My Life So Far (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  Tom explained that he had just finished writing a book about how the Vietnam War paralleled our genocide against the Native Americans and that the experience had made him identify with the Indians. Oh my God! On top of everything, Tom Hayden identified with the Indians! But the reason he’d come to my slide show, he said, was to ask me to help him with a traveling display of posters and silkscreens about Vietnam and its people. He wanted to use art to show the Vietnamese as human beings, to understand what it was in their culture that enabled them to fight the way they did against a far superior military force.

  Putting his hand on my knee, he said he’d also just finished his own slide show and that “I’d like to show it to you sometime”—at least I think that’s what he said. An electric charge had gone right through me, and all I was thinking about at that moment was his hand on my knee. Slide show? “Sure, come on over anytime,” I said, and gave him my phone number. It made sense: I’d shown him mine, now he’d show me his. . . .

  I got home that night and told Ruby that I’d just met the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with. I was giddy with excitement. I wanted a man in my life I could love, but it had to be someone who could inspire me, teach me, lead me, not be afraid of me. Who better than Tom Hayden? Respected movement leader, passionate organizer, and strategist par excellence, who was even into American Indians. And he seemed so . . . grounded. I needed grounding.

  So over he came early one spring evening shortly thereafter, carrying his slide projector. Vanessa was already asleep, but I introduced him to Ruby and showed him around the place, including the pool and the fruit trees I’d planted. I noticed how quiet he was during the tour. But a few days later as we were drinking coffee at the house, he said, “This is quite an operation you’ve got here.” Then I realized that he didn’t approve—of the grounds, or the pool, or the fact that I had an employee. I, of course, felt immediate guilt and wished I were still living in the smoggy house on the cul-de-sac. Then he would have seen I wasn’t an elitist.

  As we were heading back to the house, Tom asked if I was living with someone, meaning a live-in lover. I answered emphatically, “Oh no, never! I don’t ever want to live with a man again!”

  Tom laughed and said, “Oh,” but his expression said Whoa, lady! Why so defensive? Good question. God forbid he should see I was lonely.

  We went inside so he could do what he’d come for: show me his slide show. We sat on my living room floor, and there, on the paneled wall, unfolded a series of stunning images: children riding water buffalo, slender, reedlike women, graceful in their pastel ao dais, Buddhist temples with smiling roofs that curled at the corners, and always the rice fields stretching as far as the eye could see, dotted by Vietnamese in conical straw hats, waist-deep in an emerald vastness.

  As the images flashed before me, Tom spoke of things not apparent to the eye: how, for the Vietnamese, “growing rice is not just about raising food, it is part of a collective ritual that unites them with nature. Their dead are buried in these fields, their bones fertilize the rice that feeds their families and, thus, it is believed there is physical and spiritual continuity; the children inherit the strength of their ancestors.” He didn’t need to say that our saturation bombing was destroying not just crops and land but the connective tissue of their culture. It was clear, and more painful than any statistics could have been.

  I wasn’t prepared for this. Perhaps it was the very dryness of Tom’s voice in contrast with the lyrical images and spiritual concepts that made the experience so compelling, but I could feel something shift within me.

  Alongside the fresh and surprising cultural picture he was painting, Tom chose to effectively weave in quotes from the Pentagon Papers to highlight hard facts . . . such as that Vietnam was really one country divided artificially in 1954, at the end of France’s war, into two separate entities, North and South, and was to have been reunited two years later.* 4

  Toward the end of the slide show there were devastating images that showed what had become of South Vietnam as a result of the U.S. presence there: GIs in Saigon brothels with Vietnamese girls in miniskirts with huge breasts and push-up bras; starving, hollow-eyed urban refugees living in fetid slums, the results of our “urbanization program,” which aimed to drive the peasants away from their Vietcong-controlled land and into the cities that were controlled by the United States and the Thieu government, which we had installed. There was a large billboard advertising the services of an American doctor, a plastic surgeon, who could make Vietnamese eyes round and breasts bigger. Thousands of women were having this done, Tom said.

