In my first outline of this book in 1987, I set aside a chapter to deal with the subject of Jane Fonda’s importance in understanding the Vietnam War. A friend of mine named Bill Harbowy, who fought in Korea, warned me that if I went too easy on her, he would have to rough me up. I didn’t require that added incentive to do the work I had to do in the chapter, but I did run into an unforeseen and insurmountable problem. I could not think of enough things to say about her role in the passionately dishonest, freedom-robbing, cowardly way America thinks of its role in the war to fill one chapter; they overflowed into most of the others.

That said, I must hastily add that it’s painful to even think about her, and I would avoid it if I could. Pain is something I get no pleasure out of giving or receiving but it sometimes has to be endured to stave off greater pain or injury to one’s-self or others. It is what many people have endured because of what she did with her good name, her great gifts and her extraordinary network of friends, for tyranny and genocide in the name of peace, and what she hasn’t done to atone for it. If only to honor the faithful men and women who suffered and died in defiance of Hanoi’s precedent-setting campaign to win the psychological war for Indochina, it’s what I have to do.

December 15, 1982

Mr. David Newman
WXYZ Radio
20777 W. Ten Mile Rd.
Southfield, MI 48075

Nothing I have to say is likely to mean very much in the overall scheme of things simply because of who I am—nobody who counts. That, however, does not excuse me from the moral obligation to try.

On November 16, I tuned in on the segment of your program featuring Ted Koppel. I think you’ll agree that my predisposition of interest in whatever message he might have wished to convey was understandable. He is, after all, the trusted voice of several million people, a messenger—prince of the media whose lofty status is also a hidden part of the message—the part that says, "Pay attention! What you are about to hear is important for you to know." It’s not often that one can hear how somebody in that unique position of authority responds to the questions of anyone lucky enough to get through to him on the telephone. I was eager to find out.

For the first part of your program, you and your prestigious guest lived up to your enviable reputations. You demonstrated that you were, indeed, among the most articulate and perceptive broadcasters in the industry. Then, [an unrepentant] Vietnam veteran (like myself) called in to ask some tough questions about Jane Fonda. Mr. Koppel’s answer’s were suddenly less than knowledgeable, poorly articulated and about as perceptive as a typical punk rock devotee’s appreciation of classical jazz. You, Mr. Newman, gave no indication of having noticed the change.

Perhaps the subject matter was at fault. Like some familiar recreational drugs, it seems to have pronounced dulling effects upon key areas of the brain—the areas governing memory and judgment, for example.

If the subject had been Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, would you have been inclined to argue with a caller’s reference to it as having occurred forty years ago? I don’t think so. You certainly wouldn’t have allowed a guest to get away with "straightening him out" by saying something like this: "No, I think it happened farther back in time than the intensity of your feelings have led you to imagine—in the late 1930s or early `40s, I believe it was." Yet Ted Koppel made just such a statement without comment from you.

But the subject was not the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was the birth of Hanoi Jane (in 1972) and the decade of "easy" press that has since focused the public’s attention on all of her other publicity campaigns. Taking exception to the caller’s use of the word decade, Ted Koppel made the extraordinary mistake of trying to correct a reasonably precise statement of fact with an absurdly general guess. By any reasonable standard of intellectual merit, a remark like that could most charitably be called, stupid.

It was not, however, his first or his worst slip of the mind to go unchallenged by you. His initial response was both. He could not deny that the press has indeed treated Ms. Fonda kindly. The question was, why? After an awkward moment of groaning and groping for words, he said, "It’s over."

Think about that for a minute. If it’s true, we have no reason to concern ourselves with the fate of American POWs still in Vietnam. We can safely assume they don’t exist and turn our attention elsewhere—to Jane Fonda’s exercise classes, for example. We can quietly accept the fact that a whole generation of her devoted admirers don’t even know who Hanoi Jane is—or Fred Cherry or Ronald Dodge. We can simply bury them all in the past and get on with the important issues of today. All we have to do is remember Ted Koppel’s succinct appraisal of the situation. "It’s over," he said.

