Ghosts of Vietnam: Jane Fonda Scores a Victory for Women’s Rights and for History

Veterans resisted the induction of the activist and actress into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. But women won out.

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It should come as no surprise that the recent selection of Jane Fonda to the National Women’s Hall of Fame stirred up a new round of hatred and distortions about her.

Greg Lazzaro, supervisor of the town of Seneca Falls, the upstate New York community where the Hall of Fame is located, introduced a resolution, considered on April 2, that called on the town board to end its support of this nonprofit.

Echoing the complaints of the Fonda haters, the resolution claimed that her 1972 visit to North Vietnam is “viewed by virtually all Veterans as treason to this country.”

A large number of veterans turned out for the town board meeting, with local Veterans of Foreign Wars Commander David Ostroski saying in his speech that Fonda “committed treason” and “didn’t care about any of us.”

But other Seneca Falls residents spoke against the resolution, and in the end the town board defeated the resolution in a 4-1 vote. That should come as no surprise. After all, Seneca Falls hosted the first women’s rights convention in the United States in 1848. On the day of the vote, storefront signs in downtown Seneca Falls proclaimed, “We Support the National Women’s Hall of Fame” and “Greg Lazzaro Does Not Speak for Me!” 

“Jane Fonda went to Vietnam in 1972. In 1973, a peace agreement was signed,” said longtime Seneca Falls resident Jean Gilroy at the April 2 meeting. “Like it or not, her actions shone a spotlight on an unjust, unlawful war that needed to end. I would like to think many lives were saved because of what she did.”

Gilroy concluded her remarks by saying: “Don’t mess with the ladies of Seneca Falls.”

Betty M. Bayer, the immediate past president of the Hall of Fame board, added, “When it comes to recognizing women’s history, we need to pay attention to who gets to tell that story.” She faulted Lazzaro for overstating how the town helps the Hall of Fame, noting that the assistance came in securing funds for a major project, not for its annual budget..

Bayer, who is a professor of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, said in an interview that Fonda has been unfairly singled out. “Because she was a figure in the media, she became, in a symbolic way, a channel to express frustration.” 

Fonda, who is eighty-one years old, has, of course, many accomplishments. In addition to her acting career–including two Academy Awards for best actress, in Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978)—she’s maintained a fiercely progressive political activism since the late 1960s.

She raised money for the Black Panthers, visited Angela Davis in prison, offered solidarity with Native Americans occupying Alcatraz. She chose to act in unapologetically political films—including China Syndrome and 9 to 5. More recently, she spent Thanksgiving 2016 with water protectors fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, and has rallied at Trump Tower with environmentalist and Gasland director Josh Fox.

But none of that matters to Fonda’s critics.

“They only want to contain her as ‘Hanoi Jane’ and punish her for it,” says Bayer. No blame goes to the Presidents who got us into this conflict. Nor is there a recognition that veterans are not of one mind about Fonda.

Photographs of Fonda in an anti-aircraft gun seat during her North Vietnam visit made her vulnerable to criticism, but she has apologized for these photos.

So what was purpose of her 1972 trip? Fonda says she went to Hanoi to help document the damage done by U.S. bombing. As she puts it in her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far, “My central purpose for making this controversial trip to Hanoi was to bring back documented evidence that the dikes I visited had been bombed, a charge the U.S. government was vehemently denying.”

But go to the Facebook page “Why We hate Jane Fonda” and you’ll find such vitriol as a posting praising the man who spit in Fonda’s face and a poster about a “Jane Fonda Memorial Urinal.”

A critical look at some of the allegations raised about Fonda over the years can be found on David Mikkelson’s fact-checking site Snopes. He refers to her meeting with seven U.S. POWs and found that, contrary to mythology, no POWs were tortured for declining to meet with Fonda or for how they behaved at the meeting. And no POWs secretly slipped Fonda messages that she turned over to the North Vietnamese.

“The persons named in inflammatory claims about this alleged incident have repeatedly and categorically denied the events they supposedly were part of,” reports Mikkelson.

Like many other visitors to Hanoi back then, Fonda brought mail for imprisoned servicemen. And Mikkelson writes that she returned carrying 241 letters from POWs to their families.

Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, says the Pentagon still can’t get its facts straight about the Vietnam War, and that Fonda has become a convenient person to blame unfairly.

“She was known to people who did not like the fact that we ‘lost’ the war,” says FitzGerald.

Seneca Falls’ Hall of Fame, incorporated in 1969, is “the nation’s oldest membership organization dedicated to honoring and celebrating the achievements of distinguished American women.”

Among the 276 women honored over the past fifty years are Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Mother Jones, and Rachel Carson. A panel of judges makes the selection from the names submitted by the public.

Fonda will be inducted in the fall, along with such other notables as activist and author Angela Davis and the late Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of New York.

In the fall, the Hall of Fame is expected to move from its cramped quarters in Seneca Falls’ historic district to the first floor of nearby 1844 Seneca Knitting Mill, which has been rehabilitated. The town helped secure funding for this project.

“She was not supporting North Vietnam. She was talking to POWs. She was supporting the peace movement at home—which involved probably more than half of the country at that point.”

The lingering effects of the war surfaced in the town board’s airing of the resolution. A couple of speakers referred to the devastating effects of Agent Orange—the dangerous defoliant sprayed by U.S planes in Vietnam. Sue Sauvageau, another of the Hall of Fame advocates, told how that was the cause of her brother’s death.

She also compared the distortion of facts surrounding Fonda to the “Swiftboating” of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

In an interview, Sauvageau, who is a former town board member as well as former board member of the Hall of Fame, believes that gender is a factor in Fonda being singled out, since many male antiwar activists made the trip to Hanoi without controversy.

“She was not supporting North Vietnam,” Sauvageau says. “She was talking to POWs. She was supporting the peace movement at home—which involved probably more than half of the country at that point.”

Perhaps the induction of Fonda to the National Women’s Hall of Fame is a recognition of this reality.