1960s Anti-War Icon Tom Hayden Dead at 76

By Beth Dalbey (Patch Staff)

Tom Hayden, the anti-war activist and longtime California lawmaker, died Sunday night in Santa Monica.

Hayden, 76, roused a generation of young Americans to oppose the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. Hayden died at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica of complications related to a stroke a year and a half ago, his wife, Barbara Williams, said.

Hayden, a California state lawmaker for nearly two decades, helped write the Port Huron Statement, an anti-war manifesto for the Students for a Democratic Society, a left-leaning political activism organization that rose to prominence during the 1960s.

The 25,000-word statement, written in 1962 at the FDR Camp in Port Huron, Michigan, was called an “agenda for a generation,” and provocatively covered myriad topics, including not only U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but the economy, the nation’s intellectual and academic life, labor issues, the Cold War, nuclear arms, the anti-colonial revolution and the black freedom movement.

A journalist since his days at Royal Oak's Dondero High School, Hayden described a 1960 interview with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on a picket line outside the 1960 Democratic National Convention as part of his “summer of transformation.”

“Ultimately, you have to take a stand with your life,” King told him.

Hayden took the advice to heart.

He became the fledgling SDS’s field secretary in the South after graduating from U-M in 1961, participated in the Freedom Ride from Atlanta — and found himself jailed in Albany, Georgia, on his 22nd birthday after he was beaten by segregationists — and helped organize the urban poor in Newark, New Jersey.

As his opposition to the Vietnam War grew, he went to Hanoi in 1965 on a peace mission with Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker and radical historian Staughton Lynd. It was the first of several trips — against State Department orders. The anti-war movement expanded in the mid-1960s to include members of the Black Panthers movement and conscientious objectors.

“The Vietnam draft got young Americans' attention like nothing before,” he wrote for CNN. “White students in the North sensed in that moment what it was like to be a black student in the South.”

Hayden’s activism came at a price: He became a target of the U.S. government. Again for CNN, he wrote:

“[The] state in the late '60s deployed 1,500 federal Army intelligence officers to surveil 100,000 Americans; another 2,000 FBI agents were dispatched to disrupt legal organizations and 'neutralize' protest leaders, myself included.”

He was one of the “Chicago Seven” who were arrested outside the Democratic National Convention hall in 1968, the first people to be charged under a provision in the 1968 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal to incite a riot over state lines. There were originally eight defendants — Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner and Bobby Searle — but the trial of Searle, co-founder of the Black Panthers movement, was severed after he made repeated outbursts before the judge.

The 1970 convictions of Hayden and four others were overturned by an appeals court, and Hayden was eventually acquitted of conspiracy charges.

He married actress and anti-war activist Jane Fonda in 1973 in a union that lasted until 1990. After their marriage and the end of the war, they traveled extensively across Vietnam and conducted interviews for “Introduction to the Enemy,” a documentary that New York Times reviewer Nora Sayre called “pensive and moving,” but which detractors labeled as Communist propaganda.

He served in the California State Assembly from 1982-1992 and the California State Senate from 1992-2000. He survived two Republican-instigated expulsion attempts, and despite serving under Republican governors during most of his legislative tenure, he still managed to win approval of more than 100 progressive measures. He was defeated in a bid for Los Angeles mayor in 1997.

On learning of Hayden’s death, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted: “A political giant and dear friend has passed. Tom Hayden fought harder for what he believed than just about anyone I have known. RIP, Tom.”

He was widely published in some of the nation’s leading newspapers, the alternative press and scholarly tomes. He wrote and edited 20 books, including “Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today.”

In “Reunion: A Memoir,” published in 1989, he wrote: “Rarely, if ever, in American history has a generation begun with higher ideals and experienced greater trauma than those who lived fully the short time from 1960 to 1968.”

Photo: LBJ Library, Public Domain