Playboy Interview: Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden

Late last year, Jane Fonda called reporters to the Los Angeles Press Club and told them she was suing the President. During the press conference, she held a bulging FBI file, a gift from columnist Jack Anderson, filled with memos discussing her personal finances, children, travels--all sorts of gossipy information she claimed was gathered illegally. Furthermore, said Fonda, there was a clear line of responsibility for the file that was traceable to the man on Pennsylvania Avenue with the faulty tape machine.

Nobody attending the press conference seemed too surprised by the announcement, a measure of how Jane Fonda--and the nation--has changed. Less than ten years ago, the news would have sounded like some improbable studio publicity stunt. She was living luxuriously in France at the time and gaining simultaneous reputations as an actress of genuine talent and a tough, bright lady who took life on unconventional terms. But there was not yet any politics in the fabric of her life, and her style then seemed at least understandable, considering her rare parentage and bittersweet beginning years. Born to one of America's most esteemed actors and his second wife, socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw, Jane spent a childhood (in New England and Beverly Hills) marked by the trauma of her mother's suicide and a fierce adoration for her father that she felt was indifferently returned.

After two listless years at Vassar, she moved to Paris, where she studied painting and lived a free Left Bank life for a while. Back in the States at 21, she agreed, at a friend's persistent urging, to consider acting and went to one of Lee Strasberg's classes. He said she was good, and Fonda dove into a career, getting the starring role--with a little help from her father's good friend director Joshua Logan--in a fluffy romance called "Tall Story." Soon after, she showed the first real flashes of her emerging talent as a serious actress in "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Period of Adjustment," while continuing to do innocent romps such as "Sunday in New York" and "Barefoot in the Park." In between, she had returned to Europe, this time with a new sense of purpose. French cinema was moving in new directions, thanks to small budgets and the large visions of a bold, brilliant group of directors--among them, Truffaut, Chabrol and Vadim--and Jane, weary of Hollywood, wanted to participate. She did, becoming an international sex star and marrying Vadim. For more than six years, she sank roots, meticulously refurbishing her sprawling French farmhouse, giving birth to a daughter, Vanessa, and making films for her husband and others.

It began to turn around for her, she says, while watching newsclips on French television of American war planes dropping bombs on villages, schools and hospitals in Indochina, and her decision to return to the U.S. was further solidified when she viewed films of that brutal night in 1968 when the Chicago police decided to pound the shit out of anything hairy that moved. "I felt a need to find out, to look for answers to what was happening to my own country," she has since explained. "I felt remote and very curious about the mood that could have produced what I was watching." So she returned to America, got in a car and started across the country looking for answers, stopping frequently to help local groups work against the war, poverty and many other problems she'd never faced personally before. Instead of finding answers, however, she saw only more to question and began to issue often shrill statements combining her own honest outrage with the rhetoric of others. "News people kept demanding comments from me, asking me what I thought about this or that: the condition of Indians, the black ghettos, what I had learned from the GIs in the coffeehouses, and I simply didn't know what I thought. After I realized what was happening, I decided to do some concentrated studying."

One of the leftist writers she read most avidly was Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society, a leading radical of the Sixties and one of the foremost heads among those Fonda saw being pounded that night at the corner of Michigan and Balbo. It's hard to imagine two paths less likely to cross than Fonda's and Hayden's. Raised in a working-class section of Detroit and educated in local Catholic schools, Hayden developed his radical sensibility at the University of Michigan and, in 1962, with a group of fellow students from across the country, drafted the Port Huron Statement, creating SDS and prophesying much of the decade's social and political upheaval.

After Port Huron, Hayden immersed himself in causes, working for civil rights in Mississippi, organizing for three years in the slums of Newark, writing several books and helping construct a plan for demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention, which he and fellow radicals hoped would generate a protest so thunderous that the nation, no matter how deaf, could not help but hear. It certainly heard--and watched, recoiling from the grisly street theater--but the result of it all for Hayden was arrest and trial, the infamous Chicago Seven Conspiracy case, one of the most bizarre criminal proceedings ever played out in a courtroom, from which he was finally acquitted of all charges not long ago, more than three years after the circus had closed.

By the late Sixties, Hayden had become disillusioned with arguing radical factions and retreated from leadership to a Berkeley commune, where he continued to write prolifically--both books and articles--and to work against the war. He traveled several times to Hanoi, served as broker for the release of some P.O.W.s and eventually--somewhere between her headline-making "drug" arrest in Cleveland (for carrying what turned out to be vitamin pills) and her equally well-reported trip to North Vietnam in 1972--met fellow radical Jane Fonda. They began to see a good deal of each other, worked together preparing antiwar graphic exhibitions and shows, and soon after Fonda returned from that controversial visit to Indochina, they decided to have a baby--and got married.

They now spend most of their time lecturing and participating in the organizational efforts of their Indochina Peace Campaign, an organization of movement activists with offices in 25 states. But Jane has never gotten too involved in politics to find time for the acting work she sees as a vehicle to advance the causes she believes in--and uses to finance them. At the top of her craft, she was called America's finest actress after her Oscar-winning performance in "Klute" and most recently starred in Joseph Losey's brilliant adaptation of "A Doll's House." But Tom and Jane's primary profession is Indochina (Hayden has taught Indochinese history at two Los Angeles colleges) and they frequently leave their Santa Monica house for extended tours to remind the world that the war, like some indestructible Frankenstein monster, is still alive.

Since their personal travel calendar resembles the arrival-departure schedule at O'Hare, and because they often head out in opposite directions as their day-to-day work demands, it seemed we would have to find an interviewer with superhuman stamina. We decided, instead, to simply outnumber them, and assigned Leroy F. Aarons, West Coast bureau chief of The Washington Post, and Ron Ridenour, public-relations director of the Southern California A.C.L.U., who--with backup help from Playboy Associate Editor Douglas Bauer--managed to keep them seated long enough for several taping sessions. Aarons had met Hayden while covering various stories in which the radical leader played some part, and Ridenour, as a longtime civil libertarian himself, was acquainted with Fonda and with her politics. They report:

"Wadsworth Avenue in Santa Monica, where Tom and Jane own an old two-story home, looks like a street from a neighborhood in Queens or Chicago's West Side that has been lifted intact and relocated next to the ocean. It's very narrow, lined with old cars and battered vans, and its frame houses feature enclosed porches and roofs sagging from age.

"Since the first floor of their house was noisy with people working and talking, we usually proceeded upstairs, where Jane and Tom occupy five rooms painted various pastel shades. A large mattress is sprawled across the floor of their bedroom-living room, the most dominant piece of furniture in the place. Any lingering suspicion that they live in secret luxury from Jane's wealth is quickly erased.

"One additional Hayden, their new son, Troy, was present at some time during most of the later sessions. While we talked, about some aspect of movement politics or a particular Indochina horror, Jane would breast-feed Troy, then hand him over to Tom for burping. Meanwhile, their phones were constantly ringing and various friends came upstairs for coffee or just to say hello or goodbye.

"Since they had recently returned from a cross-country tour--attempting to arouse fresh indignation over the continuing Indochina war and to assess the potential for rebirth in the shards of the New Left--we began by asking them if they'd found much support this time around."

[Q] Playboy: With the war in Vietnam all but over--at least as a major issue in this country--many observers consider the protest movement moribund. In your travels around the nation, have you found it more difficult than you used to to arouse and recruit support?

[A] Hayden: We've found that, just as the "generation of peace" in American foreign policy hasn't happened, neither has the "cooling of America." Just as the '72 election was very depressing, the Watergate hearings have been very invigorating. Partly because of Watergate, I find political curiosity and reawakening, especially on the campuses. People can still be moved--even around the question of the war. You could wish that kids didn't have to be concerned any longer with Vietnam, but it's the reality of Vietnam that they do.

[A] We cannot conclude that peace with honor has been achieved, that the war is over, when the greatest bombing offensive in history has ended, only to be replaced by the biggest police state in the world, funded 90 percent by American tax dollars. American handcuffs made by Smith & Wesson chain General Thieu's political prisoners, confined in prisons often built by the American RMK-BRJ construction combine; his system of political surveillance and control has been developed or serviced by Computer Sciences Corporation of Los Angeles, which is teaching the Vietnamese to develop political dossiers on 11,500,000 South Vietnamese--the entire adult population. South Vietnam isn't even a country or a government; it's a war machine, and it's still an American responsibility.

[A] Fonda: During our last trip around the country, the media frequently said to us, "Are you kidding? The American people don't care about Vietnam anymore. They care more about the price of meat." And yet our experience, time and time again, was that this is simply not true. People came to our presentations in as large numbers as they did last year. Granted that, frequently, they would come to see a celebrity. But most everyone sat through a very long program and a majority stayed to ask questions afterward. And the percentage of people who would then write their name down on a piece of paper indicating that they wanted to work for peace was one out of five.

[Q] Playboy: Surely the peace agreement has had some deterrent effect on the antiwar movement.

[A] Hayden: I think the peace agreement was the fruit of the antiwar movement.

[Q] Playboy: Yes, but what about the situation since the peace agreement?

[A] Hayden: Well, on the negative side, people in the middle who depend solely on the media for their information are more or less convinced that the war is over. And a lot of radicals took the peace agreement as their opportunity to go on to other things.

[A] But the fact is that the peace agreement is not being honored. The U.S. Government and its client Thieu are opposed to the agreement's political provisions, which call for democratic liberties and a free election in the south. How can we say there's no war in Vietnam when more than 50,000 South Vietnamese died in combat in 1973--and the number is increasing? Our organization, the Indochina Peace Campaign, is demanding that the peace agreement be honored. America has a history of broken treaties, beginning with the ones we signed with the Indians. This one ought to be different.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think your efforts will succeed?

[A] Hayden: Yes. The decade of confrontation we've gone through has opened so many minds that were closed before that we are now able to work with a majority of Americans, at the grass-roots level. We've tried to overcome the sectarianism, that "holier-than-thou" attitude that turns people off. So that the peace movement now has the power to end U.S. involvement by pressuring Congress to cut aid to Saigon and Phnom Penh. That's what we plan to do this year, and that's an area in which the signing of the peace agreement has helped.

