My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  I knew that activism was right for me, that the killing in Vietnam needed to be stopped, and that using my celebrity to help people who were being bullied, deprived of safety and opportunity, was what I needed to do. So when I came out of that dressing room ready for the day’s work, my attitude was very “Fuck you, guys, whoever you are.” Since “Fuck you” was my character’s general attitude about life, it worked for me on that film. Besides, I knew that the people who worked closest to me—Alan, Donald, Gordon Willis, and Michael Chapman, the camera operator—liked me. This was when disparity in people’s feelings about me became a constant in my life. There was visceral hatred and there was something else I wasn’t used to: admiration. I wasn’t used to people throwing me high fives and peace signs. Fan letters were routine, but not letters filled with thanks for my having taken a stand, and when I went on TV talk shows, the audience response was different—as if people were rooting for me. That felt very good indeed.

  Unbeknownst to me, during this time I had become the target of the government counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO, a secret creation of J. Edgar Hoover, whose purpose was to disrupt and discredit members of the antiwar and militant black movements. This was done through infiltration, sabotage, intimidation, murder (directly assassinating or hiring rival groups to assassinate leaders), by framing activists for crimes the FBI committed, and through fake black propaganda—feeding journalists information through phony letters and inflammatory leaflets that slandered and discredited the targeted person. After extensive investigation of COINTELPRO, Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Government Intelligence Activities pronounced it “a sophisticated vigilante program aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association.” Seems the government felt it necessary to destroy democracy in order to save it. And look where it got us—Watergate and the first presidential resignation in U.S. history.

  Richard Wallace Held was head of the Los Angeles section of COINTELPRO, and he specialized in black propaganda. In his 2002 book The Last Editor Jim Bellows says that in spring of 1970, while he was editor of the Los Angeles Times, Richard Held, with permission from J. Edgar Hoover, had planted a story with the Los Angeles Times’ gossip columnist Joyce Haber saying that an actress who had recently appeared in a big musical film was now pregnant by a Black Panther. (Jean Seberg, a Panther Party supporter, had just starred in the musical Paint Your Wagon and was definitely pregnant, but by her husband, French novelist Romain Gary.)

  In August an article appeared in Newsweek specifically naming Jean as the actress in question. In her seventh month of pregnancy, Jean attempted suicide and suffered a miscarriage as a consequence. She held an open-casket funeral in Paris so that her friends and family could see that her dead baby girl, whom she’d named Nina, was in fact white. Every year on the anniversary of Nina’s death, Jean attempted suicide, until on September 8, 1979, she was found dead in her car in Paris. Also in September, the FBI admitted publicly to what it had done. Jean’s husband shot himself several months later. Nice work, guys, and on taxpayers’ money, too.

  In June, soon after the first Seberg article had appeared, the same Richard Wallace Held received a memo from Hoover authorizing him to send a fictitious letter about me to Army Archerd, a columnist at Daily Variety. “It can be expected,” emphasized Hoover’s instructions to Held, “that Fonda’s involvement with the BPP [Black Panther Party] cause could detract from her status with the general public if reported in a Hollywood ‘gossip’ column. . . . Ensure that mailing cannot be traced to the Bureau [FBI].” Held’s subsequent letter read:

  Dear Army,

  I saw your article about Jane Fonda in “Daily Variety” last Thursday and happened to be present for Vadim’s “Joan of Arc’s” performance for the Black panthers Saturday night. I hadn’t been confronted with this Panther phenomena [sic] before but we were searched upon entering Embassy Auditorium, encouraged in revival-like fashion to contribute to defend jailed Panther leaders and buy guns for “the coming revolution,” and led by Jane and one of the Panthers chaps in a “we will kill Richard Nixon, and any other M . . . F . . . who stands in our way” refrain. I think Jane has gotten in over her head as the whole atmosphere had the 1930’s Munich beer-hall aura.

