She Smiled On An Enemy Weapon While American POWs Were Being Tortured — And Hollywood Still Celebrated Her

She posed on an enemy anti-aircraft gun while American soldiers were dying in Vietnam… But 50 years later, she’s celebrated as a hero by millions.

The studio lights blazed hot under the Fox News set as Stephen Miller leaned forward in his chair, his expression tight with barely contained intensity. The chyron beneath him read: JANE FONDA: HERO OR TRAITOR? — a question that had haunted American culture for more than half a century, and one that, on this particular June evening in 2021, was about to explode back into the national conversation with the force of a depth charge.

“This is not ancient history,” Miller said, his voice clipped and deliberate. “This is a woman who sat on an enemy anti-aircraft battery — a weapon designed to shoot down American pilots — while our men were being imprisoned, tortured, and killed in Vietnamese prison camps. And today, she lectures the President of the United States about climate policy. That should matter to people.”

The segment aired and the internet caught fire.

Within hours, the clip had been shared hundreds of thousands of times. Veterans’ groups posted it on Facebook with messages that ranged from measured frustration to outright fury. Liberal commentators fired back with threads about McCarthyism, political persecution, and the right to dissent. Younger viewers — many of whom had never heard the name “Hanoi Jane” before — frantically searched the phrase and found themselves tumbling down a rabbit hole of one of the most polarizing episodes in American celebrity history.

To understand why the accusation of treason still carries such electric voltage five decades after the fact, you have to go back to 1972. You have to understand what was happening in Vietnam, what was happening in America, and what was happening inside the mind of a 34-year-old actress who believed, with all the righteous fire of her generation, that she was on the right side of history.

PART ONE: THE WOMAN BEFORE HANOI

Jane Seymour Fonda was born on December 21, 1937, into American royalty — or at least Hollywood’s version of it. Her father was Henry Fonda, one of the most revered actors of his generation, a man who embodied a certain stoic, principled American masculinity in films like The Grapes of Wrath and 12 Angry Men. Jane grew up in the long shadow of that legend, struggling to carve her own identity from marble that seemed already shaped.

Her early career was shaped largely by the male gaze — literally. In the late 1960s, her then-husband, French director Roger Vadim, cast her as the lead in Barbarella, a campy, sexually charged science-fiction film that made her a sex symbol across two continents. She wore skimpy costumes, struck provocative poses, and smiled her way through the kind of role that, in retrospect, she would come to view as a kind of gilded cage.

But the world was changing. And Jane Fonda was changing with it — or perhaps more accurately, she was being changed by it.

In 1969, she returned to the United States after years of living abroad in France, and she walked into a country she barely recognized. Cities were burning. College campuses were erupting in protest. The National Guard had shot and killed four students at Kent State University. And hundreds of thousands of young American men were fighting and dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia in a war that a growing majority of the country no longer believed in or understood.

Fonda threw herself into the anti-war movement with the same total commitment she brought to her acting roles. She toured military bases in a traveling anti-war revue called the FTA Show — the initials standing for something far more profane than “Fun, Travel, and Adventure,” the Army’s official recruitment slogan. She donated money to the Black Panthers. She was photographed at protests, at rallies, at sit-ins. The FBI opened a file on her. The Nixon administration considered her an enemy of the state.

And then, in July 1972, she accepted an invitation from the North Vietnamese government and traveled to Hanoi.

PART TWO: TWELVE DAYS THAT WOULD DEFINE A LIFETIME

The trip was intended, in Fonda’s mind, as a peace mission. She wanted to see the human cost of American bombing campaigns firsthand — the destroyed dikes, the cratered villages, the hospitals full of civilian casualties. She wanted to speak directly to the North Vietnamese people, to demonstrate that not all Americans supported the war their government was waging.

She spent twelve days in North Vietnam. She visited bombed-out sites. She met with American prisoners of war — meetings that would later become one of the most contested aspects of her trip, with some POWs claiming she reported their private complaints to their captors, accusations that she has vigorously denied and that fact-checkers have largely been unable to substantiate, though the accusations persist to this day.

She made radio broadcasts on Radio Hanoi, the North Vietnamese state broadcasting network, in which she called American pilots “war criminals” and urged them to stop their bombing missions. She urged American soldiers to refuse their orders. She spoke directly to the men in the air above her, telling them that the Vietnamese people did not hate them — they hated the government that had sent them.