[A] Just look at the Senate. Middle-of-the-road Democrats and conservative Republicans are much more willing to cut off funds now, because they can't be hit with the charge that they're risking American lives or that they're letting down American P.O.W.s. And most recently, we saw Congress override Nixon's veto of the bill to restrict his warmaking powers. That's where the peace agreement has been very positive. For a while, though, there was an enormous lull. It's a paradox that the organized radical movement, which created the issues that have now become so widely understood, thanks to Watergate, has succeeded in its aims--but it's been so hard hit by repression and division that it's almost incapable of going forward to resolve those issues.

[A] Fonda: But I think the present climate in this country is such that popular change can come from places that would have never been dreamed of in the Sixties. I'm thinking specifically of the very real possibility that Nixon will be impeached by the Congress of the United States.

[Q] Playboy: That may be true, but do you think the radical left will be successful in getting itself back together?

[A] Hayden: I'm not sure how, but organizational attempts will be made. Maybe even quite major attempts--like a political party or an electoral coalition. It's interesting to think about new campus movements in comparison with the way it was in the early Sixties, when we began. Certainly there were disadvantages to starting with a pretty blank political environment in 1960--not having a sense of history, not knowing how to do even the simplest things, like running an office. But there were also advantages. There was no political jungle: there weren't a lot of factions as there are today.

[A] Another advantage of the New Left of the Sixties was, I think, that it took the Administration and the CIA by surprise. I don't think there was any basis to anticipate that a radical movement would arise from the privileged campuses, and when it did, it wasn't immediately seen as subversive to the established order. It would be now. If a group of people said they were going to form a successor to the Students for a Democratic Society today and hold a convention in Port Huron, things would be made extremely difficult for them. But it's inevitable that new forms will arise.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see any of these new groups as militant, with a philosophy that would advocate forced overthrow of the Government?

[A] Hayden: Ninety percent of the struggle is political and cultural, not military. It's not a question of our forcibly overthrowing the established order; it's a question of people getting organized to work within the system to a point where the majority of people are at least sympathetic to fundamental change. If at that point violent repression starts, as it often does, I would rather deal with it politically than resort to counterviolence. If a policeman shoots someone, instead of shooting back, you might put out 40,000 leaflets about the victim who was shot, and that would have a more devastating effect.

[Q] Playboy: But can you conceive of ever picking up a gun to participate in a revolution?

[A] Hayden: The question seems prosecutorial. It's so hypothetical. There are certain circumstances where there's a need for armed security. But that's in self-defense against police or vigilante attacks, and that's different from picking up a gun as part of a revolution. I think under conditions of severe repression, as has been the case with the Black Panther Party, for example, blacks would be justified in defending themselves. If the Watergate conspiracy had succeeded and a police state had been established, there would be a need for self-defense for us, too.

[A] But the general answer to your question is no, I can't conceive of picking up a gun except in extreme cases of self-defense, because I visualize political success. I visualize the actual election of a progressive Government in this country in the next generation. I can imagine two Kennedy terms followed by two Julian Bond terms. That evolution would politicize the American people in the direction of peace, justice and economic reform. It would foster a legitimate left opposition, no matter how hypocritical the Presidents themselves were. Then the test would be whether or not the kind of people involved in Watergate would accept the legitimacy of such a Government or whether they'd try to overthrow it from the right. That would be the time to consider the question of weapons.

[A] Fonda: I agree with Tom. I don't think I'll have to face such a choice in my lifetime, either. But I'm not a pacifist. I understand why the Vietnamese are fighting. I understand why people in Chile took up arms in the streets to oppose the junta, and if I can support that kind of struggle for other people in other parts of the world, obviously I would support it for us, if the same situation existed here.

[Q] Playboy: Tom, how much of the blueprint for radical change that you laid out in the early Sixties has come to fruition?

[A] Hayden: A lot of issues that we raised then--one man, one vote, poverty and unemployment, opposition to the war, rule by a power elite--have become mass issues, popular issues, and the concepts of organizing have become widespread.

[Q] Playboy: In other words, much of what was formerly radical thought has been absorbed by the system. But doesn't piecemeal change, while keeping the system intact, blunt the main thrust of radicalism, which is to replace the system?

[A] Hayden: The New Left was born politically suspicious of reforms, because the earlier left seemed to run into the problem of being co-opted into the New Deal; but the reforms of the Sixties--the 18-year-old vote, the poverty program, voter rights and equal-rights amendments--haven't co-opted people. You can't have your faith in the system restored by the right to vote when Watergate shows you what kind of political system we really have. Watergate was no surprise to us. We've been talking about things like that since 1962, since the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination, and people have always said, "You're paranoid." A lot of people who thought we were talking hysterically will now have to reconsider. People will also have to ask: Who were the real traitors to the Constitution and who were the truly democratic forces? Weren't the young people in the streets, standing for freedom, far more democratic than the men behind the White House curtains with American-flag pins in their lapels and thugs on call? I think the answer's obvious.

[Q] Playboy: The fact that most people abhor Watergate doesn't mean they've changed their minds about the movement.

[A] Hayden: I don't agree with your assessment. After traveling around the country and talking not just with college audiences but with newspaper editors, and so forth, I find a sympathy and an acknowledgment that we weren't so wrong after all. The roots of Watergate lie in the roots of the early Cold War, when people like Hunt and McCord--and Nixon--rose either in the clandestine services of the CIA or in the political anti-Communist crusade. Most of the Administration officials involved in Watergate--Magruder, Chapin, Mitchell--are ideologically committed conservatives who were involved in trying to stop protests throughout the Sixties.

[A] Look at the characters. Tom Charles Huston, the aide who proposed the superintelligence group to go over the head of J. Edgar Hoover, was an early leader of Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative counterpart to SDS. So was Douglas Caddy, the lawyer who brought bail money for the Watergate conspirators the night they were caught. Liddy had been an active prosecutor against the drug culture and the youth culture and is an extreme anti-Communist. Hunt, Barker and the Cuban exiles were violent CIA adventurers. Barker and Hunt were involved in attempting to overthrow the Cuban government in 1961. Robert Mardian administered 6000 draft-resistance cases and was an ardent wire-tap advocate. Magruder and Dean were in charge of dealing with antiwar demonstrators. These were the bureaucrats who carried out the policies preferred by the big defense corporations that gave Maurice Stans most of the $60,000,000 for Nixon's 1972 campaign.

[Q] Playboy: What made them resort to acts of repression in the pursuit of their convictions?

[A] Hayden: They were frustrated by the protest movements that have grown to great magnitude in this decade, and they were even more frustrated by Vietnam. According to the public statements of Daniel Ellsberg--and, as far as I know, also according to Senate subcommittee hearings--after the 1968 election of Nixon, there was a secret decision made to escalate the military pressure on North Vietnam by secretly invading Laos, bombing Cambodia and sending Navy frogmen into Haiphong harbor so the North Vietnamese could see that the harbor was threatened. Having made that decision for escalation, there was one problem remaining: the American people, who had been sold the idea that the Vietnam engagement was about to end. That's what made a policy of repression necessary and, specifically, that's what led to the super-safeguards that evolved into "the plumbers," because we know now that in May 1969, when The New York Times broke the story that Cambodia was being bombed, the Nixon Administration became obsessed with leaks.

[A] Fonda: Now that we know the facts of Watergate, we can see that Nixon's victory in 1972 was the product of his deceptions. He should be impeached--not simply because of these criminal activities but also because his first Administration was responsible for 6,000,000 people being killed, wounded or made refugees in Indochina, according to the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees. If we are to implement the democracy we speak of, the elections should be held over again. One of the lessons Watergate has taught us is that free elections aren't necessarily a reflection of reality if the public hasn't been given all the facts.

[Q] Playboy: Have you picked up any information that hasn't surfaced in the national press about Watergate-related activities directed against the left?

[A] Hayden: There's one very complicated area still not completely uncovered that I think can be traced back to the '72 G.O.P. Convention, which was originally scheduled for San Diego. It appears that there was some confusion, perhaps even within Republican ranks, about whether the movement demonstrations that were being planned for the convention should be contained or whether there should be provoked violence of some kind that might lead to a heavy law-and-order counterreaction, especially if the demonstrations could be linked to McGovern. So quite serious violence was possible in San Diego. Then the convention was moved, for reasons that have always seemed suspect to me, since we now know that the Republicans were obviously not hurting for money and their stated reason for moving was that San Diego was too expensive. Their move could have had something to do with the prospect of a prolonged I.T.T. scandal, since I.T.T. had paid $400,000 through the Sheraton Hotel chain as a contribution to the convention. It could also have had to do with the fear that demonstrations in San Diego would get really out of hand.

[A] You remember that McCord and Liddy discussed the San Diego situation and, according to The New York Times, they were talking about the possibility of over 100,000 demonstrators' gathering in San Diego. That would be too many for a right-wing provocation to work against and too many to reduce to insignificance by giving them permits for an unimpressive rally. At any rate, in the spring, the decision was made to move the convention to Miami, but Liddy's partner Howard Hunt and their coconspirators of the ultraright moved with the convention and started actively recruiting from the Cuban-exile community in Miami--people who are professional in the art of violence.

[A] These new recruits were used first to try to beat up Daniel Ellsberg in May 1972 at a rally in Washington. The same Cubans who a month later participated in the Watergate break-in were first told to beat up Ellsberg because he was "a traitor." This is not disputed; it's all in the Ervin committee testimony. At the same time, they tried to infiltrate and sell weapons to the Vietnam vets who were to lead the various demonstrations. In June, during their second break-in, they were caught at the Watergate. I believe their capture disrupted whatever plans there were to provoke demonstrators at Miami. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War was soon afterward indicted in Tallahassee, I believe, to provide "proof" of a security threat at the convention. McCord used the alleged "V.V.A.W. conspiracy" to justify the Watergate break-in in his testimony, hinting that the vets and the Democrats might be linked. The Watergate arrests of June 1972 took out of action the principal people who had tried to beat up Ellsberg and who, I assume, were going to play some provocative role in Miami. But generally, we really don't know any more about Watergate than you do. We were just less surprised by it than you were, because we've felt Governmental and right-wing militant extremism for a long time.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of things, specifically, have you felt?