  Army Archerd knew me, and to his credit, declined to print the letter. There would be more of the same to come.

  One article, aiming to portray me as a rich hypocrite (though I can no longer remember where it was printed) said that I had been invited to speak at the University of Mexico but had insisted on having a limousine and on bringing my secretary and hairdresser. (Poor Elisabeth, there she was again.) Another reported that I had crashed a Nixon fund-raiser in New York, climbed onto a table, torn my blouse off, and shouted obscenities.

  Starting in May 1970, the FBI, CIA, and counterintelligence branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency began monitoring me and eventually built up a file of some 20,000 pages. I would learn in 1975 that the National Security Agency had made transcripts of my 1970 phone calls and distributed them to Nixon, Kissinger, and other top government officials. One FBI informant reported at the time, “What Brezhnev and Jane Fonda said got about the same treatment.” God help us!

  It was through information given to my lawyers by columnist Jack Anderson that I learned the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York and the City National Bank of Los Angeles had turned over my bank records to the FBI—without any subpoena. It turns out I was part of Group 1, which meant the documents about me could not automatically be declassified, and many were deemed top-secret. My “case” went by the code name “the Gamma Series,” and I am variously referred to as a “subversive” and “anarchist”—although nothing in my files shows any proof as to why I was considered so dangerous.

  Apart from government shenanigans, those were difficult times to be a newcomer to the movement scene. There was infighting on the Left, much debate about what the correct position was on this and that. For the radical left wing, the issue wasn’t so much ending the Vietnam War as it was smashing U.S. imperialism. Sexism was rampant in the antiwar movement, and many women activists began to develop more feminist priorities. Then there were the yippies—and I wasn’t sure what they were doing, although I spent a pleasant afternoon at the Central Park Zoo with Abbie Hoffman.

  I was confused. Was it just limp, liberal politics to ask: “But what about all the American soldiers and Vietnamese dying . . . for a lie?” I had begun to feel there was no way I could possibly learn enough fast enough to understand why these ruptures were happening and what the radicals were all talking about.

  This was a lonely time for me personally. Had I known at the start the hatred, scorn, and lies that would be unleashed at me, I would have gone ahead anyway; I was too immersed in this new world to turn back. What was lacking, I later realized, was a loving environment of fellow activists and friends with whom I could work. I didn’t want to be the Lone Ranger anymore.

  Then, in an amazing bit of synchronicity, I came upon an article in Ramparts written by the man who would within two years provide that loving environment for me: Tom Hayden. The article was titled “All for Vietnam,” and it brought things into focus for me. Hayden wrote, “Most peace activists and radicals believe that Vietnam is a flaw—a terrible flaw—in the working of the American Empire. We should follow the war “not as a ‘tragedy,’ ” he wrote, “but as a struggle in which humanity is making a stand so heroic that it should shatter the hardest cynicism.”

  That article confirmed and reenergized my commitment to ending the war, and I sensed that working with antiwar soldiers was the best way I could do that. The movement of active-duty soldiers and returned Vietnam veterans was potent, because these men and women were from America’s heartland. They had enlisted as patriots; they returned as patriots. They had been there, and this made them more believable to Middle Americans than other groups in the antiwar movement. It was GI resisters, after all, who had brought me into the
antiwar movement. I became even more committed to making these new heroes, the new warriors, the focus of my efforts.

  CHAPTER SIX

  REDEMPTION

  I hear a lot of people say, “We know Vietnam veterans and they don’t feel the way you do.” My immediate reaction is, “Wait and see. If they are lucky, they will. If they are lucky, they will open up.”

  —ARTHUR EGENDORF,

  American Orthopsychiatric Association,

  at a meeting in Washington, D.C., April 1971

  I sincerely believe that we not only have the right to know what is good and what is evil; we have the duty to acquire that knowledge if we hope to assume responsibility for our own lives and those of our children. Only by knowing the truth can we be set free.

