Truth & Beauty

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.

Tom Hayden

The NATION
Posted March 4, 2004