BillLindau

Unprinted column on Jane Fonda

Here, there & everywhere
Jane Fonda said she was sorry: Now let’s let it go
Written for, but never published by, The Post, Troy, N.C., April 2005. The editor at the time felt local military veterans would boycott the newspaper if it appeared in print.
By Bill Lindau
“Vietnam vets are not Fonda Jane.”
-- Popular bumper sticker
World War II soldiers had Tokyo Rose. Vietnam war veterans had Hanoi Jane. Even though it’s been more than 30 years since she exchanged a word with an enemy soldier, a lot of veterans of the Vietnam era still hate Jane Fonda for getting chummy with the North Vietnamese and sitting in one of their anti-aircraft guns.
Even though she has not said a word against any of our fighting men, sold guns to the North Koreans or tried to assassinate the president. Even though a lot of Vietnam vets have children who are now older than they were when they shot it out with Charlie.
Now Jane Fonda has just said she was sorry for what she did in Vietnam, and those veterans are going up against much bigger problems than this 67-year-old grandmother could ever create. I say, forgive and forget, people.
Jane Fonda has been on her best behavior since those years, coming back into the spotlight with both an autobiography and a movie co-starring Jennifer Lopez called “Monster in Law,” the first movie she has made in 15 years. And all that aside, Fonda even admitted on national television that sitting in that gun was the biggest mistake of her life.
“It was a betrayal,” she told Leslie Stahl on “Sixty Minutes”. “I will go to my grave regretting that. It was like I was thumbing my nose at the military and at the country that gave me privilege.”
She did not apologize for any films she wound up in over there, or for her broadcasts on Radio Hanoi. She said she had met with American prisoners of war and the North Vietnamese took footage of that and twisted around for the purposes of their propaganda. She also said on the April 3 segment of “Sixty Minutes” that she wasn’t trying to get the American soldiers to stop fighting. “I was asking them to consider it.”
Fonda’s involvement with the peace movement took her to various military bases, including Fort Bragg in 1970 (Man, I hated I missed her; I was a junior at Pinecrest High School that year). She and other activists got arrested at Fort Bragg, Fort Hood and Fort Meade for passing out antiwar leaflets.
Fonda also said she’d hate it if a movie star today went over to Iraq and became as friendly with the insurgents shooting at our troops as she had with the North Vietnamese.
“But that was different (from Vietnam),” she said. “We’ve been saying to Richard Nixon, ‘Stop this’ for eight years…. The majority of Americans and congress opposed the war.”
The lingering resentment she has received from a lot of Vietnam vets “makes me sad. I think that it’s ill-placed anger.”
I know Fonda had a bit of an ulterior motive. She was promoting her autobiography, “Jane Fonda: My Life So Far” (Random House, New York). She goes into a lot of candid detail about her stormy relationships with her late father, movie star Henry Fonda, and her three husbands, including media mogul Ted Turner. She also gives some lurid accounts of her sexual activity with her first husband, French director Roger Vadim.
She has made a lot of good movies, including “Cat Ballou,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “On Golden Pond” (the only film she ever made with her famous dad) and “9 to 5”. I never saw a film with her that I didn’t liked. I even liked “Barbarella,” which she said she hated making for a long time. “I couldn’t look at it for a long time because it was politically incorrect,” she said. “Now I look back and laughed.”
People scoffed at her for dissing American capitalism along with her fellow Hollywood lefties, yet marrying one of the richest men in the country and making a fortune on her workout videos. But she has put her money to good use as well, working with pregnant teens and helping girls and boys address destructive gender stereotypes. She hounded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention in 1995, and in 2002 she opened the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at the Emory University School of Medicine.
I have listened to Vietnam vets and other right-wingers diss Jane Fonda for years, calling her a Communist or a traitor as well as “Hanoi Jane” and swearing they’d never watch any of her movies again. Two U.S. congressmen accused her of treason, and the House Internal Security Council issued her a supoena, then withdrew it.
“I find it interesting that the government and news reporters knew that Americans before me had gone to North Vietnam and had spoken on Radio Hanoi,” she writes in her autobiography. “This was the first time, however, that the issue of treason was being raised.”
But the federal government never discovered a thing she did in Vietnam that they could prosecute her for. Some right-wingers have since accused her of a lot of things.
After her much publicized marriage and divorce from Ted Turner, Fonda dropped out of the spotlight. For awhile. Then in the 2004 presidential campaign, President Bush’s supporters were using her association with former Navy swift boat officer John Kerry against him.
She wasn’t even active in this past campaign, and right-wingers were using her as a weapon against the Democrats. I mean, nobody had heard a peep out of her in years. Somebody even asked me in August 2004 if she was still alive.
I’m not defending what she did in Vietnam. I was very much against that war, too, but I thought what she did with those anti-aircraft guns was in poor taste. Even her friends in Hollywood shied away from her after that.
But that happened more than 30 years ago. She was 35 years old, still young enough to commit acts of youthful folly, which about all of us have been guilty of, in one form or another.
I was coming of age during those years, and just as angry at the Military Industrial Complex as Fonda and Abbie Hoffman put together. I never hobnobbed with Viet Cong colonels or threw Molotov cocktails at college ROTC buildings, but I did do something once in my political extremism that was pretty tactless.
I was a freshman at East Carolina when a handful of politicians came to campus to talk to the students. Though I forgot his name, I listened to one of the candidates, who was running for the state legislature. A student asked him if he would to legalize marijuana if he were elected. He said it was a dangerous drug and he wasn’t planning to do it; he was even planning to get tougher on drugs.
I responded with a raspberry.
Several people standing near me backed away from me as if I were suffering from intestinal gas.
I instantly regretted what I did. It wasn’t the same as what Jane Fonda was supposed to have done, but it was rude and in extremely poor taste. I’ve never done that to any political candidate since then, not even the ones I don’t like.
I have nothing against the Vietnam vets. I was lucky enough not to get drafted, but I appreciate what these men and women went through for the rest of us who stayed at home and crabbed about everything. Some of them came home awfully messed up, in their heads as well as their bodies. They lost a lot of friends over there, and so did the rest of us.
Since that terrible period in our nation’s history, veterans of Vietnam and the wars before and since have been struggling to receive the compensation they deserved as a result of their sacrifices. They’re not just asking it for themselves, but for their spouses and children. Now they have a bigger opponent than one 35-year-old woman could ever be; the federal government is looking at programs to cut all the way across the board, and that includes a lot of benefits for military veterans.
I say, forgive and forget when it comes to Jane Fonda. She’s done a lot of good things in that outweigh all the nonsense she was up to in Vietnam. She has never really lifted a finger against any American fighting man in her life. Thirty years is too long to carry a grudge. Let it go, ladies and gentlemen.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 9:49 PM