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Fonda blasts government "lies," reprises old role

WASHINGTON — Back in the spotlight with her blockbuster autobiography, actress Jane Fonda reprised her role as a provocateur Thursday, condemning the "lies" that led the United States into the Vietnam War, as well as Iraq.

Speaking to the National Press Club, she blamed reporters for not doing a better job of informing Americans about the reasons for the two wars.

"Perhaps we would not have been so ready to believe the lies that got us into Iraq if the American public had been made aware of previous governmental lies about war," she said.

Fonda, who gained notoriety as a Vietnam War protester, has become the nation's best-selling author with her recently released autobiography, "My Life So Far."

She has told interviewers that she cringes when she recalls her impassioned anti-war rants in the early 1970s, writing in her book that she wanted to shout, "Will somebody please tell her to shut up?"

But before an audience of a couple hundred Washington insiders, reporters and political operatives, she returned to her soapbox.

After emphasizing that she had made a terrible mistake by posing for photos on an anti-aircraft gun with North Vietnamese soldiers who were fighting Americans, the 67-year-old Oscar-winning actress said she does not apologize for opposing the war.

She said the purpose of her trip to Hanoi was to help expose "the flood-and-starve tactic of U.S. bombing of the system of dikes, on which food and life depend." If U.S. journalists had reported more about how such bombing stopped a month after her trip, it "might have encouraged more activism and brought the war to a halt earlier."

She suggested the current Bush administration repeated the mistake of going to war to avoid appearing "unmanly."

"Unfortunately, there are some so wedded to the notion of American omnipotence that they claim the right to destroy any regime they don't like, scoff at the United Nations and consider it 'reflexive submission' to adhere to international law," she said.

She said presidents who continue to wage wars do so because they fear being "blamed for premature evacuation."

She said foreign policy should be guided by compassion and humility. "But these approaches are considered 'effeminate' by the men who currently run our country. There's a lot of talk about Christian values these days, but I wonder — if Christ returned, would he be labeled effeminate by these same people?"

Fonda, who teared up several times at the start of her speech, was joined at the head table by feminist Gloria Steinem, whom she said "inspired me."

She also was joined by Michele Ozumba, executive director of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, a group Fonda created after she moved to Atlanta following her marriage to CNN founder and media mogul Ted Turner. She is now divorced.