Anna Chennault

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Xiangmei

Anna Chennault, born Chan Sheng Mai later spelt Chen Xiangmei (陳香梅, actual birth year 1923 but reported as June 23, 1925 – March 30, 2018), also known as Anna Chan Chennault or Anna Chen Chennault, was a war correspondent and prominent Republican member of the US China Lobby. She was married to U.S. WWII aviator Claire Chennault.

On June 23, 1925, Chen was born in Beijing, China. In 1935, her father, a diplomat, was sent to be the Chinese consul in Mexicali, Mexico and he could not afford to take his large family to Mexico on his salary. Fearing war between Japan and China was brewing, he sent his wife and children to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to live with his mother. In 1938, Chen's mother died, and as an older sister Chen became a surrogate mother to her younger sisters. As a girl, Chen was told by two of her teachers that her birthday falling on "fifth day of the fifth moon" on the Chinese calendar meant she was destined to be a writer. On the morning of 8 December 1941, Chen was attending class at St. Paul's high school when she was forced to take cover when the Japanese bombed the school. Chen witnessed first-hand the battle of Hong Kong as the invading Japanese fought British, Indian and Canadian troops, ending with the surrender of Hong Kong on Christmas Day; in the interim, Chen spent much time hiding to avoid the bombs and shells as Hong Kong went up in flames.

After taking Hong Kong, the Japanese declared all Chinese women to be prostitutes who were to have sex for free for the next three days with their fellow Asians, the Japanese soldiers to thank them for "liberating" them from the rule of the British "white devils", which was merely an excuse for the Japanese to rape all Chinese women. Chen together with her five sisters fled Hong Kong to Guilin in "free China" to escape the Japanese. Chen attended Lingnan University, which was normally based in Hong Kong, but which had relocated to "free China". As refugees, Chen and her sisters lived in poverty during the war years, often having to eat weevil-ridden rice to survive. In China, women have traditionally had a low status, and Chen remembered that her burning desire to be successful as a writer was to escape both her status as a Chinese woman and the poverty of war-time China.

Chen Xiangmei received a bachelor's degree in Chinese from Lingnan University in 1944. She was a war correspondent for the Central News Agency from 1944 to 1948 and wrote for the Hsin Ming Daily News in Shanghai, from 1944 to 1949. She is the younger sister of Cynthia Chan, who was a US Army nurse in the Flying Tiger group under General Claire Chennault in Kunming. While visiting Cynthia Chan in Kunming, she met Chennault. While working as a journalist in 1944, the 19-year-old Chen interviewed General Chennault, the dynamic and charismatic leader of the Flying Tigers, a man widely viewed in China as a war hero; his pilots had protected the Chinese people from the Japanese who bombed everything in China without mercy from 1937 on, killing hundreds of thousands. After the interview, Chen had tea with Chennault, whose gentlemanly behavior and Southern charm left her feeling "awed" as she later remembered.

Chen Xiangmei and Chennault, who was 30 years her senior, married in 1947. In 1946, Chennault had divorced his first wife, the former Nell Thompson, whom he had wed in 1911 in Winnsboro, Louisiana, and the mother of his eight children, the youngest of whom, Rosemary Chennault Simrall, died in August 2013. Anna Chennault had two children, Claire Anna (born in 1949) and Cynthia Louise (born in 1950). After the war her husband was somewhat of a celebrity. A heavy smoker, he died in 1958 of lung cancer. The Chennaults divided their time between Taipei and Monroe, Louisiana, where Anna Chennault became the first non-white person to settle into a previously all-white neighborhood; General Chennault's status as a war hero silenced objections to his Chinese wife. At the time, there was a law forbidding non-whites to settle in the particular Monroe neighborhood that General Chennault had bought his house, but no one was willing to prosecute him for bringing Anna with him into the neighborhood.

General Chennault was a Sinophile and a strong admirer of Chiang Kai-shek, and in the 1940s, he joined the China Lobby, an informal and diverse group of journalists, businessmen, politicians, intellectuals, and Protestant churchmen who believed it was in the best interest of the United States to support the Kuomintang regime. Chiang had converted to Methodism to marry his third wife Soong Meiling in 1927, and for much of his life, Chiang was seen by American evangelical Protestant groups as China's great Christian hope, the man who would modernize and westernize China. Anna Chennault ultimately followed her husband into the China Lobby and by 1955 was regularly giving speeches calling for American support to Taiwan and the eventual return of the Kuomintang to the mainland of China. She tirelessly lobbied for American support for Chiang. Fluent in English, a good speaker, and as a Chinese-American woman who presumably was in a position to know what was good for China, Chennault's speeches made her a popular figure for the China Lobby. After she spoke in Dallas in May 1955, the "Dallas News" in an editorial called Chennault someone whose "opinions were worth listening to" and "a personage in her own right, by inheritance and achievement, as well as by marriage."

