When Jane
Fonda traded in her Ho Chi Minh sandals and Viet Cong pajamas for a
pair of tights and a leotard, most Americans quickly forgot how the
illustrious star of stage and screen had only a few years earlier
been one of communist Vietnam's most loyal and fiery supporters.
Fonda's involvement with the Vietnam War began in 1967, after
several visits with French Communists and underground
revolutionaries in this country convinced her America was the
bastard nation of the world.
Using her
wealth and influence, she managed to garner support from American
college campuses, advocating communism and encouraging rebellion and
anarchy against the U.S. government. In a speech to Duke University
students in 1970, Fonda told the gathering, "If you understood what
Communism was, you would hope and pray on your knees that we would
someday become Communist."
Not
content with spreading her poison within the home ranks, Fonda began
soliciting returned Vietnam veterans to speak publicly about alleged
atrocities committed by American soldiers against Vietnamese women
and children. The broadcasts were coordinated with North Vietnamese
officials in Canada.
A series
of "Coffee Houses" established outside U.S. military bases was
another scheme Fonda concocted to counter the positive effect
patriotic entertainers such as Bob Hope, Martha Raye, and according
to Fonda "their ilk" were having on the morale of U.S. forces.
There, special employees would attract off-duty servicemen, get them
relaxed, and then urge them to desert. According to some of those
men approached, they were also promised jobs and money if they
deserted.
Fonda was
the major financial support to one of the most damaging pro-Hanoi
groups called Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), which was led
for a time by Robert Muller, a Vietnam veteran who had been shot in
the spine. VVAW, at its peak membership, mustered about 7,000, some
of whom had been indoctrinated in the "Coffee Houses." That
organization was later led by Vietnam vet John Kerry, now a U.S.
senator and former co-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
POW/MIA Affairs.
In 1972,
Fonda took her pro-communist radicalism to North Vietnam. She
visited that country's Russian built anti-aircraft emplacements and
cheered the spirits of its communist gunners by wearing a gunners
steel helmet and peeping through the gun sight, "looking for one of
those blue eyed murderers."
At a time
when 50,000 U.S. servicemen had already died on the battlefields of
Vietnam, Fonda sided with the communists, making radio broadcasts
from Hanoi designed to break the morale of U.S. fighting forces
while encouraging the North Vietnamese to fight harder and kill more
Americans. Fonda's Hanoi radio broadcasts and propaganda films were
especially painful and damaging to American servicemen held as
prisoners of war by the Hanoi Reds. Communist interrogators used the
Fonda recordings, along with starvation and torture in attempting to
brainwash American POWs into becoming turncoats.
Upon
returning to the United States, Fonda told the world press that U.S.
prisoners of war were being well treated and not tortured. Her
outrageous claims were later exposed when American POWs were finally
freed and told of years of agonizing tortures and inhuman treatment.
Fonda responded, not with an apology, but with an accusation calling
our returned POWs "liars and hypocrites." Fonda's actions stirred up
a firestorm in America, prompting nationwide demands that she be
tried for treason.
David
Hoffman, a former POW who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1971,
said that he had been tortured because of Fonda's visit to Hanoi.
"The torture resulted in a permanent injury that plagues me to this
day," says Hoffman, who suffers a disfigured arm inflicted by brutal
communist guards at the POW camp known as the "Zoo."
"When
Jane Fonda turned up, she asked that some of us come out and talk
with her," he recalled bitterly. "No one wanted to. The guards got
very upset, because they sensed the propaganda value of a famous
American war protestor proving how well they were treating us.
"A couple
of guards came to my cell and ordered me out. I resisted, and they
got violently angry. My arm had been broken when I was shot down,
and the Vietnamese broke it a second time. It had not healed well,
and they knew it caused me great pain. "They twisted it.
Excruciating pain ripped through my body.
"Still I
resisted and they got more violent, hitting me and shouting, 'You
must go!' I knew there was a limit to which I could push them before
they might actually kill me.
"I was
dragged out to see Fonda. I decided to play the role. I knew if I
didn't, not only would I suffer - but the other guys would be
tortured or beaten or worse. "When I saw Fonda and heard her antiwar
rhetoric, I was almost sick to my stomach. She called us criminals
and murderers.
"When I
had to talk to the camera, I used every phony cliché I could. My arm
hung limply at my side, and every move caused me pain which showed
in my face. \
"When it
was over, Fonda unbelievably did not see through the ruse - or she
didn't want to. I was taken away politely - then shoved back into my
cell.
"I
detested Jane Fonda then and I detest her now - but I would fight to
the death to protect her right to say what she thinks.
"What she
did was a slap in the face to every American. It was wrong,
ill-advised and stupid. But it was her right. Unfortunately, it was
not my right to refuse to be seen with her.
"There is
no way I will ever forget what she did to me. I have the reminder
here - in an arm that can never be normal again.
