Of Warmaking, Fonda, and Forgiveness

by Thomas McCarthy

A number of people of my acquaintance have of late been drawing my attention back to someone I thought was practically as dead as Dick Nixon in 1963 and Barry Goldwater in 1965.  I am speaking of the Osama of the 1960s and 1970s, Jane Fonda.  An e-mail forwarded to me and perhaps a few million other people read in part as follows:

. . . Jane Fonda is being honored as one of the “100 Women of the Century.”  Unfortunately, many have forgotten and still countless others have never known how Ms. Fonda betrayed not only the idea of our country but specific men who served and sacrificed during Vietnam.

. . . In 1978, [one pilot,] the former Commandant of the USAF Survival School[,] was a POW in Ho Lo Prison: the “Hanoi Hilton.” Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell, cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJs, he was ordered to describe for a visiting American “Peace Activist” the “lenient and humane treatment” he’d received. He spat at Ms. Fonda, was clubbed, and dragged away.

During the subsequent beating, he fell forward upon the camp Commandant’s feet, which sent that officer berserk. In ‘78, the [pilot] still suffered from double vision (which permanently ended his flying days) from the Vietnamese colonel’s frenzied application of the wooden baton. From 1963 to 1965, Col. Larry Carrigan . . . spent 6 years in the “Hilton,” the first three of which he was “missing in action.” . . . His group, too, got the cleaned, fed, clothed routine in preparation for a “peace delegation” visit.

They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they still survived. Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his SSN on it, in the palm of his hand. When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man’s hand and asking little encouraging snippets like: “Aren’t you sorry you bombed babies?” and “Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?” Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper.

She took them all without missing a beat. At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge and handed him the little pile of papers. Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Col. Carrigan was almost number four but survived, which is the only reason we know about her actions that day.

. . . This [conduct] does not exemplify someone who should be honored as part of “100 Years of Great Women.” Lest we forget: “100 years of great women” should never include a traitor whose hands are covered with the blood of so many patriots. There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Hanoi Jane’s participation in blatant treason, is one of them.

First of all, it should be stated that some of these allegations are exaggerations, others are outright lies (e.g., the Carrigan story, which Carrigan himself denies).  There is, however, a hard core of truth here.  That said, how should one react to something like this?  A cautious man – even a Vietnam veteran – might feel stirrings of dubiety simply because the case looks so suspiciously open and shut (the letter reads like a prosecutor’s brief).  The actions of Jane and the North Vietnamese seem almost cartoonishly evil.  On the other hand, either every Vietnam POW was lying about his experience, or else the norm of prisoner treatment ranged from inhumanity at best to casual and unremitting savagery at worst.  No former prisoner, to my knowledge, has yet come forward with the counterclaim that the Hanoi Hilton had first-class showers and a mint on every pillow.  No GI ever regretted his failure to get a confirmed reservation.  Surely, if ever there were an instance of criminal misconduct turning out to be a good career move, this may be it.

Still, legitimate as the response of outrage may be, prudence suggests that one look at the other side, too.  Savagery and brutality are never OK, but why, for heaven’s sake, thirty years down the road from Vietnam, does it still seem to so many Americans that no reasonable Vietnamese could take umbrage at the destruction wreaked upon his country by American soldiers and ordnance and then overreact to it!  These American doubters are like Huck Finn reacting to Jim’s admission that he would try to steal his family from their owners if he couldn’t buy them out of slavery (“It didn’t seem natural that he would love his wife and children as much as white folks; but he did!”).  Again, though cruelty is always and everywhere wrong, and Jane may have been as cruel as the NVA officers she helped, must people really be reminded that failure to forgive is also everywhere and always wrong, too?  It is inevitably harder for those who were themselves the victims of cruelty to forgive and forget, and true compassion requires that we understand such emotional complexities without actually endorsing them.  But the moral distinction between understanding and endorsement is a crucial one and should not lightly be discarded.  (I know, too, that to counsel forgiveness and compassion frequently amounts to counseling perfection.  I myself, though neither wounded nor imprisoned in Vietnam, will not eat in a Vietnamese restaurant, nor would I willingly make the acquaintance of any Vietnamese man, woman, or child.  I am not proud of my attitude, and I do not recommend it to others, but there it is and there it has stayed for three decades.)

There is another category of thought that pleads mitigation as well, whether for Jane or her Vietnamese allies.  Many Americans recoiled from the rhetorical excesses of the radical Left in the antiwar movement of the sixties.  Those who branded ordinary GIs as war criminals for battlefield overreactions that were motivated more by fear than malice were certainly guilty of sanctimony at the least.  By the same token, many other Americans may have legitimately reacted with horror to the knee-jerk defense of the actions of who knows how many others who crossed the line between overreaction and murder by more than a matter of inches.  Though it would be anachronistic to do so, one could cite the names McCain and Kerrey.  Bob Kerrey was forgiven – by most of those few who thought he needed forgiving – in something under three milliseconds.  For most people, even suggesting that John McCain should be held accountable for something more than excessive love of country is tantamount to treason (there’s that word again).  Similar cases abounded in the late sixties; why is it unreasonable to assume that some found it harder than others to look impassively at what seemed to them to be murder?

