Jane Fonda: My Life So Far
By Jane Fonda
Ebury Press, 2005
599 pp, $49.95 (hb)
Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon
By Mary Hershberger
The New Press, 2005
228 pp, $39.95 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"Feed Fonda to the whales" was one of the limp-witted placards of the far-right Lyndon la Rouche organisation that greeted Jane Fonda at US airports in the late 70s. What drove the US pro-war and anti-environment right wing to elevate the award-winning actor to the top of their hate list is explained by Fonda in her captivating autobiography, and by Mary Hershberger in her accomplished book on Fonda's opposition to the US war against Vietnam.
The 1937 child of Hollywood actor, Henry Fonda, Jane had a childhood marked by body image problems and low self-esteem before the political '60s took a hand. Black voter registration campaigns in Mississippi, the 1968 "May events" of rebellion and strike in France, and Native American struggles for land rights, radicalised the young starlet.
Then came the Vietnam War. A former Miss Army Recruiter, Fonda reveals how her liberal illusions in US "moral integrity, justice and desire for peace" were undermined by the US military death machine in action. She attended protests against the war in Paris, assisted US army resisters in Europe, and visited "GI coffeehouses" in the US where anti-war active-duty soldiers taught her about US war crimes. An anti-war road tour in 1970 was "a blur of speeches, press conferences and arrests" for the former sex symbol from Barbarella turned anti-war activist.
Fonda was an organiser of people, fund-raising and actions such as the "Winter Soldier Investigation" in 1971, a national investigation of war crimes that documented systematic US military atrocities and showed them as the inevitable outcome of government and military policies.
President Nixon felt threatened by the popular young actress and the FBI, CIA and US Army Intelligence began the compilation of a massive 20,000 pages of secret files on Fonda. The FBI planned sedition charges against her, poring over transcripts of her speeches and telephone conversations for signs of "disloyalty" against the military or the government and advocacy of violence or communism.
Fonda was a victim of the FBI's COINTELPRO, an illegal, covert program to disrupt and discredit members of the anti-war movement. The FBI fed black propaganda on Fonda as a violent terrorist to Hollywood gossip columnists and had her arrested by US customs in Cleveland in a frame-up for drug-smuggling. The screaming headlines went quiet, however, when the drugs turned out to be vitamins and prescription medicines.
A warmer reception awaited Fonda from military audiences at performances of Free the Army, a Fonda-inspired political revue that played to 15,000 US service personnel near military bases in the US and 64,000 in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines. The show was "a biting blend of political satire and irreverent humour", says Hershberger, which challenged the military hierarchy, the Vietnam war and the concept of war itself.
When Fonda was invited to North Vietnam in 1972, her public profile (she had just won her first Academy Award for Klute) ensured she would receive special attention from the US pro-war right. Dodging US bombs, Fonda visited Hanoi to collect evidence on the (officially denied) US bombing of dikes, which would result in mass drowning and starvation.
Nixon was enraged. As he was pulling out US ground troops, bombing of the north was dramatically escalating, killing hundreds of civilians a week and, as Hershberger neatly summarises, "Fonda wanted Americans to remember that. Nixon wanted them to forget." Charging Fonda with treason would help to discredit her as an opponent of the continuing war.
Pro-Nixon Republicans pursued Fonda through the House Internal Security Committee. The attorney-general, however, failed to join in the treason witch-hunt, believing that the jailing of a popular film star was not a vote-winner in an election year with public support for the war plummeting. The Department of Justice also could not find anything in Fonda's actions in Hanoi that would stand up in court to a treason charge.
Only later, in the eighties, were some of Fonda's Hanoi exploits to return to fuel a libel campaign against her. Fonda had spoken on Radio Hanoi, not to urge US pilots to desert, however, but to argue the case for withdrawal. She had also been photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese Army anti-aircraft gun, but she had sat there merely to rest, not from a desire to shoot at US pilots. Right-wing patriots, however, made hay against Fonda's "GI Jane" reputation with this "evidence" that Fonda had seen US soldiers as the enemy. As Hershberger comments, the debate was now framed such that the scandal lay not in the bombing of innocent villagers but with those who opposed it.
Another manufactured scandal was Fonda's alleged responsibility for causing US prisoners of war (POWs) to be tortured. Fonda had met with seven US POWs in Hanoi, all of whom had become openly critical of the war. After the US withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, however, the Pentagon stage-managed a tour of a handful of hard-line, pro-war ex-POW pilots, one of whom falsely claimed to have been tortured into meeting with Fonda to denounce the war. This incendiary allegation, although undermined by fellow prisoners, developed a fanciful but vicious life of its own, aided by threats from senior officers to court-martial former POWs who did not renounce their calls for an end to the war.
As Hershberger explains, the Pentagon was using fabricated tales of POW torture to derail the US government's promise of reconstruction aid to Vietnam made during peace negotiations in 1973. This was part of the rewriting of the war as one of US suffering at the hands of the Vietnamese who did not deserve one cent of aid or one tear of sympathy. The POW torture myth fed feelings of betrayal and anger amongst super-patriots and extreme right-wing veterans' groups, and flamed into resentment of Fonda, or at least their caricature of her.
Fonda's starring role as "Hanoi Jane" in this Pentagon production was a key part of the hunt for internal scapegoats for the war the US lost. Fonda, however, had not urged the shooting down of US pilots or the torture of US POWs. She had, in fact, supported the troops in the best way possible - by ending the war and getting them home.
The end of the war did not close the radical chapter of Fonda's life. She made the award-winning Coming Home (about Vietnam veterans), and she supported the political and Senate campaigns of her second partner, anti-war activist Tom Hayden, through her film earnings and multi-million dollar exercise video industry.
Many of Fonda's concerns on the environment, living standards and rights of workers found their way into her films ("stylistically mainstream films Middle America could relate to", she says) such as The China Syndrome in 1979 about the cover-up of a nuclear power plant meltdown and "large corporations that were willing to risk the public's welfare to protect their profits". Her 1980 film, 9 to 5, scored with many women office workers and helped in their unionisation drive.
Although funding religion, Fonda also attends pro-choice rallies. Although blaming war on patriarchy rather than imperialism, she also accepts that gender roles, not Y chromosomes, condition many men to violent behaviour. She deplores the Bush administration's attacks on Iraq, free speech and civil rights under cover of the "war on terror".
Fonda's autobiography, despite the verbosity of some of her less radical liberal enthusiasms running away with her, is engaging, entertaining and, especially on the Vietnam War, spirited. Hershberger is expert, objective and no less impassioned on the war than Fonda. In both books, we see a Jane Fonda as an actor and activist who embodied a set of values that helped to make the world a better, more human, place.
As a celebrity who could voice views that would otherwise not be heard amidst the warmongers' din, Fonda felt she had a democratic duty to expose government lies and to stop the slaughter of war. In siding with the Vietnamese people, and with US soldiers as victims and resisters against the war-planners, Fonda stood tall. She did so with composure and courage despite intense pressure from government and other patriots. She remains proud of her stance against a terrible and criminal war. So, too, can we be proud of Jane Fonda.
From Green Left Weekly, May 31, 2006.
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