Word: chiangs
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...ASIA Philippines: Elevated Threat Best Friends: Phil. and U.S. Eulogy: Mme. Chiang Kai-shek Mme. Chiang: Worldly ambitions...
...even as his guest was enthralling his nation, Roosevelt was wary of Mei-ling's formidable charm. One night at dinner, the President asked in passing how she would deal with a troublesome labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. Without missing a beat, Madame Chiang passed her hand across her throat. Eleanor Roosevelt later said: "Those delicate, little petal-like fingers?you could see some poor wretch's neck being wrung...
...home, Mei-ling preserved the same balance, sometimes scrambling over the ruins of heavily bombed Chongqing?China's wartime capital?to tend the wounded, sometimes burnishing Chiang's image with her social poise. It was Mei-ling's great and abiding gift to remain equally at home with the silvery pleasantries of the social world and with the adamantine realities of the political. That powerful combination, fired by an implacable distrust of communism, enabled her to remain a central figure in Chiang's government even after the Nationalists were driven to Taiwan when the Communists triumphed in 1949. Upon...
Ernest 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...
...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...