[A] Hayden: I'll give you just one of many examples. It was revealed toward the end of 1972 in the Door, an alternative newspaper in San Diego, that a man named Howard Berry Godfrey, who's an admitted FBI informer, had infiltrated a right-wing paramilitary organization called the Secret Army Organization. He told one of its leaders, Jerry Lynn Davis, and others in S.A.O. that certain leftists would be kidnaped. I was one of those named. Davis told this to the Door in retaliation, after Godfrey testified in trials against several S.A.O. members.

[Q] Playboy: What do you know about the activities of the S.A.O.?

[A] Hayden: The S.A.O. was responsible for much physical violence against groups, newspapers and persons on the left. I know that a leftist worker named Paula Tharp, for example, was wounded by S.A.O. member George M. Hoover. Hoover shot Tharp with a nine-millimeter pistol as she sat in the home of Peter Bohmer, a radical professor who had been under attack by the right wing. Bohmer and Tharp were principal planners of demonstrations that were going to take place at the G.O.P. Convention, when it was still scheduled to be held in San Diego. Sometime after that incident, S.A.O. members were arrested and finally convicted of various acts of violence.

[Q] Playboy: Was that S.A.O. kidnap list the one that Liddy devised as part of convention security and that was discussed at the Watergate hearings?

[A] Hayden: No, this was a list that was constantly being revised, and I don't know it Liddy had a direct role in it.

[Q] Playboy: Were you generally pleased with the hearings and the conduct of the inquiry?

[A] Hayden: Senator Ervin, in particular, and his staff were very courageous. I think the hearings have given the American people a lesson about our rights against arbitrary authority and have revealed the White House power structure in a way unlike anything in American history. On the other hand, the areas of inquiry were very carefully circumscribed. There were many questions the Senators avoided. You heard Jeb Stuart Magruder say that he worked for three years on the antiwar movement, but not one Senator asked what he did. You heard that Liddy presented plans to mug and even kidnap demonstrators, but you didn't hear whether or not any part of his plans was implemented by secret police.

[A] Fonda: The thing that disturbs me most about the hearings was what wasn't explored in terms of a grand conspiracy that might have been responsible for the assassinations of the Sixties and that may be traceable to people working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. There is evidence that should be taken seriously by more people that John Kennedy wasn't shot by just some maverick. Who killed him? Who killed Martin Luther King? Who killed Bobby Kennedy? Who killed Malcolm X? Who tried to kill Wallace? We already know that the Committee to Re-Elect the President was trying to stop Wallace. We also know how Nixon benefited from Wallace's being shot. And what about Mrs. Hunt carrying all that money on the plane that crashed? These are things that aren't being investigated at all. All those events were used by the right to foster an atmosphere to turn the people against the left.

[A] Hayden: John Kennedy was shot right out of office. Bobby Kennedy might have defeated Nixon in 1968. Malcolm X might have unified the black community. Wallace might have drawn enough votes from Nixon to defeat him in a race against Muskie.

[A] Fonda: King was beginning to talk about the relationship between the black movement and the war. He was starting to make links--between racism in this country and racism as acted out by our white leaders sending blacks to kill yellow people--that hadn't been made before.

[A] Hayden: I've always doubted the notion that the assassinations of King and Malcolm and the Kennedys were the work of lone assassins, and I've always thought that groups of conspirators were involved, in some cases with official knowledge. But I think it's important for people like myself not to make assertions beyond what can be factually proved. So all I can say is that the Watergate investigation should have led to a reinvestigation of the assassinations of the Sixties.

[A] What Jane's talking about are underlying questions such as: What did Hunt and McCord do in the CIA for 20 years before they shifted to the Nixon campaign? I mean, how many governments did Hunt conspire to overthrow? How many times was he successful? How many were Bay of Pigs fiascoes? This is what the public was right on the precipice of discovering.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't the Ervin committee charged only with getting to the bottom of 1972 campaign improprieties?

[A] Hayden: Well, a few of the Senators made grand speeches to the contrary. Senator Baker, for instance, and Senator Ervin spoke of the committee's mandate not only to get at the immediate specifics but also to deal with the general and philosophical. And all they seemed to be asking was how these boys with neatly combed hair could have consciously committed crimes. But at the edges of what they were pursuing were the most amazing questions. Did any of the witnesses have personal knowledge of or informed opinions about any of the major assassinations in the Sixties?

[A] Doesn't every average person believe that the answer to that question is yes? Not that these men participated in any particular assassination, but that they may have some direct knowledge of who did. Why was Colson involved in the creation of falsified cables about the assassination of Diem in 1963? Does that shed any new doubts on the validity of the Pentagon papers? Who were the protest leaders who were going to be kidnaped and taken outside the United States? What would have happened if Watergate hadn't been uncovered in June of 1972? What would have happened if that night watchman hadn't walked by? What were their next plans?

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think the witnesses weren't asked these questions?

[A] Hayden: Because I don't think the Watergate committee cares that much about repression of the New Left. Their focus was on a safer subject, such as the White House "enemies" list, which was mainly the Democratic opposition.

[Q] Playboy: So you believe Senator Ervin was trying to hide the real cause of Watergate just as much as the Administration was?

[A] Hayden: No, I think Senator Ervin is one of those individuals who defy simple categorization.

[Q] Playboy: But he didn't raise those questions.

[A] Hayden: He came closer to asking them than anybody else did. He said, "When I came up to the Senate back in the Fifties, it was Joe McCarthyism and witch-hunting against Communists, and now, since early 1968 under the Democrats, when the Pentagon started spying on civilians, up through today and Watergate, I find a paranoid fear in the Federal Government against people who are simply demanding a redress of their grievances and a right to assembly and petition." But he was the only Senator who even began to put Watergate in that context.

[Q] Playboy: Still, do you see the fact that the system was able to "flush out" Watergate as an indication that it might, in some way, work?

[A] Hayden: It needs a little more Drano. What has really amused me for a long time is how every time a scandal, a bribery, an assassination is exposed and dealt with publicly, even if it's a genocidal barbarism like My Lai, the system congratulates itself for having had the capacity to reveal it, as if it should be a matter of pride to learn that we're afflicted with corruption, exploitation and genocide.

[A] If you think the way I do--that Watergate was not a temporary fit of extremism by some overzealous campaign aides in the 1972 election; if you see it as a part of developments that began in the Sixties, starting with the Bay of Pigs--then it's definitely the development of an antidemocratic force that has suffered failures before, suffered humiliation before, suffered the loss of personnel before. The Bay of Pigs was as big a catastrophe as Watergate, but the antidemocratic forces rebuilt very swiftly.

[Q] Playboy: When you talk about antidemocratic forces, do you mean organized right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society?

[A] Hayden: Yes. And the Young Americans for Freedom, the Secret Army Organization and other paramilitary groups.

[Q] Playboy: Are these groups Nixon supporters?

[A] Hayden: People in these groups have been divided over the last ten years about whether to work within the system or not. Many of them worked for Nixon from 1965 on, and when he was planning his 1968 campaign. Now that his Administration has led to this Watergate debacle, I think the conclusion they can fairly draw is that it's quite difficult to establish an unconstitutional system under the cloak of the Constitution.

[Q] Playboy: Do you regard men such as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler and Chapin as ideologues or as personally ambitious guys who were tied to the Nixon rise and to that alone?

[A] Hayden: Haldeman and Ehrlichman are obviously motivated by managerial power drives, but I don't think you could enlist them in a McGovern campaign in a million years. They are certainly to the right of center, far enough to the right to try to tilt the country in the direction of a police state. They've also been loyal to Nixon for more than a decade, so they're not people who have just moved from one bureaucracy to another looking for power.

[Q] Playboy: Jane, you recently sued many of these people--including the President--for what you've described as police-state tactics. What's the basis of your suit?

[A] Fonda: About a year and a half ago, I read in Jack Anderson's column that he had a partial copy of my FBI dossier. He expressed shock that this kind of surveillance had been carried out against someone who was obviously not charged with a crime, and never violated the law, did not even have a misdemeanor on record. So when other things began to happen, when the enemies list was made public and it became clear that certain things that had happened over a period of time were in fact part of an organized effort to--in the words of John Dean--"screw" me, I decided that we should look into it further and that we should sue. So at that point, my attorney, Leonard Weinglass, asked Anderson for the dossier.

[Q] Playboy: According to the file, what has the FBI discovered about you?

[A] Fonda: They copied my entire address book, which was taken from me at the Cleveland airport when I was arrested in 1970 for allegedly smuggling drugs, which were later proved to be vitamin pills. They Xeroxed it and it appears as part of the FBI dossier. Also, two banks, the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York and the City National Bank of Los Angeles, turned over--without subpoena--my bank accounts. So my financial statements are part of the FBI file.

[A] Other appalling things appear. There's a whole section of the file, for example, devoted to my daughter, Vanessa, who went to a nursery school in Berkeley a few years ago that was run by people active in the movement. The file says things like, "The fifth informant said that he once saw children marching across the street carrying antiwar posters." So, according to this file, the FBI has people spying on a kindergarten! It goes from that kind of thing to transcripts of speeches I've made and the itinerary of the Free the Army troupe. There's another portion that relates to a time I talked to some soldiers in a coffeehouse on an Army base. After I left, the FBI went in and interviewed some of the soldiers I talked with; they also talked to a chaplain's assistant--who turned out to be an informant for the FBI. The file indicates very clearly that I haven't committed any violation of the law whatsoever. I think most Americans would be very upset to know that their tax money is being used for this sort of domestic spying.

[Q] Playboy: Does the file contain anything having to do with your Hanoi radio broadcasts?

[A] Fonda: No. Every entry I have preceded my trip to Hanoi.

[Q] Playboy: There have been subsequent charges that you made those broadcasts to undermine troop morale. What were your intentions?

[A] Fonda: The GIs didn't need me to undermine their morale. I was simply giving an eyewitness account of what I, as an American woman, was seeing. Now, I assumed that most people in the Air Force--pilots who dropped bombs and didn't see their destruction close up--weren't going to desert or mutiny. But there were some who said, "I just can't do it anymore"--especially during the last months of the bombing. So I at least hoped, if a pilot had access to new information about the war, that as a human being he would eventually say, "I can't bomb anymore."

[Q] Playboy: How about the accusation that your broadcasts prolonged the killing and, together with other protest activities, made negotiations more difficult?

[A] Fonda: The only thing that forced the negotiations to take place, and forced an end to the killing, besides the Vietnamese resistance, was pressure by the antiwar movement, which got out information that the Government wanted suppressed and mobilized public opinion that affected Congress and made it impossible for Nixon to continue, just as earlier it had forced Johnson to retire.

