Anna Chennault: Key figure in Nixon's election dies

Anna Chennault, center, with former President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

IN SOME INNER CIRCLES in Washington D.C., Anna Chennault was known the Dragon Lady. She passed away last Friday but her daughter announced her death on Tuesday (April 4). She was 94.

Chennault was born Chen Xiangmei in Beijing on June 23, 1923, one of six daughters of P. Y. and Isabelle Liao Chen, members of a prosperous family of diplomats and scholars.

Chennault was one of the most visible private citizens in Washington: 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 that drew in cabinet members, congressmen, diplomats, foreign dignitaries and journalists, according to the BBC.

But it is her secret role that had the most impact on U.S. policy. She was an advocate for the Chinese Nationalists and South Vietnam, and a staunch anti-communist.

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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 American officials and Asian leaders like Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist Chinese generalissimo, and President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam.

In the days before the 1968 presidential elections, it looked like the South Vietnam was willing to accept peace negotiations that would end the Vietnam War. If a peace treaty in Paris was signed, it would give a decided advantage to Democratic candidate Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Chennault, acting as a behind-the-scenes liaison for Nixon’s campaign and the Saigon government, was recorded by FBI wiretaps 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, South Vietnam's President Thieu announced that his government would not join the Paris talks. Three days later, Nixon was elected and the war was prolonged for two more years at the cost of thousands of Vietnamese and American lives.

Ironically, Chennault died in her apartment in the Watergate Apartment complex, the same locale that became synonymous for the "dirty tricks" that led to the resignation of Nixon.

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