Anna Chennault

Anna Chennault, born Chen Xiangmei, also known as Anna Chan Chennault or Anna Chen Chennault, is the widow of World War II aviation hero Lieutenant General Claire Lee Chennault, and an Asian-American politician of the Republican Party.

History


Born in Beijing, China, on June 23, 1925, Chen Xiangmei received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese from Lingnan University in Hong Kong 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 U.S. Army nurse in the group under Claire Chennault in Kunming. While visiting Cynthia Chan in Kunming, she met Claire Chennault. Chen Xiangmei was married in 1947 to Chennault, who was more than 32 years her senior and died in 1958. She has two children, Claire Anna (born in 1949) and Cynthia Louise (born in 1950). After the war he was a wealthy, well-known celebrity. In 1946, Chennault was divorced from 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. Rosemary survived all of her seven siblings.

After her husband's death, Anna Chennault worked as a publicist for the Civil Air Transport in Taipei, Taiwan (1946 to 1957) and was vice-president of international affairs for the Flying Tiger Line that he founded, and was president of TAC International (from 1976). She was an occasional correspondent for the Central News Agency (from 1965) and the U.S. correspondent for the Hsin Shen Daily News (from 1958). She was a broadcaster for the Voice of America from 1963 to 1966.

In the U.S. she received presidential appointments from U.S. President Richard Nixon to the President's Advisory Committee for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the U.S. National Committee for UNESCO (from 1970). 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.

Paris Peace Accords
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 attempted to help the U.S. ally South Vietnam preserve its independence. 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”.

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.

Awards

 * The Freedom Award of the Order of Lafayette (1966)
 * The Freedom Award from the Free China Association (1966)
 * The Award of Honor from the Chinese-American Alliance (1971)

Books

 * Catherine Forslund, Anna Chennault: Informal Diplomacy and Asian Relations (2002) ISBN 0-8420-2833-1
 * Hyung-chan Kim, chief editor, Distinguished Asian Americans, A Biographical Dictionary, Greenwood Press (1999), pp. 55, 56.

Membership

 * National League of America
 * PEN Women
 * Writer's Association
 * Free China Writer's Association
 * 14th Air Force Association
 * USAF Wives Club
 * Flying Tiger Association
 * American Newspaper Women's Club of Washington
 * Theta Sigma Phi
 * National Military Family Association, founder and chairperson
 * Committee of 100