traveled to the United States to attend Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Ga. Soong-Mei-ling arrived in America at age 10, studying at a boarding school in New Jersey and a public school in Georgia before graduating from Wellesley College.
When she arrived at Wellesley in 1913, Ms. Pakula writes, Soong Mei-ling could lay on a “Scarlett O’Hara accent” she’d picked up in Georgia. (“Ah reckon Ah shan’t stay aroun’ much longer,” she reportedly told the freshman dean.) She was also, Ms. Pakula writes, “short, chubby, round-faced and childish in appearance, with a short haircut and bangs over her eyes that did nothing for her looks.”
[Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, right, with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House.Credit...Associated Press]
By the time she left Wellesley, however, there was a sense of destiny about Soong Mei-ling. “She had not been given a Western education,” Ms. Pakula observes, “in order to spend her afternoons at the mah-jongg table.”
He was a hardened soldier who “dressed simply in a plain cotton uniform with straw sandals,” Ms. Pakula writes, and neither drank nor smoked. Mme. Chiang was by now thin, glamorous and wore form-fitting clothes. Barely five feet tall, she had, Ms. Pakula declares, “a near-hypnotic effect on men.”
Because Chiang Kai-shek spoke virtually no English, Mme. Chiang became his de facto translator and the face China turned to the Western world. She wrote articles about China for The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly in the early ’40s. She appeared on “Meet the Press” in 1958. She was Chiang’s closest adviser and she constantly buffed his — and the country’s — rough edges.
The pair were seen as a modernizing influence in China; Time magazine named them Man and Woman of the Year in 1938. The peak of Mme. Chiang’s fame arrived in 1943, when she toured America in support of the Nationalist Chinese cause against Japan.
During that tour she was the first private citizen to address the Senate and the House of Representatives, and in Los Angeles she gave a speech to a packed Hollywood Bowl. (While in America, Ms. Pakula suggests, Mme. Chiang continued a romantic involvement she had begun earlier with Wendell Willkie, the Republican who had lost the 1940 election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
Chiang Kai-shek’s government, increasingly besieged by China’s Communist Party as the 1940s went on, was also rotting from within. He was a ruthless, petty man and a dismal leader. As Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby observed, “The manners of the Kuomintang” — the Nationalist Party — “in public were perfect; its only faults were that its leadership was corrupt, its secret police merciless, its promises lies, and its daily diet the blood and tears of the people of China.”
Eleanor Roosevelt got a chilling glimpse of Mme. Chiang’s own dark side when Mrs. Roosevelt asked her how she would deal with a difficult labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. “She never said a word,” Ms. Roosevelt wrote, “but the beautiful, small hand came up and slid across her throat.”
Chiang Kai-shek and his wife were forced into exile in Taiwan after the Communist victory in 1949; he presided for decades over Nationalist politics from there. After his death, in 1975, Mme. Chiang moved to New York City, where she led a reclusive life, dying in 2003 at 105. She had no children. Her husband had contracted venereal disease before their marriage, Ms. Pakula writes, and was probably sterile.
“The Last Empress” bogs down in overly long discursions into the intricacies of China’s political history. Indeed, Mme. Chiang’s own story often recedes far into the background. But Ms. Pakula’s book comes alive in its pepperings of telling detail about Mme. Chiang’s chaotic life.
Ms. Pakula notes the way Mme. Chiang loved to deploy esoteric words (“indehiscence,” “ochlocracy”) in her speeches in English, sending reporters scrambling for their dictionaries. She observes that President Harry S. Truman, tired of Mme. Chiang’s appeals for money, began to refer to her husband as “Cash My-check.”
She details Mme. Chiang’s final years at 10 Gracie Square, an elegant apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There she kept three dogs (two bichons and a Yorkshire terrier) and employed 24 servants. There were reports that neighbors complained about the cooking odors and cockroaches in her 18-room apartment, and that Mme. Chiang kept a closet filled with gold bars.
THE LAST EMPRESS
Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China
By Hannah Pakula
Illustrated. 787 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.