Bearing that in mind, we can also assume that nothing too terrible is going on in Indochina these days; that there are no more Indochinese "boat people" worth mentioning; that refugee accounts of Vietnamese civilians being forced to relocate to "New Economic Zones" where people die of strange illnesses and nothing grows, are unworthy of serious investigation; that there never was a war of genocide against the Hmong in Laos; that the Vietnamese troops in Cambodia are only there to protect the people from Pol Pot.

After ten years of unprecedented psychological warfare between hawks (everyone on earth who supported U.S. military assistance to Saigon and Phnom Penh) and doves (everyone on earth who opposed it) the doves emerged victorious. For years thereafter, American hawks were a despised minority. They appeared in our media only as stereotypes no one with a brain and a conscience could stomach. Doves were shown to be brainy people of conscience who couldn’t stomach the war, and took action to stop it in brave defiance of their own government.

Meanwhile, an awful lot of people in Indochina were being killed in a variety of hideous ways. So many, in fact, that their number may very well have exceeded the number who were killed during the war. The war I’m referring to, of course, is the one all "people of conscience" actively resisted—as opposed to the one they’ve been passively assisting ever since by looking the other way.

When my children ask me why so many people were ignored to death, I’ll talk to them about ideals and lesser evils, peace—and semantics, war and television, propaganda and news. I’ll tell them about opinion polls and opinion leaders, foresight and self-fulfilling prophecies. Then I’ll tell them what our eyes and ears on the world had to say about the fall of Phnom Penh and Saigon. "It’s over," they said.

Jasper Garrison

On July 16, 1972, a picture appeared in the New York Times showing Jane Fonda with three cameras looped around her neck standing beside a small group of men in pith helmets. She is looking at the North Vietnamese operator of a gun the size of a telephone pole. She is smiling and applauding. The caption reads, "AMERICAN TOURS HANOI: Jane Fonda, the actress, visiting an antiaircraft unit on Friday. She was reported to have made antiwar broadcasts over Hanoi radio. A State Department official called the report, `distressing.’"

The July 31st issue of Newsweek ran the same picture with this caption, "Guided Tour: Of all her crusades, none is dearer to the actress Jane Fonda’s heart than ending the Vietnam War. Last week, dressed in baggy trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, Miss Fonda turned up in North Vietnam as a guest of the Hanoi government. After her hosts conducted a guided tour of dikes and air-defense sites, Miss Fonda went on Hanoi radio to denounce U.S. `war criminals’ for what she described as systematic bombing of North Vietnam’s hospitals, schools and dikes."

In the August 7 issue of Time, Jane Fonda, wearing the same tourist outfit is shown in a picture walking in the countryside with several uniformed men. The caption reads, "JANE FONDA VISITING NORTH VIETNAMESE FARM WITH MILITARY OFFICIALS." Directly below those words is a picture of four unidentified, stern-faced men in striped prison clothes sitting in a room. One of them has a hand to his face with three finger tips touching his chin and the middle finger pointed discretely toward the ceiling. No reference is made in the caption to his dangerous gesture of contempt. It simply says, "FOUR CAPTURED U.S. PILOTS INTERVIEWED BY FONDA IN HANOI. More light may be cast on the question.

The article was about the bombing of North Vietnam’s dikes and the statement about light being cast on the question comes from these concluding remarks, "...More light may be cast on the question by the witness of an eight-man international team that last week flew from Moscow for a two-week fact-finding trip through North Vietnam. Among its members: Sean McBride, the respected Irish jurist who is head of Amnesty International, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark."

Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, was the Mecca of many leading activists in the peace movement. It drew the faithful throughout the world to "stand up and be counted" for peace. They would meet with American prisoners of war to assure their loved ones and the world that they were being well cared for. They would document instances of civilian casualties caused by indiscriminate American bombing. They would apologize to the Vietnamese people for the crime of war committed against them by the president of the United States. And they would promise their best efforts in securing the peace and justice for Vietnam that Hanoi’s popular democratic leaders had sought all along.

These were the main items on the agenda, together with the main articles of faith for all of Hanoi’s distinguished antiwar pilgrims from around the world. In those respects, Jane Fonda was no different from any other honored guest of the North Vietnamese government. She took the guided tours, gave the prescribed speeches and made the standard pledge of support for Hanoi’s just war effort. Three things made her trip substantively different:

1) Her prominence: Everybody in the civilized world knew who she was; she was a brilliant star, getting brighter all the time. She could have written her own check to endorse anything, purely on the basis of her high-ranking celebrity status. She chose to endorse the justice of Hanoi’s war, thereby making herself a universally recognized symbol of all "peace delegates" to Hanoi.

2) Her timing: Hanoi’s 1972 Easter offensive had been a disaster for them, thanks in no small part to the intervention of American B-52s. Jane’s visit in July must have done wonders for the Hanoi leadership’s morale at a crucial point in the war. It did, in fact, give them reason to believe that the bombers they could not shoot down with guns and missiles, might eventually be put out of action by American public opinion.

3) Her homecoming: Jane’s return to the United States, following her performance in the enemy capital, was greeted with more catcalls than applause. But the boos and hisses soon faded and the people who continued to make those rude noises following the release of our acknowledged POWs came in for as much criticism as Hanoi Jane ever did. Whatever she accomplished for Hanoi while she was there, the residual effect was controversy over whether she was a heroine or a traitor for making the trip. That, in turn, allowed the Vietnamese Communists to use our POWs and the uncertainty about our MIAs in any way they desired without fear of a united American response.

When that paragraph was written in 1988, the U.S. was still divided in its response to Hanoi’s treatment of our POWs, and Jane Fonda was still in the middle of it. Now the controversy was over whether she should have been or whether the people who thought so were politically motivated, irrationally driven, or stupid. Hanoi’s 25,000 day war for Indochina ended with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and the finite life spans of the men who began their fight for it with Ho Chi Minh. In exchange for better cooperation with Hanoi’s new business-minded leaders, we agreed to their old leaders’ terms for information about our MIAs, the terms offered by Hanoi in 1972.

During the `72 POW/MIA debate, Jane helped Hanoi get what it wanted out of American POWs in the form of their appearance with her on television. We were given the impression that they were a representative group. Their physical condition was strong evidence against charges that they had been mistreated. The ones I saw in an exercise yard on television, were obviously delighted to see her and seemed to put faith in her efforts to help them. They gave no sign of lacking proper nourishment and exercise when, in fact, starvation and long confinement to four-foot cubes was not unheard of. Moreover, prisoners were tortured as a matter of routine for failing to cooperate with other "peace delegates" to Hanoi.

The United States was pulling all of its ground forces out of Vietnam. The president and his NSC advisor, Henry Kissinger, were down to the final nuts and bolts of what to do about the remaining combatants we couldn’t withdraw because they were in enemy hands. The debate had not been settled over whether we should trust Hanoi to release all of our people they held captive if we left them alone or to bomb them until we were satisfied that the last American hostage had been freed.

What came out of the POW/MIA debate of 1972-73 was a compromise by which Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Jane Fonda could all take bows for bringing our men home. Nixon was thanked on national television by the first POW to come home. Henry Kissinger was proclaimed a national hero and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And, notwithstanding Jane’s ephemeral, time-delayed clash with a few high-ranking ex-POWs, she was back in the good graces of her old fans with new ones being added every day. In other words, no one who counted wanted to stick his or her head back into the kill zone for fear of seeing one of our men on the ground move. Since they all received medals for getting us out they had a vested interest in pretending it was over, and in looking back only to validate their wisdom and valor.

When I wrote to Jane Fonda, she was too busy making a fortune off of her good name to respond to no-names like me trying to resolve questions about living or dead MIAs which the Hanoi government might have known about. In the late `70s she was too busy making, "Coming Home." In the early `80s she was too busy putting health and fitness books on the best seller list. After that, she was too busy making wildly successful exercise tapes, a critically acclaimed television drama and happy talk visits with Johnny Carson and her friends, Susan Stamberg and Scott Simon at National Public Radio. Except for a few of us "party crashers," the American people thought that Jane Fonda was wonderful. To the extent they did, the causes fought for and won by Hanoi Jane would continue to go unchallenged.