And then came the photograph.

It happened, by most accounts, as something of an accident — or at least an impulsive, catastrophically ill-judged moment. She was visiting an anti-aircraft gun installation, part of a carefully managed tour arranged by her North Vietnamese hosts. There were soldiers there, and they were laughing and singing, and someone suggested she sit on the gun for a photograph. She laughed. She sat down. She clapped her hands together in what was meant to be a spontaneous, joyful gesture of solidarity.

The camera clicked.

The photograph showed Jane Fonda — beautiful, smiling, wearing a Vietnamese-style hat — seated on the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun of the type used to shoot down American aircraft. In the background, North Vietnamese soldiers grinned at the camera.

It was one of the most damaging photographs ever taken of an American public figure.

When the image circulated back in the United States, the reaction among many veterans and military families was not anger — it was something deeper and colder than anger. It was a kind of gut-level horror, the sense of betrayal that hits not in the chest but somewhere lower, somewhere more visceral. Here was an American woman, celebrated and wealthy and free, sitting on the weapon that had killed their sons, their brothers, their fathers — and smiling.

“Hanoi Jane.” The nickname spread like a brushfire and it has never entirely gone out.

PART THREE: THE VOICES FROM THE PRISON CAMPS

To understand why the wound inflicted by that photograph has never fully healed for so many veterans, you have to understand what was happening to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam at exactly the same moment Jane Fonda was walking the streets of Hanoi and making radio broadcasts.

The Hanoi Hilton — the sardonic nickname American POWs gave to the Hỏa Lò Prison — was not a place of comfortable captivity. Men there were kept in small cells, often in isolation, often in the dark. They were subjected to torture designed to extract propaganda statements — statements that could then be used on Radio Hanoi to demoralize American troops and undermine public support for the war back home. The torture methods included rope bindings designed to cut off circulation, forced positions that dislocated shoulders, and beatings that left permanent damage.

These men — some of them the very pilots Fonda was calling war criminals on the airwaves — listened to Radio Hanoi broadcasts through the prison walls. Some of them heard her voice. Some of them listened to her telling the world that the North Vietnamese were a gentle, peace-loving people who had been forced into war by American aggression, and they sat in their dark cells and felt something break inside them that would take decades to repair — if it repaired at all.

Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, including time at the Hanoi Hilton, where he was tortured so severely that he was left with permanent physical limitations, was characteristically measured in his public statements about Fonda over the years. But many of his fellow POWs were far less restrained.

“She had every right to oppose the war,” one veteran told an interviewer years later, his voice carefully controlled. “Every right. But she didn’t just oppose the war. She went to the enemy’s capital, sat on their weapons, and told the world we were criminals. That’s not protest. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not protest.”

PART FOUR: THE LONG AFTERMATH

In the years following the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda rebuilt her public image with extraordinary discipline and success. She won Academy Awards — for Klute in 1972 and Coming Home in 1979. She became a fitness icon in the 1980s, with a series of exercise videos that made her wealthy independent of her acting career. She married Ted Turner. She converted to Christianity. She remained, through all of it, a figure of enormous cultural power and influence.

But “Hanoi Jane” followed her everywhere.

At public appearances, veterans sometimes turned their backs to her in silent protest. At veterans’ parades, protesters held signs with her photograph crossed out in red. A myth — false, but extraordinarily persistent — spread through veterans’ communities that she had turned over notes slipped to her by POWs to their North Vietnamese guards, leading to brutal reprisals against the men who had trusted her. Multiple fact-checking organizations investigated this claim over the years and found no credible evidence to support it, but it continued to circulate and continues to circulate today, carried from generation to generation in the amber of righteous grievance.

Fonda addressed the photograph directly in a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, calling it “the largest lapse of judgment I can imagine” and saying that she would go to her grave regretting it. She has reiterated versions of this apology many times since. She has never, however, fully repudiated her opposition to the Vietnam War itself — because she doesn’t believe she was wrong about that. The war, she maintains, was a catastrophe. The bombing of civilian infrastructure was wrong. The policy was wrong.

What was wrong, she acknowledges, was that photograph.

