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It was on April 30, 1975, that the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon surrendered to the invading forces of North Vietnam. That collapse ended the long Vietnam War, uniting both halves of Vietnam under a single communist dictatorship ruled from Hanoi — a dictatorship that remains to this day one of the world’s most repressive. The fall of Saigon sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives in flimsy boats; many drowned at sea, others were captured and killed by pirates. To this day, April 30 is commemorated sorrowfully throughout the Vietnamese diaspora as Tháng Tư Đen, or "Black April."
When the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last month singled out April 30 as an annual day of recognition, it was not to ensure that the historical trauma of Vietnamese Americans would receive solemn and reverent attention. It was to honor Jane Fonda.
"Starting today," supervisors board chair Lindsey Horvath declared at a public ceremony, "we proudly proclaim April 30th each year as 'Jane Fonda Day' in Los Angeles County, in recognition of her incredible contributions to entertainment, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and social justice."
Could any proclamation have been more tone-deaf? Of all the people to single out for honor on "Black April," none was more certain to provoke outrage in Vietnamese American circles than Fonda, who has been widely reviled as "Hanoi Jane" since 1972, when she traveled to Southeast Asia to make broadcasts for Radio Hanoi and promote the North Vietnamese war effort.
"She may be a very strong activist for climate change, but besides that, we also view her as being a person who was very cruel to the rights of the South Vietnamese people during the antiwar protests," Phat Bui, head of the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times.
In a letter to the board of supervisors, state Senator Janet Nguyen condemned the designation of a day with such profound emotional and historical resonance as "alarming and profoundly disrespectful to over half a million Vietnamese-Americans in California." Another letter, signed by state Assembly member Tri Ta and 17 other legislators, lamented that the Los Angeles supervisors "would choose this particular day to celebrate Jane Fonda," calling it "an affront to the service and sacrifice of American and South Vietnamese soldiers who gave everything in the cause of freedom."
It has been more than half a century since Fonda’s notorious propaganda tour. The actress is 86 years old. Two generations have grown to adulthood since the Vietnam War ended. To many, no doubt, Fonda’s environmental activism and other causes matter far more than whatever she may have done during the 1970s. Besides, she eventually repudiated the most infamous image that came out of her visit to North Vietnam — the one in which she posed on an enemy anti-aircraft gun, grinning and clapping as she watched a helmeted soldier maneuver the weapon. By 1972, millions of Americans had turned against the war in Vietnam. After all this time, isn’t there something churlish about continuing to regard Fonda with such loathing?
No.
The 1970s aren’t ancient history, least of all to those whose lives were shattered by the communist conquest of Vietnam and Cambodia. Fonda has enjoyed a life of great wealth, fame, prestige, and comfort, but her celebrity does not wash away her conscious decision to provide aid and comfort to an enemy that was actively engaged in killing young American servicemen. The contrition she belatedly expressed was only for the picture with the North Vietnamese gun, which she called "the most horrible thing I could possibly have done."
Other than that, however, she has always maintained that she does not regret traveling to Hanoi and sees nothing wrong with having leveraged her celebrity for the benefit of a regime with which the United States was at war.
Fonda went to North Vietnam in order to demoralize American GIs. In her broadcasts for Radio Hanoi, she denounced "US imperialism," praised the valor of North Vietnamese, and urged US troops to disobey orders.
"I’m speaking particularly to the US servicemen," she said in one broadcast. "I don't know what your officers tell you … but [your] weapons are illegal and … the men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law. In the past, in Germany and Japan, men who committed these kinds of crimes were tried and executed."
Even that wasn’t the worst of it. American prisoners of war reported being tortured for refusing to attend a meeting with Fonda. Michael Benge, a civilian POW, was forced to kneel on a concrete floor, arms extended, with a heavy metal bar across his hands; every time his arms sagged from the weight, he was whipped with a bamboo cane. Navy Captain David Hoffman, whose arm had been broken when his plane went down, said that his captors broke the arm a second time and twisted it until "excruciating pain ripped through my body" when he balked at being taken to pose with Fonda. Later, when the POWs came home and told what they had undergone in Hanoi’s cells, Fonda called them "hypocrites and liars."
Fonda was not some naive kid in 1972. She was a 34-year-old adult, who willingly chose to abet the totalitarians engaged in killing, imprisoning, and torturing her fellow Americans. Even after the war ended and it became clear what the communist victory meant — countless Vietnamese civilians killed, vast refugee waves, savage "reeducation" camps — Fonda could not bring herself to condemn the brutal violations of human rights being committed by the government she had supported. Other antiwar activists did. For example, Joan Baez publicly denounced the "cruelty, violence, and oppression" being inflicted by Hanoi — only to be attacked by Fonda, who accused her of making common cause with people "who continue to believe that Communism is worse than death."
This is the woman that Los Angeles County voted to honor each year on April 30? No wonder Vietnamese Americans were outraged. Stunned by the backlash, the board of supervisors now says it will henceforth shift Jane Fonda Day to April 8. I have a better suggestion: Scrap the whole thing. Fonda has been showered with acclaim for decades. Another honor is the last thing this dishonorable woman needs.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."