Jane Fonda and the 800 Pound Gorilla in the Room

Last night, Piers Morgan did a pathetic, vapid interview of Jane Fonda on CNN. If you thought Larry King was the king of softball questions, Morgan did him one better.

The interview was absolutely awkward on both ends. Fonda didn't know how to answer certain questions. Naturally, Fonda and Morgan began by lamenting how "low America has sunk", which Fonda ascribed to that modern day bugaboo, Greed. That's the catch word of the day, and Fonda, trying to maintain her activist street creds, has  latched onto that battle cry of the Occupy movement. Of course, there was the requisite shot at the current Republican candidates.

From that, the interview slid into topics like Fonda's life, her loves, her father, her activism, her  work-out tapes, all kinds of topics except......



Not a word. Must have been "off-limits".

On it went. Morgan, trying to keep the flow going, asked her what her favorite movies were, who her favorite loves were, who she would most like to be on a desert island with, everything short of what her favorite color was, and if she were a tree, what kind of tree would she be, and of course....


Not a word.

Oh, there was a brief shot of Fonda in a booking photo from her arrest at Cleveland Airport on November 3, 1970, but no details were given.




The official Fonda version is that she was arrested for attempting to smuggle pills which turned out to be nothing more than vitamins. Excuse me, but was there not something about kicking a Customs officer while she was being searched? I joined US Customs a month after this incident and heard a different version. The reader is free to Google this incident all you wish. (Charges were dropped when the pills were found to be vitamins.)

I won't bore  you with any more details about the interview, but here is the point I want to make. What last night's interview underlined for the umpteenth time was that outside of her protective bubble of the liberal set and Hollywood, Fonda's most enduring legacy with the majority of Americans, at least those old enough to remember, is her treasonous trip to Hanoi during the Viet Nam war and her shameless visit to American POWs, which did nothing for them except make their situation worse. While there, she made radio broadcasts on behalf of our enemy and posed mounted on an anti-aircraft gun used to shoot down our pilots. When she returned, she told the nation that our prisoners were being treated well. To my knowlwdge, the only thing she has expressed regret about is posing on the anti-aircraft gun.

So to Piers Morgan, I say congratulations on your half an interview. I also say that if you think this country has sunk so low, why not return to Britain? They certainly need all the help they can get back there. As for Jane Fonda, she will always be "Hanoi Jane" to me.