In late
January, 1973, Fonda divorced her husband and three days later
married pro-communist radical leader Tom Hayden, who had founded the
revolutionary Students For Democratic Society in 1962 and was a
defendant in the conspiracy trial of the "Chicago Seven."
In 1975,
after North Vietnam violated the 1973 "Peace Agreement" resulting in
the takeover of South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Hayden greeted the
news by saying "I see this as a result of something we have been
working toward for a long time." That "we" includes Fonda of course.
Another
infamous deed of Fonda is the naming of her son, Troy. Fonda
returned to Vietnam shortly after the war ended in 1975, with her
small son, to attend a special service being held in her honor.
Fonda was still a recognized idol and hero to the Communist regime
from her earlier years of sending money, food and moral support to
the North Vietnamese.
But the
ceremony, it turned out, was not just to recognize and honor Fonda
for her love of the Communists. Her newborn son was formally
christened and named for the Communist hero Nguyen Van Troi. Troi
was a Viet Cong sapper who was executed by the South Vietnamese in
1963 for attempting to assassinate U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara.
Immediately after the christening ceremony, the baby developed a
serious case of bronchitis, according to reports. The Vietnamese and
Fonda panicked and called for a Russian doctor. The child was
treated and Fonda and her child returned to the United States.
As a
result of the communist takeover of South Vietnam, Fonda's friends
in Hanoi turned all of Vietnam into a communist Gulag of slave labor
camps with police-state oppression and no freedom of speech, press
and worship. Millions of Vietnamese were forced to flee their
country and turned into homeless "boat people."
Years
later, Fonda was invited by NASA as V.I.P. to witness the first
space shuttle launching. Apparently, one source said, NASA and its
officials felt little or no threat from Fonda's taste for Red
Government.
In late
1987, when it became known that Fonda planned to film her new movie
"Stanley & Iris," in Waterbury, Conn., there was a huge backlash
from local veterans. Veterans held rallies, promising violent
demonstrations if the filming began. Many bumper stickers reading
"I'M NOT FONDA HANOI JANE," begin appearing throughout the
community. On June 18, 1988, Fonda flew to Waterbury in an attempt
to pacify the veterans. She met with them for four hours. Fonda
later recalled "I told them my story - why I was antiwar and why I
had gone to Vietnam."
A few
weeks later Fonda appeared on TV with Barbara Walters and apologized
saying: "I'm very sorry for some of what I did...I'd like to say
something not just to the veterans in Waterbury but to the men in
Vietnam who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of the
things I said or did. I feel I owe them an apology...There were
times when I was thoughtless and careless...I'm very sorry that I
hurt them."
The vets
did not buy it.
They said
Fonda, an award winning actress, was faking an apology because
veterans were protesting against her all over the country. As a
result of the protest, the vet said, her movies were doing badly and
she had been removed from Nabisco Shredded Wheat boxes.
The vets
said "no apology will ever erase the pictures of Jane Fonda in
giggly bliss, laughing and clapping her hands, as she mounted the
gunner's seat of a communist Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun." Bui Tin,
a former high ranking Vietnam Communist Party official and North
Vietnamese Army colonel who served on the North Vietnamese Army
general staff during the war, became disillusioned with communism
after the war and went into exile in Paris and the United States. He
testified in 1991 before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA
Affairs about his knowledge of U.S. prisoners of war.
Bui Tin
said in a recent interview by Minnesota human rights activist
Stephen Young, that Fonda's highly published support of the North
Vietnamese gave them "confidence" to continue to fight and "hold on
in the face of the battlefield reverses."
When
Fonda appeared at a press conference in Hanoi wearing a red
Vietnamese dress and declared she was "ashamed of American actions"
in the war and that she would struggle along with the communists,
"we were elated," Bui Tin said.
He said
the American antiwar movement was "essential" to the North
Vietnamese strategy for victory. "I'd say a lot of American boys
lost their lives because of the encouragement she gave the North
Vietnamese," said a former rifle platoon leader from Texas.
In
December of 1991, Hanoi Jane, the once fiery communist activist, who
advocated violent revolution to overthrow America's democracy and
the free enterprise system, married billionaire Ted Turner, a
leading American capitalist and chairman of the Atlanta based Turner
Broadcasting System Inc., the parent company of Cable News Network.
Today,
the communist architects of Ho Chi Minh's brutal war against
democracy, freedom and capitalism, which resulted in the deaths of
over 3 million North and South Vietnamese, and 58,000 American
servicemen, are now "best friends" with Western bankers and
capitalist businessmen. They are even traveling the world appealing
to foreign investors to bring more big business and money back to
Vietnam, so like Hanoi Jane, they too can be rich.
A veteran
summed it up: "It is a shame that some of those who fought so well
for America can be treated as 'forgotten ghosts' and left to rot as
POWs in Hanoi's prisons, while those like Fonda, who so passionately
supported our enemy and condemned our system of government, are now
overwhelmingly blessed by its wealth."
...By Ted Sampley
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