The Truth at Last: How Nixon Beat Humphrey
Howe, Russell Warren & Trott, Sarah Hays
The Truth at Last: How Nixon Beat Humphrey by Russell Warren Howe & Sarah Hays Trott Today, the -”best-known “China lobby” name associated with Chiang Kai-shek is Anna Chan Chennaplt. Mrs....
...Nixon returned the favor, in his way, in 1971, by accepting Chiang’s and Chennault’s advice over that of Secretary of State William Rogers and deciding against establishing an embassy in Outer Mongolia, a Soviet-dominated republic claimed by Chinese of all political hues as part of Chinese territory...
...In 1975, on being informed that the FBI transcript might be available under the Freedom of Information Act, she acknowledged the whole story, adding that the transcript showed that “from the very first conversation I made it clear that I was speaking for Mr...
...The October 30 wiretap showed that Chennault passed word to President Thieu, through his ambassador, Biu Diem, that Thieu should not go to the Paris peace talks-scheduled to start the following week-with the U.S...
...Not until December 1975 did government lawyers admit in a civil suit that such taps were made and were seen as essential to the collection of intelligence...
...The Vietnam Connection In the 1968 campaign, Chennault played a critical role, in part revealed by an FBI wiretap on the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington...
...In the week of the first Nixon inaugural, The Washington Post society columnist Maxine Cheshire wrote about Chennault under the headline: “Next Perle Mesta...
...Nixon and Mr...
...A trim, Oriental mixture of assertion and charm, Mrs...
...Also,” Sherman recalls, “it would have been difficult to explain how we knew about what she had done...
...Chennault’s aim was clearly to insure that Nixon’s rival, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, would not gain an electoral advantage from a truce and the promise of peace...
...We did nothing but relay messages...
...Even the reclusive J. Edgar Hoover came...
...Chennault tours Asian capitals every two months or so for Flying Tiger, and h a acted as a conduit*$b...
...Johnson had called a bombing halt, and, as Harriman has since revealed, the North Vietnamese had made substantial troop withdrawals as a demonstration of good faith...
...Chennault, a woman of strong will and convictions, was a 23-year-old Catholic journalist when she married 5 6-year-old General Claire Chennault in 1947...
...This afiticle is adapted from their book, The.:‘Power Peddlers, to be published by Doubleday & Company, Inc...
...But Harriman notes also that the bombing halt had given Humphrey a “shot in the arm” and that, if negotiations had started, “I am satisfied, myself, that Humphrey would have won...
...Thieu’s decision not to go to Paris came five days before the election...
...Nixon asked you to relay to President Thieu that he should hold off on coming to Paris and wait until the election was over...
...When a report of Chennault’s intervention surfaced the following March in a column by Jack Anderson-who once worked with Anna Chennault in Chinese refugee relief just after World War 11-a Nixon cabinet member, Robert Finch, told reporters that anything she had done had been on her own initiative...
...I wanted to blast Richard Nixon...
...What Nixon Did In 1974, Mrs...
...Another factor enterin into the Outer Mongolia deciseeking not to irritate Mao: 1971 was the, year that Henry Kissinger began preparing the terrain for detente with Communist China...
...In 1967, a year before being elected President, Nixon, as attorney for Pepsi-Cola, had an interview with Chiang-thoughtfully set up by Anna-that led to Coca-Cola being refused a permit to establish in Taiwan, in competition with Pepsi...
...When the general died of lung cancer in his hometown, New Orleans, in 1958, his widow sold CAT to a CIA-front corporation and moved to the Washington social scene the followipg year...
...Chennault: “Well, the President decided to say that, and I am only a woman and a member of a minority so how could I say the President was a liar...
...Familiars of both say Chennault and Howar have too many of the wrong things in common to tolerate each other’s presence...
...Chiang is godmother to the two Chenriault daughters), have been former President Nguyen Van Thieu of Sou& Vietnam, President Fernando Marcos of the Philippines, and President Park Chung Hee of South Korea...
...The following interchange then took place: Question: “SO Mr...
...One of Kissinger’s dates, Johnson cocktail-circuit holdover Barbara Howar, was not welcome, however...
...Nixon, and it is clear that the ambassador was only relaying messages between Mr...
...Nixon’s indebtedness to Mrs...
...Chennault and her friends went back to before 1960...
...Just as the polls were showing Humphrey catching up with and in some cases even passing Nixon, Humphrey’s momentum was arrested by the disappointment that yet another prospect for peace in Vietnam seemed to be going down the drain...
...in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States...
...and when Nixon sent the then Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen, to the embassy to dissociate the Republican Party’s candidate from Chennault’s action, Humphrey agreed not to raise the issue in the campaign...
...Chennault-Pekipg-born’ and educated in Hong Kong-became a U.S...
...In the Kennedy era, her lavish apartment, tastefully furnished in Chinese objets d’art, was a chandeliered watering hole for top Republicans and a sprinkling of Democrats...
...Humphrey was concerned about revealing that the FBI regularly tapped embassies...
...Humphrey sent former FDR Assistant Attorney General James Rowe-himself an erstwhile, businessoriented foreign lobbyist-to see Thieu’s envoy and protest...
...Question: “But Mr...
...In that early Nixon era, before Watergate be cam e notorious , Ch ennault’s $175,000 duplex in the luxury complex of that frame regularly entertained such famous figures as John and Martha Mitchell, GOP Senators Barry Goldwater, William Saxbe, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, and Kissinger himself...
...Senate Intelligence Committee hearings the month before showed that the South Vietnamese embassy tap, and physical surveillance of Chennault in Washington and New York, was ordered by President Johnson himself, with DeLoach bringing the information to the National Security Council’s executive secretary, J. Bromley Smith...
...I asked Humphrey what he wanted me to do with the story...
...Thieu didn’t go, and the conference never got under way...
...She raised funds for Nixon in 1960 and proceeded to raise more for Goldwater in 1964...
...She raised a quarter-million dollars for the campaign by calling friends and refusing to accept anything less than $500...
...Army Air Corps...
...Humphrey was angered by the Chennault stratagem, which may even have violated the so-called Logan (or Neutrality) Act, which makes it a felony, punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment, for a citizen to have “intercourse with any foreign government...
...citizen in 1950...
...Harriman gallantly says today that Thieu might have worked out the tactic of helping Nixon by not going to Paris, even without Chennault’s advice...
...Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott are Washingtqn writers...
...etween right-wing Asian leaders and GOP administrations...
...She had told them not to go to the peace talks-that they would get a better deal from Nixon...
...Her main Asian agkociations in recent years, apart from Chiang (Mrs...
...But Humphrey accepted Nixon’s own protestations of ignorance of the Chennault maneuver...
...But Humphrey said he didn’t have the evidence...
...Nixon had Senator Dirksen tell Vice President Humphrey that he [Nixon] knew nothing about any initiative to stop President Thieu from attending the peace conference...
...They had just gotten the word from the White House that Anna Chennault had been in touch with the Vietnamese government...
...The father of eight children who divorced ‘his wife of 35 yeais to marry Anna, Chennault was a former stunt pilot who became the dashing commander of the Flying Tiger Squadron of American fighter pilots which helped Chiang fight the Japanese early in World War 11...
...In 1968, she became co-chairman (with Mamie Eisenhower) of Women for NixonAgnew, chairman of the Republican Women’s National Finance Committee, and a vice chairman of the Repttblican National Finance Committee...
...Prospects for the talks had seemed reasonably good until Thieu failed to show up...
...Not every lobbyist can claim to have perhaps elected a President-and given the United States Watergate and six more years of the Vietnam war...
...with intent to influence [its] conduct...
...And how could the [South Vietnamese] ambassador say the President was a liar...
...Nixon, knew about...
...Theodore White charged later that Chennault had recruited Chiang and Korean President Park also to lean on Thieu to support her advice...
...delegation to be led by special envoy Averell Harriman...
...In Saigon, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker-who had relayed to Washington Thieu’s earlier promise to attend the talksfumed, as did Harriman in Paris...
...Cartha Debach had it...
...She became vice president for international relations of Flying,Tiger Airline (now Flying Tiger International), the freight line then run by one of the general’s former pilots, Robert PresCott...
...When the United States entered the war, the “Tigers” were incorporated into the U.S...
...After their marriage, Chennault lived with Anna on Taiwan and fathered two more children, while running the local airline CAT (Civil Air Transport...
...Copyright Q 1976 Russell Warren Howe and Sarah Hays Trott...
...DeLoach was a top aide to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover...
...When the FBI passed the wiretap transcript to Johnson, the President flew into an understandable rage and informed Humphrey of what had happened...
...Former Humphrey press secretary Norman Sherman recalls the event: “I came into Humphrey’s [vice presidential] office and saw Humphrey and Ted [campaign aide Ted Van Dyk] sitting together in an excited conversation...
...Democrats were in an uproar, but Chennault of course denied everything, telling one reporter: “It makes me feel that the men who were defeated are trying to hide behind a woman’s skirts...
...Thieu...
...Chennault: “Yes, but all I did was relay Mr...
...Nixon’s message and then the ambassador [of South Vietnam] relayed President Thieu’s back to me so that I could tell Mr...
...It was China lobby funds that helped him in his first, successful fight for a congressional seat against Helen Douglas...
...Chennault told the writers archly that “whatever I did during the campaign, the Republicans, including Mr...
Vol. 8 • December 1976 • No. 10
