Last week on BBC’s “Hardtalk,” actress Jane Fonda was asked by show host Stephen Sackur if inside her she had a “sense of regret” for her 1972 visit to North Vietnam at the height of the Vietnam War.
Fonda denied having any regret about the visit itself and argued she had justifications for the trip.
“I don’t regret going to Vietnam,” she said. “The United States was bombing the dikes in North Vietnam — earthen dikes in the Red River Delta. If the dikes had given way, according to Henry Kissinger, somewhere around 2 million people could have died of famine and drowning. And we were bombing, and it wasn’t being talked about. And I thought, ‘I’m a celebrity. Maybe if I go, and I bring back evidence.’ And it did stop two months after I got back, so I’m proud that I went. It changed my life all for the good.”
The part she said she had regretted was appearing with the anti-aircraft and looking that she was against American soldiers and “siding with the enemy,” which she said wasn’t the case.
“The thing that I regret is that on my last day there, I made the mistake of going to a ceremony at an anti-aircraft gun,” she added. “It wasn’t being used. There were no airplanes or anything like that. There was a ceremony. I was asked to sing and people were laughing and so forth and I was led, and I sat down. And then I got up and as I walked away, I realized, ‘Oh my gosh. It’s going to look like I am against my own country’s soldiers and siding with the enemy, which is the last thing in the world that was true.”
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