In 1894, the State of Louisiana had passed a law forbidding marriage between whites and non-whites, and General Chennault had been advised by his lawyer that his marriage to Anna was "null and void" as far as Louisiana was concerned, and the state would not respect his will leaving his assets to his wife and daughters on the grounds that his marriage was illegal. There was always the possibility that Claire Chennault's first wife and his children by his first marriage might challenge the will in the courts, on the grounds that his second marriage was illegal and his daughters by Anna were thus bastards, and to prevent this, he had his will probated in Washington, D.C. where his second marriage was recognized as legal. In his will, Chennault left more money for his ex-wife and his children by her, but he left all the shares he owned in the Civil Air Transport company and the Flying Tiger Line to his wife and his daughters by her.

After her husband's death, Anna Chennault worked as a publicist for the Civil Air Transport in Taipei, Taiwan (1946–1957) and was vice-president of international affairs for the Flying Tiger Line that was founded by a former Flying Tiger pilot, and was president of TAC International (from 1976). In 1960, Chennault had her first political experience when she campaigned for Richard Nixon, being used as the Republican principal campaigner among Chinese-Americans. She was an occasional correspondent for the Central News Agency (from 1965) and the US correspondent for the Hsin Shen Daily News (from 1958). She was a broadcaster for the Voice of America from 1963 to 1966. Most notably, Chennault began a career as a society hostess in Washington, which her biographer Catherine Forslund wrote had "an edge no men could match" allowing her to create "a powerful base of influence and connections". Chennault herself often noted that her "certain exotic Asian aura" helped to forge connections in the otherwise all-white society scene of Washington. Chennault's belief that the U.S. had abandoned the Kuomintang to defeat in the Chinese civil war colored her perceptions of the Vietnam war, making an ardent hawk who argued that the U.S. had a moral obligation to stand by South Vietnam, and that any effort to withdraw from Vietnam would be equivalent to the "betrayal" of Chiang Kai-shek in the 1940s.

In 1970, she received appointments from now-President Nixon to the President's Advisory Committee for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the US National Committee for UNESCO. She was president of Chinese Refugee Relief from 1962 to 1970 and has served as president of the General Claire Chennault Foundation after 1960. Chennault served as a national committeewoman for the District of Columbia of the Republican Party (since 1960) and led the National Republican Asian Assembly. She has assisted many Chinese Americans to become active in politics and in 1973 helped found the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA).

Recorded in Nixon, A Life, by Jonathan Aitken, notes of Patrick Hillings, the former congressman accompanying the candidate's 1967 trip to Taipei, Nixon interjected just after an unexpected encounter with Mrs. Chennault, "Get her away from me, Hillings; she's a chatterbox."

Yet according to records of President Lyndon B. Johnson's secret monitoring of South Vietnamese officials and his political foes, Anna Chennault played a crucial role on behalf of the Nixon campaign which sought to block a peace treaty in what one long-term Washington insider called "activities ... beyond the bounds of justifiable political combat." She arranged the contact with South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem whom Richard Nixon met in secret in July 1968 in New York. It was through Chennault's intercession that Republicans advised Saigon to refuse participation in the talks, promising a better deal once elected. Records of FBI wiretaps show that Chennault phoned Bui Diem on November 2 with the message "hold on, we are gonna win." Before the elections President Johnson “suspected (…) Richard Nixon, of political sabotage that he called treason”.

On January 2, 2017, The New York Times reported that historian John A. Farrell, a biographer of Nixon, had found a memo written by H.R. Bob Haldeman that confirmed that Nixon himself had authorized "throwing a monkey wrench" into Johnson's peace negotiations.

In part, because Nixon won the presidency, no one was ever prosecuted for this violation of the Logan Act. Cartha "Deke" DeLoach, then FBI Deputy Director, mentioned in his book Hoover's FBI that his agency was only able to connect a single November 2, 1968 phone call from the then Vice President candidate Spiro Agnew to Anna Chennault, unrecorded details of which Johnson believed were subsequently transmitted to Nixon.

In her book The Education of Anna, General Chennault told her, "We pilots have to do the most lunatic daring things but you take the cake." She states that later liaisons with Nixon staff were by telephone to then aide John N. Mitchell, via direct personal numbers that changed every several days, as was his custom. A week after the election and Nixon's fence-mending with Johnson in a joint statement announcing Vietnam policy, Mitchell asked Chennault to intercede again, this time to get Saigon to join the talks. She refused. According to her account, Nixon personally thanked her in 1969, she complained she "had suffered dearly" for her efforts on his behalf, and he replied, "Yes, I appreciate that. I know you are a good soldier." The American historian Catherine Forslund argued that Chennault would have been in a good position to demand that Nixon appoint her ambassador to an important American ally or that she be given some other prestigious job as a reward, but Chennault declined, fearing that she might have to answer difficult questions during the Senate confirmation hearings. When testifying before the Senate, one has to take an oath to tell the truth, and any lie told would leave one to prosecution for perjury.

Chennault's interaction with the Paris Peace Accords on behalf of Nixon is sometimes called the "Chennault Affair."