[Q] Playboy: Would you explain your statements in Hanoi that many Vietnamese were victims of American antipersonnel weapons?

[A] Fonda: The U.S. has an arsenal of weapons that are illegal under international law. Fragmentation grenades, spider mines, dragon tooth mines and gravel mines. They are described by the corporations that made them--Honeywell, for example--so you know what they do to the body. When you see a woman whose body has maybe 500 small holes in it, you know that probably comes from a guava or a pineapple bomb. If you see hundreds of children with their feet and hands blown off, chances are it was caused by a gravel mine, because that's what gravel mines are designed to do. They have no effect against anything except flesh. A gravel mine can't even blow a hole in the tire of an army truck. It can blow a child's foot off, and that's about all it can do. Toward that end, they are often designed to look like toys. The Pentagon describes them as "psychological-impact weapons."

[Q] Playboy: You also charged that we were bombing cities in the North. Did you see the bombing?

[A] Fonda: The cities I saw--Nam Dinh, south of Hanoi, for example--were 80 percent rubble. I saw bomb damage that had occurred the night before I arrived in a place. You see, there are certain areas where the dikes are strategic--where, for example, a lot of rivers converge and the dike wall holds back the water. If that particular portion of dike were destroyed, the waters would flood huge sections of the Red River delta, bringing the threat of death to millions of people. The bombs invariably hit the most strategic points of the dike and were dropped during times when the waters were highest. As it happened, the rains weren't so heavy in 1972. If the flooding had been what it was in 1971, we would have been responsible for one of the worst massacres in the history of the world, and this would have happened while Nixon was telling us the war was winding down. People are told the bombing of dikes was accidental, yet the Pentagon papers tell us that this was being considered as an option during Johnson's Administration.

[A] I didn't go to Vietnam with any intention of talking on the radio, but after I was there about two days, I had seen more destruction to the hospitals, churches, villages, schools and cities than I care to think about. I asked the Vietnamese, my hosts and hostesses, if I could make tape recordings for the radio. I said I would like to do it every morning to describe what I was seeing.

[Q] Playboy: How did the taping sessions proceed?

[A] Fonda: Every morning a man would come to the hotel with a Sony tape recorder. I would sit down in a room alone with him and talk extemporaneously. I said, "Yesterday I saw children with their hands and feet blown off, and this is the kind of weapon that did it. Perhaps you're not aware of what's in the bombs you're dropping." I would talk about what it felt like to be an American seeing what our Government was doing to these people. I read some excerpts from the Pentagon papers over the radio. I talked about how the United States had prevented the reunification of Vietnam in 1956 and how we had installed a series of dictatorships in South Vietnam. In fact, I said essentially what I say when I speak in the United States. I said that we'd been lied to, and that I didn't think it was possible to continue, either as civilians having the war waged in our names or as pilots pushing buttons and pulling levers, without its destroying us as human beings. I said we really had to think about what we were doing, that we couldn't allow ourselves to be turned into robots.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't you implicitly encouraging soldiers to desert?

[A] Fonda: I never asked soldiers to desert or defect. I have very strong feelings about that. I don't feel that any civilian has any right to ask someone in the military to do something that could get him in trouble. I'm not the one who would have to stand court-martial or get sent to a stockade.

[Q] Playboy: You say you would never ask anyone in the military to do something that could get him in trouble, but if soldiers had refused to fight, as you hoped they would after listening to your broadcasts, they could have been court-martialed.

[A] Fonda: I hoped that, as human beings and as Americans who apparently cherish the concepts of democracy and independence, they wouldn't want to continue fighting if they knew facts about the war that the Pentagon has tried to keep from us. Making facts available, however, is different from advising someone to break a law.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think your broadcasts accomplished?

[A] Fonda: What speaking out always accomplishes. It may instill an idea, a new thought in the minds of even a few people. As far as I was concerned, if there was one pilot who was already having second thoughts about what he was doing and I could help him clarify his thoughts about it, it would be useful.

[A] The controversy that was created about my trip--my charges that the U. S. was bombing dikes, the films I had showing the damage--became very important to the Administration. Don't forget that Nixon was trying to get elected as a man who was winding down the war. He didn't want Vietnam to be an issue in the elections. My trip, Ramsey Clark's trip, everything that helped call attention to what was, in fact, an escalating air war, was very crucial. That's why there were all the shouts of treason. It was a Nixon tactic he's used since the Fifties to discredit his critics.

[Q] Playboy: William Loeb editorialized in the Manchester Union Leader that "Miss Fonda should either be refused readmittance to the United States or. immediately following her return, be tried for treason. She should be shot if a verdict of guilty comes in." Why do you think you arouse such hatred?

[A] Fonda: My impression is that most of the venom is from organized right-wing groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Young Americans for Freedom and others connected with the Committee to Re-Elect the President.

[Q] Playboy: Is that just an informed guess on your part or do you have evidence to substantiate it?

[A] Fonda: We've seen it firsthand. I remember a time in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for example, when a man disrupted a press conference we were having about the war. He conducted a long, loud harangue against me, then admitted later that he worked for Creep. Young Americans for Freedom has been the organizer of several widely publicized attacks against me in L.A. It's made to look like spontaneous Americana, but its roots are in Watergate.

[Q] Playboy: Whoever incited it, the hostility against you is very strong. Why?

[A] Fonda: A P.O.W. I know, a guy who was a prisoner for five years, explained it to me this way: "A lot of guys in prison were big fans of yours. They had seen a lot of your movies and they will never forgive you for betraying their dreams." I think that's the basis for a lot of it. I'm an actress, I'm famous, I come from a position in society that, given our culture, is enviable. I suppose some people also think I'm not acting "feminine." I'm saying that there are things wrong with our society and I'm going to speak out about them. I'm no longer going to accept the image of a mindless Barbarella floating through space. I'm no longer afraid to indicate that I have a mind, and I'm going to speak out.

[A] But times have changed. We've toured the country to tell people about the U.S.--created police state in South Vietnam; we went to all parts of the country, including Texas and Arizona, and I encountered almost none of the venom you've mentioned. Hardly anyone even raised the issue of my statement about the North Vietnamese not torturing their P. O. W. s. I think Watergate has played a large role in changing people's heads.

[Q] Playboy: Have you seen any signs of a boycott of your work from those within the film industry?

[A] Fonda: No. I occasionally get letters from a few chapters of Veterans of Foreign Wars telling me they've organized a boycott, and some of Agnew's cronies in the Maryland legislature say they don't want my films shown; but, frankly, as long as Hollywood can make a buck off me. I'll get work.

[A] Hayden: There's one case of repression we can't prove, but maybe that's because we haven't investigated it enough, and that's the way the film of the F. T. A. show was handled. F. T. A., which includes taped conversations with GIs as well as skits from our Vietnam tour, was put out by a very conservative mainstream film company. American International Pictures. The audience was good in some places and not so good in others, but the movie disappeared quickly on the grounds that it wasn't a hit. Then, in Japan and Australia, it started to disappear before it opened.

[A] Fonda: The day before the contract was to be signed for the distribution in Japan, the deal was canceled. The film was supposed to come out in Los Angeles in August and one of the top people at A.I.P. was quoted in the Hollywood Reporter as saying that it was going to be pulled nationally, as well as locally in Los Angeles, because they were getting pressure. The words he used were, "We got a lot of heat here." He attributed it to feedback from my visit to North Vietnam. The company that bought it in England, E.M.I., has never released it. When Joe Losey, who directed me in A Doll's House, asked to see it, the distributors said to him, "Why do you want to see that movie? It's terrible." But, in fact, in certain places where the film opened, including the Avco Theater in Westwood, there were enthusiastic responses.

[A] It's been as though A.I.P. has tried to keep people away. But we've shown 16mm copies to enough audiences to know the potential popularity of this film. It has a powerful effect on many people: students, young working people, guys who have served in the military, as well as others. It has moved people who aren't particularly progressive.

[A] Hayden: The reason, I think, is that it offers a view of the Army that's a little different from the Pentagon's. It's the view of poor black and white soldiers, soldiers who say things critical of the Army that have never been said in a commercial film before.

[A] Fonda: Given what's been happening to the film, given the importance of the film politically, given what it would have meant to Nixon, given the importance of the GI movement, it's very possible that it could be one of the victims of the Watergate group.

[Q] Playboy: But you're only speculating?

[A] Fonda: Well, I stand on what I just said.

[A] Hayden: All this kind of activity simply points up one fact: Jane is a significant political figure who commands enormous respect in the movement. That's why she is the target of the American right, including the lunatic fringe, which has weapons and legal bases of power. In their view of the world, it's the outside agitator, the inspirational figure, who's the cause of the problem, not the product of the problem. They believe that if you cut off a movement at its head, then it's weakened. How else do you explain the assassinations of the Sixties?

[Q] Playboy: Jane, do you feel you could be a target for assassination?

[A] Fonda: I just assume that anybody who is critical, and is part of an organized movement, is a target for repression and possibly death. Look what we're dealing with. Look who the people are.

[Q] Playboy: What precautions are you taking?

[A] Hayden: Well, we're taking the problem seriously. In the Maryland legislature, one elected official actually got some publicity by advocating that Jane's tongue be cut out. Another said she should be executed. But the most serious threat, I think, comes from the right-wing groups that are so hysterical about mass leaders and outside agitators, and what we've tried to do is neutralize their ability to continue their political attacks. In the California legislature, for example, we found it relatively easy, through the lobbying efforts of our Indochina Peace Campaign, to overturn a proposed resolution of censure.

[Q] Playboy: But how does all this pressure make you feel?

[A] Hayden: Unless such actions are stopped--whether they be assassinations or just underhanded attempts to discredit leaders of the movement--there's no possibility for peaceful, democratic politics in this country. We have a very good letter from a Congressman whose name I can't mention; he clipped an article from the paper saying how Scott Nearing, the elderly Socialist who's a columnist for Monthly Review and who was once pilloried and hounded and discredited for his politics, had just been given an honorary degree at some university on something like his 92nd birthday. This Congressman sincerely sent this to Jane as a sign of how she'll someday be remembered. But of what value is it to be destroyed until you're 92 and then be remembered? That's what people typically do with reform leaders. If they're not dead, they get discredited; then, in later years, people say, "Well, she wasn't so bad."