  I was speechless. Tom had brought to life for me an ancient culture that had survived foreign invasions, colonialism, torture, and war—and then shown how the United States was trying to overthrow that entire culture and replace it not with democracy but with a Western, consumer-driven, Playboy culture that was making Vietnamese women so ashamed of their slight Asian frames that they were willing to mutilate themselves to become westernized.

  I began to cry—for them and for me. Tom has written about that moment in Reunion: “I was talking about the image of superficial sexiness she once promoted and was now trying to shake. I looked at her in a new way. Maybe I could love someone like this.” I never could have imagined that in years to come I would mutilate my own body by getting breast implants, betraying what Tom saw in me that day—and betraying myself.

  If Tom sensed that evening that perhaps I was someone he could fall in love with, I can tell you that I did fall in love with him—right then and there, head over heels. I know, it sounds so seventies—falling in love because of a political slide show. But of course it was Tom and his history of activism and the sensitivity I had seen with my own eyes that I fell in love with. I felt certain that he was someone with depth and soul, different from any man I had ever met.

  We were making love on the living room floor when he heard Vanessa begin to rouse. Tom, with the agility of a leopard, managed to get himself up and pulled together before she stumbled sleepily down the hall and into the room. Tom knelt and introduced himself to her, asked her what her name was and how old she was. I noticed that he spoke to her not in the cloying, patronizing way some adults do to children they’re trying to butter up but with real interest. Another good sign.

  Tom and I began to spend more and more time together. I sat in on his classes and was captivated by his brilliance as a teacher and how much his students adored him. I was also awed by his strategic mind. He had a historical perspective on most things, not just the war. He was a powerful public speaker who could capture people’s seemingly disconnected, confused feelings and weave them into a coherent vision they could identify with. In my living room, talking with his longtime movement friends, I found many political nuances hard to understand; it was almost like being with Vadim before I spoke fluent French.

  But there was more to the relationship than his intellectual acuity. I loved his playfulness, the Irish juiciness that brought welcomed moisture to what I felt was my arid Protestant nature. Equally irresistible was his impish humor, his lithe body, and the funny way his rubber-sandaled feet glided across the ground while his upper body hunched forward as if the weight of the world were on his shoulders. Then, too, I had the sense that he really wanted to know me. He has an ability to give that impression to women, that he is—finally—the man who can delve into your psyche and understand you. Of course, I realize that I was projecting an impossible-to-live-up-to hero image onto Tom as surely as he had projected his slides onto my living room wall. For me he was the white knight who had arrived in my life just in the nick of time to set everything straight and save me from chaos. Poor Tom. How unfair projections are. No mortal man could possibly live up to that.

  But there was something else I found fascinating about him: I had never been intimate with someone from his background—third-generation, midwestern, white-collar Irish-American . . . on both sides. He was never a Marxist or Maoist, as some critics like
d to claim. One need only read the Port Huron Statement, SDS’s founding document, which Tom co-authored, to see that his politics were always grounded solidly in democratic values.

  His mother, Gene, was a sparrowlike woman who had been a librarian for twenty-five years, never missing a day’s work. His father, Jack, was an accountant for the Chrysler Corporation. Both were natives of Wisconsin and during the Depression had moved to the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, where for eight years Tom attended the Shrine of the Little Flower Church and parish school.

  But things were far from picture perfect in Tom’s childhood. Following World War II, his father began drinking heavily, and in time his parents divorced. Thereafter Gene devoted her life to Tom, never again remarrying or even seeing another man. Then, in the early sixties, Tom became a full-time activist in the civil rights movement, and his father, a conservative Republican, broke off all contact with him, his only child—for thirteen years! I had often pondered what kind of person my grandfather was to have refused to speak to my dad for six weeks because he was considering a career in acting—but thirteen years! Tom told me about this rupture with his dad in a matter-of-fact way, never in emotional terms. But I cannot fathom what an impact it must have had on him—growing up with a repressed, noncommunicative father who then cut off all relations and a mother who, though a fairly liberal Democrat, was frightened and confused by her child’s activism and held a deep bitterness about life that I could never penetrate.

