The actress on her history of activism, the backlash against “Hanoi Jane” and “Fire Drill Fridays.”
Jane Fonda, 82, is an award-winning actor and a longtime activist. She moved to D.C. for four months to launch"Fire Drill Fridays," a campaign with weekly demonstrations to focus attention on the urgency of climate-change issues.I remember very well. I had been living in France for nine years. Married. Child. There were American GIs who were resisting the war.
You know, I made a mistake. But I went to stop the bombing of the dikes. Because the United States was bombing the dikes of North Vietnam. And we knew from the Pentagon Papers what that meant. Because it had been proposed before to [President Lyndon] Johnson. And Johnson had said no, this is what Hitler did, we cannot do that. We cannot be responsible. [Henry] Kissinger estimated that several hundred thousand people would die from starvation and so forth.
And I said a lot of people have gone, but not a celebrity. Not a movie star. I’m going to go, and I’m going to focus on the bombing of the dikes, and I’m going to bring back proof. And the bombing of the dikes stopped two months later.I’m sure, over the years, you’ve talked to people who have that lingering association of “Hanoi Jane.” How did you handle the backlash?It was so weird. It didn't happen right away. It was four, five years.
I spent the last year feeling a big malaise. You know, knowing that I wasn’t doing enough, and I didn’t know what to do, and I’m not part of a movement. I was searching. I got an electric car. I stopped using single-use plastics. I’m not eating red meat, or very rarely. All those things. But I knew it wasn’t enough. And then, over the Labor Day weekend, I read Naomi Klein’s book “On Fire: The Case for a Green New Deal.” It cannot be business as usual.
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