Jane Says

"Another thing to take into account is Fonda’s public image. It’s easy to lose sight now of the time when she was seen as all apple-cheeked patriotism and plain-spoken idealism--almost like Henry Fonda himself. There was a pattern: the first anti-war figure to become the object of excessive government attention was Dr Spock, whose massively popular child-rearing manual was read and trusted by millions of American mothers. American GIs associated Jane Fonda with their first blush of innocent adolescent sexuality--think of those Barbarella posters. It was through figures like them, not through mad bombers of the far left, that ordinary Americans might come to the dangerous conviction that their government was not innocent. They were the ones that had to go."

Rick Perlstein reviews Jane Fonda’s War by Mary Hershberger in the November 2005 London Review of Books.