  Perhaps this was why, like Vadim, Tom could cry easily about children, the war, animals, but couldn’t show emotions in intimate areas like love, loss, and betrayal; he couldn’t allow that degree of vulnerability. The sensitivity displayed in his slide show disguised Tom’s lack of emotional availability. But I was so accustomed to the absence of emotionality in the men in my life that I thought Tom the most emotionally accessible human being I had ever met—and later I assumed that whatever problems we had in that area must be all my fault. (Of course, if Tom had possessed a real capacity for intimacy at that time, I probably would have fled in terror without knowing why. It’s so much easier to stay with what’s familiar.)

  Others knew Tom differently. One day soon after we became lovers, a woman named Carol Kurtz arrived at my doorstep asking for Tom. I sensed she needed to be alone with him. I knew Carol a little; she and her husband were members of the Red Family collective. I told Tom she wanted to talk to him, but instead of asking her in, he stood just outside the front door for a few minutes, and when he came back in he was clearly angry. I went to say good-bye to Carol and found her sobbing. Carol wanted to repair the breach between them caused by his expulsion from the collective and maintain a friendship with Tom. He wanted no part of it. She said to me, “He has no heart, no emotions.” I thought, She can’t be referring to the Tom I know. Tom never spoke about what transpired between them that day, but I never forgot Carol’s words, which so confused me.

  Little by little I learned that after leaving the Red Family, Tom had migrated from Berkeley to Santa Monica, where he lived anonymously while writing his book about Native Americans and Vietnam. By the time he surfaced in my life that spring, he was sharing a small apartment with the brilliant, soft-spoken attorney Leonard Weinglass, who had represented Tom during the Chicago conspiracy trial. They lived on the ground floor of a house in Venice, a colorful coastal area just south of Santa Monica. In Tom, and in his circle, I felt I had at last found a haven from the storms of uncertainty buffeting me. I felt he would bring coherence, structure, and safety into my life . . . and in many ways he did just that. In some ways he didn’t.

  But if I thought the previous buffeting had been hard, nothing could compare with what was about to happen.

  On May 8 President Nixon had ordered underwater explosive mines to be placed in the Haiphong harbor, something that had been rejected by previous administrations. Later that same month, a month after Tom and I had become lovers, reports began to come in from European scientists and diplomats that the dikes of the Red River Delta in North Vietnam were being targeted by U.S. planes. The Swedish ambassador to Vietnam, Jean-Christophe Oberg, reported to an American delegation in Hanoi that he had at first believed the bombing was accidental but now, having seen the dikes with his own eyes, he was convinced it was deliberate.

  I might have missed the significance of these reports had Tom not shown me what the Pentagon Papers had to say on the subject: In 1966, assistant secretary of Defense John McNaughton, searching for some new means to bring Hanoi to its knees, had proposed destroying North Vietnam’s system of locks and dams, which, he said, “if handled right, might . . . offer promise . . . such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do ‘at the conference table.’ ” President Johnson, to his credit, had not acted upon this option. Now, six years later, Richard Nixon appeared to have given orders to target the dikes—whether to actually destroy them or to demonstrate the threat of destruction, no one knew.

  Tom explained that the Red River is North Vietnam’s largest. Its delta is below sea level. Over centuries the Vietnamese people have constructed—by hand!—an intricate network of earthen dikes and dams to hold back the sea, a network 2,500 miles long! The stability of these dikes became especially critical as monsoon season approached and required an all-out effort to repair any damage from burrowing animals or from normal wear and tear. Now it was June, but this was no normal wear and tear they were facing. The Red River would begin to rise in July and August. Should there be flooding, the mining of the Haiphong harbor would prevent food from being imported. The bombing showed no signs of letting up, and there was little press coverage of the potential impending disaster. Something drastic had to be done.