I didn’t know enough about Hanoi Jane when she was making that name for herself to condemn her for it, having suppressed my kill zone vision of famous doves for the same reason I had not wanted to see the wounded GI move. With knowledge comes responsibility. I couldn’t see myself fighting along side the right-wing politicians and commentators who were getting all the press for blasting her. And just because I didn’t understand what made people of conscience like Jane right about Vietnam, didn’t mean they weren’t. I couldn’t have been the only person of conscience in step with the downbeat of truth on that issue. Obviously, there was something really fucked up about the way I was seeing and hearing things. In time I might be cured.

Jane’s fans from the `60s had the choice of going along with her, forgiving her or ignoring the entire issue. I was a fan of hers until 1978 and prided myself in being so forgiving when I was really ignoring the issue because it hurt too much to think about and I was tired of being "on the wrong side" of it. Jane’s visit to Hanoi was water under the bridge, I reasoned, and old wounds should not be reopened by a fruitless rehash of the past.

For almost three years following the collapse of Saigon, news stories about Vietnam were virtually nonexistent. Then, in 1978, three hundred Vietnamese refugees were drowned when their leaky, overcrowded boat sank off the coast of Malaysia. All things considered, it was a pivotal event in history that should have triggered a reappraisal of "the peace movement’s success." Instead, two movies came out that did more for shaping renewed discussion of the war than all of 1978’s news about dead and dying refugees from "post-war" Indochina. The most successful and enduring of those movies was "Coming Home," a feminist book by Nancy Dowd, redone for the big screen to the antiwar specifications of Hanoi Jane.

Yes, it was the same old Jane delivering the same old message she gave to her captive audience in Hanoi, this time under the guise of a love story. I can see how some people without ties to members of that captive audience could have been sucked in by the emotional pull of what was happening on the surface of the film. I can see how they would be drawn to the character of the paraplegic, antiwar vet played by Jon Voight. But I don’t see how any of them could forget that it was Hanoi Jane’s show, that she was the ventriloquist and he was her wooden dummy. I don’t see how they could have accepted his views on Vietnam without accepting hers. And I don’t see how they could have done that without picturing ex-GIs who rejected those views the way her character’s "insensitive," pro-war Marine Corps husband was pictured.

With Vietnam War veterans so identified in the public mind, the body count from Hanoi’s enforcement of the peace did little harm to Jane’s heroic, antiwar reputation. She opened an exercise salon in Beverly Hills and found it easy and convenient to hold her future comments on Vietnam to an absolute minimum. "Me generation" Americans were turned on by the millions to Jane’s example. They tuned out the cries of pain and outrage coming from Hanoi’s nameless enemies and shaped up to the lively cadence of Hanoi’s best known friend. The cruel irony of that enthusiastic audience participation act was not wasted on me. It couldn’t have been.

That was the most distressing aspect of Jane’s immense popularity throughout the `80s; you couldn’t get away from it. You couldn’t consume a normal diet of news and entertainment for two weeks straight without encountering an heroic portrait of Hanoi Jane, and a storm of hostility if you called her that.

The pressure has always been on people like me to close the book on Hanoi Jane and pretend that her propaganda work for North Vietnam did no lasting harm. It has been asked of us in the name of peace between opponents in a long outdated debate. It has been asked in the name of our own peace of mind. The trouble with those requests was the demand they made on us to forget about the men who were tortured for refusing to cooperate with "peace delegations" like hers and to dismiss the possibility that any of them may have been tortured to death. To forget about Hanoi Jane, we would have had to accept Hanoi’s list of POWs and write-off all of our missing in action as dead, without concern for how or why they died.

Two of the POWs who were put through the ringer for not participating in Hanoi’s public relations program, were Eugene McDaniel and Fred Cherry. According to the August 8, 1986 issue of Navy Times, McDaniel had this to say about the prison officials’ attempts to bring them Jane Fonda’s FTA show: "Of course we refused because it was very antiwar and we would have no part of it. So what they did was play it on the speakers. It tended to demoralize us, realizing our nation had gone in that direction, not knowing who they really represented because we had been in captivity for so long."

