Jane Fonda Rides Again

Jane Fonda after being arrested on drug charges in Cleveland in 1970. The “drugs” were tested and found to be vitamins.

I recently finished Jane Fonda’s autobiography, My Life, So Far, which I recommend especially if your interests include the intersection of showbiz and politics, as mine do.

Now Fonda has announced she’s coming out to protest the current war by taking a bus tour across country. She made a similar cross-country trek in the 1960’s, traveling to military towns and even onto bases to meet with active duty soldiers and returning veterans who opposed the Vietnam War. She’ll be traveling with Iraqi war veterans on the upcoming trip.

In her autobiography, we learn that Fonda was introduced to the dark side of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam while living abroad during the Kennedy era. She was married to her first husband, film director Roger Vadim, and living in France, the country from which we had recently inherited le guerre d’ Indochine. The source of her indoctrination would suprise her critics. She learned that our government was being less than truthful about Vietnam from active duty U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe who had recently returned from the war in Southeast Asia.

In fact, almost all of Jane Fonda’s antiwar activism was in support of antiwar veterans groups, up to, including and after her trip to Hanoi in 1972.

She was good friends with Ron Kovic, the disabled vet whose story was told in “Born on the Fourth of July,” and who served as the creative inspiration for “Coming Home,” the movie Fonda produced about the Vietnam veterans’ experience that won three Oscars in 1979.

She regrets being filmed sitting on an anti-aircraft weapon used to shoot at U.S. bombers, and I agree it was a bad moment in the propaganda war between Washington and Hanoi. At the same time, when that footage came out many months after she’d returned from Hanoi in 1972, I was glad she’d gone to North Vietnam, and it really didn’t bother me that she was filmed with the gun.

I was 17 years old – and throughout my adolescence I’d grown increasingly aware that my government had placed a target on my back. They were waiting for the magic day I turned 18 so I could be shipped overseas, with tens of thousands of other hapless American boys, where we supposed to fight and die for a cause that no one believed in.

I had no beef whatsoever with the people of Vietnam – and less than any interest in going over there and getting my gay ass shot off. I see now that it was wrong to blame the soldiers for the war – but I can’t reinvent the reality of 1972. I was against anyone who was for the war, whether they were conscripted or went freely.

I was radicalized by the senselessness of it all, and by the helplessness of regular Americans to stop the war. Being a youngster, I needed heroes to inspire me. Jane Fonda was one of those heroes then. She was not a major influence my life, but I saw her as someone who took action and used what she had – celebrity and money – to fight the good cause. I saw her as a true patriot – and still do.

Today I agree with Jane Fonda that what ended the war in Vietnam was primarily antiwar activism, so hate her if you will but it was Fonda, and all of us who protested, who brought that tragic, wasteful chapter in U.S. history to its ignoble end.

Now it appears that the time has come to do it all over again.

Connect: