You Gotta Love Her

by Tom Hayden

The Nation - article Posted March 4, 2004

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040322&s=hayden

I was digging into the batter’s box one Saturday
morning in San Pedro a couple of years ago when the
catcher behind me muttered, "I’m a Vietnam vet, and
I’ve been waiting for twenty years to say you should be
dead or in jail for being a traitor." The umpire said
nothing. I flied out to center. Later we talked. Then
we became friends.

It turned out that his hatred was toward my ex-wife,
not me, because he believed certain website
fabrications about Jane Fonda that circulate among
veterans. Twice the Republicans in the California
legislature tried to block my seating because of my
trips to Hanoi. But I was never a target of opportunity
like my ex—more like collateral damage.

While most Americans, perhaps including that former
Yale cheerleader and elusive National Guardsman George
W. Bush and, I suspect, most Vietnam veterans, would
like to forget the past, the Vietnam War is about to be
relived this election season.

Senator John Kerry, a veteran of both the war and the
antiwar movement, is causing this national Vietnam
flashback. The right-wing attack dogs are on the hunt.
Newt Gingrich calls Kerry an "antiwar Jane Fonda
liberal," while Internet warriors post fabricated
images of Kerry and Fonda at a 1971 antiwar rally.
Welcome to dirty tricks in the age of Photoshop.

The attempted smearing of Kerry through the Fonda
"connection" is a Republican attempt to suppress an
honest reopening of our unfinished exploration of the
Vietnam era.

Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to
fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label
intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the
martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy
American reaction to false White House promises of
victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony
contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during
the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from
Baghdad. Young John Kerry’s 1971 question—"How do you
ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?"—is
more relevant than ever.

Rather than give these reopened wounds the serious
treatment they deserve, the Republicans substitute the
politics of scapegoating and sheer fantasy. Most
centrist Democrats, in turn, try to distance themselves
from controversies that recall the 1960s. There are
journalistic centrists as well, who avoid hard truths
for the sake of acceptance and legitimacy. Such
amnesia, whether unconscious or not, lends a wide
respectability to the feeble confessions of those like
Robert McNamara, who took twenty-five years to admit
that Vietnam was a "mistake" and then, when asked by
filmmaker Errol Morris why he didn’t speak out earlier,
answered, "I don’t want to go any further.... It just
opens up more controversies."

The case of Jane Fonda reveals the double standards and
hypocrisies afflicting our memories. In Tour of Duty,
the Kerry historian Douglas Brinkley describes the 1971
winter soldier investigation, which Fonda supported and
Kerry attended, where Vietnam veterans spilled their
guts about "killing gooks for sport, sadistically
torturing captured VC by cutting off ears and heads,
raping women and burning villages." Brinkley then
recounts how Kerry later told Meet the Press that "I
committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of
others," specifically taking responsibility for
shooting in free-fire zones, search-and-destroy
missions, and burning villages. Brinkley describes
these testimonies in tepid and judicious terms, calling
them "quite unsettling." By contrast, Brinkley condemns
Fonda’s 1972 visit to Hanoi as "unconscionable,"
without feeling any need for further explanation.

Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling,
but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable?

In fact, Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in
what she said and did in North Vietnam. She told the
New York Times in 1973, "I’m quite sure that there were
incidents of torture...but the pilots who were saying
it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was
systematic, I believe that’s a lie." Research by John
Hubbell, as well as 1973 interviews with POWs, shows
that Vietnamese behavior meeting any recognized
definition of torture had ceased by 1969, three years
before the Fonda visit. James Stockdale, the POW who
emerged as Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992, wrote
that no more than 10 percent of the US pilots received
at least 90 percent of the Vietnamese punishment, often
for deliberate acts of resistance. Yet the legends of
widespread, sinister Oriental torture have been
accepted as fact by millions of Americans.

Erased from public memory is the fact that Fonda’s
purpose was to use her celebrity to put a spotlight on
the possible bombing of Vietnam’s system of dikes. Her
charges were dismissed at the time by George H.W. Bush,
then America’s ambassador to the United Nations, who
complained of a "carefully planned campaign by the
North Vietnamese and their supporters to give worldwide
circulation to this falsehood." But Fonda was right and
Bush was lying, as revealed by the April-May 1972 White
House transcripts of Richard Nixon talking to Henry
Kissinger about "this shit-ass little country":

NIXON: We’ve got to be thinking in terms of an all-out
bombing attack.... I’m thinking of the dikes.