Fred Cherry, whose F-105 was shot down in 1965 said this about the visual dimension of Jane’s visit: "There was a picture of Jane Fonda on the front page of this Vietnamese newspaper they passed around in the camp, of her posing on an antiaircraft weapon, helmet on, as if she was attempting to shoot down an American aircraft.... It was very upsetting knowing an American celebrity was doing that kind of thing."

The Navy Times may not strike you as an unbiased source of information about Jane Fonda. It didn’t strike me that way either—especially when I read the unchallenged "Fonda Defense." In that article by Nick Adde, titled, "Fond of Fonda?" a spokesman from her Fonda films production company does a spectacular job of protecting her. He offers part one and two of her standard "apology" like slices of bread with the standard stereotypes of her detractors sandwiched in between. He tells one unavoidable lie (that she didn’t support the other side) then says of her trips to Hanoi what I used to believe before she made "Coming Home."

He says, "For all the mistakes she made, she considered going out of a great sense of patriotism. She’s Henry Fonda’s daughter. He was the embodiment of the American ideal: `Young Abe Lincoln; The Grapes of Wrath; Mr. Roberts’—solid American values. Fight for what you believe in. Do what’s right, even if it’s not popular." Speaking, as he was, to a generation of sailors and marines for whom those virtues were not automatically associated with the name Fonda, as they were for my generation and the one before it, it was necessary to spell it out. But, in doing so, he was repeating his unavoidable lie.

In 1970, Jane Fonda told an audience of Michigan State University students what she was fighting for when she said, "...the peace proposal of the Viet Cong is the only honorable, just, possible way to achieved peace in Vietnam."

Perhaps Jane’s periodic statements of regret for some of the things she did for peace include giving that explanation of exactly what she meant. In any event, that slice of history was left out of the "Fond of Fonda?" article and the subject of Jane’s work for the Vietnamese Communists was left open to debate. Veterans were once again taking sides for and against Jane Fonda. Her supporters were only too eager to attack us and to deflect questions about Hanoi Jane with questions about LBJ and "Tricky Dick" Nixon. It was just like old times.

One of those supporters was Mike Levek, a volunteer spokesman for the Servicemen’s organization, Vietnam Veterans of America. By the most amazing coincidence, he was the one who twice answered the call to VVA the only two times I know the issue of Hanoi Jane was brought to them. He called her a "scapegoat," put our government officials on the spot, as usual, and said of Jane’s detractors, "It’s too easy to objectify the blame. Even to say that an actress who made intemperate statements is why we lost [the war] borders on silliness.

No, Mr. Lavek. Ignorant, arrogant, back-stabbing toadies like you are why we lost the war, and why it has always been so hard to make Hanoi account for what they did to our unacknowledged POWs. To know that they are right in doing nothing, they need only observe Vietnam vets in the media stepping all over half of their fellow vets to defend Jane Fonda. If I said anything to offend you, I apologize. But when the time comes to choose again between her and us, I expect to see you stepping all over us again to kiss her ass [Note: I had no way of knowing when I wrote those words that he would be there to do it—but he was and he did]. While you’re at it, you can kiss mine too.

Now, Mr. Levek, how do you feel about those intemperate statements? How would you feel if you were made to suffer for them without being able to fight back?

The point is, specific words in a specific context, aimed at a small target audience cannot and should not be regarded by everyone as nothing more than "intemperate." In the case of Vietnam, you also have to consider what they mean to history. Those of us who have attempted to make Hanoi’s most ardent cheerleader accountable for what she did, have been targets of intemperate statements like Mike Levek’s from day one. The only difference between his first attack on us and his second one a year or so later was the growing number of people who leaped to her defense and the dimensioning number of us who were willing to withstand the flack.

Heading into the fourteenth anniversary of Jane’s first trip to Hanoi, Jane showed up at the Washington D.C. studio of National Public Radio’s "Weekend Edition: Saturday." The host of the two-hour radio news magazine was Scott Simon, who, in the words of one man for whom I played the tape, "had his nose so far up her ass it was a wonder he could breath." I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but I couldn’t argue with him either. If you want to judge for yourself, I urge you to call NPR for a transcript (see Loose Ends) or tape.

