by Jane Fonda
I had never met him before, and he invited me to have coffee with him in the hotel’s coffee shop. He was a bona fide movement “heavy” of whom I was in awe, and I was nervous and intimidated. I remember him talking mostly about the Red Family collective in Berkeley, California, of which he was a member. These groupings were springing up all over the country in the seventies. They were a way for longtime activists to overcome the depersonalization of the mass movements by creating close-knit, supportive families, models of a new way of living.
In his eloquent opening remarks at the Winter Soldier investigation, Lieutenant William Crandell, Americal Division, an officer of VVAW, made it clear the investigation was not a mock trial. “There will be no phony indictments,” he said. Instead the men would give straightforward testimony about “acts which are war crimes under international law. Acts which these men have seen and participated in. . . .” Civilian experts testified about different aspects of the war. For the first time, Bert Pfeiffer, a doctor from the University of Montana, discussed the toxic effects of a dioxin-laden 2,4,5-T herbicide known as Agent Orange, which the United States was spraying on the forests of Vietnam to kill trees and deprive the guerrilla soldiers of their cover. A message of support from family members and spouses of American prisoners of war was read.
I want to mention the presence of Staff Sergeant George Smith, the first U.S. POW from Vietnam I had ever met. He had served with Fifth Special Forces and had been a prisoner of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam (Vietcong) from 1963 to 1965. George would later join me and others on a national tour.
The heart of the Winter Soldier investigation was the testimony from the veterans. They represented every branch of the U.S. military, officers as well as enlisted men. Sitting solemnly in front of microphones at a long table covered by white cloth, they made an unusual sight with their medals, uniforms, long hair, and beards. One by one they said who they were, where they had served, and what category of war crime they would testify about.
In voices sometimes choked with emotion, the men told how they and others had randomly killed Vietnamese civilians and tortured Vietnamese prisoners. They told of raping and mutilating women and girls; cutting off ears and heads; rounding up entire villages into concentration camps (called “new life hamlets” in the obscene war-speak that was being used to sugar-coat reality). They told of B-52 carpet bombing; throwing Vietcong suspects from helicopters; using white phosphorus (Willie Peter), which burned endlessly through a person’s body. One pilot said:
Anywhere in North Vietnam basically is a free-fire zone. There were no forbidden targets. If you didn’t find any particular targets that you wanted to hit, then normally you’d go ahead and just drop your bombs wherever you wanted to.
All this, the vets repeated, was done in the presence of officers who said nothing, did nothing, to stop it. Some of the vets talked about getting hooked on drugs to numb themselves to what they did.
One of the many lies promulgated by the U.S. government came out at the hearings when five veterans revealed that the Third Marine Division had been in secret combat in Laos in 1969. They said the U.S. military refused to evacuate out any wounded or dead for fear the press would find out about the operation.
I was numb as I listened to speaker after speaker describe these atrocities. I heard what was being said, but I couldn’t get my heart to grasp it. Partly it had to do with my own emotional state. My nerves were shot. I couldn’t sleep. Picketers outside the Howard Johnson hotel were brandishing signs saying I was a Communist. My father wasn’t speaking to me and, because of the news reports about my arrest, probably thought I was a drug smuggler. My Hollywood connections feared I’d never work again. I felt my life was spinning out of control.
One of the few times I cried was over the “rabbit story.” It was told by Sergeant Joe Bangert, First Marine Air Wing, about his last day at Camp Pendleton and reminded me of what I had heard about traumatic training from military psychologists:
You have a little lesson and it’s called the rabbit lesson, where the staff NCO comes out and he has this rabbit and . . . then in a couple of seconds after just about everyone falls in love with it . . . he cracks it in the neck, skins it, disembowels it . . . and then they throw the guts out into the audience. You can get anything out of that you want, but that’s your last lesson you catch in the United States before you leave for Vietnam. . . .
Supporters of George W. Bush’s administration, like those of Nixon at the time, have tried to portray the winter soldiers as frauds. The fact is, those soldiers were telling the truth. There is no accurate refutation of any of the testimony given during the Winter Soldier investigation. Only one man (who did not testify) had falsified his military rank, and that was Al Hubbard himself. It turned out that Al had been not an air force captain, but an air force staff sergeant E-5. Al admitted on the Today show in 1971 that he had lied “because I recognize in this country that it’s very important that one has an image.”
A month or so later, while sitting in the projection room of Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope offices in San Francisco, watching a rough cut of the documentary Winter Soldier with other of the film’s funders, I finally broke down. And once the tears came, they were unstoppable. Until then I had thought that what was important about the Winter Soldier investigation was its indictment of the U.S. government for sending men to fight a war whose very nature made atrocities inevitable. But something far more profound than the question of blame had transpired over those three days in Detroit.
