General’s widow was secret force in D.C.
Anna Chennault, for many years one of the most visible private citizens in Washington as a Republican fundraiser, writer and Chineseborn, anti-communist lobbyist who dabbled in foreign intrigue after the death of her husband, the renowned leader of the Flying Tigers in China and Burma in World War II, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 94.
Her death, in her apartment at the Watergate complex, was announced Tuesday. The cause was complications of a stroke she suffered in December, said her daughter, Cynthia.
In her memoir photographs, wearing a high-necked white ao dai, Chennault appears with her husband, Maj. Gen. Claire L. Chennault; with Presidents John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; with J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI; with Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam; and with Nguyen Cao Ky, the South Vietnamese vice president who fled to the United States with the fall of Saigon in 1975.
She was also a vice president of the Flying Tiger Line, her husband’s postwar cargo operation; a writer of novels, poetry and nonfiction books; a Voice of America broadcaster; and the center of a social whirl at her Watergate penthouse.
But there was a hidden side to Chennault’s affairs, historians say. She was known to have been a conduit for Nationalist Chinese funds for the Republican Party and to have been a secret go-between for U.S. officials and Asian leaders like Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Chinese generalissimo, and President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam.
And in a contretemps of presidential politics that generated heated debate for years, Chennault was recorded on an FBI wiretap helping to sabotage a peace initiative during the Vietnam War in order to promote Nixon’s victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election.
Soon after President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam to ease the way for Paris peace talks that fall, Chennault, a behind-thescenes liaison for Nixon’s campaign and the Saigon government, was overheard urging South Vietnamese officials to boycott the Paris peace talks, saying they would get a better deal from a Nixon administration if they waited until after the election.
That same day, Nov. 2, Thieu announced that his government would not join the Paris talks. Three days later, Nixon was elected.
Johnson was furious when he learned of Chennault’s intervention, and considered having her charged under federal statutes with criminally interfering with the conduct of foreign affairs. She was never prosecuted.
Anna Chennault was born Chen Xiangmei in Beijing on June 23, 1923.
While working as a correspondent for China’s Cental News Agency, she met Claire Chennault in Kunming. He was three decades older, a married father of eight and the hero of the Flying Tigers.
In 1947, after his divorce, they were married in Shanghai. Besides Cynthia, they had another daughter, Claire, who also survives her, as do three sisters.