Hanoi Jane

War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal

by Jerry Lembcke

Published by: University of Massachusetts Press

Series: Culture and Politics in the Cold War and Beyond

224 Pages, 6.12 x 9.25 x 0.60 in, 12

Paperback
9781558498150
Published: May 2010

$26.95

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Praise

From Aristophanes' Lysistrata to the notorious Mata Hari and the legendary Tokyo Rose, stories of female betrayal during wartime have recurred throughout human history. The myth of Hanoi Jane, Jerry Lembcke argues, is simply the latest variation on this enduring theme. Like most of the iconic femmes fatales who came before, it is based on a real person, Jane Fonda. And also like its predecessors, it combines traces of fact with heavy doses of fiction to create a potent symbol of feminine perfidy—part erotic warrior-woman Barbarella, part savvy antiwar activist, and part powerful entrepreneur.

Hanoi Jane, the book, deconstructs Hanoi Jane, the myth, to locate its origins in the need of Americans to explain defeat in Vietnam through fantasies of home-front betrayal and the emasculation of the national will-to-war. Lembcke shows that the expression "Hanoi Jane" did not reach the eyes and ears of most Americans until five or six years after the end of the war in Vietnam. By then, anxieties about America's declining global status and deteriorating economy were fueling a populist reaction that pointed to the loss of the war as the taproot of those problems. Blaming the antiwar movement for undermining the military's resolve, many found in the imaginary Hanoi Jane the personification of their stab-in-the- back theories.

Ground zero of the myth was the city of Hanoi itself, which Jane Fonda had visited as a peace activist in July 1972. Rumors surrounding Fonda's visits with U.S. POWs and radio broadcasts to troops combined to conjure allegations of treason that had cost American lives. That such tales were more imagined than real did not prevent them from insinuating themselves into public memory, where they have continued to infect American politics and culture.

Hanoi Jane is a book about the making of Hanoi Jane by those who saw a formidable threat in the Jane Fonda who supported soldiers and veterans opposed to the war they fought, in the postcolonial struggle of the Vietnamese people to make their own future, and in the movements of women everywhere for gender equality.

"This is not a narrowly focused effort to compare the 'real' Jane Fonda to the image of 'Hanoi Jane.' Rather, Lembcke shows how Fonda's demonization played an important part in a powerful right-wing campaign to attribute American defeat in Vietnam to left-wing scapegoats and to reconstitute U.S. power as well as the ideal of aggressive masculinity."—Christian G. Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides

"Pulsing with brilliant insights and invaluable scholarship, Hanoi Jane is much more than a biography of a single myth. It is an exploration of some of the tangled cultural, psychological, and historical strands that constitute American memory of the Vietnam War, memory with profound influence on American culture and behavior in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first."—H. Bruce Franklin, author of Vietnam and Other American Fantasies

"As Lembcke tackles the question of where the moniker Hanoi Jane first appeared, he offers fascinating anecedotal evidence of the fervent beliefs that continue to fuel the betrayal myth in the twenty-first century. . . . In this provocative study, Lembcke probes the way in which political dissent combined with American anxieties about class, gender, and celebrity to vilify a woman who followed her political conscience."—Women's Review of Books

"Lembke argues that popular perception of Jane Fonda's trip to North Vietnam as representative of left-wing subversive anti-Americanism is a part of right-wing myth making. Recommended [for] general readers and undergraduate students."—Choice

"In his provocative book, Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran, challenges many of the conventional wisdoms surrounding the Vietnam War. . . . [It] is crucial that we carefully examine the work of Lembcke and exorcise some of the ghosts of Vietnam and their contemporary political manipulation in support of war and militarism."—The Journal of American Culture

"Hanoi Jane is an important contribution to scholarship on American public memory-making of the Vietnam War and our efforts to consolidate Vietnam with the Gulf wars through the use of a political trope. It is a well-researched book that explores the national identity, the politics of war narratives, gendered constructions and anxieties during the post-wartime, public memory, and the power of myth-making."—Journal of Vietnamese Studies