Posted on 04/10/2005 1:59:36 PM PDT by rightalien
After 15 years being out of the public eye, Jane Fonda has burst into the spotlight to explain all the events in her tumultuous life – and it turns out that it was all her father's fault.
Just about everything she did, from her three failed and sometimes bizarre marriages to her disgraceful if not treasonous behavior during the Vietnam war was the result of her need to win approval and love denied her by her cold and aloof dad, Henry Fonda. Story Continues Below
In her new tell-all book, "My Life So Far," she really does tell all, and we could really do without knowing a lot of it. The seamier parts however – and they are very seamy – serve the purpose of attracting media attention, and media attention does tend to sell books. When a famous Hollywood personality goes into intimate detail about the perverted love-making sessions with one husband or the cheating by another, the media snaps to attention and the book quickly hits the best-seller lists as readers go straight to the juicier parts. Despite her openness about her sex life and her revelations about her famous father, Fonda is less frank about her most notorious activities – her real-life role in giving lots of aid and comfort to an enemy that was in the process of killing 58,000 American servicemen and torturing American POWs.
She apologizes for allowing herself to be photographed smiling behind a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun used to shoot down U.S. aircraft, but the apology rings hollow when she remains defiantly unapologetic about her anti-war activities that helped North Vietnam win the war in the media while losing it on the battlefield.
Fonda, who earned the name "Hanoi Jane" after posing for photographs in which she appeared standing next to that anti-aircraft gun that had been used to shoot down American planes, admitted that it was a "betrayal" of the U.S. armed forces, and acknowledged that it was the "largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine."
"I realize that it's not just a U.S. citizen laughing and clapping on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun: I am Henry Fonda's privileged daughter who appears to be thumbing my nose at the country that has provided these privileges," she wrote.
That photo, she wrote, negated the prior two years in which she had worked extensively with Vietnam veterans, she said.
"Now, by mistake, I appear in a photograph to be their enemy. I carry this heavy in my heart. I always will," she wrote.
But she insists she has no regrets about the anti-American broadcasts she made on Radio Hanoi, nor the visits she made to American prisoners-of-war, claiming: "there are hundreds of American delegations that had met with the POWs. Both sides were using the POWs for propaganda ... It's not something that I will apologize for."
According to Snopes.com, 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 inhumane treatment. Fonda responded, not with an apology, but with an accusation calling our returned POWs "liars and hypocrites."
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 he saw the actress 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 cliche 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.
On her return from Vietnam, Jane Fonda posed for the media, proudly sporting a necklace given to her by the North Vietnamese. It was made from the melted parts of a U.S. aircraft shot down by Hanoi.
But it all comes back to Daddy Dearest and the desire she felt to please the men in her life as she feels she was never able to please her father. Writing in Slate, Bryan Curtis explained that "her ever-mutating public image was stage-managed by the men in her life, who sought to mold her in their own image."
Henry Fonda, who he calls "a cold, churlish man," was "said to have cried only once, upon learning of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, treated her and her brother Peter like a pair of particularly unloved pets. His aloofness drove Fonda's mother, Frances, into a sanitarium, where she committed suicide by cutting her throat. (Fonda, then in grade school, learned the news by reading a film magazine.)
Henry drifts in and out of Fonda's life, occasionally reappearing to upbraid her for her nascent activism. This leaves Jane grievously perplexed: How could the man who played Abraham Lincoln, Tom Joad, and Clarence Darrow turn a cold eye to social justice?"
It was her efforts to please her three husbands that led her to do the things she now regrets. To please Roger Vadim, she shared her marriage bed with other women, many of whom were prostitutes she recruited; to please her second husband, the rabid Marxist Tom Hayden, she joined him in his fanatic pro-Communist war against America; and to please her last husband, Ted Turner, she accepted the role of submissive house wife.
She says she regrets not being a better parent to her own children when they were younger. Vanessa, 36, her daughter with Vadim, lives in Atlanta, where Fonda has made her home for the last 13 years. Her 31-year-old son with Hayden, Troy Garity, is an actor. He was named for a Communist hero, Nguyen Van Troi.
Fonda wrote she is determined not to create any more regrets. "The main thing [would be] if I get to the end of my life feeling I hadn't done all I could to be close to my children."
So if read that correctly, her problem is that she was photographed in North Vietnam--not that she was actually in North Vietnam, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Whore.
She can regret, wax philosophical and apologize from now till the cows come home and it won't change that she is and forever will be Hanoi Jane. And a traitor.
I like firing squads!
Does anybody know Henry Fonda's political persuasion? Apparently he wasn't an anti-war hippie like Jane, he played one of the officers leading the charge at D Day in The Longest Day, and Admiral Nimitz in Midway.
I'm just guessing here, but could one of the reasons Jane felt estranged from her Dad was because of the gulf between them on patriotism?
I hope to live long enough to urinate on her headstone.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1380532/posts?page=86
A word that rhymes with hitch is not good enough for her.
That anyone would spend their hard-earned dollars on a book to understand why Fonda has lived her life so far the way she has is a little hard to comprehend. That she would write such a book is just mind-boggling. What's the meaning, worth and relevance of her life in relation to the billions and billions of galaxies in the universe we exist in?
Fonda is not a boomer. She was born in 1937. Boomers were born after WWII. Every single generation has it's shallow misfits that fail to grow up.
Wow. And they conclusively know that his aloofness caused the woman to go crazy? Seems a little too pat for me.
Typical liberal, everything is always someone else's fault.
> Hanoi Jane. And a traitor.
She wrote this book because she is 60-something, she screwed up her life, she hasn't got a husband and (would you believe it) there's no one lined up at the door.
I have two words for Hanoi Jane, and they aren't go to hell.
Isn't s - just slightly - too old to be a boomer?
I grow more and more astounded on how these left wing imbeciles and there condition of vomiting lyes and bull shat from every orofice of there body...i ponder most of all of how the news media can sit there and nod and watch that whore Katie Couric say OH THATS SO TRAGIC whats more What ever happened to LOYALTY to ones Nation (As the saying goes the Deepest pits in hell are reserved for treacherous scum) she should have instead of crying about her little life and going to North Vietnam she should have thanked god that she wasnt in a terrorist police state but then again that may have been better with her immediate execution impending. No offense to college educated people because i do not wish to lump you all together but it seems alot of these kids now days Come out of college ever more foolish than when they once entered into it. Although I'm Merely 18
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