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The campaign drew praise in the foreign press, with one of the couple's biggest fans being Time Inc.'s Henry Luce, who was born in China to American missionary parents. Luce put them on the cover of TIME, separately or together, 11 times, most famously in 1938, when the magazine named them Man and Wife of the Year. But Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, were more wary. On Madame Chiang's 1943 tour of the U.S., she stayed with the President and his wife at the White House for a week. One night at dinner F.D.R. asked in passing how she would deal with a troublesome labor leader like John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. She drew her hand across her throat. Eleanor later said, "Those delicate, little petal-like fingers--you could see some poor wretch's neck being wrung."
At home Madame Chiang preserved the same balance, sometimes scrambling over the ruins of heavily bombed Chungking to tend the wounded, sometimes burnishing Chiang's image with her social poise. She remained a central figure in his government even after the Nationalists were driven to Taiwan when the communists triumphed in 1949. Upon the death of her husband in 1975, she returned to the U.S. for medical treatment. Since then, she split her time between her Manhattan apartment and the family mansion on Long Island, N.Y., and twice served as Taiwan's unofficial spokeswoman in rebuffing China's reunification overtures. It seemed only right that she died in the land where she had enjoyed her greatest moments and won her most fervent admirers.