The following is a pertinent excerpt:

Scott Simon: You have a story about... during the making of On Golden Pond and... I guess the moment came when, you could almost see it coming in the script, when your character was supposed to dive into the pond. And you, you’d originally planned on having a stunt double do that, right?

Jane Fonda: Eh, yeah. I hate cold water and I don’t like diving because I burst my eardrums when I was little. And I had no intention of doing a back-flip into a cold lake in northern New Hampshire at the end of September. But Katherine Hepburn, who, uh, you know is, is and always has been very athletic and a superb diver, sort of threw the gauntlet at my feet before we started shooting. She said,(very good and very funny impression of Katherine Hepburn) "Are you going to do a back flip."

Scott Simon snickers.

Jane Fonda: And I didn’t dare say, "No, I’m gonna have a stunt double do it." So I said, yes (laughs with Scott joining in), and proceeded to have to learn how to do a back flip. Finally the day came when I could actually do several back flips in a row with relative grace. But, when I finally did them I remember crawling up on the shore and there she was, arms folded across her chest. And she said, "How you feel?" And I said, "I feel great." And she said, "That’s right." She said there’s nothing more important in life than overcoming fear. And people who never learn how to do that grow up soggy. You’ve gotta teach your children to overcome fear or they’ll grow up soggy. And I’ve thought about that ever since.

Scott Simon: Uh huh. You call Miss Hepburn the least soggy person you know.

Jane Fonda: That’s right.

Scott Simon: That’s in the book (laughs).

Jane Fonda: That’s right (joins in laugh with Scott.) You read my first book.

Back flip scene from On Golden Pond with dialogue between Henry and Jane.

Scott Simon: Do you think that there is still a certain segment of public opinion in this country which fixes you forever, ah... in the role of opposition to the war in Vietnam and, in a sense, will not judge you on anything since then?

Hanoi Jane: I am proud of the fact that for the rest of my life I will be associated with the movement that opposed the war in Vietnam. I regret that some of my actions in an attempt to oppose the war in Vietnam, increased the pain and sadness of parents and loved ones who had sons over there. And I regret that. I didn’t always do the right thing in attempting to end the war. But it was a wrong war and I’m proud that I tried to stop it.

I wrote a letter to Mr. Simon, knowing that it would be the only one of its kind he would receive because of the two (and only two) negative letters NPR received following Susam Stamberg’s interview with Jane. Like all of my letters to the media, I spent every available hour of the day, every day, until I was forced by the rapidly approaching weekend to put it in the mail. I sent it Air Mail, Next Day Post, enclosed with two others. One was the Newman letter, concerning his interview with Ted Koppel and Jane Fonda’s "decade of easy press." The other one concentrated on media-made stereotypes, with a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner, Don Wright, of the Miami News xeroxed to the bottom of the page.

The Wright cartoon is about the irrationality of some people who write letters to the media accusing them of bias. It features a man and a woman much too old to have fought in Vietnam—a clever way of conveying a slew of pejorative messages instantaneously. They are drawn in profile, face to face, from the chest up.

In the first of four panels, the woman says to the man, "You know why we lost the Vietnam War? The press, that’s why!"

The old man joins in: "I’m tired of them snooping around our wars."

In the second panel you can tell by the increased size of the lettering that the volume of their discussion has increased.

Old woman: "DO WE ACTUALLY NEED A MEDIA?"

Old man: "...THEM AND THEIR BIAS!"

In the third panel, you can see that the volume has been turned up another notch. Their teeth are bared, their jaws stretched to the limit.

Old woman: "THEY NEVER TELL THE TRUTH! THEY ONLY WRITE WHAT THEY THINK!"

Old man: "INFORMATION BREEDS DISTRUST, DISTRUST BREEDS THINKING AND THINKING BREEDS ANARCHY!

