Hotel Especen; Hanoi-Vietnam :: 7 APR 95, 1911 hours:
The following public domain information is a transcript from the US Congress House Committee on Internal Security, Travel to Hostile Areas, HR 16742, 19-25 September, 1972, page 7671.
[Radio Hanoi attributes talk on DRV visit to Jane Fonda; from Hanoi in English to American servicemen involved in the Indochina War, 1 PM GMT, 22 August 1972
Text: Here's Jane Fonda telling her impressions at the end of her visit to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam; (follows recorded female voice with American accent);]
This is Jane Fonda. During my two week visit in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, I've had the opportunity to visit a great many places and speak to a large number of people from all walks of life--workers, peasants, students, artists and dancers, historians, journalists, film actresses, soldiers, militia girls, members of the women's union, writers.
I visited the (Dam Xuac) agricultural coop, where the silk worms are also raised and thread is made. I visited a textile factory, a kindergarten in Hanoi. The beautiful Temple of Literature was where I saw traditional dances and heard songs of resistance. I also saw unforgettable ballet about the guerrillas training bees in the south to attack enemy soldiers. The bees were danced by women, and they did their job well.
In the shadow of the Temple of Literature I saw Vietnamese actors and actresses perform the second act of Arthur Miller's play All My Sons, and this was very moving to me--the fact that artists here are translating and performing American plays while US imperialists are bombing their country.
I cherish the memory of the blushing militia girls on the roof of their factory, encouraging one of their sisters as she sang a song praising the blue sky of Vietnam--these women, who are so gentle and poetic, whose voices are so beautiful, but who, when American planes are bombing their city, become such good fighters.
I cherish the way a farmer evacuated from Hanoi, without hesitation, offered me, an American, their best individual bomb shelter while US bombs fell near by. The daughter and I, in fact, shared the shelter wrapped in each others arms, cheek against cheek. It was on the road back from Nam Dinh, where I had witnessed the systematic destruction of civilian targets-schools, hospitals, pagodas, the factories, houses, and the dike system.
As I left the United States two weeks ago, Nixon was again telling the American people that he was winding down the war, but in the rubble-strewn streets of Nam Dinh, his words echoed with sinister (words indistinct) of a true killer. And like the young Vietnamese woman I held in my arms clinging to me tightly--and I pressed my cheek against hers--I thought, this is a war against Vietnam perhaps, but the tragedy is America's.
One thing that I have learned beyond a shadow of a doubt since I've been in this country is that Nixon will never be able to break the spirit of these people; he'll never be able to turn Vietnam, north and south, into a neo-colony of the United States by bombing, by invading, by attacking in any way. One has only to go into the countryside and listen to the peasants describe the lives they led before the revolution to understand why every bomb that is dropped only strengthens their determination to resist.
I've spoken to many peasants who talked about the days when their parents had to sell themselves to landlords as virtually slaves, when there were very few schools and much illiteracy, inadequate medical care, when they were not masters of their own lives.
But now, despite the bombs, despite the crimes being created--being committed against them by Richard Nixon, these people own their own land, build their own schools--the children learning, literacy--illiteracy is being wiped out, there is no more prostitution as there was during the time when this was a French colony. In other words, the people have taken power into their own hands, and they are controlling their own lives.
And after 4,000 years of struggling against nature and foreign invaders--and the last 25 years, prior to the revolution, of struggling against French colonialism--I don't think that the people of Vietnam are about to compromise in any way, shape or form about the freedom and independence of their country, and I think Richard Nixon would do well to read Vietnamese history, particularly their poetry, and particularly the poetry written by Ho Chi Minh.
To her credit, during a 20/20 television interview sixteen years later in 1988 with Barbara Walters, Jane Fonda apologized for her incredibly bad judgement in going to North Vietnam and allowing herself to be used as a propaganda vehicle.
"I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did," she began. "I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm . . . very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families."
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
She's still 'Hanoi Jane'
By Robert J. Caldwell April 10, 2005
.
The most famous – make that infamous – image of Jane Fonda from her years protesting the Vietnam War was a photograph taken during her wartime visit to North Vietnam in 1972. In the photo, Fonda is sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun clasping her hands, singing, a rapturous smile on her face, a North Vietnamese helmet on her head, surrounded by grinning North Vietnamese soldiers.
