the making of historical myth

From:
Jane Fonda's Words of Politics and Passion
http://feminist.com/whatsnew.htm
http://feminist.com/resources/artspeech/genwom/politicsandpassion.html
page 17
..Im in Hanoi, out in the country...told to get out of the car and run because the bombers were coming...manholes for individual people that had thick straw lids that you pull over to protect you from the bombs and the shrapnel...a young Vietnamese girl comes up behind me and pulls me down into one of these holes...and then she got into the hole with me and pulled the top on...the bombs thudding...sandwiched in together...could feel her breath, and her eyelashes, on my cheek...saved my life...When the bombing raid was over..and I came out...I began to cry, saying over and over to the girl, 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.' She stops me and starts speaking to me in Vietnamese. Not angry, very calm...Huoc...translates. 'She says you shouldn't cry for us. We know why we're fighting. The sadness should be for your country, your soldiers. They don't know why they are fighting us.'...
page 26
...understand...the destruction...caused to civilian populations and residential areas, to cultural centers...pagodas bombed...theaters...recreation centers...the people more determined than ever to fight...
page 59
...In the spring of 1972, reports began to come in from European scientists and diplomats that the dikes of the Red River Delta in North Vietnam were being targeted by U.S. planes. Those who had witnessed this felt it was deliberate...in 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, searching for some new means to bring Hanoi to its knees, had proposed destroying North Vietnam's dikes, which, he said, if handled right, would flood the rice fields and cause starvation. He estimated maybe a million. In 1972, Henry Kissinger estimated that, if the dikes collapsed, around 200,000 would starve.
To his credit, President Johnson had not acted upon this option. Now, six years later, Richard Nixon...
...I wanted to expose the lies and bring back filmed evidence, if there was evidence (which there was), that the dikes were being bombed. Almost 300 Americans had gone to North Vietnam before me - scientists, Nobel Prize winners, activists, priests, diplomats, reporters, Vietnam veterans - over eighty had spoken over the radio there. I knew that my trip would be controversial, but I felt I had to go. And I'm glad I did...The bombing of the dikes stopped...If my trip and the footage I brought back played even a small role in that, it was worth it.
But I committed a terrible lapse of judgement on my last day there. I sat on an anti-aircraft gun. A group of soldiers had sung me a song. I had sung one back, everyone was laughing and clapping and someone asked me to sit down, pictures were taken by reporters and I didn't realize until a moment after I got up what the implication of that image would mean...
I had spent over two years working with GIs and Vietnam veterans and had spoken before hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters telling them that our men in uniform aren't the enemy...
Quite a while after that, right-wing idealogues began to create a myth about me...