In the last panel, the two people have regained their composure. Their faces are softened and the size of the lettering over their heads has shrunk back down to normal.

Old woman: "Say, that was really good!"

Old man: "Yeah! I’m going to put it in a letter to the editor!

Now what makes that jerk think that the editor would publish his letter if the media is so biased? Now, where do you suppose the real bias lies? Now can you guess how Don Wright won his Pulitzer?

The letter I wrote to Scott Simon in response to his interview with Jane was composed with that cartoon and the other Hanoi-Jane-and-the-media letters in mind. He read over the air, a portion of it, "slightly" edited and totally out of context. A casual listener would have understood that I was not happy with the interview or with Jane Fonda, but he or she would have had to bridge a wide chasm to make sense of it. Even if they could have filled in the semi-naughty word that Mr. Simon left out—or any other noun that would have given the sentence meaning, they would have missed the point. They would not have understood the long-standing, unremitting basis of my ire as an uncounted Vietnam vet. I might even have been taken for someone like the people in Wright’s cartoon. This is what my letter said in full:

July 2, 1986

Dear Mr. Simon,

This is my first and last letter to "Weekend Edition" but I think you’ve gotten enough of my "ATC" letters to know who I am.

Is it true that Jane Fonda "opposed the war in Vietnam?" Somehow I got the impression that she opposed only Washington’s war effort and collaborated with Hanoi’s war effort. I am not an objective journalist like you are, so perhaps there is some hint of bias in my choice of words, a distorted characterization of what actually happened. Besides, anyone who thinks it’s important to talk about Hanoi Jane in 1986 must be a petty, jingoistic, monomaniacal ass, trapped forever in the ancient and irrelevant past. Isn’t that right? After all, what impact could a fired-up Jane Fonda have on the humanitarian issues involving Vietnam today?

Sincerely,

Jasper Garrison

The part in italics is what he read. Other than my name and home town, it was all he read (why he turned "issues" into "issue," I don’t know). His reading of my letter gave the impression that he, Scott Simon, was open to harsh criticism and the guy who wrote to him dashed off something in a moment of mindless haste. When I heard it, I was so confused by the unconnected jumble of words in the first sentence that the last sentence blew past me. I would have defied anyone to tell me what he said. It would have been better if he had said nothing—except for one thing. It gave me standing to write a letter to Jane that she might want to read.

June 15, 1987

You are entitled to know right off the bat that I am one of those people who has referred to you in the media as Hanoi Jane. Yes, I am a Vietnam veteran. No, I do not live in the past, I am not a white racist, a black oreo, or an undereducated loudmouth of either tint. I do not wear jungle fatigues and I am not now nor have I ever been a member of any fanatical, right-wing hate group.

Where some things are concerned, it’s impossible to separate the message from the messenger. So, following last July’s curiously edited reading of my letter about your interview on National Public Radio, I realized that your only chance of getting my message straight was to hear from me directly.

Now, after eleven frustrating months of trying to compose this letter in two pages or less with honesty but without being offensive, I have surrendered to the unpleasant reality that I cannot shorten it without distorting it, or soften it without making it soggy. I hope you can do the unsoggy thing of reading it—all of it—and giving it the honest consideration it deserves.

Within the context of a cryptic apology and a pointed reaffirmation of pride in your association with the peace movement, you said, "...That war was wrong." There was no argument with that familiar shorthand assessment of the American war effort from Weekend Edition’s award-winning host, Scott Simon. Accordingly, there was no subsequent mention of any relevant issues of conscience involving Hanoi’s administration of the peace. Is that something for a "person of conscience" to be proud of?

Please don’t misunderstand me. I did, at one time, see you as a person of conscience, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan Baez and Tom Hayden. To the extent that you believed that a communist victory would bring a just peace to Indochina, one could reasonably argue that you had a moral obligation to say so—which you did—and to summon the necessary moral courage to actively pursue that end—which you also did. I therefore expected all of you who could, to be loud, angry and persistent in your response if such a victory did not bring the people of Indochina the kind of peace and justice you would want for yourselves.

