The controversial reason why Jane Fonda was blacklisted from Hollywood
The Vietnam War proved to be one of the most significant events in 20th century America, with many doubting the fragile reasons the government used for waging a conflict against the East-Asian nation. As citizens across the country protested America’s actions overseas, Hollywood stars also raised their voices, with the likes of Gregory Peck, Donna Reed and the great Jane Fonda.
As well as a two-time Oscar winner, claiming the prestigious prize for performances in 1971’s Klute and 1978’s Coming Home, Fonda was also a vocal political activist during the Vietnam War, which raged from 1955 to 1975. Attending rallies and promoting opposition to the war, Fonda’s time as an activist would peak in 1972 when she was infamously pictured sitting on top of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun during a visit to Hanoi.
Once the photo was released, it outraged a large swathe of Americans who were in support of the troops overseas, with it appearing as though Fonda was siding with the Vietnamese. In the press, the actor was donned ‘Hanoi Jane’, with her decision to sit on the gun leading her to be effectively blacklisted from Hollywood, with few willing to work with someone who appeared unpatriotic and even anti-American.
Explaining her actions decades later in a blog entry titled The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi, Fonda explained: “It happened on my last day in Hanoi. I was exhausted and an emotional wreck after the 2-week visit…someone (I don’t remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down…I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed…It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know”.
Continuing, she added: “But if they did I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen…a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever…But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart…It was never my intention to cause harm”.
The actor apologised profusely for her actions and even went so far as to state that she would go to her grave regretting her decision to sit on the gun.
“I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did,” she later stated in an interview with Barbara Walters from 1988.
Continuing, she adds: “I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers”.
Take a look at a video of Fonda in Vietnam below, where the image of her in the anti-aircraft gun can also be seen.
