Marathon Pundit: Jane Fonda's endorsement of Obama--and a look back at her 1972 visit to Hanoi

Friday, April 04, 2008

Jane Fonda's endorsement of Obama--and a look back at her 1972 visit to Hanoi

Yesterday actress Jane Fonda, "Hanoi Jane," endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. In the summer of 1972, Fonda spent two weeks in North Vietnam--and essentially cheered on our enemies.

What a lot of people don't remember is that during that visit, Fonda met with seven American prisoners of war. According to Paul Alexander in his book Man of the People, Fonda hoped to meet with John McCain, perhaps the most famous POW held by the North Vietnamese--his father Jack McCain was Commander-in-Chief of the US Navy Pacific Commnand. But John McCain refused.

From Alexander's book:

"The day before, the (seven POWs) were cleaned up, given clean pajamas, haircuts, and all that good stuff," says William Haynes, who was serving as a military pilot in Vietnam at the time. "They were lined up and they knew they'd be meeting with Jane Fonda. So they got together and decided, 'Hey, we've got to do something. Some of our families don't even know we're here.' They came up with the scheme that they would have tiny little slips of paper with their Social Security numbers written on them. They figured they'd try to get them to Jane Fonda because they didn't believe she was really in support of North Vietnam. When she went down the line and shook their hands, they gave her these little slips of paper in their handshake, and she promptly palmed them. At the end of the whole thing--and this is all a photo-op, of course--when all the cameras were off, she calmly walked to the head of the North Vietnamese delegation, handed him the papers, and said, 'This is what these people did.' The POWs couldn't believe it. They absolutely couldn't believe it. They were beaten severely. The story I heard--and I was told this from guys who were present--is that one guy died from the beating."