  —ALICE MILLER,

  The Truth Will Set You Free

  IT WAS TO BE a war-crimes hearing, what has become known, famously, as the Winter Soldier investigation. The name Winter Soldier invoked Tom Paine’s reference to the revolutionary soldiers who, through the terrible winter of 1777–1778, volunteered to remain at Valley Forge. Vietnam veterans would testify about atrocities they had committed or had witnessed while in Vietnam, as a way to let the American public know the kind of war it was. Like all information about the GIs and Vietnam veterans who opposed the war (VVAW), with a Ramboesque sleight of hand it has been disappeared, and history has been conveniently rewritten. I want to help reverse this abracadabra.

  The motivation for the Winter Soldier investigation was the My Lai massacre. When the story about My Lai had broken in The New York Times in November 1969, it had staggered the public. What had enraged a lot of Vietnam veterans, however, was the way the government was scapegoating Lieutenant William Calley and the men he commanded, calling My Lai an “isolated incident of aberrant behavior.” To the membership of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW)—some 25,000 to 30,000 members in 1970–71—the My Lai massacre was remarkable only in the number of victims involved and the fact that it became public.

  The vets knew that atrocities were occurring as an inevitable part of our Vietnam policies and that if justice was to be served, the architects of those policies—from the president on down—needed to be held accountable, as had been the case at the Nuremberg trials following World War II.

  Before the Winter Soldier investigation—the hearings were scheduled for early the following year, 1971—the VVAW, led by Al Hubbard, had organized an eighty-six-mile march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where it would end in a Labor Day rally. Donald Sutherland and I spoke at that rally.

  I will never forget it. The three-day march culminated as hundreds of the veterans swept up a hill, plastic AK-47 rifles held high, shouting, “Peace now!” Thousands of cheering people gathered to greet them. The most significant speaker that afternoon was a tall, handsome Silver Star winner, one Lieutenant John Kerry from Massachusetts. He had a charisma and an eloquence that immediately marked him as a natural leader. I was never introduced to him that day, although during the 2004 presidential campaign, photos doctored by George W. Bush supporters tried to malign Kerry by making it appear that he had stood next to me.

  Getting ready for the Winter Soldier investigation required some hard, fast fund-raising and, not surprisingly, I volunteered to take it on, for which Al Hubbard made me VVAW’s honorary national coordinator.

  The moment we wrapped Klute, I hit the road running. I went to people who had contributed to the GI office. I got my friends David Crosby and Graham Nash to do a benefit concert. But most of the money came from a grueling six-week speaking tour that took me to fifty-four college campuses across the country.

  Whatever controversy I had experienced until then was nothing compared with what ensued on November 2, 1970, after my first speech in Ontario, Canada. Back in the United States, at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, I was stopped by customs officials who, without explanation, demanded that my suitcase and purse be opened and searched. And what do you suppose they found? Little plastic bottles, 105 in all, each marked with “B,” “L,” or “D”: the bottles that contained my array of vitamins.

  That did it. They seized the bottles, my address book, and all my books and papers. I was taken to a room, held for three hours, and not allowed to make a phone call to my lawyer. When I tried to stand up, two hulking FBI chaps would shove me back in the chair. I said to them, “If there is a law that allows you to hold me here for no reason, that permits you to keep me from calling my lawyer, please show it to me and I’ll be quiet.” One of the agents answered, “You shut up! You’re in my control. You take my word for it! I’m taking orders from Washington.” I didn’t yet know about COINTELPRO, but this news showed me that what was going on was serious. Washington!

  I had just gotten my period, so after several hours I desperately needed to go to the women’s room. When the agent blocked my way and was rude, I tried to push him aside. As a result I was arrested for assaulting an officer—as well as for drug smuggling—though I didn’t yet know the charges.

  Early in the morning I was handcuffed and taken to the Cuyahoga County jail, where they fingerprinted me and took a mug shot. While I was being booked, a man who’d just been arrested asked me, “What are you in for?” I replied that I might be called a political prisoner.