Fonda, out promoting her autobiography these days, now says she regrets that particular "betrayal," and that is her word. In an interview with Leslie Stahl on CBS's "60 Minutes," Fonda said: "I will go to my grave regretting that ... It was the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine."
She expressed similar regrets in an interview in 1988 and again in 2000, when she called posing on the enemy's anti-aircraft gun "thoughtless."
Careful readers will note that "thoughtless" and "lapse of judgment" and even "betrayal" are not apologies. In truth, Jane Fonda has never apologized for eagerly lending herself and her celebrity to the wartime propaganda of an enemy state, a Stalinist dictatorship no less, that killed 58,000 Americans.
And she's not apologizing today.
Fonda did a lot more in that 1972 visit to North Vietnam than demonstrate her solidarity with those who were shooting down American pilots.
At her request, she made at least 10 broadcasts on Radio Hanoi that included calling American pilots war criminals and urging them to stop bombing North Vietnam. In a propaganda gesture heavily publicized by Hanoi, she also met with a group of coerced American prisoners of war to demonstrate, as the North Vietnamese intended, that the POWs were receiving "humane" treatment.
In fact, as we know now, nearly all American POWs in North Vietnam were brutally tortured until 1969, when Hanoi's policy changed to more selective mistreatment. One American POW was strung up from a ceiling by his broken arm until he agreed to listen to Fonda's assertions that the prisoners were being well treated.
When the POWs returned from North Vietnam in 1973 and told of their torture, Jane Fonda declared, "the POWs are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American prisoners." For good measure, she also suggested that their recollections of torture were products of "racism" toward the Vietnamese.
Does Fonda regret her propaganda broadcasts for Radio Hanoi or her role in trying to persuade the world that tortured, brutalized American POWs were receiving humane treatment? Not a bit. Is she apologizing? No.
Here's what she told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes":
"I don't think there was anything wrong with it. It's not something that I will apologize for ... we'd been saying to Richard Nixon, 'stop this'... it needed what looks now to be unbelievably controversial things. That's what I felt was needed."
During World War II, two equally deluded American women, dubbed by U.S. servicemen Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, made propaganda broadcasts from the capitals of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Both were prosecuted for treason after the war, convicted and sent to federal prison.
Fonda escaped that fate partly, one assumes, because of the ultimate unpopularity of the Vietnam War and partly because a prosecution for treason would require that a formally declared state of war had existed between the United States and North Vietnam.
Nonetheless, Fonda's treasonous folly speaks to larger truths about a war that inflicted grievous wounds on the American psyche. For millions of Americans, and for millions of America's South Vietnamese allies, those wounds have yet to heal completely, and perhaps never will.
The anti-war movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was, in fact, two parallel movements. The majority of anti-
war protesters simply believed that American participation in the war was wrong. Their objective was American withdrawal from Vietnam. But a hard-core, hard-left minority in the anti-war coalition favored a communist victory by the Viet Cong and North Vietnam.
However witlessly, Jane Fonda lent herself to that latter goal, a communist triumph in Vietnam.
When the Soviet-armed North Vietnamese army overran South Vietnam in 1975, Fonda's then-husband, the left-wing radical Tom Hayden, expressed his relief and approval. When the North Vietnamese, quite predictably, imposed their totalitarian system on South Vietnam – complete with concentration camps that imprisoned hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese and the extinguishing of all civil and political liberties – Jane Fonda said she couldn't object because the evidence of oppression was unproven.
When, by United Nations estimate, a quarter of a million South Vietnamese boat people perished at sea escaping their supposed liberators in the 1970s and 1980s, Jane Fonda was silent. When 2 million Cambodians were murdered or died of privation at the hands of the communist Khmer Rouge (originally Hanoi's allies), Jane Fonda had nothing to say. When the people of reunified Vietnam were denied basic human rights and continue to suffer today under Hanoi's one-party dictatorship, Jane Fonda apparently was too busy with her personal life to comment.
That's a lot to answer for, Hanoi Jane.
Caldwell, a Vietnam veteran, is editor of the Insight
Jane Fonda in Wonderland Non-apology not accepted.
By Dexter Lehtinen
You may have heard that Jane Fonda apologized to Vietnam veterans in her current book. That's incorrect. She expressed "regret" for one photograph, but remains proud of her Radio Hanoi broadcasts, her efforts to achieve a Communist victory, and her attacks on American servicemen as war criminals. She never uses the word "apology."
