by Jane Fonda
Long after I started identifying myself as a feminist, I still would not be brave enough to look within myself and identify the subtle ways in which I had internalized sexism—my willingness to forgo emotional intimacy with a man and betray my own body and soul if being honest and speaking my voice meant losing him. Put another way, I was the only person I could treat badly and consider that morally defensible.
We visited the Paiute Indian reservation, about forty-five minutes outside Reno, Nevada, to join a small protest against the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. With permission of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Bureau of Reclamation was diverting water from the Truckee River and Pyramid Lake, on the reservation, to irrigate farmlands owned by white farmers. On the western rim of the lake were about twenty Indians. Some had brought little vials of water to symbolically pour into the lake.
My appearance at this mild protest was the first item to appear in my FBI files. Their informant reported it this way:
The group with Fonda totaled about 200 people of which 40 were in Fonda’s personal entourage. Her group of 40 dumped 20 Gallon jugs of water, brought from California, into Pyramid Lake. It was very peaceful, and no incidents occurred.
. . . Lest we confuse intelligence with “intelligence.”
While we sat waiting to order in the only restaurant on the reservation, several Indian men came in and invited us to sit at their table. One of them, a beefy guy with dark glasses, kept saying we should get some bombs and blow up the dam the white farmers had built—it was damaging the lake. My antenna went up immediately: an agent provocateur. The Panthers had warned me about this. We left immediately.
At the Shoshone reservation in Fort Hall, Idaho, we met up with La Nada, the Native woman I’d met at Alcatraz, and were taken to meet her family—my first time in a Native American home. Her father told us of his persistent suits against the government on behalf of the Shoshone Nation—to stop the stealing of their lands and water. He pulled out several worn cardboard shoeboxes and, with great reverence, showed us documents and letters that proved the tribal claims. He handled the papers as if they were sacred, never raising his voice or appearing angry as he told story after story of defeat and betrayal. Like all Native Americans, the family descended from a people for whom oral history had once sufficed. Experience had taught them that the white man wants proof in writing. So they’d saved the papers that carry their proof. Still no one had paid attention.
As we left Idaho I noted in my journal that indigenous people in the United States seemed to have all the characteristics of a colonized people: no power, no independence, no control over their own natural resources, and a carefully inflicted and fostered tendency to feel that it must be their own fault.
Years later I learned from my FBI files that a white woman who had met us on the Shoshone reservation was an FBI informant. She reported to the agency that Elisabeth and I had come there to “organize and indoctrinate” the local Indians. Wonder if the agency paid her? Wonder if American taxpayers would think it was money well spent, an informant watching us sit at the feet of an elderly gentleman holding shoe boxes? I remembered her because she had been disappointed that I didn’t look like a movie star. She even admitted that she wanted to shout out to everyone that I was Jane Fonda and was angry that I didn’t fulfill her fantasies.
I went back to California briefly and walked down the red carpet on Vadim’s arm at the Academy Awards. I had barely thought about my nomination for Best Actress (for my role in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?). Many friends had told me they thought I would win, but my instincts said that would not be the case, and I was right. The remarkable Maggie Smith won for her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I had attended the Oscars many times during the ten years of my career and had often been a presenter, but that night felt different—not just because I was a nominee, but because my life outside of movies was starting to interest me more than being an actor.
My first public act against the war was at a two-day fast in United Nations Square in the center of downtown Denver—one of many events planned by MOBE (Mobilization to End the War). Over one thousand people were there—all ages, including Vietnam veterans and Native Americans. It seemed to boost people’s spirits to have a celebrity among them, and though it was cold and rainy, people stayed huddled together, joined in their commitment. On the final day of the fast, a group of hard hats working on a construction site opposite the square flashed us peace signs as they left work. Hard hats had been stereotyped as pro-war conservatives, just as antiwar activists had been branded as unpatriotic. I was glad to see the stereotypes were unfounded.
At the Home Front, a GI coffeehouse near Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, there were about thirty GIs and staff waiting, including a lawyer who had gotten the base commander to agree to meet with us to discuss a recent situation: A hundred soldiers had lined up in front of the medical dispensary flashing peace signs and saying they were sick—sick of the war. As a result, all of them had been put into the stockade, and it was rumored that they were being beaten. Given the potential media exposure that could result, it was hoped that my meeting the base commander would lead to the release of the soldier-protesters.
Surprisingly, the general took us on a tour of the stockade and let us talk to prisoners. If he hoped by this to show us that the GIs were being well treated, it backfired. We saw prisoners who seemed catatonic. One appeared to be schizophrenic. Some, who identified themselves as Black Panthers, said they had been beaten, and it appeared to be so. Perhaps the general had never been inside the stockade himself; perhaps he misjudged the effect it would have on me. In any case, the visit was abruptly called to an end and we were ushered out before I was able to determine which prisoners were the protesters.
