The making of Hanoi Jane

Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon by Mary Hershberger recounts the arc of Jane Fonda's early career and her awakening to the anti-war movement towards the end of the Vietnam War. The book intends to explode the urban myths that have surrounded Fonda and made her the target of attacks by some Vietnam vets and, more frequently, by the chickenhawks who like to speak for the vets. And most importantly, it details the conscious attempt by Nixon and his administration to remake her from a curious combination of sex symbol (Barbarella) and symbol of American goodness (Henry Fonda's little girl), into Hanoi Jane.

In his review in the London Review of Books, Rick Perlstein writes,

The security establishment began its battle against Fonda almost as soon as she started speaking out. Teams of FBI informants reported her every word, combed her speeches for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, which criminalises incitement to "insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military", and "disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States". She proved a disappointment. Profanity was not her style. As for incitement, we learn from one informant -- a chaplain's assistant -- that she thought it "would not help the cause of peace". He added that nothing she said "could be construed to be undermining the US government".

The government got desperate. At Cleveland airport the FBI arranged for her to be stopped at customs. During her interrogation she pushed aside agents who refused her access to the bathroom, so they arrested her for assaulting an officer. She had in her possession mysterious pills marked B, L and D, so they also charged her with narcotics smuggling -- for carrying vitamins to be taken with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Her daughter was followed to kindergarten. (America needed to know: did her school teach "an anti-law enforcement attitude"?) They investigated her bank accounts. They tapped their network of friendly media propagandists, like the future Senator Jesse Helms, then a TV editorialist, who supplied an invented quotation that still circulates as part of the Fonda cult's liturgy. Supposedly asked -- it isn't clear where or by whom -- how far America should go to the left, she said, according to Helms: "If everyone knew what it meant, we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under . . . within a Communist structure." A death threat against her was sent to Henry Fonda's house with a demand for $50,000. He took the letter to the same FBI office that was directing the campaign against his daughter. "The FBI files reveal no effort to find the sender of the letter," Hershberger remarks.

The campaign appears to have been co-ordinated with the White House, and underway long before Fonda went to Hanoi. Hershberger is an assiduous researcher, but she could have got a better idea of the extent of this co-ordination by studying the Nixon Oval Office tapes at the National Archives. On 2 May 1970, Nixon told his aides that protesters were to be accused of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". On 9 May, Nixon's enforcer Chuck Colson told the FBI to send its Fonda files directly to the White House. "What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment," an aide later recalled.

Why the obsession? What threat did a pin-up pose? Timing is one clue. May 1970 was when Nixon, having won the presidency promising to draw down the war, expanded it into Cambodia instead. It was a massively unpopular move. Fonda popped up at a moment of maximum political danger, just when the president needed to isolate and destroy his critics.

Another thing to take into account is Fonda's public image. It's easy to lose sight now of the time when she was seen as all apple-cheeked patriotism and plain-spoken idealism -- almost like Henry Fonda himself. There was a pattern: the first anti-war figure to become the object of excessive government attention was Dr Spock, whose massively popular child-rearing manual was read and trusted by millions of American mothers. American GIs associated Jane Fonda with their first blush of innocent adolescent sexuality -- think of those Barbarella posters. It was through figures like them, not through mad bombers of the far left, that ordinary Americans might come to the dangerous conviction that their government was not innocent. They were the ones that had to go.

It's remarkable how many things that we think of as permanent features of American culture can be traced back to specific political operations by the Nixon White House. We now take it as given, for example, that blue-collar voters have always been easy pickings for conservatives appealing to their cultural grievances. But Jefferson Cowie, among others, has shown the extent to which this was the result of a specific political strategy, worked out in response to a specific political problem. Without taking workers' votes from the Democrats, Nixon would never have been able to achieve the "New Majority" he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions -- previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed -- would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon "stood the problem on its head", as Cowie says in Nixon's Class Struggle (2002), "by making workers' economic interests secondary to an appeal to their allegedly superior moral backbone and patriotic rectitude". (One part of the strategy was arranging for members of the Teamsters to descend "spontaneously" on protesters carrying Vietcong flags at Nixon appearances. Of course it's quite possible that the protesters too were hired for the occasion.) It's not that the potential for that sort of behaviour wasn't always there. But Nixon had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties.

I don't think the three-headed beast that is Bush, Cheney, and Rove have Nixon's dark powers for understanding and exploiting the repressed rage that helped propel the resurgence of the Republican party since he came to power in 1968. Nixon was able to create an anti-anti-war movement at the very time the war was at a nadir of popularity, or so obviously unwinnable, by turning it into a battle between the troops and the long-haired demonstrators. And Rambo, Reagan and the Swift boat liars would further cement the myth that it was Fonda (along with John Kerry) and the demonstrators back home who destroyed "our will to win," inexorably leading to the fall of Saigon.

But you can see the beginning of the Bush/Cheney/Rove campaign to demonize their critics, just at the "moment of maximum political danger, just when the president need[s] to isolate and destroy his critics."

I don't think it will work this time. For one thing, Bush's War in Iraq was conceived and implemented by his very own team of first rate bunglers. Nixon was dealing with something created by the "Best and the Brightest" of "Camelot" -- two administrations in advance of his own. Iraq reeked of problems from, oh, say, day fifteen of Operation Coming Apart at the Seams. We've been hemorrhaging money and blood from the very start of the occupation, it has only grown worse, and it's only a matter of time before a majority of Americans begin to demand accountability. Bush has run out of time.

For another thing, it didn't really work for Nixon, either. The war still ended with embarrassment and failure, as did Nixon's entire political career. The same thing is poised to happen to Bush. The best Bush can hope for is that a Baghdad version of Hanoi Jane is unearthed in the fullness of time. That a future version of Rambo and the Swift boaters are created to help obscure the disaster that Bush has created in the Middle East. Twenty years from now, who knows? We'll probably hear the refrain from aged neocons and their doughy pantloaded camp followers, that it was lefty bloggers who lost Iraq, certainly not the brilliance of Donald Rumsfeld's strategies.