NEW YORK (AP) – Jane Fonda still can’t shake that nasty image – as “Hanoi Jane” from the Vietnam War.
On Saturday, the 71-year-old actress was back on Broadway while Vietnam veterans picketed the theater – reminding passers-by that she had once visited their Viet Cong enemy in Hanoi.
“Jane Fonda is a traitor,” said Dan Maloney of the Gathering of Eagles, which bills itself as a national, nonpartisan veterans group. “She got on Hanoi radio and called every U.S. serviceman a war criminal.”
About a dozen protesters stood behind police barricades in front of the Eugene O’Neill Theater, where Fonda stars in “33 Variations.” She plays a musicologist in the Moises Kaufman play about reconciliation, set against the woman’s obsession with Beethoven’s 33 variations on a waltz.
She was tagged with the sobriquet “Hanoi Jane” in 1972 after visiting the North Vietnamese capital, where she made radio broadcasts critical of U.S. policy and sat on an anti-aircraft gun laughing and clapping, as she describes in her autobiography, “My Life So Far.”
Though she still defends her anti-war activism, Fonda has acknowledged that the incident was “a betrayal” of American forces. “That two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until the day I die,” she wrote.
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