Actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda, 84, announced on Friday, September 2, 2022, that she’s beginning chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a type of cancer (see story here).
Fonda’s July 1972 trip to North Vietnam was just one of nearly 300 trips to that country between 1965 and 1972 by American civil rights activists, teachers, and pastors opposed to the Vietnam War (see details here).
But hers stood out because of her incredibly bad judgment in posing for a propaganda photo on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun (left) while U.S. aircrews were being shot down and captured.
That photo enraged countless veterans and spawned hatred of Fonda that endures to this day. As a Vietnam veteran myself, I think U.S. veterans of all wars are justifiably pissed at her. (Although Fonda later apologized for the photo, and claimed she was “manipulated” into posing for it, she doesn’t regret her visit to a communist enemy country.)
What she did was bad enough that rightwing detractors didn’t need to make up lies about her. But they did anyway. In an email widely circulated in the late 1990s, they accused Fonda of betraying American POWs by handing over smuggled notes to their captors, resulting in beatings. That story isn’t true and has been definitively debunked (see Snopes.com here), but some Fonda-haters continue to circulate it. 
Then there’s the fake Kerry-Fonda photo.
When Kerry, a genuine war hero reviled by rightwingers for his anti-war activism, ran for president in 2004 he was “swiftboated” by an anti-Kerry group that propagated lies about his military service (see details here). The smear campaign against Kerry also tried to capitalize on anti-Fonda sentiment by photoshopping her image into a photo (right) of Kerry speaking at a 1970 anti-war rally (debunked by Snopes.com here).
The point isn’t whether you like Kerry or don’t like him, or agree or disagree with his anti-war activities. The point is that rightwingers habitually lie, even when they don’t need to, to make a point. These are just two examples of the countless instances of rightwing lies. American conservatives are profoundly infected by the pathologies of dishonesty and lying.
I don’t know how they got that way, but it’s clearly embedded in their culture, and lying is a habit with them. Their current leader and champion, Donald Trump, is a notorious liar. (NBC News catalogued over 30,000 lies during his presidency.) It works because the Republican base is gullible, doesn’t fact-check, and swallows even ridiculous lies.
The lesson from this is you shouldn’t take anything a rightwinger says at face value, without fact-checking, because the odds are pretty high that it isn’t true. This isn’t about whether you have conservative values, or don’t like liberal policies, it’s that we can’t have honest political debates in our country anymore because one of the factions chooses to be habitual liars.
I don’t know that Fonda deserves to be hated. There probably are plenty of people who will cheer the news of her illness. The Vietnam War probably was never winnable, and that automatically makes it a bad idea that wasted over 58,000 American lives.
However, I don’t think we should be excessively judgmental of our leaders at the time. Most Americans genuinely saw communist expansion into Southeast Asia as a threat to our own security. Remember, the grownups of that time were the World War 2 generation who’d been through an existential struggle. The world had only recently learned of Stalin’s hideous crimes, the Berlin Wall had just gone up, and we were locked in a Cold War; nobody then expected the Soviet Union to disappear in their lifetimes. The war to stop communists from taking over South Vietnam was a misjudgment, but not a malicious one.
There was plenty wrong with not only the war itself, but how it was fought. LBJ paid for it with deficits, to mute opposition at home, leading to the 1970s inflation. Working-class whites and minorities were conscripted to fight it, while college-bound youths from privileged families were given a blanket exemption from military service, creating class resentment.
The military strategy pursued by General Westmoreland was flawed, in the worst ways possible; our troops were ordered to find the enemy by walking around in the jungle until they were shot at, were ordered to make uphill frontal assaults, and then ordered to give up territory paid for with the blood of their buddies — and then ordered to go up and take it again. The whole enterprise was corrupted by using body counts as the controlling measure of success or failure, and the basis of officer promotions. Piling insult on injury, the veterans who suffered through all this were mistreated when they came home.
The scars are too deep to ever fully heal, or to let bygones to be bygones. That’s why resentment against Fonda endures. She inadvertently became a symbol of betrayal, and she’ll have to live with that until she dies. But why isn’t it sufficient to just tell the truth about what she did? Why do her detractors feel it necessary to maliciously embellish her actions? Anger at one individual doesn’t seem an adequate explanation, especially given that rightwingers lie about everything else, even vaccines intended to save their lives.
We’re not born honest and truthful. Growing up, I had those values pounded into me by parents who, like many of their generation, believed strongly in them. Those values have served me well, and I like to think they’re part of the bedrock that America is built on. After all, as Biden said in his “Soul of the Nation” speech on September 1, 2022, America “is an idea.” Our nation is defined by the ideas its people believe in. On that note, I’ll close by saying I’m willing to debate issues on which we disagree, but I feel dishonest people and liars have nothing to say worth listening to.