The last diary in this series, Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Jane Fonda?, looked at how a mythology was created after the fact to use Jane Fonda ("Hanoi Jane") as a symbol for blaming the loss of the Vietnam War on the anti-war movement. In particular, Fonda was presented as a betrayer of the troops. But, as is almost always the case with rightwing narratives, whatever accusations they may make about others are almost invariably true about themselves. "Projection" is the name of the game, and this episode is no exception. Indeed, there is now compelling evidence that Richard Nixon himself is fully deserving of all the calumny that has been heaped on Jane Fonda, and much, much more besides.
You see, in 1968, records now show, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger interfered with the Paris Peace Talks, to prevent the war from being ended before the 1968 elections. As a private citizen at the time, Nixon had no right whatever to be doing such a thing. In fact, what he did could arguably be construed as treason. Whatever the legal situation, however, one thing is clear: 20,763 American troops died on Nixon's watch, while another 111,230 were wounded. That's over 130,000 American troops who would have lived, or not been wounded had Nixon not interfered, and Johnson secured the peace treaty he so desperately sought to rescue his reputation as best he could. Over 130,000 American casualties that Richard Nixon is directly responsible for, simply in order for him to become President.
And the right wants to paint Jane Fonda as a betrayer of American troops?
In Part II of this series, I referred to Jerry Lembcke's book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, and his examination of the myth that anti-war protesters commonly spat on returning veterans. I quoted from an interview in which he touched on an important aspect of his book, the attempt to make sense of the myth in terms of blame-shifting, similar to that which took place in Germany after WWI, blame-shifting that would, eventually lead to the rise of the Third Reich. In this installment, I want to quote extensively from some more recent work that Lembcke has done focusing on another aspect of that same phenomena--the demonization of Jane Fonda.
There is a striking similarity between the two subjects. Just as Vietnam vets and the anti-war movement were close allies, rather than antagonists back in the late 60s and early 70s, Jane Fonda was a very popular figure with the troops, one of the priniciple organizers of the counter-culture alternative to the Bob Hope USO shows, known either as "Free the Army," or in its more colloquial form, "Fuck the Army."