[Q] Playboy: How do you live with your fear for Jane's safety?

[A] Hayden: I'm well prepared by what I've been through. She isn't the first person I've known who's in this situation. I've felt close to several who died, and been to enough funerals.

[Q] Playboy: Jane, are you afraid?

[A] Fonda: I think fear and hatred are both immobilizing emotions. I find the weight of people's hostility very depressing. But I've seen too many people change to get depressed or cynical for long.

[A] Hayden: I've seen the same very strong feelings--love and hate and excitement--generated toward Jane that have been generated toward only a few other mass figures in my lifetime. And those figures were Martin Luther King, the Kennedys and Malcolm X.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe Jane is as influential a figure as they were?

[A] Hayden: No, I didn't mean to compare influence. It's just that there is a very special role that's played by those who have mass followings. And in the Sixties, most of these figures were cut down by bullets.

[Q] Playboy: It's been said--even by those who basically agree with you, Jane--that you've used whatever influence you have to distort and oversimplify many of the issues you've raised, particularly in connection with the war in Vietnam. Wouldn't your message be more effective if, for example, while denouncing the iniquity of the Saigon regime, you acknowledged that the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese haven't been entirely innocent of cruelty and repression?

[A] Fonda: I'm very weary of the thinking that says there are two sides to every question. There aren't. Hitler, for example, was wrong. The question shouldn't be whether or not the North Vietnamese or the Provisional Revolutionary Government commits atrocities in the course of the war. The real question is: Who is ultimately responsible for the war? For those who don't already know the answer, I suggest they read the Pentagon papers, which reveal that the United States has always been the aggressor in Vietnam. The idea that we were defending the south from a Communist invasion from North Vietnam was and continues to be a lie, designed to justify our invasion. The papers reveal that the forces we have been told are the enemy are the popular forces in Vietnam, analogous to the American revolutionaries here 200 years ago. The Vietnamese are fighting a guerrilla war, and guerrilla warfare can be waged only if there is popular support. The Vietnamese have been successfully waging a guerrilla war against foreigners for 30 years.

[A] I don't want to cater to our need to feel better about our Government by saying that the other guy is bad, too. It doesn't help. As far as Saigon is concerned, I have no good words for the government we're supporting. I can't believe that Americans, if they really knew what the Saigon government was doing, would have anything good to say about it. It is a total betrayal of everything we cherish in this country. Democratic rights are being denied to the people, people are being murdered, there's no freedom of the press, there are hundreds of thousands of people in prisons in the most terrible conditions. And we are responsible. We pay for it with our taxes. Taxes for torture.

[Q] Playboy: Do you want to give the impression that none of the conditions you just mentioned apply to North Vietnam?

[A] Fonda: I think that's irrelevant. We aren't responsible for what happens there. We don't front the North Vietnamese government. We front Saigon. But I am not an apologist for North Vietnam. No way.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you concede, then, that North Vietnam as well as South Vietnam has suppressed dissent and imprisoned its political enemies?

[A] Fonda: I don't know. I don't think so. But I was there only two weeks. I didn't see everything. I didn't see prisons. I don't pretend to know everything about the situation in North Vietnam. I can only tell you what I felt. The reason I say I don't believe they have political prisoners is because of the atmosphere. I've been in a Communist country where the atmosphere is such that it could well be that there are people who are being persecuted. It didn't feel the same in North Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: Where was that?

[A] Fonda: Russia. I felt great unhappiness, frustration; I sensed that the people were unfulfilled. Much the same as what I feel in this country. In North Vietnam, I didn't feel those things. I felt an incredible unity between the people and their government.

[Q] Playboy: Give us an example.

[A] Fonda: I walked the streets with the foreign minister of the North Vietnamese government. Now, in the streets of Hanoi, a number of people had guns, automatic weapons, because virtually everyone--men, women and children--was prepared to try to shoot down planes that were bombing their cities. And I walked down the street with this high government official, yet he had no bodyguards, no weapon, he wasn't in a bulletproof limousine and his house wasn't surrounded by electronic surveillance. When I expressed surprise at all this, my guide said to me, "Our government and our people are one." He said, "We don't have political assassinations here."

[A] Now, those could be just words, but there was also an atmosphere I felt and there were things I saw that gave that feeling of unity. What I saw in the streets were not unhappy people. I saw people helping each other, caring for each other, touching each other. People who really seemed to be living to the utmost. Truly fulfilled people, which is remarkable, because they're so poor.

[A] Hayden: I agree with the point Jane made earlier that our moral concern should be focused on our own country, but I think it's also necessary to know something about the Vietnamese. America killed 600,000 or 700,000 people there, wounded twice as many and made refugees of ten times as many. If you know nothing about them, what's the difference between you and a mad killer who knows not what he does? When history is truthfully written, we'll realize that we lost a half-million guys there for nothing. When I say lost, I don't mean just dead, but also badly wounded--physically or psychically maimed. We invested, according to Senator Fulbright, somewhere over 200 billion dollars in that war. And the consequences are going to be as severe as the cost. They're going to be with us for a long time. So to not know Vietnam is to not know America.

[A] Fonda: It would help, in order to understand what we can learn from the killing, to talk about the attitudes found in the Armed Forces, the people who began--within the military--to say, "We don't want this anymore. We don't believe the Vietnamese are our enemies." Of course, official military propaganda consistently denied it, but there was a virtual collapse of morale within the American Armed Forces.

[Q] Playboy: You challenged another official statement when you said that the Army lied in asserting that it was North Vietnamese policy to torture P.O.W.s. How do you know it wasn't?

[A] Fonda: The Pentagon carefully chose a small group of Army lifers, the most biased and conservative officers in the military, to participate in a public-relations campaign that would create the impression that torture was the routine experience of our 566 P.O.W.s. I think many P.O.W.s said they were tortured in order to excuse their circumstances of capture or their statements and actions opposing the war.

[A] Hayden: Sergeant Daniel Pitzer, a Green Beret released in '67, told me, when I was escorting him home, that it was standard operating procedure to collaborate with the Vietnamese as much as necessary and then repudiate the action by claiming torture when you got home.

[A] Fonda: With only one exception, as far as we've been able to find through the research of the Indochina Peace Campaign, no one claims to have been tortured after '69. So right there you have the men themselves refuting the story the Pentagon was encouraging--that 95 percent of the men were tortured. The one exception is of special interest to me. David Hoffman claims that the North Vietnamese pulled his already-broken arm out of its socket to coerce him into seeing Ramsey Clark and me. Yet his copilot and prison roommate, Norris Charles, said he never heard of nor saw any torture in the camp. Neither did P.O.W.s Walter Wilber and Mark Gartley, who were in the same compound. Wilber was even quoted in his hometown newspaper as saying, about my visit, "She could see that we were all healthy and hadn't been tortured."

[A] I think we should ask ourselves why Nixon made heroes of the P.O.W.s. Why not the vets, the ground troops who've come back legless and jobless? Why not the 50,000 who died there? Could it be that paraplegics don't make good spokesmen for Nixon, that voices from the grave can't congratulate the President on achieving peace with honor?

[A] Hayden: We have just visited about 35 cities around the country, and a P.O.W. named Bob Chenoweth, who spent five and a half years in North Vietnam, traveled with us. He lived, at different times, with a total of 108 P.O.W.s. That's about one fifth, almost 20 percent of all of them, and he never heard anyone say that they were tortured. More and more P.O.W.s are coming to terms with their feelings about the war; but when many of them were first released, they came home to families who were still hawkish. So a good number of the P.O.W.s found themselves in limbo, not knowing where to turn. It's taken time.

[Q] Playboy: That's somewhat the same lack of direction you expressed privately a decade ago, Jane--long before people began calling you radical--when you left the United States to live in Europe. Tell us why you went.

[A] Fonda: I went because in the early Sixties, Europe seemed to be the place where things were happening. There was the New Wave in the cinema. I was trying to get back to what I had felt in the beginning, when I began acting. I missed the excitement of working in the theater in New York and the real contact I felt I had lost when I went to California. I didn't know how to deal with the values I found here in Hollywood.

[Q] Playboy: You hadn't always wanted to be an actress, had you?

[A] Fonda: No, at first I resisted the idea of acting very much. But I was out of school and I had no idea what to do with my life. I didn't want to get married. I remember as a freshman in college I had seen my girlfriends fall--engagement, bridal magazine, wedding ring, marriage. I said to myself, if I can get past my sophomore year without feeling that I should have a ring on my finger or there's something wrong with me, if I can get by that, then I'm saved. And I got by it. But I didn't know what I did want to do, and it's a terrifying feeling. I mean, I understand so well what kids feel now. They just don't know what they want their future to be.

[A] Anyway, when I was 21 I began studying at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York and from then on, that was it. I mean, I ate and dreamed and lived acting 24 hours a day. And I think the reason I loved it so much was that it offered me a way of getting behind a mask and revealing things that I, as an uptight middle-class woman, had always been told I should not show.

[Q] Playboy: So you found yourself in love with acting but disenchanted with Hollywood. Did you discover what you were looking for in Europe?

[A] Fonda: What I was very impressed with there was the existence of film making as an art, as opposed to film making as big business. When you make a movie with a major studio in Hollywood, you deal with a vast bureaucracy. The content of the film, right down to what the actress may wear, can often be controlled by the heads of the studios or the bankers in New York. There's also usually a great deal of alienation between the workers and the final product. I'm talking about the grips, the technicians, the rank and file of the studios, who are mostly quite old--because young people can't get into the unions here--and jaded.

[Q] Playboy: And you found things different in Europe?

[A] Fonda: In Europe, films can be made more cheaply, more risks can be taken. Many, many more independent productions were being made while I was there. I would say generally that the workers were much more liberal and involved in the creation of a film. The man I was later to marry, Roger Vadim, was the first very young, absolutely unknown film maker to have made what was called a New Wave film on a very low budget. It was a huge success and, as a result, it opened the doors to all of the young directors who came later: Godard, Truffaut and all the rest. It was the beginning of the New Wave.

[Q] Playboy: You're talking about Vadim's And God Created Woman?

[A] Fonda: That's right.

[Q] Playboy: Interestingly enough, the movie was predicated on the idea of the female as a sex object.

