Elaine Chao
Elaine Lan Chao (born March 26, 1953) is an American politician who served as the 24th United States Secretary of Labor
under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009, and Deputy Secretary of Transportation under President George H. W. Bush.
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, to mainland Chinese parents, she was the first Asian American woman and the first Taiwanese American in
U.S. history to be appointed to a U.S. president's cabinet. She is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky
On November 29, 2016, it was announced that President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Chao for Secretary of Transportation
when he takes office
Early life and education
Elaine Chao was born in the capital city Taipei, Taiwan.The eldest of six daughters, Chao was born to Ruth Mulan Chu Chao (趙朱木蘭),
an historian, and Dr. James S.C. Chao (趙錫成), who began his career as a merchant mariner and later founded a successful shipping
company in New York City called Foremost Shipping.Chao's parents had fled to Taiwan from Shanghai on mainland China after the
Chinese Communists took over after the Chinese Civil War in 1949. When she was 8 years old, in 1961, Chao came to the United States
on a freight ship with her mother and two younger sisters. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier after receiving a scholarship.
Chao attended private school Tsai Hsing Elementary School in Taipei for kindergarten and first grade, and subsequently attended
Syosset High School in Syosset, New York, on Long Island. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Mount Holyoke College in
South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1975 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1979. At Mount Holyoke, she played field hockey and
was a member of the horseback riding club; she also edited the yearbook, served as the student representative for the economics department,
and worked as a Mount Holyoke recruiter.Chao has received 36 honorary doctorates, most recently a Doctor of Humane Letters from Georgetown University.
Career
Early career
Before entering politics, Chao was vice president for syndications at Bank of America Capital Markets Group in San Francisco, and an international
banker at Citicorp in New York for four years. Chao was granted a White House Fellowship in 1983 during the Reagan administration.
In October 2013, Chao told a game show audience that the fellowship was part of a special program with Citicorp. "They selected outstanding
performers within the bank and gave them an opportunity to support them for a stint in the government," Chao said.
In 1986, Chao became deputy administrator of the Maritime Administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation. From 1988 to 1989,
she served as chairwoman of the Federal Maritime Commission. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Chao to be Deputy Secretary of
Transportation. From 1991 to 1992, Chao was Director of the Peace Corps.[SUP][15][/SUP] She was the first Asian Pacific American to serve in any of these positions.
She expanded the Peace Corps's presence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia by establishing the first Peace Corps programs in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania,
Estonia, and other newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. Before a 1999 House panel during the 1996 United States campaign finance
controversy, John Huang testified that Chao had asked him to give money to her husband, Mitch McConnell, and that his Indonesian employer illegally
reimbursed him for $2,000 he ultimately gave to McConnell's 1990 campaign. Huang later repeated the assertion in testimony in a federal suit, in which
he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws in funneling $100,000 in illegal donations to President Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign.
United Way and Heritage Foundation
Following her service in the government, Chao worked for four years as President and CEO of United Way of America. She is credited with returning credibility
and public trust in the organization after a financial mismanagement scandal involving former president William Aramony. From 1996 until her appointment as
Secretary of Labor, Chao was a Distinguished Fellow with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. She was also a board member
of the Independent Women's Forum. She returned to the Heritage Foundation after leaving the government in January 2009.
U.S. Secretary of Labor (2001–2009)
Portrait of Elaine Chao by Chen Yanning in the Great Hall of the U.S. Department of Labor's Frances Perkins Building. It features the American flag, the Kentucky state flag,
the U.S. Capitol, and photos of her husband, Mitch McConnell, and her parents, James and Ruth Chao.
Chao was the only cabinet member in the George W. Bush administration to serve for the entirety of his eight years. She was also the longest-serving Secretary of Labor
since Frances Perkins, who served from 1933 to 1945, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.Under her leadership, the U.S. Department of Labor undertook regulatory
and legislative reforms in "protecting the health, safety, wages, and retirement security" of U.S. workers by "recovering record levels of back wages and monetary recoveries
for pension plans, and obtaining record financial settlements for discrimination by federal contractors." She also restructured departmental programs and modernized regulations.
In 2002, a major west coast ports dispute costing the U.S. economy nearly $1 billion daily was resolved when the Bush administration obtained a national emergency injunction
against both the employers and the union under the Taft–Hartley Act for the first time since 1971. In 2003, for the first time in more than 40 years, the Department updated
the labor union financial disclosure regulations under the Landrum–Griffin Act of 1959 to provide union members with more information on union finances. In 2004, the Department
issued revisions of the white-collar overtime regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act. In July and August 2003, Chao and her colleagues, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow
and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, took a bus across the country on their "Jobs and Growth Tour" aimed at promoting the benefits of the Bush administration's tax cuts.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation (2017–present)
On November 29, 2016, she was nominated by President-Elect Donald Trump to become his Secretary of Transportation.
Personal life
In 1993, Chao married Mitch McConnell, the senior U.S. Senator from Kentucky and the Senate Majority Leader. They were introduced by Stuart Bloch, an early friend of McConnell's,
and his wife Julia Chang Bloch, a Chinese American and a future U.S. Ambassador to Nepal, the first Asian American to serve as US Ambassador, who mentored Elaine Chao. Bloch
described Chao as a "tiger wife," a reference to Amy Chua's 2011 book about her disciplinarian parenting style. Previously, she had dated C. Boyden Gray, the White House Counsel
to President George H. W. Bush.The University of Louisville's Ekstrom Library opened the "McConnell-Chao Archives" in November 2009. It is a major component of the university's
McConnell Center.
Husband's campaigning
In the two years leading up to the 2014 U.S. Senate elections, she "headlined fifty of her own events and attended hundreds more with and on behalf of" her husband and was seen as
"a driving force of his reelection campaign" and eventual victory over Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who had portrayed McConnell as "anti-woman." After winning
the election, McConnell said, "The biggest asset I have by far is the only Kentucky woman who served in a president's cabinet, my wife, Elaine Chao."Additionally, she adds "a softer touch"
to McConnell's style by speaking of him "in a feminine, wifely way," as Jan Karzen, a longtime friend of McConnell's, put it. She has been described as "the campaign hugger" and is also
known for bipartisan socializing. For example, in 2014 she hosted a dinner with philanthropist Catherine B. Reynolds to welcome Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce, where she spent
the evening socializing with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's top advisor.
The New York Times has described her as "an unapologetically ambitious operator with an expansive network, a short fuse,
and a seemingly inexhaustible drive to get to the top and stay there." It reported that as labor secretary, she "had gold-colored coins minted with her name in bas-relief and employed a
"
Veep"-like staff member who carried around her bag."
Family
Chao is the oldest of six sisters, the others being Jeannette, May, Christine, Grace, and Angela.
The New York Times reported that "several of her five younger sisters married
Wall Street titans, including Bruce Wasserstein, the late owner of
New York Magazine." Her father, James S.C. Chao, is a shipping magnate who founded the Foremost Group.
In April 2008, Chao's father gave Chao and McConnell between $5 million and $25 million, which "boosted McConnell's personal worth from a minimum of $3 million in 2007 to more
than $7 million" and "helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year."In 2012 the family donated $40 million to Harvard Business School
for scholarships for students of Chinese heritage and the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center, an executive education building named for Chao's late mother. Her mother Ruth Mulan Chu Chao
returned to school at age 51 to earn a master's degree in Asian literature and history from St. John's University in the Queens borough of New York City.