Hanoi Jane's rehabilitation `off the wall'

Ladies' Home Journal magazine and ABC-TV have compiled a list of the 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century. I recognize that all lists are subjective, and that one person's selection raises a ``Who dat?'' from the next person.

But Ladies' Home Journal included as one of their 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century one Jane Seymour Fonda.

The magazine chose Jane because of ``her role as a workout guru.'' 

Hanoi Jane Seymour Fonda and husband Ted Turner. (Associated Press photo)  According to the magazine, ``With Jane Fonda's Workout Book in 1981, Fonda brought the idea of fitness to the masses. The book's step-by-step
regimen formed the cornerstone of a mini-empire of fitness clubs, music cassettes and workout videos.''

The 190-word blurb included only 16 words on Jane Fonda's other lasting contribution to the world during the last 100 years. ``Then, in one of her periodic personal transformations, she became active in protesting the Vietnam War.''

Oh, that little thing. The magazine, which purports to be a celebration of the ``extraordinary live and achievements of the most extraordinary women of this century,'' doesn't even use the term, Hanoi Jane. Instead, it muses on actress Fonda's ``most unlikely role yet: wife of billionaire media baron Ted Turner.''

It doesn't mention her visit to North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps, where she pronounced the Communist jailers were treating the American prisoners alright.

It doesn't mention Hanoi Jane addressing U.S. troops during a radio broadcast from Hanoi, telling men on aircraft carriers, ``use of these bombs or condoning the use of these bombs makes one a war criminal.''

It doesn't show the infamous photo of Hanoi Jane sitting at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft howitzer.

It doesn't mention that POWs who refused to parrot Jane's propaganda that they were receiving humanitarian treatment during her visits, were beaten, and some killed.

I don't mean to denigrate those that protested the war in Vietnam. I did so myself, as a high school student in the late '60s. People who protested U.S. involvement in Vietnam had a constitutional right. They could take to the streets and demand that the U.S. pull young men and women out of Indochina's civil war. They could petition their congressmen to rein-in our military. Those war protesters did their part in ending the war, though 50,000 names etched on a black granite trench signal that it was not soon enough.

But Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam - not as a wide-eyed, impressionable youth, but as a pampered, 34-year-old woman - and shook hands with those who were killing our troops. She took to the airwaves to tell U.S. servicemen, ``The men who are ordering you to use these weapons are war criminals according to international law, and in the
past, in Germany and Japan, men who committed these kinds of crimes were tried and executed.''

I was in the Navy while Jane was broadcasting from Hanoi and sitting astride the howitzer. I didn't know much about Vietnam, except that a lot of my friends had gone there, and were going there, and weren't coming home. I had more of a stake in seeing that war end than anyone, because I was just a heartbeat from shipping out.

The rehabilitation of Hanoi Jane, through belittling her treasonous past, should not be countenanced. If she did not grant aid and comfort to the enemy, she certainly brought pain and discomfort, and even death, to our troops.

Fonda apologized in 1988 for her transgressions. ``I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were time when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm very sorry that I hurt them (our men in Vietnam). And I want to apologize to them and their families.

This sanitized magazine biography puts Fonda's name up there with Katharine Hepburn, Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks. ABC-TV newswoman Barbara Walters, herself a member of the Top 100 and who will host a TV
special on the list, says, ``Every woman alive today owes an immeasurable debt to the women featured on this list.'' Walters' lack of humility aside, no one should feel indebted to Jane Fonda.

``I think that one of the only ways that we are going to redeem ourselves as a country for what we have done there (Vietnam) is not to hail the POWs as heroes, because they are hypocrites and liars,'' said Fonda after the POWs were released. ``History will judge them severely.''

History should judge Fonda more severely than just mentioning her workout regimen or her marriage to a media mogul or her prowess as an actress. History should note her behavior in putting the lives of U.S. servicemen at risk. History should instead list the brave men who died as a result of her ``thoughtless and careless'' statements.''

Lou Ransom writes editorials for the Trib. His column appears Saturdays.
E-mail him at: lransom@tribweb.com