Revelation

Ern

est Hemingway called her the "Empress of China." British novelist Christopher Isherwood found her "possessed of an almost terrifying charm and poise." Among those impressed by Madame Chiang Kai-shek's charms was the American politician Wendell Willkie, who lost the presidential race against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 but hoped to get the Republican nomination to run again in 1944. Visiting China's wartime capital of Chongqing in 1942, Willkie disappeared from an evening reception—as did Madame Chiang, who had then been married to Chiang Kai-shek for 15 years. According to the privately printed memoirs of the publisher of Look magazine, Gardner Cowles, who was sharing a house with Willkie in Chongqing, the politician returned at 4 a.m., looking "very buoyant ... cocky as a young college student after a successful night with a girl." Willkie gave a "play-by-play" account of his time with Madame Chiang and said he had invited her to return to Washington with him.

While agreeing that she was "one of the most beautiful, intelligent and sexy women either of us had ever met," Cowles dissuaded Willkie and went to tell Madame Chiang. When he broke the news, Cowles wrote, she scratched his cheeks so deeply that the marks remained for a week.

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The following year, Madame Chiang did get to Washington—to drum up support for the Nationalists—and it was a spectacular episode. She addressed both houses of Congress and spoke at a rally in Madison Square Garden. Henry Luce, the publisher of TIME and LIFE, who organized the tour, put her on the cover of his newsmagazine. As a guest at the White House, she brought her own silk sheets, which had to be changed every day. When Roosevelt met Madame Chiang, he had a card table placed between them, in order to avoid being "vamped," as he put it.

While in New York, she invited Cowles to a tête-à-tête dinner in the Waldorf-Astoria Towers. In his memoirs, which have never before been made public, Cowles relates how Madame Chiang instructed him to spend whatever was necessary to get Willkie the Republican nomination.

She promised China would reimburse the entire expenditure, presumably from U.S. loan funds sitting in the Nationalist regime's American bank accounts. "If Wendell could be elected, then he and I would rule the world," she went on, according to Cowles.

"I would rule the Orient, and Wendell would rule the Western world." It was, the publisher noted, a totally mad proposal. But, he added, "I was so mesmerized by clearly one of the most formidable women of the time that, this evening, I would not have dismissed anything she said."