Fonda’s latest foray into her past — with her pseudo-apology for having been photographed while sitting on a Communist North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, along with her continued vigorous defense of all other aspects of her trip to North Vietnam and her support for the North Vietnamese and Cambodian Communist wars — reminds us that apologies can be very tricky things. An unqualified apology offered with sincere regret for the full scope of the wrong by someone who recognizes the harm inflicted on others can help in reconciliation. But a "pseudo-apology," offered with limitations by someone who still defends the bulk of the wrong, only serves to aggravate the injury.
Everyone knows the negative effects of the common pseudo-apology, the refrain of which goes, "I'm sorry if I offended you." Pseudo-apologies attempt to subtly shift the blame to the injured party, who apparently misunderstood the good intentions of the offender.
So it is with Jane Fonda's book. In My Life So Far, "Hanoi Jane" expresses "regret" for one thing — being photographed with an anti-aircraft gun. "I do not regret that I went. My only regret about the trip was that I was photographed in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun site." Fonda amplifies: "That two minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until I die." She is "innocent of what the photo implies," but “the photo exists, delivering its message, regardless of what I was really doing or feeling." She makes it abundantly clear, without apology or regret, that what she was "really doing" was aiding the Communist enemy (who "touch our hearts"), and that what she was "really feeling" was that U.S. aviators were war criminals.
The photograph is not Fonda's primary transgression. Of course, the photo itself became the everlasting graphic proof of her outrageous behavior. So in a way Fonda is right — in practice, it is the photograph that reminds generations of who Jane Fonda really is. In her "regret," limited to the photograph alone, Vietnam veterans see Fonda’s endeavoring to ameliorate the harm to herself with virtually no regard to the harm she caused to others.
Hanoi Jane's wrongs go far beyond the photograph. First, of course, are the facts that she joined the enemy gun crew at all and made two visits to North Vietnam. Second, Fonda's self-initiated broadcasts on Radio Hanoi accused Americans of being war criminals. It was these broadcasts from the enemy's capital (not the gun photo) that gave her the lasting handle "Hanoi Jane" in emulation of "Tokyo Rose," an American who broadcast Japanese propaganda in World War II. In her self-proclaimed FTA ("F*** the Army”) rallies, she claimed that personal atrocities "were a way of life for many of our military".
Third, Fonda exploited American POWs for Communist gain, asserting that the POWs were being treated humanely following a Communist-controlled visit. In fact, the remarkable POWs who showed any resistance to the Fonda visit were beaten severely and she betrayed the POWs by falsely claiming that they expressed "disgust" and "shame" over what they had done. When the returning POWs reported their torture, showing their broken bodies as proof, Fonda called them "hypocrites and liars.” She claims in her book that she was "framed."
Fourth, Fonda ignored the non-Communist Vietnamese and Cambodians who resisted the Vietnamese Communists and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, showing no concern for their fate. Fonda continued to support the Communists against indigenous non-Communists even after American withdrawal. She was not "anti-war"; she was "pro-war" — for a Communist victory. She was not even "anti-atrocity" per se, remaining silent on Communist executions of Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians (such as the 3,000 slaughtered with their hands tied in Hue in 1968, or the final tragedy following Communist victories in 1975).
Fonda's hopes for a Communist victory in South Vietnam and Cambodia were fulfilled. But her hopes for fame as an instrument of Communist achievements have been dashed on the rocks of reality — the truth about Communist malevolence and disregard for human dignity; the truth about the commitment by most American soldiers to honorable behavior; the truth about the torture and murder of American POWs. Now her efforts to promote commercial gain through a limited pseudo-apology, which is simultaneously withdrawn by a less visible (yet explicit) defense of her transgressions, will fail on the same rocks of reality.
Jane Fonda has always lived in a kind of Wonderland — where American POWs are liars and Communist tyrants are honorable men. Now she says that "the U.S. loss represented our nation's chance for redemption" and that the Communist victory "symbolizes hope for the planet." Her latest foray into the Vietnam War only shows that, unlike Alice, Jane Fonda has yet to emerge from Wonderland.
— Dexter Lehtinen was severely wounded as a reconnaissance platoon leader in Vietnam. He later graduated first in his class from Stanford Law School and served as a Florida state senator and United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
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