Anna Chennault
Anna Chennault, born Chan Sheng Mai, , also known as Anna Chan Chennault or Anna Chen Chennault, was a war correspondent and prominent Republican member of the U.S. China Lobby. She was married to American World War II aviator General Claire Chennault.
Controversy surrounds Anna Chennault for the crucial role she may have played on behalf of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign in seeking to delay the Vietnam War peace negotiations, in order to boost Nixon's chances for victory.
Early life and education
On June 23, 1923, Chen was born in Peking. In 1935, her father, a diplomat, was sent to be the Chinese consul in Mexicali, Mexico, but he could not afford to bring his large family there. 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 mother figure 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 that she was destined to be a writer. On the morning of December 8, 1941, Chen was attending class at St. Paul's High School when she was forced to take cover, as the Japanese had bombed the school. Chen witnessed 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. Chen and her five sisters fled Hong Kong to Guilin in "free China" to escape the Japanese. She attended Lingnan University, which was normally based in Hong Kong, but 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. Chen remembered that her desire to be successful as a writer was to escape both her low status as a Chinese woman and the poverty of wartime China.Chen 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 1945 to 1949. While visiting her sister Cynthia Chan, a U.S. Army nurse in Kunming, she met General Claire Chennault, head of the Flying Tiger group. While working as a journalist in 1944, the 21-year-old Chen interviewed General Chennault, a man who was widely viewed in China as a war hero who had protected the Chinese people from Japanese bombing since 1937. After the interview, Chen had tea with Chennault, whose gentlemanly behavior and Southern charm left her feeling "awed", as she later remembered.
Marriage
Chen Xiangmei and Chennault, who was 30 years her senior, married in December 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 and Cynthia Louise. 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, a law forbade non-whites from settling in the Monroe neighborhood in which General Chennault had bought his house and an anti-miscegenation law made their marriage illegal in Louisiana, but no one dared 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 that 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 Mei-ling 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. After the Kuomintang lost the Chinese Civil War, there was much fury by American right-wing politicians about the "loss of China", and though the China Lobby was not officially partisan, the China Lobby tended to tilt rightward after 1949. The narrative promoted by the China Lobby pictured an idealized version of the Kuomintang government that was heartlessly betrayed by the Truman Administration, which was depicted as incompetent for allowing the loss of China or for even having permitted alleged Soviet agents to carry out the China policy of the United States. A 1952 dinner hosted by the Nationalist Chinese ambassador in Washington, D.C., attended by senators Patrick McCarran, William Knowland and Joseph McCarthy, all partisans of the China Lobby, began with the toast "Back to the mainland!"
Anna Chennault ultimately followed her husband into the China Lobby, and by 1955, she was regularly delivering speeches calling for American support of Chiang and Taiwan as well as the eventual return of the Kuomintang to the Chinese mainland. Fluent in English, a good speaker, and as a Chinese-American woman who was presumably in a position to know what was best for China, Chennault became a popular figure for the China Lobby through her speeches. After she spoke in Dallas in May 1955, a Dallas Morning News 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."
Life as a widow
In 1894, the state of Louisiana had passed a law forbidding marriage between whites and non-whites, and General Chennault was advised by his lawyer that his marriage to Anna was "null and void" in Louisiana and that the state would therefore not respect his will leaving his assets to his wife and daughters. Because his first wife and his children by his first marriage might challenge the will in court on the grounds that his second marriage was illegal and his daughters by Anna were thus illegitimate, he had his will probated in Washington, D.C., where his second marriage was recognized as legal. In his will, Claire Chennault left more money for Anna and her children, but left all of his shares in the Civil Air Transport company and the Flying Tiger Line to his first wife and her daughters.After her husband's death, Anna Chennault worked as a publicist for Civil Air Transport in Taipei, Taiwan, as vice president of international affairs for the Flying Tiger Line and as president of TAC International. In 1960, Chennault gained her first political experience when she campaigned for Richard Nixon, being used as the Republicans' principal campaigner among Chinese-Americans. She was an occasional correspondent for the Central News Agency and the U.S. correspondent for the Hsin Shen Daily News. She was a broadcaster for the Voice of America from 1963 to 1966. Chennault began a career as a society hostess in Washington, a role that biographer Catherine Forslund wrote had "an edge no men could match", allowing her to create "a powerful base of influence and connections." Chennault often noted that her "certain exotic Asian aura" helped to forge connections in the otherwise all-white society scene of Washington. Her belief that the U.S. had abandoned the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War colored her perceptions of the Vietnam War, making her 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 1958, Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward in China, which led to a famine estimated to have killed between 30 and 55 million people. As a result, thousands of Chinese fled to Hong Kong as refugees. Chennault was very active as the president of a group named Chinese Refugee Relief, which sought to care for the destitute refugees in Hong Kong. In 1962, Chennault testified before the Senate in an appeal for the U.S. government to fund the CRR. Recalling her own life as a refugee in wartime China, Chennault said: "I know the misery of physical deprivation of the homeless and the emotional privation of the forgotten." She called her late husband "the symbol of deliverance to the Chinese people from the cruelty of the Japanese" and stated she "was now engaged in the unfinished business of delivering the Chinese people from the cruelty of the Communists." Chennault called the leaders of the People's Republic of China "masters of Chinese slavery" who callously used food as "an instrument of life and death to kill freedom." Chennault wanted famine relief to benefit only the Chinese people and not the Chinese state, saying "We would be making the same mistake we did when under the pressure of scrap dealers we shipped scrap iron to Japan before Pearl Harbor. Such impossible appeasement would be shot back in our faces in Southeast Asia as it was shot back at Pearl Harbor and Korea. Do you put troops in Thailand and Vietnam to face Chinese Communists made strong with our own food?" Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Chennault worked hard to publicize the famine in China caused by the Great Leap Forward and to appeal to the American people to donate money for the CRR and to adopt refugee orphans living in Hong Kong.
Chennault's strong anticommunism led her to favor the Republicans, and in the 1964 presidential election, she worked hard as a volunteer and fundraiser for Senator Barry Goldwater, who was generally considered to be the most aggressive and hawkish of all Republican politicians at the time. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which led to accusations of racism and engagement in a "Southern Strategy" of courting conservative Southern whites who had traditionally voted Democratic by opposing civil rights for blacks. To counter such allegations, Chennault played a prominent role as a speaker for Goldwater in the 1964 election, appearing on stage with him several times starting in April 1964. Chennault was useful to the Goldwater campaign not only for her work in attempting to persuade Chinese-Americans to vote Republican, but importantly to attract the support of nonwhite voters who opposed Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act.