A spiritual shift had occurred that signaled hope. These men, as they gave witness, were shedding the old, soul-destroying warrior ethic, emerging out of numbness, being reborn. They were pointing the way for all of us: If they, who had done and seen the unimaginable, could transform themselves by their collective truth telling, then couldn’t we all? Today we do those who served in Vietnam a grave disservice to feign outrage at what these men said and did and to deny that any atrocities were committed by Americans or to blame them. They were not alone in revealing the horrors of the Vietnam War. In 2004 The Blade (Toledo) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for its October 2003 series, Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths, which documented how the 101st Airborne Division’s Tiger Force platoon went on a seven-month rampage through forty villages in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1967, killing scores of unarmed men, women, and children. The Pentagon undertook a full-scale investigation of the atrocities committed by Tiger Force and submitted it in 1975. It seems to have been “lost” at both the White House and the Pentagon when Richard Cheney was chief of staff and Donald Rumsfeld was secretary of defense.
What many people failed to do then (and continue to fail to do today) is admit what happened, understand the context, and make sure those circumstances never happen again. The winter soldiers showed us that redemption is possible when truth is spoken.
Nothing can change until we acknowledge what is—as I have learned over time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
INSURRECTION AND SEXUALITY
Nixon doesn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war but he may be the first American president to lose an army.
—DICK GREGORY
. . . Being the object of male desire and the male gaze, that acknowledgment of personhood that, in the conventional world, only a man can bestow.
—CAROLYN HEILBRUN
BY THE BEGINNING OF 1971—a year after the release of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and while the Winter Soldier investigation was in progress—I began thinking seriously about quitting the film business. I didn’t want to be a celebrity anymore. I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to join a film collective somewhere and just blend in.
Part of it was a desire to shed my celebrity, and part of it was that I needed a home, structure, a “family.” While I have no problem now, at age sixty-seven, being by myself while I go through transitions, at age thirty-three I was adrift on every level. I needed anchoring.
I had b
ecome friends with Ken Cocheral, a charismatic black attorney in Detroit who was, among other things, lawyer for the League of Black Workers. I confided to him my desire to give up my career and he surprised me by saying, “Jane, there will always be people who can be in collectives. There is no one in the movement, no real activist, who is a movie star. Stay with it, we need you. Own your leadership.”
Own my leadership? What leadership? I didn’t see myself as a leader. I saw myself as a staunch lieutenant—give me my orders and I won’t stop until I’ve carried them out. But his comment had an impact on me. It suggested that my career had broader implications beyond my own success or failure—that being successful at my work would give me more heft and a wider reach for what needed to be communicated. Maybe I could even figure out a way to make movies that themselves had something of value to say. But to be honest, the notion of having to step up to the plate and address my film career seriously felt overwhelming.
I moved back to Los Angeles and found a place of my own. It was a rental in downtown Los Angeles just off the Hollywood Freeway, at the end of a cul-de-sac, crouched in a perpetual haze of smog. Vanessa and Dot were with me, and it was home base for most of the next eight months while Donald Sutherland and I worked on a film comedy called Steelyard Blues.
I had sold all my belongings, collected lovingly over the years in France when such things could be had for a price: the blond Biedermeier pieces, the pair of red lacquered Ruhlmann chairs from the 1930s, the Roy Lichtenstein rug—all gone. I wish I had them today, but I needed the cash. Now, instead of noteworthy furniture-cum–works of art, I did what others in the movement did back then: Wooden cable spools were my tables, mattresses on the floor served as beds and couches. They didn’t look bad covered with the bright cotton fabrics I’d brought back from India. Some lamps and beanbag chairs from the nearest Salvation Army center rounded out the meager furnishings, and to tell you the truth, I was perfectly happy. The differences between the way I lived and the way those I worked with lived were beginning to disappear, and I was able to answer the question that had scared me during my Rocky Mountain epiphany: Yes! I can give “things” up; my desire to come down off the mountain was not a momentary whim.
My accountant, fearing the profits from the sale of the French farm and my furniture would disappear overnight into the coffers of some new movement organization or other, had encouraged me to hire someone to live with me and keep fiduciary control over my expenses. Ellen Lustbader was her name, and she was a five-foot-eleven blonde with a ready sense of humor, game for just about anything I threw at her. We called her Ruby Ellen, and I was grateful for her support and good company during those difficult in-between-husbands years.
Every morning I drove Vanessa to a preschool cooperative, and once a week I took my turn there as a parent-helper. I was still suffering with bulimia and probably didn’t do a very good job. I was always tired.
On Vanessa’s third birthday I baked a cake using a recipe from Adelle Davis’s Let’s Cook It Right. As I was carrying it into the living room, where a group of her schoolmates were eagerly gathered, the cake slid off the platter and broke into little pieces on the hardwood floor like a brick, which made the kids howl with laughter! Vanessa had a look that seemed to say “What’s a kid to do with a mom like this?”
