My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  It seemed that every news service in the world was in attendance. Simone Signoret was there as well—my unique support system. The conference was hosted by the well-known French photographer Roger Pic. I do not recall if I carried the film out of Vietnam myself or if Guillaume had it shipped from Hanoi, but unfortunately, somewhere between Hanoi and Paris the sound track was erased, so I had to show it without sound.

  I explained carefully how the antipersonnel bombs entered the dikes at a slant and exploded inside the mud walls, doing damage that was invisible in aerial photographs and difficult to repair. I explained that monsoon season was almost upon Vietnam and that if the weakened dikes should give way, hundreds of thousands of people would drown or die from starvation. It was all there on the screen: the rubble of the cities and hamlets I’d visited, the damage to the dikes, the craters, the close-up of where an antipersonnel bomb had entered the side of the dikes, and the beginning of my meeting with the POWs.

  I showed the silent film again at a press conference in New York City—and that was the last I saw of it. It has disappeared. All that is left now is a photo that appeared in a number of magazines, of me at the press conference with the image of some of the POWs visible on the screen behind me. I do not know if the footage was stolen by spooks or lost innocently.

  I told the press that I hoped people would realize, as I and other foreign visitors had, that the repeated bombing of civilian targets and dikes was intentional and must be stopped, and how the damage was concentrated where the dikes were most strategic. I told them that the POWs had given me messages for people back home, saying that they were afraid of being bombed and asking their families to support George McGovern for president. (I carried a packet of letters from POWs back to the States with me.)

  At the Paris press conference, pointing to the film showing two of the POWs I met with.

  (AP/Wide World Photos)

  I was asked how I felt about being accused of treason. I tried to give a “bamboo”-type response and was quoted in the papers the next day saying, “What is a traitor? . . . I cried every day I was in Vietnam. I cried for America. The bombs are falling on Vietnam, but it is an American tragedy. . . . Given the things that America stands for, a war of aggression against the Vietnamese people is a betrayal of the American people. That is where treason lies . . . those who are doing all they can to end the war are the real patriots.”

  Tom was waiting for me at the airport in New York City when I landed. He whisked me downtown to the Chelsea Hotel, where we holed up for the night like two refugees. I needed rest. I needed to be held.

  Tom felt that because he had encouraged me to go, he was responsible for the trouble I’d gotten into, and he promised to try to make it up to me. Both of us realized that it had been a mistake for me to go alone. But I never felt that he was responsible. I hate buck passers.

  As we lay in bed in our funky Chelsea Hotel room, I told Tom that I wanted us to have a child together as a pledge of hope for the future. We held each other and wept.

  In the period of time right after my return, Representatives Fletcher Thompson (R-Ga.) and Richard Ichord (D-Mo.) accused me of treason. They said I had urged American troops to disobey orders and had given “aid and comfort to the enemy.” Representative Thompson, who was running for the U.S. Senate from Georgia, tried to subpoena me to testify before the House Internal Security Council (the updated version of the House Un-American Activities Committee made infamous in the fifties by Senator Joseph McCarthy), but his efforts were blocked. (He subsequently lost the election.) The committee issued me a subpoena, but when my lawyer, Leonard Weinglass, and I sent them a letter saying I was ready to appear, we were notified that they had adjourned the hearings and would contact us when a new date was set. We never heard from them again.

  Soon thereafter, Vincent Albano Jr., chairman of the New York County Republican Committee, called for a boycott of my films.

  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. This was the first time, however, that the issue of treason was being raised.

  The accusations about the bombing of the dikes that I along with others brought back from Vietnam caused an uproar within the administration. UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim held a press conference and said that he’d heard through private sources that the dikes had been bombed. Then Secretary of State William P. Rogers said: “These charges are part of a carefully planned campaign by the North Vietnamese and their supporters to give worldwide circulation to this falsehood.” Meanwhile, Sergeant Lonnie D. Franks, an intelligence specialist stationed at Udorn Air Base in Thailand was due to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about air force officers involved in bombing falsification of other targets. That investigation was eventually dropped, and only General John Lavelle, the commanding officer who had ordered (or overseen) the falsification, was held responsible.

  While the United States may not have been waging an all-out bombing campaign to obliterate the dikes, they were targeting the dikes during the spring of 1972. The evidence that I, and many others, saw was incontrovertible. Perhaps this was done as a threat to get the North Vietnamese to cave in at the negotiating table. The massive B-52 bombing of Hanoi that would stun the world come Christmas was admittedly done to achieve this same thing. Both efforts would fail.

  Despite the saber rattling, the Justice Department found I had violated no statutes, including those covering sedition. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst announced in San Francisco on August 14 that there would be no prosecutions. Later, when questioned about why he never prosecuted me under the charge of sedition, Kleindienst stated:

  There was a real difficulty technically with respect to proof, but over and above that, I felt and I think most of us shared this view in the Administration, that the damage was slight and the interest in favor of free expression was very high. . . . I thought the interests in favor of free speech in an election year far outweighed any specific advantage of prosecuting a young girl like that who was in Vietnam acting rather foolish.

