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It is perhaps indicative of the divisive nature of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s that one of the persons most commonly associated with the war was neither a world leader nor a politician, neither a general nor a soldier, neither a participant nor a casualty of the war, but an American actress. And in ironic fashion, that actress is most notorious for something she didn't do in Vietnam rather than all the things she did do. In July 1972, during the waning days of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, actress Jane Fonda incurred the enmity of untold thousands of Vietnam veterans and their families (as well as service members for generations to come) when she arrived in Hanoi, North Vietnam, and began a two-week tour of the country. Fonda visited North Vietnamese villages, hospitals, schools, and factories damaged in the war, weaving her comments about what she observed at those sites with denunciations of U.S. military policy in recordings broadcast as propaganda to U.S. servicemen via Radio Hanoi; met with international visitors and reporters who were also in North Vietnam; spent about an hour chatting with seven U.S. POWs at a meeting arranged by her North Vietnamese guides; and posed for photographs at an antiaircraft emplacement set up in a rural area just outside Hanoi: Although Fonda's actions in visiting North Vietnam were sufficient to earn her the wrath of many Americans, in the years since those events took place they have been embellished to the point that the one tale most commonly associated with her Vietnam trip is an incident that never took place — a tale about U.S. POWs who furtively slipped messages to Fonda while she was meeting with them and whom Fonda promptly betrayed by turning those messages over to the POWs' North Vietnamese captors (resulting in several of those prisoners' being beaten, tortured, or killed): The facts are that while in North Vietnam, Fonda met with only a single group of seven U.S POWs: all seven of those POWs agreed to meet with her, no POWs were tortured for declining to meet with her (or for behaving inappropriately during the meeting), and no POWs secretly slipped Fonda messages which she turned over to the North Vietnamese. The persons named in inflammatory claims about this alleged incident have repeatedly and categorically denied the events they supposedly were part of. First of all, the whole premise on which this tale is based is contradicted by the plain reality of the situation: none of the POWs Jane Fonda met needed to furtively hand her messages encoding their identities in order to get word to the world that they still survived. Fonda spent about an hour talking with a single group of seven POWs whose names she had ample opportunity to learn during that time; the POWs didn't need to sneak Fonda pieces of paper with their Social Security numbers written on them, as she could simply have remembered their names and repeated them once she returned home. Plus, there was no reason for the POWs' identities to have been kept a secret in the first place — since the North Vietnamese arranged the meeting between Fonda and the POWs for its propaganda value, they very much wanted the American public and the world at large to know exactly whom she'd met with. The POWs also had no need to rely on Fonda to secretly relay other messages from them to the outside world. After politics disrupted the delivery of letters to and from American POWs in North Vietnam via U.S. Mail, many visitors who traveled to Hanoi during the war years (such as members of the group Women Strike for Peace) regularly brought POWs letters from their families and took letters from POWs back to the United States with them. Jane Fonda was no exception: she brought mail for imprisoned U.S. servicemen with her to Hanoi, and she returned to the U.S. carrying 241 letters from American POWs back to their families. (Fonda even called the wives of some of the men she met with to provide them with updates about their husbands.) None of the POWs who met with Jane Fonda had any need to resort to the form of subterfuge claimed in these Internet rumors in order to get information about themselves carried to friends and family back home. Additionally, no POWs were tortured to coerce them into meeting with Jane Fonda or for refusing to do so. Fonda had only a single meeting with a small group of POWs, and there were plenty of volunteers for the occasion: Despite the claims of hundreds of Vietnam veterans who maintain they were there and affirm that accounts like the smuggled Social Security number betrayal are true because they supposedly witnessed them, the fact is that Fonda met only seven American POWs while in North Vietnam: Edison Miller, Walter Wilber, James Padgett, David Wesley Hoffman, Kenneth James Fraser, William G. Byrns, and Edward Elias. None of those men reported her sabotaging their attempts to slip her information about themselves, and anyone other than those seven men who asserts he was there and witnessed such a scene is simply not telling the truth. Some of the POWs who actually did meet with Jane Fonda, such as Edison Miller, have spoken out on the record over the years to disclaim the apocryphal stories about her Col. Larry Carrigan, the U.S. serviceman whose name is invoked in the e-mailed reproduced at the head of this article, has affirmed that he neither claimed nor experienced any of what has been attributed to him, and that he never even met Jane Fonda: The tale about a defiant serviceman who spit at Jane Fonda and was severely beaten as a result is often attributed to Air Force pilot Jerry Driscoll. He has also repeatedly stated on the record that it did not originate with him: Mike McGrath, President of NAM-POWs, has also stepped forward to disclaim the Internet-circulated rumors about Jane Fonda and American POWs: Even Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, whose 2002 book Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam made the argument that Jane Fonda could have been tried and convicted of treason for her activities in North Vietnam, acknowledged that the slips of paper tale was untrue: Jane Fonda's inclusion in the 30 April 1999 ABC television special A Celebration: 100 Years of Great Women (hosted by Barbara Walters) fanned the flames of anger within many who felt she had never properly atoned for her behavior. However, that program was produced and broadcast over seventeen years ago; contrary to outdated messages which still make the rounds of the Internet, Jane Fonda's being honored as one of America's great women isn't something that just happened or is about to happen. (Nor, as claimed in some versions, does Obama [now] want to honor her — the 100 Years of Great Women program was aired over nine years before Barack Obama was elected President.) It's also not the case, as stated in some later versions of this rumor, that Jane Fonda was slated to portray Nancy Reagan in an upcoming film biography of the Reagans. The referenced movie (The Butler) has already been completed, and it wasn't a biography of Ronald and Nancy Reagan — it was a film about a character named Cecil Gains based on the life of Eugene Allen, who served as the head butler at the White House under eight different presidents between 1952 and 1986. Jane Fonda was one of a large cast of actors and actresses who played supporting roles portraying former presidents and first ladies in that movie. In 1988, sixteen years after the fact, Fonda finally met with Vietnam veterans to apologize for her actions. This nationally televised apology (during which she characterized her actions as thoughtless and careless) came at a time when New England vets were successfully disrupting a film project she was working on, leading some to read a huge dollop of self-interest into her apology. Fonda also apologized in 2005, an act which once again coincided with the release of a film in which she had a starring role (Monster-in-Law, her first leading role since 1990's Stanley & Iris) and a book tour to promote her autobiography. As she had several years earlier, though, Fonda specifically apologized for the act of posing for photographs while seated at (an inoperative) North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, but not for her other activities in North Vietnam:
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