Home

Jane's Addiction

08.10.11

Why? The blazing irony is this: Fonda’s enduring fame probably has more to do with the rage provoked by her unutterably disgusting political conduct 40 years ago than it does with the degree of admiration her work onscreen earned her. In other words, were it not for the fact that she advocated the defeat of the United States and had herself photographed sitting on an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi used to shoot down Americans—and had she not agreed to be paraded in front of American POWs held under monstrous conditions in the Hanoi Hilton—she would have the cultural standing today of Julie Christie.

Patricia Bosworth is clearly sympathetic to her subject’s views on the Vietnam War, but that sympathy is only possible today by coating the pages on these matters with sugar. Fonda, she says several times, only wanted to save the lives of American troops fighting in a senseless conflict. But that is simply not true. Fonda wanted the North Vietnamese to defeat the United States, to swallow up South Vietnam, and to spread Communist rule throughout Indochina. She and her second husband, Tom Hayden, named their son Troy not after Troy Donahue but in honor of Nguyen Van Troi, who was executed by South Vietnam in 1964 after he attempted to assassinate Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

Source: The Weekly Standard