By Jerry Lembcke

Hanoi Jane is a provocative study of how—and why—Jane Fonda the person became Hanoi Jane the myth.  Lembcke locates the origins of this myth 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. 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. “Pulsing with brilliant insights and invaluable scholarship, Hanoi Jane is much more than a biography of a single myth,” notes Vietnam War scholar H. Bruce Franklin.  “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.”

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