This week (March 29) in 1973, the United States withdrew its last remaining combat troops from Vietnam, ending its military involvement in the Vietnam War.

It also ended what had been the United States’ professed rationale for fighting in Vietnam.  As President Lyndon Johnson put it at the time, America’s objective was to preserve the independence and “self determination” of the South Vietnamese government and people.

Yet it’s highly debatable whether the U.S. government, in particular the Johnson administration, truly considered it an objective to preserve the independence and “self determination” of South Vietnam.  After all, from 1961 to 1965 — that crucial period before the United States sent in combat troops and therefore ended any realistic chance of peacefully negotiating a settlement between the North and South on terms acceptable to both — not only did South Vietnam think such negotiations were possible, so did North Vietnam and its two patrons, the Soviet Union and China.  The only nation opposed to North-South negotiations was the United States

To that end, from 1961 to 1965 the U.S. government strongly pressured the various South Vietnamese governments with which it was allied not to enter into negotiations.  Those governments included one headed by South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had gained power in 1955 thanks to U.S. support.  Yet in 1963, when Diem began talking of negotiating with the North and asking America to leave his country, he was replaced in a U.S.-supported coup by General Duong Van Minh.

By 1964 Minh also realized that negotiating a peaceful settlement with the North looked preferable to continuing to fight it.  For his troubles he was replaced in a U.S.-supported coup by General Nguyen Khanh, who, by the end of 1964, also began hinting of a negotiated settlement with the North.  As a result, in February of 1965, again with support from the United States, Nguyen Cao Ky overthrew Khanh.

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“If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would someday become communist.” – Jane Fonda, Nov. 21, 1970

This week (Aug. 22) in 1972, on a tour of North Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War, actress and political activist Jane Fonda made a broadcast from the Hotel Especen in North Vietnam’s capital city, Hanoi, in which she praised the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) for shooting down American air crews.  She also accused President Richard Nixon of attempting to turn North Vietnam into an American “neo-colony” and recommended that Nixon read the poetry of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh.  And adding injury to insult, during that tour she was photographed smiling at NVA soldiers while sitting in the firing-seat of one of the NVA’s anti-aircraft guns, which had shot down countless American pilots (including Sen. John McCain).

Her trip ignited a firestorm of controversy, which was heightened upon her return to America because she claimed that American prisoners of war were well treated by the North Vietnamese, and she called returning American POWs who had claimed otherwise “hypocrites and liars.”

Granted, 1972 was a crazy time in America, with Vietnam and race relations alternately polarizing America’s citizens, but millions of Americans, in particular Vietnam War veterans, never forgave Fonda for what they perceived to be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, if not committing outright treason.  Vets dubbed her “Hanoi Jane” and bumper stickers sprouted up proclaiming “I’m not Fonda Hanoi Jane.”

And speaking of hypocrites, in addition to making very good money as an actress, in her later years Fonda started a video exercise business in which she wrote books and released workout videos that sold millions of copies and made her even wealthier.  For someone so enamored of communism, her critics noted, she was certainly doing nicely in the world’s most capitalist society.  And it didn’t help that she later married one of America’s richest capitalists, media mogul Ted Turner.

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