How’s this for a story? North Vietnam, 1972: Jane Fonda is in the midst of her visit when an N.V.A. officer gets an idea. He collects a group of American POWs from their septic dungeons, cleans them up, and has them mustered on parade to show his guest how well his embattled nation treats its prisoners. Fonda moves down the line, greeting each man with encouragements like “Aren’t you ashamed you killed babies?” as she shakes his hand. And, as she does, each POW palms her a scrap of paper with his Social Security number written on it. After all, she is an American; surely she’ll carry the message home to the families that their husband or son is alive.

Fonda shakes the last hand, then turns to the officer and gives him the fistful of messages. The POWs are beaten. Four die; one, Colonel Larry Carrigan, survives—just barely, but it is he who tells about the incident.

After we published Peter Braunstein’s article on Jane Fonda in our July/August issue, perhaps 60 people sent me this story. It never happened. It’s folklore, but folklore of a curiously evolved sort. There was a real Colonel Carrigan, and he was a POW in Vietnam. But he never met Jane Fonda, and he has no idea how the maddening tale attached itself to him.

The story surfaced online in 1999, and my guess is that it will live there a long time. For a great many people, it’s not enough that Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam, offered encouragement to an army that was daily killing her countrymen, climbed up on that anti-aircraft gun, insisted that all American prisoners were well-treated, and so on. She has to be a murderess, too.

Why? Ramsey Clark went to Hanoi during the war. So did Joan Baez and William Sloane Coffin, Noam Chomsky and Pete Seeger, Rennie Davis and Judy Collins. Nobody remembers, nobody cares. Jane Fonda remains unforgiven.

Here’s how we saw the article we ran: It is a survey of the singular career of a woman who both drove and was driven by many of the largest social concerns of her era, and who came to embody some of them. And it’s about a woman who had a capacity for reinvention that, like Jay Gatsby’s, was the more effective for her whole-souled belief in what she devised. The chance to remake oneself is a universally acknowledged strength of this Republic, and the Republic itself has done it often enough. Peter Braunstein’s article speculated that Jane Fonda had this ability to a degree unique in modern times. The cover called her “Ms. America.” The Ms., we thought, would signal a bit of ironic distance from the broad, ingenu- ous affection contained in “Miss America.”

It evidently didn’t. No article of ours gets hundreds of letters, but this one did, very few of them friendly. Almost all the messages said we had no business writing about Fonda because she