Jane Fonda Talks to Tom Hayden--But Not That Tom Hayden

Unlike my beloved father-in-law and many others of my elders for whom I have enormous respect as veterans and men, I'm not taken much to fulminating about "Hanoi Jane" Fonda. Over the years, I've been more than willing to believe that, like a lot of other former admirers of totalitarian regimes, she grew up and realized that America, with all its gross commercialism and support for right-wing dictators overseas, was a heck of a lot better than a system of barbed wire, machine guns, concentration camps, and the constant drone of pep-rally propaganda.

Yet as I think about it now, the sort of mental growth transition I'm describing is not all that common. Most "useful idiots" (Lenin's term for western leftists who uncritically praised his regime) never grow beyond that stage; otherwise they wouldn't have been "useful idiots" in the first place.

Susan Sontag, a former admirer of Castro's Cuba, seemed to have made that transition in the 1980s, when she denounced her former stance; but she lost all the respect she'd regained from thinking people when, immediately after 9/11, she published a savage piece in the New Yorker that blamed America for the attacks and extolled the terrorists as heroes. Then again, there was no real moment of realization and repentance on the part of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, or most of the other "useful idiots" depicted in Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (an amazing book about how otherwise intelligent people returned from visits to Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, and other such slaughterhouses with glowing reports of freedom and prosperity). Generally, "useful idiots" either die unrepentant or, like Noam Chomsky , they just keep on babbling and presumably feeling good about themselves.

Actually, has any "useful idiot" ever grown up? I thought that this rubric described Joan Baez--i.e., that she had been a supporter of North Vietnam who later recanted--but discovered that from the beginning, she (unlike Fonda) was a true anti-war (as opposed to anti-U.S.) activist who refused to denounce America itself and even openly expressed support for American POWs held in Vietnam. A far cry from Jane Fonda, as this article notes. Still, there have been these examples of growth, but they usually occur before the individual entered the limelight: for example, long before writing 1984, George Orwell lost whatever Communist sympathies he might have had when he encountered Stalinism close-up while fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. In the famous words of Lloyd George, "If you're sixteen and you're not a socialist, you don't have any heart; if you're sixty and you're still a socialist, you don't have any brain."

Anyway, back to Jane Fonda. Every few years, the subject of her support for North Vietnam comes back up, and she manages to somehow half-heartedly apologize without really apologizing, and then the same debate rages, and so on. Hence a recent article I read in U.S. News and World Report, where she was interviewed by Thomas Hayden--who, as he himself noted humorously, is not to be confused with Fonda's former husband Tom Hayden. In the piece, Fonda blames "the right wing" and "the men who lied to them [the soldiers] and sent them" to Vietnam. She may or may not have a point there, but none of that exonerates her for her support of a system that, both before and after it triumphed, used torture and imprisonment on a mass scale, prohibited free movement of its citizens, and generally imposed a degree of repression far beyond anything experienced under your run-of-the-mill U.S.-supported right-wing military dictatorship.

Ironically, the only time communist Vietnam was ever subjected to broad censure in the West was when it did one of the best things it ever did: invade Cambodia in 1979, bringing an end to the far more repressive regime of the Khmer Rouge (of whom Chomsky was a leading admirer.) But Fonda never denounced the Vietnamese regime in any meaningful way, nor has she subjected her own actions to any kind of honest scrutiny. In fact, what struck me most in her responses to Hayden (and in other interviews of the kind) is her arrogance and sense of entitlement or privilege as a member of America's uncrowned elite.

So perhaps the best understanding of Jane Fonda goes far beyond ideology, politics, war, etc., to matters of the psyche, the conscience (or lack of it), and so forth. In attempting to illustrate for the uninitiated just what it was she did back in the day, I went searching for web pages cataloging her offenses. Most of what I found was far too tendentious to post--even if the anger of the veterans who wrote such pieces is perfectly understandable. But then I found a more neutral, but still critical, piece here, and it helped me understand "Hanoi Jane" much better. Turns out that in an earlier incarnation, she was, in the words of Hank Holzer (Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam) "the poster girl for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command." The little-known fact that she had once promoted the U.S. war effort, then made a 180-degree shift without a great deal of apparent soul-searching, only illustrated that, as Holzer said, "there really was nobody home in the values sense."