Tom Hayden, 76, activist against the Vietnam War
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Tom Hayden, a 1960s anti-war activist whose name became forever linked with the celebrated Chicago 7 trial, Vietnam War protests and his ex-wife Jane Fonda, has died. He was 76.
He died on Sunday after a lengthy illness, said his wife, Barbara Williams, noting that he suffered a stroke in 2015.
Mr. Hayden, once denounced as a traitor by his detractors, won election to the California Assembly and Senate where he served for almost two decades as a progressive force on such issues as the environment and education. He was the only one of the radical Chicago 7 defendants to win such distinction in the mainstream political world.
He remained an enduring voice against war and spent his later years as a prolific writer and lecturer advocating for reform of America’s political institutions.
Mr. Hayden wrote or edited 19 books, including “Reunion,” a memoir of his path to protest and a rumination on the political upheavals of the 1960s.
“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,” he wrote.
Mr. Hayden was there at the start. In 1960, while a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was involved in the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), then dedicated to desegregating the South.
By 1962, when he began drafting the landmark Port Huron Statement, SDS and Mr. Hayden were dedicated to changing the world.
In 1968, he helped organize anti-war demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that turned violent and resulted in the notorious Chicago 7 trial. It began as the Chicago 8 trial, but one defendant, Bobby Seale, was denied the lawyer of his choice, was bound and gagged by the judge and ultimately received a separate trial.
After a circus-like trial, Mr. Hayden and three others were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot. The convictions were later overturned, and an official report deemed the violence “a police riot.”
Thomas Emmet Hayden was born Dec. 11, 1939, in Royal Oak, Mich., to middle-class parents.
He joined the fledgling Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, went freedom-riding during civil rights protests in the South and was beaten and briefly jailed in Mississippi and Georgia. He married a fellow activist, Sandra “Casey” Cason.
In 1965, Mr. Hayden made his first visit to North Vietnam with an unauthorized delegation. In 1967, he returned to Hanoi with another group and was asked by North Vietnamese leaders to bring three prisoners of war back to the United States.
In 1971, Mr. Hayden met actress Jane Fonda, a latecomer to the protest movement. After he heard her give an eloquent anti-war speech in 1972, Mr. Hayden said they connected and became a couple.
Mr. Hayden and Fonda were married for 17 years and had a son, Troy.