  The Nixon administration and its U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, George Herbert Walker Bush, would vehemently deny what was happening, but the following are excerpts from the April–May 1972 transcripts of conversations between President Nixon and top administration officials:

  April 25, 1972

  PRESIDENT NIXON: “. . . We’ve got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack [of North Vietnam]. . . . Now by all-out bombing attack, I am thinking about things that go far beyond. . . . I’m thinking of the dikes, I’m thinking of the railroad, I’m thinking, of course, the docks. . . .”

  KISSINGER: “. . . I agree with you.”

  PRESIDENT NIXON: “. . . And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?”

  KISSINGER: “About two hundred thousand people.”

  PRESIDENT NIXON: “. . . No, no, no . . . I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?”

  KISSINGER: “That, I think, would just be too much.”

  PRESIDENT NIXON: “The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? . . . I just want to think big, Henry, for chrissakes.”

  May 4, 1972

  PRESIDENT NIXON TO KISSINGER, AL HAIG, JOHN CONNALLY: “. . . Vietnam: Here’s those little cocksuckers right in there, here they are. [He thumps on his desk] Here we are. They’re taking on the United States. Now, goddammit, we’re gonna do it. We’re going to cream them. . . .

  “I’ll see that the United States does not lose. . . . South Vietnam may lose. But the United States cannot lose. Which means, basically, I have made the decision. Whatever happens to South Vietnam, we are going to cream North Vietnam. . . .

  “For once we’ve got to use the maximum power of this country . . . against this shit-ass little country: to win the war. We can’t use the word ‘win.’ But others can.”

  May 4, 1972

  JOHN B. CONNALLY: “. . . Bomb for seriousness, not just as a signal. Railroads, ports, power stations, communication lines . . . and don’t worry about killing civilians. Go ahead and kill ’em. . . . People think you are [killing civilians] now. So go ahead and give ’em some.”

  RICHARD NIXON: “That’s right.”
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  H. R. HALDEMAN: “There’s pictures on the news of dead bodies every night. . . . A dead body is a dead body. Nobody knows whose bodies they are or who killed them.”

  RICHARD NIXON: “Henry [Kissinger] is overreacting on that . . . because they’re going to charge us with it [killing civilians] anyway.”

  [Later in same conversation]

  RICHARD NIXON: “We need to win the goddamned war . . . and . . . what that fella [?] said about taking out the goddamned dikes, all right, we’ll take out the goddamned dikes. . . . If Henry’s for that, I’m for it all the way.”

  H. R. HALDEMAN: “I don’t know if he’s for the dikes.”

  RICHARD NIXON: “No, I don’t think he’s for the dikes, but I am. I am for the Connally idea.”

  [Later in same conversation]

  RICHARD NIXON: “I agree with Connally about civilians, too. I’m not going to worry about it.”

  So much for winding down the war. So much for our concern about civilian casualties and our “allies” in South Vietnam.

  That May I received an invitation from the North Vietnamese in Paris to make the trip to Hanoi. Tom felt strongly that I should go. Perhaps it would take a different sort of celebrity to get people’s attention. Heightened public attention—even if it took controversy to achieve it—was what was needed to confront the impending crisis with the dikes. I would take a camera and bring back photographic evidence (if such was to be found) of the bomb damage to the dikes we’d been hearing about.

  I arranged the trip’s logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris peace talks, bought myself a round-trip ticket, and stopped in New York. Since 1969 mail for the POWs had been brought in and out of North Vietnam every month by American visitors. This effort was coordinated by the Committee of Liaison with Families of Prisoners Detained in Vietnam. I picked up a packet of letters from families of POWs that I would deliver.