HOW JANE FONDA BECAME ‘HANOI JANE’
On a hot, sticky May afternoon in 1970, several thousand students and protesters took over the University of Maryland mall. Many were there to protest the Vietnam War. Others were hoping to catch a glimpse of a famous Hollywood actress. Her name was Jane Fonda.
As the war raged, the one-time blond bombshell cut her naturally brown hair short, trading sex appeal for liberal activism and rebranding herself as a political crusader against the war. On campus, she was pushing her movement to turn U.S. soldiers into pacifists.
“The Army builds a tolerance for violence,” she shouted at the crowd. “I find that intolerable.”
For the next several years, Fonda would continue as one of the most prominent public faces in the antiwar movement. But it wasn’t until she travelled to Hanoi in July 1972 that she really enraged critics and fundamentally altered how the world viewed her for decades to come.
Last weekend, filmmaker Ken Burns’s 10-part documentary on the Vietnam War began airing on PBS. Burns said the project is an attempt to heal old resentments. Although he didn’t interview Fonda, the film looks at her controversial 1972 visit to Hanoi.
Fonda’s transformation from actress to activist began several years earlier. She was active in the Black Panthers and marched for the rights of American Indians, soldiers and working mothers.
By July 1972, when Fonda accepted an invitation to visit North Vietnam, America had been at war overseas and with itself for years. She went to tour the country’s dike system, which was rumoured to have been intentionally bombed by American forces — something the U.S. government to this day forcefully denies.
“I appealed to them to please consider what you are doing. I don’t think they know,” Fonda said in a news conference when she returned home. “The people who are speaking out against the war are the patriots.”
But the action that still enrages veterans most was that photograph of her with the Viet Cong on an anti-aircraft gun that would have been used to shoot down American planes. This, probably more than anything, earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane.”
Some lawmakers called her actions treason. Congress held hearings. The Veterans of Foreign Wars passed a resolution calling for her to be prosecuted as a traitor.
Fonda wasn’t deterred.
She continued to openly question the accounts of the U.S. government and American POWs, who told devastating stories of the torture they endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese.
“These men were bombing and strafing and napalming the country,” she said, according to a report in April 1973, which quoted an interview she gave to KNBC-TV in Los Angeles. “If a prisoner tried to escape, it is quite understandable that he would probably be beaten and tortured.”
Over the years, as Fonda reinvented herself as a fitness maven and again a movie star, she apologized many times for the anti-aircraft gun photo. But she maintains she was not a traitor for speaking out against the war or trying to turn soldiers against it, because she still believes the U.S. government was lying to them.
In her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, Fonda wrote of the infamous photo this way:
“Here is my best, honest recollection of what took place. Someone (I don’t remember who) leads me toward the gun, and I sit down, still laughing, still applauding. It all has nothing to do with where I am sitting. I hardly even think about where I am sitting. The cameras flash. I get up, and as I start to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what has just happened hits me. Oh, my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes! I plead with him, You have to be sure those photographs are not published. Please, you can’t let them be published. I am assured it will be taken care of. I don’t know what else to do. It is possible that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. If they did, can I really blame them? The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake, and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it.”
Still, for some veterans, no apology from Fonda will ever change their views of her as an adversary of America and the troops during wartime. In 2015, about 50 veterans stood outside the Weinberg Center for the Arts in Frederick, Maryland, to protest Fonda’s appearance there. They held signs that read “Forgive? Maybe. Forget? Never.”
Fonda told the audience that their protests saddened her.
“It hurts me,” she said, “and it will to my grave that I made a huge, huge mistake that made a lot of people think I was against the soldiers.”