[A] Fonda: One thing that was true of his films, however, was that the women were always strong. They were always the central characters, always the winners. She may have been portrayed as a beautiful object, but Brigitte Bardot ruled the roost. She kicked out any man she was tired of and invited in any man she wanted. She lived like a man in Vadim's films. I think the reason And God Created Woman was such a success was that it was the first time you saw a beautiful female creature behave exactly like a man, and it was a very liberating experience for a lot of women to watch her on the screen. Of course, there's the other side of the coin: Sex was the determining factor: woman objectified as sex object. But I think it's facile to dismiss that film as simply a sexy exploitation film. I think it was much more.

[Q] Playboy: What about Barbarella? It would certainly be surprising to hear you refer to it as anything other than sexist.

[A] Fonda: The trouble with Barbarella was that she wasn't Superwoman. Instead of being a great female, she was a sexy girl. Again, sex was the determining factor in who had the power. Besides that, I don't like making the kind of movies where you have to wait four hours because the dry ice isn't steaming or the birds that are supposed to be eating you are dying.

[Q] Playboy: Which of your more serious films has given you some satisfaction?

[A] Fonda: I'll always like They Shoot Horses, Don't They? I guess because it's one of the few movies I've done that say something truthful, that aren't just silly or prototyped. I don't feel very close to my character in the movie, who is cynical and fatalistic, but I think the metaphor of the marathon dance fits our society: people being manipulated by a few who reap the benefits.

[Q] Playboy: For your performance in that film and several others, some critics have called you America's finest actress. How do you feel about that?

[A] Fonda: I don't like any sort of rating or comparison, because it just exacerbates a tendency--which is exaggerated enough in my profession--for everyone to compete with one another.

[Q] Playboy: You accepted an Oscar, which is certainly a competitive award, for your performance in Klute.

[A] Fonda: I thought about that a whole lot, and there was one period when I had decided I wouldn't accept the Oscar if I won. Then I began to think I should accept it, because it does come from the people in my industry and is a vote of confidence from the people I work with and whose opinion I respect. I also feel that the Oscar means something to the American people.

[Q] Playboy: Do you disagree, then, with the way Marlon Brando handled his award?

[A] Fonda: I respect very much what he did. I think his gesture of having an Indian woman raise the issue of racism in Hollywood was fine and I applaud him for it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still have your own Oscar?

[A] Fonda: It's holding up books on the bookcase downstairs--and the gold is flaking.

[Q] Playboy: You've been quoted as saying you fought a lot with Vadim about his films, which you didn't particularly like.

[A] Fonda: I don't want to talk about Vadim. He is a kind and gentle but very, very complex human being. And attempts that people make to categorize him and write him off as a male-chauvinist pig are inaccurate and do him injustice. Yes, he does put too much emphasis on the way women look. That's absolutely true. And I think that attitude took its toll on me; I don't mean to pretend that it didn't. But I don't regret the time I spent in France.

[Q] Playboy: Are you still friends?

[A] Fonda: Yes. We're still friends and he's the father of my daughter. He's a wonderful father and I'm very glad he is her father. There is just one more thing I'd like to say about my film-making experiences with Vadim, and then I don't want to talk about it any further. There was something that happened during the time I was working with Vadim that made it very hard for me to agree to be interviewed by Playboy.

[A] I was doing a movie with him called La Curée, which was based on a novel by Emile Zola, and there was a scene in it where I'm swimming with the man who is my lover in a sort of hothouse swimming pool, and we're naked. In fact, in the film you didn't see that we were; you only sense that we were naked. But you don't really see our bodies. I requested, when the time came to shoot the scene, that all the crew leave the set. The only people there, I thought, were the actor, my husband and the cameraman, who was a very close friend of ours.

[A] Ok, several months go by and PLAYBOY comes out and I see a whole layout of photographs of myself getting in and out of the pool naked. The shots were obviously taken by some one who was up on the studio catwalk, on the scaffolding, with a telephoto lens. Well, we checked and discovered that there was a French or Italian photographer who had sneaked illegally onto the closed set and had taken those pictures without my permission and sold them to Playboy. Playboy didn't ask permission to publish them, and I was outraged. It seemed that Playboy couldn't see the difference between something that I had decided to do as an actress, when I knew exactly what was going to appear on the screen and could say, "That will have to be cut out," and the violation of an unknown cameraman who sneaked in. took pictures of me naked and sold them.

[A] I tried to sue. Unfortunately, when you're famous, you have absolutely no right to privacy. Someone can do practically anything to you and there is no way that you can win an invasion-of-privacy suit. So it was dropped and Playboy wrote me a private letter of apology that said they felt they had been taken advantage of by the photographer, too, and it ended there. Except that it didn't end in terms of the embarrassment I felt. So it was--and still is--with some difficulty that I agreed to do this interview. I just want to set the record straight.

[Q] Playboy: What made you decide to do it?

[A] Fonda: Well, I thought a lot about it, and at first I refused. You know, there are two things going on in Playboy. On the one hand, it has some of the most important interviews that are being published today, since most of the other magazines that used to do them have closed down. They also run some very important articles, and I recognize them as such. On the other hand, I think the magazine is bought, essentially, for the centerfold. It's the purchase of naked women. I don't like the way Playboy exploits women's bodies. I think it only titillates men's sexual fantasies.

[Q] Playboy: It's a debatable premise that publishing nude pictures of the human body is exploitive; but if Playboy's appeal is based primarily on its sexual content, why don't the girlie magazines, which publish many more--and nuder--pictures, outsell Playboy? Our circulation began rising most rapidly when we began to publish not nuder pictures but articles and interviews such as the ones you mention.

[A] Fonda: That may be true, but the fact is that because of those naked women, Playboy has become the symbol of what is the enemy for women.

[Q] Playboy: You don't believe it really is, do you?

[A] Fonda: You're going to tell me how PLAYBOY has supported the women's movement by joining the fight for abortion reform. Well, that's fine, but it doesn't change certain basic things about the magazine. Before I agreed to be interviewed, I talked to a number of women I work with and am close to and I asked them what they felt I should do. Generally the feeling was that it's not often one is given room to speak, and with the climate as it is today, I felt it was important to be able to have space to say some things I felt were important. So that consideration overrode my reluctance.

[Q] Playboy: What's your opinion of magazines such as Viva and Playgirl, which publish photos of nude men? Do you think they exploit men's bodies?

[A] Fonda: Yes, I do, and I don't read them.

[Q] Playboy: Fair enough. Let's change the subject. You were still in France when your own exploitation as a sex star was at its height. What occurred during that time to politicize you?

[A] Fonda: What happened was that I was living there when people in this country were beginning to change. Essentially, I was away during the civil rights movement. I was away during the beginning of the antiwar movement and felt the turmoil of that time only indirectly. When a Frenchman said to me that the United States Air Force had bombed a village, razed it "in order to save it." I told him he was lying, that it wasn't true. I said Americans don't do things like that. The first specific thing I can remember was watching television when there was a march of half a million people on the Pentagon and seeing people getting bludgeoned to the ground. I watched women leading marches. I watched women walking up to the bayonets that were surrounding the Pentagon, and they were not afraid. The soldiers were the ones who were afraid. I'll never forget that experience. It completely changed me, not overnight, but it started a process in me as I began searching for what was behind it all.

[Q] Playboy: When and how did you begin that search?

[A] Fonda: It was 1968. There were soldiers in Paris at the time, deserters from Vietnam, young men who had enlisted in the Service and had gone to Vietnam and then left because they couldn't deal with what was happening there anymore. I met some of them in Paris and I talked with them. Then I began to read. I read Bertrand Russell's War Crimes in Vietnam transcripts, a book by Jonathan Schell called The Village of Ben Suc; I got subscriptions to Ramparts and The Village Voice. Paris was in a state of siege. Most everyone I knew was in the streets, but my eyes were on my own country: the occupation of Columbia University, the '68 convention riots in Chicago.

[A] Gradually I realized that my place was not as a married woman on a farm in France any longer, that I wanted to come back here. I had a purpose in coming back. I wanted to find some way that I could be part of what was going on. For the first time in my life, I realized that people were finding a way to create change. I didn't know what it was; all I knew was that people were beginning to feel powerful again, and I wanted to be part of it.

[Q] Playboy: When you returned to the U. S. late in '69, you immediately embarked on a cross-country tour that created a lot of publicity because of the things you said. Why did you make that trip?

[A] Fonda: I realized when I came back to the United States from France that I didn't know this country at all. I knew New York and California, and vaguely Omaha, because that's where my father comes from, but I didn't know the rest of the country and I decided that one way to start finding out about it was to drive through it. Because I'd spent time with soldiers in Paris, I became very interested as I traveled in what was called the GI movement. I didn't really understand what that was in the beginning. I remember telling someone I was going to be driving across the country and he said, "Oh, you should go to the coffeehouses." I didn't even know what the coffeehouses were, but I learned that there were soldiers organizing, putting out newspapers and opening coffeehouses where other guys from the base could go and talk about conditions in the military and about the war. I visited these places all across the country and talked with guys who had just come back from Vietnam. They knew more about the war than anybody else, in the sense that they felt the weight and horror of it in their guts.

[A] I saw guys who will probably never be the same. You've read about the post-Vietnam syndrome. I've seen men suffering from it who can't even speak. They talk in whispers. They would whisper in my ear that they were incapable of doing anything except kill. I don't know whether everything they said was true or not, but I do know what a powerful effect it had on me to hear GIs talking about the atrocities they had committed against Vietnamese, the falsifying of reports and body counts. I participated with Vietnam Veterans Against the War in organizing the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971. Over a hundred officers and enlisted men testified at the hearing about war crimes. Some testified to having participated in Nixon's secret invasion of Laos and in the 1969 raids against Cambodia. Yet the TV networks dismissed them as "alleged veterans."

[A] I guess one of the most important experiences I can remember was arriving at a coffeehouse called the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas, where I found a group of men and women activists, GIs who were treating each other differently than I had ever seen people treat each other before. The men were fighting their male chauvinism. Women had assumed new positions of leadership. Responsibilities were shared. What I realized during the week I spent with these people was that all the words I had been hearing really meant something, that there really was an alternative way of living.

[Q] Playboy: If you'd had doubts until then that all the words you'd been hearing really meant something, why had you already committed yourself to the movement?