But when the bitter harvest of your success became evident, Dr. King was no longer around to say or do anything about it. Joan Baez was. And she did. And for many thousands of fellow human beings it undoubtedly made the difference between life and death. But what of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda? What have I missed in the Hanoi authorities’ attitude toward American POWs and MIAs; in its relationship with its neighbors or in its treatment of would-be refugees who haven’t found a way out. What have I missed which would continue to justify the conclusion that it was immoral to have opposed the North Vietnamese Army?

Despite what you may think I missed from award winning television and radio news personalities or the award winning authorities they rely on, I assure you, I didn’t miss anything. They did. They missed the grotesque irony of highly acclaimed journalists and scholars like themselves and people of conscience like you, seeing, hearing, speaking and seeking no evil of the genocidal, totalitarian Vietnamese, and only of the genocidal, totalitarian Khmer Rouge when the unified Vietnam you fought for invaded Cambodia. They missed the obvious death camp connection between some old Agent Orange zones created by some criminally irresponsible Americans, and the New Economic Zones created for some politically undesirable Vietnamese. They missed every critical aspect of the war and "peace" in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that doesn’t begin with the award winning conclusion, "That war was wrong."

No one knows better than I do just how great an influence such highly placed and highly regarded information sources can have on our beliefs, notwithstanding the best of reasons to believe something quite different. The Scott Simon version of what I wrote about his interview is a case in point, read as it was, completely out of context and containing as it did, an error in syntax which stripped it of all reason.

I should have known immediately why it didn’t make sense. But for one intensely embarrassing moment, even I, Jasper Garrison, with absolute knowledge and proof to the contrary, believed that some ass named Jasper Garrison must have been responsible for the twenty seconds of gibberish ascribed to him by Scott Simon. Had I not retained a copy of the original and tape recorded the Scott Simon version so that I could compare the two, I still wouldn’t be sure of what I did to my forty-six hours worth of carefully drafted text. But who else would have given so "brief" and "trivial" a matter a second thought? Who else could have?

And so it is that you may never have heard of Vietnam vets like me with legitimate reasons for complaint about the editing of your role and ours in Hanoi’s war and peace. In our place there has been a "platoon" of like-minded veterans known to millions, who speak of what the war was really all about with the quiet eloquence and authority of truth itself. One of them looks just like Jon Voight. And he sounds just like Hanoi Jane.

You have yet to take the kind of dramatic, meaningful initiative that would repudiate your rightful claim to that title. You have never even offered a clear, unconditional apology for what you did to earn it. You don’t have to, of course, not for as long as you are young and beautiful and popular with the great majority of people in America who don’t particularly give a damn about "...the humanitarian issues involving Vietnam today." Your friends in the media can be counted on to do whatever you wish. Your other big fans are, no doubt, similarly inclined to take their lead from you. Your right-wing critics don’t count. And, for all practical purposes, invisible warriors such as I, never made it back home alive.

There is, in fact, no external pressure on you to follow through on your commitment to peace and justice in Vietnam, for which you have accepted much praise then gone off to do other praiseworthy things. There are great numbers of highly placed and highly regarded sources you can fall back on to justify what you did in the past and what you’re not doing now. However, there is no courage in those numbers and great need for extraordinary courage. For that, I hope you can consult just one source, before the fate of our missing American servicemen in Indochina becomes academic and who knows how many more Indochinese misfits of a murderous, totalitarian society are ignored to death. The authority I’m appealing to is your conscience, the only voice of the only living human being who can focus our media’s attention on Hanoi, where it belongs, and keep it there until something gives.

Perhaps you can yet win a victory in Vietnam for history’s final judgment on people of conscience in general and Jane Fonda in particular. There are no guarantees that you will accomplish anything significant in this generation. But for all the generations to come, what have you got to lose but your bad name,

Sincerely,

Jasper Garrison

cc.Jesse Jackson, Tom Hayden, Coretta Scott King, Scott Simon, Joe Stroud, Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Dave Lawrence

Each of the people on that list received a letter of his or her own, along with the letter to Jane. The only reply I received (from Dave Lawrence) didn’t really say anything. So, I decided to write to you—and your children and your children’s children.