But to her critics — and particularly to the veterans’ community that still burns with something bright and old when her name is mentioned — the apology for the photograph is beside the point. The photograph, they argue, is merely the most visible symbol of a more fundamental betrayal: the act of giving comfort and propaganda assistance to an enemy government during a time of war, when American men were dying in combat and suffering in captivity.

PART FIVE: THE LEGAL QUESTION OF TREASON

The word “treason” is powerful, and it is also specific. Under Article III of the United States Constitution, treason is defined as levying war against the United States, or adhering to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort. The framers deliberately made the legal standard for treason exceptionally high — requiring two witnesses to the same overt act, or a confession in open court — because they had experienced firsthand the dangers of governments that weaponized treason accusations against political opponents.

Legal scholars who have examined Fonda’s 1972 trip generally conclude that while her actions were deeply controversial and arguably fell within the broad conceptual territory of “giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” the specific legal threshold for a treason conviction would have been extraordinarily difficult to meet. The United States was not in a declared state of war with North Vietnam — Congress had never formally declared war, meaning the legal status of the conflict itself was constitutionally murky. Prosecuting Fonda for treason would have required the government to first resolve a fundamental ambiguity about the legal nature of the war itself.

More practically, the Nixon administration — which was certainly not inclined toward charity where Fonda was concerned, given that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been surveilling her for years — concluded that prosecution would be more trouble than it was worth. A treason trial of one of the most famous actresses in America, in the middle of a deeply unpopular war, would have been an enormous political spectacle with an uncertain outcome.

She was never charged. She was never tried. She has lived the entirety of her public life under the shadow of an accusation that has never been tested in court and, under the American legal system’s presumption of innocence, technically remains unproven — though the court of public opinion, particularly the veterans’ community, reached its verdict long ago and has not revisited it.

PART SIX: STEPHEN MILLER AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

When Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News in June 2021 to revisit the Fonda question, he was operating in a specific political context that gave his words a particular charge. Fonda, at 83, had become increasingly vocal in her environmental activism. She had been arrested multiple times during protests against pipeline projects in Washington, D.C., wearing a signature red coat that became something of a protest trademark. She had publicly criticized President Biden — a Democrat — for not moving aggressively enough on climate policy, positioning herself as a voice of the progressive left that found mainstream Democratic politics insufficiently bold.

Miller’s Fox News segment came in the context of Fonda’s renewed public profile and, more specifically, in the context of the Biden administration’s decision to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, a decision that Fonda had been vocally advocating for. By connecting Fonda’s current activism to her 1972 trip to Hanoi, Miller was making a specific argument: that Fonda’s credibility as an activist and moral voice should be permanently disqualified by what she did in North Vietnam.

It was, in many ways, a thoroughly traditional conservative media move — using the past to delegitimize the present, framing contemporary political conflicts in terms of historical moral failures. Whether you found it persuasive depended almost entirely on what you already believed about Jane Fonda, about Vietnam, about the nature of protest and patriotism, and about whether past actions should be permanently disqualifying or whether people are capable of growth, change, and redemption.

These are not easy questions. They have not gotten easier with time.

PART SEVEN: THE VETERANS WHO FORGAVE AND THE VETERANS WHO DIDN’T

The veterans’ community is not monolithic, and it never has been. While organizations like the VFW and the American Legion have historically been hostile to Fonda’s legacy, there are veterans — including Vietnam veterans — who have arrived at more complicated places.

Some have said, over the years, that they opposed the war themselves — that they were drafted into a conflict they didn’t believe in, sent to fight and die for a policy they didn’t understand, and that they understand, even if they can’t fully excuse, the fury that drove Fonda to Hanoi. Some have said that the photograph was wrong but that the broader anti-war movement was right, and that the country’s failure to reckon honestly with the Vietnam War has made it harder to have honest conversations about every war since.

Others have not moved. They will not move. The photograph is burned into their memory with a permanence that no apology, however sincere or frequently offered, can undo. These are not unreasonable men — or unreasonable women, for female veterans served in Vietnam too, as nurses and in other capacities, and some of them share the same feelings. They simply carry a specific wound, inflicted at a specific moment, by a specific person, and the wound is real and it is theirs, and they have earned the right to keep it.