[A] Fonda: Well, prior to that experience, I had this feeling that I wanted things to stop. But I really didn't know what I wanted to replace them with. What I saw acted out in the lives of the people in the coffeehouses showed me the kinds of things I wanted to start. I began to see positive alternatives to work for, not just negative things to work against.

[Q] Playboy: What do you say to the accusation that during this period when you under went such a radical transformation, you were being used for promotional purposes, being manipulated by the movements that attracted you?

[A] Fonda: It's true to a degree. But I kept coming upon people who were living life-and-death experiences: Their land was being taken away, or they were starving, or they were about to be shot or had been shot. These people weren't getting their stories out; they weren't being given access to the media; and groups of people would come and ask me to try to get some attention drawn to what was happening and I found it difficult to say no. On the other hand, I didn't trust the words I had to use. They were incoherent: they were unsophisticated; so I borrowed words from people who knew a lot of big political words, and they didn't sound good in my mouth. What I was seeing was real: I should have just relied on that realness and talked about it that way.

[A] I was just trying to find a way to express what I was feeling--rage; the rage people feel when they've been lied to and suddenly realize it. The rage of someone who was, despite the cynicism and everything else, very idealistic about her country. I was very angry about the deception. My feelings came from inexperience, from being famous and, therefore, being asked to take an instant public position. They came from being a woman, unfamiliar with the need to be assertive. My outrage was also influenced by the fact that I was alone during this period. What you gain with experience and political maturity is the ability to be calm, the ability to understand that you have to have a great deal of patience, that you have your limitations and that you can't do everything. You learn that without an organization, little can be accomplished.

[Q] Playboy: It was also at this time that you began to speak out for women's rights. Tell us a little about the internal changes that turned you from a sex star into a feminist leader.

[A] Fonda: I don't think of myself as a leader. I'm a woman who's changing. I think the problem women face is that we don't define our own lives, what it is we strive for, and consequently the means we use to get there are pretty well dictated by men. Recently, when I was having our new baby, all the workers in the hospital who did the shit work--who washed up and cleaned the floors and stuck a thermometer up your ass--were female and black, chicano or Asian. All the internists--any one who had a dignified role--were white and male. It was just another reminder of the way women have been treated in terms of job opportunities.

[Q] Playboy: But you've always been able to work and feel economically equal to men. What made you feel oppressed?

[A] Fonda: For a long time, I didn't see how the women's movement related to me. I didn't even comprehend the concept of women's oppression. We get so used to certain things' being the way they are that we consider them normal, inevitable. Three or four years ago, I would be asked periodically by groups of women to discuss my exploitation as a movie actress; I never knew what to say. It seemed to me that if you were an actress, you were a property that was packaged and sold and I saw that as normal. Looking back on it, I remember the first day I went to Warner Bros., when I was doing my first film there and a bunch of make-up artists were examining my face--checking it out to tell how they were going to make me up. I remember their looking me over, and I wasn't what they wanted.

[A] When they got finished with me. I didn't really know who I was. My eyebrows were like eagle's wings and my mouth was all over my face. My hair wasn't the right color and had to be changed, too. Then Jack Warner, the head of the studio, sent a message down to the set that I had to wear falsies, because you couldn't become a movie star unless you were full-breasted. It seems silly today, given the consciousness that exists now, that I would accept that, but I just assumed these men were experts: They know, they've been doing it to women for years. So I allowed myself to be changed.

[Q] Playboy: What made you begin to see things differently?

[A] Fonda: I met women who had a new consciousness and they helped me understand the joy of not competing with each other, of being able to be open with and rely on other women. I also met a few men who had another attitude toward women, who weren't chauvinists. That made me think a lot and I was able to see the degree to which growth was literally stunted by concerns having to do with how we looked and what we had to do to be liked by men. The concern among women was always how they should relate to men.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Fonda: Because who wanted to relate to women? Women were losers. Looking back over my life and the women I had known, I realized the extent to which thwarted energy turns inward and eats you up like a cancer. How many vital, vibrant, brilliant women have broken like dried wood because they were denied an outlet? And I became angry. The way I saw things a couple of years ago, men--most men, anyway--were the enemy. It became very difficult for me to deal with men at that time. I felt anger for me, for my mother and for all my sisters. I also felt a new compassion for women and a pride to be part of all these females who are holding their heads up, saying, "We are strong and our strength has been denied, we are beautiful and our beauty has been painted over."

[Q] Playboy: Tom, did you know Jane during the time she was feeling hostile toward men?

[A] Hayden: No. That was before I knew her.

[Q] Playboy: In view of your new compassion for women, and your period of hostility toward men, Jane, how do you feel about the upsurgence of lesbianism in the feminist movement?

[A] Fonda: I don't want to get into that. I just think people shouldn't be persecuted for their sexual desires.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about men now?

[A] Fonda: I no longer think men are the enemy. They've been able to reap more benefits than women have, but most men are also victims of their own institutional role. They have the burden of being the provider, of being told that to be a man (continued on page 180)Playboy Interview(continued from page 90) means being the stronger, the real go-getter. What a drag. Well, the only way we're going to make things fundamentally better is to do things together.

[Q] Playboy: Tom, as a male leader of the left, did you have any trouble adjusting to the feminist awakening?

[A] Hayden: I had tremendous problems. For anyone to discover a blind side isn't easy. My adjustment isn't over yet. I'm still working on it. It's a very tough problem involving almost a restructuring of your senses. You have to begin to truly listen to women and understand where they're coming from. You try to overcome all the subtle male things that make them feel trivialized, like talking to women in a certain way, giving them a kind of charming banter that you wouldn't carry on with a man. May be you should have conversations like that with men and women, but not just with women. It's a process that takes a long time, because the problem's so deep. Men have been treating women insensitively for generations. It was as difficult for me to begin changing those attitudes as it was for a lot of men who were first confronted with their chauvinism in the late Sixties.

[Q] Playboy: When did you two meet?

[A] Fonda: I had heard about Tom and some of his articles had affected me a lot. I like the way he writes; he's neither pedantic nor rhetorical. At a moment when there was a lot of confusion on the left about priorities, Tom's articles saying Vietnam was the strategic conflict were wonderful to read. They came at a crucial time: spring of 1972. The Vietnamese had launched their counter-offensive to destroy Vietnamization and Nixon was about to run as a peace candidate. Tom and I were both in Los Angeles, both speaking a lot and working with graphics and slides to help focus the issues, so we began to work together.

[Q] Playboy: Tom, what first attracted you to Jane?

[A] Hayden: It was a mutual recognition of the importance of Vietnam. I think, Jane, that immediately after your trip, you were in the same place I was, believing that we should dedicate ourselves to the war as the issue. I don't know entirely why, but going to Vietnam when you did, as the war reached a climactic point, made you come back feeling a lot more solidly about me, and I felt the same way about you, and it will probably take us years to understand that.

[Q] Playboy: It sounds as if your relationship is based on the dedication you share about Vietnam.

[A] Hayden: It isn't that our relationship is based entirely on Vietnam, but I think that just as Vietnam brings out genocidal characteristics in some people, it brings out the better qualities in other people as well. And it magnifies feelings. That's what happened to us.

[A] Fonda: We fell in love. It's a phenomenon that's not unique. Many people fall in love and don't describe the process in PLAYBOY. I could sit down and explain exactly why I'm in love with Tom, and why I'm very happy living with him, but I don't think it's appropriate here.

[A] Hayden: Everybody should be concerned about what love is and how to make it work, but it isn't our specialty and we've been in love before and it hasn't worked, so were not experts on the subject.

[Q] Playboy: It seems surprisingly conventional and middle class for you to formalize your relationship by getting married.

[A] Fonda: When I first met Tom, he said, "Who're you living with?" and I said, "God forbid, nobody." I was very cynical about relationships and I certainly never would have thought I'd be married again and have another child. But being in Vietnam had a very important effect on me. Here you are, an American in a country that's undergoing 24-hour-a-day bombardment. Yet I have never been in a place where the life force was so strong, where people were looking forward so much to the future. As I met more and more people, I kept having this feeling that they were living beyond themselves. That manifested it self in many ways. Women were not only fighting with their hands, they were fighting with their bellies, having babies; it was a symbol of what this struggle in Vietnam represents. There was a poem that was written just before I got there, describing the 1972 spring offensive; it was a long poem written by a famous Vietnamese poet, and the last line was, "Nixon, we will fight you with all the joys of a woman in childbirth." That says so much about their struggle. They are giving birth to new hope for the people of the world.

[Q] Playboy: What has all this got to do with deciding to marry Tom?

[A] Fonda: Well, seeing it all made me want to have a baby. So I came back to the States and I just said to him, "Tom, I want to have a baby." Before I went to Vietnam, I had begun to spend a lot of time with Tom, and I fell in love with him. The stability and clarity that I had sensed in his writings come through also in his relationships with people, and he's as secure and gentle a person as I've ever met. It was this security that helped me past the cynicism I was feeling about all relationships. But after I came back from Vietnam, I felt much stronger, not only about Tom but about life.

[A] It was due partly to the fact that Vietnam rekindled an enormous amount of hope in me. Hope in terms of people's individual capacity for change, recognition of the degree to which I had changed and an enormous sense of confidence in the possibility of people changing history. So why shouldn't two people who are involved in a struggle together and who are both confident of people's ability to change--why shouldn't they have a child together to participate in that atmosphere of new hope?

[Q] Playboy: But why, as radical critics of the establishment, did you decide to make your relationship contractual?

[A] Hayden: It was a step-by-step decision. I think when we both felt that we wanted to have a baby, many questions had to be answered--questions of responsibility to ourselves before a society. If we weren't married and this child were coming, what do you think the newspapers would print about Jane?

[Q] Playboy: That Jane Fonda is going to have an illegitimate child. So what?

[A] Hayden: Well, it's difficult enough to deal with the hostility directed toward radicals in general, but particularly toward her. And I think that while it's valid to have relationships without marriage, and children without marriage, you have to decide what the priority problems are in your life and in what order you're going to solve them. We certainly aren't trying to promote marriage as an institution for people for whom it doesn't work. On the other hand, to frivolously reject marriage and all other institutions simultaneously means you're coming from a very isolated position. So when we decided to get married, we reached our conclusion in a kind of backward process. We said, "Well, we're going to have this kid. If we're not married, it'll cause all kinds of unreasonable criticism and divert attention from what we're trying to say. So maybe we better get married."

