Fonda's 1972 Journey To North Vietnam Continues To Haunt Her -- Plainly Jane

In 1972 Jane Fonda made the most controversial journey of her life: a trip to the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. Her anti-American radio broadcasts and her dealings with American POWs have haunted her ever since. Part three of a five-part excerpt from ``Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life Of Jane Fonda,'' by Christopher Andersen.

Clad in black pajamas and a white tunic, Jane Fonda stepped off her Aeroflot jet on July 8, 1972, and into a maelstrom of controversy. She arrived, she told her uniformed, helmeted hosts, with ``greetings'' from revolutionary ``comrades'' in America. Over the next two weeks Jane, several cameras slung around her neck, was led on a tour of bombed-out hospitals, schools, factories, villages and dikes. The devastation left her shaken, but not so shaken that she was unable to do some front-line morale-boosting for the enemy.

It was then that Jane, surrounded by applauding soldiers, took her notorious joy ride aboard a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun whose sights were normally trained on American planes. The image of a euphoric Jane aboard the gun, captured as it was on film, would be the hardest for Jane to shake; in this sense she was undone by the very medium she had mastered.

Still, had she stopped there and returned home with ``revolutionary greetings'' from Hanoi, Jane's trip might have soon been forgotten. Instead, she volunteered to make 10 propaganda broadcasts over Radio Hanoi squarely aimed at demoralizing American servicemen in combat. The broadcasts, aired between July 14 and July 22, were delivered in the same warm, almost seductive tone of voice used by enemy propagandists Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally during World War II.

To American servicemen with Jane Fonda pinups taped to their lockers, it was as if Betty Grable had begun making Nazi broadcasts from Berlin. Yet their anguish could not compare with that of POWs in Hanoi. Inside the famed ``Hanoi Hilton'' POW camp, Fonda's words were broadcast over loudspeakers day and night until in the words of one prisoner, ``We almost went f---ing crazy.''

``It's difficult to put into words how terrible it is to hear that siren song that is so absolutely rotten and wrong,'' says Col. George Day, who was ranking officer at the Hanoi Hilton. ``It was worse than being manipulated and used. She got into it with all her heart. She wanted the North Vietnamese to win. She caused the death of unknown numbers of Americans by buoying up the enemy's spirits and keeping them in the fight. That's not what you'd expect from Henry Fonda's daughter.''

Adding insult to injury, the North Vietnamese then rounded up POWs to hold a news conference with Jane and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, another outspoken anti-war activist. Those prisoners who refused to appear with Fonda - and many did - were tortured. Day, who had already spent 37 months in solitary confinement, was flogged with a fan belt until his buttocks were ``hamburger.''

Eventually, eight POWs did meet with Jane and Ramsey Clark at a meticulously orchestrated news conference. Lt. Cmdr. David Hoffman, a Navy pilot, was one of them - though at first he refused. His captors broke his arm, then yanked on it until he agreed.

Another POW, a captured pilot held in solitary, whose identity has never been established, was rumored to have been executed for refusing to meet with Jane.

In their carefully scripted remarks, the POWs forced to go on display with their movie-star visitor claimed they were being treated humanely, that they were not being tortured, and that they were eager to see the United States pull out of Vietnam. From the strain on their faces and the robotic delivery of their lines, it was obvious that they were not speaking freely. Jane chose not to notice.

Her last day in Hanoi, Jane met with North Vietnam's vice premier, Nguyen Duy Trinh. She told him she was deeply impressed by the Vietnamese people's determination to emerge victorious. She also told the vice premier that his people would ``certainly triumph'' over the Americans.

The Communists could not have been more pleased. ``That visit and the support it showed had great impact on the Vietnamese people,'' said North Vietnamese Col. Bui Tin.

The trip to Hanoi moved Jane up several notches on Nixon's ``enemies list.'' Yet one high-level member of the administration felt that, if the complexities of the situation were explained to her, Jane might tone down her rhetoric. At one point, Henry Kissinger invited Jane to meet secretly with him to discuss U.S. policy. She declined; unless she could call a news conference afterward to talk about what was discussed at the meeting, Jane was not interested. To Kissinger, Jane seemed intent on publicizing the North Vietnamese cause. ``She knew precisely what she was doing - she wanted Hanoi to win,'' says Kissinger. ``What she did was totally immoral.''

Was she being entirely fair and looking at both sides of the issue? ``There are no both sides in this question,'' snapped Jane. She went on to assert that North Vietnam was blameless, that Nixon was a ``cynic, liar, and murderer. Nixon has gone further than any human being, in my opinion, in history in terms of slaughter.''

When the American prisoners of war - some of whom had been held for up to nine years - returned to a hero's welcome in the spring of 1973, they began describing in detail the torture they had endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese.

Jane wasted no time retaliating. ``I think that one of the only ways that we are going to redeem ourselves as a country for what we have done there,'' she said, ``is not to hail the POWs as heroes, because they are hypocrites and liars. History will judge them severely.''

Jane shrugged off as ``laughable'' the notion that the eight POWs she had met in Hanoi might have been coerced. These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who've been brainwashed.

What of those POWs who insisted they were tortured? ``They are exaggerating,'' said Jane, ``probably for their own self-interest.''

In 1987 a Vietnam veterans group campaign to prevent Fonda from filming ``Stanley and Iris'' in Waterbury, Conn., because of her Hanoi trip and her lambasting of American POWs, touched off a national cause celebre that threatened to hurt her fitness business and damage husband Tom Hayden's political career. Jane would tell Barbara Walters on ``20/20'' that these remarks were ``popped off.''

In fact, she continued her public attacks on the POWs for months. ``We should recognize that there is considerable room for doubting these charges of torture, at the very least,'' she told an audience of 3,000 at UCLA. ``We should remain skeptical. We have no reason to believe that U.S. Air Force officers tell the truth. They are professional killers. . . .''

``I was angry,'' Fonda conceded to Barbara Walters in a June 17, 1987, interview. ``I popped off and I shouldn't have done it.'' She stopped noticeably short, however, of retracting her statement altogether. ``It's beside the point. They (the POWs) suffered. They suffered enough. They didn't need to hear from me.''

Clearly, this was not enough for Walters. ``Jane, you wanted to do this interview because there were some things that you wanted to set straight. . . . There are still people who, I guess, feel you have never apologized. Would you like to just say something to them now?''

``I would like to say something,'' Fonda replied. Her speech was deliberate, measured. ``Not 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. I feel that I owe them an apology. My intentions were never to hurt them or make their situation worse. It was the contrary. I was trying to help end the killing, end 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 to their families.''

(From the book ``Citizen Jane: The Turbulent Life of Jane Fonda. Copyright, 1990, Christopher Andersen. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company Inc. A Donald Hutter Book. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.)

Tomorrow: Reconciling with Henry.