Gender, Betrayal, and Public Memory: America's Lost War in Vietnam.

Gender, Betrayal, and Public Memory:America's Lost War in Vietnam By some accounts the presidential election of 2004 hinged on the so-called Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry. On the surface, those attacks were about his character but the questions about his military service were accompanied by charges that, in joining the anti-war movement when he returned from Vietnam, he betrayed the U.S. military mission in Vietnam. The accusation of betrayal was gendered in the early months of the campaign when the Swifties associated him with Jane Fonda. This paper will examine the central role played by Fonda, aka "Hanoi Jane," in the gendering of America's memory that the war was lost on the home front and show how that betrayal narrative formed a subtext resonant with the message coming out of the Swift Boat campaign. The paper will look at the construction of that betrayal narrative throught a synthesis of material from my published work and new material developed for a study of "Hanoi Jane" that includes a debunking of commonly held beliefs about her 1972 trip to Hanoi as a peace activist, a content analysis of POW memoirs, a reinterpretation of her image in the 1968 film Barbarella, and a sketch of "Hanoi Jane's" biography-who conceived her, how she became an icon for public memory about the war, and how she functions in current American political culture. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]