Elisabeth pondered this paradox of our democracy: Men are punished for protesting the war, yet we are allowed to visit the stockade.
I received word that a psychiatrist from a nearby military academy wanted to meet privately with me. I was taken to a motel where the young doctor talked to me about the training new recruits were being made to undergo, training he said was horrifying, turning the young men into “mechanical robots, devoid of humanity, ready to kill anything.”
I had brought dozens of books to give to GIs I met along the way. They included copies of The Village of Ben Suc, the abridged version of Bertrand Russell’s Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the International War Crimes Tribunal, Robert Sherrill’s Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music, and a collection of GI-movement newspapers. Permission for me to reenter the base had been denied following the visit to the stockade, but several soldiers from the base offered to sneak us on. They wanted me to see an on-base coffeehouse that the brass had created, complete with girlie shows, to keep the men from coming to the GI movement coffeehouse.
We were smuggled onto the base in the trunk of a soldier’s car and managed to get to the on-base coffeehouse. It was a rather antiseptic room with a few pinup posters and a small stage, where we quickly distributed the books to the few soldiers who were there (no time to try to get to the stockade). I told them about the Home Front and why I had brought the books. But no sooner had I finished than several MPs arrived and escorted us off the base. Later some soldiers told me that the general didn’t make more of a stink about it because he didn’t want any media attention, since it was active-duty servicemen who had smuggled us in. I realized that the higher-ups feared word getting out as to the breadth and depth of soldiers’ antiwar feelings.
Later I learned that it was during my time in Denver that the FBI began its serious investigation of me—not just getting information from informants, but attempting to get me charged with sedition—which punishes anyone who “advises, counsels, urges, or in any manner causes or attempts to cause, insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States.” The FBI cannot investigate someone unless a criminal law has been vi
olated, which was why the agency, soon joined by the United States Army, Secret Service, and National Security Agency, decided to cite sedition—and then set out to try to prove it. In this effort, the FBI questioned nine people who had been present at the time I was on base at Fort Carson.
The answers the FBI received were fairly similar to what they heard from other informants over the three years they pursued their investigation. The agent reported being told that I explicitly stated that deserting will not “help the cause for peace”; that nothing I said “could be construed to be undermining the U.S. government.” Another informant said that I “did more listening than talking.”
I began to be aware that I was followed constantly and took care not to drive over the speed limit. Nonetheless we were stopped numerous times on one pretext or another, and I had to show my driver’s license and registration. I saw it as a form of harassment and realized that for the first time I had stepped across the line that allows upper-class white people, especially celebrities, never to have to experience what other people, especially people of color, face all the time—only far worse. There was a tightening in my stomach; I never knew what would happen next. I was aware of the possibility that I might be set up, but I also felt a deepening resolve to not turn back.
They’re not going to scare me. I’m still the Lone Ranger, and my car is my horse.
One morning I stepped outside our motel room and there, stretching before me to the horizon, was Monument Valley—red, huge, humbling in its vastness. The monoliths towering up from the flat, timeless valley floor seemed divinely placed, like the vaulted domes of great cathedrals that carry our eyes and our hearts heavenward, a reminder of man’s insignificance. I was dumbstruck. My heart filled with love for this country, which I was getting to know. Right then I vowed to commit myself to ensuring that America’s moral fiber remained as strong as its beauty.
As Elisabeth and I headed into Santa Fe, we heard on the radio the news that the United States had invaded Cambodia. Suddenly we shifted into emergency mode.
Listening to soldiers at a GI coffeehouse.
Meeting with students during the road trip.
(Bill Ray/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
The motel we had checked into must have called the newspapers to say I was there, because several reporters showed up to get my reaction to the invasion. I was shaking with fury: Here was Nixon, elected by promising he would end the war, expanding it into another country! The American public did not yet know that the United States had been secretly bombing Cambodia since March 1969. Nor did we know that U.S. bombers, from 1964 through 1969, had secretly obliterated an entire civilization in the Plain of Jars in northeastern Laos. I would meet countless young people in years to come who cited the events of those days in May 1970 as their wake-up call to activism.
Before the United States bombed Cambodia, it was possible to view the war as President Johnson’s “mistake” that President Nixon had inherited. After Cambodia we had to face the fact that the war was no president’s mistake. Nixon was expanding the war under the pretext of ending it, despite the fact that by then at least half the Senate and most of the American public viewed it as wrong! These were not actions a president made by mistake. It would be decades before I could see this as the curse of patriarchy—the fear of premature evacuation, of being called “soft.”
A student leader at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque invited me to speak on campus. He said the school had been apathetic about the war and he hoped my speech would get something going. I had never made a speech about the war before, and though I was nervous, I agreed. I called Donald Duncan to seek his advice. Donald had actually gone into Cambodia as a Green Beret and knew a great deal about the situation. I took careful notes and wrote out a serious, detailed speech.