In October 1971, when the United Nations general assembly voted to expel the Republic of China and to give China's seat to the People's Republic of China, Chennault as one of the leaders of the China Lobby was involved in an unsuccessful effort to stop the expulsion. In a speech at the time, Chennault said "let's hope the United Nations doesn't end up like the League of Nations...Its effectiveness is in grave doubt...Fortunately, the big events cannot be settled in the UN anyway". After President Nixon visited the People's Republic in 1972, there was a real possibility that the United States might finally recognize the People's Republic as the legitimate government of China and in 1974 the US opened an "Information Office" in Beijing that was a de facto embassy. All through the 1970s, Chennault had lobbied against US recognition of the People's Republic and in 1977 she, together with 80 prominent Chinese-Americans, signed a public letter to President Carter drawing attention to the poor human rights record of the People's Republic and asked that the US not establish diplomatic relations with Beijing. Despite the letter, in 1979, Carter recognized the People's Republic. Believing that the U.S. had betrayed South Vietnam by withdrawing in 1973 and allowing North Vietnam to conquer the south in 1975, Chennault set herself up as the "conscience of the U.S in Vietnam" and lobbied Congress to admit Vietnamese refugees fleeing the communist regime.

In January 1981, Chennault visited Beijing to meet the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, ostensibly as a private citizen, but in fact as an unofficial diplomat representing the incoming Republican president Ronald Reagan, who was due to be sworn in as president on 20 January 1981. As a long-time Republican politician Reagan had been strongly critical of the People's Republic, but as president Reagan wanted to focus on the struggle against the Soviet Union, which he had dubbed the "evil empire", and wanted China as a de facto US ally against the Soviet Union, which was the message that Chennault had conveyed to Deng.

As Chennault was a long-time Republican and one of the doyennes of the China Lobby, her meeting with Deng attracted much media attention in the United States. Chennault stated at the time that Deng had complained to her that none of the American "China Hands" were huaren (overseas Chinese), asking "Why do all the so-called China experts have blue eyes and blond hair?" During her visit to the People's Republic, Chennault also met her relative, the Communist politician Liao Chengzhi. Chennault told The Washington Post that she and Liao had "talked about the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four and how they had lost an entire generation. They told of their need for administrators and technicians to run the country and how they are having to reeducate the people in the new technology because when the Russians left China they took everything with them. Now the Chinese realize it was wrong to copy the Russians." After her visit to Beijing, Chennault visited Taipei to meet President Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, to brief him on what she had seen in the People's Republic. Chiang was displeased about the trip as it disbursed the illusion that Reagan might break relations with the People's Republic and once again recognize the Republic of China as the legitimate government of China, but told her he was pleased that it was she who made that trip as he knew she was a friend of the Kuomintang. Very cautiously, Chiang distanced himself from the policies of his father, saying that it was time for new thinking about relations across the Taiwan straits, saying the People's Republic under Deng was moving away from the policies it had pursued under Mao.

In 1984, Chennault led the President's Export Council mission to China, which was intended to facilitate US-China trade as Deng's reforms in the 1980s opened up China's economy. As someone closely linked to the Kuomintang, Chennault served not only as a consultant on American-Chinese trade but on trade between Taiwan and China. Despite the long-standing hostility between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang, in the 1980s Taiwanese companies began to invest in the mainland, bringing much-needed capital and skills. It was the hope of both Deng and Chennault that economic integration between Taiwan and China might lead to reunification, but political reforms in Taiwan during the 1980s led to that nation evolving into a democracy. Though the majority of the Taiwanese are ethnic Chinese, a sense of Taiwanese nationalism had emerged by the 1980s, and many Taiwanese had no desire to be reunited with China under any conditions, which meant that economic integration did not lead to political integration as hoped. Chennault was attacked in the Taiwanese media in 1989 for her statement that she was in favor of "separating economics from politics", which led the China Times newspaper to condemn her in an editorial for letting "personal financial considerations" influence her political views. After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, when the People's Liberation Army shot down protesting university students demanding democracy, the US publicly pulled away from China. At the request of the US government, Chennault passed along a message to Deng saying that Washington still wanted a good relationship with Beijing, the sanctions imposed on China were only to appease American public opinion, and the sanctions would be ended as soon as it was opportune (i.e. once the American people forgot about the Tiananmen Square Massacre). To further press the point, on 30 June 1989, the US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft secretly visited Beijing to tell Deng that "President Bush recognizes the value of the PRC-US relationship to the vital interests of both countries" and that the US viewed the Tiananmen Square massacre as an "internal affair". Despite the controversy, in December 1989 and again in March 1990, Chennault led delegations of Taiwanese businessmen to China to "study the investment climate on the mainland". She acknowledged that people must be "humble enough to learn, courageous enough to change their positions."

She died on March 30, 2018 in Washington, District of Columbia at the age of 94. Some news stories gave her age at death as 92, based on June 23, 1925 as her generally reported date of birth, but she was actually born in 1923. She is buried next to her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.