Haim,
Do you really belief this urban legend about Fonda's treachery? If so, I go a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Ms. Fonda wasn't fighting America's soldiers, she was fighting a hubristic, arrogant and wrong-headed elite in Washington that was leading our great nation into an awful, unnecessary mess.
Instead of wasting time reading trashy Yahoo posts, perhaps time would be better spent reading what real military historians have to say about our involvement in Viet Nam:
Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies That Led to Vietnam
by H. R. McMaster
amazon.com
Mr. McMaster is a military man, here's the blurb:
For years the popular myth surrounding the Vietnam War was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew what it would take to win but were consistently thwarted or ignored by the politicians in power. Now H. R. McMaster shatters this and other misconceptions about the military and Vietnam in Dereliction of Duty. Himself a West Point graduate, McMaster painstakingly waded through every memo and report concerning Vietnam from every meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to build a comprehensive picture of a house divided against itself: a president and his coterie of advisors obsessed with keeping Vietnam from becoming a political issue versus the Joint Chiefs themselves, mired in interservice rivalries and unable to reach any unified goals or conclusions about the country's conduct in the war.
McMaster stresses two elements in his discussion of America's failure in Vietnam: the hubris of Johnson and his advisors and the weakness of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dereliction of Duty provides both a thorough exploration of the military's role in determining Vietnam policy and a telling portrait of the men most responsible. --
So, instead of portraying Jane Fonda as traitor, perhaps it would be more correct to label Robert McNamara as such. He's someone that David Halberstam on C-SPAN yesterday labeled "the biggest lying son-of-a-bitch this government has ever produced".
Jane Fonda went to North Viet Nam to save lives. McNamara and his ilk are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese killed after he made the assessment, admitted to in his book, that he felt in 1963 that the war was unwinnable. Who's the traitor to his country?
Sincerely, RGD |
