What would you need to do to earn the title of the most hated person in America? According to netflix, you would need to found an atheist advocacy group in 1963, which is probably a pretty decent way to do it.
However, for the purposes of this mini-doc I'd like to look at another strong contender from the same era: Jane Fonda who would later be infamously nicknamed "Hanoi Jane".
Let's rewind the clock to 1965. Jane Fonda was an American actress who had just had a major career breakthrough in the comedy western Cat Ballou, which received five oscars and cemented her as an accomplished actress who would go on to be in several more successful movies in the last half of the 60's.
But we're not here to learn about her movie career. Fonda was also making waves in the late 60's as an outspoken member of the counterculture activism that the decade is known for. She was an outspoken feminist, and supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, particularly of the Black Panters. Most famously, she was a staunch opposer to the Vietnam War. In 1970, Fonda founded an anti-war road show with fellow activists Fred Gardner and Donald Sutherland that was designed to increase the anti-war movement amongst young Americans. The tour was called the FTA tour, officially standing for "Free the Army" but was a play on the popular troop phrase "F*** the Army", which was a play on the Army recruitment slogan "Fun, Travel, and Adventure". The Army slogan kind of deserved to be made fun of in my opinion, as soldiers would've definitely traveled and probably would've had an adventure, but I sure wouldn't call it fun. The closest modern equivalent would probably be creating a tour called the "ACAB tour", standing for "Anti Cop.. Action… Band". I don't know, I read wikipedia articles, not create acronyms.
The FTA tour would travel to military towns and talk to soldiers about their feelings about their deployment. The tour then used this footage to make a low-budget documentary also called FTA and released it in 1972. The film would get sucked into Fonda's other controversies and was pulled after just a week. Interestingly, the film distributor also destroyed most of the copies, meaning that the film was lost until 2009, when director David Zeiger, released a similar documentary called Sir! No Sir! Which featured previously lost footage. The movie featured GI interviews, some political songs which weren't really my thing, but I thought one of the skits performed by Fonda was kind of funny.
The major controversy that Fonda would become involved in, and also the controversy that tanked the movie, is when Fonda took the idea of interviews to the next level—by actually going to Vietnam to interview the Vietcong. If this sounds crazy, it's because it kind of is: Can you imagine if anti-war protestors went to interview Al Qaeda during the War on Terror?
Fonda was also in Vietnam to protest against allegations that the US was strategically bombing the expansive dike systems that Vietnam has to control the heavy water flow they recieve during their monsoon season, saying afterwards, "I believe in my heart, profoundly, that the dikes are being bombed on purpose."
These claims are tenuous, but appear to be based in truth. In June of 1972, a North Vietnamese diplomat claimed that the US was purposely bombing the dikes to cause major floods for the upcoming monsoon season. Fonda's specific claims were forcefully rejected by George H. W. Bush who at the time was the US ambassador to the UN. The claims were more broadly rejected by President Nixon, who was reported in a 1972 Times article as saying, "If it were the policy of the U.S. to bomb the dikes, we would take them out, the significant part, in a week. We don't do so because we are trying to avoid civilian casualties, not cause them."
In the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, he claimed that Nixon had at least considered it, although I haven't found another source for this specific conversation. The aforementioned Times article reported that "A secret Air Force report prepared in 1965... concluded that —moral considerations aside—Hanoi's flood-control system could probably not be destroyed by conventional bombing because of the system's massiveness and complexity." This is supported by columnist Joseph Kraft's conclusion that if the US Air Force were "truly going after the dikes, it would do so in a methodical, not a harum-scarum way." and that "I have to conclude from what I have seen that there is no deliberate American drive to bomb the dikes. But the dikes do run parallel to many roads. Some are close to railroad tracks and bridges." Kraft asserted that the images of destroyed dikes being used as propaganda by the North Vietnamese were the result of accidental damage, not deliberate targeting.
Now the reason it's important to know if these allegations are true is because Fonda's trip to visit the Viet Cong was heavily predicated on her belief that the US was strategically bombing these dikes.
It was on this trip that caused Fonda to become truly hated by many American. More specifically, a single photograph that was taken on this trip. Near the end of her trip, Fonda was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. This photograph, depicting Fonda in an army helmet and sitting on the gun, while seemingly gazing into the sky, came as the ultimate spit-in-the-face to many veterans and their families back home. To them, it seemed to be an endorsement of their deaths at the hands of the Viet Cong.
Fonda's version of events has her painted as the victim of the North Vietnamese shrewd propaganda skills. Fonda claims that the North Vietnamese had just sang her a song about their independence. Fonda said that as they sang, she began to cry and clap with them. In the middle of their celebrations, Fonda claims that, "someone (I don't remember who) led me towards the gun, and I sat down, still laughing, still applauding. It all had nothing to do with where I was sitting. I hardly even thought about where I was sitting. The cameras flashed ... It is possible that it was a set up, that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know. But if they did I can't blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen ... a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever."
To her credit, she has since apologized. In the same blog post where she recounted this story, she said, "But the photo exists, delivering its message regardless of what I was doing or feeling. I carry this heavy in my heart. I have apologized numerous times for any pain I may have caused servicemen and their families because of this photograph. It was never my intention to cause harm."
It's worth noting that in the midst of Fonda's contentious actions during her two week trip, there are several false stories floating around on the internet that add to the vitriol that Fonda receives. A popular one that was well debunked by Snopes refutes a story that during her trip to North Vietnam, Jane Fonda turned smuggled messages from US POW's over to their captors, resulting in them getting beaten. This is categorically false, as while Fonda did meet with several POWs, all of them have refuted this story.
It's important to get that out of the way, because no matter how you slice it, Fonda's actions in Vietnam are very dicey so it's important to note her actions as accurately as possible. Even if you can chalk up the photo of Fonda as an irresponsible mistake caused by the Viet Cong, Fonda still publicly refuted claims that there was a wide-spread practice of torture among US POW's. When stories of torture started to become mainstream, Fonda is often quoted as saying that those making these claims were "hypocrites and liars and pawns." However, it is very much not in dispute that US prisoners were at the time being viciously tortured in the very city that Fonda had visited. The Hỏa Lò Prison, ironically nicknamed the "Hanoi Hilton" by POW's, was the site of severe torture to captured troops.