  Two months after my return from Hanoi, President Nixon was informed in a daily briefing paper that “according to excerpts being studied by Congress, Fonda used her Hanoi radio time to pose questions to the U.S. GIs, but limited her advice to pleas for ending the bombing, and didn’t urge defections.” The following month the FBI gave my files to three of their own in-house reviewers, asking them to examine what the agency had on me and assess whether or not the clandestine investigation should be continued. All three determined that it should be discontinued. One of the three reviewers, a Ms. Herwig, wrote to the FBI, “There are more dangerous characters around needing our attention. Unless the [Department of Justice] orders us to continue, these investigations should be closed. The basis for investigation appears to be—pick someone you dislike and start investigating.”

  More dangerous characters indeed. Five men using funds from a secret Republican campaign fund had recently been arrested trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee. One of them was the security director for CREEP, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. At the end of September it would be revealed that while serving as attorney general, John Mitchell had controlled a slush fund used for illegal espionage and sabotage operations against the Democrats and other political opponents.

  The bombing of the dikes stopped that August.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FRAMED

  We have not grown used to knavery, and to that species of untruth which lies so near to the truth as to be able to wear its clothing, and to turn upon the idealist its seductive and silencing countenance.

  —DANIEL BERRIGAN,

  Night Flight to Hanoi

  MUCH HAS BEEN SAID about my actions against the Vietnam War, and you have just read about my controversial trip. I went because I wanted to expose the lies of the Nixon administration and help stop the killing on both sides.
I believe the trip made it harder for Nixon to distract the public’s attention from his escalation of the air war, and perhaps it helped end the bombing of the dikes. I wanted to speak to U.S. pilots as I had done on so many occasions during the FTA tour. I did not ask them to desert. I once read in a congressional report that A. William Olson, a representative of the Justice Department, said after studying transcripts of my broadcasts that I had asked the military “to do nothing other than to think.” Nothing I did caused any POWs to be tortured. Torture in the prison camps of North Vietnam had stopped by 1969, three years before my trip.

  I do regret that I allowed myself to get into a situation where I was photographed on an antiaircraft gun. I have explained how that happened and how it sent a message that was the opposite of what I was feeling and doing. I regret the angry remark I made when the POWs returned home that enabled apologists for the war to orchestrate the myth of “Hanoi Jane.” I was framed and turned into a lightning rod for people’s anger, frustration, misinformation, and confusion about the war.

  The myth of “Hanoi Jane” lingers today; I would like to speak to the charges.

  After I came back from North Vietnam, the trip wasn’t a big story. While there was a brouhaha about it behind the scenes at the White House, publicly little fuss was made—nothing on television and one small article in The New York Times. After all, there had been almost three hundred Americans before me who had gone to Hanoi, and more than eighty broadcasts by Americans over Radio Hanoi had preceded mine. Once the Justice Department announced they had nothing to prosecute me for, what flap there was seemed to evaporate.

  The mythmaking began in February 1973—after the U.S. POWs had returned home in a lavish “Operation Homecoming.” No previous American POWs had ever received this type of welcome. The combat troops certainly didn’t, and this made me angry. I saw that Nixon was using the event to create something that resembled victory. It was as close as he would come.

  For four years the administration had seen to it that the issue of torture of U.S. POWs in North Vietnam was front-page news. There appears to be a reason for this, though no one knew it at the time. Starting in 1969, when the torture stories began to appear, Nixon had begun secret plans for an escalation of the war, including a major bombing offensive of North Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong harbor, and nuclear contingency plans. This would be a hard pill for the American public to swallow—unless the North Vietnamese could be demonized in a way that would resonate personally with Americans. Thus the torture of the POWs—and securing their release—became the justification for continuing and escalating the war.* 6

  Once the POWs were home, the Pentagon and White House handpicked some of the highest-ranking POWs—senior officers—to travel the national media circuit, some of them telling of torture. These media stories were allowed to become the official narrative, the universal “POW story,” giving the impression that all the men had been subjected to systematic torture—right up to the end—and that torture was the policy of the North Vietnamese government.

  In particular, a Lieutenant Commander David Hoffman (who was among the POWs I met in Hanoi—the one who raised his arm above his head and asked me to tell his wife) was getting extensive media coverage with his story of torture. On national television he claimed that his meeting with me (and another one a week or so later with former attorney general Ramsey Clark) had caused him to be tortured—that is, he was tortured to force him to meet me and feign opposition to the war. I do not believe that this was so.

  In Vietnam in 1973 Hoffman appeared six times at meetings with antiwar visitors, more than almost any other POW. Film footage taken by U.S. delegations at several of these meetings—footage I have actually reviewed—shows Hoffman appearing healthy and unusually verbal in his opposition to the war. He also signed antiwar statements. He has never claimed he was tortured to attend those other meetings or to sign those statements. But the visits with Ramsey Clark and with me were widely publicized, and I suppose he needed the allegation of torture to explain his attendance at them. Perhaps more important, the government needed a way to malign Ramsey Clark and me.* 7

  According to books written by some POWs, conditions in the POW camps improved in the four years preceding their release—that is, from 1969 until 1973. They describe how the food got better, how they were given roommates and allowed time in the game room, how there was volleyball, Ping-Pong, and exercise. This explains why, upon their release, Newsweek magazine wrote, “The [torture] stories seemed incongruent with the men telling them—a trim, trig lot who, given a few pounds more flesh, might have stepped right out of a recruiting poster.”

  Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Edison Miller, who was also among the POWs I met in Hanoi, was in the same camp as Hoffman. He says that about eighty to one hundred POWs were being held there.

  “The visits with delegations were strictly volunteer,” Miller told me recently. “I know of only two or three guys out of one hundred who didn’t want to meet with you. At the least, it was a way to break up the boredom of the day.” Hoffman’s co-pilot and prison roommate, Norris Charles, agrees that there were more than enough POWs in the compound who wanted to meet with me and with Clark, and that he never saw or heard of any torture in his camp. Navy commander Walter Wilbur, who was also in the Zoo, has said the same thing. In the spring of 1973, before Hoffman made his claims of torture, Commander Wilbur was released and told the Los Angeles Times about my visit with the POWs, saying, “She could see that we were healthy and had not been tortured.”

  Hoffman’s roommate said there was no torture; according to the POWs themselves, torture stopped in 1969. Not that any torture is justified or that anyone who had been tortured should have been prevented from telling about it. But the White House presented a distorted picture of what actually occurred.

  In my anger at how the entire POW situation was being manipulated and how they were treated as opposed to the ground troops, I made a mistake I deeply regret. I said that the POWs claiming torture were liars, hypocrites, and pawns. I said, “I’m quite sure that there were incidents of torture. . . . But the pilots who are saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic, I believe that that’s a lie.”

  I firmly believe that the POWs I met with had not been tortured. But what I didn’t know at the time was that prior to 1969 there had in fact been systematic torture of POWs. I found it difficult to believe, based on the Vietnamese I met during my visit, that torture would be approved—any more than I could have believed, prior to the Winter Soldier investigation or the Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prison scandals, that GIs could commit atrocities. I was wrong and I am sorry.

  My heart had always been with the soldiers, and I should have been clear that my anger was at the Nixon administration. It was the administration, in its cynical determination to keep hostilities alive, that tried to use the POWs. It was the deceitful blaming of me for torture, together with the Nixon administration’s manipulation of the entire POW story and my unfortunate reaction to it, that was responsible for a dramatic upsurge of attacks against me. These, as well as a wave of inflammatory stories about my trip to Hanoi, are what launched the myth of “Hanoi Jane.”

  I became a lightning rod. People who defended the war saw me as antisoldier—something I am not and never have been, as I believe this book shows. Even though I knew the attacks on me were based on lies, my heart ached from them, because I never blamed the soldiers for the war or for any atrocities that were committed.

  The attacks didn’t let up. By the end of the nineties, truly grotesque lies were again circulated about me over the Internet (and continue as of this writing), although even former POW Captain Mike McGrath (USN ret.), president of the organization Nam-POW, says that the story circulated on the Internet is a hoax.

  In spite of the efforts to demonize me, a 1976 Redbook magazine poll had me as one of the ten most admired women in America. In 1985, another poll—the U.S. News–Roper poll—showed that I was rated the numb
er-one heroine of young Americans, and the Ladies’ Home Journal–Roper poll that same year listed me as the fourth most admired woman in America. My books and videos continued to be best-sellers and my films, at least through the early eighties, were very successful. I tell you this not to boast but because I think it’s important to show that the attacks and lies aimed at me seemed not to be sticking with a sizable number of Americans.

  But the attacks didn’t let up. In 1988, when it was announced that I would be filming Stanley & Iris with Robert De Niro in Waterbury, Connecticut, a furor was unleashed that raged for months and was reported widely in the press. The uproar was launched by ultraconservative elements in the area, led by Gaetano Russo, a World War II veteran and former chair of the local Republican Party committee who had been defeated in his campaigns both for mayor and for Congress. Russo formed the American Coalition Against Hanoi Jane, held town meetings, and tried to pass resolutions to bar me from Waterbury. He was joined in his efforts by the local Republican congressman, John G. Rowland, who later became governor of Connecticut and resigned in 2004 in the face of a federal corruption investigation and threats of impeachment.

  No sooner was it announced that I would be filming in Waterbury than a Ku Klux Klan flag began to fly across the street from the Waterbury newspaper and several KKK members attended a meeting at the VFW hall in Naugatuck, trying to whip up the hostility against me. The Naugatuck Vietnam vets told the KKK to leave. But there was a large population of Vietnam veterans in the area and the controversy quickly caught on with them. As Rich Roland (retired First Marine Division, Seventh Marines) from Waterbury told me recently, “You were a lightning rod for the vets. A lot of guys had come back and didn’t feel accepted as people. There were all those feelings of anger and frustration about our war experiences that had never been expressed and they all focused on you. After all, what could we say to the government?”