In his previous book, “The Spitting Image,’’ Lembcke argued persuasively that claims of servicemen returning from duty in Vietnam being spat upon by antiwar protestors were more myth than reality.
Here, he faces a more difficult task, for the documentary evidence that was lacking in the spitting charges is all-too present for Fonda’s actions from which she later attempted to distance herself.
Some discussion of the activities of the 300-some other antiwar activists who visited North Vietnam during the war years would have been helpful in providing a context for Fonda’s two visits.
Fonda’s 1972 visit, and a second one two years later with her then-husband Tom Hayden, received relatively little coverage in the mainstream press at the time. It was reported in Stars and Stripes, however, prompting Lembcke to comment that “the ironic fact that Fonda’s words more likely reached US fighters through [its] pages than the enemy’s airwaves greatly dispels the aura of duplicity that decades later surrounds her image as Hanoi Jane.’’
“The idea,’’ he writes, “that [GI’s] innocence was shattered by Fonda’s voice on the camp intercom is itself rather naïve.’’
Thus for Lembcke, the resilience of “Hanoi Jane’’ has more to do with the coining of the name than with the actions that provided a basis for it.
“Hanoi Jane,’’ Lembcke reports, does not appear in the mainstream press until 1978. It only gained wide currency in connection with protests over the filming of the romantic working-class drama “Stanley and Iris’’ in Waterbury, Conn., in 1988.
Lembcke bases his account of the Waterbury connection on interviews with local veterans, including the retired general who takes credit for “having made ‘Hanoi Jane’ the household phrase it is,’’ as well as local antiwar activists.