It saddens me to put it this way, but I fear that the ultimate motive of those who would remind Americans about the perfidy of Jane Fonda is less a salutary caution to keep people and things in proper moral perspective than a not entirely subliminal attempt to thump the tub for an important part of the foreign policy of the present administration and the establishment media, that is, the desire to characterize as treason all opposition to their Grand Plan – the Grand Plan being the program of slaughter of civilian ragheads unfortunate enough (1) to live on the road to Caspian Sea oil, (2) to be on Ariel Sharon’s (and Kristol’s and Bennett’s and Dubya’s and Rumsfeld’s and Perle’s and Wolfowitz’s) list of bad guys, (3) or both.  This Grand Plan has another, better-known name: the war on terrorism.

How many of the Fonda-is-treasonous crowd just happen to be defenders of the show trial of John Walker Lindh or the characterization of captured Afghanis as war criminals and terrorists and therefore not entitled to the humane treatment that Christian charity (as well as “international law,” that curious omnium gatherum of morals, customs, and statutes) enjoins their captors to give them?  Whose model of treatment of one’s enemies should Americans be embracing?

Besides, what exactly is treason?  Is it really equatable with everything from poor judgment to morally ignominious acts?  In fact, treason is defined, in a now-defunct piece of parchment called the U.S. Constitution, as the act of levying war against any or all of the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies.  Though the second half of the definition appears to be as potentially elastic as the dreaded “necessary and proper” clause that has cost generations of Americans so much freedom, any honest lawyer (Mr. Diogenes and Mr. Twain, please call your office!) will tell you that “aid and comfort” is a term of art with real and specific legal and historical application.  In short, not every abomination is a crime.

This recollection brings us back to Jane Fonda.  There is no denying that she is carrying one hell of a lot of baggage, and I for one have no particular interest in lightening her load.  However much my thinking about the war has altered over the decades, I, in common with many other Vietnam vets, agree that some of Jane’s actions and attitudes during the war years seemed pretty loathsome.  Other than that, I am largely agnostic about her.  She was very cute and sexy in Barbarella and gave a reasonable simulacrum in Klute of what in Hollywood is termed acting.  And of moments of innocent merriment recalled, few equal the televised image of Jane, alongside her then hubby Ted Turner, attempting to draw on her Actors Studio training to perform the already politically suspect Tomahawk Chop with something approaching conviction (“Mr. Strasberg, help me find the meaning”) as thousands of Atlanta’s well-heeled Braves fans howled for the network microphones and cameras.  Besides, her dad was apparently a very decent guy, and her brother once smiled and said hello to me as we passed one another in Golden Gate Park thirty-two years ago.  All of the foregoing constitute reason enough for me at least to consider the prospect of cutting her a little slack after all this time.

There is an even better reason, however, for allowing time to heal the wounds that Jane has inflicted.  I think I am not alone in feeling distaste bordering on revulsion at the ongoing, never-ending search for people now in their seventies and eighties, many of whom are guilty of little more than having been Germans at some time between 1930 and 1945.  Everyone knows what happens when one such is discovered: denunciation, obloquy, sometimes deportation or imprisonment or both.  In the last twenty years very, very few individuals guilty of more than the lamentable, quotidian excesses of wartime have been turned up.  Anyone with the temerity to raise the issue of proportionality of means to ends is shouted down or – if he is someone unlucky enough to have something to lose – destroyed.  I have come to feel about the word justice what Graham Greene felt about the word culture – hearing it makes me want to reach for my revolver.  We can thank this Darwinian pseudodemocracy that suffocates us all for so successfully conflating justice and revenge that only a trained metaphysician’s scalpel could separate the two.

Unless all men and women are treated as morally equivalent actors, unless time and forgiveness and proportionality are restored to places of honor in the formation of moral judgments, and unless the Christian humility that reminds people that, ultimately, God alone can balance all the scales replaces the bloodthirsty cries, I firmly believe that it will be difficult if not impossible to forgive Jane Fonda for her crimes or to prescind from committing or excusing new crimes against people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and countless other undreamed-of places east of Suez.

Finally, it would not be amiss to recall the wise words of Minority Mike, well known to frequenters of this site (and one of the many good reasons for helping LewRockwell.com stay alive and well): “I am not ashamed of my tour in Viet Nam.  I am ashamed that I believed in the government that sent me there.”  When the U.S. government or its friends counsel you not to forgive, be on your guard.  They are not interested in your morals, your health, your family, or your life.  Be wary; be very, very wary.

April 6, 2002

Thomas McCarthy [send him mail] is a senior reference editor for a scholarly publisher in New York.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

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