What is perhaps most striking, looking at the long arc of the Jane Fonda controversy, is how consistently it resists resolution. In most historical controversies, time does its work — passions cool, context accumulates, nuance seeps into spaces that were once occupied only by hot certainty. But the Fonda controversy seems to generate its own heat, even across generations that did not experience the events firsthand. Young conservatives who were born decades after 1972 carry the “Hanoi Jane” image with something that resembles inherited grievance. Young progressives who were born decades after 1972 carry an image of Fonda as a persecuted activist, hounded by the right for having the courage to speak truth to power.

Neither of these images is entirely accurate. Neither of them is entirely wrong. That is, perhaps, the essence of the thing.

PART EIGHT: WHAT JANE FONDA SAYS NOW

In interviews conducted in recent years, Fonda has been asked about Hanoi more times than she can count, and her answers have settled into a kind of practiced but apparently genuine sorrow. She says she was “an imperfect messenger for a right cause.” She says the photograph was the worst mistake of her life. She says she understands why veterans feel the way they feel, and she respects their pain even as she maintains that their government’s conduct of the war was wrong.

She does not ask for forgiveness, exactly — she seems to understand that forgiveness is not hers to request or to expect. What she offers instead is acknowledgment: of the pain, of the damage, of the way that moment crystallized and weaponized feelings that had been building for years on all sides of a conflict that tore America apart at its seams.

She is 86 years old as of 2024. She has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which she announced publicly in 2022, and which she has said is in remission. She continues to speak publicly about climate change and environmental justice. She continues to be protested by veterans at some of her public appearances. She continues, by all accounts, to be one of the most complicated figures in the history of American celebrity — a woman whose life has encompassed movie stardom, political extremism, fitness entrepreneurship, religious conversion, environmental activism, and a single catastrophic moment in a North Vietnamese military installation that has refused, for fifty-odd years, to recede into the past.

PART NINE: THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION

Stephen Miller ended his Fox News segment with a question, and it is worth sitting with that question rather than rushing past it: Should someone who committed what he characterized as treason be celebrated as a hero and given a platform to influence contemporary politics?

The honest answer, which Miller did not offer and which Fox News is not in the business of providing, is that this depends on a series of prior questions that are themselves contested and probably unanswerable.

Was what Fonda did in 1972 treason? Legally, almost certainly not — at least not in any form that could have been prosecuted to conviction under the specific requirements of American constitutional law. Morally? That depends on your framework. If you believe that allegiance to country in wartime is an absolute obligation that supersedes personal moral judgment, then what she did was a profound betrayal. If you believe that allegiance to conscience supersedes allegiance to country when the country is engaged in what you believe to be a criminal enterprise, then what she did was an act of moral courage that happened to include a catastrophically ill-judged moment with a camera.

Does a catastrophically ill-judged moment disqualify someone from public life in perpetuity? America has generally answered this question with a qualified no — we are, at least in theory, a culture that believes in redemption and second chances. But we also carry our grudges with remarkable fidelity, and the grudge against Jane Fonda is one of the most durably carried in the national inventory.

The debate that exploded again in June 2021 when Miller went on Fox News is the same debate that has been happening, with varying intensity, since 1972. It will almost certainly continue after Fonda is gone. The photograph will outlast her. The nickname will outlast her. The war that produced them has already, in some permanent way, outlasted everyone who fought it.

PART TEN: WHAT THE CONTROVERSY TELLS US ABOUT OURSELVES

In the end, the Jane Fonda controversy is not really about Jane Fonda. It is about the things that Americans cannot agree on — about what patriotism means, about what dissent is for, about whether the right to oppose your government extends to giving comfort to its enemies, about whether individuals should be held accountable for the political consequences of their moral choices, about whether the passage of time and the expression of remorse constitute sufficient grounds for moving on.

These questions were not settled by the Vietnam War. They were not settled by the wars that came after it — the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, a long chain of military engagements that each generated their own protests and their own controversies and their own accusations of disloyalty hurled across a widening cultural divide.

They are not settled now. The Fox News segment, the Twitter arguments, the veterans turning their backs and the progressives shouting back — all of it is the same argument, running on the same fuel, powering the same engine of American cultural combat that has been running, in one form or another, since the first shots were fired in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Jane Fonda sat on an anti-aircraft gun in 1972 and smiled for a photograph.

She has been apologizing ever since.

The argument about what that means — about what she is, about what America is, about what we owe each other and what we owe our history — shows no sign of ending.

Perhaps it never will.