KISSINGER: I agree with you.

NIXON: ...Will that drown people?

KISSINGER: About two hundred thousand people.

It was in order to try to avert this catastrophe that
Fonda, whose popular "FTA" road show (either "Fun,
Travel, Adventure" or "Fuck the Army") was blocked from
access to military bases, gave interviews on Hanoi
radio describing the human consequences of all-out
bombing by B-52 pilots five miles above her. After her
visit, the US bombing of the dike areas slowed down,
"allowing the Vietnamese at last to repair damage and
avert massive flooding," according to Mary Hershberger.

The now legendary Fonda photo shows her with diminutive
Vietnamese women examining an antiaircraft weapon,
implying in the rightist imagination that she relished
the thought of killing those American pilots innocently
flying overhead. To deconstruct this image and what it
has come to represent, it might be helpful to look
further back in our history.

Imagine a nineteenth-century Jane Fonda visiting the
Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills before the battle at
Little Big Horn. Imagine her examining Crazy Horse’s
arrows or climbing upon Sitting Bull’s horse. Such
behavior by a well-known actress no doubt would have
infuriated Gen. George Armstrong Custer, but what would
the rest of us feel today?

In Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner played an American
soldier who went "native" and, as a result, was
attacked and brutalized as a traitor by his own men.
But we in the modern audience are supposed to respect
and idealize the Costner "traitor," perhaps because his
heroism assuages our historical guilt. Will it take
another century for certain Americans to see the Fonda
trip to Hanoi in a similar light?

The popular delusions about Fonda are a window into
many other dangerous hallucinations that pass for
historical memory in this country. Among the most
difficult to contest are claims that antiwar activists
persistently spit on returning Vietnam veterans. So
universal is the consensus on "spitting" that I once
gave up trying to refute it, although I had never heard
of a single episode in a decade of antiwar experiences.
Then came the startling historical research of a
Vietnam veteran named Jerry Lembcke, who demonstrated
in The Spitting Image (1998) that not a single case of
such abuse had ever been convincingly documented. In
fact, Lembcke’s search of the local press throughout
the Vietnam decade revealed no reports of spitting at
all. It was a mythical projection by those who felt
"spat-upon," Lembcke concluded, and meant politically
to discredit future antiwar activism.

The Rambo movies not only popularized the spitting
image but also the equally incredible claim that
hundreds of American soldiers missing in action were
being held by the Vietnamese Communists for unspecified
purposes. John Kerry’s most noted achievement in the
Senate was gaining bipartisan support, including that
of all the Senate’s Vietnam veterans, for a report
declaring the MIA legend unfounded, which led to
normalized relations. Yet millions of Americans remain
captives of this legend.

It will be easier, I am afraid, for those Americans to
believe that Jane Fonda helped torture our POWs than to
accept the testimony by American GIs that they sliced
ears, burned hooches, raped women and poisoned
Vietnam’s children with deadly chemicals. Just two
years ago many of the same people in Georgia voted out
of office a Vietnam War triple-amputee, Senator Max
Cleland, for being "soft on national defense."

If there is any cure for this mouth-foaming mass
pathology in a democracy, it may lie at the heart of
John Kerry’s campaign for the presidency. Rather than
distance ourselves from the past, as the centrist
amnesiacs would counsel, perhaps we should finally peel
back the scabs and take a closer look at why all the
wounds haven’t healed. The most meaningful experience
of John Kerry’s life was the time he spent fighting and
killing in Vietnam and then turning around to protest
the insanity of it all. Instead of wrapping himself in
fabrications, he threw his fantasies and delusions, and
metaphorically his militarism, over the White House
fence. That’s what many more Americans need to do.

If I were George W. Bush, I would be terrorized by the
eyes of those scruffy-looking veterans, the so-called
band of brothers, volunteering for duty with the Kerry
campaign. They look like men with scores to settle,
with a palpable intolerance toward the types who sent
them to war for a lie, then ignored their Agent Orange
illness, cut their GI benefits, treated them like
losers and still haven’t explained what that war was
about. They know Jane Fonda is a diversion from a
larger battlefield. They are the sort who will keep a
cerebral United States senator grounded, who have
finally figured out who their real enemies are and who
are determined that this generation hear their story
anew. They are gearing up for one last battle.
Chickenhawks better duck.