May 9, 2024

Anne Cox Chambers, Media Heiress and Ex-Ambassador, Dies at 100

“I think it’s too soon for us to have a black president, but even if it weren’t, I don’t think he should be it,” she told Vanity Fair. “He’s sleazy.” The nomination went to Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, who lost to George Bush.

Some of her politicking was of the shoe-leather, door-to-door variety. In Mr. Carter’s 1976 campaign, she was part of the “peanut brigade” of volunteers that traveled to contested states. She did the same thing in later elections, including 2004, when she was 84, supporting Senator John Kerry’s bid to unseat President George W. Bush. She opposed the tax breaks — a substantial one in her case — that Mr. Bush had given rich people like her.

“It’s tainted money,” she said. “I don’t want it.”

In a 2011 interview with Atlanta magazine, which noted that she had a cardboard cutout of President Barack Obama in her living room, she credited her father for her lifelong affiliation with the Democratic Party. “I remember someone asked Daddy if he would ever think of voting for a Republican, and he said, ‘Sure I would, if I ever found one worth voting for,’” she said.

Anne Beau Cox was born on Dec. 1, 1919, in Dayton, Ohio. Her mother, the former Margaretta Parler Blair, used the baby as a way to avoid talking about political issues when appearing in New York the next year, during her husband’s presidential campaign.

“But please excuse me from talking politics,” she said. “Anne is very well, thank you. Baby Anne was born last winter.”

Mrs. Chambers attended Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., spent a year in Paris and graduated from Finch College in Manhattan, which closed in 1976. She liked to say she first went to Atlanta to attend the premiere of “Gone With the Wind” on Dec. 15, 1939, and never left.

She married Louis G. Johnson six months after the premiere. That marriage ended in divorce. She married Robert William Chambers in 1955. That marriage also ended in divorce.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/anne-cox-chambers-dead.html?emc=rss&partner=rss

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