She was born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda, but earned her reputation as “Hanoi Jane” Fonda after “aiding and abetting” the enemy – North Vietnam – as documented in these photos taken in Hanoi (July 1972):
Hanoi Jane on North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun: A few hundred yards from the location of this photograph, American POWs were being subjected to all manner of torture at the “Hanoi Hilton.” You can read about one of those POWs, Col. Roger Ingvalson, whose aircraft was shot down by an NVA-AAG similar to the gun Hanoi Jane is straddling.
Fonda called returning POWs “hypocrites and liars,” adding, “These were not men who had been tortured. These were not men who had been starved. These were not men who had been brainwashed. … Pilots were saying it was the policy of the Vietnamese and that it was systematic. I believe that’s a lie.” You can read about one of Fondas “hypocrites and liars” in this Veterans Day Profile: Point Man, Roger Helle
Read the transcript of Hanoi Jane’s propaganda radio broadcast delivered in Hanoi, North Vietnam on August 22, 1972.
As for the success of anti-democracy protests by radical protagonists like Fonda, John Kerry and others, Hanoi could not have been more pleased.
General Vo Nguyen Giap, supreme leader of the North Vietnamese Army, told CBS in a 1989 interview: “We paid a high price [during the Tet offensive] but so did you [Americans] … not only in lives and materiel. Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people. … The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory…. The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion. ”
More to the point, in a 1995 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a communist contemporary of Giap and Ho Chi Minh, who was serving as an NVA colonel assigned to the general staff at the time Saigon fell, had this to say about the Leftmedia and Soviet puppets like “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and John Kerry: “[They were] essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses.”
Bui stated further, “Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.”
Most notably, Bui observed, that the 1968 Tet Offensive was “to weaken American resolve during a presidential-election year. We had the impression that American commanders had their hands tied by political factors. Your generals could never deploy a maximum force for greatest military effect.”
Sixteen years later, under enormous pressure after Ronald Reagan had restored the honorable social standing of military service, Fonda admitted to former American POWs and their families that she regretted the pain she caused them. Few accepted her apology.
In a 2005 interview with CBS, Fonda reiterated that she had no regrets about her trip to North Vietnam in 1972. “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.”