The university auditorium was packed to overflowing, although we had not expected many people, given what the student leader had told us about campus apathy. People were hanging off the balcony and spilling into the corridors. I felt quite important and delivered my prepared, rather scholarly speech to an attentive but quiet audience.
When I finished, a drunken poet stumbled onto the stage demanding to know why I hadn’t mentioned the four students who had just been killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. Oh my God! I hadn’t heard the news. No wonder so many people had come to the auditorium! It had nothing to do with me. I was shocked by the news and felt like a fool. We were swept up in a mass of bodies marching toward the university president’s home to demand he shut down the university as a way to mourn the Kent State deaths.
The rest of the trip was a blur of speeches, press conferences, and arrests—at Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, Fort Meade—for passing out antiwar leaflets. A few incidents stand out. At the Los Angeles press conference with Donald Duncan announcing plans for a GI movement demonstration on May 16, Armed Forces Day—the GIs were calling theirs Armed Farces Day—one reporter shouted, “Miss Fonda, why were you at the University of Albuquerque inciting the students to riot?” I should have said that he was giving me too much credit, and didn’t he think the killing of the Kent State students might have caused the rioting? Instead, I got angry and defensive.
Donald wanted to open a GI office in Washington to act as ombudsman for soldiers—a place where GIs could call or write about what was happening to them, where acts of military injustice could be documented, and where doctors and lawyers could verify their claims and get information about it to the House and Senate for investigation. We decided on the spot that Donald would move to D.C. to head up the office and that I would raise money to fund it.
I had seen turmoil in Paris in 1968, but now in the United States it was happening nationwide. In May, 35,000 National Guardsmen were called out in sixteen states. Over a hundred demonstrators were wounded or killed. A third of the nation’s colleges closed down. In early May, students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. On May 14, police shot into a dormitory at Jackson State University, wounding twelve students and killing two. More than five hundred GIs were deserting every day.
I was refused rooms in two Albuquerque motels because my criticism of Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia had appeared in the papers.
I met Terry Davis, an attractive brown-haired woman who was on the staff of another GI coffeehouse, the Oleo Strut, in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood. It was my first time experiencing a woman’s leadership. This was so powerful for me that, when I think back over my 1970 trip, my time with Terry stands out above all else. Terry treated me not like a movie star but as a peer. She was interested in why I had become an activist and how I had gotten involved in the GI movement. She asked my opinion, included me in all decisions, and made sure I was comfortable. I saw this same sensitivity and compassion in the way she dealt with the GIs. With her, there was no hierarchy, only circle—everyone was valued, heard. It was a harbinger of the new world, a world of authenticity. This was the first time I had met an organizer who deeply embodied her politics, working toward true democracy in her own relationships.
It was at the Strut coffeehouse that I heard, for the first time, a speech about the women’s movement. Terry had invited a feminist to speak to the GIs. I was impressed. Up until then I had been confused by women who identified themselves to me as feminists. Mostly, these women asked questions like “How did you feel doing Barbarella? Did you feel that you were being exploited?” I could tell that I was supposed to feel exploited, but secretly I thought: No one forced me to make the film. I didn’t enjoy it very much for lots of reasons, but I didn’t feel exploited. (Now I think that with a little tweaking, Barbarella could have been a feminist movie—and just as sexy.) The speaker that night, however, said that if there were true equality between women and men, it would be good for both sexes: men wouldn’t feel that they alone have to carry the burden that has been placed on them by the patriarchal system. “It’s not a matter of women taking a piece of your pie,” she said to the gathered
, attentive men, “it’s about us sharing the pie and making it bigger.”
Representing the GI movement at the huge rally in Washington, D.C., May 1970.
(Keystone/Getty Images)
Arrested at Fort Bragg military base, with Mark Lane and Elisabeth.
(AP/Wide World Photos)
My experience at the GI coffeehouse was what caused me to begin calling myself a feminist publicly—though it would be many more years before I had a true understanding of what the word and the politics really meant. It was much easier for me to organize on behalf of others—Vietnam veterans, Indians, blacks, and GIs—than it was to look at issues of gender. That would be hardest to face, because it meant questioning the foundation on which my identity as a woman had been built: Women are meant to please. They can rock all the boats there are out there, but they must do what’s necessary to keep the man happy at home.
At the Oleo Strut, Elisabeth and I shared a queen-size mattress on the floor with just a quilt to cover us. This was new for me but, as I would learn, a common mode of sleeping among movement activists—one I would soon adopt out of financial necessity. For the first time I also saw wooden cable spools turned on end and serving as tables.
In Washington, D.C., at my first national antiwar rally, there were about one hundred thousand people. I saw white people chanting “Free Bobby Seale!” and many Vietnam veterans in uniform with peace signs on their caps. There were speakers representing all aspects of the antiwar movement. A black man named Al Hubbard spoke eloquently on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Shirley MacLaine was there, the only other Hollywood person I saw, and she was clearly far more experienced at public speaking than I was.