I felt I just couldn’t get anything right when it came to mothering. For a while Vanessa took dance classes at UCLA, where children pirouetted around on tiptoes waving long, colorful streamers above their heads. Often she’d want to do encores in our living room for me, but she always refused to dance unless I promised to keep my eyes closed. She was a funny one—imaginative, feisty, unusually bright, with a tawny, tomboyish beauty. I loved her and hated the distance that remained between us. I didn’t share the physical closeness she had with her father (to whom I was still legally married). Whenever a photo was taken of us together, there would be an I-don’t-want-to-be-here expression on her beautiful little face—like me with my own mother. I needed to forgive my mother and to love myself more before I would learn how to be a better mother to Vanessa.
While I was living in the charmless house on the cul-de-sac, Donald and I launched a new organization in Hollywood aimed at harnessing the industry’s powerful antiwar voice. We named it the Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice (EIPJ) and invited everyone we knew in Hollywood to its launch in the grand ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Six hundred people from all walks of the industry turned out, including Barbra Streisand, Burt Lancaster, Tuesday Weld, Jennifer Jones, Richard Widmark, Don Johnson, Kent McCord—the sheer volume of star power was astonishing. The problem was that neither Donald nor I had ever started an organization before and weren’t equipped to give leadership to this uniquely rambunctious group.
EIPJ should have made a big difference, but instead of focusing on how we could use the considerable talent and influence of this unique group of people to mobilize for ending the war, we got caught up in more divisive and diversionary issues—like whether or not film studios should be nationalized. Our meetings began to get longer and longer. It was easy to understand why most of the Hollywood folks drifted away after a time.
Today I can look back on the EIPJ experience with some forgiveness of my leadership failings. Leadership is complicated, especially for women. Men grow up in a culture that assumes their leadership. Even men who may not be true leaders are taught, explicitly or implicitly, what leadership looks like; it’s passed down to men through generations.
Women were traditionally denied this generational fix on leadership, and this became evident in the early seventies. So we stumbled and groped. Now, as the women’s movement has matured, we’ve made the delicious discovery that most women’s style of leadership is very different from men’s—more circular and inclusive than hierarchical and elite. For women it’s not about having leadership over. It’s about facilitating a process that evokes everyone’s inherent leadership abilities. This isn’t because women are morally better than men; we just don’t have our masculinity to prove. Of course, there are some women (I won’t name names) who are ventriloquists for the patriarchy, who try to get seats at the table by doing things the way men do them. But over the last decades we’ve discovered that despite our vaginas and breasts, if we do things the same old way, we’re going to get the same old I-win-you-lose results, rather than win-win.
I was the leader within the Entertainment Industry for Peace and Justice organization, but because I lacked confidence, I didn’t “own” my leadership and was always looking over my shoulder for someone who could take over and really lead.
I continue to be amazed at the number of women I consider strong leaders, who still worry about “taking up too much space in meetings,” worry about being “too assertive” in expressing their ideas and needs, become little girls again in the presence of male “authority” figures. Once we women are able to own our leadership, to embody our power (and more and more women are—including myself), the world will be a better place indeed.
In June 1971, The New York Times began publishing articles based on secret government documents—the Pentagon Papers. It electrified the antiwar movement. Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon insider and ex-marine who had been one of the authors of the documents, together with a RAND Corporation researcher named Anthony Russo, had spent months copying and smuggling the documents out of RAND. As Ellsberg wrote in his 2002 book, Secrets, “What I had in my safe at RAND was seven thousand pages of documentary evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years, to conceal plans and actions of mass murder. I decided I would stop concealing that myself. I would get it out somehow.” Even Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, when he read the study he had commissioned, said to a friend, “You know they could hang people for what’s in here.”
Of course the Nixon Justice Department freaked and issued an injunction against The New York Times, ordering the paper to cease publication of the documents. But the Supreme C
ourt ruled that the paper could continue publishing the articles. Nixon then got a federal grand jury in Los Angeles to indict Ellsberg and Russo for violating the Espionage Act and stealing government documents. All charges were eventually dropped against Ellsberg, for reasons of government misconduct against him.
No one knew it at the time, but the leaking of the Pentagon Papers was what led Nixon to create his team of “plumbers,” so named because their job was to stop “leaks.” Their first assignment was to burglarize Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in the hope of finding something they could blackmail him with. The administration feared that Ellsberg knew that Nixon had began discussing the use of nuclear weapons in North Vietnam in 1969, and they wanted to silence him. The plumbers’ Watergate assignment—well, that’s history.
One day in the fall of 1970 while I was filming Klute and helping to plan the Winter Soldier investigation, a man named Howard Levy came to see me. He was a celebrity in the GI movement, a physician who had done prison time for refusing to train special forces going to Vietnam. He pitched an idea to Donald Sutherland and me: Why not put together an antiwar alternative to Bob Hope’s traditional pro-war entertainment? He even had a name for it: FTA.
Those letters formed a popular acronym among GIs (Fuck the Army), but for us (publicly, at least) it meant Free the Army. Howard wanted us to try to bring the show to U.S. military bases both stateside and in the Pacific. I found the concept irresistible. Here was a way to support the GI movement—which I increasingly felt was the cutting edge of the peace movement—and to do so using my professional skills. Acting and activism—together at last!
