By her own account, Jane Fonda’s first impression of America’s involvement in Vietnam was that it was a just cause.
After all, she’d been raised by actor Henry Fonda, who’d served in the United States Navy in World War II and forged his name in Hollywood by playing good guys in movies. She was brought up to believe that America was good.
“I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels,” Fonda said.
Related: The shortest soldier in American history was a Green Beret who fought in Vietnam
So when she first heard about President John F. Kennedy sending advisers to Vietnam, she figured it was a necessary action.
Influenced by Her Time in Paris
For the first eight years of the Vietnam War, Fonda was living in Paris with her first husband, film director Roger Vadim. The two of them were surrounded by the French cultural intelligencia. (“Communists with a little ‘c,'” as she labeled them.)
Fonda described that period on her blog:
“The French had been defeated in their own war against Vietnam a decade before our country went to war there, so when I heard, over and over, French people criticizing our country for our Vietnam War I hated it. I viewed it as sour grapes. I refused to believe we could be doing anything wrong there.
“It wasn’t until I began to meet American servicemen who had been in Vietnam and had come to Paris as resisters that I realized I needed to learn more. I took every chance I could to meet with U.S. soldiers…. I decided I needed to return to my country and join with them—active duty soldiers and Vietnam Veterans in particular—to try and end the war.”
Jane Fonda and the Anti-Vietnam Movement
F.T.A. – Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland – Official Re-Release Trailer
Fonda received some notoriety for her activism once she returned to the U.S., and in the late 1960s, she threw her celebrity heft behind causes and groups as far reaching as the Black Panthers, Native Americans, and feminists.
But the anti-Vietnam movement is where she really found her voice. She started an “anti-USO” troupe with Donald Sutherland and others called “FTA,” for “Free the Army”–a play on the expression “F*ck the Army,” which had come into favor at the time. FTA toured military towns on the West Coast doing skits, singing protest songs, and getting veterans to tell their stories of an unjust war.
About the same time, she began to support Vietnam Veterans Against the War, speaking at rallies and raising money. In recognition of her efforts, VVAW made Fonda their honorary national coordinator.
In her own blunt-force, actress-as-center-of-attention way, Fonda tried to segment the war from the warrior, something the nation at large failed to do during the Vietnam era (and for years afterward).
It was all heady stuff for a well-bred celebrity who wanted to be known for something more than her looks. It could be said that Fonda was educated to a fault, and the actions of the Nixon administration and their South Vietnamese cronies gave her just enough talking points and associated faux logic to be dangerous on an international, foreign-policy stage.
Intended to Be a Humanitarian Mission
And Fonda got the perfect chance to be dangerous in May 1972 when the North Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace Talks invited her for a two-week visit to Hanoi.
She accepted the invitation with the intention of treating the trip like a fact-finding humanitarian mission. She wanted to take photos that would expose that the Nixon administration was bombing the dikes to flood civilian areas.
Ultimately the trip had a different effect.
On the last day of a two-week visit in Hanoi, Fonda allowed herself to be part of a photo op. She arrived at an anti-aircraft installation on the outskirts of Hanoi, and roughly a dozen soldiers greeted her. Fonda recalled on her blog that many photographers and possibly journalists were there, too.
The soldiers sang Fonda a song, then the actress reciprocated. She admittedly bungled the words to “Day Ma Di,” a song written by anti-war South Vietnamese students. The audience laughed and clapped.
Pleading Not to Publish the Infamous Photo
What happened next turned Fonda into “Hanoi Jane.” According to her “best, honest recollection” of the incident:
“Someone (I don’t remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed. I got up, and as I started to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what had just happened hit me. ‘Oh my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes.’
“I pleaded with him, ‘You have to be sure those photographs are not published. Please, you can’t let them be published.’ I was assured it would be taken care of. I didn’t know what else to do.”
But the photos were published, and they suggest that she knew she was sitting on an anti-aircraft gun. (One shot shows her peering through the gun’s sight and smiling.)
Fonda’s Controversy Goes Deeper
And other facts about Fonda’s trip emerged.
Like an updated version of Tokyo Rose, she’d gone on Hanoi radio and petitioned American fighting men stationed to the south to lay down their arms. Fonda claimed they were fighting an unjust war against the peace-loving North Vietnamese.
She also met with a select group of American POWs, “cooperative” prisoners who’d never shown their captors any resistance. While those seven stated they were not coerced to tell Fonda about their fair and humane treatment, other hard-case POWs said they were tortured before and after her visit.
Despite Fonda’s self-justifying logic and parsing of details, there’s an easy way to avoid the hatred of your fellow citizens. Regardless of how you feel about the war, don’t visit another country as a guest of the leaders your country is at war with.
Fonda’s Legacy
But were her actions treasonous?
The Nixon administration came after her in a big way but failed to get any charges to stick. It seems the war was just too unpopular for lawmakers or the general public to see the effort through.
It wasn’t unpopular enough, though. Military veterans and conservatives in general shackled Fonda with the label “Hanoi Jane, Traitor B–ch.”
The arguments about Fonda’s legacy rage to this day. And in an era where celebrities go out of their way to “support the troops,” it seems improbable that one of them would show up in a video chumming around with ISIS or high-fiving a Taliban leader after he launches a Stinger missile at a coalition helicopter. But these are different times. Now we don’t have Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or the draft–elements that tended to give the average American strong opinions about the war in progress.
But whatever animosities linger, ultimately America has to accept that America created Jane Fonda. And Fonda’s story before, during, and after the Vietnam War is uniquely American.