  “Well, they oughta throw you in jail,” said he. “We don’t want no Commies running around loose in this country.”

  “What are you in for?” I asked.

  “Murder,” he replied.

  I was in a cell for ten hours. The next day I was brought from jail in handcuffs past a phalanx of TV cameras and photographers. As my hands are slender and double-jointed, I easily slipped out of one handcuff and threw a “power to the people” fist in the air, much to the chagrin of the guards. Leaving behind the cameras, I was taken to a courthouse, where I was surprised and relieved to see Mark Lane. He had heard the news of my arrest (TV was all over it and it had made the front page in many papers) and had flown in to defend me.

  Arrested at the Cleveland airport for “smuggling drugs”—my vitamins.

  (Reuters/Corbis)

  I refused to face the presiding judge but turned my back instead, as I felt the “system” had turned its back on me. Mark pleaded with me to turn around, but I wouldn’t. I was released on $5,000 personal bond on the drug charge and then booked on the local charge of assaulting the airport official, released on that charge on a $500 surety bond, and then booked for a hearing the following week.

  Headlines across the country screamed the news that I’d been arrested for drug smuggling and assaulting an officer. Several months later one article tucked away on the back pages of The New York Times noted, “It was determined the pills she brought into the country from Canada were really vitamins, just as she said they were,” and the charges of assault and drug smuggling were dropped. No headlines for that.

  The day after my court appearance, I was back on the lecture circuit. Everywhere I went the surveillance had increased. At every airport there were at least two spooks in dark suits and shades (do they always operate in twos?), not even trying to pretend they weren’t there to observe and intimidate me. Stress and fatigue began to get to me, but I was determined not to be cowed.

  I was moving too fast. I was actively bulimic. I was depressed. I hadn’t seen Vanessa and I felt anguish about that. I wasn’t reading anymore. I was barely thinking. But I kept going. It never occurred to me not to. I was living in crisis mode. U.S. soldiers were willing to testify about the war—at potential personal risk—and I felt a responsibility to do everything I could to make that possible.

  A few times the marquees announcing my appearances would say COME HEAR BARBARELLA SPEAK. I began to feel like a sideshow and wondered if what I had to say about the war was getting through all the hoopla.

  Mostly I traveled by myself with one small bag. I would arrive at the local airport, where the student in charge of the speakers’ bureau would pick me up. En
route to the campus, I’d try to get a sense from my host of what I needed to prepare myself for. Increasingly the atmosphere would be described as tense, which usually meant there would be a large turnout; most of the time the audience numbered in the many hundreds, if not thousands. I spoke about the war and the upcoming Winter Soldier hearings and said that I was contributing my speaker’s fees to enable more veterans to attend. When I finished my speech, I would invite any vets in the audience to come up and give me their names and addresses if they were interested in participating, and as soon as I could get to a phone I would follow up with the VVAW’s Detroit office.

  Right up to the day the hearings began in January 1971, vets were showing up to see if they could testify, or at least attend. Most had never been part of any organized activity against the war; many had never before spoken to anyone about their war experiences.

  It was critical for VVAW that all the men who were slated to testify were legitimate veterans with their DD-214 (discharge documents) in hand, and that they could prove they had been where they said they had been. The organizers did a remarkable job with this—which was fortunate, since the Nixon White House subsequently did all it could to prove the men weren’t really combat veterans; and when they failed, they did the men the disservice of calling them “alleged vets” anyway, in an effort to discredit them and their testimony.

  On January 31, hundreds of people from all over the country crammed into the large conference room in a Howard Johnson motel to witness this unprecedented event. Barbara Dane and Ken Cloke were there, Ken to review veterans’ documents and offer legal help as it was needed. Another person who stopped by was Tom Hayden, author of the Ramparts article that had so influenced me.