"The Hopeless Hope"

Midway in World War II a slight, intense Chinese woman delivered to the U.S. Congress a memorable plea that turned out years later to have been a fateful warning. She was Shanghai-born, Wellesley-educated (class of '17) Mme. Chiang Kaishek, First Lady of Free China. Her plea--lackadaisically met--was for more U.S. help for China to stave off disaster. One day last week Mme. Chiang, back in the U.S. from Formosa for medical checkups, went to Ann Arbor to accept an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Michigan, there delivered another timely warning that had fateful undertones. Its net: because of too much intellectual handwringing over the horrors of modern war, "freedom and the values of human dignity, which we were taught to cherish above all else, have begun to be secondary to biological survival."

"It is a tragedy," she said, "that some powerful minds have allowed themselves to be enmeshed in arguments over means such as relaxation of tension, appeasement and finally slavery-better-than-annihilation, groveling in the hopeless hope that life would be spared them.

"These intellectuals . . . confuse the need for peace with survival at any cost.

"They nullify and perhaps unwittingly desecrate the principle of human dignity which has been the motivating force against tyranny.

"They are ignoring the fact that if total darkness should fall upon the world it would be they who have made the Communist conquest possible by destroying the will to fight. They would be achieving what Communist imperialism could never have hoped to achieve if the will to stand firm had been kept high."

That warning delivered, Mme. Chiang flew off to New Orleans to see an old friend and fellow freedom fighter whose sentiments were similar: Major General Claire Lee Chennault, 67, the old commander of the Flying Tigers, who is now fighting a tough battle against lung cancer in Ochsner Foundation Hospital. "I can't talk very well," said Chennault, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. Said Mme. Chiang with a smile: "Well, you always talked too much anyway. I want to do the talking this time." And she added a final word to the old Flying Tiger that was applicable to them both. "You have that wonderful fighting spirit," she said. "You were never defeated--certainly not by the Japanese."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.