[Q] Playboy: Would you still have gotten married if you hadn't been concerned about public opinion?

[A] Hayden: I don't think I would have thought about it as carefully. I would have been able to duck it. But I'm glad it came up. I think it makes me feel more responsible, not for having gotten married, as such, but for having had to think it through more carefully. You know, a by-product of the alternative culture is that you don't have to think about relationships as permanent. If you start from the assumption that all relationships are temporary, then you can go ahead and have a series of them. And the end of each one will seem inevitable. It may or may not be so, but once you start from that assumption, you don't have to think too much and it becomes self-fulfilling.

[Q] Playboy: Jane, how compatible do you find marriage with your feminist principles?

[A] Fonda: Well, in past relationships with men, it never occurred to me to ask the man to share certain responsibilities with me or to allow me space to grow. Women have always been made to feel that if you're married and you want to stay married, it's usually up to you to hold it together. So what you have to do is be "the best possible wife," and what that means is you have to be a great cook, be sexy, look good all the time and be a wonderful mother your husband can brag about.

[Q] Playboy: Is that the way it was for you in the past?

[A] Fonda: Yes, but I'm not saying that in my previous marriage my husband demanded these things from me. He didn't need to. Our culture demands it. Nor would he have refused to do certain things. It simply never occurred to me to ask him. With Tom's consciousness, because of his years working with and being criticized by women in the movement, we just automatically share responsibilities on every level--taking care of children, shopping, cleaning house, whatever.

[Q] Playboy: Do you do all the work yourselves, with no hired help?

[A] Fonda: The work gets done. We do it.

[Q] Playboy: Since you were raised in a world of luxury, and left that life only a few years ago, it would be interesting to know what kinds of possessions you now have.

[A] Fonda: Well, possessions used to be very important to me. They were like a fortress; it was a kind of security to have a lot of things. But I've given away or sold most everything I had, out of a need to be unburdened, and what we have now is stuff we need, that's all.

[Q] Playboy: Do you own your house?

[A] Fonda: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of car do you drive?

[A] Fonda: I have a Volvo and Tom drives a borrowed Volkswagen.

[Q] Playboy: Tom, your background is much less familiar to the public than Jane's. Tell us something about it, about the experiences that led you to become a founder of SDS.

[A] Hayden: I was born in a working-class family and raised in Detroit, although I lived in San Diego when I was four, while my dad was stationed there in the Marines. I lived basically in a suburban neighborhood outside Detroit. I grew up and went to Catholic grade schools there. I was involved in sports and the high school paper and wanted to be either an athlete or a foreign correspondent, so I could travel. There was no radical activity in my home town, to say the least. And I think in that environment, most people who rebelled didn't do so in political terms, because there were no political terms. McCarthyism had wiped out any semblance of a labor movement, or a left, in the late Fifties. We were attracted much more to figures like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, who were described by the establishment as being troubled malcontents with no apparent outlet or program. It was the same generation that was drawn to the work of J. D. Salinger, then went on to Mad magazine and, especially on the two coasts, into following the development of the Beats. Then, when the sit-ins began in the South, we found a way to rebel with a cause.

[Q] Playboy: What made you decide to form SDS?

[A] Hayden: It was formed in response, I think more than anything else, to the world-wide idea that students were making history. There were students demonstrating in Seoul, in Turkey, young intellectuals leading the Cuban revolution, black students sitting in a Wool-worth's in the South. Students hadn't been taken seriously in American history or in past progressive movements; even in traditional Marxism, the student class has a very secondary role. We were attracted to the idea of students as agents of social change. SDS came out of ethnic social groups that hadn't been involved in American radicalism: WASPs, Catholics, the white middle class, Mid western young people. America had reached such a limit of what it could offer to people that, suddenly, protest reached even those in the mainstream. Really, Nixon stole the idea of middle America from us, because the original SDS was middle America.

[Q] Playboy: Jane, do you remember being aware of the forming of SDS back in 1962?

[A] Fonda: No, I was in Europe and I was very apolitical during this time. As I remember, I became aware of SDS in 1968, and I first heard Tom's name while watching the Chicago convention riots on television.

[Q] Playboy: What did SDS' first proclamation, the Port Huron Statement, say?

[A] Hayden: It said, in general terms, that a society should be organized to ensure that every individual participates in decision making, in choosing the form of government and representation he wants, and that he play a role in the vital issues that affect him--in the neighborhood, at work, and so on. It spoke the language of the whole political generation that followed.

[Q] Playboy: If you were writing a Port Huron Statement for this decade, what would you talk about?

[A] Hayden: Well, for one thing, we need to make clear the deceptive and unworkable nature of our economy, since true democracy is incompatible with capitalism. You need only look at the headlines to see how true that is. Rule by the rich has created a country whose economy can't check inflation even though thousands of its citizens are suffering from malnutrition, a country that's unable even to provide sufficient energy to run itself.

[Q] Playboy: Under what economic system would the nation flourish?

[A] Hayden: You need creative jobs, a redistribution of income, workers' control and democratic public planning in combination. Our economic system is a global one, so the solutions to our economic problems have to be global. If we're using our technology and building factories in so many countries, then the peoples of the world are going to have something to say about decisions affecting our economy. I see the need for an economic system where private property is no longer legalized or tolerated, at least with respect to the massive and vital industries. But it's not a case for socialism, as it would have been 50 years ago, when the people of this country alone would have controlled our economy. It's a case for international change. This, I think, will come about through a revolutionary process that results in either a much-reformed United Nations or some other international system of planning and cooperation in which the people of the United States, not just the corporations, are represented.

[Q] Playboy: Can you describe the kind of Government you'd like to see in America?

[A] Fonda: Well, participatory democracy would be revolutionary here. A society that didn't depend on racism would be, too. But I don't have any blueprint for what it's going to look like. One of the things we would hope for is that people had what they needed to live happily and healthily.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by participatory democracy?

[A] Fonda: A society and a Government in which people have a true voice and can really determine the decisions that are made, thus forcing change that's really in their own interests. Rather than the situation that exists today, in which we go by the name of democracy but, in fact, the people aren't making the decisions and the decisions that are made aren't in the interests of the majority.

[Q] Playboy: Would participatory democracy mean a decentralized Federal Government?

[A] Fonda: No, not necessarily. As long as the Federal Government paid attention to the needs of all its people, rather than just to those of that minute percentage of the population that has most of the money.

[A] Hayden: The question really is: Can a country as large as the United States be run any longer by a centralized elite? And the answer is, clearly, no. The system is falling apart. So we must ask what new institutions would re-establish order. The present system is literally suicidal. The oceans may dry up, the sources of oxygen may dry up, the remaining resources may disappear. I don't think there's a cubic foot of clean air over America at the present time. Private control of the economy is even leading to the ruination of the people who are making money from it.

[Q] Playboy: Considering these urgent new priorities, aren't you tempted to turn your energies away from the diminishing issue of peace in Indochina?

[A] Hayden: We think that the Indochina conflict has already been a decisive turning point in American history. Economically, it has precipitated the erosion of the dollar and proved that the United States cannot afford to fight long wars in other countries. Culturally, it has awakened millions of people. Politically, it has shown that as long as we support corrupt dictatorships in other countries, we will not be able to have an honest or democratic Government here. We will have to have a Government of secrecy. That's one of the lessons of Vietnam that must be learned. The long-term objective of our new organization, the Indochina Peace Campaign, is to make vivid these lessons of the war--through films, for instance. We're working on a full-length commercial film about veterans, their lives and families and that sort of thing--having people go to different base towns, military installations and hospitals around the country, researching the reality and involving lots of people in the film.

[A] We've also put together an Indochina peace pledge that we hope will be adopted by political-office seekers and incumbents. This pledge has three basic points: one, to prohibit direct American reintervention in Indochina; two, to abide by the political provisions of the peace agreement; and, three, to stop all nonhumanitarian financial aid to Thieu and Lon Nol. By that, I'm talking about things such as their using U. S. dollars to build prisons and strengthen police departments. We want to encourage all kinds of citizens' groups and clubs to take this pledge and work to get politicians to endorse it. And Jane and I, among many others, are going to be spending a lot of time this year lobbying in Washington, at budget hearings and political caucuses, and in Congressional districts around the country, in the hope that the peace pledge will become a plank in the platforms of candidates running for office in 1974. You see, this is the first war that the United States isn't going to win, and the American people have a lot to learn from it. We can't afford to let them forget about it.

[Q] Playboy: Still, don't you find a tremendous desire among people to do just that?

[A] Hayden: Yes. But if you succumb to that feeling yourself, then you're only postponing a problem that's going to stare you in the face the next time you try to arouse anybody about anything. If we don't deal with painful questions, we can't make progress on any front. But I think a lot of people don't want to forget the war and are looking for therapeutic ways to make sense of it. Guys in V. A. hospitals, 3,000,000 veterans and their families, intellectuals and artists. Have the German people forgotten the Forties? They can't forget those years. Neither should we forget these years.

[Q] Playboy: Obviously you won't, and if you have your way, neither will the American public. But in the face of its mood of indifference toward the war, its continuing resistance to the basic reforms you demand and its personal hostility toward you as personalities, what keeps you going?

[A] Hayden: I don't think it's a matter of choice; I didn't choose to be a radical. In fact, I don't even like the word radical, because when we select words to define ourselves, we must be up front and honestly explain the fundamental changes we want, but we shouldn't have to use words that isolate us. Radical is such a word. It connotes an extreme edge of society. It suggests an extreme alternative, one that causes the inevitable disruption of people's lives. I believe that if you want change, you have to be part of the mainstream, part of a kind of normalcy, if you will. Radical doesn't imply your goals; it identifies you with a means rather than an end. The word is entrenched, though, and you live with it. But it doesn't make me believe that what I want for myself and others is radical. I've felt from the beginning of my political activity that I was really just reacting to things in this society that were interfering with my life and the lives of millions of others. And as long as I have my life, I have to keep on fighting against that which interferes with it.

[A] Fonda: I feel a very deep certainty about the possibility of people changing, and I have full faith in my feelings because of my own experience and because of what I see going on around me all the time. People can change, and as long as I believe that, everything is possible.