The Photo Dems Fear Most: Kerry with 'Hanoi Jane'

Democratic Party officials are hoping that no photographs exist of a well-covered Vietnam War protest where soldier-hating actress Jane Fonda and Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry, then an up-and-coming member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, railed against U.S. war policy from the back of the same pickup truck.

"Scores of newspaper articles about the march" exist, according to Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley.

Dubbed "Operation RAW" (Rapid American Withdrawal), the September 1970 march featured Fonda, Kerry and a motley band of anti-war vets in an 86-mile trek from Morristown, N.J., and Valley Forge, Pa. – two Revolutionary War sites.

According to "Tour of Duty," Brinkley's book on Kerry's war years, when the protesters reached their destination they were treated to Fonda standing in the bed of a pickup truck, where she "denounced the Nixon administration as a beehive for cold blooded killers."

"Marijuana was in the air," said Brinkley. "Skinny dippers frolicked in the Delaware River. ... [The group's] long hair, ripped jeans, army surplus store canteens, and toy guns gave the VVAW the look of a ragtag band of Haight-Ashbury refugees. ...

"Along the marching route, veterans would shout out phrases like 'Kill him!' and 'Cut his belly open' for dramatic effect," said Brinkley.

Others who spoke that day proclaimed the U.S. guilty of "genocide" in Southeast Asia.

Kerry followed Fonda's Nixon denunciation with a rousing anti-war address that made him "the new leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War," Brinkley said. "From Valley Forge onward, [Kerry] was a committed anitwar activist. ..."

From there, Kerry went on to Detroit to organize a particularly offensive bit of guerrilla theater dubbed the "Winter Soldier Investigation," where Fonda presided as U.S. war atrocities were chronicled by "soldiers" who some later suspected were impostors.

After Winter Soldier, writes Brinkley, "Fonda personally adopted [Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War] as her leading cause."

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