A touch of old Washington passed away March 30 with the death of 94-year-old Anna Chennault.
A familiar figure in the nation’s capital after she arrived in the late 1950s, the woman who was born Chen Xiangmei, daughter of a Beijing lawyer-diplomat, had barely survived the perils of war-torn China, earned a university degree in Hong Kong, worked as a journalist, and married a swashbuckling American general. In later years, as a young widow, she ran the commercial airline her husband had led and ended her long and storied existence as a Washington lobbyist, hostess, political activist, publicist, broadcaster—and woman of mystery and controversy.
Of course, to some degree, the mystery image was cultivated by Mrs. Chennault herself and closely connected to the controversy, the origins of which date to World War II.
Her husband, Claire Chennault, was an Army Air Corps officer who, before U.S. entry into the war, organized volunteer squadrons of expatriate American airmen—dubbed the Flying Tigers—who flew missions in support of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese forces against Japanese invaders. General Chennault, who admired Chiang and whose Flying Tigers were later absorbed into the U.S. Army Air Forces, was continually at odds with the American commander in the China Burma India theater, Gen. Joseph Stilwell, who despised Chiang. Their professional rivalry and mutual antipathy divided Americans serving in China as well—a division that persisted for decades into postwar Washington, splitting old China hands and U.S. policy into warring Stilwell and Chennault camps.
In the nation’s capital, after her husband’s death, Mrs. Chennault was an implacable foe of Communist China and effective proponent on Capitol Hill of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime on Taiwan. She was shrewd as well as persistent—she counted prominent Democrats, including President John F. Kennedy, among her friends and admirers, and was a popular hostess. And she proved so socially astute that she earned the grudging, if arguably racist, nickname of “Dragon Lady” from her detractors. In the 1968 presidential election, her skills at diplomatic intrigue and political maneuver involved her in events that still resonate.
The retiring president, Lyndon Johnson, who was desperate to prevent the election of the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, was equally desperate to pressure South Vietnam into peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris, thereby boosting the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. It seems clear, from fragments of evidence, that Mrs. Chennault counseled South Vietnamese interlocutors to advise Saigon to resist LBJ’s pressure; and Johnson, who had tapped her telephone, was furious about her advice, believing her guilty of interfering with U.S. policy.
Thus was born the erroneous conviction, especially implacable on the left, that the Chennault Affair, as this 50-year-old incident came to be called, threw the 1968 election and amounted to treason. The New York Times, among many other publications, still repeats this tendentious interpretation as though it were established fact.
Of course, the problem is that “treason,” especially in this instance, is very much in the eye of the beholder and always judged from the Johnson-Humphrey standpoint. LBJ’s primary aim was to thwart Nixon, elect Humphrey, and end the war against the North Vietnamese invasion of the South. Accordingly, the Saigon government suspected, no doubt on its own, that the election of Johnson’s handpicked successor was not necessarily in their country’s interest. And so the South Vietnamese concluded that it would be wiser to join the Paris peace talks if Richard Nixon, and not Hubert Humphrey, were elected president—as they did.
In that sense, Anna Chennault’s perspective was correct, even principled, and largely borne out by subsequent history. Moreover, it’s difficult to argue, after seasons of destructive riots and campus unrest, not to mention bloody stalemate in Vietnam, that she influenced anybody’s vote. Yet the notion that Anna Chennault singlehandedly undermined the Paris peace talks and robbed Humphrey of his reward took root in the partisan press of the day and, over the decades, produced a mindset on the left in which every Republican presidential victory must be the result of some secret conspiracy. The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, to take only the most famous instance, was in this version of events the result of some secret deal with Iranian hostage-takers. Reagan’s real crime was to dissent from Democratic policies.
In the long run, Anna Chennault won innumerable battles but lost the war. Her brand of resistance to Communist tyranny, born out of personal hardship and suffering, became unfashionable in Washington policy circles; and even she made her peace with the post-Maoist China of the 1980s and beyond. Still, her long life was a great and instructive adventure and she herself was vivid, indefatigable, good-humored—and right.
